Check out this leadership development carnival i.e. a collection of blog posts about leadership issues. It’s hosted by Sharlyn Lauby of HR Bartender. While you are there be sure to explore Sharlyn’s blog. I discovered she created an HR Bartender iPhone App. How cool is that?
Category Archives: Connection Culture
Employee Engagement Podcast with StategyDriven
I recently recorded a podcast interview on the topic of employee engagement and how it affects strategic alignment, productivity and innovation with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven, a terrific group out of Atlanta that provides resources to help business leaders. You can hear the podcast and learn more about StrategyDriven at this link.
Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well
David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select? He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.
Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago. We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity. A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.
My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side. Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet. Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.” In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life. My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this. That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion. It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.
Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the “Great Recession”
Jason Pankau and I are delighted to announce we are presenting a webinar for Communitelligence entitled “Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the ‘Great Recession.'” The webinar will occur on May 5 from 2-3 PM Eastern. Here’s an overview:
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Research insights on what differentiates communications from engagement,
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The three factors that drive employee engagement,
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How to develop an inspiring corporate identity that makes employees feel proud of their organization,
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How to dial up the elements in the employee experience that make employees feel valued,
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How to eliminate the elements in the employee experience that make employees feel devalued, and
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Eight ways to keeping employees informed and give them a voice to share their ideas and opinions.
Additional details and registration information can be found at this link.
Duke Men’s Basketball’s Secret Weapon: The “Women K”
Duke men’s basketball team lead by Coach K are in The Final Four again. What’s their secret? According to Coach K, it’s what might be called the “Women K”: his wife Mickie and their three adult daughters. Read all about it in this fabulous article entitled “Follow Me” written by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the February 2006 edition of Play magazine, a supplement of The New York Times. If you read the article and Coach K’s books you’ll see that he clearly describes what we refer to as a Connection Culture, including its three elements: vision, value and voice.
Most leaders are intentional about developing task excellence but they are not intentional about developing relationship excellence. Not Coach K. Here are just a few of the quotes that appear in the article that show Coach K strives to develop relationship excellence via connection:
“Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships”
“When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, ‘We’re developing a relationship here, and if you are not interested, tell me sooner rather than later.’ That word — relationship — os one he uses frequently. [He tells players] ‘If you come here, for however long, you’re going to unpack your suitcase. We’re going to form a bond, and you’re going to be part of this family.”
“Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches. It is a time for interaction.”
“There’s an empathetic part of leadership, and this is what my wife and daughters have taught me.
Google Lives Up to Values
Google just announced it will shut down its China-based search engine over the Chinese government’s censorship activities. Here’s a New York Times article about it. Earlier I wrote in “A Test of Google’s Character” that Google should live up to its values and I described some of the benefits of doing so.
Chain of Connection: Leaders -> Employees -> Customers
On Wednesday I’ll be leading a panel at The Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference. One of my panel participants is Vince Burks, a Senior Vice President at Amica Mutual Insurance Company. With Vince’s permission, here is an piece he wrote about what I describe in my work as the “Chain of Connection” that runs from the CEO to Customers. It is necessary to maximize strategic alignment, employee engagement and achieve sustainable superior performance in every organization, especially now when according to Gallup Research only 18 percent of people trust business leaders.
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Lagniappe.
Its origin is Spanish. Its meaning is special. And for companies striving to make a difference – or merely to survive – its value is enormous. As Mark Twain explained during his travels to New Orleans, “It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen’ … something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.”
In other words, lagniappe (pronounced “LAN– yap”) is about making an extra effort … about going the extra mile … about doing something extra special. It is a gift. It is a courtesy. It is a way to stand out in a positive way.
And for companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Zales, Starbucks and Sodexho … it is a way of life.
Successful companies know how to run successful businesses. They know how to win over and keep customers. They know how to hire and inspire their workforces. They know the importance of giving 110 percent. They know lagniappe.
