On April, 7 at 10:30 AM Eastern, I will join Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program to talk about employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity and innovation.
Tag Archives: leadership development
Leadership Development Carnival
Check out this leadership development carnival i.e. a collection of blog posts about leadership issues. It’s hosted by Sharlyn Lauby of HR Bartender. While you are there be sure to explore Sharlyn’s blog. I discovered she created an HR Bartender iPhone App. How cool is that?
Employee Engagement Podcast with StategyDriven
I recently recorded a podcast interview on the topic of employee engagement and how it affects strategic alignment, productivity and innovation with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven, a terrific group out of Atlanta that provides resources to help business leaders. You can hear the podcast and learn more about StrategyDriven at this link.
Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well
David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select? He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.
Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago. We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity. A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.
My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side. Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet. Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.” In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life. My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this. That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion. It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.
Google Lives Up to Values
Google just announced it will shut down its China-based search engine over the Chinese government’s censorship activities. Here’s a New York Times article about it. Earlier I wrote in “A Test of Google’s Character” that Google should live up to its values and I described some of the benefits of doing so.
Chain of Connection: Leaders -> Employees -> Customers
On Wednesday I’ll be leading a panel at The Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference. One of my panel participants is Vince Burks, a Senior Vice President at Amica Mutual Insurance Company. With Vince’s permission, here is an piece he wrote about what I describe in my work as the “Chain of Connection” that runs from the CEO to Customers. It is necessary to maximize strategic alignment, employee engagement and achieve sustainable superior performance in every organization, especially now when according to Gallup Research only 18 percent of people trust business leaders.
—
Lagniappe.
Its origin is Spanish. Its meaning is special. And for companies striving to make a difference – or merely to survive – its value is enormous. As Mark Twain explained during his travels to New Orleans, “It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen’ … something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.”
In other words, lagniappe (pronounced “LAN– yap”) is about making an extra effort … about going the extra mile … about doing something extra special. It is a gift. It is a courtesy. It is a way to stand out in a positive way.
And for companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Zales, Starbucks and Sodexho … it is a way of life.
Successful companies know how to run successful businesses. They know how to win over and keep customers. They know how to hire and inspire their workforces. They know the importance of giving 110 percent. They know lagniappe.
For their clients, this means an added emphasis on customer service. Extra courteous. Extra responsive. Always available. They proactively reach out to our clients. They listen to them carefully, patiently, and thoroughly. They treat them well. They build trust.
Like all successful companies, they place a premium on customer relations and recognize that it is not just about the extra “roll” but also the extra call, the extra time, the extra attention.
But that’s not the full story.
At companies like the ones above – as well as my own, Amica Insurance – the concept of lagniappe is not just a part of our brand ethos; it is ingrained in everything we do. It therefore extends to our most valued resource – our employees. In fact, that is the secret to our success.
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.
President Obama’s Real Mistake
Check out this article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. His approach is poisoning the administration’s work environment and its relationship with other branches of government. In our work we teach leaders to hire people who have demonstrated they can achieve both task excellence and relationship excellence through their competence and character. President Obama is learning the hard way about his chief of staff what John Wooden, the legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach, once observed, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.”
Goldman Sachs’ Inspiring Identity At Risk
A few hours ago, Goldman Sachs acknowledged in an SEC filing that mounting criticism in the press is a risk to the firm. Goldman should be concerned. A firm’s reputation affects employer brand, employee engagement and employee retention. In the past Goldman employees were proud to say they worked for the firm. Not so today following a long string of articles where Goldman has been referred to as a blood-sucking leech in the economy that cares only about its bottom line. I cringe when I read such reports because I have several good friends who work or have worked at Goldman and without exception I trust and respect each one. That said, having worked on Wall Street for most of my career, I know that people get caught up in thinking what they do is a game the score of which is determined by how much money they make relative to others. This mindset encourages imprudent risk-taking and behavior that may meet the letter of the law, but not the spirit. (Note: the gamesman profile was first described by Michael Maccoby in his book The Gamesman.)
I advise leaders that they must clearly communicate a set of virtuous values and keep them in front of employees. The most effective leaders do this by celebrating the stories of individuals who exhibit the right values and getting rid of employees who don’t. Absent a clear focus on virtuous values, an organization’s members will eventually stray into ethically questionable behavior that can destroy the firm. And with organizations such as Goldman that are interconnected to many companies and countries via derivative contracts, they can take the economy down with them. That’s one reason I agree with Paul Volker and others who support effective regulation of financial services organizations.
When Truth is Victim of “Nice”
Take a look at this article about Ursula Burns, the new CEO of Xerox, and her efforts to alter Xerox’s culture. Anne Mulachy, the former CEO did a remarkable job pulling the Xerox family together to save the company when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Mulcahy is a tough act to follow but I’m pulling for Ms. Burns to take Xerox to the next level. One way to look at Ms. Burns challenge is that she needs to frame Xerox’s success as being rooted in achieving both task excellence and relationship excellence. When a culture sacrifices truth to being nice (or more accurately to avoiding conflict) a company’s performance eventually suffer. Ms. Burns is performing a delicate dance. If she comes off too strong, people wil ear to spaek he truth. If she does nothing, it seems that the desire to avoid constructive conflict may eventually sabotage the companies performance.
If I were advising Ms. Burns, I would say “make it clear to your Xerox colleagues that we must be intentional about achieving BOTH task excellence AND relationship excellence in order to thrive. Sacrifice either and we will risk managerial failure for reasons I’ve written about in Fired Up or Burned Out.