The Value of Working in a Restaurant

December 19, 2014

Back when I was a kid, my spending money didn’t come from my parents. I needed to earn it on my own. And these jobs provided me valuable lessons that served me well throughout my career.

Beginning as a 10-year-old, I had two paper routes and delivered newspapers after school. I also had to collect for them and send checks to my employer. I didn’t earn much money, but I learned about the value of work and I enjoyed having this cash.

My father was a carpenter and on Saturday mornings he would take my brothers and me to his construction jobs, where we would pick up scrap lumber, sweep floors, do small carpentry work and even nail asphalt shingles on house roofs. The real treat was a hamburger and Coke for lunch. For this work we were paid a total of $4 . . . for the day! This was the early 1970s and it was actually a lot of money to us at the time.

When I turned 15 I lied to a restaurant manager and told him I was actually 16. This enabled me to work as a busboy and make the big money. Before long, I took part in many aspects of the business, including washing dishes, waiting tables, cooking, managing a small team of others to clean and stock the bar, and, when I reached the age of 17, bartending. This was not typical for kids my age, but that’s what happened with me.

Looking back on that time now, I see I learned some important lessons in each of these environments, but it was in the restaurant—where I worked throughout my high school years—that I learned the most valuable lessons of all. These lessons include a sense of urgency, maximum efficiency, relationship management, teamwork, motivation, perseverance, and doing things right the first time.

  • Sense of Urgency – In a restaurant, this means dealing effectively with the uncertainty of a busy night. No matter what business you are in today, the ability to speed up when necessary is especially important. This means you are able to separate the critical from the trivial and get stuff done. It means you are able to rise to the occasion and respond to your customer’s immediate needs.
  • Maximum Efficiency – Restaurant work requires that you don’t waste steps. This means whenever you bring out dishes or beverages, you also pick up empty plates or glasses when returning to the kitchen—either from the same table or another one nearby. Every organization has similar operational efficiencies that need to be observed and adhered to. They can ultimately influence your overall profitability.
  • Relationship Management – Restaurants are all about repeat business and the best way to ensure this is to serve great food at reasonable prices, and provide exceptional service. Great service is vital for every business and perhaps one the most important advantages given the competition on price and availability. Relationships with fellow employees are just as important as those with customers. Invest in all your relationships and your business will thrive both internally and externally.
  • Teamwork – If a waiter and cook are not on the same page, there is no way the customer is going to receive the food they ordered in a reasonable length of time. The same is true for any organization. More can be accomplished when all employees are working together towards the same goal. This means ensuring that goals are clear and everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in the process.
  • Motivation – In a restaurant, especially on the front line where you interact most with customers, your attitude can greatly impact your income. This behavior impacts how you are perceived as well as treated by others. As a waiter this can influence how much you receive in tips. In every workplace your motivation can determine to what level others rely on you, trust you and want to work with or follow your direction.
  • Perseverance – The ability to continue in spite of an unruly customer or unfair scheduling means you will succeed when the going gets tough. This is an important lesson in every workplace because you will face adversity no matter what business you are in. And how you deal with it determines how long you will last and how well you will succeed.
  • Doing Things Right the First Time – Making a good impression on a restaurant customer is essential if you want to see them again. This means providing a warm and welcoming environment, providing impeccable service with a smile and delivering a great meal. No matter what business you are in today, it is essential that you seek to do things correctly from the beginning. This ensures you meet your customer’s expectations and maintain your costs.

Restaurant jobs may not pay especially well, but they do offer opportunities to learn valuable lessons and hone skills for whatever you do in your career. Much of this may be understood only in retrospect, but don’t underestimate how you can benefit from your current position no matter where you are in your career.

Work Friends & Social Recognition

September 22, 2014

All of us want to feel valued for our contribution in the workplace. But there may be a disconnect between what employers think drive this feeling of being valued and what employees actually want and need.

It turns out that peer relationships can greatly impact our level of commitment and engagement. And the more friends we have at work, the more likely we are to trust co-workers as well as leadership.

Another area is in years of service recognition. The days of the gold watch or pin for various years of service no longer suffice as recent research has show that employees are more likely to be moved by emotionally-driven, social recognition.

These are the findings of research by Globoforce in a report called “The Effect of Work Relationships on Organizational Culture and Commitment.” The Fall 2014 Workforce Mood Tracker recently surveyed 716 randomly selected employees in the United States who were working in companies with at least 500 employees.

When we consider that most of us with full time jobs spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our families, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of these relationships.

Among the research findings with regard to peer relationships:

  • 93% value the respect of work friends or colleagues and 63% of them find it extremely important or very important.
  • 74% claim to have a shared history and memories with co-workers.
  • 89% say work relationships matter to their quality of life, with more than half (55%) saying it is extremely important or very important.
  • Employees with friends at work are twice as likely to trust leadership than those without friends.
  • The more friends one has at work, the higher level of pride they take in their company as well as their co-workers.
  • The more friends an employee has at work, the less likely they are to leave. In response to: “Would you accept another job if it were offered to you?” those with no friends at work were 42% likely, while those with 1-5 friends 38% likely, and those with 6 to 25 friends only 30% likely.
  • Highly engaged workers: no friends 28%, 1-5 friends 37%, 6-25 friends 48%, 25+ friends 69%.

 

Clearly, having friends at work can directly impact trust, engagement, retention and overall quality of life.

When it comes to recognition, the survey also found that meaningful recognition matters, and when not tied in with co-workers can actually negatively impact the employee. Among the findings on recognition:

  • Employees feel more valued when peers participate in anniversaries. 70% vs. 24% feel more valued when celebrated with peers in addition to the company as opposed to the company alone.
  • Workers with peer-celebrated milestones are less likely to leave the company for another position. In response to the question: “Would you accept a new job if it were offered to you?” 74% said yes when there was no celebration at all, 66% said yes when celebration was with company only, and only 52% said yes when celebration included co-workers.
  • When employees report their last company milestone as “an emotional, moving or poignant experience,” they are significantly more likely to see that anniversary as positive and three times more likely to say it made them feel more valued.
  • Employees were more likely to report a positive experience when the formal recognition experience was tied to company goals and values. They were also three times more likely to say it made them feel more valued.
  • When asked what could make the milestone experience more meaningful, 65% said shared stories and memories, and 72% said they like the idea of including a retrospective of their career accomplishments.

 

Emotional anniversaries and recognition make employees feel more valued with higher pride, higher engagement, and are more reflective and likely to renew their commitment to the company.

So how do you encourage workplace friendships and provide more robust, meaningful recognition? Obviously, a friendly and welcoming workplace is more likely to encourage people to socialize. Specificity both positive and negative when providing feedback is extremely helpful. Also, you can encourage other’s opinions and viewpoints when determining policy decisions and workplace issues.

Peter Drucker once said “culture eats strategy over breakfast.” Staying on top of your company’s culture to keep it positive and aligned with your values will go a long way towards encouraging friendships and making recognition more meaningful. Never underestimate the power of your company’s culture.

A product called TINYpulse can capture anonymous feedback from team members to reveal insights, trends, and opportunities to improve retention, culture and results. Think of it like the old fashioned “suggestion box” only it can be done with quick online surveys directly pushed to employees. This will help keep them involved and encourage them to feel their opinions matter.

Finding ways to foster friendships as well as acknowledging years of service by including co-workers in the recognition will go a long way in making employees feel valued. And feeling valued is what will make employees more engaged, productive, and less likely to leave for another opportunity.

 

Higher Engagement by Meeting Employee Needs

July 23, 2014

Employee engagement is a vital component of successful organizations. Nothing helps spur innovation and raise productivity like a highly engaged group of people who are passionately involved in what they are doing.

“Because they [employees] care more, they are more productive, give better service, and even stay in their jobs longer,” writes Kevin Kruse, author of Employee Engagement 2.0. “All of that leads to happier customers, who buy more and refer more often, which drives sales and profits higher, finally resulting in an increase in stock price.”

Kruse sites 28 research studies showing a correlation between employee engagement and sales, service, quality, safety, retention and total shareholder return.

Employee engagement is about a person’s emotional commitment to the organization and its goals. Raising this emotional commitment cannot be done through some generic training course or corporate mandate.

Instead, the organization must appeal to the employees’ needs and meet these needs with specific leadership skill development.

Every employee has basic human needs that must be met in order for them to feel passionate about the work they do. When this need is met with specific leadership skills, the organization will benefit from more engaged employees.

