Do Try This At Home!

I know for years we have encouraged people to think global and act local, but I want to explore a different paradigm with you.

As you know I am extremely passionate about the concept of creating engaged environments and strong employment brands. Often what I hear from people is " that's great Mark, but I am a small business with a small work force and small budget". The other thing I hear is "how"?

I came across a couple of pieces earlier this week that I thought were nothing short of brilliant in explaining both why and how this is relevant to small business.

Paul Mitchell, the brilliant Australian social scientist www.thehumanenterprise.com.au, shared some things that both resonated with me and were immediately applicable to businesses without regard to their size.

• The first thing that Mitchell did was describe leadership in a simple, but very compelling way. A leader excites their followers to exceptional performance. This definition is especially relevant because performance and effort are what engagement is ultimately about. Not happiness, not "satisfaction", but performance. Those others factors maybe contributors, but at the end of the day we need results.

The next thing that Mitchell talked about were the four key elements that every business should build into their "value proposition":

• Great leaders focus on followers. Mitchell and I share the belief that relationships are the "glue" in organizations. Truly effective leaders do things with people, not to people. With their employees, with their customers, with their suppliers, with their community.
• Build a sense of community. Following that same theme leaders understand they are part of a community and they invest in it. They build and nurture relationships on a foundation of trust and respect. They exchange value and values not transactions.
• Be yourself, but with more skill. Mitchell calls this authenticity. Everyone has allowable weaknesses, his point is to focus on your strengths and core competencies. Seek out other relationships internally and externally that complement your skill sets and offering.
• Focus on what matters. Mitchell suggests that we look for significance in ourselves and others. Find what you and others do right and celebrate it whether they are an employee, a customer, a neighbor, or a stranger. Connect them to the larger community and the larger context. We are a village, not an island.
• Build the excitement. There is an old amusing expression "if you are excited, you might want to let your face know". This speaks precisely to Mitchell's earlier definition of leadership. Be excited and share excitement. If you are not excited and don't believe in "you", how can you expect others to?

Added to this wisdom from over the "pond" I had a chance to see some results from the national survey and initiative on engagement from the U.K. that showed similar things. The country wide study found that there are four elements that build and sustain the engaged environment:

• Listening
• Treatment
• Coaching
• Role and role modeling

Once again it comes down to relationship. Listening and treatment speaks to my guiding principle of respect. Coaching and role speak to the principle of the big picture and autonomy. Role modeling speaks to authenticity and values. The British study also found that when leadership commits to these behaviors they become "viral", they spread through the organization both formally and informally.

By the way they did examine compensation as well and what they found was again consistent. Money may initially attract, but the most important qualities of compensation are perceived equity and fairness. So the short story is if you do compensation well it is a break even, it won't detract from engagement. If you do it badly it will destroy your foundation. Once again we see the tie back to relationship that once we get past survival mode it is about fairness and equity, not dollars.

So when you think about building and reinforcing your brand, be sure you include these elements. The interesting thing is you don't need a big budget or large staff and yes, you can do this at home......

The Power of Example

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

I had the opportunity this week to attend two very different functions that had some interesting parallels.

The first was a "transition" or retirement party for an executive that I admire a great deal. I have known him for a long time and in candor there have been a number of occasions where our viewpoints were at odds. What I found consistently about him however; was that our disagreements never started or became personal. He possesses a clear set of values and a personal vision that although I might not always share I always appreciate.

As I listened to people who had worked with him over a 35 year career describe him they consistently used words like; integrity, honesty, ethics, vision, faith, humility, and passion. I recognized that those words resonated with me in my own experiences with him. He is tough minded yet compassionate, a strong negotiator, but never for his own personal gain.

People who worked for him would describe him as visionary, task driven, and demanding of excellence from himself and others. I doubt many would describe him as warm, but a compassion and empathy emanate from him as well as a quiet courage.

