I can’t write much on this one other than to say it represents the types of behaviors that give high concept consultants and high level executives bad reputations.
It’s worth your time to watch for a bit (and hopefully to get a chuckle).
You ever have to work with someone who took a “just do it, it’s easy” attitude toward things that are literally impossible?
Me too. And, I hope I never do it again.
I’ll keep this one short. The turkey is in the oven and all the sides are either comfortably prepared or queued appropriately.
In the midst of a holiday focused on giving thanks, I thought it apt to put in a plug for “thanks” as an element of leadership we mustn’t overlook. And, as is always appropriate when it comes to simple notions and time constraints (yes, I am actually cooking at the moment), I’m going to borrow a quote.
About 20 years ago, I stumbled upon the book Leadership Is An Art by former Herman Miller CEO Max De Pree. Mr. De Pree’s book has been one of the foundational influences on my personal leadership vision; and I love to see it on the shelves of people I know.
But, I digress. In the midst of the book’s preamble is a simple quote that lays out what I believe to be one of the most elegant notions of leadership in an ocean of attempts at elegant notions of leadership. It goes like this:
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor. That sums up the progress of an artful leader.”
I have digested this quote from many different perspectives over the years in trying to progress myself and the people I lead into a state of “artful” leadership. It covers strategy, servanthood, obligation, and–perhaps most importantly–progress. We never arrive. It’s safe to say that I love this quote.
For the purpose of this post, it’s the bookends of leadership that De Pree defines that really stand out.
At the front is defining reality. Without it, one is not a leader. The leader’s definition of reality–where we are, where we are going, and the pressures and risks we face–is fundamental to leadership. It establishes “we.” It provides the touchstone for all other activity; and it’s the alpha and omega for any strategy.
It also lets those being led know that the leader is, in fact, a leader…not simply someone executing on somebody else’s vision and doing a job for a paycheck. Just doing a job for a paycheck is the realm of high functioning managers and mercenaries. Mercenary cultures grow when leaders have no vision. Mercenary culture is incompatible with the notion of leadership as defined by Max De Pree simply because he starts it with vision–reality defined.
At the back–the last responsibility of a leader–is to say thank you. Leadership…true leadership…is not finished until those being led have been thanked for their contribution to the effort that “we” have put forth. Sure, thanks can come in the form of money, but I have to insist that a thank you cannot be simply monetary. Cash is necessary, but insufficient.
Thank you. It’s integral to leadership.
As we celebrate this holiday…this season that focuses nominally on thanks, let’s focus on what it means to incorporate thanks into our leadership philosophy.
Happy Thanksgiving to my U.S. readers. And, for all of us…let’s take De Pree’s definition of leadership to heart.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.”
Roger “Verbal” Kint – The Usual Suspects
Do you sit in a position of power? Do you, also, sit in a position of isolation?
Oddly, the two things can coalesce into one if you fail to remain vigilant. One of the hallmarks of bad governance everywhere–from Teapot Dome to Barings Bank to Enron to, I’m sure, Volkswagen–is the existence of good people in powerful positions who have allowed themselves to become isolated from the facts on the ground.
VW has now lost upwards of 40% of its market capitalization since the emergence of the news that engineers and managers in the company conspired to cheat on international emissions standards in the company’s small diesel engines. I won’t belabor the point, but I can assure you that there are powerful people in high places in the company…its board and senior management (possibly up to and including its now-resigned CEO) who would not have consented to such egregious white collar crime had they known the existence of it.
I won’t speak for all the executives or board members at VW, because I simply don’t know them; but I will speak for the consistently present minority (or even majority) in such situations who were elevated to high places and subsequently isolated from the reality of ethical and legal behavior on the ground. They allowed themselves to be convinced that things were being done right.
It happens in most every situation of moral, ethical, or legal lapse within corporations: Good people at the board or senior management level–usually due to great performance of the organization they are called to lead or govern–stop asking questions. They take the word of people whom they “have no reason not to trust.”
They, essentially, fall asleep at the switch. And, to give some examples, the fallout looks rough. Namely:
Unethical behavior surreptitiously drives performance (such as in the Teapot Dome bribery scandal of the early 20th century).
Low control of rogue elements destroys entire institutions (such as in the Barings Bank collapse of the 1990s).
Entire financial fictions are erected by complicit management and advisors (such as in the Enron case of the early 2000s).
And, in some cases, good companies are systematically disabled and functionally dismantled by management with incentives very different from boards and shareholders (which occurs in far too many companies worldwide).
None of the bad actors in the named scandals above gave outward reason to doubt their trustworthiness in the times leading up to the scandals; and in some cases they would have recoiled or lashed out with righteous indignation at their higher ups if they were, in fact, questioned.
That’s the refuge of ne’er do wells everywhere–righteous indignation.
Watch for it.
In every case, people in positions of fiduciary and ethical responsibility have the obligation to ask. But, they have the obligation to ask those who actually can convey reality, not those who are charged with packaging reality for consumption by boards and senior management.
In his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Stanford University professor and author Robert Sapolsky coined a proverb that is quite powerful for people in positions of assurance everywhere… It goes like this:
“If you want to know if the elephant at the zoo has a stomachache, don’t ask the veterinarian, ask the cage cleaner.”