For their clients, this means an added emphasis on customer service. Extra courteous. Extra responsive. Always available. They proactively reach out to our clients. They listen to them carefully, patiently, and thoroughly. They treat them well. They build trust.
Like all successful companies, they place a premium on customer relations and recognize that it is not just about the extra “roll” but also the extra call, the extra time, the extra attention.
But that’s not the full story.
At companies like the ones above – as well as my own, Amica Insurance – the concept of lagniappe is not just a part of our brand ethos; it is ingrained in everything we do. It therefore extends to our most valued resource – our employees. In fact, that is the secret to our success.
Happier People Connect Daily
Here’s a link to a New York Times article entitled “Talk Deeply, Be Happy.” The study cited is additional evidence that people need to connect during the workday in order to flourish. It is especially relevant today when workers do more work online. I like Dr. Edward Hallowell’s advice that human beings need face-to-face human moments of connection on average at least every four hours to perform at the top of their game.
Post-Merger Traps Sabotage Performance
Over the course of my career I’ve had the good fortune to have been involved in several mergers. At first, I was fascinated by the process of identifying a compelling rationale for combining companies, negotiating the deal, planning the integration of people and systems and then executing the plan. The dizzying array of tasks that must be accomplished to complete a merger is challenging to say the least. In time, however, I learned that even greater challenges arose after the investment bankers and lawyers had packed up their briefcases and moved on to the next deal.
Building trust, cooperation and esprit de corps among the members of the newly combined organization is far and away the most underestimated challenge of mergers. The failure to plan and address cultural differences is why most mergers fail to meet the expectations of the parties going in. Unless leaders learn how to avoid the inevitable post-merger traps their efforts will be too late to repair the damage that has already been done.
Post-merger traps emerge when behaviors thwart the meeting of universal human needs for people to thrive, individually and collectively. These needs are respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning. When these needs are not met in legitimate ways, people have a tendency to seek illegitimate ways to meet them. As individuals focus more on self-interest, they lose sight of the organization’s interest. In time, the downward performance spiral accelerates as individual performance declines, communication is stunted, decisions are made based on incorrect assumptions, financial performance suffers, and so on until survival is threatened.
The good news is that post-merger traps are largely predictable. Here are a few to be on the lookout for and what leaders can do to avoid them.
U2’s Decision-Making Approach Contributes to Success
Previously I wrote a post about the rock band U2 and how the band members’ value one another as human beings rather than treating each another as human doings. I explained how this value contributes to the band’s extraordinary success.
Another factor that contributes to the band’s success is its participative, consensus-oriented decision-making approach. The members of U2 argue relentlessly over their music, which reflects their passion for excellence. Bono has stated that this approach is frustrating at times but that U2 feels it is necessary to achieve excellence. The key here is that the band’s members appreciate each other’s strengths. Bono has said that although he hears melodies in his head, he is unable to transfer them into written music. Because he considers himself a “lousy guitar player and an even lousier piano player,” he relies on his fellow band members and recognizes that they are integral to his success. To Bono, U2 is “the best example of how to rely on others.”
As human beings, we tend to overvalue our strengths and contributions and undervalue the strengths and contributions of others. Don’t make that mistake. For each individual you regularly work with, take the time to learn how he or she thinks, his or her temperament and character values. I recommend applying the thinking styles identified by Robert Stenberg at Yale University, the Kiersey Temperament Sorter to test and understand temperaments, and the character value strengths identified by Martin Seligman. If you (1) invest the time to understand thinking styles, temperaments and character values, (2) assemble teams with diverse strengths required in light of tasks the team mush accomplish and (3) apply a participative, consensus-oriented approach to making decisions, your teams will consistently outperform the teams of leaders who do less.
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Michael Lee Stallard coaches and teaches leaders to increase strategic alignment, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. He is president of E Pluribus Partners, a leadership training and consulting firm, and the primary author of the bestselling book Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity and Productivity. For more: www.MichaelLeeStallard.com