The Long and Winding Road

The Leadership Journey

Leadership is not for the faint hearted. It is very much a journey rather than a destination. The other thing about it is that leadership is bestowed on you, it doesn’t come with a declaration on your part or a promotion, or a place on an org chart. It is a gift.

You may be part of what is referred to as your organization’s leadership team, but that doesn’t make you a leader. Leadership is when people agree to follow you and it is a privilege that can be retracted at any point.

I am pretty concerned that right now we are observing leadership failure on an epic level.

I have been a corporate human resources executive, C level executive, and management consultant for over thirty years and I am miserably disappointed with the progress I see to date.

One of my colleagues pointed out in a blog post last week that the old management/leadership model (in the old days we treated them the same) were about planning, directing, controlling, budgeting, and others things we do to people rather than with people.

I saw a post recently that said the new organizational currency is trust. My reaction was that this isn’t new, we just don’t want to acknowledge it.

Stephen MR Covey goes even further to identify three levels of trust-

·        Deterrence, trust coming power or authority

·        Knowledge based, trust coming from perceived competence or credentials

·        Identity based, trust coming from shared experiences and intimacy

Most of our institutions are based on at best the first two levels of trust. The work ethic to a large extent takes its roots from Calvinism. Rich people were inherently good and to be obeyed. Poor people were poor because they weren’t good.

Scientific management, the prevailing management model for generations, picked up right where that left off. This was the concept that manager/leaders thought and workers did. You broke down work into small monotonous pieces that could be mastered and completed without a lot of mental horsepower.

By dumbing the work down, you could also pay a lot less. There are some that would like to return to that model with robotics and automation.

I see a bit of embracing the knowledge based trust model in our infatuation with things like lean, six sigma, and the relentless pursuit of credentialing and certifications in almost every profession.

Everybody wants to be bona fide. It is interesting to me to see the new tendency towards MBA graduates to adding that to their business cards as an implied form of credentialing or competency. I applaud people who have done the work to complete that process, but I have yet to encounter an MBA curriculum that creates leaders.

That identity based trust thing is a real bugaboo! There is not a credential or certification in the world that ensures that. You have to do the work, and that work is hard.

My former profession of Human Resources is taking a real ass whooping these days. You can’t crack open the internet without someone commenting on how obsolete the profession and practices are and why maybe the function should be eliminated.

I hate to admit that to an extent I agree. Many HR practitioners are very skilled in compliance, building lots of rules and infrastructure or making sure that their organization is in compliance with infrastructure imposed by the government because of the way we treated employees in its absence.

Compliance will never optimize organizational performance and lead to identity based trust.

A very well respected colleague of mine posted a great article on 10 things that are bad for your organizational culture. To a large extent I agreed with her.

I do take a couple of exceptions though.

She like a lot of others really have their undies in a wad about employee engagement. They are especially ferocious in indicting organizations who use employee engagement surveys as being a tool for ratting out employees and unnecessary because managers and leaders should know how their employees feel and what their issues are without a survey.

I have two thoughts on that:

·        If you are using your engagement survey to identify malcontents, you have baseline cultural issues way beyond anything your engagement survey can fix.

·        I believe Dunbar’s Number. This is the idea that very few of us can maintain highly personal relationships with more than 150 people at a time.

I know when I was an executive I tried to be very visible and approachable by all the employees in the organization. I know as my scope increased and those organizations got bigger I felt like I got less effective doing that.

I don’t think an engagement survey should be your only or even primary way of sensing where people in your organization are and how they are doing. I also don’t think having a meeting with your employees annually to discuss their performance and how it links to compensation is effective.

That being said I think that engagement surveys can be a tool. I think that while we should abandon the annual performance appraisal process unless it is merely a summary of frequent, periodic discussion about performance we need to give employees feedback.

We also need to explain how we make decisions about their compensation, career growth and a bunch of other things that are really important to them.

Those discussions should be with their manager, not HR. That is how you build identity based trust. That means their manager has to have those skills and be held accountable to do that work.

My colleague doesn’t like employment at will much either. I actually am in support of it to the extent it is practiced the way it was intended.

As it is intended employment at will creates parity in the employment relationship, either party can end for any legal reason. The key is either party. Employers don’t like that part.

It is not a tool to build loyalty, that is a different model. Loyalty goes back to my old friend identity based trust. It is mutual and it is measured in terms of contribution and alignment, not tenure or morale. It is a relationship of equals.

The cold reality is that most organizations exist to meet the expectations of their stakeholders. Providing employment is ancillary. Smart employers realize that recognizing employees as equal stakeholders and appropriately balancing their interests is good for the interests of the entity. I call that employee engagement.

