Michael Lee Stallard » connection

Many Ways to Connect

Michael Lee Stallard — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:53:56 +0000

This last week I was in Boston for several meetings and to teach a seminar for the Institute for Management Studies (IMS). I always teach that there are hundreds of ways to connect with others and the challenge facing leaders is to get to know the people they lead and identify ways to connect with them given who they are and the context of their work together.

Following are a few of the ways I learned that people and organizations are connecting.

At Bose Corporation, new employees learn “The Essence and Values of Bose,” including that “we treat others with respect.” At Bose, these words are more than window dressing. All new employees take a course on respect that help them bring this value to life in Bose culture.
At Amica Insurance, serving customers is an all-consuming passion. Amica is a perennial winner of customer service awards. Inside the company, when an employee is identified as having served a customer well, his or her team is recognized too. This motivates the team to support one another’s efforts to serve customers.
Elizabeth Dole, when she was president of the Red Cross, took the time to learn something significant about each person she would meet so that she could affirm each individual a personal way. In subsequent meetings, Ms. Dole was very good at remembering and mentioned the significant fact when she saw the individual.
David Gill, a professor at Gordon Conwell College, told me that we connect with the Divine when we “help people fulfill their dreams or overcome their nightmares.” (We also connect with others when our organization’s mission accomplishes these ends.)

The importance of creating Connection Culture also came to my attention this week as I was doing research on Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO. Ford just announced its third full year of profit. Frances Hesselbien, a friend and leader whom I much admire, has praised Mulally so I decided it’s about time that I take a closer look at his leadership of Ford. In this splendid interview he did with The New York Times, Mulally recounts how he learned the importance of giving people autonomy, being inclusive, keeping people in the loop and connecting them to their organization’s “Inspiring Identity.”

In the coming weeks I’ll be speaking and teaching in Houston, Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Edinburgh. As I travel, I’ll post new things I learn about connection.

Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande on Connection

Michael Lee Stallard — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:00:37 +0000

Several writers at The New Yorker understand how important the force of human connection is to help people thrive. I’ve previously written about Ken Auletta’s masterpiece “The Howell Doctrine,” and, of course, there’s Jim Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Two other writers at The New Yorker have made significant contributions on this topic.

In Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, we learn that disconnection (the failure to communicate and connect) is the primary cause of aircraft accidents and a major contributor to medical errors. Gawande, a surgeon, prescribes checklists to help improve performance as the work we do becomes increasingly complex. Here’s one example. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital learned that surgical teams performed better when, prior to surgery, each member of the team introduced him or herself and shared any foreseeable concerns. When surgical teams did this, lower status members were more likely to speak up if they saw mistakes being made. This became a step on Gawande’s checklist he and his team developed for the World Health Organization.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, connection is a theme throughout. In the introduction, we learn that several research studies found residents of the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania were healthier and lived longer solely because they were a more relationally connected community. In the next chapter, we learn that 10,000 hours of intentional practice is required with coaching (i.e. connection) to achieve expert level performance. Although Gladwell doesn’t explicitly make this point, the support of family and friends is necessary to persevere through the inevitable difficulties of practicing for 10,000 hours, which is 10 years of practicing for 20 hours a week.

In a chapter on geniuses, Gladwell concludes they are often not very successful because they fail to connect with other human beings and it renders them less effective at getting things done. Similar to Gawande’s book, we learn that the key to airline safety is to reduce human error by making sure pilots, co-pilots and air traffic controllers are connected in both a rational and emotional sense. Gladwell describes how the crash of a Columbian Airlines flight a few years ago because it ran out of fuel was attributable to a failure of communication between the co-pilot, pilot and air traffic controller at JFK Airport in New York. The problem was that the plane’s co-pilot used “mitigating speech” to be respectful to those he perceived as having great status and authority. When he needed to communicate the urgency of the situation he should have been screaming like a New York cab driver to make his point clear.

Finally, we learn from Gladwell about the success of the KIPP charter schools in low income urban neighborhoods. Eighty percent of KIPP students go on to attend college. KIPP students learn a protocal called “SSLANT” which stands for smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with our eyes.” All of these behaviors help kids connect with others. Brilliant, isn’t it. KIPP teaches its students academic competence and relationship competence. It was so inspiring to read how KIPP was giving these kids hope for a bright future, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

I very highly recommend both of these books. They are utterly fascinating and well written, so much so that I couldn’t put them down.

One Easy Way to Be Happier

Michael Lee Stallard — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:26:50 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Americans are connection deprived. A quarter of Americans live alone and the number of Americans who haven’t had a conversation with a best friend over the previous six months has tripled since 1985 to nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population. This also likely means Americans are running low on oxytocin, a molecule that is associated with empathy, trust, morality and connection.

To learn more about oxytocin, check out Paul Zak’s fascinating TED lecture. Here are just a few interesting points he makes:

Oxytocin is found only in mammals
Massage, dancing, sex, social media and praying boost oxytocin
Empathy boosts oxytocin and, as a result, increases moral behavior
Con artists learn to manipulate oxytocin levels in people
Sexual abuse, stress and testosterone inhibit oxytocin production
Weddings cause the release of oxytocin, especially in the bride and her mother
The easiest way to boost oxytocin is to hug someone
Zak prescribes eight hugs a day boost your oxytocin levels and make you happier

Hopefully, one of the above points catches your attention so that you’ll take time to watch the lecture. It’ll be 20 minutes well spent.

Do Leaders Need to Make Employees Happy?

Michael Lee Stallard — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:54:23 +0000

For the second year in a row, 84 percent of American workers intend to actively look for a new job, according to new research by Right Management. Workplace incivility is also on the rise. According to research presented at the 2011 American Psychological Association annual meeting, up to 80 percent of workers have experienced incivility. Workers are struggling and have been for some time. In 2009, The Conference Board published a report with the subtitle “America’s Unhappy Workers.” The report concluded that employee satisfaction was at its lowest point since The Conference Board began surveying it more that 20 years ago.

The good news is that is doesn’t have to be this way. Leaders can develop workplace cultures that engage people. Engaging people makes them happy because they benefit from the positive emotions that come from being productive, learning and growing and working together with others to accomplish something of value. This is what the Greek’s described as eudaimonia, the joy that we experience when we do good work. The other type of happiness is hedonia. It comes from pleasurable experiences such as when we see a beautiful sunset or enjoying a great meal. Leaders need to create work cultures where people experience eudiamonia. That’s the type of happiness that affects employee engagement, productivity and innovation.

Here’s another way to think it it. There are three types of workplace cultures: Dog-Eat-Dog Cultures, Indifferent Cultures (cultures that are indifferent to people and treat them as human doings), and “Connection Cultures” where people experience eudiamonia because they feel connected to their organization’s identity (i.e. mission, values and reputation), they feel connected to their colleagues and supervisor, and they feel connected to their role in the organization (because it fits their strengths and provides the right degree of challenge).

Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together. Without going too far into the psychology of connection, let me just summarize by saying simply that we are humans, not machines. We have emotions. We have hopes and dreams. We have a conscience. We have deeply felt human needs to be respected, to be recognized for our talents, to belong, to have autonomy or control over our work, to experience personal growth, and to do work that we feel is worthwhile in a way that we feel is ethical. When we work in an environment that recognizes these realities of our human nature, we thrive. We feel more energetic, more optimistic, and more fully alive. When we work in an environment that fails to recognize this, it is damaging to our mental and physical health.

And when you think about it, that makes sense. Let’s consider how this plays out in the workplace. When we first meet people, we expect them to respect us. If they look down on us, if they are uncivil or condescending, we get upset. In time, as our colleagues get to know us, we expect them to appreciate or recognize us for our talents and contributions. That really makes us feel good. Later on, we begin to expect that we will be treated and thought of as an integral part of the community. Our connection to the group is further strengthened when we feel we have control over our work. Connection is diminished when we feel we are being micro-managed or over-controlled by others. If we are over-controlled, it sends the message that we are being treated like children or incompetents, and it’s a sign that we are not trusted or respected. Connection is also enhanced when we experience personal growth. In other words: when our role, our work in the group, is a good fit with our skills, providing enough challenge to make us feel good when we rise to meet that challenge (but not so much challenge that we become totally stressed out). Finally, it motivates us to know our work is worthwhile in some way and to be around other people who share our belief that our work is important. To the extent that these human needs of respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning are met, we feel connected to the group. When they are not met, we feel less connected, or even disconnected.

The bottom line is that connection plays a critical part in improving individual performance. People who are more connected with others fare better in life than those who are less connected. Connection, because it meets our human needs, makes people more trusting, more cooperative, more empathetic, more enthusiastic, more optimistic, more energetic, more creative and better problem solvers. It creates the type of environment in which people want to help their colleagues.They are more open to share information that helps decision makers become better-informed. The openness that emerges in a trusting and cooperative environment creates a robust marketplace of ideas that stimulates innovation. Connection among people improves performance in an organization and creates a new source of competitive advantage.

To learn more about connection cultures and employee engagement, listen to this podcast interview Jason Pankau and I did before we spoke at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. You can hear the interview at this link.

Update: In May, I’ll be speaking on the topic “Do Leaders Need to make Employee Happy?” in Denver at the annual conference of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). In addition, I’ve contributed a chapter to the soon to be published ASTD Handbook on Management edited by Lisa Haneberg who writes the Management Craft blog.

The Subversive Side of Technology

Michael Lee Stallard — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:35:15 +0000

When I speak or teach, I’m nearly always asked if human beings can be “over-connected.” This question is typically in reference to an obsessive use and reliance on online technologies.

Technology is a double-edged sword. On the one side, it allows us to connect with people who share our interests and with those who are not near us in a geographical sense. On the other side, technology can overwhelm us if it crowds out in-person connection.

For an interesting take on this topic, check out this Krista Tippett, host of American Public Radio’s On Being, fascinating interview of Sherry Turkle, the professor at MIT who studies the subjective side of technology i.e. how technology affects human beings. During the interview, Ms. Tippett mistakenly states the objective of Ms. Turkle’s work is exploring the “subversive” side of technology, to which Ms. Turkle responds that her work explores the “subjective” side of technology. Personally, I was delighted by Ms. Tippet’s Freudian slip, especially in light of research that shows the dark side of the online technologies. For example, consider Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo’s TED video on the “Demise of Guys.”

Steve Jobs’ Announcement: Reminder of Need to Make Cancer History

Michael Lee Stallard — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:22:26 +0000

Apple’s announcement yesterday that Steve Jobs is stepping down as its CEO, is a poignant reminder of just how important it is to make cancer history. I learned of Jobs’ announcement yesterday while in Houston to share our work with leaders at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The combination of learning the news about Jobs and being at M.D. Anderson triggered a some emotions. I’ve followed Jobs closely over the years and written about him. I’ve also written about the challenges facing cancer patients and their families from my wife Katie’s battles with breast cancer in 2003 and advanced ovarian cancer in 2004 (today, Kate is cancer free).

Being at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center was inspiring and humbling. MDACC is the top-rated cancer center according to U.S. News and World Report. The people there think of themselves first and foremost as healers. Being with people who serve a cause greater than themselves always moves me. Yes, they have to keep an eye on econonomic matters, too, in order to make their work sustainable, but money is not what motivates them. This is an important distinction that makes a difference to affordable delivery of healthcare, as Atul Gawande noted in an excellent New Yorker article he wrote entitled “The Cost Conundrum.”

During our presentations at M.D. Anderson, we shared the research and ideas in our book, Fired Up or Burned Out. We firmly believe that creating a culture that is intentional about developing both task excellence and relationship excellence is the only way organizations can achieve sustainable superior performance. In the context of healthcare, research is showing that culture and relationships affect patient outcomes. A recent article that appeared in the Annuls of Internal Medicine, entitled “What Distinguishes Top-Performing Hospitals in Acute Myocardial Infarction Mortality Rates? A Qualitative Study,” supports our view.

Hospital cultures should be life-giving but the irony is that most are not. We are human beings, not machines, and recent research shows that workplace cultures that are hostile or indifferent to human needs shave years off our lives. We hope that more hospitals will get this important message and do something about it, like our friends at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are doing in their pursuit to make cancer history.

In Search of Happiness

Michael Lee Stallard — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:18:44 +0000

Happiness is much sought after these days. Book stores and magazine stands are full of titles that promise to unlock the secrets of happiness. Positive psychology courses are all the rage on college campuses across America. Recognizing that happiness gets attention, I recently decided to title a chapter I’m writing “Should Leaders Care About Employee Happiness?” The chapter will be included in the American Society for Training and Development’s new Handbook of Management.

In my view, the primary reason happiness is on the decline in America and in many market democracies around the world is that we’ve become “achieve-aholics” who, as a result of our achievement-seeking lifestyles, lack sufficient human connection. Lacking connection, we eventually dysfunction. As achieve-aholics move through adulthood, they feel a sense of boredom, emptiness and meaninglessness. Many are mis-diagnosed as having depression when in fact they are just lonely (I wrote about this in an earlier post on the rise of loneliness in America). To feel better, achieve-aholics oftentimes seek illegitimate thrills (e.g. sexual affairs, pornography, extreme sports and extreme business risks) or they self-medicate to numb the pain, which leads to substance abuse. In my opinion, this is why America, with a mere five percent of the world’s population consumes half of the mood-altering pharmacological medications and two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs (a point that Joseph Califano, head of the National Center on Substance Abuse at Columbia University, made in a video interview on the Atlantic’s website).

The bottom line is that we are human beings, not machines. As I consistently present on this blog, and all the science makes it abundantly clear, we need human connection to thrive. This point is underscored in another fine Atlantic article written by my friend Joshua Wolf Shenk entitled “What Makes Us Happy?.” Josh’s article is about the 70-year long Grant study to understand happiness and flourishing in life by following the lives of 268 men who graduated from Harvard in the late 1930s.

Dr. George Valliant, the psychiatrist at Harvard who heads the Grant study, summed it up this way: ”The only thing that really matters in life is your relationships…” As for happiness, Dr. Valliant concludes in the video interview: “happiness is love.” I agree, for the most part, that happiness is relationships and love. I would add meaningful work to the equation and phrase happiness in a slightly different way. In The Connection Culture Manifesto and Fired Up or Burned Out, I present the case that meaningful relationships AND meaningful work are both important to experience joy and contentment, and to flourish over the course of one’s life.

Balance is key. But getting the balance right isn’t easy. It’s a recurring issue in my own life. Recently, a friend of mine who heads leadership training for a prestigious hospital system in New England, asked me try out the Hartman Values Profile as a possible tool to use in my work coaching leaders. It indicated I’m flourishing in most areas of my life but still I work too much and don’t take sufficient care of myself. Now I’m thinking through how I can make changes to keep from drifting to a state of imbalance.

What do you think? I hope you’ll take the time to read the links in this post and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Do you agree with what I’ve said? Are you getting the balance right? Do you have advice you can share here about how to balance work and life outside of work?

The Secret of Apple and U2’s Success

Michael Lee Stallard — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:08:23 +0000

Apple is now the most valuable company in the world in terms of market capitalization and U2’s recent tour just became the highest grossing of all time, crushing the previous record held by the Rolling Stones. Learn about Apple’s remarkable rise in market cap in this New York Times article and learn about U2’s claim as the greatest band of all time in this article from the Atlantic magazine’s website.

Apple and U2’s continued success begs the question, “what’s their secret?” One reason is the people who work at Apple feel connected to Steve Jobs and the members of U2 feel connected to Bono. The members of both groups also feel connected to one another as part of a “Connection Culture” that we wrote about in Fired Up or Burned Out. Learn more about how Steve Jobs connects by reading this interview I did with The Wall Street Journal’s Live Mint entitled “‘Think Different’ Makes Apple Stand Out”. To learn more about how Bono connects with his band mates read “To Boost Productivity, Connect with the Core.” Jason Pankau and I wrote it for the Leader to Leader Journal.

Update: Next week, Jason and I will be speaking about Connection Cultures, leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Next month I’ll speak with CNO Admiral Vern Clark, the former Chief of the U.S. Navy, at Wharton and Harvard Business School events in D.C.. In the coming months we will be speaking and teaching workshops at the NASA Johnson Space Center, TCU, the Connected Church Conference, Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, Scotiabank and the Young Presidents Organization. In addition, we will be teaching webinars for Scotiabank and McKesson Corporation. The word about Connection Cultures is spreading. Already we’ve committed to teaching nine workshops in 2012, five in the U.S. and four in Europe, for the Institute for Management Studies. Many thanks to those of you who have told others about our work and emailed the Connection Culture Manifesto to family members, friends, and colleagues at work. We estimate that it has been downloaded by more than 20,000 people worldwide and praised by thought leaders such as the tech guru and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and William J. Holstein who writes for The New York Times and Business Week.

New Research: Friendly Workplace = Longer Life

Michael Lee Stallard — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:02:43 +0000

During our speeches and workshops we conclude the section where we present research from a diverse fields of knowledge that makes the case for connection to thrive at work and in life by stating:

“connection = life” whereas “disconnection = death” (we point out that this applies to both individuals and organizations)

Now we have additional research about the effect of connection on individuals in the workplace to prove it. A 20-year study by researchers at Tel Aviv University found that workers who reported working in cultures where they experienced positive social interactions and felt emotionally supported to the people they worked with were 2.4 times less likely to die over the next 20 years than those who reported they didn’t feel emotionally supported at work. The New York Times recently included an article about it entitled “Friendly Workplace Linked to Longer Life.” (You can purchase the published research findings on Psychnet at “Work-Based Predictors of Mortality: A 20-Year Follow-up of Healthy Employees.”)

This provides additional evidence that the “Connection Cultures” we described in Fired Up or Burned Out are essential for people and organizations to thrive for sustained periods of time. Connection boosts hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel more alive, more energetic, more confident, more creative and better problem solvers. Furthermore, during periods of stress, connection reduces stress hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. This helps us cope with stress and anxiety so that we are more likely to make rational decisions rather than rash decisions when our emotions overwhelm us.

Boost Employee Engagement Globally

Michael Lee Stallard — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:53:52 +0000

Earlier this year my colleague Jason Pankau spoke at the HR Summit in Singapore. We’re delighted to announce that next year I’ll be teaching workshops on leadership, teamwork, employee engagement, productivity, innovation and Connection Cultures at the Institute for Management Studies (IMS) in Amsterdam, Brussels, Edinburgh and London. (Stateside I’ll be teaching sessions in 2011 for IMS in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and San Francisco.)