03 Jan 10 It’s a New Year

So, 2010 is upon us and we’re making some changes here at the ole IMPACT headquarters. 2009 was a year of learning and one of the things we learned was that social media, and communication in general, is a lot more difficult to keep up with than we first surmised.

Actually, the problem I have always had is to figure out the difference between what I post on the blog versus what I write in the newsletter. In 2009 I tried to keep up with two blog entries per week and one newsletter per week. Nuts! So at the end of the year I took a break from both in order to rethink the purpose behind the different channels and how best to approach them for the next year.

I just finished re-reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)“> (If you haven’t read it, you should) and noticed something in the added material at the back of the book. Levitt and Dubner approached this issue in a way that makes sense to me. First, there is the book from which most of the discussion comes. Second, they have a website and newsletter that provides more or less updates to the book (they have a new one now called Superfreakonomics which I’m listening too on my various commutes…fascinating!). Third, they have their blog. The blog is a much more casual device for them with various observations, rantings and ravings but overall a better look into their own thinking just through the fact that it is so conversational.

There’s the model I want to use. I have tried in the past to create a blog that is educational and addresses substantive issues with leadership tips, etc. But that’s also what I’m doing with the newsletter. So I have decided that this year the blog will be much less scientific and a lot more…well, fun. It will be OPINION and hopefully in so doing will be not only an added thought value for you, but also more entertaining and engaging than the mini-lectures that have occurred here in the past. Also in a fit of independence and spontaneity, I will commit to at least a weekly blog entry but there might be some weeks where there are several. Who knows? Why not?

The newsletter on the other hand will become more substantive and provide more information and ideas than it has in the past. I am going to publish it in pdf format for those who like to print things or want to read them on their Kindle or Sony Reader (or iPhone or whatever). The objective of the newsletter is to create something that you will want to keep and to which you may want to refer. This allows me to have guest columns as well as much more useful content in one place on a monthly basis.

More than anything, as we move along on this quest to get it right, I invite you to give me feedback and input on what you think would be most useful. In the meantime, we’ll keep messing with the formula until we get something that works. For example, right now I have two websites: www.ImpactSuccess.com and www.GlobalLeadershipDialogue.com. I’m not sure this makes sense any longer and perhaps there should just be one. I think I have two partially valuable sites right now and not one that is a powerhouse. Maybe there’s a way to address that. Anyway, you get the picture. (If you have an opinion on this, I would love to hear it).

Off we go now into the new decade. We will keep learning and evolving and we invite you to do so with us. I suspect this is another case where there is no right or wrong answer, at least not one that is readily apparent. In the meantime, we’ll keep trying and see what we learn this time. Happy New Year!

Tags: engagement, Global Leadership, great leadership, trust, vision

23 Oct 09 Building a Performance Based Culture

The problem with bonus and compensation driven performance is two-fold. First, from a public relations standpoint, bonuses tick people off right now. Rightfully or wrongfully, the impression of entitlement rubs folks the wrong way as many are being laid off or having their salaries cut. To be honest, there are clearly cases where bonuses make no sense…for example in government bailed out companies where performance is not the issue, employment contracts are. Second, and more important for most leaders, monetary incentives are short-term activators. Whether you believe money motivates people or not, it does so only for a brief period. As soon as you feed the beast, it is hungry again.

The good news is that an organization based on performance does not have to be an expensive proposition. Pride is a much greater motivator than money any day. Unfortunately, because you have pride in your organization doesn’t automatically mean your employees see it the same way. Leaders tend to be leaders because they already have a drive for performance and success. Instilling this element in the culture of the organization takes an intentional effort.

For people to be committed to performance in their work, there are a few necessary elements that need to be in place:

1. A clear vision of what is to be achieved. Beyond just a laminated statement of some sort, this vision has to be of a future state with a road map and some direction for achieving the vision. If people know where they are going, and can track their progress toward those objectives, they can take ownership in the vision themselves. If the objective is not clear, or there is no way to monitor progress, followers will focus on the immediate tasks at hand only.