The current state of leadership concerns me. When I look at the current election cycle our choices are pretty underwhelming.

I will be blunt; I am not a Trump fan. He is no leader in business or anywhere else. Anybody that operates from a model of dividedness is not leading. His models are exclusionary and prey on people’s angers sand fears.

I underwhelmed by his competition as well.

I am very disappointed in our Congressional leadership. I don’t agree with everything the President has done, but the blatant obstructionisms of the Republican leadership are hurting the country. Since his reelection the Republican leadership has clearly stated their objective is not to run the country, but to thwart any of his initiatives.

As recently as today announcing they will use their majority to refuse to consider any Supreme Court nominee to honor the right of the people to participate in that process is incredibly poor leadership.

What will be their recourse in the event they lose the general election and the next President to make that appointment is also a Democrat? After all the people will have spoken…….

I am not going to claim that the opposition party hasn’t resorted to similar tactics, but since third grade I was taught that retaliation is not leadership.

Leadership is hard work. It is not for everyone and no one should be ashamed for not seeking it. On the other hand, we are at a time and place where true leaders are in short supply so maybe we need to reexamine our models and figure out where we go from here…

Dunbar's Number, Bad Process and Results

Dunbar’s Number, Surveys and Engagement

Bad processes yield bad results.

I make that statement as I look at the shouts across the blogosphere that performance appraisal has failed, employee engagement is bullshit, and a number of other sweeping generalizations.

When I examine those things I come up with a pretty consistent conclusion; if your process is designed and executed poorly you are likely to yield poor results.

Let’s look at hiring and selection. It is generally a mess. Most organizations still rely heavily on the interview as their primary selection tool, even though results have said that unstructured interviews by themselves are basically a crap shoot.

Then we add technology to it through automated systems to sift applications and determine the most qualified candidates. That way we can dumb the process down and turn recruitment into an entry level role in HR, because the system does the work. That is typically an epic fail.

If your performance management system consists of an annual trip to the woodshed between manager and employee to communicate why you won’t be getting the raise you anticipated, it is an epic fail.

Employees representing every generation have been clear from the start of the Industrial Revolution that they desire clear performance expectations, appropriate and constructive feedback, and equitable compensation. And for the most part we still suck at it. That doesn't mean we should abandon it, it means we need to do it better!

Most compensation delivery and performance management systems are designed by HR people for HR people. We want to streamline and increase efficiency and consistency. Those are code words for routinizing it. Creating alignment (the appropriate goal of engagement) is not routine, it is personal. It takes work and commitment and it lives at the front line where employees live and work.

A recent Gallup study indicates that employees are much less engaged than senior management thinks they are as a rule. No surprise. How often do senior managers interact with line employees?

Dunbar’s number is the concept  that most of us mere mortals can’t maintain meaningful connected relationships with more than 150 people. As organizations get larger those relationships get strained.

We live in a fantasy world today where people have thousands of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. Do you really want to go out on a limb and say those are meaningful relationships? I can’t and I will admit to being in four figures for LinkedIn connections.

Stephen MR Covey tells us that the most important level of trust is identity based, which is based on shared values and experiences and the recent literature indicates every generation, especially the Millennials see this as a baseline element of healthy relationships with their employer.

That requires investment and personalization, you know that soft skill stuff.

Today I read a post that says doing surveys is dumb because good companies already know how their people feel about key issues and how aligned they are with their work and the company.

Really? So is the definition of a good company one that is led by one of those prodigies that can maintain those identity based relationships with hundreds of employees rather than those of us who can only maintain 150?

I will concede that if the only way you are creating and maintaining alignment is with an annual or semiannual survey you are likely falling short of your objective. It’s a tool not a solution.

If you are only having performance management and feedback conversations annually you are failing epically.

If your hiring process consists of hitting the panic button and pushing a bunch of people though an interview process without looking at the totality of the role and multiple tough points like congruency and fit you probably have both hiring and retention issues, not to mention shitty engagement.

I saw a great quote the other day that said if a plant isn’t growing properly you change its environment, not the plant. If your processes aren't working then refine them, don’t throw them out.

Get rid of language like human capital and hire whole people.

Don’t promote anyone into a management or leadership position that doesn’t have decent emotional and social intelligence skills and who has demonstrated competencies in things including: setting clear expectations, giving and receiving constructive feedback, taking corrective action, and coaching. I consider these a baseline.

