Archive for March, 2009

Intuitively, we know that bosses who demean their employees have a damaging effect on employees. This article highlights some research that appears to confirm our intuition. The study certainly shows that rude behavior has an effect on productivity and creativity. (You could infer, although this wasn’t studied, that there is also an effect on the organization’s bottom line).

There was an interesting article in the Sunday NY Times called “Is It Time to Retrain Business Schools?”. Well worth reading and thinking about. It raises the question for business school’s responsibility in our current economic mess.

Finger pointing at any one possible source of the issue isn’t helpful, and all the stories about the greedy and crooked execs out there aren’t ether. Perhaps part of the problem is the news media itself – by focusing on all of the negative people and institutions that have contributed to our situation (including a few bad apples in leadership), they tend to lead the public to believe that “all leadership is bad leadership”. What role might this play in our current economic mess?

How often (recently) have the NY Times and other similar publications reported on the ethical and hard working CEO’s and other leaders who are working their tails off to keep their companies afloat and, more importantly, keep their employees in jobs? And please, when you see these stories, send me the links!

I’d love to see reporters allowed (encouraged) to report on “what and who is good in leadership” during this recession. The stories are out there. We need to hear them. Our news media would do all of us a favor by providing stories of great business leader role models. How hard could it be?

It’s shocking. I’m amazed at the number of leaders who don’t meet regularly with the very people who help them to get work done. I mean the real, formal, sit down and talk type of meetings that allow the employee, peer, or manager to say whats on their mind. To discuss priorities. To give feedback. To assess the situation.

Sure, you’re busy. Sure, you have lots of deadlines and stuff to do. But wouldn’t all that “stuff to do” be easier if you engaged the people in your network to assist? It seems counter-intuitive to neglect the relationships of the very individuals who can help (or harm) your cause.

I dare you to open up your own calendar and take a look at the last month. Count up how many times you’ve met with:

- your direct reports
- your peers
- people in your other relationship networks (customers,clients, suppliers, and yes, even friends)

What are you missing by not being intentional about those relationships?

Get moving, and schedule some of those important and neglected relationships!

Adapted from the Aspire Collaborative Services’ March 2009 Newsletter

I was captivated by the way a government official introduced herself at a recent event. “I’m Sue Smith and I work for all of you”. Whoa. I get it – we pay our taxes and the government serves us. Yet it caught me off-guard because we rarely hear this from those in leadership roles – in government, private sector or nonprofits.

What if leaders everywhere had the mindset of “I work for you”? How would our organizations be different? What impact might they make?

What if you embraced the attitude of “I work for you”?

There are organizations, large and small, whose leaders have adopted this concept and can demonstrate the positive results on the bottom line. The term that is often used to describe this concept is “Servant Leadership” and it embraces sharing power and serving others.

You may have been lucky enough to watch other leaders share their power in order to serve their employees and customers. If you observe their organizations, you may see these results:

- Employees are engaged and dedicated to the success of their peers and the organization;

- Learning and development become vital to success and part of the culture;

- A collective community of leadership develops, with new leaders emerging spontaneously;

- Employees cultivate a strong sense of purpose;

- Customers are outrageously and consistently delighted.

The greatest leaders embrace sharing of power. I’ve been honored to know a few, and have worked for even fewer (it’s unfortunate that I can recall less than a handful that I worked for over my career in business). I remember the feeling of trust that developed, and the sense of engagement I felt under the mentorship of these fine human beings. These are the leaders who left a lifetime impression on those who were privileged to work with them.

The leaders who believe in sharing power may work in a larger organizations that don’t fully embrace the principles of “I work for you”, and are often not rewarded for their skills. It’s often an uphill climb for them. This is as true today as it was 25 years ago, but I feel a shift happening and a greater understanding and increased support for these concepts.

There is a new recognition, led by companies like Southwest Airlines, TDIndustries, and many others, that serving and sharing power is not only the right thing to do, but also has a positive financial impact. In the case of Southwest, motivated employees have consistently made happy customers and satisfied shareholders, even as their competitors struggle for market share.

So how do you take the first steps to becoming a Servant Leader? Here are some ways to begin:

?€¢ Listen with your entire being, while you suspend your judgment. “Seek first to understand”, without trying to be helpful or attempting to solve problems.

?€¢ Ask how you can help. You’ll be surprised how often others you serve just need to be heard.