You get it? If you really want to know if something just isn’t right, don’t ask the so-called experts…they rarely have the task of cleaning up the mess. Ask the people who witness and clean up messes. Ask people lower down the ladder, whose credibility might not naturally be so high, but whose incentives might also not lead them to unnecessary spin or outright dishonesty.
In other words, ask around. If you sit on a board or in senior management and find your interactions with rank and file people to be overly stage-managed, then ask some more.
You know why?
Because–with apologies to Verbal Kint–the greatest trick that bad actors pull is convincing the world that they aren’t bad actors.
Reality depends on whom you ask. So, ask around.
I welcome your questions and comments.
I’ll just start with this: I tend toward an idealistic world view. I believe in establishing and testing core principles and doing my best to live by them. I launched a firm based on that. I’m not perfect, and I’ve been around the block enough to know that a principled world view is one that can be dangerous to one’s career and to one’s reputation–even when principles are otherwise “right.”
It’s a little acknowledged fact that, as a western culture, we applaud and crowd around feats of physical courage. We love people who “put their life on the line” and laud them accordingly. People who are physically courageous might face questions of why they take such risks, but such risks are appreciated. We saw this recently with a few U.S. citizens who stopped what might have been a much worse shooting incident on a train in France. We laud them, rightfully so.
On the other hand… Moral courage is actually a very lonely thing. The courage to stand on principle in the face of really rotten circumstances, to give up power, prestige, or even (gag!) money to have the ability to sleep well at night is…to put it bluntly…tough. Why? Well, it usually has to do with a matter of reflection. When we are morally courageous, we cause other people to reflect on their relative lack of courage. It’s easy for an individual to look at a selfless feat of physical courage and say “oh, my, I don’t think I could ever do that” and still maintain a solid self image. Change the circumstances to one of moral courage, and people are suddenly confronted with their own foibles more directly.
For the average person, It might be hard to put one’s self in harm’s way to save someone from being shot or run over by a car, but it’s (conceptually) actually pretty easy to walk away from an unethical leader. However, throw in a bunch of other people following the same unethical leader, good money, and good old inertia, and the person who opts out of such a circumstance has to foster a lot more courage (again, conceptually) than a person who saves the damsel in distress.
Wait, do you mean that it’s harder to be morally courageous than to be physically courageous?
Yes, of course. If such weren’t the case, we would see a lot more instances of whistle blowers and conscientious objectors vs. physical heroes. We would see fewer instances of closed ranks, cloistered leaders, and silent exits of key executives. Instead, whistle blowers and conscientious objectors know that they can be vilified, ostracized, and ultimately damaged by the very act of calling out issues.
On a more micro level–one that I hope affects us all vs. the more macro issues faced by whistle blowers–if we saw more flexing of moral courage, we would see a lot less drama in the average group endeavor.
Why?
Because the core of moral courage is honesty. It’s bringing your best, honest self to bear on any situation.
Drama typically ensues in organizations when there is ambiguity, passivity, apathy, and manipulation. Drama, true to the metaphor, comes as much from what is happening behind the scenes as on stage. And, believe you me, there are predatory minds that relish the ability to foster drama and discord. They thrive on it.
So, my point: If we are to flex our moral courage, we have to start practicing some level of honesty. Honesty with ourselves is where it has to start. Have we examined ourselves, our lives, our professional approaches? The average human mind (and ego) really doesn’t do that well. And, make no mistake, we are, on average…average.
Honesty with others is the next step. Have we offered up, in careful but clear terms, an honest appraisal of situations and the mindsets around us, or do we let drama stir? Have we examined our relationships in this manner? Have we been willing to say “no” to those who foster discord? Keep in mind that it is possible to be honest without being brutal. Most corporate jerks I know are “honest” on some superficial level, but they are also absolutely brutal at it.
Honesty requires grace, and honesty without grace is brutality.
Some might wonder why “honesty” rises to the top of a blog that is ostensibly about leadership and strategy and organizations and transformation. I’ll just put it this way:
If you can’t be honest with yourself and those around you, you can’t be an effective strategist. Drama–and the dishonesty underpinning it–obfuscates. It creates ambiguity. It creates friction. It creates frustration.
I’ll say it again: I’m an idealist. That means, for instance, that I don’t mind being called naive while acting in defense of honesty. I have found that defending an honest point of view helps the predators and pretenders to reveal themselves for who they are much faster than if I play along. I sleep well at night.
Bring your best honest self to the situation, and see what happens. You might not like the reaction, but I guarantee you will like the outcome.
Remember the first time you had to really perform in a meeting? Or the first time you had to give a subordinate a performance review? Or maybe the first time you were responsible for the sales call?
How about the first time you said “I love you” to a significant other and meant it?
Maybe you remember the first time you tried really hard to master a sport, or an art, or a language. You found a link between passion and performance. You went through pain or anguish or nervous uncertainty to get there.
Maybe these things don’t resonate for you, but still, there’s a first time for everything. And for those things we very much want to do well on, we do the work, we deliver with feeling. We, in short, find a way. The first time is hard won.