The Passion Pyramid identifies five human needs that help ignite passion and the accompanying leadership skills required to create conditions to satisfy each need. It also describes the outcome or payoff to the organization for satisfying each need.

These human needs are:

  1. Be respected
  2. Learn and grow
  3. Be an “insider”
  4. Do meaningful work
  5. Be on a winning team

As I described in an earlier post, what employees say they want can vary a great deal from what managers think employees want. Many of these same human needs for increasing employee engagement were among the top ten things employees say they want. Specifically: 

  1. Full appreciation for work done (Be respected)
  2. Feeling “part” of things (Be an “insider”)
  3. Interesting work (Do meaningful work)
  4. Promotion/growth opportunities (Learn and grow)

Tying these human needs with specific leadership skill development can then help ignite the passion necessary to raise engagement. With intentional and orderly intervention, these leadership skills can meet the employees’ needs.

The leadership skills are also in a specific order as no team can be effective without building upon a foundation of trust. Coaching, counseling and mentoring can help with each individual’s specific growth opportunities and blind spots. And no organization can expect employees to be engaged without inclusiveness.

Aligning teams with the organization’s purpose, values and vision ties intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards. Finally, building a high performance team requires the foundation of all the preceding skills as well as a shared purpose and bond to succeed together.

These leadership skills help meet employees’ needs, which can help ignite the passion necessary to raise employee engagement in your organization. Isn’t it worth the investment to bring out the best in your employees so they can bring out the best in your organization?

Workplace Engagement Through Continual Learning

May 8, 2014

Maximizing your investment in today’s economy should be a no-brainer. However, when it comes to the selection of higher education, there seems to be way too much emphasis on which university to attend rather than the quality of the professors and a passion for a particular field of study.

Having a prestigious university name to list on your resume may get you the job interview, but finding inspirational mentors and holding a passion for a particular subject matter that engages you to continue learning throughout life may be much more important to thriving in your career and life.

The college years are undoubtedly the most optimal time to learn, however, they should serve merely as a launching pad for a lifetime of continual learning. To best compete in the 21st century job market, it is vital that you can demonstrate active learning as an integral part of living.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described a Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages and all 50 states, which found that elite universities don’t necessarily produce better workers or overall happiness. Instead, it was the inspiring professors—wherever they may have taught—who made the biggest difference.

“Individual traits matter more than where you went,” says Stacy Dale, an economist at Mathematica, a New Jersey research firm. “It’s a lot more important what you learn later in life than where you got your undergraduate degree.”

The WSJ poll didn’t measure graduates’ earnings or earning potential. Instead Gallup’s research was based upon their 30 years of data that demonstrates the people who are most happy and engaged at work are also the most productive.

Gallup found that success for the people who are most engaged and happy was determined by “meaningful connections with professors or mentors” and the significant investments these people made in long-term academic projects and extracurricular activities.

Among other findings, the poll found that only 39% of graduates said they felt engaged at work and just 11% stated they were “thriving” in aspects of life such as financial stability, strong social network and a sense of purpose.

The strongest correlation for well being emerged with graduates described as thriving in that they were three times as likely to have described feelings of being emotionally supported by a professor or mentor while in school. Those people who described “experiential and deep learning” while in school, were twice as likely to be engaged in their work.

We should all recognize the importance of continued learning in our field of study, and that following passionate leaders and mentors who can inspire us will keep us engaged in the work and perhaps increase our overall happiness.

Keeping our brains active in the work we do enables us to continually exercise our creativity and ingenuity in solving problems and innovating. This also keeps us more fully engaged and it is what companies need most in their workers.

Employers should recognize that hiring based on the prestigious name recognition of universities should not out-weigh the overall candidate’s suitability for a job based on his or her abilities to engage in the work and continual learning on the job.

Getting a potential candidate to speak about a professor or mentor who inspired them may reveal more about their productivity potential than anything else.

I have learned that as my children approach their high school completion, the college campus tours we take will now require a better analysis of individual professors in particular subject areas and perhaps trying to sit in on their classes. And the elite universities will have to do more to convince us that we should spend our money with them based on their reputation alone.

Organizational Health Key to Innovation

April 3, 2014

Is risk encouraged or discouraged in your organization? What happens when someone makes a mistake?

When I talk with a potential client with regard to his or her organization, these are questions I like to ask because they provide me with an indication of just how much of a learning organization it may or may not be. Peter M. Senge describes this concept in great detail in his book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization.”

So much of organizational health is determined by how these two questions are answered because a healthy organization is one that knows calculated risks and mistakes are necessary in order to grow and prosper.

Risk is inherent in business and most businesses would never have started if their founders were risk averse. As companies get larger, control often increases to help maintain structure and order. It can also stifle risk and the resulting innovation.

Organizations that try to minimize mistakes are also likely to minimize innovation. Those that accept mistakes as part of growth, however, are likely to reap more innovation.

Innovation doesn’t have to be about creating the next iPhone: it can also be about finding new materials to minimize production costs, restructuring the workforce to be more efficient, or expanding into new and unproven markets.

Innovation requires being open to risk and allowing for mistakes.

So much of risk taking is the ability to make oneself vulnerable. Being vulnerable can often lead to criticism, ridicule and embarrassment. It can also lead to creativity and spur new ideas.

Vulnerability is all too rarely seen in our leaders. However, I believe it actually demonstrates great strength of character and brings about loyalty.

In Brene Brown’s book “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent and Lead,” she discusses the importance of our ability to be vulnerable. She argues that this vulnerability is not a weakness, but instead a path to courage, engagement and meaningful connection. And vulnerability can spark a spirit of truth—and trust—in organizations as well as our families, schools and communities.

Vulnerability is what unites us as humans and, contrary to popular belief, when demonstrated by leaders, actually inspires us to follow them.

In her book, Dr. Brown has 10 questions that help uncover the health of an organization:

  1. What behaviors are rewarded? Punished?
  2. Where and how are people actually spending their resources (time, money, attention)?
  3. What rules and expectations are followed, enforced, and ignored?
  4. Do people feel safe and supported talking about how they feel and asking for what they need?
  5. What are the sacred cows? Who is most likely to tip them? Who stands the cows back up?
  6. What stories are legend and what values to they convey?
  7. What happens when someone fails, disappoints, or makes a mistake?
  8. How is vulnerability (uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure) perceived?
  9. How prevalent are shame and blame and how are they showing up?
  10. What’s the collective tolerance for discomfort? Is the discomfort of learning, trying new things, and giving and receiving feedback normalized, or is there a high premium put on comfort (and how does that look)?

These questions can be difficult because they will cause those answering them to be vulnerable. However, the process can lead to great insight and perhaps fundamental shifts inside the organization. Ultimately, discussing them with a large group could reap huge benefits and begin to help heal the organization.

One of my favorite quotes is by the wrier Anais Nin who said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” What if rather than holding back and keeping yourself from showing your vulnerability, you brought it forward? This would take great courage, but it would also free you from what holds you back and expand your life.

Is it risky? You bet. But there may be no better way to transform yourself and your organization to become healthy.  And a healthy you in a healthy organization will bring about needed innovation.

7 Tips for Effective Conference Calls

March 2, 2014

Today’s workplace means people are more geographically dispersed and this greatly compromises our ability to communicate well. There’s also an increased need to collaborate and this can be especially challenging when working in different locations.

The ubiquitous conference call has quickly become the norm when it comes to meetings and makes for unique challenges in for them to be effective. So much of our communication is non-verbal (eye contact, body language, etc.), and we need to take this into account when speaking and listening in conference calls.

In the same ways that emails can be easily misinterpreted, so too can the things that are said and unsaid in conference calls. You can’t simply speak and listen the way you would in face-to-face meetings.

Even with the popularity of videoconferencing tools such as NetMeeting, GoToMeeting, Google+ hangouts and others, the voice-only conference call is still used in most cases.

Determining first whether or not to hold a conference call should take a few things into consideration: 1) What is the purpose of the call? 2) Who needs to be on the call? 3) Will a voice-only call be effective and appropriate given the purpose or should a face-to-face meeting or videoconferencing be employed instead?

Like any meeting, certain ground rules should be considered: 1) start on time (don’t wait for stragglers as it only encourages them), 2) have an agenda and stick to it, 3) keep minutes of the meeting and follow up with action items, 4) end on time or earlier if you’re finished.

