John Timmerman, Corporate Vice President of Operations at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C. (click here for his bio) was my guest on a recent webcast on Brighttalk.com’s Leadership and Employee Engagement Channel. You can see the webcast by clicking on employee engagement.
During the webcast John identifies a variety of Ritz-Carlton practices that hep make it a Connection Culture including:
Last week I spoke at a breakfast meeting of Wharton and Harvard Business School Clubs of D.C. It was such an engaging group of individuals that included entrepreneurs, leaders of government agencies, and leaders from the social sector. I would like to thank them for their enthusiastic response to my presentation.
During the presentation I spoke about the leadership style of or Retired Admiral Vern Clark, the former Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) who served as CNO from 2000-2005. Retired Rear Admiral Rose Levitre, who presently works for LMI (an intelligence consulting organization) and Rear Admiral Frank Thorp, the current Chief of Information for the Navy, stood up before the group and shared their experiences working for Admiral Clark. Thank you Rose and Frank for inspiring us with your stories.
Finally, I would like to thank the Wharton Alumni Club of D.C.’s president, Alan Schlaifer, for doing a first class job of organizing this event and Anthony Priest, chairman of the Harvard Business School Club of D.C., for promoting it.
Last week I received an email notifying me that my blog was selected as one of the top 100 leadership blogs by Bestuniversities.com.
There is a lot of talk these days about focusing people on their strengths. Certainly there’s some wisdom in that but it’s not wise to focus on apparent strengths alone.
Recently, I met an extraordinary man named Stephen Hopson. His life story made me reconsider the wisdom of focusing on apparent strengths.
Stephen is deaf and has been since birth. If Stephen had focused on his apparent strengths, what would he have become? Probably not a financial executive on Wall Street, a motivational speaker or an airplane pilot.
Hopson became all of those.
In a recent study of 759 public companies across 17 nations, Gerard J. Tellis, Jaideep C. Prabhu, and Rajesh K. Chandy concluded that corporate culture is a better predictor of a firm’s ability to capitalize on disruptive innovations than factors such as government policy and R&D spending. The study entitled “Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Preeminance of Corporate Culture” appeared in the January edition of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing. These findings are consistent with what I argued in the changethis.com manifesto I wrote entitled “The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage” and in an article entitled “Encouraging Knowledge Flow” published in Perdido.
Here is the draft of an article I’m working on. What do you think about it? If you have any comments or suggestions, please email me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.
Values of Great Leaders Connect with Employees
By Michael Lee Stallard
When people feel emotionally connected, they put more effort in their work. Research bears this out. A 2004 Corporate Leadership Council study of 50,000 employees worldwide concluded that emotional factors were four times as important as rational factors when it came to employee effort.
Great leaders connect on an emotional level with the people they are responsible for leading. When employees follow their leader’s example, they become more connected with one another, boosting trust, cooperation and esprit de corps throughout the organization. What I have discovered as a leader and as an advisor to leaders over the years is that the emotional connections leaders develop with people are ultimately grounded in the leader’s own values. The values that foster connection among people come in clusters that I refer to as Truth Values, Beauty Values and Goodness Values.
Congratulations to New York-Presbyterian Hospital for being recognized as the top academic medical center in terms of employee engagement. I wrote an article about New York-Presbyterian entitled “Strengthening Human Value in Organizational Cultures” that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Leader to Leader. You can read about it in a blog post of mine entitled “Amazing Things are Happening Here.”
Last Friday I was a guest on my friend Jim Blasingame’s nationally-syndicated radio program entitled “The Small Business Advocate.” In the interview Jim and I talked about employee engagement and why leaders need to clearly communicate their vision and values to the people they are responsible for leading. This is especially important during difficult economic times. You can hear the interview by clicking on the “listen now” below.
Athenaonline.com sent me links to several video clips I filmed for its MyQuickCoach product that was voted one of Human Resource Executive magazine’s top training products of the year. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Relationship Excellence and Performance
Today, Athenaonline.com sent out an email newsletter to its clients to make them aware of the recent training videos I filmed for its MyQuickCoach program. In the email AthenaOnline included this video clip of me discussing the importance of Connection Cultures.
Athenaonline was voted one of Human Resource Executive magazines top new training products. It includes thought leaders such as Marshall Goldsmith, Ram Charan and David Allen on topics like leadership training and development, employee engagement, team building and time mangement .
For the AthenaOnline clients who are clicking through to check out my blog, I want to make you aware of the free, downloadable eBook I wrote that was published by Changethis.com. You can download it by clicking on employee engagement.