He has faced adversity both in his professional and personal life, but you get a sense that he strides on with his mission in view and his values intact. An example to peers, subordinates, and colleagues. His departure will leave a hole, I have not encountered many of his ilk of late.

The other individual in some ways couldn't be more different. His transition was sudden and unexpected. He died during an accident harvesting firewood on his ranch. He was a rancher and community leader who spent his life doing what he loved as a steward of the land that his family has owned for generations.

I met him several years ago in a small country church where he was speaking to a men's group about his faith and how it called him and changed him. I got to know him much better later as part of a community group and as a political candidate. In some ways we were unlikely allies. He was a man of the land and passionate in his conservative Christian beliefs. I have spent a good deal of my life in more urban and corporate settings. While I consider myself to be Christian I am more wary of the restrictiveness of organized religion, especially when it imposes strict boundaries.

We spent a lot of time together one on one and I found him to be a highly discerning listener and a man who while he held his own beliefs firmly was very capable of respecting the views of others; a characteristic I find rarely and appreciate more as I get older.

When I was running for office I found myself on the "wrong" side of a pretty controversial issue. As a major fundraiser and supporter who had traded on his own reputation to build support for me my position put him in an ackward spot. I remember when we met one on one to discuss it and at the end of our discussion he told me "now that I understand your position I agree with you." His steadfast support of me caused both my supporters and detractors to scratch their heads. In their minds we were polarities. They couldn't have been more wrong. We shared a common conviction that the common bond that is critical to all successful human systems is relationships and that you should endeavor to find the points of agreement rather than contention. I lost the election, but I have to say that the process of running for office and creating relationships like the one I shared with him made that experience one of the most worthwhile endeavors I will likely ever engage in.

One was an executive who through his leaderhip position and commitment leaves a legacy of organizational structure, strategic vision, and mentees and colleagues who will carry on his legacy. The other was a rancher, community leader, and "elder" who touched hundreds through engagement with his community, his church, and his friendship. The commonality; they don't talk about their values they live them onstage everyday for everyone to see.

When it is my time to "transition" or to depart I hope to follow their example and for people to think of me not in terms of what I possessed, but rather what I leave behind. Skip and Lee, thanks for setting an example for me and others.

A Matter of Balance

The power of language intrigues me. I participate in a group of people much smarter than I am in trying to re-shape how we define words and their context and the effect that has on perception and understanding. I find it plays an enormous role in many applications, but the place that intrigues me the most is in the arena of leadership.

As many of you know I am an enormous proponent of engagement as a cultural norm. I feel that organizations where the inter linked relationships are based on shared values, respect, and a common vision and goals will always be more successful than a transaction based relationship. I also differentiate true engagement; which involves employees, customers, and shareholders, from engagement models that focus exclusively on "loyal" customers.

The Sotomayor nomination has created an interesting debate regarding the appropriateness of empathy in the judiciary. Should a jurist consider context and circumstances in rendering a decision or merely the "facts"?

I used that as the basis for a question I posed on LinkedIn as to the appropriateness of empathy not only in the judicial system , but to the essence of leadership. Is empathy an essential or at least important characteristic in effective leadership? The vast majority of the responders agreed that it is, but there was some dissent arguing that empathy can cause decisions to be made on the basis of emotion or disparate consideration for the interests of one "stakeholder" group over another.

I think we are finding much about our "objective" models that are based exclusively upon numbers and singular shareholder groups is flawed. I mentioned in a previous blog that Bill George of Harvard stated that a possible positive outcome of the current crisis is a new "balanced" model. Even more recently Richard Rumelt of UCLA mentioned in an interview with McKinsey that much of our current circumstance was based on reliance exclusively or primarily on short term "numbers" and indices that don't tell the whole story.