Conference calls require additional rules to make them most effective. These include:

  1. Lead the call effectively. Take charge by explaining who you are and the purpose for the meeting within the first two minutes. Establishing leadership with your voice only means you often need to over communicate and be more careful with your word choice.
  2. Get everyone involved. Engage everyone from the start by giving them a chance to speak up by introducing themselves. Call on those who are not speaking up during the call to keep everyone engaged.
  3. Share the floor. Unless you are presenting something, as the leader you should ensure you don’t hog the floor. Give everyone an equal opportunity to share their perspective. If there are many people on the call or new people, have everyone identify themselves when they begin to speak.
  4. Avoid distractions. Ensure that everyone finds a quiet space for the call and uses a landline if at all possible. Use the mute button strategically. Be careful not to shuffle papers, tap pens, and turn off other electronic devices. Anything that could be considered rude in face-to-face meetings should be avoided during a conference call.
  5. Don’t multitask. Close email so you’re not tempted to play catch up on other things. If you find yourself doing something other than focusing on who is speaking and the meeting at hand, perhaps you should not be on the call. As a leader, ensure that the meeting remains focused so no one’s time is wasted.
  6. Provide time for questions. Give a five-minute warning before the end of the call so everyone has an opportunity to question or ask for clarification on anything.
  7. End the call effectively. Thank them for their participation. Indicate when minutes will be coming as well as any follow up that needs to happen. Provide the time and date for the next meeting as necessary.

Another thing you might consider: some people can be perceived as negative or disagreeable and may want or need to improve this perception among coworkers. To do this during a conference call, consider the use of a mirror during the call. This can greatly help regulate your tone of voice as you will be influenced by how you look when you’re speaking. Most of us will not deliberately look negative or disagreeable when looking into a mirror and this will be reflected in our tone.

Like any meeting, conference calls need to be run well so people stay engaged and the meeting remains an effective use of everyone’s time. Leading a conference call means you need to be hypersensitive because you have so few ways to monitor meeting attendees beyond what you hear them say.

Keep in mind these seven tips for conference calls and you’ll find them to be more effective and a useful method for meeting with others.

Three Ways to Increase Employee Engagement

January 27, 2014

Raising employee engagement should be the goal of every organization because engaged employees are more productive than those who are not.

Despite the fact that many companies are lavishing their workers with extravagant perks, overall employee engagement is still very low. Seventy percent of the country’s 100 million full-time workers are either not engaged or are actively disengaged.

Three ways to increase employee engagement include the freedom on how to do the work, the option to work on things that interest the individual employee, and the flexibility to work remotely at least part of the time.

A few years ago Netflix created their employee slide deck in which one of the seven aspects of their culture is freedom and responsibility. This includes self-motivation, self-awareness, self-discipline, self-improving, acts like a leader and others.

They found that as companies grow they are typically forced to add more processes and procedures in order to manage the increasing complexity that comes with more employees. These processes and procedures, however, lead only to short-term benefits and often drive the highest performing employees out of the company.

Netflix instead attracted high value people with the freedom to have a big impact, demanded a high performance culture, and provided top of market compensation. So instead of a “culture of process adherence” they have a “culture of creativity and self-discipline, freedom and responsibility.”

As I wrote in a previous post, this freedom takes great courage and faith that your employees will be responsible and accountable for getting things done.  So far, this seems to have paid off for Netflix.

The second area that can help boost employee engagement is enabling workers to follow their interests and passions. This could be similar to what Google provides in “20% Time,” where employees can choose to work on a project or concept that intrigues them to stir innovation. Though not official, there are reports that Google has done away with 20% Time, even though it produced such profitable ventures as Gmail, Google News and Adsense.

The idea of giving employees this freedom is not new as 3M was exploring the use of 15% time for this purpose as far back as the conservative 1950s. Well-known and profitable products like Post-its and masking tape were invented out of this.

There is even a 20-Time in Education that allows students 20% of class time (one day each week) to work on and explore a topic of their choice. Since the world is becoming more interconnected and collaborative, it seems natural to enable learners to begin working in this way before they need to earn a paycheck for it. This means teaching students to be autonomous learners who can guide their own career and discover how to most effectively contribute to a team.

Finally, there is the notion of creating a culture of openness that enables employees to choose not only how they do the work, but also from where.

Nearly 30% of employers now offer telecommuting as a way to improve staff retention rates, and nearly three-quarter of employees say flexible work hours would cause them to choose one job over another.

But is the ability to work remotely really the complete answer?

Gallup recently found that employees who worked remotely ended up working longer hours and were slightly more engaged employees. They found that 32% of employees who worked remotely engaged, while only 28% of those employees working on-site were engaged.

However, it turns out that there was a point of diminishing returns for remote workers. Those spending 20% or less of their time working remotely were found to be the most engaged (35%) and had the lowest level of active disengagement (12%). Working remotely began to decrease engagement levels, however, with more time spent away from the workplace.

There should be a balance between face-time with other workers and flexibility for how the work gets accomplished.

Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft, in an entertaining look in this RSA animated video, discusses how technology can be part of the problem as well as a potential solution.

Among other things, Coplin says that social networking has changed how we work in that we are now sharing just about everything versus previously when we were sharing only what we chose to share. This sharing inevitably requires a great deal more trust not only in our selves but in each other as well.

The idea of providing employee perks to encourage workers to stay at the office longer can initially attract employees, but giving benefits that stir innovation and lasting employee engagement needs to appeal more to people’s intrinsic motivation.

This means providing people with the freedom on what the work is, how it gets done and where to do it. Accompanying this freedom also requires a degree of trust, responsibility and accountability.  And that’s a formula for increasing employee engagement.

Happiness Through Work

December 17, 2013

Social scientists have boiled down Americans’ level of happiness to three major sources: genetics, events and values. The first two are largely out of our control, but the last one is where we have a great deal of control with which can ultimately determine our happiness.

According to a University of Chicago’s General Social Survey of Americans conducted since 1972, it found that about a third of Americans reported they are “very happy,” about half say they are “pretty happy,” and 10% to 15% report being “not too happy.” And these ratios have stayed about the same over 40 years.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece titled “A Formula for Happiness” and in similar content on a YouTube video, Arthur C. Brooks explains how research has determined that 48% of our happiness is inherited and another 40% is based on events that have occurred in the recent past. Much of that may be beyond our control. This leaves just 12% that can help us alter our happiness quotient.

Many people may think there is direct relationship between money and happiness. And this is generally true for the poor.

But Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that once people reach a little beyond an average middle-class income level (about $75,000), even big financial gains don’t bring about much more, if any, happiness.

So that brings us to the 12% of which all of us have some control over our happiness. And this is in our values.

According to Brooks, these values come down to four things upon which we have a great deal of control. These are: faith, family, community and work.

Faith does not necessarily mean being religious, but is more about the interior or spiritual life. Family is obvious, but may require a new perspective with regard to how integral these people are to our overall happiness. Community means cultivating important people into our lives and being charitable. This includes the friends we choose to associate with and how generous we are to those outside of our immediate family.

And then there is work.

“Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others,” says Brooks. This secret to happiness through work is what Brooks calls earned success.

“This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data,” says Brooks. “Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics.”

I should point out that Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C. public policy think tank with an obvious free market perspective. Its mission is “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism.“

His perspective is that free enterprise is the right approach to reaching happiness through work. He says that if you want happiness not only for you but for others around the world, then you should work for free enterprise everywhere.

I won’t debate the potential political and economic argument here, but instead stay focused on the element of pursuing work that matters to you which can help determine your happiness.

What about you? Are you happy? Are you very happy? Is there something you can do to alter the values upon which determine your level of happiness?

Here at the end of another year, perhaps it’s time to take stock of where we are. Since our faith, family and community is ultimately under our control, it comes down to whether or not we choose to take responsibility for them or not. The same is true for work.

Do you believe you are creating value with your contribution at work? If so, the research says that you are more likely to be happy with your life.

As I’ve written about on a number of occasions, the work we do is a lot more than simply a paycheck and a way to provide for us monetarily. In our work, we have the opportunity to find fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and a reason for being that can ultimately help determine our overall happiness.

Don’t we owe it to ourselves to find and make ourselves happy by pursuing work that joins our passion and skills to provide value to us, and to the world?

Great Leadership Requires Asking Questions

November 27, 2013

So often we look to leaders to provide answers to the most challenging problems we face whether in politics or business. In fact, great leaders are those who instead ask the right questions and engage others to arrive at the best answers together.

The media overly promotes a single businessman, politician or sports star as responsible for overall success. As a result, it’s hard to think of Apple without Steve Jobs, J.P. Morgan Chase without Jamie Dimon, and the current Denver Broncos without Payton Manning.

