Tag Archives: connection cultures

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Connection Cultures Help Students Thrive

Greenwich High School (Greenwich, CT) was recognized in a New York Times article as a school in an affluent community that’s successfully integrating students from low income families. What the article misses is that a key contributor to Greenwich High School’s success is that it its Connection Culture.

The school’s headmaster, Christopher Winters, regularly talks and writes about the importance of connecting students, teachers, administrators and parents. He walks the talk, too. Chris greets students when they arrive in the morning and he easily moves about the student center connecting with students.  He encourages camaraderie among teachers and administrators and encourages parental involvement.

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Stress + Loneliness = Disaster

Like many people today, Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, slowly slipped into a life where her job was #1, ahead of every relationship in her life. To have sufficient energy to work an exhausting schedule throughout the week, she spent weekends sleeping.  Eventually she reached a point where what she did was who she was.  When she left her job around the time of Lehman’s demise, she was devastated.  As Jason Pankau, my friend and business partner says, “when you are what you do, when you don’t, you aren’t.” Recently Ms. Callan told her story in a very thoughtful essay that appeared in The New York Times.  Be sure to check it out at “Is There Life After Work?”

The other night my wife and I watched the DVD extended-cut version of the movie Margaret.  The movie’s story is about stress, relational disconnection and loneliness in the lives of a teenage girl and her mother, an Off-Broadway actress.  Anna Paquin gives a tour-de-force performance as the teen traumatized after she witnesses a bus hit a pedestrian after running a red light and the woman dies in her arms.  She seeks comfort from her divorced parents with little success (her father lives in California, while her mother is pre-occupied with the opening of a new show). Desperate for connection to help soothe her pain, Ms. Paquin’s character begins to look for connection in all the wrong places including alcohol, drugs and having sex with a male acquaintance who already has a girlfriend and one of her high school teachers (played by Matt Damon).   I don’t want to be a spoiler so let me encourage you to rent the DVD.

Today we live in an age where relationships are devalued and tasks that increase wealth and status rule supreme.  The problem with this is that human beings are hardwired to connect.  Insufficient connection leads to feelings of anxiety, emptiness and depression, and an unsustainable life.  We thrive only when our lives include meaningful relationships.  Ms. Callan’s essay and the movie Margaret provide vivid reminders of that, so to is the recent sad news that in America, deaths from suicide now exceed deaths from motor-vehicle accidents (note that the Centers for Disease Control has found that promoting connection in a community reduces the risk of suicide).

Are you investing sufficient time in developing and nurturing the meaningful relationships in your life?

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Your Leadership is Killing Me!

Why do people react so strongly when they don’t have a voice in decision-making? Research suggests there is a rational biological basis for this reaction.  It comes down to this: feeling that we have little or no control is detrimental to our health.

The famous Whitehall studies in the U.K. established that there was an inverse relationship between level of hierarchy, power, control, status and cardiorespiratory disease/mortality rates in members of the British Civil Service.  More recently, a group of researchers found that participants in a Harvard Business School program for leaders had lower stress (as measured by cortisol levels and self-reported anxiety levels) versus people in the local community who didn’t manage others.  The researchers also found that leaders with more powerful positions had even lower cortisol and self-reported anxiety.  Here is a link to the published research and to a New York Times article about it entitled “It’s Easy Being King.” 

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Leader, Beware of Failing to Give People a Voice

John Sexton, the president of New York University, is been aggressively expanding NYU at home and abroad.  Now the faculty of NYU’s largest school, Arts and Sciences, have scheduled a no-confidence vote on Sexton.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “A Test of Leadership at NYU,” described the no-confidence vote as coming about because dissident faculty felt Sexton was acting like a maverick CEO.  How did this happen?  It appears that Sexton’s mistake was failing to give faculty a voice in major decision-making and failing to address their legitimate concerns such as increased teaching loads that require travel abroad and the impact of the expansion on student-teacher ratios. “Voice” is one of the three elements in a Connection Culture (the others are Vision and Value).  When a leader fails to give people a voice in decisions that affect them, he or she runs the risk that some people will organize and seek to have the leader replaced.  This article describes that scenario.  Note in the article that one astute observer comments: “had more faculty been involved in the process…few if any professors [would be actively opposing Sexton].”

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Life-Giving Cultures in Health Care Organizations

You can’t give what you don’t have. That’s why cultures in health care organizations need to be life-giving in order to energize health care workers who give so much of themselves to their patients. This is an important issue today.  In some health care-related fields, as many as one-third of employees leave their jobs each year. What can be done?  To learn more, read the article I wrote for the Fall 2012 Addiction and Behavioral Health Business Journal entitled, “Connection Culture: Creating a Life-Giving Environment in Health Care Organizations.”

