This month’s Leadership Carnival is hosted by Chris Young at MaximizingPossibility.com. It includes favorite blog posts from leadership bloggers. It’s a terrific group of leadership thinkers and I encourage you to check it out. Below is Chris’ post on the June Leadership Carnival.
Tag Archives: leadership speaker
The Role of Business in the Pursuit of Happiness
Delivering Happiness is the rare book that gives us an inside look at one individual’s journey to find happiness and as a leader in business. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has written a thoughtful account of what he has learned from experiences in life, in business and from his studies of the fast growing field of positive psychology.
I highly recommend this book to leaders and others who want to see what an engaging work environment — or “Connection Culture” as I’ve described it in my writings — looks like. Not only will you learn about Hsieh’s thinking, you’ll see how he puts ideas into action.
John Wooden and the Power of Virtue in Leadership
Many thanks to Michael Hyatt for featuring my guest post entitled “John Wooden and the Power of Virtue in Leadership” on his blog. Michael’s blog was recently recognized and the #1 leadership blog. Not bad considering his day job is CEO of America’s 7th largest trade book publishing company, Thomas Nelson.
Research: Employee Engagement = Connections
This month Jason Pankau and I will be speaking to leaders at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Johnson & Johnson, the Internal Revenue Service and to church leaders at LifeSpring Network’s Conference on Connection Culture & Discipleship.
In recent presentations, we’ve emphasized the importance of research from The Conference Board that concluded after studying 30 definitions of employee engagement used by consulting firms, the best definition is as follows:
“Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”
This definition is consistent with our research at E Pluribus Partners where we frequently heard respondents use the terms “connect” or “feel connected” to describe the emotions they experience in relation to their organization’s identity, the people they work with and their day-to-day work.
In our book Fired Up or Burned Out and in The Connection Culture Manifesto, we identify and describe the “force of connection” as
“a bond based on shared identity, empathy and understanding that moves self-centered individuals toward group-centered membership.”
After defining connection, we identify the “Connection Culture” as an environment producing emotional and rational connections that, as The Conference Board’s definition says, “influences [people] to apply discretionary effort to [their] work.”
The Connection Culture meets universal human needs for respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning. When these needs are met, people thrive individually and collectively. The Connection Culture is ultimately grounded in character strengths and virtues. Learn more by reading the manifesto or go even deeper by reading our book. For the latest developments and examples about how to boost connection, stay tuned to blog posts here and consider following my tweets on www.twitter.com/michaelstallard.
When Managers Become Leaders — The Connection Edge
Leaders of the New Century
On June 23, I’ll be filming a few video segments for the Leader to Leader Institute’s “Leaders of the New Century” project that includes Allan Mulally of Ford, Sir Richard Branson and Tony Hseih of Zappos. Next week the Summer edition of the Leader to Leader Journal comes out. It includes an article that Jason Pankau and I wrote entitled “To Boost Productivity and Innovation, Connect with the Core.” The article is about how great leaders don’t just focus on star performers, they are intentional about connecting with employees at large. Examples in the article include Ret. U.S. Chief of Navy Operations Admiral Vern Clark and Bono, the lead singer for the rock band U2.
What Are “Sustainable Values”?
In my last post, I wrote about “sustainable values,” i.e. the beliefs and behaviors that produce an inspiring identity, human value and knowledge flow in groups that help people thrive individually and collectively. In other words, when a group embraces and behaves in ways that are consistent with sustainable values, it leads to sustainable superior performance.
In our work, we recommend that leaders of organizations promote the universal character values celebrated by religious thinkers and moral philosophers throughout history. Cultures that have these values exhibit superior strategic alignment, employee engagement, productivity, innovation and overall performance. Researchers that are part of the American Psychological Association’s positive psychology research effort identified these values as helping people flourish and a body of large body research is developing in support of that view. Here’s a list of the values and their definitions:
Tom Friedman, Dov Seidman: Need For “Sustainable Values”
Check out Tom Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times at this link. Friedman cites Dov Siedman’s belief that in an interconnected world we need “sustainable values” more than ever. I couldn’t agree more. In past posts I’ve written about Dov, his book entitled How and LRN, the company he founded to promote principled leadership.
In our work at E Pluribus Partners, we promote universal character values and virtue as essential for people to thrive, individually and collectively. Our “Character > Connection > Thrive Model” (see below) lays out the rationale. In a nutshell, individuals who believe and behave in ways that are consistent with Universal Character Values (also known as character strengths), create “Connection Cultures” that meet universal human needs to thrive. You can learn more about Connection Cultures, Universal Character Strengths and Virtues by reading this free manifesto published by changethis.com entitled The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.
Webinar: Jobs, Catmull, Lafley Have the “Connection Edge”
Jason Pankau and I are presenting a 60 minute webinar for Communitelligence about the “Connection Edge” that leaders such as Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and A.G. Lafley employ to boost strategic alignment and employee engagement. The webinar will be held on June 9 at 2:00 PM Eastern. You can sign up at this link.
Has SAS’s Jim Goodnight Cracked the Code On Corporate Culture?
On Friday, I was granted a private interview with Dr. Jim Goodnight, co-founder and CEO of SAS. We met in Atlanta during the Chick-fil-A Leadercast where 50,000 individuals participated live or via simulcast from locations around the world.
Goodnight, who has a Ph.D in statistics, founded SAS more than 30 years ago with colleagues from North Carolina State University. Today, SAS is on a roll having achieved an enviable long-term record of revenue and profit growth. The firm was named number 1 on Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” list for 2010. Harvard Business School named Goodnight as one of the “20th Century’s Great American Business Leaders.” He was also recently named one of “America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs” by Inc magazine.
During the Leadercast program and prior to my meeting with Goodnight, author Jim Collins interviewed him on stage. Collins has written about the Level 5 leaders who experienced a catalyst in their lives — death of a loved one, near death experience, religious conversion — that developed humility in their character and made them better leaders. Collins seemed to be looking for something similar in Goodnight to explain SAS’s benevolent corporate culture where the average work week is 35 hours and the bucolic SAS campus has nearly every employee perk imaginable. Despite Collins’ attempts to draw out Goodnight, he hit a dead end. Typical of Goodnight, he answered several of Collins’ questions with a “yes” or “no.” When Collins asked Goodnight why most SAS employees were given offices rather than the standard cubicles that the typical software company employee has, Goodnight replied tongue in cheek that if an employee were watching porn from the privacy of his office it would not be the problem that it would be if he were in a cubicle out in the open. The audience responded with tentative laughter. They weren’t quite sure what to make of Goodnight.
Like Collins, I have known and written about many great leaders who experienced adversity that made them better leaders. Goodnight is a different breed, a leader who by all accounts has not gone through a Level 5-type transformation and yet has at least in some respects cracked the code on corporate culture. For every job opening, SAS receives 100 or more resumes. Over a business cycle, SAS’s employee turnover in the low single digits is a fraction of the software industry’s that at times reaches into the mid-20 percent plus range.
My interview with Goodnight and some additional research led me to believe that Jim Goodnight is among the most important role models for leaders to emulate today. This week I’m working on an article that explains why. If you have thoughts about Jim Goodnight or SAS’s corporate culture that you would like to share, please post them here or email me at mstallard [at] epluribuspartners [dot] com.