Your career will soar if you avoid leaders’ #1 blind spot

Many leaders unknowingly sabotage their careers by wrongly assuming their employees are actively engaged in their work.

This lack of understanding about engagement — enthusiasm, effort and enjoyment at work — will eventually affect the bottom line and make the leader look ineffective.

Here are the facts: The average leader engages only three out of every 10 employees. The best leaders engage six or more out of every 10 employees.

Your customers clearly see whether your employees are engaged or not. Engagement affects the quality of their work, their productivity and responsiveness, all of which affect your customers’ experience.  They feel employees’ enthusiasm and energy — or lack thereof — and recognize the bad results of an organization with overall morale problems. Employee engagement matters. 

Say “Hi” and “Bye”

#5 Say Hi and Bye

When you enter a room and it’s appropriate given the context and number of people present, greet people by name.  When you leave their presence, say goodbye.  Not saying hi and/or bye, runs the risk of giving someone the impression that you are indifferent to them.  (This practice reflects the Connection Culture element of Value.)

This is the fifth post in our series entitled “100 Ways to Connect.” The series highlights attitudes and behaviors that help you connect with others.  Although the attitudes and behaviors focus on application in the workplace, you will see that they also apply to your relationships at home and in the community.

Update: Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International, and I co-authored an article entitled “Leadership Myopia” that appears in the August edition of Leadership Excellence alongside articles by well known leadership experts Gary Hamel, Marshall Goldsmith and Patrick Lencioni.    On October 10, I will give a keynote speech at the Retailing Summit held in Dallas, Texas.  The Retailing Summit is a premiere event for senior leaders in retail.  This year’s conference includes Karen Katz, President and CEO of Nieman Marcus, Maxine Clark, Founder of Build-a-Bear Workshop, Duncan Mac Naughtan, EVP, Chief Merchandising & Marketing Officer for Wal-Mart U.S. and Graham Atkinson, CMO & Chief Experience Officer of Walgreens.

Former Cab Driver Helps Liberate WWII France

After American and British troops took control of the beaches on D-Day, they got stuck in France’s hedgerow country. Sergeant Curtis Cullen, a former cab driver from Chicago, came up with an innovation that General Omar Bradley, commander of America’s First Army, credited with helping to liberate France.  Watch the video to learn about this extraordinary story of innovation and the leaders and culture that made it all possible.

Your Work Culture: Live-Giving or Killing You?

Are you working in a “culture of connection” where you feel a sense of connection to your supervisor, your colleagues, your day-to-day job tasks, and your organization’s mission, values and reputation?  A connection culture is life-giving as compared to a culture of indifference or culture of dominance that drain the life out of you.   To learn more, check out the video interview I did with Michelle Pokorny of Maritz Motivation following the keynote speech I gave at the Recognition Professionals International Annual Conference in New Orleans.

Connection Cultures Help Students Thrive

Greenwich High School (Greenwich, CT) was recognized in a New York Times article as a school in an affluent community that’s successfully integrating students from low income families. What the article misses is that a key contributor to Greenwich High School’s success is that it its Connection Culture.

The school’s headmaster, Christopher Winters, regularly talks and writes about the importance of connecting students, teachers, administrators and parents. He walks the talk, too. Chris greets students when they arrive in the morning and he easily moves about the student center connecting with students.  He encourages camaraderie among teachers and administrators and encourages parental involvement.

When Mission Matters

Organizational missions are inspiring when they communicate how an organization brings truth, beauty and/or goodness to the world. For example, organizations in research or education help bring truth to the world (e.g. biotech companies, universities, schools). Organizations that produce goods or services reflecting aesthetic or artistic beauty or functional excellence bring beauty to the world (e.g. organizations that produce goods or services reflecting a high level of quality, advertising and design organizations, entertainment organizations). Finally, organizations that help improve the wellbeing of people, bring goodness into the world (e.g. healthcare, consumer products or leisure and entertainment organizations).

Citibank’s recent television commercial is a great example of an organization communicating a mission that inspires. The ad shows some of the projects that Citi helped finance including the transatlantic cable, the Marshall Plan to rebuild a post-World War II war-torn Europe, and the Space Shuttle Program. Now those are some accomplishments to be proud of and collectively they have brought greater truth, beauty and goodness into the world.

Sympathy is NOT Empathy

Connecting with people requires empathy i.e. you feel the emotion another individual feels.  This is different from sympathy where you recognize the emotion but don’t feel it.

In Fired Up or Burned Out, I wrote about the company Cranium and how it designs “high five moments” into its games.  High five moments are times when people connect via the shared empathy of joy (remember that we define “the force of connection” as shared identity, empathy and understanding).  When you are interacting with people you want to connect with, feeling and expressing emotion helps.  When you feel someone’s joy or pain, it connects.

In the news

Here are a few recent articles related to connection that you might enjoy:

Walter Isaacson wrote about leadership lessons from Steve Jobs’ life for Harvard Business Review.  In the article, Isaason addresses issues relevant to Connection Cultures including the elements of Vision, Value and Voice.  Jobs was brilliant when it came to Vision, terrible when it came to Value and mixed win it came to Voice.  Fortunately, there are other members of Apple’s senior leadership team whose strengths helped overcome Jobs’ weaknesses.

