“Getting people to welcome feedback was the hardest thing I ever had to do as an educator.” 

― Professor Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Everything is connected today. We need to collaborate with others to succeed in our relationships, life and work. For that, we need to develop the art of giving feedback and critiques.

In its original sense, feedback is the exchange of information about how one part of a system is working, with the understanding that it affects everyone else within the system. If any part veers off course, prompt remediation is critical.

Feedback is every organization’s lifeblood — the mechanism that lets people know whether they’re doing a good job or if their efforts need to be fine-tuned, upgraded or entirely redirected. In a marriage, feedback determines whether each partner can adapt to the needs of the individual, couple and family.

Most people, however, are uncomfortable when giving or receiving feedback. It’s one of the most important tasks to master, but we procrastinate and try to avoid it altogether. Without feedback, people remain in the dark. They have no idea how they stand with the boss, their peers or their spouse regarding what’s expected of them. Problems invariably worsen over time, so we need to use feedback to find solutions that help us adapt and adjust.

In a study of 108 managers and white-collar workers, researchers found that most conflicts were caused by inept criticism (ahead of mistrust, personality struggles, and disputes over power and pay). After harsh criticism, people refuse to collaborate or cooperate, leading to stonewalling and disengagement.

Positive vs. Negative Feedback

A partnership’s or team’s emotional health depends on how well individuals can air their grievances. Many managers are too willing to criticize, yet stingy with praise. People are more receptive to negative feedback when they’re used to receiving plenty of positive comments.

Therapist John Gottman’s extensive research on successful marriages reveals there should be at least a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative comments. Similarly, organizational psychologist Marcel Losada found that business teams function best with a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback.

Across industries, most employees believe they don’t receive enough positive feedback. Problems are compounded when negative feedback is delayed — often because a manager is queasy about delivering it. Most problems start out small. When they’re allowed to fester, they escalate. By the time many managers decide to give feedback, there’s a backlog of frustration and anger that makes any conversation more difficult.

Early criticism allows people to correct problems, and it prevents a bad situation from boiling over. Managers should avoid giving feedback when they’re angry or inclined to be sarcastic, as the recipient will become defensive and resist change.

How to Give Effective Feedback

Constructive critiques focus on what people have done and can do, rather than targeting their character or personality. If people believe their failures result from personal, unchangeable deficits, they lose hope and stop trying. Let them know that setbacks and mistakes result from circumstances they can change.

Psychologist and corporate consultant Harry Levinson provides the following suggestions for delivering praise and criticism:

1. Be specific. Focus on the actual behavior, using verbs instead of judgmental adjectives. Communicate clear facts that people can understand and act upon. Describe what people did and how they did it. If you wish to address a pattern or habit, pick one significant incident that illustrates the key problem. Describe what the person did well or poorly and how it can be changed. Don’t beat around the bush or try to be evasive. The same rules apply to giving praise. Specificity is required for learning.
2. Offer a solution. A critique should identify ways to fix a problem. Otherwise, it only serves to demoralize and demotivate. Try to open the door to unexplored possibilities and alternatives. Your suggestions can provide a broader perspective or context.
3. Be present. Critiques and praise are most effective face-to-face and in private. Don’t try to ease your own discomfort by giving them from a distance or in writing. You need to be fully present and allow the recipient to respond and seek clarification.
4. 4. Be sensitive. Be attuned to the impact of what you say and how you say it. Even when your intentions are positive, you don’t know how your message will be received. Your greatest empathy skills are required. Criticism can be destructive. Instead of opening a path for correction, you may unintentionally provoke a backlash of resentment. Criticism is best used as an opportunity to work together to solve a problem, but you need to make this clear.

How to Receive Feedback

As a member of any group, team or partnership, you must learn to accept responsibility for your actions and accept that there’s always room for improvement. View constructive criticism as valuable information that helps you perform your job better — not as a personal attack. Feedback is beneficial because it facilitates teamwork.

Avoid the impulse toward defensiveness, which each of us innately has. Being defensive closes the door to receiving important information that can improve your work relationships and make your tasks easier. If you become upset, take a break; resume your meeting later.

Remember: Criticism is an opportunity to resolve a problem. It’s not meant to create an adversarial relationship.

“The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of their organization is going to blow the competition away.” ~ Walter Wriston

If your people continue to think and act as they do now, can you expect to achieve the results you need?

If your answer is no, then changing your organizational culture is not an option—it’s an imperative.

NASA’s 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster is a tragic example of what happens when cultural norms fail. Six months after the shuttle disintegrated upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members, NASA investigators found that “organizational culture and structure had as much to do with the accident as the [shuttle’s damaged] foam.”

Similarly, organizational culture had contributed to the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, which also killed seven crew members. As Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman wrote in an appendix to NASA’s official report: “It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.”

The ultimate responsibility for both shuttles’ failures fell on NASA executives who ignored, dismissed or minimized engineering experts’ testimony.

How can organizational culture prevent future disasters? And conversely, how can we use culture to drive spectacular results?

Research shows that the right culture champions high levels of performance and ethical behavior. When organizations design and support a culture that encourages outstanding individual and team contribution, they achieve amazing bottom-line results.

As with NASA, leaders who ignore a disconnected culture risk failure and potentially tragic results.

What Drives Results

While leaders regularly pore over financial, operations, marketing and sales reports, they generally lack specific tools to analyze corporate culture. Even worse, they show little curiosity about the ways in which cultural beliefs and attitudes affect performance and profitability.

Employee accountability and engagement are the driving forces behind achieving great results. As a manager, it’s your job to help employees see how their participation contributes to your organization’s success.

Employees become engaged when they can describe their role in outcomes and desired results.

Manage Your Culture

In Change the Culture, Change the Game, Tom Smith and Roger Connors write: “Either you manage your culture, or it will manage you.”

In simple terms, “culture” refers to how people think, act and get things done in your company. It is comprised of three components:

1. Experiences, which foster beliefs
2. Beliefs, which influence actions
3. Actions, which produce results

Few managers excel at optimizing culture. While they’re aware of surveys that reveal two-thirds of employees are disengaged, they don’t know how to break down culture into readily identifiable components. They get lost in emotions, feelings, beliefs, soft skills and fuzzy thinking.

Optimizing your culture should command as much attention as performance metrics, operations, finances, sales and every other organizational discipline.

By harnessing the power of culture, you can change the game by growing faster than your competitors, surviving a bad economy, improving your value proposition and outperforming all previous metrics.

How People Experience Work 

You may not realize it, but as a manager or team leader, you create experiences every minute of the day that help shape your organization’s culture. These experiences include:

• Promoting someone
• Firing someone
• Announcing a new policy
• Interacting in meetings
• Providing feedback
• Communicating through conversation, email or presentations

Such interactions shape beliefs about “how we do things around here.” These beliefs, in turn, drive people’s actions, which collectively produce results.