If you have to retrofit your leadership team through training and/or reassignment, then bite the bullet and do it. Hold everyone accountable to walk the talk.

Remember that your leadership culture is defined by the worst behavior you are willing to tolerate from either management or employees!

It is okay to manage performance, communicate your compensation delivery strategy and align it to organizational goals and performance.

It is also okay to occasionally survey your employees and ask them how we are doing as an organization since you might not have an intimate, identity based relationship with all of them. If you do that listen to what they tell you and act on that feedback.

If you need the survey to identify your poorest performers and most disgruntled employees, you have severe weaknesses in your management infrastructure. Identify those and fix them.

The tough news is you have to all of this not just some of it because half assed solutions or incomplete systems don’t yield complete outcomes ever……

Leadership, Loneliness, and Credibility

It’s Lonely, But Especially at the Top

I am a pretty big Simon Sinek fan. For those of you that aren’t familiar with him he has published two books; Start With Why, and Leaders Eat Last. He has also been a featured presenter on TED (if you don’t know what TED talks are drop me an email) and drawn huge audiences.

I see Sinek as a bit like Malcolm Gladwell, who I also enjoy. Neither of the two are scientists in the traditional sense. They are just very smart, curious people who look at patterns and situations and make observations and comments on them.

 Sinek’s latest blog post; http://www.businessinsider.com/simon-sinek-why-every-leader-needs-a-buddy-2016-3 is just such an observation. In it he discussed the importance of having a colleague to partner with in traveling your leadership journey.

I use colleague perhaps differently than most; I don’t intend it to exclusively describe a peer or coworker in your organization, but rather someone you respect and who you can agree to hold each other accountable as you evolve.

I have long believed that leadership is something others bestow on you rather than something you achieve by virtue of a position on an organizational chart or certification from an organization. To that end doing by yourself is both improbable and probably inaccurate.

I differentiate management and leadership. Not in a judgmental way, I think highly effective managers are critical to organizations in achieving their goals. I just personally see leadership as more ethereal and strategic than management.

In his recent blog, my UK based colleague Geoff Searle points out that traditional leadership models are based on four primary skill sets and activities: planning, organizing, controlling and motivating. It is interesting to me that all four of these activities are things you do to people rather than with them. I especially highlighted motivating because in this old school mindset the model was again things you do to by using leverage points like compensation and performance management, usually reactively rather than proactively. He also astutely identifies that the key skill of alignment isn’t included in this approach.

I have also found that the majority of models to teach leadership are flawed because they focus almost exclusively on the I think, or intellectual part of people and don’t discuss behavioral and even more visceral things like trust and congruency, I think in large part because those are “soft skills” and in part because they are much tougher to change.

Another person I admire a great deal Meghan Biro, commented this morning on the trust deficit that exists in many organizations based on corporate behavior when we embraced the human capital model and used strategies like down- sizing, outsourcing, and off shoring to create higher rates of return at the expense of people and jobs.

Both Gen X and the Millennials got a front row seat to that paradigm shift. It is ironically amusing to me to hear corporate leaders lament about the lack of loyalty from these generations given their willingness to employ the models I mention to improve the bottom line.

Equally amusing is the recognition that truly engaged employees, and I describe engaged as aligned not happy, outperform less engaged employees by a significant margin.

You just have to overcome that trust deficit thing and create an environment that reinforces engagement…

We see a certain recognition of the mutual reinforcement model with the proliferation of coaching models and certification programs. My concern is that those can teach you the techniques, but do we really see changed behavior?

I am a big believer in Stephen MR Covey’s Trust model ™ that indicates that real trust is identity based, built from shared values and experiences so the trust that comes just from training or practitioners who are certified as coaches may have achieved Covey’s second level, competency based trust, but just like George Clooney’s character in Oh Brother, Where Art Though, that doesn’t make you bona fide.

Partnership is powerful. Having created a shared experience with a colleague inside or outside your organization and holding yourself accountable is I believe a much stronger model.

A new article from McKinsey demonstrates the reality/perception delta between employees’ perception versus “leaderships” perception of their credibility and ability to motivate staff, the difference is over 10% in all cases rising to a high of 16% on inspiration. They may be “certified”, but it appears they aren’t bona fide.

This is interesting as Gallup and the famous Net Promoter model have both included scores on the question “I have a best friend at work” as a key indicator of employee engagement.

Most executives I have talked to don’t consider that as relevant or appropriate once you start climbing the management ladder. I will admit to being among them.

Perhaps however if we were to rephrase it to “I have a trusted colleague who I share a commitment to hold ourselves and each other to our stated values and behavior” it becomes relevant again at every level?