We tend to therefore associate the success of any group as overly reliant on those who lead them. Leaders are vital, of course, but the best are those who inspire others and share leadership to arrive at the most creative solutions.

Leaders play a pivotal role yet achieving success is predicated on getting more from the individuals they lead. This means engaging everyone to contribute fully because the best solutions come when the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

A recent Forbes magazine article discussed the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman, and quoted the author as writing that the best multipliers “are leaders who bring out intelligence in others and get the best ideas and work out of the people they lead. ”

One of the trappings of leadership is thinking you have to have all the answers and that it is entirely up to you to provide people with the right answers. This is narrow-minded and it is detrimental to multiplier thinking.

“When a leader asks the questions,” says Wiseman, “they channel the energy and intelligence of their team on the challenge at hand, and they shift the burden of thinking onto others.”

Instead of looking to answer the big and important questions on his or her own, the multiplier asks provocative questions of the group and encourages them to work on it together. This engages employees like nothing else and no longer has them sitting on the sidelines awaiting the answer from their leader.

In his book Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer, he writes:

“The great gift we receive on the inner journey is the certain knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts in town, but some of them from time to time are even better than ours! On this inner journey we learn that we do not have too carry the whole load, that we can be empowered by sharing the load with others, and that sometimes we are even free to lay our part of the load down. On the inner journey we learn that co-creation leaves us free to do only what we are called and able to do, and to trust the rest to other hands. With that learning, we become leaders who cast less shadow and more light.”

Leaders who encourage this co-creation demonstrate humility in the face of the attention attributed entirely to them.

Jim Collins stated that great leaders are those who look out the window when things are going right, and in the mirror when things are not going right. It is this strength of character that enables great leaders to ignore the limelight society wants to throw upon them and instead diffuse it by sharing the glory with others with success and taking responsibility with failure.

This takes courage and patience. It takes resilience and persistence. And ultimately it takes trust that the individuals you lead have the ability to reach the best solutions collectively.

These best solutions require the best questions and a collective approach to reaching the answers.

Should a Good Leader also be a Good Manager?

November 18, 2013

President Obama’s leadership has recently come into question due to the Affordable Care Act’s website challenges. The Economist magazine recently suggested that even Obama’s supporters are now concerned that he is a terrible manager.

It begs the question: Does good leadership require good management?

Warren Bennis famously wrote “good managers do things right, while good leaders do the right things.” This is more than a play on words.

While some may argue that creating the Affordable Care Act in the first place was not the right thing, executing what was created and passed into law should be up to those responsible for managing things right.

Leaders should be about creating strategy and managers should be about executing strategy.

In Obama’s apology to the American people for the technical problems surrounding the website, he defended Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. “Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” he said. “You know, I’m the president. This is my team. If it’s not working, it’s my job to get it fixed.”

Taking responsibility for the failures of those reporting to him is a sign of good leadership. Years to come, President Obama knows the ultimate success or failure of Obamacare will be attached to him regardless of how many other people work on it.

This responsibility is a huge component of leadership. That’s why business leaders and sports coaches get huge salary increases with the success of their companies or teams, and why they get fired if these companies or teams fail.

In my experience, good managers don’t necessarily make good leaders. Some of them, however, do become great managers. And we can’t have too many of them. Great managers get results, execute strategy and fulfill the mission.

Great leaders, on the other hand, create and communicate a compelling vision others want to follow. They also ensure the right people are in the right place, and they engage them to bring out their best.

And perhaps somewhat surprisingly, great leaders don’t necessarily make great managers. That’s because they require a different set of skills.

The best leaders are focused on strategy and looking at the big picture without getting mired in the execution of that strategy.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will soon step down from the CEO job because as he stated they needed to break a pattern and he’s a pattern. His management style included requiring direct reports to provide a massive amount of data and details before decision making, an environment with corporate silos where colleagues competed with each other for resources, and the recently dropped rank order performance-appraisal practice that pitted people against each other for personal gain rather than encouraged collaboration and cooperation for the good of Microsoft.

While Ballmer tripled Microsoft’s revenue during his 13 years at the helm, this came from their existing markets and the company missed huge opportunities in Web-search engine advertising and the overall shift of consumers to mobile devices and social media.

Ultimately, Ballmer admitted he had created an environment where managers were so focused on trees instead of the forest that it was impossible for him to change their thinking. Trees, of course, should be the primary focus for managers and forests the primary focus of leaders. But neither can lose sight of the other.

Managers should be laser-focused on day-to-day execution. They should be concerned with ensuring the strategy is executed as planned.

Is it therefore really possible for anyone to be far-sighted for strategy and at the same time near-sighted for execution?

In my work as an executive coach, I try to help middle managers and directors build leadership skills so they can become more effective and advance their careers. I help them focus on competency areas that will enable them to grow their leadership capacity. But this doesn’t mean they will all become great leaders.

Some of us are better suited for vision, while others are more suited for process. Some more concerned with asking why and others with asking how.

Being able to shift back and forth between seeing the future vision and the day-to-day reality is extremely valuable, but there is a natural tendency to have a dominant perspective.

Ballmer’s successor may very well need to be more a visionary like Bill Gates if Microsoft is to transition back to the dominate player it was previously.

If Obama is to be successful with the Affordable Care Act, he will ultimately need to ensure he does in fact have the right people in place to execute his vision. He will also need to do a better job communicating not only to these people, but also to the American people.

Any leader can only be as great as the quality of the managers he or she leads.

Predictive Analysis to Motivate Employees

September 21, 2013

Predictive analysis in human resources is becoming a lot more helpful in determining how well-suited potential employees may be for a particular company and a specific job.

What can it tell us about employee engagement?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding a soon to be published study by Deloitte Consulting LLP, about 5% of companies with 25,000 or more employees are now using predictive analysis in human resources.

This analytical information can go a long way towards learning about who to hire and for what positions to better ensure they are likely to succeed in the job and stay at the company.

At Google, where numbers are crunched for just about everything, they use analytics to identify the skills, behaviors and values of ideal candidates for specific roles. Humans still scan resumes, but this is no longer the primary method for finding the right people.

ConAgra Foods has gone further and used analytic software to help predict which key employees were likely to leave the company and why. They studied departments with particularly high turnover as well as those with low turnover and looked at more than 200 factors that may contribute to employees leaving the company.

The results surprised them as two of the strongest indicators as to whether an employee would likely leave the company were his or her relationship with their supervisor and the degree to which they were recognized for their work. Compensation wasn’t even in the top ten.

As I wrote in a previous post, what employees are looking for can vary greatly from what managers assume they want. This disparity can greatly diminish productivity as well as cause employees to leave the company. Learning to correct for this disparity can improve employee engagement and organizational performance.

One should expect that data will be used more and more for determining existing employees’ suitability for promotions and succession planning as well as the overall impact on them through mergers and acquisitions.

Studying human capital data may not only help verify the difference between what we think and what actually does motivate employees, it may help us understand how to best engage them as well.

In the same way the Hawthorne effect demonstrated at least a minimal short-term positive impact by simply paying attention to employees, I think predictive analysis could be used to generate some greater understanding of how to best engage employees. And this can have much longer term implications.

Ideas to do this may include finding effective ways to first quantifiably measure employee engagement as well as emotional intelligence and job satisfaction levels. Using this data, organizations can then analyze how it compares to the productivity of individual employees. If a direct correlation can be drawn from the results, then creating effective ways to raise any of the variables may result in a predictable increase in employee productivity.

This is not meant to reduce employees into statistics, but only as a way of verifying in a quantitative way what we may already suspect qualitatively.

Understanding and verifying how to best engage and motivate employees can then effectively raise an organization’s productivity, reduce the high cost of turnover and make for a better workplace environment.

Valuing Diverse Personality Types in Workgroups

September 10, 2013

Today’s workgroups are made up of people from a variety of cultures, ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds. They also include different personalities.

High performing workgroups are those that embrace and leverage these personality differences in order to achieve outstanding results.

In my line of work I use many diagnostic tools and assessments to help evaluate clients in the environment where they work. These can be useful as they provide valuable insight into how individuals differ from the people they work with most closely.

Each of these tools and assessments typically involve a four square grid where people are placed in one specific quadrant. Yes, they put people into boxes, but more importantly, they provide a common vocabulary in order to converse about what it means to be different.

Not better or worse, just different in how we think, respond and operate in the world.

This common vocabulary can then enable better understanding and ultimately movement with regard to changing behavior to help improve communication, engagement, collaboration, and overall efficiency in the workplace.