2. Autonomy in their work. This doesn’t mean that each employee should simply chose what they do and when they do it. Autonomy can take many forms. Depending on the nature of the job, the degree to which employees are able to make their own decisions and participate in creating their own work-world will determine how committed to this world they actually are. Lack of autonomy always means lack of accountability. If you make all the decisions about every detail, what do I have left to own.

3. Meaningful and engaging work. If the only way you can imagine the organization of your followers work is in a menial and mundane fashion, you can’t expect that your employees will be focused on performance. They might be focused on achieving a specific milestone or measure but you will have to continually reinforce the measure to get the performance. Humans are amazing creatures when it comes to adding significance to their work. If there is no significance, there is no reason to be engaged and perform.

4. A sense of community. This aspect is overlooked by many leaders trying to provide a motivational work environment, but your followers are social people. Feeling that we are all part of the same team, or that my co-workers and I share a set of values or interests, goes a long way in retention and motivation. A Performance-Based Culture is not one of individual success. It is one where our efforts to be successful are combined with those of a like mind.

Of course there is no silver bullet in establishing this mindset of performance. Leaders can’t dictate an atmosphere of camaraderie or a culture of achievement. Leaders can, however, create the circumstances that promote these elements. Focus on compensation to the point that it is fair and competitive but treat it only as one element of the workplace. Successful leaders engage their followers through interaction and relationship.

Tags: engagement, leadership integrity, performance

21 Oct 09 Making the Measure the Meaning

Although many would argue that we have come a long way since Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1899 first proposed the “scientific management method,” it appears that efficiency, the ratio of input to output of a given system, is still the primary tool of leaders in the corporate world. What may have changed somewhat is the treatment of people within the system, but the overall focus is still the same. As I’ve mentioned before, even more contemporary approaches like lean manufacturing or six sigma can easily turn any business into a numbers game. In response to the current recession, companies (including my own) are caught in a cycle of attempting to become more and more efficient through cost-cutting and attempts to create more output from less input.

Becoming married to the measure can be disastrous. A client of mine, prior to the recession, had a cost ratio in equal to 11% of sales. In late 2008 and early 2009, sales dropped not only precipitously, but quickly. By February, the measure of cost had increase to 18%. The immediate and all-hands effort by the company executives focused on one question: “How do we get our cost ratio back down to 11%?” Last month, this critical number was tracking at around 12%. Have they been successful in their efforts?

If the measure is the meaning, then yes. They are nearly back to the cost balance they had prior to the recession. However, they have lost nearly 20% of their workforce, the employees that they have are suffering in large part from shell shock and their leadership body is disoriented as to which demon they should be chasing…cost or sales? In a recent discussion, I asked them how they thought they would do in their employee satisfaction survey this year. They don’t expect it to go very well.

My point is not that costs are irrelevant or that companies should let themselves go out of business because their margins disappear when sales drop. However, many have adopted a philosophy that assumes efficiency as the primary driver of business success. Leaders in this case become accountants…monitoring paper at the copier and cutting back on the true drivers of profitability such as customer service. This cost obsession creates strong silos and turfs within the organization as managers focus on THEIR expenses without regard to the bigger picture.

Most damaging is that times such as these call not only for prudence but for creativity and innovation. But innovation happens in the white space…that extra room that employees have to think or experiment or take risks. Leaders who want to be successful have to remember that employees are not machines…they can’t be tuned and tweaked like a car engine to deliver greater results. That is one of the reasons leadership can be so difficult. The answers to the questions of success are usually multi-dimensional. It’s not just about cost and at the same time it’s not just about innovation. It’s about finding the right balance at the right time.
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Tags: cost-cutting, efficiency, engagement, global leader

13 Oct 09 Build Esteem, Don’t Start There

As a speaker and sometimes “Motivational Speaker,” I was accosted this week by a student who made a passing comment regarding the purpose of motivational speaking. She said, “I’ve never bought into the self-esteem movement.” As we talked, she was referencing an experience she had at her workplace where a speaker was brought in for an annual meeting and, in an attempt to pump all of the managers up, focused on the leader’s role in building the self-esteem of their followers. I gather that the premise of the speech was, leaders who build self-esteem create workforces that are empowered to be successful.

