This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Authenticity
Shining eyes
“A [symphony orchestra] conductor doesn’t make a sound. His job is to awaken the possibility in other people.”
This is what Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, says.
And, how do you know you’re doing it?
“If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it… It’s about how many shiny eyes are around us.”
As a leader, how many shiny eyes are around you?
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Be aware, be very aware
Dale Carnegie once said people will judge you not only by what you do, but also by how you do it, and what you say, and how you say it. In other words, words and speech matter. True, but strong and silent men and women have even more problems. Because in the real world people will judge you not only on what and how you do and say it, but when, where, why, and to whom you do it and when, where, why, and to whom you say it. Not to mention, who said and did what immediately before and after you did. In other words, words, speech, action, and context matter. This is why communication is so difficult. The lesson for communicators in organizations is “be aware be very aware.” A lesson everyone else would also be wise to learn,too.
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Thriving in chaos
According to a recent article in Fast Company, This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business, we’re in trouble. The volume and pace of change is relentless and uncontrollable. We can’t know the future. And the past may or may not be relevant. It’s chaos.
“Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless, since we will be constantly rethinking them; you can’t rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way; silos between industries are breaking down; anything settled is vulnerable.”
And then, just when you think there’s nothing we can really do institutionally, except hope and pray, comes this: “The key is to be clear about your business mission. In a world of flux, this becomes more important than ever.”
When you can’t know, get back to basics. Get back to your institutional values and aspirations. Not the stuff that’s written on plaques on walls. The real stuff. The essence of what your organization is and what you stand for and care about.
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Great brands are more than marketing
Imagine you’re an Apple employee in 1997. It’s over a decade since Steve Jobs was ousted from his position as CEO. You know you’re part of a team with “good people”. But, despite strong “brand loyalty” and “millions of dollars of investment in research and development”, Apple feels like it’s “standing still” and the business you love is being described as the “failure story of wall street”. [quotes]
And, now, Jobs is back. And, he’s describing Apple’s core values: “We believe that people with passion can change the world!”
In this short video, he talks about the Apple he’s come back to, gives a primer on the power of core values to create great brands like Nike. He’s talking about marketing and introducing an ad campaign.
But, great brands, like Apple are about more than marketing! And, Jobs knew that.
Great brands capture the imagination of people inside and out and then they deliver.
What are your core values? It’s a question that has been asked before. It’s a question worth asking again.
How do you describe who you are and what you stand for? As an institution? As a CEO? As a leadership team? And, how do you translate that into an experience for employees and customers?
Thanks to Lisa Barone for the inspiration.
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Use your senses
“To find out whether a company is optimistic, experimental and attuned to risk, people should simply use their senses: look for a colorful landscape of messy disorder rather than a suburban grid of beige cubicles. Listen for burst of raucous laughter rather than the constant drone of subdued conversation… I can literally smell excitement in the air.”
Tim Brown, Change by design, 2009, p 77
An experiment. Tomorrow morning when you come to the office, take a good look, listen and smell. Use your senses. Let me know what you discover.
Do you have the kind of organization you need to stay competitive and productive? Can you smell the excitement in the air?
And for a little fun from Wallace and Gromit on using your senses check out:
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Annual performance reviews may be making things worse. Now what?
If, the idea is to improve organizational and employee performance, then the annual performance review may be making things worse not better. Today’s Globe and Mail confirms that according to an “academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies… two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback is given.” [link not available - "Every year not enough, try weekly performance reviews", Rachel Emma Silverman]
Since it’s that time of year, the time of year when I know many of you are focused on reviewing this year’s performance and defining next year’s team and individual objectives, I thought you might be interested in learning about something completely different. Something that will really increase your chances of improving performance next year.
The “Managerial moment of truth” presents a framework and an approach to skill building. As Robert Fritz describes it, “the managerial moment of truth is a one trick pony. But, it’s a really really good trick.”
It’s not personal. It will help you build an institutional and individual ‘cycle of correction’ and learning. It will enable you to effectively increase organizational and individual performance.
