Category Archives: Connection Culture

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Connection Cultures Help Students Thrive

Greenwich High School (Greenwich, CT) was recognized in a New York Times article as a school in an affluent community that’s successfully integrating students from low income families. What the article misses is that a key contributor to Greenwich High School’s success is that it its Connection Culture.

The school’s headmaster, Christopher Winters, regularly talks and writes about the importance of connecting students, teachers, administrators and parents. He walks the talk, too. Chris greets students when they arrive in the morning and he easily moves about the student center connecting with students.  He encourages camaraderie among teachers and administrators and encourages parental involvement.

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Stress + Loneliness = Disaster

Like many people today, Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, slowly slipped into a life where her job was #1, ahead of every relationship in her life. To have sufficient energy to work an exhausting schedule throughout the week, she spent weekends sleeping.  Eventually she reached a point where what she did was who she was.  When she left her job around the time of Lehman’s demise, she was devastated.  As Jason Pankau, my friend and business partner says, “when you are what you do, when you don’t, you aren’t.” Recently Ms. Callan told her story in a very thoughtful essay that appeared in The New York Times.  Be sure to check it out at “Is There Life After Work?”

The other night my wife and I watched the DVD extended-cut version of the movie Margaret.  The movie’s story is about stress, relational disconnection and loneliness in the lives of a teenage girl and her mother, an Off-Broadway actress.  Anna Paquin gives a tour-de-force performance as the teen traumatized after she witnesses a bus hit a pedestrian after running a red light and the woman dies in her arms.  She seeks comfort from her divorced parents with little success (her father lives in California, while her mother is pre-occupied with the opening of a new show). Desperate for connection to help soothe her pain, Ms. Paquin’s character begins to look for connection in all the wrong places including alcohol, drugs and having sex with a male acquaintance who already has a girlfriend and one of her high school teachers (played by Matt Damon).   I don’t want to be a spoiler so let me encourage you to rent the DVD.

Today we live in an age where relationships are devalued and tasks that increase wealth and status rule supreme.  The problem with this is that human beings are hardwired to connect.  Insufficient connection leads to feelings of anxiety, emptiness and depression, and an unsustainable life.  We thrive only when our lives include meaningful relationships.  Ms. Callan’s essay and the movie Margaret provide vivid reminders of that, so to is the recent sad news that in America, deaths from suicide now exceed deaths from motor-vehicle accidents (note that the Centers for Disease Control has found that promoting connection in a community reduces the risk of suicide).

Are you investing sufficient time in developing and nurturing the meaningful relationships in your life?

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Your Leadership is Killing Me!

Why do people react so strongly when they don’t have a voice in decision-making? Research suggests there is a rational biological basis for this reaction.  It comes down to this: feeling that we have little or no control is detrimental to our health.

The famous Whitehall studies in the U.K. established that there was an inverse relationship between level of hierarchy, power, control, status and cardiorespiratory disease/mortality rates in members of the British Civil Service.  More recently, a group of researchers found that participants in a Harvard Business School program for leaders had lower stress (as measured by cortisol levels and self-reported anxiety levels) versus people in the local community who didn’t manage others.  The researchers also found that leaders with more powerful positions had even lower cortisol and self-reported anxiety.  Here is a link to the published research and to a New York Times article about it entitled “It’s Easy Being King.” 

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Leader, Beware of Failing to Give People a Voice

John Sexton, the president of New York University, is been aggressively expanding NYU at home and abroad.  Now the faculty of NYU’s largest school, Arts and Sciences, have scheduled a no-confidence vote on Sexton.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “A Test of Leadership at NYU,” described the no-confidence vote as coming about because dissident faculty felt Sexton was acting like a maverick CEO.  How did this happen?  It appears that Sexton’s mistake was failing to give faculty a voice in major decision-making and failing to address their legitimate concerns such as increased teaching loads that require travel abroad and the impact of the expansion on student-teacher ratios. “Voice” is one of the three elements in a Connection Culture (the others are Vision and Value).  When a leader fails to give people a voice in decisions that affect them, he or she runs the risk that some people will organize and seek to have the leader replaced.  This article describes that scenario.  Note in the article that one astute observer comments: “had more faculty been involved in the process…few if any professors [would be actively opposing Sexton].”