This turned out to be one of those discussions that bounces around in your head for awhile. You know there is something important there but you’re not sure exactly what it is immediately. On my two-hour commute between where I live and Devos Graduate School of Management where I was teaching, it came to me that I was (a) a bit defensive about her perspective and (b) almost entirely in agreement with her concern. (I really hate it when that happens!). As I began to think about the subject matter of many of my speaker colleagues who are absolutely sincere about their desire to help make leaders more successful, I came to realize that we sometimes get the message backwards. Based on what we think we know about self-esteem, it’s important to separate the myth from the reality:

1. Self-esteem precedes success. This may be one of the most damaging myths and one of the most common. I say “damaging” in the sense that it is simply not effective. Our self-esteem is established as a result of our successes, not as an antecedent. Think about it. Nathaniel Brandon a well known psycotherapist, defined self-esteem as “the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness.” Where does this disposition come from in your followers? It comes from their ability to provide evidence for themselves that they are able and skilled enough to be successful. Success, by the way, is defined by the individual…not by you.

2. Self-esteem is about praise. In an effort to teach leaders how to motivate their employees, many lecturers and writers have focused on the idea that praising employees builds self-esteem which in turn creates satisfaction which in turn creates productivity. While this seems fairly straightforward, the problem is it doesn’t tell the whole story. Efforts to build self-esteem in others by heaping on praise usually fall short because the praise, if not seen as authentic, is not useful. When John gives a terrible executive briefing, using the conventional approach of telling him that his presentation was not clear but he spoke with authority is hollow. The key to praise is that is recognition of an action worthy of note. Think about it. You know when somebody is blowing smoke…your followers know as well.

3. Self-esteem can be built in others. This was at the core of my students complaint about the “self-esteem movement.” It is ludicrous to think that you, as a leader, have the ability to grant self-esteem to others. You don’t give me self-esteem…I give me self-esteem. To decide that one of your goals is to increase the self-esteem of your followers is to decide that you somehow hold the key to their self-worth.

If you want to help your followers create an atmosphere of success and self-worth, you should ensure that the expectations of success are realistic and challenging at the same time. Helping others be successful is a large part of the truly effective leader’s approach. This is done through goal-setting, providing the right tools for the job and coaching. It is not a function of a steady stream of “you can do it” messages. If you want me to believe I can “do it,” then you have to tell me why you believe so. You have to be specific about it. What is it about my strengths or abilities or determination that makes you believe that I can succeed. And what will you do to be a partner in that success. Leaders who focus on creating a success culture are focusing on things within their power. And they are creating an environment where others can use their strengths and establish their own image of what they can accomplish.

Tags: accountability, engagement, honesty, motivation

29 Sep 09 Performance Improvement through Personal Strengths

There comes a point in life where one realizes that most of the weaknesses we have…we are going to continue having. For example, I am not a numbers person. I like numbers, I have tried to work with numbers, but I am simply not the guy who is going to a “Finance for Non-Financial Managers” course and coming out of it with a focus on numbers. Now, while I’m not a numbers guy, I am a story guy. If you can give me the numbers and help me understand what they mean, I will be able to explain the numbers in a way that people understand. Granted it’s not a superhuman strength like x-ray vision, but it has served me well as a strength for most of my career.