Here’s co-author Bruce Bodaken, CEO of Blue Shield of California, speaking about the impact of this approach on his business’s leadership and performance. He believes that this approach has helped him and his team unleash between 25 and 40% of the underutilized capacity in his organization at little or no cost. In his 5 years as CEO, BlueShield has become the fastest growing health plan in California. They’ve doubled membership and grown revenues from $3B to 8B. A remarkable achievement indeed. Worth checking out the full video, especially after minute 6.
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The best invest in their people! Really?
Tony Schwartz recently shared his thoughts on “how the best companies are investing in their people”. He believes all human beings have four sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental/cognitive, and spiritual. So, companies who want to the best performance need to make sure employees’ needs on all four sources are adequately met as a business priority. Makes sense. Sadly, when asked, Tony couldn’t name one company, not even his client Google, who is currently doing this.
Still, I think there’s something here worth giving thought to here. As a starting point for thinking about what institutions are doing or not doing to create better places to work…
Physical – All of us need to be adequately nourished, rested and fit to perform well. What is/should/could your institution doing to ensure that employees are?
In my experience only one company, Nike, even came close on this one. Makes sense since this is the business they are in. Their cafeteria looked out on a beautiful ‘lake’ and redwood forest in Oregon. The food that was prepared and presented was healthy and nutritious and not “granola”. There were a range of culinary delights on offer and even a selection of wines and beers. The portion calorie count was clearly listed even then almost 8 years ago. There was a track, a cross-country trail and a gym on the property. Though I’m sure there was an elevator, everyone I saw walked up and down the three story court floor stairs. People worked intensely but they also seemed to know when to break. You got the sense that employees treated their business life as they would their athletic training.
At Google, according to Tony they are very aware of this source of energy and do many things to actively support employee health including covering the cost of employee meals and making nap pods available.
Emotional - We need to feel our work is valued and appreciated. When and how do the people in your institution thank and recognize each others work [and really mean it]?
I’ve seen this done well and badly and often in the same organization. So much depends on the skill of the manager. We all know when our work is really appreciated and when we’re being manipulated. This is not about the usual employee award programs. It is about getting real and timely recognition from your colleagues, your clients and your boss. Leading outside the lines is a great resource for beginning to thinking about this from an institutional point of view. Managerial moment of truth takes the idea further. It’s not about what one of my clients called ‘cumbaia’. It is about setting conditions for a fair game.
Mental and cognitive – We need to be adequately focused. How does your organization keep the work focused and prioritized?
Most organizations I know are currently suffering from 24/7/52 syndrome. Thanks in part to technology and cultures that are hyped on “bigger, better, faster” there are no breaks insight. The pace of work looks manic from the outside, and feels overwhelming on the inside. Days are full of meetings. The work gets done outside of that. There’s little or no time to think. Tony suggests that even Google fails on this one. I think in addition, this is the place where we need to think about the impact our work space itself has on our ability to do a good job.
Spiritual – We need to see that we are contributing to something that is based on deeply held values and a clear sense of purpose; something that we find meaningful. How does your institution make sure that employees feel the organization is doing something meaningful to them and aligned with their values?
I think employee recruitment and selection is key on this one. If you’ll never get over the fact that if you work for Rio Tinto Alcan that 10% of the world’s energy every day is used in the production of aluminium then you will never be a match for this business. If you believe that aluminium makes lives better because it is the only fully recyclable product in the world and used in millions of applications and that’s what you care about then you’ll be a match for the business. If you join the company before knowing these facts, that’s a problem. This spiritual element is either a match or it isn’t. As an institution you can make the reality more evident for employees but you can’t fake it.
So, maybe, just maybe, it’s really all about recruiting and selecting the right people and then setting the conditions for people to do great work and supporting them in ways that they find helpful. Now there’s an idea.
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Making “magic in the marketplace”
Today, thanks to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, I came across this key note address by Bill Taylor, the founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.