So I guess I would suggest when you look at developing and reinforcing your culture you keep some things in my mind-

·        How you act is more important than what you say.

·        Assuming that you have credibility and trust at the identity level is probably ill advised.

·        Find a partner in your organization who you can share your experiences and concerns with and agree to hold each other accountable

·        When you are looking at reinforcing leadership skills and models wherever possible use a cohort or partner model to build in reinforcement and shared accountability.

·        Manage and engage with whole people at every level.

Truth be told the Millennials are no more demanding, narcissist, or disloyal than any other generation. Just like as history tells us you get the performance and loyalty you earn and manage for every day….  

Millennials and Leadership Fails

Millennials, Employee Engagement, and Leadership Fails

It is interesting to watch both the behavior of the Millennial generation and all of the energy and dialogue they are creating.

I think the dialogue is good. Millennials make up 50% of the workforce today and that number will increase to 75% over the next ten years. It is amusing however to see our desire to lump them all together with sweeping statements about who they are and are not.

The last couple of weeks there have been two different situations involving Millennials and leadership opportunities that have played out over social media.

The first was the young woman from Yelp who was frustrated with her living situation and lifestyle opportunities given her economic situation living in the Bay area and not making a lot of money. She chose to use social media to address her concerns in an open letter to the CEO. Didn’t work out well, she lost her job for “policy violations”.

There was a lot of discussion about whether or not she was a victim or overly entitled. That has been debated ad naseum so I won’t cover it here.

I will say that her being hired by Yelp was a management failure. I encourage my clients to build congruency into their hiring process.

Congruency includes things like- the job is consistent with my values, I believe in the product or service, I am willing to do the work to be proficient, I see the activity as being something meaningful and engaging.

When I read her list of concerns I don’t think that was covered in her interview.

I don’t want to confuse anyone by stating I believe in lifetime employment, but even in the tour of duty or gig economy I advise employer and employed to have that congruency discussion.

When you look at what happened and how she handled her issues from the beginning I am going to go out on a limb and say that didn’t happen in her hiring process.

The second story is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

A young woman was hired to work in a retail store. She was so excited and committed to the product and the brand that she posted pictures of her wearing the company’s garments on social media as an encouragement to her network to share her enthusiasm and purchase and wear the clothes as well.

She did that until she received a post on Instagram from the CEO that she didn’t fit the image of the models he wanted representing the brand- essentially she was the wrong body type.

WTF- you tell a committed employee it is okay for you to sell our product, but essentially please don’t wear it or god forbid if you wear it don’t promote it and identify it as our product.

Epic leadership fail. The average employee unless they are working in a very small organization has very few personal interactions with the CEO or any senior manager. How awesome that this interaction is telling an employee they aren’t suitable to represent our brand!

No surprise the young woman has terminated her association with the company. Her story has also been shared over social media.

There are these related concepts called employee engagement and employment brand.

Employee engagement is what Ken Matejka in his book, Why This Horse Won’t Drink, calls being physically, psychologically and emotionally impelled. Employees willing give up other choices to align with your organization. That translates into higher levels of productivity, higher profitability, higher retention and a bunch of other things that CFO’s drool over and human resources professionals wring their hands over trying to create.

It is a good thing. Organizations with high engagement outperform their less engaged counterparts on every key performance metric. The tough part is that it isn’t a survey or a program, it is a culture. You never get done reinforcing it.

That is where employment brand comes in. Employment brand how your employees, alums and potential employees see you and describe you to others. It is very important and it isn’t just about your recruiting brochures and Linked In and Facebook profiles.

Every organization has an employment brand. The smart ones manage their employment brand to ensure they are top of mind with the talent they have and want to acquire.

Engagement starts with that brand. Being able to recruit and manage people who are preconditioned to be supportive of your organization and goals – physically, psychologically, and emotionally impelled so to speak, makes it way easier to manage those folks and get high performance from them. Changing people is really hard, especially since we are so poor at it.

The emerging generations talk with and share perspectives much more than previous generations. Just as executives have old boy’s clubs (and hopefully soon old girl’s clubs) that they tap into to attract and retain candidates these people talk to each other.

Not only do they talk to each other, but they trust each other way more than they trust us. (For more on why read my blogs and articles on the Social Contract.)

So here are my thoughts-

·        Manage whole people, not just their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

·        Hire individuals. Don’t get caught up in group think and treat them all the same whether that is based on gender, age, nationality, sexual preference, or any of the other stupid labels we dream up.