As leaders, we often approach our employees as if it is our job to “fix” them. Then, of course, we get frustrated at the fact that “fixing” never seems to work. I’m not talking about behavioral problems that need to be addressed. I’m talking about those alignments where the strengths of the individual are either not in alignment with their responsibilities or have simply not been allowed to develop in relation to the task at hand. As the end of the year approaches, and most leaders are looking at performance reviews looming on the horizon, here are some tips for helping employees improve through strengths:

1. Ask your employees to identify the part(s) of their job that excites them or gives them energy. The part of the job that most excites an employee, or more specifically, the most energizes an employee, is likely to be directly related to their strength. When we are doing things that are in alignment with our interests and our abilities, we find that the time spent doing these activities tends to be energizing. Even if the work is hard, we take power from using our strengths.

2. Ask your employees to identify the part(s) of their job that is the most fun. Again, the alignment of strengths with activities is usually so enjoyable for people that it qualifies as “fun.” Pay attention to the answer to this question. It might be that your employee is most jazzed by time spent with customers or colleagues. It might also be that they love solving complex problems. Don’t judge their answer by whether or not you would find the activity fun. That isn’t the question.

3. Looking at the performance for the year, ask your employees to evaluate themselves. First of all, when given an opportunity for honest reflection, most employees are fairly accurate about how well they are doing. There ARE times where the employee may be misinterpreting their performance, but in most cases, they are pretty close. This should not be a “guess the right answer” exercise nor a spontaneous one. Have them evaluate their performance in some form that you will review before the performance discussion. Use their evaluation as the basis for your discussion.

4. Have your employees tell you what should be different about their job in order for their performance to improve. This one takes guts because we normally go into a performance review situation telling employees what they need to do to change. You are probably still going to have some things you want them to do differently. But start from a collaborative effort. Perhaps there are simple ways…or ways you would never guess on your own…that the work could be better aligned with the strengths of the employee. This is not necessarily re-engineering the job. It might simply be allowing and individual to do the job in an individual kind of way.

From the time we are children we are taught to identify our weaknesses and eliminate them. While there are examples where this approach has been successful, it is enormously time consuming and energy draining. If you truly want to engage your employees in a performance improvement effort, allow the possibility that it might not be the person who needs to change, but the approach of the work that would give the greatest return on investment if aligned with the already held strengths of the individual.

Tags: accountability, engagement, leverging strengths, performance improvement

16 Sep 09 The Myth of Motivation

If you are a student of leadership, you really need to know the name Daniel H. Pink. He is a career analyst and author of a trifecta of best sellers including the latest The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need
If you want to know how unconventional Pink is, you have to check out this career guide. It is written and illustrated in Manga style (Japanese comic) and is the only graphic novel ever to become a BusinessWeek bestseller.

While his writing is interesting, his latest video on motivation is the real topic of today’s post. In his video, Pink talks about an old study called “The Candle Problem” and it’s re-emergence in the work of Sam Glucksberg of Princeton University. In the new studies, Glucksberg provides various motivations for solving the puzzle of the candle. In some conditions he incentivizes participants with money, in other cases with nothing. What he finds is amazing.

While I don’t want to go into the detail of the problem in this entry (you can find it if you watch the video), the important finding is this. When participants are offered a monetary incentive for solving the problem, their response time is actually much SLOWER than those who are not offered money. That’s right. An incentive to solve the problem faster actually slows the process down.

This research was funded by the Federal Reserve Bank of all things, and they played with versions of the incentive and versions of the puzzle. They continued to find the same thing. Monetary reward slowed the process except in one condition. If the puzzle was presented in a way where the solution was obvious, participants actually completed the puzzle more quickly when offered money. If there was no thinking to be done, but only action, money served as a strong motivator.

Pink reveals some additional studies done at MIT and found that, in a series of games where participants are offered small, medium and large rewards for winning. The same thing happened. If the game requires only mechanical task work, the rewards influenced the completion times positively. But if there was any cognitive component of the game that required higher level thinking, rewards actually slowed the process down. By the way, this research was replicated across many cultures, ages and situations. It appears to be consistent no matter where you sit on the globe.