Achieving True Accountability

In organizations, accountability is often viewed as something negative that happens to you when things go wrong. This kind of accountability never works. Real accountability is achieved through a step-by-step process that makes things go right.

Accountability should not be defined as punishment for mistakes. It’s a powerful, positive and enabling principle that provides a foundation to build both individual and company success.

The way we hold one another accountable defines the nature of our working relationships, how we interact and what we expect from one another. With positive accountability, people embrace their role in facilitating change and take ownership for making progress happen.

When people adopt a sense of accountability, they recognize that their participation can and will make a big difference. They go the extra mile because they know what to do, and they know how their job and their actions will drive results. This adds energy to their work, as most people crave meaning and fulfillment.

Accountability is the single biggest issue confronting organizations today, especially for those engaged in big change initiatives. When you build a culture of accountability, you have people who can and will achieve game-changing results.

Accountability steps include:

• See it: In order to see what needs to be done, you must take responsibility for reality. Because reality frequently changes, you need to stay alert and be flexible. There’s no hiding behind what used to work. When you see something, you must rise to a new challenge. This means obtaining others’ perspectives and candidly asking for and offering feedback. You must be courageous and relentless in your pursuit of acknowledging reality.
• Own it: Accept being personally invested in outcomes. Be willing to take risks and learn from successes and failures. Align your work with what the company needs. Link where you are and what you’ve done with where you want to be and what you’re going to do.
• Solve it: Obstacles can always get in the way of achieving results, so apply persistent effort. When thwarted, find another way. Keep asking, “What else can I do so this gets resolved?” You must learn to overcome cross-functional boundaries, limitations and “no” responses.
• Do it: Focus on top priorities, overcome obstacles, do what you promise to achieve, and avoid blaming others. Work to sustain an environment of trust for all participants, even those who are unwilling to help.

In a culture of accountability, people step forward to become part of the solution — often when they begin to see others doing it. Managers should seize every opportunity to model this behavior with their own attitudes and actions, which will create a trickle-down effect.

The payoffs for positive accountability are better performance metrics, but perhaps more significant is what people report internally. When people participate more fully in their jobs, they create meaning and fulfillment. Work becomes more pleasurable. And when people start achieving better results, they are most likely rewarded in tangible ways, as well.

When to Change the Culture

How do you know if your current culture needs to be changed?

Most companies could use a few improvements in the way people think and act. These shifts may be necessary because of needed improvements in performance, anticipation of a large change initiative or a change in the business environment.

Connors and Smith point out that, by definition, your culture produces your results. You cannot expect your current culture to produce new results. It may not be a bad culture; it simply isn’t what’s needed if you want different results.

Shifts in culture are required anytime you want people to think and act in new ways to achieve new outcomes. Most of the time, they don’t involve a total transformation, but rather a transition to new cultural norms.

Remember that cultures are powerful, and persistent, and that people are entrenched in their habits and work routines. If you want to achieve new or different results, you will need to create a new culture. To do so, you must define the needed shifts in the way people think and act so they can create new experiences that will translate into new beliefs and actions.

Change Begins with Desired Results

To accelerate a change in the culture, start by defining the new results you wish to achieve. Everyone in the organization needs to be focused on and aligned with the desired new outcomes. Culture changes one person at a time.

Your people must believe that these new results are obtainable. Only then can they change their thinking and actions — something that usually happens when they can verbalize their job descriptions in terms of how they contribute to successful outcomes.

For example, in a restaurant case study, one waiter stated: “My job is to achieve a 5.5 percent profit margin, and here’s how I do it. The faster I clean and set a table, the more people we seat per hour. The more people we seat, the greater our contribution. The greater our contribution, the better our margin. That’s what I do.”

This response is powerful, representing a cultural shift from a mere two months previously. During that time, the restaurant realized a 200 percent increase in profits.

When everyone buys into creating new results, you are accelerating the necessary cultural transition. It doesn’t happen easily. It requires dialogue, engagement, debate and leadership.

Your culture produces your results. If you need a change in results, then you need a change in culture. Your culture is always working, either for you or against you.

Categories: Leadership, Change, Communications, Emotional Intelligence, Innovation

“Human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.” — Malcolm Gladwell

What does it take to transmit bold new ideas to people who don’t want to hear them? How can the language you use facilitate enthusiastic, energetic implementation?

Transformational leaders:

• Generate enduring enthusiasm for a common cause
• Present innovative solutions to solve significant problems
• Catalyze shifts in people’s values and ideologies
• Demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the greater good
• Help others get through crisis moments
• Inspire people to want to change, creating a positive energy that sustains the change
• Generate followers who will ultimately become leaders

The what of transformational leadership is reasonably clear. It’s the howthat’s usually obscure.

 How do leaders communicate complex ideas and spark others into enduringly enthusiastic action?

 What words do they use to inspire others to become new leaders?

 Why are some leaders able to accomplish the feat while others fail miserably?

Stephen Denning, a senior scholar at the University of Maryland’s Burns Academy of Leadership, makes the case for transformational communications in his book The Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007). More than anything, it’s what leaders say — and the way they say it — that generates sustained energy and exponential results.

How to Lead Change

Many experts proclaim that leadership is solely an issue of inner conviction: You must find the leader deep within yourself.

Other experts encourage you to:

• Become the person others will want to follow
• Discover your strengths
• Increase your self-awareness, self-regulation and authenticity
• Become emotionally and socially intelligent
• Visualize to materialize
• Be true to yourself, and change will happen

If leaders’ own inner commitment to change is to have any effect at all, they must communicate it to those they aspire to lead. Leaders’ actions speak louder than their words, but in the short run, it’s what leaders say — or don’t say — that has an impact.

The right words can create:

• A galvanizing effect
• Enthusiasm
• Energy
• Momentum
• Sustainable motivation

The wrong words, or even words said in the wrong sequence, can undermine your best intentions and plans, killing an initiative on the spot.

Old-School Communication

The traditional communication approach follows this sequence:

Define the problem ► Analyze it ►Recommend a solution

This approach appeals to reason and has been a revered intellectual tradition in organizations since the ancient Greeks. It works well when the aim is to pass on information to people who want to hear it, or who are obliged to comply and follow without question.

But if your aim is to get people to change their behavior and act in some fundamentally new ways with sustained energy and enthusiasm, old-school communication has two flaws:

1. It doesn’t work.
2. It often makes the situation worse (negative impact).

People who disagree with you or have other ideas and habits won’t respond well to your list of reasons to change. In fact, lecturing them on your beliefs will often lead to greater entrenchment in their long-held approaches and behaviors.

Confirmation Biases

A significant body of research shows that asking people to change often drives them more deeply into opposition. In study after study, people display a phenomenon called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and to irrationally avoid information and interpretations that contradict existing beliefs. All of this happens instantaneously in the part of the brain that’s responsible for emotional reactions.

This explains why traditional persuasion techniques fail, especially when delivered too early in a presentation. You risk speaking to a skeptical, cynical and/or hostile audience whose confirmation bias has been activated.

