Tag Archives: business speaker

Posted on

Tom Friedman, Dov Seidman: Need For “Sustainable Values”

Check out Tom Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times at this link. Friedman cites Dov Siedman’s belief that in an interconnected world we need “sustainable values” more than ever. I couldn’t agree more.  In past posts I’ve written about Dov, his book entitled How and LRN, the company he founded to promote principled leadership.  

In our work at E Pluribus Partners, we promote universal character values and virtue as essential for people to thrive, individually and collectively.  Our “Character > Connection > Thrive Model” (see below) lays out the rationale.  In a nutshell, individuals who believe and behave in ways that are consistent with Universal Character Values (also known as character strengths), create “Connection Cultures” that meet universal human needs to thrive.   You can learn more about Connection Cultures, Universal Character Strengths and Virtues by reading this free manifesto published by changethis.com entitled The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.

Slide1

Posted on

Darden’s Leadership Sage


Jason Pankau and I were at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business this week to speak about our work on Connection Cultures, leadership, productivity, innovation and employee engagement.  We gave a three hour presentation to students in the MBA for Executives program and briefly visited friends such as professors Marian Moore and Alec Horniman.

Darden has so much going for it.  World class professors and a great culture.  No doubt the business school’s culture benefits from Alec Horniman’s wisdom as a thought leader in the fields of leadership, organizations, change and ethics.   Take a look at the excellent video of Dr. Horniman discussing the importance of ethics in business and you’ll see what I mean.

Posted on

Winning Workplaces’ Article on Connection

Winning Workplaces just featured an article that Jason Pankau and I wrote in its April newsletter and on its website.  The article is entitled “To Boost Productivity and Innovation, Fire Up the People You Lead.”  Check out the article and the Winning Workplaces website, it has great ideas, many written by one of our favorite bloggers Mark Harbeke.  Mark is Winning Workplaces’ Director of Content Development.

Posted on

Tom Peters, Top Leadership Blogs, and New Friends

Quote of the day: “Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together.”  – Jason Pankau

It’s been a very good week.  This morning I received an email that Tom Peters was following my tweets. In the early 1980s, as I young employee of Texas Instruments I read In Search of Excellence and went through a training program based on Tom’s book and ideas.  I still have the audio tapes from his lectures!  What I found so enthralling was that he described what was possible, a better work culture and an organization where people thrived individually and collectively.  It put a fire in my belly not to settle for the current reality.  For Tom Peters influence in my life, I am sincerely grateful.

Other good things that happened this week:

Jurgen Noop from the Netherlands recognized my blog as one of the top leadership and management blogs.  Many thanks, Jurgen!

This week I thoroughly enjoyed speaking about the Connection Culture, Fired Up or Burned Out, employee engagement, leadership, productivity and innovation with Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program, Nathan Ives on the StrategyDriven Podcast, and Roy Saunderson and S. Max Brown on their Real Recognition Radio program.  What wonderful people to get to know.  I encourage you to check out their work.

Yesterday, I spoke at an organizational development network conference on Long Island.  It was a tremendous group with great energy and intelligence.  I’m still buzzing from the experience.

And finally, I connected via email with Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.  Jason Pankau, my best friend, business partner, and author of the foregoing “quote of the day,” gave me Parker’s book as a gift some years ago.   It had a profound effect on me.  I still revisit it periodically.  It is a small book that’s packed with wisdom.   If you’ve not read it, I highly encourage you to check it out along with everything else Parker writes about on the website for his organization The Center for Courage and Renewal. He is a man of remarkable wisdom and character.

Over the weekend I’m finishing the remarkable book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas and working on an article with Howard Behar, the extraordinary leader who turned around Starbucks.

Have a great weekend!

Posted on

The Conference Board: Employee Engagement = Connections

The Conference Board does excellent research work on employee engagement thanks in part to John Gibbons, a Senior Research Advisor at the organization. After examining the myriad definitions of employee engagement, The Conference Board concluded that employee engagement should be defined as follows:

“Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”

I like this definition.  It is consistent with our research where we heard respondents consistently use the terms “connect” or “feel connected”  to describe the emotions they experience in relation to their organization’s identity, the people they work with and their day-to-day work.

In our book Fired Up or Burned Out and in The Connection Culture Manifesto, we identify and describe the “force of connection” as

“a bond based on shared identity, empathy and understanding that moves self-centered individuals toward group-centered membership.”

After defining connection, we identify the “Connection Culture” as the environment that produces emotional and rational connections that, as The Conference Board’s definition says “influence [people] to apply discretionary effort to [their] work.”  The Connection Culture meets universal human needs. Learn more by reading the manifesto or go even deeper by reading our book.

Posted on

How Paul O’Neill Fired Up Alcoa’s Culture

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.

Posted on

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.

__

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

Posted on

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.  

Posted on

Refugee Camp to Harvard: Mawi Asgedom, an Inspiring Intentional Connector

mawi.jpg Yesterday I wrote about the incivility and indifference low status workers experience and how it contributes to today’s widespread employee disengagement. Mawi Asgedom is a friend who I admire in part for his passion to connect with people regardless of their status. Mawi graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1999 and was voted by his fellow students to be one of the Harvard’s four commencement speakers.

Standing before an audience of 30,000 Mawi gave a remarkable speech entitled “Of Snakes, Butterfies and Small Acts of Kindness.”

Posted on

George Washington, Worthy of Praise?

Yesterday was President’s Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington.  Reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in yesterday’s The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be?  I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth.  My journey went as far as contacting and interacting with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington’s generalship.  After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on 20 leaders in a book I wrote entitled Fired Up or Burned Out.

——

First in Their Hearts

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, observed the following about George Washington: “It wasn’t his generalship that made him stand out . . . It was the way he attended to and stuck by his men. His soldiers knew that he respected and cared for them, and that he would share their severe hardships.”