·        Lose the expression human capital from your business vocabulary. If you have to call them something call them people or talent.

·        Don’t expect any more loyalty and commitment than you are willing to provide.

·        Never, never pee on employees who are committed and passionate about your brand and your company. They are incredibly valuable.

·        Do the work to create and sustain employee engagement. It is better, period.

Revisiting The Social Contract

The Social Contract Revisited
Over this weekend I found myself reading and thinking about a number of things I saw posted and debated on the blogosphere. 
There are a number of different postings out there about a young woman who directed a letter/post the CEO of her organization deploring her personal working conditions, primarily her compensation vis a vis, 
 the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay area and the affordability gap for basic food and shelter and wages.
The young woman was released from the company (fired) and part of the discussion was whether or not she was terminated for taking her view and her issues public. The CEO has indicated he was not personally involved in that decision.
There are a number of issues that this incident has provoked discussion about including, but not limited to –
•    The ongoing debate about a “living wage” and who is responsible for providing it
•    Whether her taking her issues to the public represents an act of courage or a sense of entitlement that we have branded the Millennial generation with
•    Whether the action taken by the organization was appropriate and within their purview
Another excellent post talked about engagement versus empowerment and how we should measure it and whether or not it is still relevant.
I personally believe that engagement is a culture and a process rather than a program or an event and I think that if we look at the organizational performance of organizations where employees rate themselves a highly engaged as opposed to marginally or unengaged the question of the relevance of engagement becomes pretty obvious.
I have long believed that engagement is about alignment. When I have a clear understanding of the goals of the organization, can see the direct impact and relationship between my efforts and organizational performance, and a direct link between my efforts and performance and the reward structure of the organization, and finally I feel that my personal values are aligned with that of the organization I am inclined to do my best work.
Our existing social contact has its roots in compliance, not engagement. We wanted employees to do what they are told with a minimum of pesky questions and the need to be coached, motivated, or otherwise individually managed.
There are many who believe (and I am among them) that the primary purpose of our educational system was to train a supply of people who had the basic skills to follow direction and understood that performance equated to complying with authority. Do what teacher says and get the A. In return under the old model you were provided with a degree of economic security.
Then the 70s and 80’s happened and off-shoring, down- sizing, and right sizing to optimize financial performance became acceptable.
Another great post talked about that HR bugaboo, turnover. The author points out a number of things that we should take into account when we look at turnover-
•    The fact that few of the Millennial generation embrace the idea of lifetime employment
•    That who is leaving and why they are leaving may be way more important than how many
•    That certain types of employment are transactional and essentially temporary and that is ok.
I have long thought that one of the most appropriate measures of highly effective executives/leaders is their talent legacy. How many of their staff have gone on to significantly greater responsibility either within or outside the organization.
Yet another great post talked about the entitlement mentality. He talks about how every organization in the world is basically created to generate value for the stakeholders. Simply put that means that the end goal isn’t to provide jobs for employees. That is a side benefit.
On the flip side employees don’t exist to serve their employers. They rent their talents, efforts and abilities to the employer as long as it works for both parties. 
Enlightened employers have figured out that when you see your employees as stakeholders rather than human capital and you hire and develop people who share your vision, values, etc. and reward appropriate behavior they are likely to stay longer and contribute more during their tenure with you.
I feel legitimately bad for the young lady who finds herself unemployed in a high cost of living area, but on the flip side I have to ask myself these questions-
•    Was she not aware of the compensation being offered for the position she accepted and the requirement that you stay in a department for a year before transferring to a different (I am assuming higher paying) role?
•    She made a cognitive decision to live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the U.S. Did she look at the total picture before accepting the job? Has she considered relocating?
•    What other actions did she take before she addressed her concerns to the CEO in a very public forum?
I can relate to much of her experience. The community where I currently reside has major issues with the affordability index which is the cost of living relative the average wage rate. We have largely stagnated for close to two decades or more since the severe reduction of the extraction economy the community was built on. I am deeply disappointed with community leadership that after that much time we have made little meaningful progress in addressing that issue.
I find it kind of repugnant that a big part of our allure to some employers was the ability to pay relatively lower wages to a pretty well educated workforce, something that may be changing as the state is embracing a new minimum wage that will be among the highest in the country.
It is also ironic to me that we have an issue for employers requiring staff with more vocationally oriented than academically oriented skills, positions that do pay a living wage, and we have made minimal progress addressing that.
We have issues in our society with the wage gap, access to health care and a number of others.
I don’t happen to be among those who feel that the government is best suited to address those issues. I am more supportive of collaborative models involving all the sectors than increasing codependency.
My perspective may seem harsh. It isn’t intended to be.
We are leaving literally trillions of dollars on the table annually in the U.S. alone from lost productivity from disengaged employees, employee turnover, and the direct and indirect health care related costs of employee health care expenditures relating to stress, depression and other related issues.
We need a new social contract that is based on mutual respect and mutual responsibility. I can’t see anything but upside. Can you?