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Feel Lonely and Left Out at Work?

Recently, I’ve sensed more people feel lonely and left out at work.  With years of layoffs, those who remain carry greater workloads.  This crowds out time to connect with colleagues.  Managers are also stretched and have less time to connect with the people they are responsible for leading.  When I ask people at the seminars I teach which element of a Connection Culture — Vision, Value or Voice — they would like to increase in their workplace culture, it’s nearly always Voice.   One result of this is that there has been a decline of connection, community and the spirit of unity in organizations.

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Life-Giving Cultures in Health Care Organizations

You can’t give what you don’t have. That’s why cultures in health care organizations need to be life-giving in order to energize health care workers who give so much of themselves to their patients. This is an important issue today.  In some health care-related fields, as many as one-third of employees leave their jobs each year. What can be done?  To learn more, read the article I wrote for the Fall 2012 Addiction and Behavioral Health Business Journal entitled, “Connection Culture: Creating a Life-Giving Environment in Health Care Organizations.”

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When Mission Matters

Organizational missions are inspiring when they communicate how an organization brings truth, beauty and/or goodness to the world. For example, organizations in research or education help bring truth to the world (e.g. biotech companies, universities, schools). Organizations that produce goods or services reflecting aesthetic or artistic beauty or functional excellence bring beauty to the world (e.g. organizations that produce goods or services reflecting a high level of quality, advertising and design organizations, entertainment organizations). Finally, organizations that help improve the wellbeing of people, bring goodness into the world (e.g. healthcare, consumer products or leisure and entertainment organizations).

Citibank’s recent television commercial is a great example of an organization communicating a mission that inspires. The ad shows some of the projects that Citi helped finance including the transatlantic cable, the Marshall Plan to rebuild a post-World War II war-torn Europe, and the Space Shuttle Program. Now those are some accomplishments to be proud of and collectively they have brought greater truth, beauty and goodness into the world.

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Wisdom in Seeking and Considering Opinions of Others

Seeking and considering the opinions and ideas of others reflects the character strengths of wisdom and humility. Today’s world is complex and rapidly changing so that we need to hear the perspectives of people who have had different experiences and who possess different thinking styles.  Doing so helps improve the likelihood we will make optimal decisions. 

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Is Too Much Stress Damaging Your Chromosomes?

Too much stress, including stress in your workplace, damages “telomeres” on the ends of your chromosomes and causes rapid aging.  Interestingly, when people connect in supportive relationships it triggers the production of enzymes called “telomerase” that heal damaged telomeres.  Check out this outstanding 58 minute National Geographic documentary entitled “Stress: Portrait of a Killer” about this and other research on the effects of stress. It includes an excellent segment on the famous Whitehall research studies in the UK that established stress and mortality were inversely related to hierarchy in organizations.

Update: I recently returned from speaking, teaching and meeting with leaders of organizations in business, higher education and government in Houston, Fort Worth, Texas and Erie, Pennsylvania.   ASTD’s The Public Manager recently published a version of a case study I wrote about CNO Admiral Vern Clark’s improving the U.S. Navy’s culture.  The article is entitled “Great Leaders Connect with the People They Lead.”

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In a Crisis, Culture Matters: the Navy on 9/11

Within hours after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, destroyers and cruisers were in place to protect America’s shores. Naval leaders anticipated what had to be done and took action before they received orders. At the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., planning for America’s response began while fires from the attack still smoldered nearby.

The rapid response of the U.S. Navy on September 11 was in part due to the culture led by Admiral Vern Clark who served as the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) from 2000 until his retirement in 2005.  The CNO is the principal naval adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense on the conduct of war.  The Navy achieved some impressive gains during Clark’s tenure as CNO and the naval leaders I’ve met or spoken with have praised his leadership and positive impact.  By the time Clark retired as the second longest serving CNO in U.S. Navy history, he had led changes that would have a positive effect on the U.S. Navy for years to come.  Learn about Admiral Clark’s leadership of the U.S. Navy in an article I wrote for Leadership Excellence that you can read at this link.