 Successful leaders follow a unique, almost hidden communication pattern:

Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

Step 1: Getting the Audience’s Attention

In an experiment with 60 executives, researchers found the most important factors in grabbing their attention were:

1. A personalized message
2. Evoking an emotional response
3. A trustworthy source
4. Concise language

In fact, personalized messages that evoked emotion were more than twice as likely to resonate with the group.

Social scientists have shown that negative messages are more attention-getting than positive ones. To get an audience’s attention, share:

• Stories about the audience’s problems
• Stories about the problems’ worsening trajectory
• A relevant story about how you dealt with adversity 
• A surprising question or challenge that will interest the audience

Step 2: Creating Desire

Positive stories are extremely important for creating a desire to change. If you want your team to do something different, present stories and clear examples of how successful innovators are making a difference.

Appeal to both heart and mind to gain an enthusiastic buy-in. Effective leaders establish an emotional connection.

The task isn’t to impose your will on an audience; it’s to enable participants to see the possibilities and come to their own conclusions, based on the evidence presented in your positive stories. These stories allow audience members to see the world for themselves, view their relationships in a new way and make progress in implementing organizational goals.

Step 3: Reinforcing with Reasons

The desire for change will wane unless it’s supported and reinforced by compelling reasons. Remember to share the story of:

• What the change is, as seen through the eyes of those who will be affected by it
• How the change will be implemented, with a delineation of the simple steps for getting from “here” to “there”
• Why the change will work, with an explanation of the underlying mechanisms that make change virtually inevitable.

More than anyone else, the boss creates the conditions that directly determine people’s ability to work well. ~ Daniel Goleman, Primal Leadership

Ever wonder why some of the most brilliant, well-educated people aren’t promoted, while those with fewer obvious skills climb the professional ladder?

Chalk it up to emotional intelligence (EI).

When the concept first emerged in 1995, EI helped explain why people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs more than two-thirds of the time.

In the United States, experts had assumed that high IQ was key to high performance. Decades of research now point to EI as the critical factor that separates star performers from the rest of the pack.

People have been talking about EI (also called EQ) ever since psychologist Daniel Goleman published the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence in 1995. Everyone agrees that emotional savvy is vital, but we’ve generally been unable to harness its power. Many of us lack a full understanding of our emotions, let alone others’. We fail to appreciate how feelings fundamentally influence our everyday lives and careers.

Research by the TalentSmart consulting firm indicates that only 36% of people tested can accurately identify their emotions as they happen. Two-thirds of people are typically controlled by their emotions but remain unskilled at using them beneficially.

The Emotional Brain

The brain’s wiring makes us emotional creatures. Our first reaction to any event is always emotional. We have no control over this part of the process. We can, however, control the thoughts that follow an emotion, how we react, and what we say and do.

Your reactions are shaped by your personal history, which includes your experiences in similar situations and your personality style. When you develop your emotional intelligence, you’ll learn to spot emotional triggers and practice productive responses.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

EI is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships. It affects how you manage behavior, navigate social complexities and make personal decisions that achieve positive results.

EI is composed of four core skills that are paired under two primary competencies: personal and social.

Personal competence includes self-awareness and self-management skills that focus on your interactions with other people.

• Self-Awareness is your ability to perceive your emotions accurately and be aware of them as they happen.
• Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to be flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior and motives to improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on other people’s emotions and understand what’s really going on.
• Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your and others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional Intelligence, IQ and Personality Are Different

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no connection between IQ and emotional intelligence. Intelligence is your ability to learn, as well as retrieve and apply knowledge.

Emotional intelligence is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. While some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren’t born with it.

Personality is the stable “style” that defines each of us. It’s the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. IQ, emotional intelligence and personality each cover unique ground and help explain what makes us tick.

Emotional Intelligence and Performance

When we feel good, we work better. Feeling good lubricates mental efficiency, facilitating comprehension and complex decision-making. Upbeat moods help us feel more optimistic about our ability to achieve a goal, enhance creativity and predispose us to being more helpful.

How does emotional intelligence contribute to our professional success?

The higher you climb the corporate ladder and the more people you supervise, the more your EI skills come into play.

TalentSmart tested EI alongside 33 other important workplace skills and found it to be the strongest predictor of performance, responsible for 58% of success across all job types.

Likewise, more than 90% of top performers in leadership positions possessed a high degree of EI. On the flip side, just 20% of poor performers demonstrated high EI.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills, and it impacts most everything you say and do each day. It strongly drives leadership and personal excellence.

EI and Income

You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but it’s rare. People with a high degree of EI make more money—an average of $29,000 more per year than those with low EI.

The link between emotional intelligence and earnings is so well founded that every point increase in EI adds $1,300 to one’s annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world.

EI and Leadership

As a leader, you set the emotional tone that others follow. Our brains are hardwired to cue in (both consciously and unconsciously) to others’ emotional states. This is particularly true for leaders. People want to know how a leader feels and will synchronize with authorities they trust.

The emotional tone that permeates your organization starts with you as a leader, and it depends entirely on your EI. When employees feel upbeat, they’ll go the extra mile to please customers. There’s a predictable business result: For every 1% improvement in the service climate, there’s a 2% increase in revenue.

The table that follows, provided by TalentSmart’s Dr. Travis Bradbury, contrasts the behaviors of high-EI vs. low-EI leaders:

CEOs Score Low EI

Measures of EI in half a million senior executives, managers and employees across industries, on six continents, reveal some interesting data. Scores climb with titles, from the bottom of the ladder upward toward middle management, where EI peaks. Mid-managers have the highest EI scores in the workforce. After that, EI scores plummet.

Because leaders achieve organizational goals through others, you may assume they have the best people skills. Wrong! CEOs, on average, have the lowest workplace EI scores.

Too many leaders are promoted for their technical knowledge, discrete achievements and seniority, rather than for their skills in managing and influencing others. Once they reach the top, they actually spend less time interacting with staff.

But achieving goals—and high performance—is only part of the formula for leadership success. Great leaders excel at relationship management, influencing people because they’re skilled in forming alliances and persuading others.

EI has a direct bearing on corporate reputation. Boards of directors recognize how it affects stock prices, media coverage, public opinion and a leader’s viability. Look at any corporate disaster or scandal. If leaders cannot genuinely express empathy, it’s that much harder for them to garner trust and support.

A 2001 study by Dr. Fabio Sala (www.eiconsortium.org) demonstrates that senior-level employees are more likely to have inflated views of their EI competencies and less congruence with others’ perceptions.

Sala proposes two explanations for these findings:

1. It’s lonely at the top. Senior executives have fewer opportunities for feedback.
2. People are less inclined to give constructive feedback to more senior colleagues.

Nonetheless, EI’s effect on business performance and senior employees’ grandiosity highlight the need for well-executed performance management systems that measure emotional competencies.

Ethical Failures

The news media have highlighted numerous cases involving failed CEOs derailed by their low EI. Press coverage has prompted boards to become more sensitive to this leadership trait.