David Brooks just wrote a column for The New York Times entitled “The Relationship School” that touches on aspects of Connection Cultures in schools.

The Atlantic had a piece entitled “Stress Makes You Sick: Exploring the Immune System Connection.” The article explores how stress weakens the human immune system and mentions the link between stress and connection. (Remember I shared with you that recent research over a 20-year period showed people who work in cultures with supportive relationships had mortality rates that were 2.4 times lower than people who worked in cultures with weak relational support. This supports the longstanding view that lifestyles with little relational support produce chronic stress will kill you.)

While teaching seminars on leadership and Connection Cultures at the Darden Graduate School of Business, Professor Marian Moore introduced me to the work of her colleague Jonathan Haidt, a social psychology professor at the University of Virginia.  Haidt just wrote The Righteous Mind.  Here’s a well-written review of the book entitled “Why Won’t They Listen?”  The book review clearly shows it addresses issues related to the Connection Culture elements of Value and Voice.  I’ve ordered a copy but not read it yet.

Finally, I recently spoke with Jim Blasingame about the competitive advantage of culture on his nationally syndicated radio program entitled “Small Business Advocate” that you can hear at this link.  Also, I wrote an article on the  “Science of Engagement” for Training Industry Quarterly.

Many Ways to Connect

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This last week I was in Boston for several meetings and to teach a seminar for the Institute for Management Studies (IMS).  I always teach that there are hundreds of ways to connect with others and the challenge facing leaders is to get to know the people they lead and identify ways to connect with them given who they are and the context of their work together.

Following are a few of the ways I learned that people and organizations are connecting.

  • At Bose Corporation, new employees learn “The Essence and Values of Bose,” including that “we treat others with respect.”  At Bose, these words are more than window dressing.  All new employees take a course on respect that help them bring this value to life in Bose culture.
  • At Amica Insurance, serving customers is an all-consuming passion.  Amica is a perennial winner of customer service awards.  Inside the company, when an employee is identified as having served a customer well, his or her team is recognized too.  This motivates the team to support one another’s efforts to serve customers.
  • Elizabeth Dole, when she was president of the Red Cross, took the time to learn something significant about each person she would meet so that she could affirm each individual a personal way.  In subsequent meetings, Ms. Dole was very good at remembering and mentioned the significant fact when she saw the individual.
  • David Gill, a professor at Gordon Conwell College, told me that we connect with the Divine when we “help people fulfill their dreams or overcome their nightmares.”  (We also connect with others when our organization’s mission accomplishes these ends.)

The importance of creating Connection Culture also came to my attention this week as I was doing research on Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO.  Ford just announced its third full year of profit.  Frances Hesselbien, a friend and leader whom I much admire, has praised Mulally so I decided it’s about time that I take a closer look at his leadership of Ford.  In this splendid interview he did with The New York Times, Mulally recounts how he learned the importance of giving people autonomy, being inclusive, keeping people in the loop and connecting them to their organization’s “Inspiring Identity.”

In the coming weeks I’ll be speaking and teaching in Houston, Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Edinburgh.  As I travel, I’ll post new things I learn about connection.

Great Leaders: TCU’s Chancellor, Victor Boschini

TCU is on a roll.  It has been recognized by U.S. News as one a top 100 colleges in America.   Its athletics’ teams are generally among the top teams in Division I college sports.   More recently the Chronicle of Higher Education named TCU as one of the “43 best colleges to work for.” I could go on.

This is no accident. TCU has benefitted from having a string of great leaders over recent decades.  These leaders developed a vision for the school that inspired the TCU community.  They raised money to fund a sizable endowment that gives the school financial flexibility to weather the ups and downs of the economy.  They improved campus infrastructure.  They invested in identifying and attracting the best “teacher-scholars” who love teaching and connecting with students and also share a passion to advance the pursuit of truth through research and scholarship.

The current leader of TCU, its chancellor, Victor Boschini, is an impressive leader.  He’s brimming with energy and optimism while being grounded in reality.  He combines a passion for excellence in tasks and in relationships (Boschini refers to fundraising as “friend-raising.”) He’s curious, always seeking people’s opinions and tapping their  knowledge.  He has surrounded himself with a team that has the energy and intelligence I can only compare to the White House staff in Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing.

At present, Boschini’s focus is to strengthen TCU’s culture of unity, community and connection.  This is one reason I’m thrilled as a parent that my daughter Sarah is a junior at TCU, and beginning next Fall, my youngest daughter, Elizabeth, will be a freshman there.   Sarah is co-captain of TCU’s cheerleaders. She describes TCU as “a small school with big spirit.”  Like many students at TCU, she’s involved in the local community.  Sarah is the cheerleading coach of Nolan Catholic High School where she coaches and mentors girls to develop their competence as student-athletes and their character as human beings.

