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.)
Dennis Nally, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Chairman, recognized the need to connect with Millennials, in a Wall Street Journal interview entitled “PwC Chairman Aims to Keep Millennials Happy.” In the interview Nally states:
“Connecting with your employees so they understand you can deliver the career they want is key…they want less-hierarchical structures, they want more flexibility, they want to work as hard but they want to define how they do their work. If you can’t figure out a way to accommodate that kind of flexibility, you’re not going to be able to retain that talent.”
Millenials are not the only employees companies need to connect with. Research consistently shows that on average, 75 percent of employees feel disconnected at work. As a result they don’t give their best efforts or align their behavior with organizational goals. Employers need to develop Connection Cultures so that employees thrive, individually and collectively.
Today I’m teaching a two-hour webinar entitled “Outstanding Individual Contributors” for Executive Development Partners and its client the McKesson Corporation. As part of the webinar, I’m offering a free download of the digital version of Fired Up or Burned Out. You can access the digital version (a pdf file), save and print it at this link.
Now for more good news. We are seeing unprecedented opportunities to speak about developing virtuous leadership, employee engagement and unity in business, government and social sector organizations. My colleague Jason Pankau recently returned from speaking at the largest leadership conference in Asia. I recently taught a one-day workshop in New York City where leaders were present from a wide variety of business and government organizations. Jason and I were just hired to teach workshops for the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, one of the largest and most well-respected cancer centers in the world.
On September 13, I will speak alongside CNO Admiral Vern Clark (Ret.) at breakfast and lunch meetings sponsored by the Harvard and Wharton Alumni Clubs of D.C. Admiral Clark was chief of the U.S. Navy from 2000-2005. Admiral Clark and I will be speaking about virtuous leadership and how it unites people in an organization to give their best efforts and pull together. (Read what Jason and I wrote about Admiral Clark’s leadership in an article that was published in the Leader to Leader Journal.)
We are grateful to the individuals who continue to help us raise awareness of the importance of human connection at work and in life. There are several ways to do this including reading and recommending our book Fired Up or Burned Out, and/or bringing us in to their organizations to give keynote speeches and/or lead workshops through our leadership training and coaching firm E Pluribus Partners
In Leadership Is Dead: How Influence Is Reviving It, Jeremie Kubicek, CEO of the leader development company GiANT Impact, makes a clear and compelling case that “dominating leaders” who lead by coercion are on the decline and are being replaced by “liberating leaders” who lead through influence.
Kubicek observes that leadership has moved from a noun to a verb. It has become a means or vehicle for appropriate change rather than a goal or end in itself (i.e. to become the leader who exerts power over others). Peggy Noonan, President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, once stated it this way: “Poor leaders want to be great. Great leaders want to do something great.” Kubicek points out that for leaders to successfully make this shift, competence is required to get the job done well and character is required to build strong relationships based on mutual trust. People are much more likely to give their best efforts when following a liberator than a dominator because this type of leader helps the people he or she leads and, in doing so, develops a bond of connection.
I highly recommend this book. In addition to making a valuable contribution to leadership thinking, the stories and examples make it a page-turner.
Today is Presidents’ Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington. After reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be? I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth. I went as far as contacting and speaking with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington’s generalship. After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on 20 leaders in Fired Up or Burned Out.
First in Their Hearts
Richard Neustadt, Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, observed the following about George Washington: “It wasn’t his generalship that made him stand out . . . It was the way he attended to and stuck by his men. His soldiers knew that he respected and cared for them, and that he would share their severe hardships.”
Recently I was invited to include my blog content on LeadershipDigital, a topic hub that collects, organizes and finds the best posts and articles that provides an edge to leaders and managers. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and support both manual and social curation of that content.
The goals of the site are:
Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content as defined by the community.
Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.
Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.
Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.
I hope you will check it out by clicking on the LeadershipDigital badge at the top of this post.
Many thanks to Deborah Mills-Scofield for complementing my book Fired Up or Burned Out in her Forbes.com blog post entitled “Personal Connections are the New Currency.”
At the heart of building community is developing a bond of connection among the members of a group. In other words, when the members of a group feel positive emotions related to being understood, respected, appreciated, and included by their group’s leaders and fellow members, it forms a bond that strengthens cooperation and commitment among group members.
Emotions are important to organizational effectiveness. Research by the Corporate Executive Board has shown that emotional factors are four times as effective as rational factors when it comes to the amount of effort employees put in their work. Emotional factors include how an employee feels about his organization’s identity and the people he works with whereas rational factors include what an employee thinks about his compensation.
Typically, an organization’s managers and stars feel emotionally connected while three-quarters of all employees do not. What happens to those who don’t feel connected? They stop caring. They stop giving their best efforts. They stop fully communicating and, as a result, decision-makers don’t get the information they need to make optimal decisions. This disconnection results in a gradual spiraling down of performance that may eventually threaten an organization’s survival.
Connection is grounded in human needs. I’ve found that two of these needs, recognition and belonging, can be partially met through participation in online communities. The need for recognition is in our DNA. It’s almost as if we have a “recognition battery” that needs to be charged regularly but the curious aspect of this battery is that its plug-in is located at a spot on our back that we can’t quite reach. As such, we rely on the people around us to charge our recognition battery. If it’s charged, we are energized; if not, we become drained and lose energy.
In addition to recognition, we have a need to feel that we belong to a group — to be in a place where “everyone knows your name,” as the popular theme song of the old comedy television show Cheers stated. Positive interactions on a regular basis with members of a group bring about this feeling of belonging.
There are a number of online capabilities that organizations can put place to help meet the needs for recognition and belonging, and bring about feelings of connection.
Online Personal Profiles that allow people to express their personal identities through posting photographs, hobbies and interests outside of work provide recognition. When co-workers inevitably comment on these personal expressions of identity, it provides recognition and a sense of belonging that makes people feel more connected. Giving employees a place to express who they really are helps them avoid feelings of isolation that occur when they begin to feel like cogs in a machine. Also related to personal identity are affinity groups such as book clubs and alumni groups. These groups can be encouraged and supported with online intranet websites and social media that increase connection among people with shared interests outside of work.
Social Media can be used to inform employees and invite them into conversations about corporate issues. Leaders who mine the resulting body of content for good ideas, implement them, and give credit where credit is due will discover that this helps employees feel more connected. This practice will also improve decision-making and innovation as decision makers gain access to new information and participants to identify new business opportunities, process improvements and product possibilities.
Podcasts and Webcasts are helpful tools to facilitate connection by reaching employees who have visual and auditory learning styles. They can also be used to increase awareness of thought leaders and experts in an organization. For example, Polly Pearson, former Vice President of Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement at EMC, interviewed thought leaders and experts on an internal webcast entitled “Culture Talk.” Polly helped several EMC employees to become internal bloggers and eventually to blog externally. As a result, EMC developed more than 40 bloggers.
These are but a few of the online means that can be utilized to foster connection among the members of an organization. By helping everyone to feel connected, organizations will increase the employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity, innovation and overall performance.
Jason Pankau and I were guests on a podcast for clients of The Alter Group, one of America’s leading real estate development firms. The podcast host was Tom Silva, Vice President of the Alter Group. Our topic was happiness at work, leadership, employee engagement and employee motivation. You can check it out at this link or download it on iTunes.
Check out this article entitled “Wellbeing on the Home Front.” It describes how social connections at home, at work and in the community affect our wellbeing. Gallup’s new research provides additional support for the Connection Cultures we described in Fired Up or Burned Out.