E

The Criticality of Feedback

The “Gift” of Constructive Criticism

A couple of recent articles reminded me of something that I both learned painfully and continue to struggle with after several decades in the workplace- “Constructive criticism aka feedback is a gift and should be recognized as such”.

No one really likes to get feedback that is not positive, at least initially, but a couple of articles recently talked about the connection between emotional intelligence and the ability to mine that feedback for value by keeping a few things in mind.

Diane Gottsman in her article How to Accept and Give Criticism with Grace, provides some great ground rules that while not earth shattering or rocket science can be very helpful.

·        Be aware of your body language

·        Be prepared mentally and emotionally

·        Remain calm and don’t respond with angry excuses

·        Rethink the word/concept of criticism. I personally try to avoid that language and use constructive feedback in its place.

·        Be appreciative- of the effort if not the content.

From my own experience I have learned a couple of other suggestions I would add:

·        Focus on the feedback not the person. It is easy to reject the right feedback from the wrong person.

·        Recognize that everyone is not equally skilled in their language or their technique. Listen for the message carefully. This is especially true when there is an unequal power relationship like subordinate to boss or provider to customer.

·        Try to adopt the standard of most positive interpretation, this means giving the person the benefit of positive intent even if their delivery is less than perfect.

Most people would rather get a sharp poke in the eye rather than give feedback whether it is to a colleague, a subordinate, and especially a superior, but constructive feedback is both critical to teamwork and improved performance it is a fundamental expectation of the Millennial generation. Their intraprenurial mindset looks at careers and opportunities to increase their skills and value. They expect timely, balanced, and meaningful feedback as a fundamental right.

Even with all the hoo hah about blowing up traditional performance evaluation the root cause there is that the process is typically done so poorly, not that recipients don’t want feedback. The typical annual review system is an epic fail. It isn’t timely, it isn’t balanced, and many find it marginally meaningful.

As a recovering HR executive I find that many performance evaluation systems are designed by HR professionals to impress other HR professionals and to deliver limited pay increases. They aren’t user friendly to the actual manager and recipient.

Gottsman also mentions some guidelines for giving feedback to make it more meaningful and useful.

·        Be private. No one wants a critique in public

·        Focus on issues or behaviors not on people. People own their behavior they aren’t their behavior.

·        Be specific, especially about the impact on the work, work group, etc.

·        Provide suggestions.

·        Be available and follow up. It is a process not an event.

In my perspective if you can’t tie your feedback to the work and work performance and provide a suggestion as to how to improve it isn’t feedback. It is just petty criticism.

Justin Bariso in his article How Emotionally Intelligent People Handle Criticism, adds some additional great suggestions, ask yourself these two questions:

·        Putting my personal feelings aside, what can I learn from this alternate perspective?

·        Instead of focusing on the delivery, how can I use this feedback to help me or my team improve?

He uses the illustration of a scathing review a top chef received from a New York Times food critic as a great example of how to own the issue and use it as a vehicle to improve future performance.

I firmly believe that the ability to constructively provide and receive feedback is essential to building trust and trust is the foundation for high functioning relationships both personal and professional.

You will never make the transition from manager to leader if you don’t master this skill.

Covey’s third and highest level of trust, identity based trust, simply can’t be achieved without honest dialogue and mutual investment.

Employee engagement worldwide still remains at what I believe to be unacceptably low levels and it is things like trust, congruency, and alignment that are going to address the causes of low engagement and get us the performance we want, not technology, six sigma or other process interventions and feedback is an essential building block….