Culture and leadership matter.  Most academic cultures are indifferent to students as human beings.  Not TCU. That’s why I’m writing an article about TCU and spending a healthy sum to send my daughters there.   My hope is that more colleges will become Connection Cultures, especially during this time when research shows college freshman are experiencing record levels of stress according to recent research by UCLA.

To learn more about Victor Boschini, check out this great article entitled “Far from Normal” written when he was appointed chancellor and this inspiring convocation speech he gave earlier this year on TCU’s Connection Culture.

Another leader to keep your eyes on is Dr. Ronald DePinho, president of the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. DePinho has declared that M.D. Anderson, the world’s largest cancer center, is “in a moonshot moment” in the war on cancer. Take a look a at this inspiring article about him entitled, “Leader in Cancer Fight, and Son of an Illegal Immigrant.” My prediction: an highly-motivated leader who knows how to connect with people + the competence and resources at M.D. Anderson = very big things in the years to come.  (Full discosure: Both TCU and M.D. Anderson are clients of my leadership training and consulting firm, E Pluribus Partners.)

Finally, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, is yet another leader who looks promising based on what I’m reading. Check out this great interview she did with The New York Times entitledI Was Impossible, but Then I Saw How to Lead.

Do Leaders Need to Make Employees Happy?

For the second year in a row, 84 percent of American workers intend to actively look for a new job, according to new research by Right Management. Workplace incivility is also on the rise.  According to research presented at the 2011 American Psychological Association annual meeting, up to 80 percent of workers have experienced incivility.   Workers are struggling and have been for some time.  In 2009, The Conference Board published a report with the subtitle “America’s Unhappy Workers.”   The report concluded that employee satisfaction was at its lowest point since The Conference Board began surveying it more that 20 years ago.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Leaders can develop workplace cultures that engage people. Engaging people makes them happy because they benefit from the positive emotions that come from being productive, learning and growing and working together with others to accomplish something of value.  This is what the Greek’s described as eudaimonia, the joy that we experience when we do good work.  The other type of happiness is hedonia.  It comes from pleasurable experiences such as when we see a beautiful sunset or enjoying a great meal. Leaders need to create work cultures where people experience eudiamonia. That’s the type of happiness that affects employee engagement, productivity and innovation.

Here’s another way to think it it.  There are three types of workplace cultures: Dog-Eat-Dog Cultures, Indifferent Cultures (cultures that are indifferent to people and treat them as human doings), and “Connection Cultures” where people experience eudiamonia because they feel connected to their organization’s identity (i.e. mission, values and reputation), they feel connected to their colleagues and supervisor, and they feel connected to their role in the organization (because it fits their strengths and provides the right degree of challenge).

Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together. Without going too far into the psychology of connection, let me just summarize by saying simply that we are humans, not machines. We have emotions. We have hopes and dreams. We have a conscience. We have deeply felt human needs to be respected, to be recognized for our talents, to belong, to have autonomy or control over our work, to experience personal growth, and to do work that we feel is worthwhile in a way that we feel is ethical. When we work in an environment that recognizes these realities of our human nature, we thrive. We feel more energetic, more optimistic, and more fully alive. When we work in an environment that fails to recognize this, it is damaging to our mental and physical health.

And when you think about it, that makes sense. Let’s consider how this plays out in the workplace. When we first meet people, we expect them to respect us. If they look down on us, if they are uncivil or condescending, we get upset. In time, as our colleagues get to know us, we expect them to appreciate or recognize us for our talents and contributions. That really makes us feel good. Later on, we begin to expect that we will be treated and thought of as an integral part of the community. Our connection to the group is further strengthened when we feel we have control over our work. Connection is diminished when we feel we are being micro-managed or over-controlled by others. If we are over-controlled, it sends the message that we are being treated like children or incompetents, and it’s a sign that we are not trusted or respected. Connection is also enhanced when we experience personal growth. In other words: when our role, our work in the group, is a good fit with our skills, providing enough challenge to make us feel good when we rise to meet that challenge (but not so much challenge that we become totally stressed out). Finally, it motivates us to know our work is worthwhile in some way and to be around other people who share our belief that our work is important. To the extent that these human needs of respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning are met, we feel connected to the group. When they are not met, we feel less connected, or even disconnected.

The bottom line is that connection plays a critical part in improving individual performance. People who are more connected with others fare better in life than those who are less connected. Connection, because it meets our human needs, makes people more trusting, more cooperative, more empathetic, more enthusiastic, more optimistic, more energetic, more creative and better problem solvers. It creates the type of environment in which people want to help their colleagues.They are more open to share information that helps decision makers become better-informed. The openness that emerges in a trusting and cooperative environment creates a robust marketplace of ideas that stimulates innovation. Connection among people improves performance in an organization and creates a new source of competitive advantage.

To learn more about connection cultures and employee engagement, listen to this podcast interview Jason Pankau and I did before we spoke at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. You can hear the interview at this link.

Update: In May, I’ll be speaking on the topic “Do Leaders Need to make Employee Happy?” in Denver at the annual conference of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). In addition, I’ve contributed a chapter to the soon to be published ASTD Handbook on Management edited by Lisa Haneberg who writes the Management Craft blog.