Thanks to my friend Deborah Mills-Scofield for sending me this article from Science Daily entitled “Exploring How Partners Perceive Each Others Emotion During a Relationship Fight.” It looks at how expressions of hard, flat or soft emotion are perceived and how such perceptions affect relationships. This research suggests that a leader’s ability to express appropriate emotions at appropriate times is important to keep people feeling connected to the them (and emotional connections are essential to employee engagement and alignment).
Tag Archives: teambuilding
Pixar’s Competitive Advantage? A Connection Culture
At the Technical Academy Awards ceremonies held in Hollywood, the Associated Press reported that it wasn’t the host, actress Jessica Biel, who attracted the most attention. Instead, it was an understated, bespectacled, computer engineer named Ed Catmull. When Catmull’s name was announced to receive an Oscar for his lifetime of work in computer animation, the crowd went wild, whistling and whooping. And rightly so. The impact Catmull and his collaborators have had on Hollywood may last for decades to come.
Ed Catmull is the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. He has rejected the traditional Hollywood star system and its often toxic work environment and replaced it with an environment that emphasizes community and long-term relationships. Catmull described it this way in a Harvard Business Review article he wrote: “[Pixar has] an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity…the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people…”
What is it about Pixar’s environment that attracts talented employees and helps them produce outstanding movies such as the blockbuster hits Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E that have made Pixar the envy of Hollywood?
Overcoming Leadership Myopia
Howard Behar and Michael Lee Stallard
American leaders need to wake up and smell the coffee. Research from two well-respected organizations makes it clear that we have a big collective blind spot that’s dragging down productivity, innovation and economic performance. Earlier this year, a Conference Board research report showed that job satisfaction is at the lowest level since the organization began measuring it more than 20 years ago. The report went on to show this has been a long-term downward trend rather than a temporary decline due to the Great Recession.
Another well-respected organization, the Corporate Executive Board, came out with a research report last year that showed 90 percent of employees are either not aligned with organizational goals or not engaged and giving their best efforts. It’s nearly impossible to pull out of difficult economic seasons when nine out of ten employees are just showing up for the paycheck. We need everyone to pull together in the same direction to lift us out of this slump. What can be done?
Free Linkage Leadership Webinars
Jason Pankau and I spoke on a webinar for Linkage about maximizing employee engagement and alignment. You can see the 60-minute webinar at this link. You may also be interested in other free webinars offered by Linkage at this link.
Talent May Get You to the Top, But…
…it takes character to keep you there. John Wooden, the late legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach once stated this in so many words.
Wooden’s observation came to mind when I read a New York Times‘ article today entitled “The Day the Patriots Empire Began to Crumble.” The article argued that the Patriot’s lost their lustre when its coach, Bill Belichick, was caught cheating.
Over the years, the leaders of the Patriots, Coach Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, did so many things right. I wrote about many of them in a chapter Fired Up or Burned Out. Belichick’s cheating, however, diminished one of the three elements of a Connection Culture: the element of “Vision.” The element of Vision exists when everyone in an organization is motivated by the mission, united by the values and proud of the reputation. Belichick’s cheating was not in keeping with the Patriot’s core values. It also tarnished the organization’s reputation. the cheating caused players and fans lost some of their respect for Belichick and the Patriots. They were not longer felt as proud to say they were members of the Patriots’ organization. Pride in one’s identity is emotional in nature and research shows that emotional connections are 4X as important as rational factors when it comes to the amount of effort people put in their work. The Patriots lost some of that emotional connection and as a result their players have not been as fired up as they once were.
Hopefully, Belichick learned a lesson and in time can gain back the connection, respect and trust he once had.
Maximize Employee Engagement, Alignment and Productivity
Jason Pankau and I are speaking about maximizing employee engagement, alignment and productivity on several upcoming webinars. The webinars are based on ideas in our book Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity and Productivity (Thomas Nelson).
Here are the names of the organizations hosting the webinars along with the respectives dates and links to sign up:
December 7, 1:00 PM EST for Linkage
December 7, 3:00 PM EST for the Human Capital Institute sponsored by the ITAGroup
December 15, 12:00 PM EST for the New Talent Management Network
Strengthen Your “Critical Connections”
Research has shown that people perform better if they take time to create checklists that break their work down into necessary tasks. Here is an approach we recommend. Make a list of those individuals whom you count on you in order to do your work well and the individuals who count on you in order to do their work well. Think of these people as your “Critical Connections.” Strengthening your relationship with them is, in addition to making checklists, another key to achieving excellence in your work.
Get to Know Colleagues’ and Customers’ Stories
Here’s a stirring video from Chick-fil-A to remind us that every human being has a story. In our endeavors to develop Connection Cultures we encourage people who work together to get to know one another’s stories and to reach out and learn customers’ stories, if at all possible. Learning the stories of the people in your life is just one aspect of Human Value, the second element of a Connection Culture. When you know a person’s story, it helps you empathize and connect with them. It’s also more difficult to grow extremely disconnected with someone when you know their story.
Speaking at the New Canaan Society
Here’s an article entitled “Worker Engagement Holds Key to Success” that appeared this morning in The Connecticut Post, The Greenwich Time, The Stamford Advocate and The Danbury News Times. The article briefly describes the “Connection Cultures” we wrote about in our book, Fired Up or Burned Out, and mentions that on Friday morning, November 5, I’ll be speaking about how Christians can help improve the workplace at the New Canaan Society’s Darien Connecticut Chapter. Breakfast begins at 6:30 AM and my talk will start at 7:00 AM. For details, click here.
The New Canaan Society is a group of men who meet to encourage one another to live out Biblical values. It was founded in 1995 by Jim Lane, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and has grown to 30 chapters across the United States.
On a related topic, Jason Pankau will be speaking at the New Canaan Society’s New York City Chapter in Manhattan on January 19th and at NCS’s Annual Retreat at the Homestead in Virginia on March 4-6. You might also be interested to know that in the coming weeks, Jason and I are doing a series of webinars on leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation for Linkage, the Human Capital Institute, the DNA Global Network and the New Talent Management Network. The webinars are free to the public. Details and sign-up information will be posted in the upcoming engagements section on the left-hand side of the front page of our book website at this link.
Vince Lombardi on Broadway?
It takes guts to bring a drama to Broadway these days without a megastar playing the lead. To top it off, the producers of the show Lombardi promise to reveal why the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers football team was so successful. Lots of luck with that, I thought, when I first read about the show. My curiosity got the best of me, however, once I learned that Lombardi was based on one of my favorite sports biographies, David Maraniss’ When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.