Unfortunately, for a lot of the things I just listed, there’s also a one hundredth time. For some performances, there is a ten thousandth time.
The Professional’s Call
This weekend, I had the opportunity to witness the performance of a virtuoso jazz musician in an intimate setting. I was able to see and hear the music flow from someplace within him that I couldn’t see. As is sometimes the case when we witness amazing talent in action, I struggled to understand how perfect the performance seemed, even when almost all of it was improvised (it was, after all, jazz).
During an intermission, the musician–acting as our host–told those of us in the audience an interesting anecdote about the great performer Burt Bacharach.
Bacharach is known for his performance of the song Alfie, a somber, meaningful song about life. Here it is:
Through some mental math, our host related that Bacharach, over his career, has likely performed Alfie more than 10,000 times. That’s 10,000 instances of a performer’s finding the same passion and emotion in an activity that he had the very first time. Our host explained that being able to perform every time with the passion of the first is, in a lot of ways, a secret to life.
A Lesson for Life and Work
The anecdote is a profound illustration of what it means to be a professional. It’s also, I think, a profound illustration of what it means to maintain curiosity, wonder, and passion within a world of banality and repetition.
Think about it. Can you imagine being able to experience the joy and wonder you felt during your first kiss during the goodnight kiss on your 30th anniversary? Can you imagine being able to say “I love you” today to your spouse with the same trepidation and sense of the future you had the first time?
What a rush!
A friend and mentor of mine once related to me that she knew she was doing well as a professional when she no longer felt nervous walking into meetings with senior executives; the act of leading meetings had become a rote exercise. I respect this point of view. I’ve lived through the maturation that she mentioned, and I’ve delivered the same insight to others. But while the maturity of professionalism is important, so is the passion.
I’ve witnessed countless professionals “going through the motions.” They do endless meetings with no soul and no passion for vision or values. They work to their incentives like coin-operated machines. They look elsewhere for their passion and in the meantime demolish the hopes of their audiences. Except that their audiences are the people in their organizations or, in the worst cases, their potential business partners and customers.
We professionals, like the performers we really all are, must remember to go back to the passion (if not the nerves) of the first time if we are to deliver our own virtuosic performance on the hundredth or the thousandth time. If we seek to move others, we have to break out of the professional monotony that comes to us and deliver with feeling, and this matters whether you are a jazz pianist or a financial analyst.
Find an insight. Find something new in every repetition. Rediscover the first time you did it. Find the passion that comes with the first time—the hard-won first time—every time, and I do think that you’ll find at least one secret to life.
A day or so ago, I came across a post via my LinkedIn feed. It has now disappeared, probably to protect someone’s sense of career risk. But…
The post, entitled “Stop Living Your Life Like a Motivational Poster,” is about how the whole motivational poster and quote industry is dangerous because it leaves out essence and authenticity while peddling positivity and motivation. The author states:
I truly believe that to keep ignoring every emotion that does not fall into the positive category is at best unhealthy , and at worse can lead to feelings of inadequacy- that your [sic] somehow strange, not good enough, not strong and self controlled enough to ‘think yourself positive’
The post touched off a minor candle fire of discussion on LinkedIn. And, there’s something hiding in that post for those of us working to perfect (if “perfect” is a possibility) strategic leadership.
Namely, that something is about how the insidious drive to simplify, distill, and extract the essence of motivation can leave out critical context to the detriment of individuals and organizations.
That context might just be how challenging the circumstances were for a leader whose wisdom gets distilled into a motivational witticism. Mohandas Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world” quote is used incessantly by folks who probably don’t understand the massive hardship Gandhi went through to have the credibility to deliver it.
Perhaps more importantly, however, the context can be the values and constructive intent that get left to the side of a motivational incentive.
So, I roped you in with a reference to porn, and now I need to make the link. To do so, I’ll use a quotation (irony, yes, I know) from Pope John Paul II. He said:
There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.
Did you get that? The problem isn’t that pornography reveals too much of the context, but that it reveals too little. Removing the context removes the dignity.
That’s what you and I as strategic thinkers and leaders need to reflect on when it comes to motivating others. Are we distilling motivational text, structures, and systems down to quotes, numbers, and dollar amounts that remove the context (and the dignity)?
In short, are we making fundamental values a transactional thing that can be priced away?
While the habit of distilling away contextual values in pursuit of efficiency and impact is something to watch out for in all parts of life, I’ll reflect on three areas here that matter.
1. Motivating your organization:
There’s a very large market for organizational motivation diagnostics and techniques.
This market will only grow as Millennials become more and more disconnected from the values and realities of the older generations who (in many cases) manage them. If men and women are from Mars and Venus, Millenials and Baby Boomers are from different galaxies.
Practitioners refer to this area of organizational practice as “engagement,” but reality is that this is all about motivation toward the goals of the organization as a whole. Like the article I linked in the opening of this post, “engagement” techniques and programs all too often fall into the trap of trying to distill a multi-faceted, highly personalized issue down to a few pithy drivers.
This is a noble act, to be sure; because engagement does matter. Still, these programs turn on the distiller and invariably come up with programs that get at only one or two of the fundamental things that people think about when they think about engagement.
In your organization, one person is most engaged when thinking about building the value of the organization he works within.