Whether using the popular Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, Keirsey Temperament Sorter, DISC profile or any number of tools, the fundamental principle of all models basically provide four types of personalities—expressive, analytical, driven and social.

Each personality type is valuable to the success of a team. All of them are vital to getting things done. And the team’s leader can come from any of them.

Most importantly, it is the dynamic interplay between these four types that make a team of people truly creative in finding and implementing effective solutions.

You can find examples of these four personality types in every workplace, even popular television shows. Think of Seinfeld where Kramer is the expressive, burst in to rooms, big personality; George is the analytical, wanting to know all aspects of a situation before making a decision to act; Elaine is the driven, assertive person who can never find a man smart enough and rich enough; Jerry is the social, friendly guy who brings together and maintains the cohesiveness of the group.

After first identifying our own type and realizing the gifts and challenges it provides, next comes understanding the value of the other types and appreciating how they can also contribute to team results.

Jim Collins, author of the best-selling Good to Great, says it’s not only important to get the right people on the bus, but to get each of them in the right seat on the bus.

Without making too much of an over generalization, different personality types lend themselves to different work. Those who are the analytical type may not be happy or successful in a traditional sales or public relations position. An expressive or social type may find a research position far too confining.

In the words of Albert Einstein, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

A workgroup must take into account how the work is shared among diverse personality types. Just because one person has a certain job title or job function doesn’t mean he or she should be confined to that specific work. Let your team members determine how best to accomplish the work.

For any whole to be greater than the sum of its parts requires maximizing the potential of each individual and leveraging the efficiencies found in true collaboration.

In their book Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results, Geoffrey Bellman and Kathleen Ryan write “extraordinary groups cultivate a positive mind-set about differences, choosing to see them as intriguing, informative, and essential—rather than irritating, divisive or threatening.”

Bellman and Ryan found in their research of extraordinary groups that this ability to express and work with these differences as critical to their success. Holding these differences in a way all individuals can move forward together rather than pulling the group apart is a core distinction between an ordinary and an extraordinary group.

To enable more creative and innovative solutions to business problems requires utilizing the creative potential of diverse personalities in workgroups. This means not only welcoming and respecting our differences, but also learning to collaborate with and maximizing the collective wisdom found in this mix.

Low Employee Engagement: The Cost and the Cure

July 19, 2013

An astounding 70% of U.S. workers are either not engaged or are actively disengaged, according to a 2012 survey by Gallup. Further, these actively disengaged employees are emotionally disconnected from their companies and as a result are less productive, more likely to miss work, more likely to steal, may negatively influence coworkers, and will drive customers away.

Employee engagement is strongly connected to business outcomes that are so essential to the organization’s productivity, profitability and customer engagement. And those who are actively disengaged at work (18%) can cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity every year.

Gallup’s State of the American Workplace: 2010-2012 report also revealed that this level of employee engagement differed among generations.

Those at the beginning of their careers and at the end of their careers are most likely to be engaged at work. Traditionalists, representing merely 4% of the workforce, have the highest level of engagement at 41% and Millennials, who represent just 8% of the workforce, are second highest at 33%. The remaining 88% of the workforce has just 28% of Generation Xers and 26% of Baby Boomers likely to be engaged at work.

Clearly employee engagement is critical for every organization and much can be learned by the questions Gallup uses to measure it. They finalized what they call the Q12 in the late 1990s and it has since been administered to more than 25 million employees in 189 countries. These 12 questions represent what Gallup considers actionable workplace elements with proven links to performance outcomes.

  1. I know what is expected of me at work.
  2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
  3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
  4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
  5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
  6. There is someone at work who cares about my development.
  7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
  8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel the job I do is important.
  9. My associates or fellow workers are committed to doing quality work.
  10. I have a best friend at work.
  11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
  12. This last year I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

The answers to these questions are important, but so are the questions themselves. What do they reveal about employee engagement? It seems to me that clarity about the work and focusing on the employee’s strengths is important. Recognition and praise for a job well-done too. Empathy, congeniality and genuine concern are also important.

The order of the questions is also intentional. The first two represent the employee’s primary needs and asks: What do I get out of this role? Questions 3 through 6 have to do with how employees think about their own contribution as well as their connection to the team and the organization. The questions 7 through 10 have to do with: Do I belong? The final two questions have to do with whether or not the employee can learn, grow and input their own ideas.

Increasing employee engagement is not a one-off intervention through an annual team building off-site, but instead it is a continual process of healthy workplace policies and behaviors. These should include:

  • Clear roles and responsibilities for everyone, and ensure that each person is equipped with the right tools and training to do the job they were hired to do.
  • Start at the top. If your managers, directors, vice presidents and CEO are not engaged, you can forget about your frontline employees. Ensure that engagement begins at the top and extends throughout the organization.
  • Live the values in your business plan. Employees join your company because of its reputation and what they believe you stand for. Ensure that these values are more than corporate marketing.
  • Build upon employee strengths. Rather than focusing on fixing weaknesses, companies should focus on building upon each employee’s individual strengths. According to research, Gallup found that people who use their strengths everyday are six times more likely to be engaged at work.
  • Give praise and be friendly. There is no reason why the workplace needs to be a cold and dreary place. Every one of us has the opportunity to show gratitude and genuine concern for others at work. This can go a long way towards making us feel that our contribution matters and that we’re cared about.

Each of these can help raise employee engagement, but they need to be under constant scrutiny because they won’t last simply because they were written down in some policy and procedures manual. These policies and behaviors need to be continually demonstrated and practiced for engagement to last.

Actively engaged employees should be the goal because they are directly tied to positive business outcomes. Getting and retaining employees who are actively engaged means better business results and a better place to work. And that’s the cure we all could use.

Six Tips to Successfully Deliver Employee Feedback

June 28, 2013

Leadership involves many interpersonal skills and for some of us the ability to deliver effective feedback can be the most challenging.

Everyone who supervises other people is expected to provide feedback—both positive and negative—and yet it is often put off until annual performance reviews, which makes it even more stressful to both because of the context it’s given in.

For some reason the workplace is a difficult place for many people to regularly speak openly and honestly about the work that’s being performed. Perhaps the formality of many places makes a genuine compliment or complaint much more difficult to convey. Or maybe it’s simply the emotions it can stir up.

Whenever you say something nice or not so nice to someone, it is likely to be met with an emotional response. This can make you and the other person feel awkward, uncomfortable, or embarrassed in the workplace setting. And that alone can be reason enough to make you avoid saying anything at all.

But the more you exercise giving genuine feedback to others, the more comfortable you will become with it and this can benefit both you and your organization.

That’s because we all seek recognition and acknowledgement for what we are doing, whether we are willing to admit it or not. We want to know that what we do matters and that others are aware of it. Additionally, if we are doing something not so well, we want to know what this is and especially how to correct it. Don’t underestimate a person’s level of resilience because such feedback loops are vital to their continued growth.

When you deliver effective feedback to others, you are also seen as someone who is observant and concerned. Others see and feel this, which enables them to respond to it either by basking in the glow of recognition of a job well done or by taking corrective action to improve their performance.

If you find yourself avoiding giving face-to-face feedback to those you supervise, these six suggestions may provide a more comfortable approach.

  1. Deliver feedback (good & bad) all the time. Catch people doing things well and make a point to notice and compliment them right then and there. By the same token, when someone is doing something not particularly well, let them know it immediately. Don’t wait until an annual performance review to tell an employee they did something wrong nine months earlier.
  2. Make it specific and focused on behavior. Meaningful feedback needs to be about something specific in order for a change to result. This is also why it is so important to give it when you see it. And keep feedback about the behavior or the work. Remember to attack the problem not the person.
  3. Be direct and use a measured tone. Speak to him or her in a straight-forward manner so there can be no ambiguity. Keep your voice poised and calm. Give the listener an opportunity to ask questions or seek clarification. Maintain eye contact but don’t glare. Be patient and look for genuine understanding.
  4. Praise publicly and criticize privately. When you want to give someone a compliment on something done well, be sure and do this in a public forum whenever possible. Be sensitive to those who may be uncomfortable with this, however. And when you need to admonish someone, do this in a private meeting so you don’t humiliate or create resentment in the person.
  5. Offer support with constructive feedback. Don’t simply tell the individual what they did wrong and demand it gets fixed. Instead, offer a genuine desire to help through your support. This might be recommending a class or training, a mentor (including yourself), or perhaps a leadership coach. Sometimes it could just mean providing an open door for them in the future.
  6. Make clear your expectations. If you expect to see more of the same from the person you are complimenting, go ahead and say “keep up the good work.” By the same token, if you expect a change from someone you are criticizing, ensure that you make it clear that this is unacceptable and you expect to see what specific change and by when.

