Winning Workplaces just featured an article that Jason Pankau and I wrote in its April newsletter and on its website. The article is entitled “To Boost Productivity and Innovation, Fire Up the People You Lead.” Check out the article and the Winning Workplaces website, it has great ideas, many written by one of our favorite bloggers Mark Harbeke. Mark is Winning Workplaces’ Director of Content Development.
Tag Archives: teams
Micro-Connections Enhance Energy, Enthusiasm
Years ago when I lived in West Texas and worked for Texas Instruments, I was surprised that frequently when I passed another car on one of the long stretches of highway, the driver would wave at me. People in that part of America typically make eye contact and say hello to passersby on the street. If you did this in most large cities, especially in the Northern parts of America or coasts where I presently live (i.e. Greenwich, Connecticut), people would think you were strange.
Small actions to connect with people around you are called “Micro-Connections.” These actions boost enthusiasm and energy in the work environment. Environments where people are friendly—where they make eye contact and say hello in hallways and elevators even thought they personally know one another well—are healthier and more pleasant environments. Another type of micro-connector is asking questions that are unrelated to work to learn more about an individual. Unrelated questions help us learn other people’s stories. Micro-Connections treat people as human beings rather than human doings. As Atul Gwande wrote in his book Better, asking questions unrelated to work “make the machine feel less like a machine.”
Little things can make a big difference. Start trying these Micro-Connections out and watch what happens.Over time you will be energized and you’ll build trust and esprit de corps in your organization.
Employee Engagement, Connection in the Movie “Departures”
While looking for a video to watch a friend recommended Departures, a film by Yojiro Takita that won an Oscar for best foreign language film. I highly recommend it. The movie touches on issues of employee engagement, connection, identity and human value that I raise in my changethis.com Connection Culture Manifesto. There were moments that this film reminded me of the beautiful book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer.
When you watch the film you’ll see a myriad of situations that relate to connection, including the protagonist Diago’s connection to his father, his wife, his employer, his former occupation and his new one, his clients, and his friends and acquaintances in the community.
Connection and the character values that support it resonate deeply with the Japanese, a topic that I will elaborate on in an upcoming blog post.
Employee Engagement: Zane Safrit Show
On April, 7 at 10:30 AM Eastern, I will join Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program to talk about employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity and innovation.
Leadership Development Carnival
Check out this leadership development carnival i.e. a collection of blog posts about leadership issues. It’s hosted by Sharlyn Lauby of HR Bartender. While you are there be sure to explore Sharlyn’s blog. I discovered she created an HR Bartender iPhone App. How cool is that?
Employee Engagement Podcast with StategyDriven
I recently recorded a podcast interview on the topic of employee engagement and how it affects strategic alignment, productivity and innovation with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven, a terrific group out of Atlanta that provides resources to help business leaders. You can hear the podcast and learn more about StrategyDriven at this link.
Duke Men’s Basketball’s Secret Weapon: The “Women K”
Duke men’s basketball team lead by Coach K are in The Final Four again. What’s their secret? According to Coach K, it’s what might be called the “Women K”: his wife Mickie and their three adult daughters. Read all about it in this fabulous article entitled “Follow Me” written by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the February 2006 edition of Play magazine, a supplement of The New York Times. If you read the article and Coach K’s books you’ll see that he clearly describes what we refer to as a Connection Culture, including its three elements: vision, value and voice.
Most leaders are intentional about developing task excellence but they are not intentional about developing relationship excellence. Not Coach K. Here are just a few of the quotes that appear in the article that show Coach K strives to develop relationship excellence via connection:
“Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships”
“When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, ‘We’re developing a relationship here, and if you are not interested, tell me sooner rather than later.’ That word — relationship — os one he uses frequently. [He tells players] ‘If you come here, for however long, you’re going to unpack your suitcase. We’re going to form a bond, and you’re going to be part of this family.”
“Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches. It is a time for interaction.”
“There’s an empathetic part of leadership, and this is what my wife and daughters have taught me.