The next thinks primarily about impact on the customer.
Another thinks it’s all about himself.
The next thinks its about doing good for society.
Still another thinks its about her working team.
Research shows that people split evenly on these 5 factors when selecting the one that motivates them.
When you look to engage your organization, or even your immediate team; you have to factor in this diversity of drivers. Distilling down to a focus on team building activities or greater community involvement or quotes about whether it’s “good for the customer” will only touch the tip of the iceberg.
2. Financial incentive structures
There has been a decades long move toward greater tying of daily activity to monetary incentives.
This trend has slowed somewhat in recent years as so-called “pay for performance” or “penalty for performance” has time and again created unintended consequences and malicious gaming from the shop floor to the c-suite.
When we distill mission critical and values-driven activities like safety or quality monitoring down to financial incentives for attainment of certain standards, we introduce a very challenging set of defining moments for our people.
By defining moments, I mean a choice between two highly conflicting fundamental values. Do I report that safety incident and take the hit on my bonus, or do I conceal it and get paid? Do I report the customer complaint when my customer satisfaction rating is at the threshold of my bonus payment, or do I just forget I heard it?
These are fundamental contextual issues that get lost in the distillation of motivation to a single- or even multi-point-formula.
A great and commonly cited study that gets at this particular point involves a set of day care centers in Israel. The study found that when there were no financial penalties (and therefore no economic incentives) for leaving children beyond the day care centers’ 4pm pickup time, parents rarely were significantly late.
However, once a financial penalty for late pickup was introduced, parents were late much more frequently.
The study shows the types of unintended consequences that can happen when a financial incentive is put in that allows people to replace a moral or ethical one.
People see the price of their ethical lapses, and can judge accordingly.
If I’m a parent operating under a social contract that says 4pm is the pickup time and leaving my child any later means a teacher has to work overtime because of my lateness, I take the moral impact into account.
If the social contract is changed to a financial one, then the price I pay for my lateness is clearly outlined and transactional. The day care center makes it easy for me to forget about ethics and just pay the fine.
This is all kind of cute when it comes to a day care center. But, imagine what happens when you place a price on values driven behavior in a safety program, or customer service, or (shudder) healthcare programs.
Price is a clear motivator. I’m a huge fan of price–except for when the cost of inaction is priceless.
3. The continuing emergence of aggressive short-termism
The place where distillation of context is perhaps most dangerous is in the boardroom and c-suite. The emergence of aggressive short-termism as a de facto course of management comes directly from the pornographication of motivation.
Boards, being limited in what they can measure when it comes to the health of an organization (though less limited than most boards realize), resort to distilled measures of current profitability and cash flow. These measures, while absolutely critical to performance, are devoid of the context necessary for the long term stewardship of capital resources.
They are indicators of current vitality (just as a patient’s pulse rate is); but they leave out important contextual risk factors (like whether the patient is a smoker, obese or anorexic, and/or exercising regularly).
Once again, price matters. When a senior executive can look at the price of his or her action in the short term and see the financial payoff, there becomes a transactional aspect of stewardship that boards must be vigilant about. This is particularly key when vesting structures align such that executives’ short term actions are monetized at a much greater rate than actions that affect the long term.
I co-opted the pseudo-term “Pornographication” because, first, I think it’s a pretty amusing term; and second, because I think it says something about what can happen to an activity (whether that be sex, love, or motivation) when essential contexts are removed and only a most basic “basis of arousal” is left for consumption.
As strategic leaders, board members, and managers; we must be careful to think through the contextual consequences of distilled incentives. The value of an enterprise depends on considered choices about some things (like safety programs or long term investment) that can only by measured by conjecture.
Watch out for the oversimplification of complex motivational issues.
Context matters.
This post was inspired by some commentary on a prior post regarding strategic cost reduction efforts. In the course of thinking through the comments I received, I realized that there is a real gap in knowledge on some of the pitfalls that come with good, honest, and necessary restructuring activities.
If you read no further, read this: In times of really hard choices about cost reduction, leaders, particularly mid-level leaders, can become so fatigued that they stop managing for value and start managing solely to the numbers. It’s incumbent upon all of us as executives, advisors, and leaders to watch out for these attitudes of fatigued resignation.
In the lives of nearly all business leaders comes a time when hard personnel choices have to be made. Very few leaders escape it. Even well known, visionary growth titans like Steve Jobs (who chopped Apple to a fraction of its workforce in the 1990s) have to experience these times.
But what happens when leaders having to make such choices to preserve value instead start making them out of a sense of resignation and duty?
They stop focusing on the value remaining, and start focusing on themselves…getting their job done.
And, then you start to hear a familiar refrain used by exhausted, resigned leaders facing tough choices.
“Well, we can’t save everyone…”
In the business environment, we often use such thinking to cope with making the hardest personnel decisions.
Constraints are real, and we all face them at some point.
However, you and I have to be careful not to let a truism about not being able to save everyone mean that we harden and decide not to save anyone. Such a tragic false dichotomy has, in my experience, reared its head far too often in organizations making hard choices; and it results in the demoralization that people associate all too often with cost cuts.
Leaders harden.
They stop coaching.
They stop caring.