Providing meaningful feedback is not necessarily difficult, but it is a skill and like any other skill it needs practice to master. Start out small by offering compliments to one or two individuals for a couple of weeks. Then expand your feedback beyond them.

Make all your feedback constructive rather than destructive. Remember that the reason for feedback is for continual performance improvement. Focusing on this will ensure that others see the value of all your comments and respond accordingly.

The more regularly you can give feedback the more it will foster greater trust and strengthen overall employee engagement. And that’s important for everyone.

Trickle Down Employee Engagement

June 13, 2013

Leaders do many things but perhaps more important than anything is the behavior they demonstrate in the workplace. This includes how well they communicate, their honesty and integrity, and their overall level of engagement.

This leading by example is something employees pick up on and often emulate without any directive. And a leader’s engagement level can directly impact their employees’ engagement level.

Research by Gallup and others has consistently shown how critical leaders are in engaging team members. If managers are engaged, they are more likely to be supervised by highly engaged executives. And frontline employees supervised by highly engaged managers are more likely to be engaged than those supervised by disengaged managers.

This trickle down affect may be instructive for how to further increase productivity in the workplace. Overall confidence in the marketplace can certainly engage our corporate leaders like nothing else, but engagement at the top—no matter the level of marketplace confidence—is more important than ever.

A recent Gallup poll of more than 150,000 U.S. workers revealed that about one in three employees are actively engaged in their jobs. This varies depending on occupation, but the percentage is up in almost every category from an earlier poll done in 2009. Overall, this should signal good news for business and the U.S. economy.

That’s because there is a strong relationship between employee engagement and a company’s overall performance. Engaged employees mean greater productivity.

According to the Gallup poll, the greatest increase in engagement was in “managers, executives and officials” where it measured 36% and ten percentage points higher than the earlier poll.

Every occupation measured showed improvement other than “service workers” where engagement levels actually decreased by three percentage points over the same period. Those in “transportation and manufacturing or production workers” were least likely to be engaged in their work and most likely to be actively disengaged.

Actively disengaged workers can cost the U.S. economy $450 billion to $550 billion a year, due to high absenteeism and turnover, quality-control issues and lost productivity.

When I am called upon to help raise employee engagement, the first question I have to answer is: What is the level of engagement of their supervisor(s)? If the answer is anything other than actively engaged, I must be honest about how little impact I can have on these employees.

That’s because the level of engagement of leaders greatly determines the level of engagement of their employees.

Think about the great bosses you’ve had in your career. Most likely they all share an enthusiasm and passion for the work. The same was probably true of teachers back when you were a student. It was those very few passionate teachers who inspired you in ways unlike all the others.

In virtually every aspect of our lives, actively engaged people are those who we want to be around and emulate. Their drive and passion are infectious.

Business leaders don’t have to be overly charismatic, but they do need to demonstrate positive emotional attachment to the work, their colleagues, and the organization. This cannot be fabricated, but it can be replicated.

This is not to suggest that having an actively engaged leader results in actively engaged employees. Much more is required. But if the leader is not highly engaged, no amount of training, team building, and other interventions will provide higher and sustained employee engagement.

Leaders with active engagement will impact those around them like no other intervention. Begin at the top and the rest will be easy.

Fostering Innovation in the Workplace

May 15, 2013

Today there is a great deal of talk about the need for more employee collaboration. This is because collaboration can lead to creative solutions and is directly tied to innovation.

Though we often attribute innovative ideas to a single person, rarely do these ideas occur in isolation. Finding novel solutions to problems or creating new market opportunities requires people sharing and discovering through direct and open interaction with others.

The physical environment can certainly play a role in encouraging innovation. Here are some examples of what organizations are currently doing.

  • Google is designing their new corporate headquarters to maximize casual employee conversations, which is exactly how they came up with innovations like Gmail and Street View.
  • Zappos created a new headquarters and deliberately provided employees with smaller workspaces and break rooms, not only to save money, but to encourage people to physically bump into each other. They hope this will lead to more spontaneous and productive interactions.
  • Many companies are also providing common work areas that enable employees to mingle and chat with the hope that more ideas will result.
  • National Public Radio has “Serendipity Days” where employees from different departments come together to deliberately think about new ideas and projects over a two-day period. The focus is on getting employees to work with people who they wouldn’t normally work with as a way to alter their current thinking and broaden perspective.
  • Some companies are asking employees to swap jobs for a few months in order to better understand each other’s work, and also seek different approaches to existing ways of doing things.
  • Yahoo recently put a ban on telecommuting as way to encourage incidental encounters in hallways and the cafeteria that would likely not occur if these employees worked from home.

Clearly these physical interventions may create an environment where people can collaborate and innovate together, but innovation also requires getting the right people together and having a culture that encourages the innovating process.

Here are some ideas on how organizations can encourage innovation:

  1. Hire the right people. Look for a cultural fit as well as passion in the people you hire. Don’t underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence, which is vital for effective relationships, but may not show up on resumes. Seek out curious people who look beyond presenting problems and find sustainable solutions.
  2. Foster a team approach. Don’t let an individual’s desire for career advancement override the team’s ability to succeed. Remember the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
  3. Enable brainstorming time. This means not shooting down what may appear at first to be a bad idea. Real innovation occurs when people are free to ask stupid questions, challenge assumptions, and try out what hasn’t been done before.
  4. Encourage risk taking. True creativity requires the opportunity to make mistakes and not be penalized for it. This means organizations must not only tolerate mistakes or false starts, but encourage them as the natural process for reaching innovative success.
  5. Foster a playful environment. Innovation demands that people follow their interests and play with ideas that may fall outside traditional thinking. While this may at times appear silly and unproductive, it is the exact environment where ideas can grow.
  6. Welcome diversity and conflicting opinions. Many organizations are conflict avoidant; they are also less likely to be innovative. That’s because coming up with new ideas is often messy and requires people to see and hear what is beyond their current point of view. Stay in the mess in order to let the best ideas surface.

Outside the workplace, there are organizations like Maker Faire that encourage innovation. “Maker Faire features innovation and experimentation across the spectrum of science, engineering, art, performance and craft.” In other words, it encourages people from many disciplines to take something old and make something new.

Regardless of the industry, organizations that provide products or services need to continually innovate in order to gain or maintain a competitive edge. Fostering an environment that encourages collaboration with a corporate culture and policies that support it can enable this innovation to occur.

 

Telecommuting: When Does it Make Sense?

March 15, 2013

Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer recently declared that her company’s employees may no longer work from home and this has created quite a stir—both inside and outside of the company.

Telecommuting offers many benefits as it removes wasted time travelling back and forth to the job; it provides employees the flexibility to balance work and family around the individual’s schedule; and because there may be fewer interruptions than in the workplace, it allows for more focused attention that can lead to increased productivity.

Telecommuting also raises employee engagement. The more flexibility workers have, the higher their job satisfaction and the less likely they are to leave the company.

Research has found that they also work harder. A 2010 Brigham Young University study found that office employees work only 38 hours a week before they feel as if they’re neglecting their home lives. People who work from home put in up to 57 hours before they feel stretched too thin.

Nearly 15,000 Yahoos currently enjoy the freedom to do their jobs from home. And according to the independent employment research firm Telework Research Network, 20 million to 30 million Americans currently work from home at least once a week.

So what do we know about these telecommuters? According to the above study updated in 2011, the typical telecommuter is 49 years old, college educated, a salaried non-union employee in a management or professional role, earns $58,000 a year, and works for a company with more than 100 employees.

If all the potential telecommuters worked from home just half the time, the national savings would total over $700 billion a year including:

  • The typical business would save $11,000 per person per year
  • Telecommuters would save between $2,000 and $7,000 a year
  • The oil savings would equate to over 37% of our Persian Gulf imports
  • Greenhouse gas reduction would be the equivalent of taking the entire New York State workforce permanently off the road

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the entire five-year cost of implementing telework throughout government ($30 million) would be less than a third of the cost of lost productivity from a single day shutdown of federal offices in Washington DC due to snow ($100 million).

So why can’t telecommuting continue at Yahoo? The answer could be manifold and surely includes Mayer’s need to reboot the company culture, cut deadwood and discipline the slackers who have taken advantage of the work at home policy.