You’re prone to ethical failures if you overestimate your intelligence and believe you’ll never get caught. Arrogance distorts your capacity to read situations accurately.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, neurosciences journalist Jonah Lehrer discusses the contradiction of power — essentially, how nice people can change when they assume positions of authority.

“People in power tend to reliably overestimate their moral virtue, which leads them to stifle oversight,” he writes. “They lobby against regulators, and fill corporate boards with their friends. The end result is sometimes power at its most dangerous.”

How to Develop EI

Research by Goleman and other experts supports the view that EI can be learned, and it seems to rise with age and maturity.

In 2005, TalentSmart measured the EI of 3,000 top executives in China. The Chinese leaders scored, on average, 15 points higher than American executives in self-management and relationship management. To compete globally, the United States must pay attention to emotional competencies.

Developing your EI skills is not something you learn in school or by reading a book. It takes training, practice and reinforcement. The first step is measurement, through behavioral-based interviews and 360-degree feedback.

Executives with little experience in receiving feedback can find this approach somewhat threatening. Try to conquer your fears, as the process brings needed attention to gaps and development opportunities. It may be best to work with an executive coach.

Remember: Your emotional state and actions affect how others feel and perform. This trickle-down effect contributes to — or sabotages — your organization’s well-being.

Knowing why you’re here, and who you want to be, isn’t a part-time job. The challenge is to live out what you stand for, intentionally, in every moment. ~ Tony Schwartz, author

Far from being touchy-feely concepts touted by motivational speakers, purpose and values have been identified as key drivers of high-performing organizations.

• In Built to Last, James Collins and Jerry Porras reveal that purpose- and values-driven organizations outperformed the general market and comparison companies by 15:1 and 6:1, respectively.
• In Corporate Culture and Performance, Harvard professors John Kotter and James Heskett found that firms with shared-values–based cultures enjoyed 400% higher revenues, 700% greater job growth, 1,200% higher stock prices and significantly faster profit performance, as compared to companies in similar industries.
• In Firms of Endearment, marketing professor Rajendra Sisodia and his coauthors explain how companies that put employees’ and customers’ needs ahead of shareholders’ desires outperform conventional competitors in stock-market performance by 8:1.

Leaders who have a clearly articulated purpose and are driven to make a difference can inspire people to overcome insurmountable odds, writes Roy M. Spence Jr. in It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand for.

“Life is short, so live it out doing something that you care about,” he writes. “Try to make a difference the best way you can. There’s an enormous satisfaction in seeing the cultural transformation that happens when an organization is turned on to purpose.”

While a well-designed strategy and its effective implementation are required for business success, neither inspires followers to maintain engagement during troubled times. Purpose must tap into people’s hearts and help them give their best when the chips are down.

Don’t ever take a job— join a crusade! Find a cause that you can believe in and give yourself to it completely. ~ Colleen Barrett, president emerita of Southwest Airlines

In a company without purpose, people have only a vague idea of what they’re supposed to do. There’s always activity and busyness, but it’s often frenetic, disorganized and focused solely on short-term goals. There’s a lack of direction and commitment to purpose.

Top executives erroneously look to the competition when making decisions, rather than making up their own minds about what really matters. This lack of clarity leads to poor business decisions and failed product launches. Employees who work without purpose experience the consequences.

“Across organizations, nearly every survey suggests that the vast majority of employees don’t feel fully engaged at work, valued for their contributions, or freed and trusted to do what they do best,” reports Tony Schwartz in a recent  HBR.org blog post. “Instead, they feel weighed down by multiple demands and distractions, and they often don’t derive much meaning or satisfaction from their work. That’s a tragedy for millions of people and a huge lost opportunity for organizations.”

Lack of Full Engagement

Put simply, satisfied and engaged employees perform better. In a Towers Watson study of roughly 90,000 employees across 18 countries, companies with the most engaged employees reported a 19% increase in operating income and 28% growth in earnings per share. Companies whose employees had the lowest level of engagement had a 32% decline in operating income and an 11% drop in earnings.

People enjoy being engaged in meaningful work. Humans, by nature, are a passionate species, and most of us seek out stimulating experiences. Companies that recognize this and actively cultivate and communicate a worthwhile corporate purpose become employers of choice.

A major Gallup Organization research study identified 12 critical elements for creating highly engaged employees. About half deal with employees’ sense of belonging. One of the key criteria is captured in the following statement: “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.”

After basic needs are fulfilled, an employee searches for meaning in a job. People seek a higher purpose, something in which to believe. If, in your role as a leader, you aren’t articulating what you care about and how you plan to make a difference, then you probably aren’t inspiring full engagement.

Energy and Creative Flow

Having a purpose provides context for all of one’s efforts, and it’s a chief criterion for “flow”—the energy state that occurs when one’s mind, body and entire being are committed to the task at hand. Flow turns mundane work into completely absorbing experiences, allowing us to push the limits of skills and talents.

Flow and commitment also create healthier, happier employees, while driving innovative thinking. To tap into full engagement, leaders must clearly identify and articulate what truly matters to the company:

• Why are we in business?
• What difference do we want to make in the world?
• What’s our most important purpose?

On some level, everyone wants to live a purposeful life, yet we are distracted by societal pressures to achieve wealth and prestige. There are indications, however, that this is changing. Just as GNP fails to reflect the well-being and satisfaction of a country’s citizens, a person’s net worth actually has little to do with personal fulfillment.

It is difficult to impossible to truly inspire the creators of customer happiness — the employees —  with the ethic of profit maximization…It is my experience that employees can get very excited and inspired by a business that has an important business purpose. ~ John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market

Leadership starts on a personal level and permeates one’s function in a company, community and society. While countless books address the importance of finding personal purpose, how does it play out within an organizational context? How do you link your personal purpose and values to those of your company?

Finding a Business Purpose

As work evolves in the 21st century, separating our professional and personal lives proves to be an artificial divide. Your personal purpose influences your work purpose, and vice versa.

A company’s purpose starts with its leaders and works its way through the organization. It shows up in products, services, and employee and customer experiences.

An inspirational purpose often lies hidden within an organization. The following suggestions will help you identify and articulate key elements:

1. Revisit your organization’s heritage (past history).
2. Review successes. At what does the business excel?
3. Start asking “why?”
4. What won’t your organization do? Review false starts and failures.
5. Talk to employees.
6. Talk to top leaders.
7. Talk to high performers.
8. Talk to customers.
9. Follow your heart.

Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your calling. ~ Aristotle

A purpose is informed by the world’s needs. When you build an organization with a concrete purpose in mind — one that fills a real need in the marketplace — performance will follow.

Ask the following questions:

• Why does your organization do what it does?
• Why is this important to the people you serve?
• Why does your organization’s existence matter?
• What is its functional benefit to customers and constituents?
• What is the emotional benefit to them?
• What is the ultimate value to your customer?
• What are you deeply passionate about?
• At what can you excel?
• What drives your economic engine?