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When Mission Matters

Organizational missions are inspiring when they communicate how an organization brings truth, beauty and/or goodness to the world. For example, organizations in research or education help bring truth to the world (e.g. biotech companies, universities, schools). Organizations that produce goods or services reflecting aesthetic or artistic beauty or functional excellence bring beauty to the world (e.g. organizations that produce goods or services reflecting a high level of quality, advertising and design organizations, entertainment organizations). Finally, organizations that help improve the wellbeing of people, bring goodness into the world (e.g. healthcare, consumer products or leisure and entertainment organizations).

Citibank’s recent television commercial is a great example of an organization communicating a mission that inspires. The ad shows some of the projects that Citi helped finance including the transatlantic cable, the Marshall Plan to rebuild a post-World War II war-torn Europe, and the Space Shuttle Program. Now those are some accomplishments to be proud of and collectively they have brought greater truth, beauty and goodness into the world.

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In a Crisis, Culture Matters: the Navy on 9/11

Within hours after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, destroyers and cruisers were in place to protect America’s shores. Naval leaders anticipated what had to be done and took action before they received orders. At the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., planning for America’s response began while fires from the attack still smoldered nearby.

The rapid response of the U.S. Navy on September 11 was in part due to the culture led by Admiral Vern Clark who served as the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) from 2000 until his retirement in 2005.  The CNO is the principal naval adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense on the conduct of war.  The Navy achieved some impressive gains during Clark’s tenure as CNO and the naval leaders I’ve met or spoken with have praised his leadership and positive impact.  By the time Clark retired as the second longest serving CNO in U.S. Navy history, he had led changes that would have a positive effect on the U.S. Navy for years to come.  Learn about Admiral Clark’s leadership of the U.S. Navy in an article I wrote for Leadership Excellence that you can read at this link. 

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NYTimes: Why Coach K “Coaches Like a Girl”

Recently I was delighted to read a great USA Today article about Coach K of Duke leading the U.S. Men’s Basketball Team in the Olympics.  Coach K has won four NCAA college basketball titles as the head coach of Duke, a gold medal as an assistant coach of the 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona and a gold medal as head coach of the U.S. mens team in the 1998 olympics in Beijing.  He’s a servant leader who creates the “Connection Culture” where his players feel connected to him and to one another, a phenomenon we wrote about in Fired Up or Burned Out.  Coach K cares about task excellence and relationship excellence.  He cares about people and results.

To learn more about Coach K’s leadership style and the surprising story of how he evolved as a leader check out this fascinating New York Times Magazine  article entitled “Follow Me.”   In it you’ll learn why this extraordinary leader, a guy’s guy from an all boys Catholic high school, West Point and the U.S. Army, coaches, as the author Mike Sokolove says, “like a girl.”

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Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Check out this excellent article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”  Some eye-popping statistics and quotes from the article include:

  • In 1950 less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person.  By 2010, nearly 27 percent had just one person.
  • A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely as opposed to 20 percent a decade earlier.
  • Roughly 20 percent of Americans — about 60 million people — are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.
  • “Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly about an epidemic of loneliness.”

The rise in loneliness has led to an explosion in the number of paid confidants.  A 2010 Hoover Institute paper stated in 1950 the U.S. had a combined 33,000 paid confidants including clinical psychologists, social workers and therapists.  By 2010 that number reached an estimated 1,091,00 paid confidants which includes new categories such as mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and life coaches.

Clearly, Facebook and other assorted addictions to media are not the only contributors to the epidemic of loneliness. The geographic spread of families, increased time spent working/commuting to work, and the decline of relationships in the workplace are also responsible.  Regarding relationships in the workplace, the push for productivity has contributed to a rise of cultures that label people who take time to build relationships as slackers.   Today, having lunch alone in your office is the norm.  Unfortunately, productivity and innovation take a toll when workers burn out from a lack of human connection.  They learn to play “face time” games that make it look like they’re working, when in reality they’re not.  Creating Connection Cultures in organizations to achieve “relationship excellence” is wise.  We most recently made the case for Connection Cultures in an article entitled,”The Science of Engagement,” that appeared in the Spring edition of  Training Industry Quarterly.

In addition to the The Atlantic article on Facebook making us lonely, here are two other readings I recommend.