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.
Category Archives: Employee Engagement
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.
President Obama’s Real Mistake
Check out this article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. His approach is poisoning the administration’s work environment and its relationship with other branches of government. In our work we teach leaders to hire people who have demonstrated they can achieve both task excellence and relationship excellence through their competence and character. President Obama is learning the hard way about his chief of staff what John Wooden, the legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach, once observed, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.”
Connecting with Customers? Let Me Count the Ways
On March 24, I’ll be moderating a panel at the Conference Board’s annual Customer Experience Management Conference in New York City. I was delighted to hear that Robert Reiss, conference chairman, host of The CEO Show and a Forbes.com columnist, subtitled the conference “building customer connections.”
The panel will address several case studies about building the exceptional customer experience. The companies represented on the panel all have reputations for outstanding customer experience and yet they are very different organizations.
FedEx is known for its reliability. Who can forget Tom Hanks playing Chuck Noland, the FedEx efficiency expert in the movie Cast Away.
Wisdom Webinar
Jason Pankau and I will be presenting in the Wisdom Webinar series organized by the South Bay Organizational Development Network. The webinar will occur from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM PST on April 13. You can register to participate at this link.
High Fives, Fist Bumps: Touch and Performance are Correlated
In Fired Up or Burned Out I wrote about “high five moments” that are celebrated at Cranium, the games company. It turns out that new research reported in a New York Times article by Benedict Carey entitled “Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much” shows there is a correlation between touch and performance. Reading the article immediately made me think of the twin Jensen brothers who dominate men’s doubles in tennis. They must give each other a hundred fist bumps a set!
Like the Jensen brother in tennis, Craniun is a force to be reckoned with in games. Here’s what I wrote about them:
Day 19: High-Five Moments
In 1998, with $100,000 of their own money, Richard Tait and Whit Alexander, two former Microsoft employees, decided to create a new board game.1 Tait came up with the idea when he and his wife were playing games at the home of their friends. The couple easily won Pictionary and were trounced at Scrabble. Pondering how he felt as the winner of one game and loser of another, Tait thought it would be ideal to play a game that involved different skills so that everyone had a chance to shine. That type of game would be more fun, and it would bring people together rather than alienate them in a winner-take-all battle. Tait persuaded Alexander to join him, and together they created the game Cranium.
Cranium became the fastest-selling independent board game in history, selling more than either Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit had in its first year. The company (also named Cranium) went on to shatter industry records by creating games that won the Toy Industry Association’s Toy of the Year game award four out of the last five years. It has sold more than 15 million games in 10 languages and 30 countries. In 2005, while the toy industry’s unit sales were down 6 percent, Cranium’s sales were up 50 percent.
Is Your Corporate Identity Inspiring?
Jason Pankau and I recently spoke at Vistakon, Johnson & Johnson’s Vision Care group. J&J has an inspiring identity that is expressed in its Credo. Our definition of an inspiring identity is that it exists when everyone in the organization is motivated by the mission, united by the values and proud of the reputation.
Take a look at the J&J Credo by clicking here. As you study the J&J Credo ask yourself if its mission and values are inspiring. After you study the J&J Credo, turn your attention to your organization’s mission and values and ask the following questions:
- Are your mission and values clearly expressed and widely communicated?
- Do you have a portfolio of stories that help people understand your organization’s mission and values?
- Do people in your organization periodically take time to consider their decisions and practices in light of consistency with your organization’s values?
- Does your organization’s reputation reflect it’s values?
- Does your organization’s employer brand benefit from its inspiring identity?
J&J does a marvelous job on the Credo section of its website. Take a look at it by clicking here. In preparation for a book I’m writing, I’ll be interviewing Kathleen Fitzpatrick, J&J’s Director of Credo and Workplace Engagement, and posting portions of the interview on this blog.
Have you seen expressions of corporate identities (mission, values, supporting stories or practices) that have inspired you? If so, please post them here or email me at mstallard [at] epluribuspartners [dot] com.
Emotions Affect Rational Minds, Too
Who could be more rational than a neuroscientist with a doctorate from Harvard? Dr. Amy Bishop, who has the aforementioned credentials, is accused of shooting and killing three of her faculty colleagues at the University of Alabama because she felt slighted. You can read about the case in this article entitled “For professor, Fury Just Beneath the Surface.” It is alleged that Dr. Bishop’s actions were set off when she discovered that her colleagues had decided not to award her tenure.
This is yet another example that shows how emotions affect behavior, even the behavior of individuals who have learned to appear rational at times on the surface. In our work, we implore leaders to be intentional about developing both task excellence and relationship excellence. Measurement, accountability and intervention are necessary elements of a process, a system, that brings intentionality to developing relationship excellence. No organization drifts toward relationship excellence so intentionality is essential. Systems that help develop relationship excellence make it less likely that individuals with mental health problems — e.g. narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathology — go unnoticed and unaddressed.
Refugee Camp to Harvard: Mawi Asgedom, an Inspiring Intentional Connector
Yesterday I wrote about the incivility and indifference low status workers experience and how it contributes to today’s widespread employee disengagement. Mawi Asgedom is a friend who I admire in part for his passion to connect with people regardless of their status. Mawi graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1999 and was voted by his fellow students to be one of the Harvard’s four commencement speakers.
Standing before an audience of 30,000 Mawi gave a remarkable speech entitled “Of Snakes, Butterfies and Small Acts of Kindness.”
George Washington, Worthy of Praise?
Yesterday was President’s Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington. Reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in yesterday’s 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. My journey went as far as contacting and interacting 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 a book I wrote entitled Fired Up or Burned Out.
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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.”