Wrong Solution

Sigh, I Don’t Think He Got This One Right
I just read where the President has signed a bill proposing that all companies with more than 100 employees will be required as part of their equal employment opportunity filing to report compensation by gender, ethnicity, and other factors.
My concern is that while this may lead to “transparency” it will not necessarily lead to pay equity.
I am old enough to remember when affirmative action planning actually had teeth to it. The idea was to identify inequities in employment and address them. Not surprisingly white men tended to have much higher representation in the higher level ranks than women or people of color. I will take heat for saying this, but some of it was deliberate some of it was a function of unintended consequences of less than optimal practices.
Promotion to higher level positions in part is a function of experience and training and hiring and selection. Most of us have heard of the “halo effect”, this is our tendency to hire and promote people we are comfortable with, i.e. people like us. Although we have been aware of it for over fifty years I still see it happen frequently. Most organizations quite bluntly do a generally poor job of hiring across the board.
What we found with EEO reporting that in many cases women and minorities weren’t “qualified” for senior roles because they didn’t have the experience necessary to move up. That is where the Affirmative Action part comes in. Every level has “feeder” groups from which the next generation candidates come from. The idea is by changing the composition of the feeder group you can change the candidate pool. Although this playing the long game several organizations I worked with embraced it recognizing that the demographics of the workforce was changing and it was not just a legal requirement it is good business. These days we refer to it as encouraging diversity. While we are certainly in no position to declare victory I think that organizations who sincerely embrace this process see much better representation of the workforce.
I also call it good business. Succession planning at every level is a fundamental component of good business planning. Scrambling to find talent when someone dies, retires or quits is a sucker bet. High performing organizations don’t operate that way.
So now let’s talk about how this applies to pay.
Properly executed good compensation planning takes into account the qualifications, experience, and performance of employees including the context of market conditions. Compensation planning is art as much as science.
Looking at job titles and compensation by themselves without consideration for factors like experience, qualifications, training and performance leaves out some critical data.
While I recognize that some people might be surprised by this I consider myself almost a feminist and a huge advocate of equal opportunity. When experience, qualifications, and performance are equal there should be no disparity in compensation.
As I said before however, compensation is not an exact science. I have shared the lament of many an executive who paid a premium for an outside superstar based on market conditions and performance somewhere else who feels disappointed with what they got. Just look at the musical chairs being played at the C level in organizations every day.
I a perfect world we pay for performance and I am going to go out on a limb and say that government at every level rarely provides a great example of that concept.
Mandating equity rarely works.
I am probably one of the few people I know who doesn’t think Obamacare is an abject failure. It is flawed as I pointed out in my eBook Plan B- An Alternative to Obamacare, (I will even be smug and point out I published it before it became law.
Access to care is appropriate and necessary for the long term. The problem is that the model is strictly compliance based and doesn’t address some of the underlying issues like the lack of personal responsibility and education to encourage individuals to participate in managing their own health. It also doesn’t provide navigation through a very complex health care delivery system that is byzantine to the average person.
Compensation inequity purely based on gender, national origin, or other factors unrelated to performance and market isn’t just wrong it’s dumb!
Less than 30% of the American workforce consider themselves to be engaged or highly engaged at work. As many as 17% are actively disengaged.
We don’t just have a pay equity issue, our whole approach to managing people is screwed up.
There are ways to fix it. Comprehensive and systemic approaches that look at whole people and integrated solutions, not patches.
So Mr. President while I applaud and support your intent this one isn’t a solution I can get behind…
As always I would be very interested in hearing opposing viewpoints…

HR's Elusive Value Proposition..

So What Is HR Exactly?
I was having lunch recently with a client and a very capable human resources professional that I was introducing to him and he posed that question.
He wasn’t being sarcastic or demeaning. His organization has never hired a professional human resources person in their 50-year history so he was genuinely curious about what he could expect from making this kind of investment.
I have to say as someone who has been in and around the profession for 30+ years that still remains and interesting question for me.
Is hasn’t been that long since a national survey of CEO’s and COO’s couldn’t frame a consistent answer to that question. Even scarier to me was that the majority of senior level human resources practitioners responded that the most important role they play in their organization is compliance.
I find that utterly disheartening. With four generations in the workplace, employee engagement stalled at lower than 30 percent, and organizations indicating that the acquisition and retention of talent is a key issue for the foreseeable future and the “top” minds in HR think that compliance and keeping the lid on are our highest value added activities…
Years ago when I was working in manufacturing the Total Quality Movement was just starting to gain momentum. Someone had the brilliant insight that building quality in was way better than bolting it on. Quality professional began evolving from functionaries to internal consultants, building appropriate processes and deploying them throughout the organization rather than the old school end of the line approach. It makes sense.
I have seen a number of those in the HR movement seeking to piggy back on that approach with lots of cross certifications in Black Belt and Six Sigma.
In my mind the problem with that is that those address intellectual processes. They are about building things.
When we are dealing with people we are dealing (or should be) with emotional processes.
The most important part of any high functioning relationship is trust and there is not a recipe for trust.
Stephen MR Covey brilliantly describes the three levels of trust, deterrence, knowledge based, and identity based. As you might suspect he believes as I do that identity based is by far the most important of the three.
Therein lies the problem with traditional HR. Compliance is all about deterrence. Six Sigma, Black Belt, and HR certifications are all about competency. Oops we left out that identity based thing.
I want to be clear that the first two are important elements to getting to identity based trust. Knowledge based has competency and character as foundational elements and you need those to be an effective manager.
Effective managers are critical to every organization and management is different than leadership. Bluntly you don’t need armies of leaders in an organization.
So to answer the question my client posed I would submit my answer-
•    HR helps the organization answer the Why question posed in Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle.
•    HR helps identify the values and attributes that are fundamental to and congruent with the Why. As I have said before creating alignment for people who already share your values is much easier than trying to “fix” people.
•    HR helps identify and deploy the competencies that reinforce the performance that we desire and ensures that those are practiced consistently across the organization. Those include setting expectations, giving feedback, course correcting, and coaching among others. Those competencies belong to managers, not HR.
I recommend that HR gets way better about helping organizations answer their WHY and reinforcing the values and way less about compliance and certifications.
We need to teach managers and emerging leaders about how to trust and be trusted. Trust is not an entitlement. It doesn’t come with a title, position, certification, or degree.
There are skills, attributes and abilities that are foundational to that process and they can be taught and learned and in my opinion those are part of HR’s charter as well.
So in the final analysis HR doesn’t manage human capital, we don’t master compliance. We teach organizations and people how to create an environment where people join up rather than comply and we share a vision and goals…..