They “do what they are told.” And, often, nothing more.
They stop, in other words, leading.
I have witnessed, firsthand, fantastic people leaders turn into cold, distant souls following years of having to make challenging cuts. The stress and pressure along with the cognitive dissonance of removing livelihoods to save corporate life build until each further action comes with that lament…
“You can’t save everyone.”
Yes. But you can try to create a valuable solution that saves someone.
Think about how to redeploy, re-think, and, above all, sell! Be willing to stand up and look for value.
One of my favorite apocryphal parables touches on this topic. It is referred to as The Boy and the Starfish.
It goes like this:
While walking along a beach, an elderly gentleman saw someone in the distance leaning down, picking something up and throwing it into the ocean.
As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, picking up starfish one by one and tossing each one gently back into the water.
He came closer still and called out, “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”
The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”
The old man smiled, and said, “I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?”
To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”
Upon hearing this, the elderly observer commented, “But, young man, do you not realise that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”
The young man listened politely. Then he bent down, picked up another starfish, threw it into the back into the ocean past the breaking waves and said, “It made a difference for that one.”
The boy in the story took a bit of energy to save a few starfish from certain death.
Others thought he was doing fruitless work.
He knew he was making a difference.
Times of crisis or stress or pressure are the times we must think about how to create value the most, even in our own small corner of the world.
Other leaders may look at you and say “why bother? You can’t save everyone…”
When you face them, know that you can’t save everyone; but don’t use that as an excuse to keep from saving anyone.
I’d enjoy your thoughts and comments.
This is an article on reflection on and appreciation of the lessons one’s childhood can provide. As a parent, I’m fond of thinking about how kids see the world. As I’ve grown, I’ve realized many of the lessons I needed for later in life were right in front of me. It only took time to understand them.
I had the great privilege to grow up around a couple of entrepreneurs.
No, let me rephrase that…
I had the great privilege to grow up around a couple of drop dead risk takers.
Few people get to do that.
That privilege came with the ups and the downs of business ownership in an era of significant change. I was immersed in both the elation of business success and the absolute devastation of bankruptcy.
My childhood included vacations in Aspen and L.A.–a real treat for a kid living on the Gulf Coast–followed by an extended stint living with relatives and years of palming a “free or reduced lunch” card to the lunch lady at my high school.
Such is life, and I’m a lot better for it.
Still, I learned about what risk is and isn’t; and about what accountability, likewise, is and isn’t.
The cool part, though, is what I learned by osmosis in those years of walking around smaller businesses and the people in them. In that environment I had free rein to explore all kinds of cool equipment, and to interact with all sorts of people.
One of the businesses was a private ambulance service, the other was a telephone answering service.
In one business, I got to play around in an old Cadillac ambulance like this one:
Yes, it was Ghostbusters style (or, for a more apt but obscure cinematic description of the operation as I remember it: Mother, Jugs & Speed).
Ours was blue.
I can still smell its interior and see the duct tape on one of the seats where the rotary-dialed radio telephone (yes, rotary) was installed.
In the other business, I was witness to the transition of telephone answering services from old-fashioned telephone switchboard operators–no kidding, like Lilly Tomlin’s “Ernestine” character–
to computerized switching. I spent so much time around those operators that I can still today recite some of the customers:
“M&M Patio, may I help you?”
Those operators doing their thing still ring through the ages for me. All this was in the time before voicemail largely displaced that particular profession.
Enjoying my free rein, I could play with old telephone equipment to my heart’s content, and I could explore the emergency medical equipment and tools in all directions.
I knew what an Ambu bag and mass trousers were before I could diagram a sentence.
I learned how to patch a switchboard at the same time I learned to ride a bike.
I had full access. In retrospect, it was a part of my childhood that was replete with lessons.
Both businesses were 24x7x365, reactive operations. As the son of entrepreneurs running businesses of this sort, I grew to expect that mom worked the holidays.
More significant than that: I never, ever, witnessed an adult say “that’s not my job” or “I’m off today, somebody else will handle it” or “I’m calling in sick today.”
Never.
It was no big deal…we knew why.
Accountability.
Ownership.
Risk taking.
That simple reality alone has had a profound impact on my life and work, not to mention on the (low) level of my appreciation for paycheck players and iron bureaucrats of all sorts.
The entrepreneur’s life wasn’t easy, but it was colorful.
To this day, I’ll take colorful over easy anytime.
But, I digress.
The part that was most interesting is what I took away from the people; and that’s what this article is about. 24X7 professional operations of these sorts have a lot of downtime for the people in them.
To wit, I can remember building model airplanes with one of the EMTs, learning how to properly wash a car and change out spark plugs from another; and getting to know all sorts of people who worked in the business–old, young, men, women, black, white, creole, Asian, serious, funny, mean, nice and all points in between on each.
Such personalities and the inherent downtime of the operations mixed to produce some amusement and some lessons for a kid like me wandering around the operation.
Which brings me to this:
In the sleeping quarters for the overnight ambulance crews–replete with bed frames hammered together with pine 2x4s and framing nails–was a steel desk. I’d be willing to bet it had been picked up at an army surplus auction back in the 1970s.
