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Share Your Success

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“Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.” – Woody Allen

As we step into the last week of February, what is the one thing you most want to accomplish this week?

For me, this week, I start teaching tomorrow my first business class with Hallmark University — Business Intelligence and Analytics. It’s both an in-person and online course. I want to make this an effective and impactful experience for the students.

So, my one this is: To Deliver Value This Week!

Share with me and everyone else your one thing this week! Let’s make it happen!!!

Bad vs Good Leaders

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Poor leaders ask you what you think about them.

Good leaders know!

Let’s face it, if you’re a good leader, you are “plugged into” your people. You know what they’re doing. You know what they’re thinking. That’s because you’re engaged with them!

In reality, bad leaders know they suck. Who wouldn’t know? No one can be that clueless! Why are they bad…so many reasons: micromanagement, absent, unengaged, poor communicator, etc.

These are the leaders that ask you for you opinion of them in 1:1s. Why, because they know they’re bad…and they know you won’t be honest, because their life will be a living H$%% of honest. Bad leaders know you will lie to their face to prevent retaliation.

And, in their sad, demented, world, this will make them feel good about themselves and confirm their veiled delusions that they’re a great leader.

How do we “flip the script?” How do we stop the madness?

Success Vampires

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People don’t like confidence. It makes them feel less … confident.

Success attracts … haters.

Happy people leave in the wake … unhappy people.

Have you ever noticed, just when you’re at the top of your game, there’s someone right around the corner look to kick the chair out from under you?

Why do you suppose people are like this?

How do you handle these situations?

Who Am I — Success Incubator

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Your success is my success…I’m a success incubator!

In the early 90s (Air Force cop), I got involved in quality. In 1998, I retrained as a fulltime internal coach and consultant. I was always the problem solver, so I moved from job-to-job every couple of years.

When I retired from the Air Force, I really wanted to help people–the business person. I created my own consulting business, Crosscutter Enterprises. Crosscutting is a jeweler’s way to bring out the brilliance of a diamond–I crosscut your business.

A month later, Booz Allen Hamilton (top 10 consulting firm) called me about a job they hadn’t posted and I hadn’t applied for. My interview was more of when can you start. Over three years, Booz changed and I left to work again with business people who need my help.

A month later, USAA called offering a contract. A month later, the exec I worked with told me he was going to hire me at the end of my contract–he did. For seven years I led four strategic engagements.

Today, I’m back…looking to work with you–businesses that need an expert to help them grow and solve problems.

Let me be your success incubator!

Stop Dumbing Down Your Work!

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I’m not sure who started teaching leaders that “less is more.” I have watched the move away from presenting and providing detailed information about an issue, project, effort, etc. Today, we’re sharing so little detail on the item that leaders don’t have enough information to make sound decisions.

This is a terrible trend! This is creating a culture of employees only doing enough work to provide three bullet points on a single slide–the result of an organization becoming “PowerPoint Deep.”

Leaders think they’re too busy to need all the data and information to make a decision. The higher you go, the less detail. I’ve attended training classes on executive level presentation. We expect people to be brief and concise in their message to the point of obliterating the facts.

Stop!

Leaders — get out of their glass tower, walk around, and really understand what’s going on. You need to see the data and research. You need to understand the problem. Otherwise, the culture you’re setting is that no one that works for you understands the work. Why would they go to the trouble of researching a subject, collecting data, and analyzing the findings if the you aren’t going to look at it?

What is your culture like at work?

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Gallup reported, in August, employee engagement at its highest in nearly 20 years: 34% of U.S. workers engaged. That still leaves 66% disengaged. What is your culture like at work? Do the words like: positive, motivating, challenging, exciting, energetic, and rewarding describe your office? Or would you describe it more like: toxic, controlling, complacent, corrupt, backstabbing, and unhealthy?

Where does culture come from? Leader and employee behaviors create cultures over time. Statements like, “That’s the way we do it here,” reflect an accepted culture. Artifacts on the walls often represent a culture at work.