Mayer was one of Google’s first 20 employees where data is used to measure just about everything, including people analytics. Now that Mayer is running Yahoo, she may be trying to instill this data-driven methodology to increase productivity, even if it means upsetting the company culture to do so.

While Google generates a whopping $931,657 in revenue per worker, Yahoo generates just $344,758. And Google actually encourages their employees to work in the office because, among other things, they say it generates a more collaborative atmosphere.

High technology companies have long been on the leading edge not only in products and services, but also in flexible work hours and employee benefits. Instilling the Results Only Work Ethic or ROWE model, for example, makes it easy to justify employees working whenever and from wherever they choose.

But there is something to be said for people working in the same physical space where serendipitous interactions can help stir creativity and innovation like nothing else. Bell Labs long ago designed their campuses around the management philosophy that innovation happens when you force smart people to collaborate in person where they can constantly bounce creative ideas off each other.

So how do you enable the benefits of telecommuting while retaining those of working in the office?

A Rational Telecommuting Policy would include:

  • Identify which jobs lend themselves to telecommuting. Those who work in the fast food industry certainly can’t telecommute. However, those who work in certain types of sales and customer service who need only a computer with a telephone certainly could.
  • Determine how to track and measure performance. Like any job, we should measure employee effectiveness in ways beyond how often they sit in an office cubicle and stare at a computer screen. Data can’t measure everything, but it can certainly contribute to overall accountability. This should be monitored regularly to avoid problems.
  • Hold telecommuters responsible. Anyone who regularly works away from the office like outside sales people need to check in frequently to make themselves visible. Telecommuters need to do this as well and keep up with virtual communication so they remain top of mind to coworkers and supervisors.
  • Demand that telecommuters be in the office on a regular basis. This is important because of the necessity of building rapport and fostering trust that is so vital to effective team building as well as increase the opportunities for collaboration and serendipitous creativity to spur innovation. Maybe it’s two days a week or maybe one day every two weeks, but consistency is key so others can plan around it.

Telecommuting offers many benefits to individuals, their families, the organization, and the environment. It’s not going to go away and I suspect Yahoo’s Mayer will find a way to bring it back to certain employees.

In the end I believe companies need to give employees the flexibility to work away from the office, yet measure and hold them accountable for the work they need to do. At the same time, they should demand that these employees work in the office at least part of the time, because this strengthens teamwork and encourages collaboration. And that’s good for the organization.

Rethinking the Role of Manager

December 4, 2012

Does your boss often get in the way of helping you be more productive? This is not entirely his or her fault as many organizational structures are based on an outdated incentive mentality that can actually be detrimental in today’s workplace.

The workplace has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Secretaries are scarce, the metallic sound of office machinery is replaced by electronic tones of pagers and cell phones, and—rather than conversing around the water cooler—we are more likely to be texting or using social networks as a way to interact with others.

How we manage other people, however, has remained the same.

The role of manager varies depending on the industry and nature of the work, but when it comes to supervising others, there is very often conflict and disharmony.

In a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The Value of Bosses” by Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher T. Stanton, supervisors were found to have an enormous impact—good or bad—on productivity.

Among their findings, nearly 75% of all employees say their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job. And 65% of employees say they would take a new boss over a pay raise.

The same study determined it is not what these bosses do, but what they don’t do that makes them so bad. This includes 1) failing to inspire; 2) accepting mediocrity; 3) lacking clear vision and direction; 4) inability to be collaborate and be a team player; 5) failing to walk the talk.

It turns out that the best bosses are actually teachers, and the report stated that teaching accounts for 67% of a boss’s effect on employees’ productivity.

What if your manager was focused on teaching and encouraging your intrinsic motivation to enable you to be more productive and happier in the process?

Too often motivation throughout many companies is based on the carrot and stick approach. For all but a very few types of manufacturing jobs or those requiring mechanical skills, however, this approach has been scientifically proven not to work. In fact, it can actually be detrimental to productivity.

So why is there so much time and money spent on extrinsic incentives in order to get employees to work harder? Extrinsic incentives include things like a high salary, bonus, stock options, and generous benefits, which are often what attract employees in the first place. However, it is the intrinsic incentives such as interesting work, flexible time on when and where to do the work, ROWE or results only work ethic, 20% time to follow interests, etc. that keep employees motivated and highly productive.

According to author Daniel Pink, intrinsic motivation is absolutely required and his model includes three essential elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives; mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters; and purpose is the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

Workers today face challenges that require right-brained, creative, and/or conceptual thinking. This “outside the box” thinking cannot be incentivized through conventional external means, but instead requires internal motivation.

Intrinsic nature means the job’s core responsibilities and you’re being paid to do something you find satisfying, says Timothy Judge, Mendoza’s Franklin D. Schurz Professor of Management.

After conducting a hundred job-satisfaction studies, Judge says he’s never found one where the intrinsic nature of the work itself wasn’t the most important predictor of overall job satisfaction.

So what if a manager’s role was not to incentivize, scold, or threaten those he or she manages, but instead to teach, inspire, and support the employee’s need for autonomy, mastery and purpose? This new role for manager would look a lot more like a coach, mentor or teacher who is in service of raising the level of productivity of others.

In this way the workplace could be less hostile and more cooperative, less competitive and more collaborative. Managers could contribute to the workplace environment in a way that creates higher employee engagement and greater productivity. And that would be good for any organization.

Getting Along to Get Things Done

November 8, 2012

The election is over and it is time for our elected officials to get to work. The American people have spoken so our leaders can stop campaigning and start governing. And governing means doing what we elected them to do, which is to get things done.

Our politicians need to follow the lead of President Obama and New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie who recently overcame ideological differences to work cooperatively and deal effectively with the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. The so-called looming “fiscal cliff” now has the same immediacy and perhaps greater severity to more people’s lives.

Living in this especially contentious time, we as a people seem unable to have a meaningful and respectful dialogue in order to better understand each other’s position.

In their book You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought, But You’re Still Wrong by Phil Neisser and Jacob Hess, the authors present how a stanch conservative and a die-hard liberal can appropriately converse and agree to disagree.

“We have thus reached a point where conservatives are more interested in what Bill O’Reilly says about liberals than what their own liberal neighbors say about themselves,” write Neisser and Hess. “Likewise, many liberals ‘know’ about conservatives from reading updates on Huffington Post as opposed to getting to know actual conservative acquaintances.”

Rather than seeking to truly understand each other, we look for shortcuts from partisan media, make assumptions based on stereotypes and all too often take as fact what the pundits pontificate about. This leads to further misunderstanding and deeper resentment.

Authors Neisser and Hess explore the notion that despite political differences of people on the left and the right, many share a deep desire to work for the greater good of society. In a divided congress, it is essential that our politicians are able to do this.

It is also necessary for the rest of us to stop thinking in terms of competition between the blue and red teams, and start working together to build bridges of understanding. This understanding should demand that our elected officials no longer persist in simply holding firm to their positions, but instead find ways to compromise for the benefit of all.

Divisiveness cripples our politics, but also the rest of our lives. Only through working together in spite of conflict can we get to a shared place of understanding and growth. This requires being open and trying to really appreciate the other’s perspective. It requires having respect and taking responsibility for maintaining a positive relationship.

These traits of being open, listening for understanding, and working hard to fully appreciate the other’s perspective are vital to all our relationships. At work, assumptions you make about your colleagues will continue to keep you divided and conflicted. If instead you try to find common ground and see others for who they really are, you will be rewarded with a more congenial workplace where things are getting done.

Workplace & Leadership: This I Believe

September 21, 2012

In my work with organizations both as an employee and external consultant, I have learned (and continue to learn) many things over the years. Many of these have evolved or been entirely reversed, which is indicative of the fact that we are living at a very dynamic time.

For example, in a recent article in Harvard Business Review magazine, Michael J. Mauboussin writes about how organizations are so often using the wrong metrics to measure success. The continual focus on earnings per share instead of other metrics and statistics prevents these companies from fully understanding their business. It’s time for business leaders to adapt their thinking.

In this blog post, I thought I would simply state some of what I believe with regard to the workplace and leadership. Although these statements are likely to continue evolving over time, I believe they will retain a kernel of truth that should remain constant.

I am indebted to many great business leaders and theorists for these ideas and I apologize in advance for a lack of attribution.