Here’s the point. Extrinsic rewards (bonuses, prizes, etc) are distractors when leaders are trying to achieve greater results. They simply don’t work. We have often said that money isn’t everything, but it might be that money is actually a negative thing. The intrinsic rewards of engagement, solving the problem, adding value and working together continue to show greater results than the standard “carrot and stick” approach.

So if, as Pink claims, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does, why do we keep doing it? It’s not because leaders are unaware of the mismatch…it has been studied for decades. It might be because we default to a logic that is comfortable and easy. Perhaps we offer incentives because we don’t have the creativity to create business situations that are engaging in other ways. If that’s the case, we are going to have to challenge ourselves in the current business environment to find new ways to engage and motivate since the problems we face are less tactical and more cognitive. Until then we may keep throwing money at internal issues that simply refuse to go away.

Tags: commitment, engagement, Executive Compensation, Global Leadership, motivation

08 Sep 09 Speechs to Engage your Followers

How do leaders motivate followers in troubling times? Look no further than the President’s speech to schoolchildren.

The mood of the country has become even more critical since the beginning of the last school year, so President Obama’s audience of schoolchildren, parents and teachers are starting the term with a greater level of uncertainty about a greater number of things than before. In his speech, the President had the daunting task of not only reassuring his audience, but also motivating them to become involved in their own future. You can follow the same structure as you address your employees, volunteers or members in moving them from victim to active participant.

1. “I know where you are coming from today.” President Obama’s speech began with a connection. I went to school as well and I remember what it’s like on the first day. Had he given his speech on the second day, or the second week of school, he would not have been able to do this. He chose THIS day as a way to connect with his audience from the beginning. When you are planning to speak to your followers, see if there is a day or an event that you can select that will allow you to show the common ground from the beginning. Then relate to them about that day.

2. “This is important to me.” The President revealed the importance of the topic very early in his speech by mentioning all of the speaking he has done previously. He mentioned his speeches on education, his speeches to teachers and his speeches to parents. Even to a kindergartner, it is clear that the President feels this is important because he has obviously talked a lot about it. Once you have related to your audience, let them know the topic you are speaking on his important to you. Don’t just say it is…provide the evidence.

3. “You are the key to success.” Don’t mislead or lie to your followers about this, but if you truly believe that your employees are the difference between success and failure, tell them so. If you want to engage your audience, show them how YOU see them in the grand scheme of things. President Obama pointed out to his audience that, while he has spoken to many different constituents, the students themselves will make the difference.

4. “Because you are so important, you have a great responsibility.” This is the focal point to the President’s speech and, as a leader trying to engage your followers, this should be the focal point for you. Engaging employees has nothing to do with how hard YOU have been working or how much YOU care about the topic. If you have established already that it is important to you, you can then focus on what is important to the rest of us…us. The important issue here is that you first have to establish our role, then you can remind us that we are accountable.

5. “You are showing the way already.” Through the use of many positive examples, President Obama also shows his audience that they are capable of making the right choices and benefiting from their responsibility. He emphasizes his message of accountability and commitment through using personal examples (“I understand”) but more importantly, through examples of people from the same audience who have been successful. Corporate leaders especially tend to be unaware of the positive examples in their workforce. If you can include the element of success in your presentation, you can encourage your followers that it is possible.

6. “Be proud of who you are.” This is not only a message about individuality, but a message of pride in the group. For you as a leader, it can be pride in the organization. President Obama not only talked to his audience about their abilities as individuals, but included one sentence that you can emulate to support the followers as a team. His comment was, “The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things get tough.” He is relating to the pride of his audience in their country. As a leader, you can do the same about your organization.

7. “Work with me on this.” The final section of President Obama’s address could be done a number of ways, but in essence he is reminding his audience that all of the outside sources…his office, the teachers, the parents and the system in general…are doing everything they can to contribute to success. This reminds the audience that they are a part of the bigger picture and that not only does the “boss” want them to take responsibility, he EXPECTS them to do so. Consider your relationship with your followers and find a way to include the entire system in the future success of the organization.

Tags: authenticity, communication, congruency, Energy, engagement, expectations