What "Type" Are You?

Greetings from San Diego. I have the opportunity to be out here and meet with a group of colleagues that I deeply respect to talk about new ways to motivate and work with people.

During my trip I have had a chance to catch up on a little reading and explore some of the work of two of my favorite social and business "system" commentators, Daniel Pink and Seth Godin.

My question comes from a model/theory that Pink explores in his book Drive -the surprising truth about what motivates us. Perhaps the reason I enjoyed the book so much is because what Pink describes and what I believe are in such close sync.

He also tees off on one of my favorite targets- Frederick W. Taylor, the "father" of scientific management. This is the theory that non management people are not terribly intrinsically motivated so productivity is best optimized by routinizing their tasks.

Pink's type "I" argues that at least some part of us is driven by needs for autonomy, learning, and purpose. He doesn't take the position that all work and all people fit this model, but that many do. He even goes further and uses the "P" word, Purpose and suggests that most of us seek this with varying degrees of energy. Kind of resonates with the concept of focusing on what "matters" doesn't it.

If you haven't yet read the book I commend it to you. In addition to stimulating your thinking he also provides some "templates" for both organizations and individuals.

Seth Godin's latest work - Linchpin is another fascinating read. He explores that a new category of critical "player" is emerging in organizations. Traditionally we had labor and management and the lines were pretty clear. Linchpins are those people who can connect groups and individuals.
Their skills are in communication, building trust, and relationships; not sciences or technology. Kind of sounds like they are building engagement doesn't it? He even uses words like obedience aka compliance and how we built it into our work and social systems and the costs we are experiencing because of it. I especially see this represented in the U.S. labor law infrastructure; most of it was written in the 40's and 50's with little meaningful change since. If you are familiar with it you know that it is highly structured and based on an adversarial model.

Any of you that know me or my orientation know that concepts like working with people, creating engagement, and related models speak to my heart; but I think anyone in any organization would benefit by exploring the concepts these two discuss.

One of my favorite quotes talks about "employees being physically, emotionally, and psychologically impelled. They gladly give up other choices."

Maybe it is just me, but that sounds pretty exciting. What do you think.....?

Do We Have A Leadership Crisis?

We are in an interesting time and as you know this whole topic of leadership is a passion of mine. I become especially concerned when we can use language like 'jobless recovery" with a straight face.

I had a chance to read John Baldoni's blog on Harvard Publishing-http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/baldoni/2009/11/what_it_takes_to_lead_now.html and I have to tell you that it didn't provide me any comfort.

Baldoni references a recent McKinsey and Company survey citing that only 48% of managers believe that providing inspiration during the crisis is their job and 46% feel a responsibility to provide direction. Even more alarming the numbers drop to 45 and 39% post crisis. To make me feel even worse only 30% felt responsible for motivating their employees during the crisis and it drops to 23% post crisis!

Let me sum it up, less than 50% of the managers surveyed believe that inspiration, direction, motivation, and accountability are essential for managing corporate performance! I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me!

The defenders of course say that those are "senior management" or "executive responsibilities". They see their roles as tactical, gutting it out on the day to day. The problem is this is the "corps" of where that future leadership comes from. When does the age of enlightenment kick in and they recognize and develop their skills in these other areas.

When you add these facts to those including that 40% of "new" managers fail in their first 18 months on the job, usually for "non-technical" reasons, the costs of failures is estimated at between 2 and 4 times annual salary, and less than 30% of the organizations in the world have an employee engagement strategy it provides a pretty grim picture.

To quote Baldoni; "Execution without adequate leadership is short sighted. It will carry a company through a quarter or a year, but it will not provide a foundation for what organizations really need to do, and that is to grow."

I agree with Baldoni and also with Marcus Buckingham -
“Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant […] They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals […] our need for clarity is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.”

A recent study by Rhoads and Whitlark also discusses that the crucial foundation for engagement (which by the way yields some wonderful byproducts in areas like productivity, sustainability, and profitability) is trust. Doesn't seem like we are moving the ball in the right direction.

I see time and time again where we seek to systematize leadership- to define it in terms of metrics and statistics. Looks like once again we are missing the point that it is relationships and people.

"Presenteeism" costs the U.S economy an estimated $200+ billion per year and a majority of our managers don't see the underlying issues that cause this phenomena as being their responsibility. We are in deep shit!

I guess these statistics say a couple of things to me:

• I am hoping that the organizations I am working with are represented in the 48% who "get it".
• We need to re-evaluate or management talent acquisition and development processes in a big hurry if we are going to have to make meaningful changes.

So I guess if I was leading an organization I would be asking myself - "Where is my management team on these issues?" and maybe even more importantly, " as a leader what am I doing about it?"