At some point, a person had used a cool-for-that-time-period Dymo la
bel maker, one like the one in the picture here, to leave behind some wisdom on its right side pull-out writing surface.
That person, likely bored beyond comprehension and enjoying a moment toying around with the label maker; pressed out a phrase.
It read:
It’s the basic definition of accountability. The Yang of leadership culture.
Probably thinking it was a good phrase to live by (or just a way of ribbing other crew members), the person peeled and stuck the phrase to the writing surface of the desk.
At some point later, a second person took the same labeller and pressed out Phrase 2. It read:
Phrase 2 was stuck just below Phrase 1… as a sort of quasi-professional, realpolitik-driven retort to the self righteousness of Phrase 1. The Yin of leadership culture.
I suppose I discovered the two stickers when I was 8 or 9 years old. I have never spoken or written of them until I decided to write this short article.
Probably half of that is because of the language they are written with isn’t all that polite; and half is because it has taken me a long time to really grasp the significance of their brutal and ironic simplicity.
Now, language aside–and, yes, I spent all of my childhood around a crew that could curse the paint off the walls–these two phrases encompass two very different and very relevant sides of leadership culture.
One one side are the people who take responsibility. On the other side are those who duck responsibility.
The dark and the light.
The Yin and the Yang.
You have, in the form of two very basic phrases, the foundations of organizational and leadership culture.
Just as the Tao I’ve used in the opening image for this post implies that light and dark reinforce one another, and to a small degree reside within one another; these two sides of leadership culture reinforce and infiltrate one another.
In most organizations, there is a competitive equilibrium between the accountable set and the avoidant set. The accountable ones find positions and actions that are profitable, and the avoidant ones do the same.
It is in the behaviors that we, the leaders, reward that we determine which set gets to be dominant.
Which animals do you feed, and which do you slaughter?
I’ve seen organizations feed both sides. Based on that, I’d choose accountable.
I hope you’ll take away two things from this story:
First, this matters because great leaders give credit and take responsibility.
Do you find yourself in a culture where people do that? Or, at least, do you find that accountable people are rewarded more than avoidant ones?
Or, do you find yourself in a culture where people give responsibility and take credit? They lay off risk and lay on the stories of their successes.
It’s a simple assessment. Are the most accountable people in your organizations also the ones most likely to be “slaughtered” when the fan stops spinning?
It’s an existential question for individuals and for organizations.
Second, I hope you’ll see that this story matters because your organization and community is training its next generation of leaders.
No, it’s not doing so through your training programs.
It’s doing so through the equivalent of a label maker and a desktop.
The informal culture wins the day. The behaviors that get fed day in and day out are the ones that grow.
It really doesn’t matter what speeches, brochures, or PowerPoint documents you distribute.
The reason I went into detail on the autobiographical vignette is that I was made a better professional and leader by the diverse and sometimes “not-fit-for-kids” environments that I was able to explore and experience.
The diversity of experience I was blessed with has made me better.
I’m sure, somewhere out there, there are kids (and young professionals) who still get those types of experiences; and I hope all of us as parents and leaders will encourage them.
In the meantime, the rest of us can learn by osmosis from this particular Yin and Yang of leadership culture.
Feed the accountable ones.
Please share your thoughts on this article below…
In thinking through this particular professional “do not,” I had to come to grips with something… I’m a multi-tasker.
On the most interesting of days, I crave motion like a ferret with ADHD and an espresso IV staring into an open sock drawer.
That’s life. You and I like to have a lot of things going.
So, when I thought through this particular “do not,” which is about multi-tasking in meetings, I thought about how it’s typically framed.
Usually, we hear about how multi-tasking in meetings is a bad thing because it takes our eyes off the ball. It creates inefficiency and distraction.
Those things are right.
However, some level of multi-tasking is going on in almost any meeting; and the higher level the meeting, the more there is.
By that, I mean that people’s minds are on other things. It might be their kids, or a problem at the plant, or a customer call that’s coming in over the next hour.
People are multi-tasking, they just might call it distraction.
My angle is that I’d rather not worry about the fact that professionals get distracted. That’s going to happen.
What I suggest on this Saturday morning is that we focus less on the fact that people multi-task in meetings, and more on the fact that people are disrespectful to others in meetings by willfully distracting themselves.
In other words, we should avoid being unprofessional in our distractions.
The most obvious and pervasive focus of disrespect these days is facilitated by the use of phones and devices. At some companies I’ve been around, having devices in hand during meetings is a given. Laptops are open in every meeting, smart phones are used with impunity in meetings; and people generally accept or at least tolerate it.
Indeed, laptop use in meetings is viewed by some as a sign of forward thinking (“wouldn’t want to kill too many trees.”).
The issue is that far too often the “forward thinkers” are the ones looking online at new apparel to buy or what the latest political news is, all while other people are discussing content in the meeting. And, others know it. Behind privacy screens (or not) and in front of their peers, these folks put their disdain for the meeting and for other professionals in the room on display.
If you are senior, don’t do this. Even if you don’t avoid it because it’s wrong; avoid it because it’s transparent to others in the room. People watch you too closely.
