Posted on

Virtual Leadership

I just returned from speaking about values-based leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation to students and faculty at Illinois State University.  Here a link to an article on my presentation.  While visiting my alma mater, I had the good fortune of interacting with Dr. Jim Jawahar, the Chair of the Management and Quantitative Methods Department, and several of the department’s outstanding faculty members.  During the discussion, we identified several areas of shared interest.  Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about what I learned.

To begin, Assistant Professor Dr. Laura Erskine has done some fascinating research on leading employees via online, virtual interactions.  In a thought-provoking article published by my friends at the Center for Creative Leadership Dr. Erskine wrote: “Although physical separation and communication channels may be what the news media and organizations are focused on, the real driver [in virtual leadership] is the degree of psychological distance between leaders and followers.  Followers who felt that their leader trusted them, would back them in difficult situations, and give them autonomy were both more successful and more satisfied.”

The full article is available online at this link.

Next week, I’ll be chairing the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston.  It’s not to late to sign up and attend.  You can find out more about the program at this link.

In the coming weeks I’ll be working on an article for The Economic Times in India, a guest editorial I was invited to write for Talent Management magazine, speaking along with my colleague Jason Pankau to the leaders of a hospital system in Chicago and completing a book proposal for a book I’m coauthoring with Stephen Paletta, winner of Oprah Winfrey’s Big Give television program and founder of The International Education Exchange.

Posted on

Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence, Both Are Essential

I recently attended a meeting where it seemed that everyone was focused on the people or relationships in a business and believed that doing so would bring success.  Don’t believe it.  Great leaders focus on achieving BOTH task excellence and relationship excellence.   This dual focus produces sustainable superior performance.   Managers who are solely task focused eventually burn people out.  Managers who are solely relationship focused don’t set sufficiently high performance standards and challenge the team to accomplish them.   Managers who focus on task and relationship excellence inspire their teams to work together to reach their goal and when they do the sense of pride inspires, engages and energizes the team to keep performing at the top of their game.

You’ll find a passion for task excellence in all the great leaders.  In John Eisenberg’s new book That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory, Fuzzy Thurston, an All-Pro guard who played for the great coach said, “We realized in his first season that we were going to be a very good team…Lombardi wasn’t going to stand for anything less.”  That’s the attitude it takes to be great.  It’s the relationship excellence that keeps people feeling connected to their leader and makes task excellence sustainable.

Most people don’t know that side of Vince Lombardi’s character.  They’ve heard the quote attributed to Lombardi that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  The quote was actually from a movie entitled Trouble Along the Way. What Lombardi taught was that winning isn’t everything, but making the effort to win is.  It’s similar to basketball coach John Wooden’s philosophy that a winner achieves competitive greatness by giving their very best effort all the time and thus receives a sense of satisfaction from knowing they’ve given their all.

Vince Lombardi had a passion for relationship excellence too.  He loved his players.  He told them they must love one another and said love made the difference on their team.  In addition, he abhored cheating or taking cheap shots at an opposing player.  He viewed it as unethical and illegitimate behavior that was inconsistent with being a winner.  Winning the right way, with character and virtue rather than vice, was what Lombardi believed and taught.  He learned it from the renowned and demanding Jesuit teacher Ignatius Wiley Cox who taught ethics at Fordham University (Lombardi received a “A” in Cox’s ethics class).  This is the side of the great coach that David Maraniss brought out in his outstanding book on Lombardi entitled When Pride Still Mattered.

Posted on

Free Slide Presentation Download

Northwestern Univ. Human Capital Conference

This week I spoke in Toronto as part of Rotman School of Management’s Leadership Experts Series and Jason Pankau and I spoke at Northwestern University’s Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement in Chicago.   The presentations addressed leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation.  Above is free download of our slides from the Northwestern presentation.

Posted on

Free Teleseminar Playback

Yesterday, I joined author-consultant Kevin Eikenberry on a teleseminar to discuss accountability and employee engagement.  As soon as I receive the link that will allow you to access the recording of the FREE teleseminar, I will post it here.