Another interesting debate is whether or not organizations should focus their efforts on shareholder satisfaction or stakeholder satisfaction. As you might suspect my perception is that organization who focus exclusively on shareholder value rarely maintain sustained success. I would submit that much of our current financial crisis is predicated on focusing on the value to the shareholder as represented by stock price to the exclusion of other stakeholder values. I have seen debates on LinkedIn and other venues insisting that shareholder value is the primary or exclusive measure of organizational success, but if you ignore or minimize the interests of the other stakeholder groups how do you stay in business?

In the past week I had a great conversation with a colleague who is trying to "re-invent" the practice of human resources management. Like me she is concerned that HR has become overly concerned with policy and procedure and systems rather than "people". We want to ignore or minimize the human element. Organizations are staffed by people.

I have another colleague who works in the area of trust. She has become frustrated occasionally with potential clients who don't particularly value strategies and systems to build and sustain trust with their customers, suppliers, or employees. They are not sure they can track a direct correlation to the bottom line. Hmm, sounds like a shareholder versus stakeholder issue.

Yet another colleague has designed a management system she calls KindExcellence(TM). Her belief (and I share it) is that kindness and excellence are not a polarity, but rather an axis. You need both to operate as an effective leader.

In my model responsibility and respect form a similar axis. If you allow someone to perform in a manner that doesn't live up to your expectations or their capabilities is that truly a respected based relationship?

I guess at the end of the day I agree with Margaret Wheatley that the most powerful force in organizational systems is relationships. These other elements are important as long as they are kept in "balance".

I think I will continue to endeavor to manage "whole people" and to include empathy in my decision making model. I particularly like the way a Buddhist philosopher put it in a quote a colleague shared with me.

"A person who cannot genuinely empathize with others can never excel as a leader. So much of what ails society today is the result of too many people in leadership positions who do not or cannot identify with the plight of their fellow men and women. It is in enduring pain and struggles that the earth of our humanity is cultivated. And it is from this earth that a capacity to be genuinely concerned for the welfare of others blossoms." - Daisaku Ikeda.

I think that sounds like balance......

People in Your Foxhole

Over the past few months I have had an opportunity to meet some fascinating people who have taught me a great deal. We have formed kind of a coalition to change the world and how we do things.

We call it Nemawashi- or building a new foundation. We have decided to take on some pretty interesting "truths"- like what defines leadership, loyalty, commitment, and a few other terms that seem to inspire a lot of discussion.

One of our group shares some great military metaphors- one of the best is the concept of "who has your six". At it's most basic the concept means covering each others back, especially your blind spot. The deeper meaning is a commitment to each other and something more than you. I think based on the information I see about engagement people want and need that. He also had a great metaphor about "Pete" the painter. As a leader your job is provide context and direction and to remember that each "canvas" requires a different brush.

Another colleague is trying to help organizations understand the importance of congruency and shared values in inviting people to join your organization. Why are we so cavalier about this and then so surprised when we don't get the results we are after.

Yet another colleague and I are trying to help people recognize that there is a natural symmetry to certain concepts that we tend to overlook- kindness and excellence. Respect and performance that meets our expectations. Clear expectations and feedback and trust. These things all go together.

We are also doing some work with definitions. It is interesting how social norms determine "truths". I saw two different editorials this weekend that were interesting to me regarding President Obama's speech. One said that President Obama was not being appropriately inclusive when he said "God bless America". I wonder if he meant to exclude the Buddha, Allah, or others? Is it important what we call our God, or just that we are willing to acknowledge the presence of a higher power?

The other person took umbrage that President Obama has been overly apologetic to the Islamic community and didn't include consideration for the actions taken in Serbia and other places during past administrations or the fact that we don't see public demonstrations against Muslims on the anniversary of September 11. I am probably too simplistic, I don't see what happened on September 11 as the actions of Muslims, but rather of terrorists. I think Timothy McVeigh considered himself a "Christian" didn't he? I thought the President was reaching out to rebuild trust.

What I share with these folks and others is a sense of engagement. These are some of the people I have in my "foxhole", those who have my "six" as I have theirs. Who have you invited to your foxhole?