  • Most people want to do their very best at work.
  • More autonomy for how the work gets done leads to greater employee satisfaction and higher productivity.
  • Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them. They hire motivated people and inspire them.
  • Character traits like zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity are common among great employees, yet are rarely advertised for or even looked for when seeking and interviewing candidates.
  • Emotional intelligence may not get you the job, but it will undoubtedly keep you in the job and help you get promoted.
  • Getting the right people focused on the right task is the most important objective for any organization to reach its goals.
  • Focusing on employees first is what will make customers happy and this leads to happy shareholders.
  • The role of a great leader is not to come up with great ideas. Instead, a great leader should create an environment in which great ideas can happen.
  • Everyone has the capacity for leadership no matter the position.
  • Leadership development should not be restricted to executives, but implemented throughout every level of the organization.
  • Most of the billions of dollars companies invest in leadership development fall short of success because the programs are so heavily focused on data and assessment gathering and very little on people and processes.
  • A high level of trust in the workplace is directly related to greater productivity, higher profitability and more engaged employees.
  • Building trust and accountability are the most important things a manager should work on in order to get the most out his or her people.
  • Praising workers in a meaningful way is a simple, yet highly effective means of raising employee satisfaction and overall productivity.

I welcome your thoughts and comments as well as other statements with regard to what you believe in order to extend the conversation.

Negative Emotions Impede Organizational Productivity

July 12, 2012

In your workplace you probably know a Debbie Downer or someone who is always able point out what is wrong and how the glass is really half empty.

Such a constant negative perspective can have a contagious effect on others and should be monitored so it doesn’t impede productivity throughout the organization.

Emotions, both positive and negative, can and do play a role at work even though we may think we are effectively holding them in check. This is because emotions impact our behavior—whether we want to admit it or not—and others see this behavior.

I grew up in a family where sarcasm was considered a high comedic art form. In reality, sarcasm is typically ridicule or mockery and usually used for destructive purposes. Sarcasm usually has some underlying and unexpressed emotion attached to it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky considered sarcasm a cry of pain when he said it is “usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”

In a recent Harvard Business Review post by Tony Schwartz, he wrote how the negative emotions of a new executive at his company altered the corporate culture such that the entire organization was more negative. It wasn’t that this leader was only being critical, but he was so “singularly focused on what was wrong that he lost sight of the bigger picture, including his own negative impact on others.”

This emotional contagion resulted in others taking on these same negative feelings and sapping the vital energy from the organization. Ultimately, this leader had to be let go because of the ramifications his negative outlook had on the leadership team and overall employees.

I am not advocating wearing blinders to what is wrong within an organization. Instead, it’s important to seek out what is indeed wrong and then have an optimistic vision on how to improve things in order to get to a sustainable change.

We also need to keep in mind how our behavior and attitude can impact those around us. Even though we may not feel we are being overly critical when pointing out flaws in a product design or service procedure, others may feel it is. Sometimes this is only a matter of being more tactful in our delivery.

And this is not to say I mean avoid being authentic at work. Authenticity is vital to your emotional well-being, and emotional intelligence can help you understand and regulate your emotions as well as be aware of the emotions of other people. Then you can choose how to appropriately respond to any given situation.

Negativity is a powerful force and can spread quickly throughout an organization, especially if it is the predominant emotion witnessed in leaders. Many leaders will defend this perspective as they believe it is a powerful motivator, and it may very well be for some employees and for some period of time.

But in the long run and for the majority of people, a negative perspective will suck the energy and productivity from an organization. It will reduce employee engagement and it will harm the bottom line.

Is there someone in your organization draining it of energy? Does the leader exhibit generally positive or negative emotions and how have these influenced his or her management team and the entire organization?

Innovation through Trust and Accountability

June 8, 2012

There’s a great deal of discussion today about the need for innovation in business. Innovation is what fueled the enormous growth of American companies throughout the last century, leading to the proliferation of the telephone, television, and automobile, and made space flight possible.

Innovation is essential to revolutionizing the way we live and help maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. But this innovation requires fostering a workplace environment that includes employer trust and employee accountability.

Apple, with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion, is arguably the most valued and innovative company in the world. Their continual innovation has propelled Apple’s astounding profitability.

In the same way the Macintosh revolutionized the personal computer back in 1984, the iPod, iPhone and iPad created huge markets. These other products may not have been the first to market, but they were designed, manufactured and marketed in such a way that everyone had to have one.

Much credit has been attributed to the late Steve Jobs, but more than likely it was the culture he and others created at Apple that enabled this kind of innovation.

This is because Apple, unlike any other company, embedded the encouragement of creativity and “thinking different” into their corporate culture. This was no small task as creativity is all too often now left to fewer and fewer individuals in school and business.

Sir Ken Robinson, a leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation, says that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. He contends that our educational system frightens us out of being wrong, and the willingness to be wrong is absolutely necessary in order to foster creativity.

In his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World,” Tony Wagner writes about the common characteristics of learning cultures at many schools and programs he profiled that offer innovative learning. They are all organized around the values of:

  • collaboration
  • multidisciplinary learning
  • thoughtful risk-taking, trial and error
  • creating
  • intrinsic motivation: play, passion, and purpose

David Liddle, co-founder of Interval Research, speaks of the fundamental characteristics of a creative organization. “It is first and foremost a place that gives people freedom to take risks; second it is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence; third, it is a place where there are no ‘stupid’ questions and no ‘right’ answers; and fourth it is a place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamic, the surprising, the playful.”

The willingness of individuals to be wrong and management’s acceptance of them being wrong in service of innovation is critical to bring on real innovation.

Steve Jobs and the other Apple employees were able to see beyond where the technology and market was in the present in order to envision and deliver something entirely new. I’m sure there were plenty of false starts and jettisoned projects along the way, but this didn’t result in a reduced research and development budget. Instead, Apple embraced those setbacks as necessary in the natural order of innovation.

Google is another example of a company who provides engineers with space and time to play with ideas. Their 20 percent time program has so far resulted in Gmail, Orkut, Google News and Adsense as well as many internal projects.

All companies could encourage innovation not only in research and development, but in sales, marketing, operations, and even human resources. But this requires a great deal of trust for management and accountability for employees.

When management trusts employees enough to give them the freedom and opportunity to ask stupid questions, take risks, play with ideas, and not suffer from being wrong, then there is an environment that fosters true innovation. And when employees are held accountable for eventual results, they are no longer just doing a job but helping to make a difference in their company, themselves and quite possibly the world.

Bringing more trust and accountability to the workplace can provide an environment that enables innovation to occur. And that is a good thing for everyone.

Increased Productivity Through Mindfulness

May 24, 2012

In this global economy with virtual meetings, social networking, and hyper-competitiveness, it is encouraging to see a large corporation choosing to embrace mindfulness. This mindfulness training is seen as a means to increase productivity as well as employee happiness.

Google’s popular course called “Search Inside Yourself” was designed to teach emotional intelligence through practical, real-world meditation. But this is not about sitting in the lotus position reciting “Ommmmm.” Instead it is a pragmatic approach for raising awareness in order to be more productive and happy.

Based on curriculum from his popular class which has been offered to Google engineers for the past five years, Chade-Meng Tan wrote a funny and practical book titled, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace).

What I find particularly compelling about Chade-Meng’s book and course is that he applies these ancient principles in the 21st century workplace. He believes that we can all achieve inner peace (and ultimately world peace) as well as become more productive in the workplace setting.

According to Chade-Meng, the course has been able to provide the knowledge and practices that can increase creativity, productivity and happiness. The book promises readers will learn to:

  • Calm your mind on demand
  • Improve your concentration and creativity
  • Perceive mental and emotional processes with increased clarity
  • Discover that increased confidence is something that can arise naturally in a trained mind
  • Develop optimism and resilience necessary to thrive
  • Deliberately improve empathy with practice
  • Learn that social skills are highly trainable

This mindfulness is developed through learning the skills of emotional intelligence, which I’ve written about in previous posts. Based on the neuroplasticity of the brain, what we pay attention to gets done. What we think, do and pay attention to actually changes the structure and function of our brains. And like any training, practice is required for this to take full effect.

Mindfulness, according to Jon Cabat-Zinn, means to pay attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. This enables you not only to become calm, but also more and creative.

A successful practice supports reflection over reactivity, encourages feeling your feelings rather than acting on them, and opens awareness to what is really going on. This means slowing down to notice. Any mindfulness is good mindfulness.

If Google has seen fit to offer this free course to its employees for more than five years, they certainly must have vetted its overall effectiveness. Analyzing qualitative data such as happiness is extremely difficult, but I suspect Google has found that those who have completed the course are in fact more productive.

And I strongly believe happy employees are indeed more productive employees.

You can see an hour-long presentation about this by Chade-Meng in this YouTube video.