Chain of Connection: Leaders -> Employees -> Customers
On Wednesday I’ll be leading a panel at The Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference. One of my panel participants is Vince Burks, a Senior Vice President at Amica Mutual Insurance Company. With Vince’s permission, here is an piece he wrote about what I describe in my work as the “Chain of Connection” that runs from the CEO to Customers. It is necessary to maximize strategic alignment, employee engagement and achieve sustainable superior performance in every organization, especially now when according to Gallup Research only 18 percent of people trust business leaders.
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Lagniappe.
Its origin is Spanish. Its meaning is special. And for companies striving to make a difference – or merely to survive – its value is enormous. As Mark Twain explained during his travels to New Orleans, “It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen’ … something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.”
In other words, lagniappe (pronounced “LAN– yap”) is about making an extra effort … about going the extra mile … about doing something extra special. It is a gift. It is a courtesy. It is a way to stand out in a positive way.
And for companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Zales, Starbucks and Sodexho … it is a way of life.
Successful companies know how to run successful businesses. They know how to win over and keep customers. They know how to hire and inspire their workforces. They know the importance of giving 110 percent. They know lagniappe.
For their clients, this means an added emphasis on customer service. Extra courteous. Extra responsive. Always available. They proactively reach out to our clients. They listen to them carefully, patiently, and thoroughly. They treat them well. They build trust.
Like all successful companies, they place a premium on customer relations and recognize that it is not just about the extra “roll” but also the extra call, the extra time, the extra attention.
But that’s not the full story.
At companies like the ones above – as well as my own, Amica Insurance – the concept of lagniappe is not just a part of our brand ethos; it is ingrained in everything we do. It therefore extends to our most valued resource – our employees. In fact, that is the secret to our success.
How Paul O’Neill Fired Up Alcoa’s Culture
This week I taught a workshop for the Institute for Management Studies on strategic alignment and employee engagement. The workshop was held in Pittsburgh and leaders from many the area’s top organizations were in attendance. The workshop was hosted by IMS chair Mark Spear. Mark has great tremendous breadth and depth of experience in organizational development. One of his previous employers was Alcoa. Over dinner the night before the workshop, Mark praised Paul O’Neill’s leadership of Alcoa during what many current and former employees of the company refer to as the “golden age of Alcoa.” One observation Mark shared was that O’Neill regularly met with groups of employees to answer any questions they had and to ask them questions.He was approachable, humble, open-minded and inquisitive. This is an example of what I refer to as a leader who conducts “Knowledge Flow Sessions” that have increase strategic alignment, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. The story was so compelling I asked Mark to share it with attendees when I presented the section on “Knowledge Flow.” If you are interested in Paul O’Neill’s leadership style and legacy, take a look at this article that appeared in Business Week.
Post-Merger Traps Sabotage Performance
Over the course of my career I’ve had the good fortune to have been involved in several mergers. At first, I was fascinated by the process of identifying a compelling rationale for combining companies, negotiating the deal, planning the integration of people and systems and then executing the plan. The dizzying array of tasks that must be accomplished to complete a merger is challenging to say the least. In time, however, I learned that even greater challenges arose after the investment bankers and lawyers had packed up their briefcases and moved on to the next deal.
Building trust, cooperation and esprit de corps among the members of the newly combined organization is far and away the most underestimated challenge of mergers. The failure to plan and address cultural differences is why most mergers fail to meet the expectations of the parties going in. Unless leaders learn how to avoid the inevitable post-merger traps their efforts will be too late to repair the damage that has already been done.
Post-merger traps emerge when behaviors thwart the meeting of universal human needs for people to thrive, individually and collectively. These needs are respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning. When these needs are not met in legitimate ways, people have a tendency to seek illegitimate ways to meet them. As individuals focus more on self-interest, they lose sight of the organization’s interest. In time, the downward performance spiral accelerates as individual performance declines, communication is stunted, decisions are made based on incorrect assumptions, financial performance suffers, and so on until survival is threatened.
The good news is that post-merger traps are largely predictable. Here are a few to be on the lookout for and what leaders can do to avoid them.