So I guess I have answered my own question- now I would pose one to you " Where do we go from here?" By the way, I wouldn't suggest turning this over to your HR department to fix. This is a key leadership issue.

So You Want To Be A Leader?

This is actually the topic of a presentation that I used to do for our local Chamber of Commerce leadership development program as the last chapter of an eight month development program. Our intent was to send them out with both a sense of empowerment and accountability to something larger than themselves and their companies.

I among others have had the opportunity to discuss and debate what differentiates leadership and management on the "pages" of this blog, linkedin, and a number of other venues as have thousands of others smarter than me.

I ran across a summary of an interview with Robert Dolan, Dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, on BNET that I think summarized it it more succinctly than I have ever seen or heard before. He stated, "a manager maintains the status quo and delivers profitability, a leader performs three essential functions-

• they develop and encourage great talent merely with their presence
• they see new opportunities and innovations and push the organization to pursue them
• they act as a moral compass for the organization and role model the appropriate adoption of the organizational values and principles."

We can argue for decades about all of the other characteristics and attributes, but what I really like about Dolan's point is that they describe action and doing rather than passivity.

I found this summary especially timely because I hear the media and others starting to declare that the recession is "over". It is over because the stock market is moving up and large corporations are starting to declare profits again. I guess the fact that they expect unemployment to remain in double digits for the foreseeable future and that we have a health care crisis represents a rounding error. Not to me.

I like to think of myself as a realistic optimist. I was hoping that the recession would serve as kind of a national wake up call on a number of key societal issues. As anyone who has read my blog, my book, or other publications knows I am a big fan of engagement, true engagement. That is a system where stakeholders align in a common purpose. Studies show that organizations who adopt and maintain engagement strategies outperform their competitors in every key dimension. I was hoping the recession would cause more organizations to recognize that engagement is not only necessary, it is good for business.

I still remain hopeful that the "end" of the recession doesn't mean we think we have solved the health care issue. We have a very expensive system that delivers health care inefficiently and with pretty poor outcomes.

I am also a fan of personal competency. Getting away from the corporate and governmental codependency that has dominated our economic model for the last several generations. Employees need to be given an opportunity to engage and in return they need to be educated and expected to play a role in decisions about their health, their long term economic security, and generally be financially literate.

Much of the debate around leadership is whether leaders are born or "taught". Is it a series of characteristics or traits or is it behavior? I kind of like the behavior model. If you have capacity and you don't do anything with it are you really a leader? I think that is similar to the point Malcolm Gladwell made in Outliers, a high IQ in and of itself is no guarantee of spectacular success either personally or professionally, you must apply it.

When I look at where we got to and how we got there I have to tell you I see a lot more people in business and government who are managers- protecting the status quo and profitability; than leaders, individuals who develop deep talent, challenge their organizations to innovate, and act as moral compasses and role models not only internally, but externally.

Even the debate over health care represents an interesting model; we recognize it is compromised, but we seem (at least our "leadership") to embrace significant change in a model that doesn't work in delivering against key performance measurements.

I heard earlier this week that the performance bonuses paid out by the major financial institutions exceeded their recorded profits. Am I the only one who missed the logic of that decision?

How can we declare the recession is ending with record unemployment?

So for me I like Professor Dolan's definition of leadership. To his three characteristics I would add two more of my own:

• Come to work every day prepared to be fired for doing the right thing.
• Think about your "legacy", what you leave behind more than your "career", what you take with you.

It would appear to me that if you choose leadership rather than management as defined by Dr. Dolan you might not find the field nearly as crowded. What do you think?

Is There A Rainbow Behind This Cloud?

As some of you may have noticed I posted a question on LinkedIn about our focus on leadership as opposed to management last week. More specifically I asked whether or not we were focused on leadership to the exclusion or minimization of management. Needless to say I got pretty good response to my inquiry.

A few people "educated" me as to the difference between leadership and management. Although I feel I recognize the differences between the two I appreciate the insight and feedback that people provided to me. Others challenged my assertion that we needed to focus on management as opposed to leadership and discussed the "leadership" void we find ourselves in in some many elements of our society, but especially it would appear in government and industry.

In candor I wasn't taking a position that we need management rather than leadership. My point is that both sets of skills are essential in a high functioning organization.

Marcus Buckingham has said that the most critical role of leadership is to create and reinforce organizational clarity. I agree with him. He states that clarity is the most important attribute of leadership; not charisma, technical ability, presence, or any of those other ethereal qualities we ascribe to and pine for in our leaders.

Richard Rumelt of UCLA says that the most important role of management is to remove ambiguity for employees. To create a direct personal connection of the tasks and activities we expect them to perform in support of the organizational mission. The CEO does that at a very high level for the whole organization, managers do that for their employees.