Good cultures are measured and cultivated. They begin with assessment of the values being represented every day in the office. Then the desired culture is codified in values for the organization with a description of the expected behaviors. These behaviors are actively monitored and measured. Leaders hold everyone accountable.

An example is when the US Air Force created their values of integrity, service, and excellence. Then they documented them in their Little Blue Book.

How does your organization define its culture? Have they documented their expectations? Do they live by them?

Volunteerism

Creating the customer condition

Leadership Meandering Genius

Last week I encountered a very interesting customer situation. It was early morning and I was getting some breakfast at a cafeteria-style place at work. The short order cook clearly was not in a good mood. He was making orders and serving them up with a “I could care less” attitude. I watched him for a few minutes until I requested my items. He simply asked, “What can I get you?”

I placed my order and took my breakfast items. It was a simple encounter and I honestly didn’t think anything of it at that moment.

I got my coffee (self serve) and went to the register to pay. Here, the lady working the register was energetic, excited, and pleasant. She was very excited that it was a Friday.

I smiled and greeted her, paid my bill, and wished her a great weekend.

As I sat and ate my breakfast, I started to reflect on what just happened. In a matter of just a few minutes, two customer service workers drove in me a condition of response. Their attitude toward their work, affected my attitude toward them.

I never addressed the cook politely or said please and thank you. Yet, I was super polite to the lady on the cash register. In both situations, they created my customer condition.

If you ever wonder about the experience your employees create for customers, this was a perfect example. It took me several minutes of reflection to actually notice what had happened to me in this encounter. Imagine my day, if the cook had been the last person in the process and I went to work then versus after the lady at the cash register.

Through their actions and attitude, your employees create a customer condition. Something to think about.

Developing the Leader Within

A Lesson from Life in Leadership

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Here is the perfect lesson in leadership. Not to be political, but to share a point. Clearly, if the results were different, I’m wondering if the actions would have been any different. However, this was a poignant lesson in leadership just the same.

Election night thousands of Clinton supporters waited for hours throughout the day. They stood and watched, all exuberant when the initial polling reports came in. They stood and watched as the numbers started coming in. They stood and watched as the expected New England states started flipping for Clinton. They stood and watched as critical swing states like Ohio and Florida were lost. They stood and waited for their leader.

They stood and waited for something that never came!

Behind the scenes, Clinton was calling Trump to concede, while on stage she had sent her Campaign Manager, John Podesta, address her supporters. “Go home,” he said, “we’re not done yet.”

Yes…yes, you are. 

The moment the leader fails to be a leader and abdicates their responsibility to another is the moment the leader stops becoming a leader. 

By sending Podesta to address (and lie) to her thousands of supporters, she has shown that this is all about her and not about them. A servant leader would have empathized with her people and would have known that they needed her to speak.
Instead, she called, conceded, and went home to bed. The next day she called a press conference at 10 am, but didn’t speak until almost noon. This time it was only to staff, aides, and cameras. Worse yet, the loss was blamed, through veiled statements, on a system designed to keep a woman from the Oval Office. 

This was the best display of poor leadership, demonstrated at the highest levels. What to learn from this:

1. If you lose, something fails, it breaks, etc., get out there and address your people. Be transparent and provide them closure.

2. You’re in charge. Accept the blame and move on. Blaming anything and everything else on the failure might make you feel better about yourself, but it robs you of control of the situation. Taking ownership, means taking control and that’s what your people want to see–it provides hope, not defeat.

Please take a lesson from this and not be like this.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2016/11/9/13572218/clinton-concession-speech-not-speaking?client=ms-android-att-us

Mentor or Coach

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Over lunch a couple of days ago, we were discussing the subject of mentors and coaches and started to highlight the difference in the roles. Sometimes people can seemlessly operate in both roles at once, so the roles do not seem distinctly different, but they are.

We discussed a few items that seem to differentiate the two roles:

One of the items was Blind Spots. Coaching is designed to identify blind spots, where mentorship is more designed to overcome blind spots once identified. Sometimes the coach can guide the coachee in ways to overcome the blind spot, while in other situations they might recommend they obtain training or a mentor.

