Category Archives: Connection Culture

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Teaching Connection at GE








Today I taught about Connection Cultures and employee engagement to leaders at GE’s famed Crotonville Leadership Training Center. In the coming weeks I’ll be working with GE to add material from Fired Up or Burned Out to one of GE’s leadership courses.  The Connection Culture will help GE attain its desire to be inclusive.  And I’m fired up about helping this great organization become even better. 

GE is a company I’ve always admired.  Previously I’ve written about Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO, and how he has made inclusiveness one of GE’s values.  More recently, I wrote in a post entitled “Warren Buffett: More Than an Oracle,” that Buffett made a multibillion dollar investment in GE.  Although the current economic conditions are challenging, like Buffett, I believe GE’s future is bright.

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Webcast: John Timmerman, Corp. VP Operations, Ritz-Carlton

John Timmerman, Corporate Vice President of Operations at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C. (click here for his bio) was my guest on a recent webcast on Brighttalk.com’s Leadership and Employee Engagement Channel.  You can see the webcast by clicking on employee engagement.

During the webcast John identifies a variety of Ritz-Carlton practices that hep make it a Connection Culture including:

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Presentation to Wharton and Harvard Business School Clubs of D.C.

Last week I spoke at a breakfast meeting of Wharton and Harvard Business School Clubs of D.C.  It was such an engaging group of individuals that included entrepreneurs, leaders of government agencies, and leaders from the social sector.  I would like to thank them for their enthusiastic response to my presentation.  

During the presentation I spoke about the leadership style of or Retired Admiral Vern Clark, the former Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) who served as CNO from 2000-2005.  Retired Rear Admiral Rose Levitre, who presently works for LMI (an intelligence consulting organization) and Rear Admiral Frank Thorp, the current Chief of Information for the Navy, stood up before the group and shared their experiences working for Admiral Clark.  Thank you Rose and Frank for inspiring us with your stories.  

Finally, I would like to thank the Wharton Alumni Club of D.C.’s president, Alan Schlaifer, for doing a first class job of organizing this event and Anthony Priest, chairman of the Harvard Business School Club of D.C., for promoting it.

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Weathering the Storm

Facilitator and blogger Terry Seamon just posted a piece I wrote entitled “Weathering the Storm.” Terry has invited a number of thinkers to share their ideas on employee engagement in a series on his blog entitled “Engaging Voices.” This series will include posts from David Zinger, Tim Wright, Judy Bardwick, Phil Gerbyshak, and Judy McLeish.

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Challenger Disaster Documentary a Tribute to Truth Tellers
























In Fired Up or Burned Out, I wrote about the lack of Knowledge Flow (or Voice) at NASA and how it contributed to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.  National Geographic produced an excellent documentary about the Challenger disaster that’s available on Hulu.com.  You can access it at Challenger: The Untold Story.  

In most organizations there are truth tellers who have the courage to speak truth to power.  In this case, Morton Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly and The Rogers Commission’s Richard Feynman emerge as the courageous truth tellers.  Feynman appears in another chapter of Fired Up or Burned Out as the young supervising engineer of the Manhattan Project who asks Robert Oppenheimer to tell the supporting engineers the purpose of the project (which results in a tenfold increase in their productivity). Feynman also appeared in Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign (above).

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Lessons I Learned from Stephen Hopson’s Adversity University

There is a lot of talk these days about focusing people on their strengths.  Certainly there’s some wisdom in that but it’s not wise to focus on apparent strengths alone.

Recently, I met an extraordinary man named Stephen Hopson. His life story made me reconsider the wisdom of focusing on apparent strengths. 

Stephen is deaf and has been since birth.  If Stephen had focused on his apparent strengths, what would he have become? Probably not a financial executive on Wall Street, a motivational speaker or an airplane pilot.

Hopson became all of those.

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A Culture of Radical Innovation

In a recent study of 759 public companies across 17 nations, Gerard J. Tellis, Jaideep C. Prabhu, and Rajesh K. Chandy concluded that corporate culture is a better predictor of a firm’s ability to capitalize on disruptive innovations than factors such as government policy and R&D spending. The study entitled “Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Preeminance of Corporate Culture” appeared in the January edition of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing. These findings are consistent with what I argued in the changethis.com manifesto I wrote entitled “The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage” and in an article entitled “Encouraging Knowledge Flow” published in Perdido.

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Employee Engagement During Difficult Times

Here’s another article I’m working on. If you have any suggestions, please email me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.com.

During difficult times it’s natural for anxious individuals to retreat into isolation, a state that nearly always results in diminished productivity. When it comes to the amount of effort employees put in their work, research by the Corporate Leadership Council has shown that emotional connections are on average four times as important as rational factors.  Emotional connections arise when employees feel: 1) proud of their organization’s mission, values and reputation, 2) valued by their supervisor and colleagues, and 3) informed and that their opinions and ideas about matters that are important to them are considered by decision-makers before decisions are made. 

Recently I visited an impressive organization that is poised to continue performing well even through the challenging economic environment we are presently facing.

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Truth, Beauty and Goodness Increase Employee Engagement

Here is the draft of an article I’m working on. What do you think about it?  If you have any comments or suggestions, please email me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.  

Values of Great Leaders Connect with Employees 

 

By Michael Lee Stallard

When people feel emotionally connected, they put more effort in their work. Research bears this out. A 2004 Corporate Leadership Council study of 50,000 employees worldwide concluded that emotional factors were four times as important as rational factors when it came to employee effort.

Great leaders connect on an emotional level with the people they are responsible for leading.   When employees follow their leader’s example, they become more connected with one another, boosting trust, cooperation and esprit de corps throughout the organization. What I have discovered as a leader and as an advisor to leaders over the years is that the emotional connections leaders develop with people are ultimately grounded in the leader’s own values.  The values that foster connection among people come in clusters that I refer to as Truth Values, Beauty Values and Goodness Values.

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Webcast with Charles W. “Willy” Moore, Jr. of Lockheed Martin

Please join me as I host a webcast with Charles W. “Willy” Moore Jr. on January 14, at 11:00 AM Eastern. When I spoke to a group of leaders at Lockheed Martin last year I heard Willy share his thoughts on leadership. He impressed me with his wisdom and extensive experience as a Vice President responsible for a major group at Lockheed and as a Vice Admiral during a distinguished 36-year career in the United States Navy. During his Navy career, Vice Admiral Moore served as a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Readiness and Logistics, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and Commander, U.S. Fifth Fleet (1998-2002). In this role VADM Moore commanded all U.S. Naval Forces throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa during a time of nearly constant combat. VADM Moore led his forces in combat operations including Infinite Reach after the 1998 Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Operation Desert Fox in Iraq and subsequent combat in the no-fly zone, Operation Southern Watch, Operation Determined Response after the terrorist bombing of USS Cole and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan fighting the global war on terrorism.

This is a webcast you don’t want to miss. To sign up for the live webcast or to hear a recording, click here.