In the worst of cases that you and I might come across, relatively senior managers carry on instant messaging conversations with each other while sitting near one another in meetings–giggling to one another along the way. The more junior people in the room stand dumbfounded after some of those meetings, wondering what kind of role modeling they just witnessed.
In a few other companies I’ve been around, devices were verboten in meetings. No, nobody stands up and says “no devices,” it’s just a norm.
Yes, they use more paper.
No, they are no less distracted than other company managers.
But, get this: When they are present in a meeting, they “look” present in a meeting. They leave the multi-tasking to the mind.
And, trust me, the “no devices” crowds get just as much done as the fully wired crowd. And, they tend to do it in less time.
Oh, and they make eye contact. Eye contact is a good thing when one is looking to show respect. Devices distract from it.
Multi-tasking happens. Sometimes it happens because we are focused on the right things (“How am I going to get that deal closed???”); and sometimes it happens because of personal distractions (“gotta go get my kid from school in 20 minutes…I hope this meeting doesn’t run long.”).
Your mind multi-tasks. Sometimes you have to fight it and focus; and sometimes (believe me), you just have to go with it and see where it takes you.
This “Coffee and a Do Not” is titled “multi-tasking in a meeting.” But, the reality is I’m saying “sure, you are going to multi-task…Just don’t be disrespectful and unprofessional in the process.”
Have a great weekend.
Liz Ryan, Founder and CEO of Human Workplace, writing as a contributor to Forbes, outlines how “best companies to work for” lists get the whole thing wrong.
Here is YOUR LINK
The operative passage (and I hope you read this after you’ve already clicked the link above) is this:
“I don’t trust “Best Places to Work” lists, because I was an HR person for five thousand years. I know that you can have lovely looking policies and programs for employees, but they don’t mean anything if the air in the place is heavy. If it isn’t a fun place to work — if people don’t trust one another, if the managers treat the employees like children, and if you can’t bring yourself to work all the way — then weight machines and free lunches can’t make it any better.
Unfortunately, it’s easier for some management teams to talk about gyms and lunches than to talk about fear and trust. They are too fearful to talk about fear!”
In taking down the “Best Places to Work” lists, Liz goes on to take down the game that results in them, namely that companies employ them as PR and branding programs.
She says:
“‘Best Places to Work’ listings are PR stunts that aren’t based on real employee feedback.”
I have a somewhat ambivalent to negative point of view on these sorts of lists. Having worked for and within companies that are featured on various and sundry of them, I think that Liz Ryan’s take is probably right. Still, the lists that I’m most familiar with do make an effort to take in employees points of view, and they certainly do knock out companies for not meeting a given bar on the employee survey side.
So, I suppose there is some integrity to them.
But they do cause problems. And, I figured I’d list a few points that make these lists, their impact, and the incentives created around them a potential problem for the companies and the very people they are intended to help…namely all of us reading the lists and using them to make choices. Some of the problems include that:
1. The inputs and nominations for the lists are self generated – This is essentially Ryan’s point: If you look at the content generated for these lists, it is generally provided by the employers themselves. In some cases, policies and perks are in the mind of an executive when they are put on paper explicitly for the survey, and it’s never referenced again. Face it, it’s a fact. Ryan basically says if you want to know whether a restaurant is a good one, don’t ask the proprietor, ask the patrons (and, especially, erstwhile patrons). If you want to know whether a policy is in place, don’t ask the owner of the policy, ask 15 other people and see what you get.
2. The lists drive companies to plan around them – Companies view the lists as critical to successful branding and talent attraction, and so they create executive incentives for their company to be on them. Human Resources and other executives are given incentives, sometimes heavy ones, to get on a given list.
3. The incentives, of course, can have unintended consequences – When executives are incentivized not with creating a “best” company, but rather with crafting a “best” response to a “best” survey, then behavior can get confusing and, frankly, cynical. Real issues that are brought to the fore (say in terms of fairness or application of policies) but that have no bearing on the surveys (which may not test for these hard to get at issues), are dismissed as “unimportant.” This may sound harsh, but incentives matter. In the worst cases, less than mature or overly incentive-driven executives huff and puff at people who actually bring up real issues that don’t matter to the “bests” lists.
4. Surveyors stroke the egos of executives, creating an incrementalist approach to change – The surveyors, who do in my experience give feedback to companies that participate but do not make their lists, feed the egos of the executives (not the needs of the people) in dangerous ways by constantly explaining how “close” a company has come to making the list. It’s a “just a little more and you’ll be there” exercise.
I have yet to hear of a “bests” list survey team that will walk into a C-suite and say “Hey, bub, you aren’t even close…the people here not only dislike working here, but they dislike you and your team; and think you are only trying to make us, the survey team, happy.”
Such a surveyor wouldn’t last long. So, those messages are given are incremental at best. “Just a wee bit more engagement,” or “we can see your progress and encourage you to keep doing what you are doing” is what gets said. The implication is that executives are rarely caused to reflect by not making the list. In the absence of the ego stroking “independent” evaluator, execs might have to take more drastic measures to change a culture in freefall.