Creating Clarity and Context

Every once in a while you get exposed to something that just either creates or crystallizes a perspective for you.
For me one of the first of those events was when I saw a demonstration by a man named Monty Roberts the model for the character played by Robert Redford in the Horse Whisperer, demonstrating a completely different way to train horses.
 Before Roberts that process had generally been described as breaking them in and as that implies was basically a process of inflicting your will on the horse. He pointed out that a horse is essentially a herd animal and that given the opportunity is naturally inclined to join up with you if offered the invitation.
I saw some pretty clear parallels between that demonstration and my own struggles to communicate a different way of working with people and introducing change as with rather than to people. It framed the creation of my model compliance to Commitment which is my personal spin on what we commonly refer to these days as employee engagement.
Over the last few days a client exposed me to the TED presentations by Simon Sinek and I felt very similarly. His first presentation on How great leaders inspire action from 2009 talks about what he refers to as the golden circle, three concentric circles on how businesses and organizations approach marketing their efforts and do it bass awkwardly. The outer circle is composed of what. What we claim is our product or unique value proposition. The next circle is how, the famous description of features, functions, and benefits. The innermost circle is why. Why do we bring our product or service to market?
His point, reinforced by our capitalistic nature is that the usual reason for why is to provide a return to the stakeholders and is rarely described in any kind of a compelling way.
I find the same thing is missing in much of our employment relationship. We make little or no attempt to create any sense of identity for employees; we see them as human capital. The nasty thing is that many of them are playing by our rules. They see themselves as independent contractors who rent their skills and behaviors to the highest payer.
We have no right to blame them. As evidenced by outsourcing, right sizing, and all kinds of other models to increase profit at the expense of people, we created the model. We had started to make some progress before the 2008 recession, but unfortunately it provided an excuse to return to a lot of nasty habits. Now that the economy is improving I hear a lot of complaining that organizations can’t find or keep the talent they want. Payback is a bitch.
Sinek’s 2014 TED talk, Why good leaders make you feel safe, is equally if not more compelling. He talks about the mutual responsibility and reciprocity of the relationship between team and leader. The most compelling part of that is trust.
As everybody knows I am a huge fan of the trust model outlined by Stephen MR Covey in his book, The Speed of Trust. What I heard Sinek discussing is Covey’s highest level of trust, identity based trust, which doesn’t come from entitlement or even necessarily expertise and credentials, but rather mutual investment and shared experiences.
I also hear Congruency in his model, something that goes beyond the transactional and becomes personal.
This kind of peopley stuff makes a lot of people squirm. It involves emotions and feelings not just facts and figures.
What he is talking about is the cornerstone of true engagement. There have been some criticisms of his perspective when he compares leadership to parenting, but if you listen carefully he isn’t talking adult/child or codependency, but rather developing skills and competency.
Maybe the reason this stuff resonates with me so much is because it parallels my own thinking, but if you haven’t seen it I strongly encourage you to give it a listen.
It may just clarify for you why this engagement thing is so important and why getting there requires different models than we are both teaching and reinforcing……