This week I taught a workshop for the Institute for Management Studies on strategic alignment and employee engagement. The workshop was held in Pittsburgh and leaders from many the area’s top organizations were in attendance. The workshop was hosted by IMS chair Mark Spear. Mark has great tremendous breadth and depth of experience in organizational development. One of his previous employers was Alcoa. Over dinner the night before the workshop, Mark praised Paul O’Neill’s leadership of Alcoa during what many current and former employees of the company refer to as the “golden age of Alcoa.” One observation Mark shared was that O’Neill regularly met with groups of employees to answer any questions they had and to ask them questions.He was approachable, humble, open-minded and inquisitive. This is an example of what I refer to as a leader who conducts “Knowledge Flow Sessions” that have increase strategic alignment, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. The story was so compelling I asked Mark to share it with attendees when I presented the section on “Knowledge Flow.” If you are interested in Paul O’Neill’s leadership style and legacy, take a look at this article that appeared in Business Week.
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.
President Obama’s Real Mistake
Check out this article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. His approach is poisoning the administration’s work environment and its relationship with other branches of government. In our work we teach leaders to hire people who have demonstrated they can achieve both task excellence and relationship excellence through their competence and character. President Obama is learning the hard way about his chief of staff what John Wooden, the legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach, once observed, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.”
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
Connecting with Customers? Let Me Count the Ways
On March 24, I’ll be moderating a panel at the Conference Board’s annual Customer Experience Management Conference in New York City. I was delighted to hear that Robert Reiss, conference chairman, host of The CEO Show and a Forbes.com columnist, subtitled the conference “building customer connections.”
The panel will address several case studies about building the exceptional customer experience. The companies represented on the panel all have reputations for outstanding customer experience and yet they are very different organizations.
FedEx is known for its reliability. Who can forget Tom Hanks playing Chuck Noland, the FedEx efficiency expert in the movie Cast Away.
Wisdom Webinar
Jason Pankau and I will be presenting in the Wisdom Webinar series organized by the South Bay Organizational Development Network. The webinar will occur from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM PST on April 13. You can register to participate at this link.
Goldman Sachs’ Inspiring Identity At Risk
A few hours ago, Goldman Sachs acknowledged in an SEC filing that mounting criticism in the press is a risk to the firm. Goldman should be concerned. A firm’s reputation affects employer brand, employee engagement and employee retention. In the past Goldman employees were proud to say they worked for the firm. Not so today following a long string of articles where Goldman has been referred to as a blood-sucking leech in the economy that cares only about its bottom line. I cringe when I read such reports because I have several good friends who work or have worked at Goldman and without exception I trust and respect each one. That said, having worked on Wall Street for most of my career, I know that people get caught up in thinking what they do is a game the score of which is determined by how much money they make relative to others. This mindset encourages imprudent risk-taking and behavior that may meet the letter of the law, but not the spirit. (Note: the gamesman profile was first described by Michael Maccoby in his book The Gamesman.)
I advise leaders that they must clearly communicate a set of virtuous values and keep them in front of employees. The most effective leaders do this by celebrating the stories of individuals who exhibit the right values and getting rid of employees who don’t. Absent a clear focus on virtuous values, an organization’s members will eventually stray into ethically questionable behavior that can destroy the firm. And with organizations such as Goldman that are interconnected to many companies and countries via derivative contracts, they can take the economy down with them. That’s one reason I agree with Paul Volker and others who support effective regulation of financial services organizations.
When Truth is Victim of “Nice”
Take a look at this article about Ursula Burns, the new CEO of Xerox, and her efforts to alter Xerox’s culture. Anne Mulachy, the former CEO did a remarkable job pulling the Xerox family together to save the company when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Mulcahy is a tough act to follow but I’m pulling for Ms. Burns to take Xerox to the next level. One way to look at Ms. Burns challenge is that she needs to frame Xerox’s success as being rooted in achieving both task excellence and relationship excellence. When a culture sacrifices truth to being nice (or more accurately to avoiding conflict) a company’s performance eventually suffer. Ms. Burns is performing a delicate dance. If she comes off too strong, people wil ear to spaek he truth. If she does nothing, it seems that the desire to avoid constructive conflict may eventually sabotage the companies performance.
If I were advising Ms. Burns, I would say “make it clear to your Xerox colleagues that we must be intentional about achieving BOTH task excellence AND relationship excellence in order to thrive. Sacrifice either and we will risk managerial failure for reasons I’ve written about in Fired Up or Burned Out.
High Fives, Fist Bumps: Touch and Performance are Correlated
In Fired Up or Burned Out I wrote about “high five moments” that are celebrated at Cranium, the games company. It turns out that new research reported in a New York Times article by Benedict Carey entitled “Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much” shows there is a correlation between touch and performance. Reading the article immediately made me think of the twin Jensen brothers who dominate men’s doubles in tennis. They must give each other a hundred fist bumps a set!
Like the Jensen brother in tennis, Craniun is a force to be reckoned with in games. Here’s what I wrote about them:
Day 19: High-Five Moments
In 1998, with $100,000 of their own money, Richard Tait and Whit Alexander, two former Microsoft employees, decided to create a new board game.1 Tait came up with the idea when he and his wife were playing games at the home of their friends. The couple easily won Pictionary and were trounced at Scrabble. Pondering how he felt as the winner of one game and loser of another, Tait thought it would be ideal to play a game that involved different skills so that everyone had a chance to shine. That type of game would be more fun, and it would bring people together rather than alienate them in a winner-take-all battle. Tait persuaded Alexander to join him, and together they created the game Cranium.
Cranium became the fastest-selling independent board game in history, selling more than either Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit had in its first year. The company (also named Cranium) went on to shatter industry records by creating games that won the Toy Industry Association’s Toy of the Year game award four out of the last five years. It has sold more than 15 million games in 10 languages and 30 countries. In 2005, while the toy industry’s unit sales were down 6 percent, Cranium’s sales were up 50 percent.