5. Executives can revert to blaming in some unsavory ways – With knowledge that their organization is “so close” to making the list reinforced by the survey teams, execs might resort to blaming the organization or, in extreme circumstances, the survey team. The “our employees don’t know how good they have it” ad hominem is a useful tool when explaining middling survey results and other yellow flags. As a bonus, execs will also blame the survey team for mis-timed surveys (for instance for surveying during times that are too hot, too cold, too busy, or too boring). When you are “so close” you look for small reasons for the miss, not big drivers.
6. Companies getting “so close” start teaching to the test – The lists become the “thing” and not the outcomes the list was intended to measure. Companies start teaching to the test. They solve for a gym when a gym isn’t on anybody’s list. They solve for engagement by throwing parties and handing out t-shirts when engagement is really about a much harder search for common meaning. In short, they change the construction of a complex interpersonal environment into a check-the-box test; and fail in the process.
7. They focus on the survey when it really doesn’t fit – The “test” might not even fit a given corporate environment. For example, many of the “best places to work” lists are overloaded with professional services, marketing, and “knowledge work” firms and underloaded with manufacturing, materials, and blue collar firms. The time and energy wasted in responding to a PR exercise could be better spent on improving the human dynamics in the actual company; but the survey distracts from this.
8. Sometimes the best companies know better – I know of at least one extraordinary global firm that has wrestled with the decision on whether to take the time and energy necessary to participate in these surveys. The reason? The company defines great for itself, and doesn’t necessarily seek outside validation. It’s a compelling argument; but it MUST come with a highly reflective, listening-oriented leadership team (and it does in this particular firm). The implication of this “opt out” factor is that people looking to due diligence a potential employer really can’t tell anything by the lists, because sometimes great companies skip the exercise altogether, and opt outs aren’t necessarily publicized.
9. Companies ignore and sometimes play into the conflicts of interest inherent to these surveys – This is perhaps the most critical factor in the “best” survey business, so I’m going to take a few more paragraphs on it.
As a rule, these surveys are meant to make the surveyors money. They are rarely if ever a public service.
Any businessperson can tell you that an activity that produces a salable report every…single…year better come with some provocative changes every…single…year or else what’s it good for? Imagine a magazine that had the same article every month. That is what you would get if the surveys didn’t mix it up. So, the surveys are geared to be interesting PR, and that’s what the surveyors want from their participants. It’s not clear that interesting PR and highly engaged, stable, effective workforce always go together.
Desiring churn in the name of salable product is the first conflict of interest. After all, companies staying on the list year after year is actually not what is best for the surveyor selling its results.
Farther than this, some survey companies have gone so far as to attempt to create franchises around their surveys, including consulting firms, licensing agreements, and any number of other entanglements that can start to look like good old payola.
To wit, in October 2014, David Lazarus at the LA Times posted an article about the conflicts inherent to the business model used by Ethisphere in creating its “Worlds Most Ethical Companies” list. His assertion? Companies pay to use the Ethisphere logo, they pay to have their survey processed, and they pay to be a part of Ethisphere’s events and alliances. They can also pay Ethisphere to benchmark their ethics programs outside of the survey. All of this while Ethisphere serves as, ostensibly, an independent evaluator.
Ethisphere’s issues as an impartial evaluator have run hot and cold for years (starting with an article in Slate in 2010 that was quite scathing prior to some restructuring by Ethisphere, and later articles have defended or attacked their practices). As an executive and advisor, I have been on the inside of at least 9 of the companies honored by Ethisphere, and while believing strongly in the principles that Ethisphere hopes to uphold can also say that, on the ground level and when it comes to individual executives: Your mileage may vary.
Ethisphere’s “most ethical” list gets a couple of lines from me because out of all the topics that “best” lists can cover, ethics is the one I’m not sure you can every, really survey. The late collegiate basketball coach Dean Smith was known for once saying “you should never be proud of doing the right thing, you should just do the right thing.”
I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
No one ever says “They are the most ethical, be sure to ask them about it.”
To know a company’s ethical bearing, you have to go to the source of ethical tension, which is in the defining moments faced by that organization’s leaders every day in dealing with all stakeholders. I’ve said it before: A defining moment is when two fundamental beliefs are in conflict with one another–people vs. profit dilution, transparency vs. legally required disclosure, honesty or efficiency.
It’s tough to say which company is “best” during those moments of truth, because many companies and their leaders haven’t had to face them all that often. Impeccable ethics don’t reside in policy and procedure. They reside in decisions and actions.
Being untested (or, frankly, merely the best at keeping our dirty laundry in the hamper) is not grounds for being labeled the “best.” The same is true of pretty much any subjective “best” list, whether it is best places to work, most reputable, most welcoming, most flexible, or otherwise.
Go to the source.
“If you want to hear what employees think about a workplace, check out the reviews on Glassdoor and remember to trust your instincts above all other sources.”
The short advice from me for those looking to due diligence a company from a reputation, ethics, or work environment standpoint is this:
My advice for corporate execs thinking about how to “use” these surveys for PR or other purposes is threefold:
Oh, and I’d also talk to people who used to work there. They give you insight and in most cases have nothing to “lose” by sharing a bit.
Once again, LinkedIn has made that a piece of cake.
Know what great is for you and the organization you lead, and work to represent it through thought and action.
info@wilsongrowthpartners.com
/wilsongrowthpartners
@GeoffTWilson