Mission statements used to have a purpose. The purpose was to force management to make hard decisions about what the company stood for. A hard decision means giving up one thing to get another.  ~ Seth Godin, marketing expert

When a mission statement is well written, it serves as a declaration of purpose. But corporate mission statements are often little more than a descriptive sentence about products, aspirations or desired public perceptions. They’re more powerful when they clearly and specifically articulate the difference your business strives to make in the world.

Leaders who want to succeed should straightforwardly communicate what they believe in and why they’re so passionate about their cause, according to business consultant Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Portfolio, 2010).

Most people know what they do and how they do it, Sinek says, but few communicate why they’re doing it.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy into why you do it,” he emphasizes.

If you don’t know and cannot communicate why you take specific actions, how can you expect employees to become loyal followers who support your mission?

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. ~ James Baldwin, author

The Bridge to What Matters

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. ~ Helen Keller

Great leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Walt Disney always communicated their “why”—the reasons they acted, why they cared and their future hopes. Great business leaders follow suit:

• Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, believed air travel should be fun and accessible to everyone.
• Apple’s Steve Wozniak thought everyone should have a computer and, along with Steve Jobs, set out to challenge established corporations’ status quo.
• Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton believed all people should have access to low-cost goods.
• Starbucks’ Howard Schultz wanted to create social experiences in cafés resembling those in Italy.

Once company leaders have identified and clearly articulated what they stand for, it’s up to you to build a bridge between the business’ purpose and your own values:

• In what way can you make a difference through company products and services?
• How can you express what truly matters in the work you do?
• In what ways can you make a difference in the world through the people you work for and with?

Making a Difference

When you share your greater cause and higher purpose, listeners filter the message and decide to trust you (or not). When listeners’ values and purpose resonate with your own, they are primed to become followers who will favorably perceive subsequent messages.

You cannot gain a foothold in someone’s brain by leading with what you want them to do. You must first communicate why it’s important.

Strive to be like the leaders who never lose sight of why they do what they do and why people should care. Only then will you inspire your people to attain sustainable success.

Leaders are the stewards of organizational energy. They recruit, direct, channel, renew, focus and invest energy from all the individual contributors in the service of the corporate mission. The energy of each individual contributor in the corporation must be actively recruited. This requires aligning individual and organizational purpose. ~ Authors James Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement

February 16, 2012
Are leaders born or made? One could argue for either position.

The real issue is that all leaders can improve. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a high-potential team member, you can boost your performance in five crucial leadership areas.

More than half a million business books deal with leadership acumen, but studying the most respected experts’ ideas reveals a consensus on the foremost roles required for effectiveness.

In The Leadership Code: 5 Rules to Lead By, (Harvard Business Press, 2011) Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman have synthesized current thinking on leadership and developed a framework that blends idealism with realism. They’ve distilled leadership into five core roles, regardless of one’s industry or business environment:

1. Strategist—Leaders shape the future.
2. Executor—Leaders make things happen.
3. Talent manager—Leaders engage today’s talent.
4. Human-capital developer—Leaders build the next generation.
5. Personal proficiency—Leaders invest in their own development.

Five Golden Rules

Having a framework for the most essential leadership skills will help you avoid quick fixes and business-book fads. While the scope of leadership may seem overwhelming, five golden rules provide much-needed focus.

Leaders must excel in many areas: innovative strategies, long-term customer relationships, quality execution, high-performing teams and accountability. They need to manage people, communicate well, engage and inspire others, exercise keen judgment and decision-making, excel at emotional intelligence and demonstrate ethical integrity. It’s easy to get lost if you pursue the wrong priorities.

With a clear and concise framework that covers the entire leadership landscape, you can concentrate on how to become more effective and determine the best ways to develop talent. The Leadership Code offers five pivotal rules that lay out how the game is played. Knowing them enables you to modify your behavior and ultimately succeed.

Rule 1: Shape the future. As a strategist, you must answer the question “Where are we going?” for the people you lead. You not only envision the future, but help create it. You need to figure out where the organization must go to succeed, while pragmatically testing ideas against current resources and capabilities. Work with others to figure out how to move from the present to the desired future.

How informed are you about future trends, both inside and outside your field? How much time and attention do you allocate to future planning? How will you inspire your people with vision, purpose, mission and strategies?

Rule 2: Make things happen. As executors, leaders focus on the question, “How can we ensure we’ll reach our goals?” You must translate strategy into action. You’ll need to transform plans for change into measurable results by assigning accountability, knowing which decisions to manage and which to delegate, and ensuring that teams work together effectively.

This means keeping promises to multiple stakeholders. It also means ensuring that systems are in place for others to perform with the support and resources they need. Discipline is required. How can you help your people create their own high-performance results? Do you know when to step in or, conversely, step back?

Rule 3: Engage today’s talent. As a talent manager, you’re in charge of optimizing teams’ performance. You must answer the question, “Who goes with us on our business journey?” You need to know how to identify, build and engage talent for immediate results.

How can you bring out the best in people? Do you know which skills are required and where to find talent in your organization? How can you best develop and engage people, guaranteeing that they turn in their best efforts? When you excel at talent management, you generate personal, professional and organizational loyalty. Talent thrives when you provide nurturing and developmental opportunities.

Rule 4: Build the next generation. As a human-capital developer, you’ll need to plan for the next generation. You must answer the question, “Who stays and sustains the organization for the next generation?” Just as talent managers ensure shorter-term results through people, human-capital developers make sure the organization has the longer-term competencies and people required for future strategic success.

This rule requires you to think in terms of building a workforce plan focused on future talent, developing that talent and helping employees envision their future careers within the company. You cannot overlook the fact that the organization will outlive any single individual.

Rule 5: Invest in yourself. Leaders must model what they want others to master. Leading others ultimately begins with yourself. You cannot expect to influence followers unless you invest time and energy on your personal proficiency, individual strengths, self-awareness, and emotional and social intelligence. If you’re not working with a mentor or executive coach, you’re missing out on one of the most effective ways to build strengths and talents.

A Review of Theories

How do these five rules fit in with other leadership theories?

Leadership has evolved from the military models of centuries ago to contemporary theories of scientific management, situational leadership, servant leadership and other widely discussed styles.

The primary principles of effective leadership nonetheless remain consistent. Without effective leadership skills, no one will follow you.

Here’s a look at some traditional leadership theories, based on the key questions journalists ask to uncover a story: who, what, when, where, why and how.