During the call, I cited two research studies.  Here are links below to information on each of them:

3-to-1 Positivity Ratio

Local culture more important than global culture (See the parts of the article entitled “It All Depends on Which Store You’re In” and “The Encounter Must Be Measured Locally.”)

Posted on

Gary Hamel: Three Challenges Facing Organizations

Last week I was invited to attend the World Business Forum in NYC with 50 other leading bloggers.  The presentation that resonated the most with me was Gary Hamel’s.  In it, he outlined three challenges facing today’s organizations:

  1. How do we build an organization that can change as fast as change itself? Change is accelerating at this time in history and organizations need to act faster to deal with opportunities and threats.  Consider the changes in the last century including in healthcare, microprocesssors, transportation, computing power, the internet, telephony, gene sequencing, biotech, etc.
  2. How do we build an organization where innovation is everyone’s job? The accelerated pace of change makes this a necessity.  Do employees understand their organizations innovation insights?  Is every employee’s contribution to innovation measured?
  3. How do we build an organization that actually inspires extraordinary accomplishment?  This is the most important of the three challenges facing today’s organizations.  On average, seventy-five percent of employees are not engaged in their jobs.  We need employees who regard their jobs as the way to bring their passion in the world. Our job as managers is to build a work climate, a sense of purpose that inspires initiative because obedience, diligence and intellect are mere table stakes in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace.

These ideas are from Hamel’s book, The Future of Management.  In upcoming blog posts, I’ll comment on the challenges Hamel identified.  Do you think he identified the top challenges? If so, why?  If not, what did he miss?

Posted on

HSM: Enabling Mosaic Thinking at #WBF09

Chagall Mosaic Chicago












Today I’m attending day 2 of the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall in NYC at the invitation of HSM, the forum’s sponsor.  I’ve joined a list of leading bloggers (see below) who are covering the forum.  I’m a big fan of this event because it exposes me to a broad diversity of people and ideas.  The speakers are certainly interesting. Every bit as thought-provoking are the conversations I’ve had with fellow bloggers and forum attendees.   These individuals are mostly from the U.S. although I’ve met several who came from abroad.  They come with differing interests, experiences, perspectives, thinking styles and temperaments.  Reading the bloggers posts and interacting with them inevitably helps me see new perspectives.  I encourage you to check out their blogs at the links below.

Being intentional about seeking out the opinions and ideas of others outside your present social networks is wise.  Opportunities and problems, especially complex ones, are like mosaics.  The more tiles you see in the mosaic, the greater likelihood you will integrate the tiles into patterns.  When patterns emerge it increases the probability of innovative thinking and optimal decision-making.  I keep an image of the Chagall mosaic (above) on my MacBook Pro desktop to remind me to be intentional about regularly interacting with people outside my own social networks. To do so is to immerse yourself into a rich and robust marketplace of ideas.

Links to World Business Forum Bloggers:

Posted on

Innovative Thinking at Rotman

rotman logo

Next Tuesday I’ll be speaking about connection cultures, leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.  Before my presentation I’m meeting with Roger Martin, Rotman’s dean who also happens to be the author of an excellent book I read entitled The Opposable Mind and an upcoming release I look forward to reading entitled The Design of Business.  Rotman is bringing fresh thinking to business and I’m eager to share my work with members of the Rotman community as well as learn more about new ideas emerging from this center of innovative thinking.  If you have not already, I encourage you to check out the award-winning Rotman magazine.

Posted on

WBF Emerging Theme: Corporation or Corpse?

Today and tomorrow I’m in NYC as one of the bloggers invited by HSM to cover its World Business Forum.

What has struck me about the emerging theme here this morning is that more individuals in the business community are recognizing the importance of factors beyond the obvious tasks of business.  A model we use in our book Fired Up or Burned Out is Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence = Sustainable Superior Performance.  At this conference, I hear a steady drumbeat of speakers who say that our organizations desperately need to develop Relationship Excellence. By Relationship Excellence I mean the relationship employees have with their organization’s identity, the relationship employees have with each other and the relationship employees have with their day-to-day jobs.  Consider, for example, the following quotes: