Tag Archives: Innovation

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A Coach Whose Record May Never Be Surpassed

One of my heroes celebrated his 99th birthday last month. I’m not going to tell you his name just yet because it will spoil the story for some of you.    In his honor, I’m posting an excerpt from my book Fired Up or Burned Out that describes why he is such a great leader and admirable individual. There is much to learn about leadership, employee engagement and productivity from his example.

Connection and the Legend

So often in life, good things bloom from the seeds of hardship. The personal character of a young teenager who went on to become a great leader was immeasurably shaped during the Depression when his family lost their farm in Indiana.  His father’s reaction to the loss was unusual. He wasn’t bitter about it. Instead, his dad focused on the future and told his children that everything would be all right. And it was.

During those impressionable years in this leader’s life, he learned that, like the Depression, some things in life are not in our control. His father taught him that he should always strive to do his best at anything he chose to do and not worry about the outcome. He would later spread that philosophy to countless other.

Another perspective he gained during those formative years was to value people. By watching his mom and dad and hearing the stories of faith they taught him, he learned the joy that came from making people and relationships his focus in life.

The young boy grew up to be an outstanding high school and college basketball player in a state that was rabid about the game. After college he married Nell, the love of his life and the only woman he had ever dated. He taught high school English and coached basketball until 1943 when he enlisted to serve in the Navy during World War II. When he returned from the war to the high school in South Bend, Indiana, where he previously taught, he was offered his old job. Other returning GIs were not, however, and so he refused the offer because he felt it was wrong for the school to deny veterans the jobs they had left to serve their country. Instead, he accepted an offer to become athletic director and head basketball coach at Indiana State Teachers College.

A Caring Coach

For the 1946-47 season Indiana State received a post-season invitation to the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) national play-offs. After the coach learned that a young African-American, second-string guard on his team, Clarence Walker, would not be allowed to participate in the tournament because of the color of his skin, he declined the offer.

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The Blind Side

I highly recommend seeing The Blind Side, a movie about Baltimore Ravens’ offensive tackle, Michael Oher.  It’s worth the price of the ticket alone to see Sandra Bullock’s tour-de-force performance as Michael’s adoptive mom, Leanne Tuohy.  What I especially like about the movie is that it shows how the right social environment helps people thrive in life.

I don’t want to give away the story so let me just say in a nutshell that it was Leanne Tuohy who reached out to Michael.  It would have been easy for her to ignore him, but she didn’t. Instead, Leanne felt compassion for a young man who was wearing shorts in the winter and hanging around a high school gym just to stay warm.  She took the time to get to know him and his life’s story.  While others saw him as “Big Mike,” a quiet, giant, African-American young man from the Memphis ghetto, Leanne Tuohy saw him as a thoughtful boy with a big heart and protective instincts to match.  She called him “Michael,” a name he much preferred to “Big Mike.” Leanne’s insights helped Michael discover who he really was deep down inside and who he could become. These insights helped Michael see himself as a protector who “has the back” of his family and those he loves. It should come as no surprise then to learn that Michael Oher thrived in football as an offensive tackle responsible for protecting his teammates from the defense.

The Blind Side shows how the social environment we live in shapes us for good or ill.

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Why Employee Engagement Efforts Fail

To be successful, employee engagement efforts must educate and inspire then model, mentor and measure.  Most employee engagement efforts educate employees and thereby lay out the rational case but they utterly fail to inspire.  Research has shown that emotional factors are four times as effective as rational factors when it comes to the amount of effort people put into their work. Stories move people’s hearts, capture their imaginations and, as a result, they inspire people to make the effort to change.  When we hear inspiring stories about great leaders and individual contributors who engage the people around them, we inevitably want to emulate them. This gets people started on the right track.

To keep them moving in the right direction and build habits that engage, modeling, mentoring and measuring are all necessary. Most leaders understand they must model the behavior they want to spread.  Mentoring and measuring are also necessary to provide honest feedback, help us see our blind spots and provide the encouragement individuals need to persevere.  Absent these essential elements, any program is unlikely to succeed.   Here are some questions to consider:

1. Do your employee engagement efforts inspire as well as educate?

2. Do your employee engagement efforts mentor to provide encouragement and measure results to provide honest feedback?

If your answer is “no” to either or both of the above, you need to address the gaps.

Update

Here are a few updates related to my work.

Corp! magazine recently published an article on the presentation Jason Pankau and I gave at the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement, an affiliate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  You can read it at this link.

The Boy Scouts of America selected Fired Up or Burned Out as a text for its People Management 3 course for advanced staff leaders.

On Jan. 26-27 I will be chairman of the Human Capital Institute’s Talent Management for Life Sciences conference in Princeton, NJ.

This month, Developing HR Strategy, a journal based in the UK, published an article I wrote about how leaders develop emotional and rational connections with their followers.

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ASTD Webcast Download: Neuroscience Implications for Leadership

ASTD logo







Last week I did a webcast for members of the America Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The webcast covers select research findings from the field of neuroscience and their implications for leadership, productivity, innovation and employee engagement. ASTD is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and development professionals.  The webcast and slides are available at this link. (Note: clicking on the link will begin an automatic download of the webcast and slides.)

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Employee Engagement Conference, Free ASTD Webcast

This week I’m chairing the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston.  During the conference  I promised to share some free resources with conference participants.

Here are links to the Employee Engagement Network, the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement and the New Talent Management Network.

If you like the stories and ideas I shared at the conference, you’ll love the book.  Here is a free pdf download of  Fired Up or Burned Out. The free book download is only available through Friday so hurry!

I’m posting my slides and select published articles so that you can download them for free at Slideshare.

You can participate in a free webcast I’m giving for ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development) at 2:00 PM Eastern on Oct. 29 by signing up at ASTD Michael Lee Stallard Webex.  Nearly 700 individuals have already signed up!  During the webcast I will discuss findings in neuroscience and other research that helps us see what type of work environment is necessary for employees to thrive individually and collectively.  The webcast will address issues such as leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation.

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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.

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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?

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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:

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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.