Here’s what really caught my attention: ”You can’t build something special, compelling, distinctive in the marketplace unless you also build something special, compelling distinctive in the workplace… Strategy is your culture. Culture is your strategy. Success today is about so much more than just price, performance, features, technology, pure economic value. It’s about passion, emotion, identity, sharing your values… Real magic in the marketplace is when you make your organization more memorable to encounter.”
And that my friends can’t happen when the relationship with employees is the last thing on the C-Suite’s agenda! It can’t happen when leaders do not trust employees [though they expect employees to trust them], where leaders are not loyal to employees [though they expect loyalty from them] and where they are not proud of employees and the work they do [though they expect employees to be proud of the leadership and the organizations they work for]. Broken cultures on the inside will always show on the outside sooner or later!
Recommend you take the 20+ minutes [Bill comes in at about minute 4] to watch it. Some great stuff on bench marking too!
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When the dog doesn’t bark…
You may recall Sherlock Holmes in Silver Blaze where he describes how he’s able to solve the mystery as a result of “… the ”curious incident of the dog in the night-time”:
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.””
What does this have to do with employee communication? Well, quite a lot I think.
Today, I’ve been catching up on e-mail after over a week away and I read an interesting e-mail from a friend of mine who is serving in Afghanistan with the US Air Force. He writes thoughtful and provoking letters on a pretty regular basis and his mindful missives are always compelling. He’s definitely not what you’d imagine as your usual guy at war.
This e-mail was especially interesting because he described what happened on his base in Kabul in the hours leading up to the announcement that Bin Laden had been killed. Specifically, “…we were ready for the kick-off of the morning update meeting where everything in the AOR (Area of Responsibility) is covered – this is a computer briefing so you just log into the site and watch-listen. Briefings at this meeting are given on everything from what is being built in the AOR to the current threat level. It always starts on time, except for today. Turning on the TV to kill some time clued us into what was going on. The nation was on stand-by awaiting the President’s “Special” announcement late night in the States but early the next day here in Kabul. We could overhear people making comments about high level members receiving important calls (they didn’t mute the conference mic) – and then the media broke the story, Osama Bin Laden was dead and the U.S. was responsible.”
So, just like it was for Sherlock Holmes, these troops recognized there was a ‘curious incident’: not meeting when they’d come to expect their regular morning meeting. While communicators were busy working on positioning and timing for the announcement, the troops were already reading the signs and coming to their own, and surprisingly accurate, conclusions about what was going on. You can’t fool mother nature. And, it seems you can’t fool employees.
Sometimes what we don’t do speaks more powerfully and accurately than what we do do.
My question: How can knowing this help us be better at institutional communication?
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The black hole & the employer brand
Human resource departments talk a lot about the employer brand; the ultimate reflection of the employee experience of the brand. And given the growing challenge of getting the best people, it’s something that all business leaders are beginning to worry about.
So, imagine my surprise to read that “nearly 30 percent of executives surveyed by search firm Korn/Ferry International said job applicants aren’t being treated respectfully by potential employers”! These executives report the following experiences:
- No confirmation that their application arrived
- Interviews that turn out to have been set up for other candidates
- Interviews that have been set up for the wrong job
- Interviewers who are under prepared
- No follow-up after interviews
- No answers to e-mails or phone messages
- A big black hole.
This isn’t any old recruitment. This is executive recruitment. Presumably people who have more money and influence than most. Makes you pretty sure that it’s a lot worse for your average job seeker.
We know bad news travels faster than good news. We know the value of the brand experience as an employee or as a customer. It’s pure gold. And the erosion of the brand experience a business killer. So, how could we be going so wrong in what seems like such a simple matter – basic courtesy?
Could it be because of overworked employees? Sucky values? Bad training? Too many files? Too few hours? Not the right tools to do the job? Or all of the above?
I don’t know, but as communicators we’re all about helping our organizations [and their employees] build strong positive relationships with all our stakeholders, so I think it’s something worth looking into and taking action on. The employer brand starts here.
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Recent posts
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