?€¢ Invite others to share in decisions. Many decisions can be improved through input from others.

?€¢ Nurture relationships intentionally and authentically. Show people you care and treat them with kindness. Be aware of those relationships that are in need of attention, and take action on them.

?€¢ Support learning through sharing power with those around you and especially those who report to you.Treat others as individuals when assisting them in customizing their learning goals.

?€¢ Build community by taking responsibility to connect and support the people involved in a shared vision.Don’t wait for someone else to do it.

Leaders who embrace the concepts of “I work for you” consider work to be part of the “whole” of a person’s experience, and a contributor to the collective good. When the collective good of an entire organization or community stands together, the possibilities become endless.

My colleague and friend Paul Knudstrup of Midwest Consulting Group, has provided the following post that is a nice “follow-on” to my own March 1 post on relationships. As our guest blogger, he provides a different twist on the topic, below:

What do you “expect” of your key relationships – those employees, co-workers, boss, spouse, family in your life? Do you expect those relationships to be relatively positive most of the time? Do you expect your employees to perform well on a consistent basis? And do they perform well? Do you expect your boss to keep you in the loop, communicate well and thoughtfully, and give you opportunities to grow, and help you in your career? Does that happen? If you can honestly say that you have these kind of high expectations and these key people actuallly do meet those expectations, then please comment on this blog. We all want to know how to have that happen.

Or do you expect your employees to be lazy, unengaged in their work, and generally perform poorly? And they do. Do you expect your boss to be a jerk . . . and he or she is a jerk? If so, then why do you think that has happened?

I submit that in both cases, you are getting the result you expect. It is the expectation – a belief held that has not yet become reality – that at least partially causes the expectation to become reality. Think about the expectations you have for the people around you. Are your expectations positive, results-oriented, with a positive focus? Then the odds improve that the successful outcome will become true.

Most of us know the basic story of professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.” The play and two movies (1938 Pygmalion and 1964`s My Fair Lady) illustrate how expectations can become reality. Rooted in mythology, the relevance and basic truth of the self-fulfilling prophecy has been proven again and again.

Here`s what happens: An expectation that is not necessarily tue becomes true when people act upon that expectation. So, our expectations, either positive or negative, influence the outcome. For instance, the Great Depression of the 1930`s saw bank “runs” as depositors demanded their money in cash until all the onhand cash was gone and the bank forced to close. People believed that if they didn`t take out their money now, they might not be able to later. And they were right. Their negative expectation created the reality they feared.

Hundreds of experiments conducted in the last 40 years prove the reality of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Students who are expected to succeed do better than those who are viewed as average. Employees who are identified as having “high potential” will perform better than those who are viewed as being average performers.

What do you think?

“Relationship” in the context of how we get along with others at work, is a word that is shunned in the leadership-world. Perhaps it carries an emotional tone that we’d rather avoid in organizations.

Yet, leadership is fundamentally about relationships. Sure, it isn’t practical for a leader spend time “relating” without attention to getting to the strategy – especially for those really big, awesome goals. But achieving a goal just doesn’t happen without relationships with those who are responsible for completing it. Who wants to follow someone who is treating them like a line item on the financial statement? And what is a leader without followers?

It’s interesting that some leaders are surprised by this analysis. Its not that they aren’t good leaders. More often, their surprise comes from:

- A natural ability to create good relationships with their staff, their peers, and others who are important to getting the work done. This ability comes so easily to them that they don’t stop to think about it;

- A belief that strategy and “getting the work done” are the most important traits to have;

- They’ve just never thought about the importance of relationships to “getting the work done”.

Both strategy and relationship building are important. You can’t have one without the other and be an effective leader.

Tom Rath, author of Strengths Based Leadership puts it this way:

“There’s a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn’t seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I’ve spoken with have said to me. But relationship building and strategic thinking are very important in bringing a team together to achieve a big goal. If you only have strategic thinking, you’ll head in the right direction with no one behind you. If you have relationship building without strategic thinking, you have a really happy team that might not be headed toward a result.”

I find it more common for leaders to be stronger in strategic thinking, and for strategic thinking to be more valued than relationships (at least in the organizations I work in). So I challenge leaders who may resist, or feel uncomfortable with relationship building to consider: what if building strong, healthy relationships is a strategy? More on this later.