As a practicing human resources professional and consultant for almost 30 years I can tell you that both the "vision" and the removal of ambiguity are critical. People need clear expectations, constructive feedback, and ongoing coaching on a personal level. Charismatic leadership will not replace that.

There is some potential good news. Harvard Business School professor Bill George says that our current economic crisis may be both the wake up call and the catalyst for creating a new generation of leaders. He states, "... this new group will build organizations that produces long lasting value for employees and customers, not short sighted strategies focused on 'shareholder' value. Rewards will be for performance, not transactions."

Maybe I am reading into it too much , but that sounds a lot like engagement to me. If you look at where we are in the financial crisis I would submit that much of it derives from that focus on transactions not performance.

A colleague of mine who is focusing her energies in the criticality of trust in creating high performance cultures has been somewhat a victim of the "transactional" mindset. Her potential clients want to see statistical "evidence" of the link between trust and performance. They want a transaction process, not a relationship. I defy anyone to show me an organization with long term sustained high performance that has not created true engagement and didn't build that on a foundation of trust!

I recognize that there are organizations that have enjoyed a level of "transactional" success through the utilization of down sizing, outsourcing, and other "cost" based tactics; but now that we have run out of emerging economies to exploit and operate in a global economy how is that working for them?

I see questions on LinkedIn and other sites seeking the "technological" solution to creating engagement; guess what, there isn't one!

As my colleagues in LinkedIn pointed out to me we desperately need a new "leadership" model that has elements of both those ethereal qualities and heroes that we seek, but also the competencies of effective management. We also need a new value proposition based on relationship, not transactions. We need that between employee and employer, supplier and customer, and citizen and community. Transactions; creating short term value at the expense of others, is what got us here. The old solutions aren't relevant and simply won't work. So what do I suggest:

• Respect
• Personal responsibility
• Shared information
• Equitable rewards
• Mutual loyalty

Hmmm, sounds a lot like relationships based on trust on mutual benefit doesn't it. Who knows, maybe it will catch on.

The Ides of April

Maybe it is a desperate desire for Spring to really arrive or watching the roller coaster of the market, but I sense a need and an opportunity for change.

Once again I have had an opportunity to do some reading and a lot of thinking. A while back I had the opportunity to participate in a survey/study on what makes Human Resources an effective business partner. I just got the results and they weren't terribly surprising to me. The authors wisely pointed out that many of the suggestions regarding HR as a function related to other "staff" functions as well. The big three certainly do:

• Your function needs to exist in the context of the larger organization. Great HR systems, accounting systems, etc do not exist in a vacuum. They need to be integrated into the business. For those of you in an agency or not for profit the business is achieving the organizational mission. The fact that the objective is not a return to shareholders doesn't give us an excuse not to perform effectively and efficiently.
• You need to be value added. It is easy to hide behind compliance or other rules and regulations to explain to our customers why they can't do what they believe they need and want to do. If it was always easy they wouldn't need us. I like to think that when I was involved as an internal HR practitioner I saw myself as a consultant. My job was to provide technical expertise and facilitation to my "clients". When I say facilitation that's what I mean as well. Human resources is a function not a department. We should be sure that management and leadership of our organization both possesses and demonstrates core competency in things like setting expectations, giving feedback, and even administering compensation. Those are tools we should be providing to them, not doing for them.
• Own your space. By this I mean that you need to see yourself as an organizational peer and make sure you have the credibility to pull it off. That means that as well as competency in your discipline you need to be competent about your business. You don't get a seat at the table by either waiting to be invited or by not being able to contribute as a thought partner when you are invited to play.

I also had an opportunity to read a blog post by Stanley Bing on BNET. Like Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bing takes the "mba's" to task. He points out that much of our graduate business education is based on theoretical statistical models and systems; many of which he believes and I agree got us where we are today. We love systems and technology in the U.S. and they are valuable tools if they are used to empower people. Too often they are not, they are vehicles to reduce headcount or costs.

It was interesting, I was having a discussion with my son the other day about our current economic situation with a focus on Detroit. He informed me that a big part of the issue was the lack of personal accountability for the work performed by individuals and protected by the unions. I remember being his age and believing that as well; until I had an opportunity to work in a collective bargaining environment that fully embraced the philosophy of capitalism and Frederick W. Taylor. For those of you that don't remember, Taylor was the "father" of scientific management, the concept that managers manage and workers do what they are told. Add to that the Calvinist concept of pre-destination and you have a kind of industrial elitism that still exists in many industries and organizations.

I am not an apologist for the UAW, but our history of not so benevolent autocracy contribute significantly to the history of labor relations in America.