1. Who is a leader? The image of a tall man in a dark suit, impeccably groomed, comes to mind. He is authoritative, with a firm handshake, warm smile and steady gaze. For a long time, leaders were sought for their physical traits: height, gender, heritage, education and speaking style. This approach proved to be based on false assumptions, but such prejudices still exist in the C-suites. Today, it’s called executive presence. The criteria have changed (somewhat), but people are still influenced by looks.
2. How do leaders act? Leadership has been defined by behavioral style. There are six distinct leadership styles, according to Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee, authors of Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence:

• Directive: Immediate compliance. Giving orders, or telling someone what to do.
• Visionary: Providing long-term direction and vision for employees. Inspiring action through personal and professional vision.
• Affiliative: Creating harmony among employees and between the manager and employees. Fostering a harmonious environment.
• Participative: Building commitment among employees and generating new ideas. Collaborating to achieve a goal.
• Pace-setting: Accomplishing tasks to high standards of excellence. Setting high standards that challenge the team to keep up.
• Coaching: Long-term professional development of employees. Determining how to help people address their strengths and challenges. Creating a development plan to help them achieve their potential.

In general, these styles define a leader by how he or she behaves. Do you “take charge” or “take care”? Leaders exhibit a preferred style, but the effective ones can be both soft and hard; they’re flexible in switching between managing tasks and caring about people.

3. When and where do leaders focus on the person or task? This question relates to situational leadership. The appropriate leadership style depends on understanding situational context and specifics.
4. What do leaders know and do? What are the key leadership competencies? What core body of knowledge, skills and values define successful leaders? In this leadership model, the focus is on both the situation and the business strategy.
5. Why does leadership matter? Some leadership theorists have shifted away from competencies to focus on results. Leadership is about getting the right results in the right way. Leaders need to achieve a balanced scorecard of employee, customer, investor and organizational results to provide sustainable results.

Are there universally shared leadership characteristics? Experts estimate that 50 to 85 percent of leadership characteristics are found in all effective leaders. The missing variables are personal situations and internal influences.

You can improve by focusing on the main characteristics that define those who succeed at leading others. The Leadership Code’s five-rule framework represents 60 to 70 percent of fundamentally effective leadership. While there may be variances in strategy, vision and individual job requirements, the rules are designed as a foundation for effective leadership.

Understanding the Five Roles

Most people are naturally predisposed to excel in one or two of the first four roles: strategist, executor, talent manager and human-capital developer. Some are big-picture strategists and future-oriented, while others love getting things done or engaging people for high performance.

If you’re in a more senior role, you’ll need to branch out from your predisposed areas of excellence. You’ll be required to master all of the first four roles or surround yourself with people who can fill in the gaps for you.

The last role (personal proficiency) is, in many ways, the foundation for improving skills in the first four roles. Personal proficiency will help you become a more rounded leader. It is the only one that cannot be delegated, although having an executive coach can help you develop more rapidly.

Personal Proficiency

At the heart of leadership effectiveness is the ability to continually learn and enhance your personal effectiveness.

You are not solely defined by what you do or know. In fact, there’s a lot you don’tknow about yourself because everyone has limited vision and blind spots. We err in thinking. We jump to conclusions. We have poor communication habits that could definitely improve. Personal proficiency takes time, vigilance and help from others.

Who you are as a leader has everything to do with how much you can accomplish with and through other people. In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner cite three reasons why people follow someone:

1. Integrity
2. Competency
3. Forward thinking

Leaders are learners, and their classroom is everywhere. We learn from our mistakes, successes, books, coworkers, bosses, friends and life itself. Leaders are passionate about their beliefs and interests, willing to examine them at every occasion.

Leaders know what matters to them. They inspire loyalty and goodwill in others because they  act with integrity and trust. They can be bold and courageous because they know what matters most. This helps them tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty and crises.

The Leadership Code provides four summary observations:

1. All leaders must excel at personal proficiency. Without a foundation of trust and credibility, you cannot ask others to follow you.
2. All leaders must have one towering strength. Most successful leaders excel in at least one of the other four core roles. Most are personally predisposed to one of the four areas (i.e., their signature strength).
3. All leaders must be at least average in their weaker leadership domains.
4. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you need to develop excellence in the remaining domains.

How can you use this framework for leadership effectiveness to improve your abilities?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 10:50 am and is filed under Newsletters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

December 15, 2011
“So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” ~ Peter Drucker

As any fan of The Office can attest, negative managerial behavior severely affects employees’ work lives.

Managers’ day-to-day and moment-to-moment actions also create a ripple effect, directly facilitating or impeding the organization’s ability to function.

The best managers recognize their power to influence and strive to build teams with great inner work lives.

In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Press, 2011), Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe how people with great inner work lives have:

• Consistently positive emotions
• Strong motivation
• Favorable perceptions of the organization, their work and their colleagues

The worst managers undermine others’ inner work lives, often unwittingly. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees at seven companies, Amabile and Kramer found surprising results on the factors that affect performance.

What matters most is forward momentum in meaningful work—in a word, progress. Managers who recognize the need for even small wins set the stage for high performance.

But surveys of CEOs and project leaders reveal that 95 percent fundamentally misunderstand the need for this critical motivator.

What Really Motivates Us?

If you lead knowledge workers, you likely employ these conventional management practices:

• Recruit the best talent.
• Provide appropriate incentives.
• Give stretch assignments to develop talent.
• Use emotional intelligence to connect with each individual.
• Review performance carefully.

Unfortunately, you may miss the most fundamental source of leverage: managing for progress. Recognizing even the smallest win has a more powerful impact than virtually anything else.

In a survey by Amabile and Kramer, 669 managers ranked five factors that could influence motivation and emotions at work:

1. Recognition
2. Incentives
3. Interpersonal support
4. Clear goals
5. Support for making progress in the work

Managers incorrectly ranked “support for making progress” dead last, with most citing “recognition for good work” as the most important motivator.

Your ability to focus on progress is paramount. Video-game designers excel at this mission, hooking players on the steady pace of progress bars.

Facilitating Progress

When you focus on small wins and facilitate progress, your employees will find the energy and drive required to perform optimally.

Two key forces enable progress:

1. Catalysts—Events that directly advance project work, such as:
   1. Clear goals
   2. Autonomy
   3. Resources, including time
   4. Reviewing lessons from errors and success
   5. Free flow of ideas
2. Nourishers—Interpersonal events that uplift workers, including:
   1. Encouragement and support
   2. Demonstrations of respect
   3. Collegiality

Dealing with Setbacks

Three events undermine people’s inner work lives:

1. Setbacks—The biggest downer, yet inevitable in any sort of meaningful work
2. Inhibitors—Events that directly hinder project work
3. Toxins—Interpersonal events that undermine the people doing the work

Negative events carry a greater impact than positive ones. We pay more attention to them, remember them, and spend more time thinking and talking about them.

That’s why it’s so important for managers and team leaders to counteract negative events with positive perceptions and comments. Research shows it takes three positive messages to balance a negative one.

The Daily Progress Checklist

To better manage your people, use the Daily Progress Checklist (below) to review today’s and plan tomorrow’s managerial actions. After a few days of checklist use, you’ll be able to save time by scanning for the italicized words:

1. Focus first on the day’s progress and setbacks.
2. Next, think about specific events: the catalysts and nourishers that affected progress.
3. Finally, prepare for action: What’s the one step you can take to best facilitate progress?

Source: T. Amabile & S. Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Press, 2011)

Discover Your Inner Work Life

Management responsibilities can take a toll on day-by-day perceptions, emotions and motivations. Most managers are both superiors and subordinates, with limited power in some circumstances.

Recognizing small wins is the best way to motivate your team—the key principle revealed through rigorous analysis of daily journal entries by Amabile and Kramer.

Every day events affect our inner work lives, and managers are certainly not exempt. As a leader, you must tend to your staff’s inner work lives by providing support each day. You, too, will perform best when your inner work life is positive and strong.

Be sure to use the Daily Progress Checklist to review the day’s events and how much you’ve accomplished—no matter how difficult or disappointing. Even if gains seem relatively miniscule, you’ll benefit from an honest assessment. Remember: Setbacks are inevitable, but they serve as learning opportunities.

Progress triggers a positive inner work life. To boost yours, focus on providing your people with catalysts and nourishers. Buffer them, as much as possible, from inhibitors and toxins. This sets the stage for progress in your managerial work, as well as a positive progress loop.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2011 at 12:15 am and is filed under Newsletters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

November 15, 2011
Baby Boomers are lingering in the workplace. The younger Gen X and Gen Y (New Millennials) are growing impatient to ascend to leadership responsibilities. New graduates are knocking at HR’s door in record numbers. And technology, including social media, is transforming the mode and pace of communication. These trends are creating new opportunities, but not without foreseeable generational clashes.

October 21, 2011
Businesses are becoming more complex. It’s harder to predict outcomes because intricate systems interact in unexpected ways.

Staying on track is much easier with a guide or checklist. Michael Useem, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of The Leadership Moment, has published The Leader’s Checklist to create a clear roadmap for navigating any situation. It is presented here in condensed form, with sample questions accompanying each principle:

1. Articulate a Vision: Formulate a clear and persuasive vision, and communicate why it’s important to all members of the enterprise.

a. Do my direct reports see the forest, as well as the trees?

b. Does everyone in the firm know not only where we are going, but, most importantly, why?

c. Is the destination compelling and appealing?

2. Think and Act Strategically: Make a practical plan for achieving this vision, including both short- and long-term strategies. Anticipate reactions and resistance before they happen by considering all stakeholders’ perspectives.

a. Do we have a realistic plan for creating short-term results, as well as mapping out the future?

b. Have we considered all stakeholders and anticipated objections?

c. Has everyone bought into, and does everyone understand, the firm’s competitive strategy and value drivers? Can they explain it to others?

3. Express Confidence: Provide frequent feedback to express appreciation for the support of those who work with and for you.

a. Do the people you work with know you respect and value their talents and efforts?

b. Have you made it clear that their upward guidance is welcomed and sought?

c. Is there a sense of engagement on the frontlines, with a minimum of “us” vs. “them” mentality?

4. Take Charge and Act Decisively: Embrace a bias for action by taking responsibility, even if it isn’t formally delegated. Make good and timely decisions, and ensure they are executed.

a. Are you prepared to take charge, even when you are not in charge?

b. If so, do you have the capacity and position to embrace responsibility?

c. For technical decisions, are you ready to delegate, but not abdicate?

d. Are most of your decisions both good and timely?

e. Do you convey your strategic intent and then let others reach their own decisions?

5. Communicate Persuasively: Communicate in ways that people will not forget, through use of personal stories and examples that back up ideas. Simplicity and clarity are critical.

a. Are messages about vision, strategy and character crystal-clear and indelible?

b. Have you mobilized all communication channels, from purely personal to social media?

c. Can you deliver a compelling speech before the elevator passes the 10th floor?

6. Motivate the Troops, and Honor the Front Lines: Appreciate the distinctive intentions that people bring to their work; build on diversity to bring out the best in people. Delegate authority except for strategic decisions. Stay close to those who are most directly engaged with the enterprise’s work.

a. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it?

b. Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications?

c. Are you keeping some ammunition dry for those urgent moments when you need it?

d. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act?

e. Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers?

f. Can your people communicate their ideas and concerns to you?

7. Build Leadership in Others, and Plan for Succession: Develop leadership throughout the organization, giving people opportunities to make decisions, manage others and obtain coaching.

a. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates?

b. Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership?

c. Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers?

8. Manage Relations, and Identify Personal Implications: Build enduring personal ties with those who work with you, and engage the feelings and passions of the workplace. Help people appreciate the impact that the vision and strategy are likely to have on their own work and the firm’s future.

a. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up?

b. Are managers self-aware and empathetic?

c. Are autocratic, egocentric and irritable behaviors censured?

d. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy affect them individually?

e. What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause?

f. How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and the quality of their work lives?

9. Convey Your Character: Through storytelling, gestures and genuine sharing, ensure that others appreciate that you are a person of integrity.

a. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity?

b. Do others know you as a person? Do they know your aspirations and hopes?

10. Dampen Over-Optimism: To balance the hubris of success, focus attention on latent threats and unresolved problems. Protect against managers’ tendency to engage in unwarranted risk.

a. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely, but extremely consequential, events?

b. Do you celebrate success, but also guard against the byproduct of excess confidence?

c. Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results, but for long-term performance?

11.  Build a Diverse Top Team: Although leaders take final responsibility, leadership is most effective when there is a team of capable people who can collectively work together to resolve key challenges. Diversity of thinking ensures better decisions.

a. Have you drawn quality performers into your inner circle?

b. Are they diverse in expertise, but united in purpose?

c. Are they as engaged and energized as you?

12. Place Common Interest First: In setting strategy, communicating vision and reaching decisions, common purpose comes first and personal self-interest last.

a. In all decisions, have you placed shared purpose ahead of private gain?

b. Do the firm’s vision and strategy embody the organization’s mission?

c. Are you thinking like a president or chief executive, even if you are not one?

Not all of these questions are applicable to every situation, but it is the questioning that counts.

Whether you are facing a typical day at the office or walking into a crisis, ask yourself and others these questions to inspire correct actions. Only then can you make sense of the complexities you encounter.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2011 at 11:28 am and is filed under Newsletters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

September 30, 2011
“Some of the most important and insightful learning is far more likely to come from failures than from success.” ~ Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley, interviewed in Harvard Business Review (April 2011).

How we respond to failures and bounce back from our mistakes can make or break our careers. The wisdom of learning from failure is undeniable, yet individuals and organizations rarely seize opportunities to embrace these hard-earned lessons.

Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is unequivocal: “One difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing.” Even for the best companies and most accomplished professionals, long track records of success are inevitably marred by slips and fumbles.

Our response to failure is often counterproductive: Behaviors become bad habits that set the stage for continued losses. Just as success creates positive momentum, failure can feed on itself. Add uncertainty and rapidly fluctuating economics to the mix, and one’s ability to find the right course is sorely tested.

Long-term winners and losers face the same ubiquitous problems, but they respond differently. Attitudes help determine whether problem-ridden businesses will ultimately recover.