I think it is telling that we still call the skills surrounding understanding behavior and people "soft" skills while managing machines, systems, and numbers are "hard" skills.

You have heard me and others talk about the return on investment from creating truly engaged organizations. It would seem many of the skills required to do this are "soft" skills.

For those of you that are in the HR profession or other related areas that would be interested in the results of my colleagues study, drop me an email and I would be glad to forward you the summary.

As always your comments and thoughts appreciated.

The "Turtle" or the Hare

In hockey there is an interesting expression called "turtling". It generally means that a player curls up rather than fight when confronted by a member of the opposing team. It struck me that businesses are going to have to make some of those same decisions as we continue in this economy for what looks to be the foreseeable future.
There are some strategies that are available to businesses right now to "survive" this economy and in fact even position yourself.
I was reading an article about President Obama and it was commenting on leadership and strategy during "turn around" times that have some interesting implications for these times as well.

One of the first "weapons" you want to have in your arsenal in times like these is great leadership. I want to be clear about what represents great leadership in my mind and to me it comes down to a couple of key factors- the first being what Marcus Buckingham describes as clarity. Clarity is ensuring that everyone in the organization understands the mission and where they fit in. If you are the CEO or another C level person that is absolutely critical right now.
I believe this is also a time for executive courage that is demonstrated by being visible, available, and personally accountable. This is not a time to hunker down in your office or in a conference room with your executive team. That's turtling.

If you are a middle manager your role is to minimize ambiguity. As managers our primary role is to remove the complexity from situations and make it very clear what each employee's role is and how it contributes to the bigger picture. In times of stress that becomes even more important.

I believe this is an excellent opportunity for transparency. By transparency I don't mean an "open" book policy. especially if you haven't previously had one. What I do mean is showing people the respect they deserve by being honest with them about the situation and potential outcomes and actions. They are adults. They need to be led not parented.

I think this is a great opportunity for collaboration. Most of us like to believe that we hire and retain competent management staffs. If that is the case why do we exclude them from the decision making process? I can't tell you how many times I have been in situations where the executive team dictated the "solution" to an issue, without engaging the participation and input of the people managing the actual work processes.. I am not necessarily arguing for negotiation about targets, but I am proposing that you may dictate the "what", but give them an opportunity to participate in the how.

I am a great believer in cautious optimism. They need to believe that you believe that you will come though this a stronger organization. If you don't and you feel that the "end is near" then do the right thing and resign and leave the leadership to someone who is still committed!

I am also a believer in making the tough decisions. Many people don't like Jack Welch's tough performance matrixing model, but the reality is that everyone doesn't perform at the same level. High performing organizations know this and they evaluate their talent pool constantly. People who can't or won't perform at the expectations set by the organization are given an opportunity to find a better fit at another organization. Consistency is highly overrated in the absence of good performance management. Consistency means we treat everyone exactly the same, the problem with that is everyone doesn't perform the same way. Your processes should be consistent, the application should not be. There is nothing illegal about treating your best performers and your non-performers differently, or treating your best performers differently than your "average " performers. Before you do an "across the board pay cut" ask yourself if you have the right people in the life raft.

As you all know from my previous blogs, writings and rantings I am a big believer in engagement. I am going to go on record here and tell you that engaged organizations will not only weather the impact of this recession, they will emerge stronger!. You see they have their foundation of clarity, transparency, trust, and commitment already in place.

So in this case the hare is better. One of my favorite expressions is "when you are being run out of town get out front and make it look like a parade". Curling up and "turtling" is not going to get us through this recession, but the recession could cause us to take actions we have neglected and build a new foundation.

Leadership is different!

I have been seeing and responding to a number of posts on LinkedIn and other places all talking about the difference between leadership and management. I have seen things going all the way from describing the differences in great detail to saying they are the same- it is just a matter of semantics. I even saw a post recently sating do companies with a clear vision need leaders- or will good management that can implement the vision suffice.

I would argue passionately that they are different. I am not saying that one is better than the other, but we need them both.

Leadership is all about creating new paradigms or a paradigm shift- seeing a "disturbance in the force" and responding to it and helping others respond as well.

I saw an interesting editorial the other day about gun control and the right of each of us to "bear arms". The writer pointed out appropriately that at the time the Bill of Rights was written "arms" consisted of muskets. Kind of hard to conceal one under your coat or blast a bunch of people like you can with today's weaponry. That's a paradigm shift.

A little over 100 years ago we decided it wasn't ok to own other people. In 1964 for really the first time under law it became illegal to discriminate against someone because of their gender, their race, their color, their religion, or their national origin. Those were paradigms shifts. Those paradigm shifts came from leaders, not managers!