Luckily, most of us can learn to become more resilient with training and coaching.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Take the example of two typical MBA graduates who were laid off from their positions during the recession. Both were distraught. Being fired provoked feelings of sadness, listlessness, indecisiveness and anxiety about the future.

For one, the mood was transient. Within two weeks he was telling himself, “It’s not my fault; it’s the economy. I’m good at what I do, and there’s a market for my skills.” He updated his resume and, after several failed attempts, finally landed a position.

The other spiraled further into hopelessness. “I got fired because I can’t perform well under pressure,” he lamented. “I’m not cut out for finance; the economy will take years to recover.” Even after the market improved, he was reluctant to apply for positions and feared rejection.

How these individuals handled failure illustrates opposite ends of the spectrum. Some people bounce back after a brief period of malaise and grow from their experiences. Others go from sadness to depression to crippling fear of failure—and in business, inertia and fear of risk invite collapse.

Optimism and Resilience

Research clearly demonstrates that people who are naturally resilient have an optimistic explanatory style—that is, they explain adversity in optimistic terms to avoid falling into helplessness.

Those who refuse to give up routinely interpret setbacks as temporary, local and changeable:

• “The problem will resolve quickly…”
• “It’s just this one situation…”
• “I can do something about it…”

In contrast, individuals who have a pessimistic explanatory style respond to failure differently. They habitually think setbacks are permanent, universal and immutable:

• “Things are never going to be any different…”
• “This always happens to me…”
• “I can’t change things, no matter what…”

University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin P. Seligman believes most people can be immunized against the negative thinking habits that may tempt them to give up after failure. In fact, 30 years of research suggests that we can learn to be optimistic and resilient—often by changing our explanatory style.

Seligman is currently testing this premise with the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, a large-scale effort to make soldiers as psychologically fit as they are physically fit. One key component is the Master Resilience Training course for drill sergeants and other leaders, which emphasizes positive psychology, mental toughness, use of existing strengths and building strong relationships.

This military program will no doubt provide insights for civilians who wish to become more effective within their workplaces and organizations.

Learning from Mistakes

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Failure is one of life’s most common traumas, yet people’s responses to it vary widely. Many managers have learned to reframe personal and departmental setbacks by stating: “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”—and it’s a great sentiment. In practice, however, their companies often continue to view failures in the most negative light.

Part of the problem lies in our natural tendency to blame. We perceive and react to failure inappropriately. How can we learn anything if our energy is tied up in either assigning or avoiding blame? Still others overreact with self-criticism, which leads to stagnation and fears of taking future risks.

In the 1930s, psychologist Saul Rosenzweig proposed three broad personality categories for how we experience anger and frustration:

1. Extrapunitive: Prone to unfairly blame others
2. Impunitive: Denies that failure has occurred or one’s own role in it
3. Intropunitive: Judges self too harshly and imagines failures where none exist

Extrapunitive responses are common in the business world. Because of socialization and other gender influences, women are more likely to be intropunitive.

Fortunately, managers at all organizational levels can repair their flawed responses to failure. Business consultants Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan suggest three highly effective steps in “Can You Handle Failure?” (Harvard Business Review, April 2011):

1.            Cultivate Self-Awareness. First, identify which of the three blaming styles you use. (Note: They occur automatically and immediately, so they are unconscious emotional responses.) Do you look to blame others? Deny blame? Blame yourself? It’s hard for us to see our personalities clearly, let alone our flaws. It’s harder still to learn from our mistakes if we’re caught up in the blame game.

Next, take at least one self-assessment test to help broaden your view of your interaction style. Two popular assessments are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Big Five Personality Test. (You can take a free version online at personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm.)

Finally, work with a coach or mentor to improve your level of self-awareness. While it takes some time to shine a light on our attitudes with respect to failure and blame, each of us can benefit from such reflection and discussion.

For example, think about challenging events or jobs in your career, and consider how you handled them. What could you have done better? Ask trusted colleagues, mentors or coaches to evaluate your reactions to, and explanations for, failures.

Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations. Ask for informal feedback. If you’re in a managerial position, you may underestimate how what you say may be perceived as criticism, due to the hierarchical nature of your job.

2.            Cultivate Political Awareness.

Whereas self-awareness helps you understand the messages you’re sending, political awareness helps you understand the messages others are receiving. It requires you to know how your organization defines, explains and assigns responsibility for failure, as well as how the system allows for remedial attempts.

Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach mistakes within your specific organization, department and role.

3.            Develop New Strategies.

Once you’ve become more aware of your failure response style (and your bad habits), you can move toward more open and adaptive behaviors.

Practice these strategies the next time mistakes and failures present challenges:

Listen and communicate. Most of us forget to gather enough feedback and information before reacting, especially when it comes to bad news. Never assume you know what others are thinking or that you understand them until you ask good questions.

Reflect on both the situation and the people. We’re good at picking up patterns and making assumptions. Remember, however, that each situation is unique and has context.

Think before you act. You don’t have to respond immediately or impulsively. You can always make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation.

Search for a lesson. Look for nuance and context. Sometimes a colleague or a group is at fault, sometimes you are, and sometimes no one is to blame. Create and test hypotheses about why the failure occurred to prevent it from happening again.

Blameworthy or Praiseworthy?

Admittedly, some mistakes are more blameworthy than others. As a manager, how do you make it safe for people to report and admit to mistakes?

Harvard management professor Amy Edmondson delineates a “spectrum of reasons for failure” in “Strategies for Learning from Failure” (Harvard Business Review, April 2011), as summarized here:

1. Deviance: An individual chooses to violate a prescribed process or practice.
2. Inattention: An individual inadvertently deviates from specifications.
3. Lack of Ability: An individual doesn’t have the skills, conditions or training to execute a job.
4. Process Inadequacy: A competent individual adheres to a prescribed, but faulty or incomplete, process.
5. Challenge: An individual faces a task too difficult to be executed reliably every time.
6. Process Complexity: A process composed of many elements breaks down when it encounters novel interactions.
7. Uncertainty: A lack of clarity about future events causes people to take seemingly reasonable actions that produce undesired results.
8. Hypothesis Testing: An experiment conducted to prove that an idea or a design will succeed actually fails.
9. Exploratory Testing: An experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility leads to undesired results.

Notice how this spectrum progresses from mistakes that are blameworthy to those that could be considered praiseworthy.

How many of the failures in your business are truly blameworthy? Compare this to how many are treated as blameworthy, and you’ll have a better understanding of why so many failures go unreported.

You cannot learn from your mistakes when the emphasis is on blaming. You cannot learn to become more resilient when your energy is tied up in assigning or avoiding blame.

Perhaps Procter & Gamble’s Lafley said it best in his Harvard Business Reviewinterview: “I think I learned more from my failures than from my successes in all my years as a CEO. I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, you won’t get better—and the company won’t get better.”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 10:24 am and is filed under Newsletters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.