Another item was Proximity. Coaches are generally involved with what they are coaching you on, whereas a mentor is someone you mostly meet with to discuss things with. Coaches tend to actively participate in the thing they are coaching you on so they can witness your actions and provide advice and direction if improvement is needed.

Another item was Selection and Appointment. Although some organizations have more formal mentorship programs, generally coaching relationships are formal and assigned for a specific reason. Mentors are normally sought out to discuss and close a gap.

When we were discussing the subject, we discussed two different types of coaches–Lean Six Sigma and Executive. Both of these are very specific roles where an individual is involved with what is going on in a coachee’s life. In Lean Six Sigma, for example, the coach is engaged with every step of a coachee’s project,  guiding them in the application of the skills they should have learned already. If the coach recognizes that the coachee has difficulty in running meetings or presentations, they might suggest that the coachee obtain additional training in those areas. If the coach notices that the coachee has trouble with time management, they might suggest establishing a mentorship relationship with someone that they know is particularly good at time management. If the coach is good at time management, they might quickly switch into that mentor role, but this is outside of the original coaching arrangement.

This is why people often see coaches and mentors as the same thing–they can cover more areas than what they are specifically coaching for. In the case of an executive coach, the coach might be able to provide all kinds of advice and assistance on leadership and employee motivation. However, they probably would suggest the executive have a mentor if the coachee is trying to learn how to navigate the company’s culture toward promotion.

When you think about the roles, this should help you better delineate what each does and which you need.

The Employee Engagement Discussion

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For the last ten years, businesses have focused on employee engagement and its cost to businesses. Pretty much any report or study on engagement points out that about 70% of employees in the U.S. are not engaged at work and it is costing businesses approximately $500 billion a year.

Unfortunately, this employee-focused issue has not changed since before the 1950s when the emphasis was on employee satisfaction.  In the 1980s, the emphasis turned to organizational commitment.  The business issue; however, has not changed since researchers started studying and quantifying the situation more than 70 years ago.

There are a few major companies out there that have found some success in this arena and have become the poster childs for how they treat their employees.  Like in everything else, many companies think if they simply do the same visible things that they will be successful and their survey results will go up.

Speaking of survey results; when it comes to this topic, this is another important aspect. The purpose of surveying employees on their engagement (or whatever employee-focused thing) is to quantify how employees feel about the organization. Many companies do not even measure this, which tells someone a lot about how much they care about the issue. A good deal others use the survey results to target specific things in the organization to raise the score. This is a failed approach to employee improvement.  Surveys are for the purpose of providing a gauge of how engaged your employees are, not specifically a roadmap to improvement.

When you look at this issue from the business’ point of view, they do not really care if the employee is satisfied or engaged at work. They just know that if the employee is not, they are not operating as well as they should. What organizations want is employees committed to the organization–organizational commitment.

Employees, on the other hand, do not care about being committed. What they want is to be satisfied with their job–employee satisfaction.

The concept of “being engaged” is a deeper subject that most companies and employees simply do not understand. Employee satisfaction represents how employees feel about the things they can measure in their job. Organizational commitment is a result of satisfied and engaged employees and is measured from the business’ point of view.  But engagement is something entirely different.

Each of these three terms: satisfaction, commitment, and engagement, work together in business. Each one is important and should be the focus of employee and organizational wellbeing.

From a satisfaction point of view, employees are focused on the tangible things that they can measure at work.  Things such as the security of their position, comusurate pay and benefits with their role in comparison to others, recognition and rewards, opportunity for advancement, the company dress code, etc.

From an organizational commitment perspective, there are three factors that exist: employee, leadership, and organization. Employees must be present and they must be dedicated to work. If the company does not have any employees, then who will be committed to the organization? If the employees are lazy and not interested in working hard–just want to get paid–then they will not be committed. If there is no effective leadership to provide a vision and goals, or reward and recognize employees, then commitment cannot occur. The organization might have people in leadership positions, but they might not be leaders. Lastly, the organization must not just exist, but it needs to be an organization worth being committed to. If your organization does not have a strong purpose, vision, and culture, employees find difficulty being committed to it.

Engagement is the term that confuses managers the most. The reason is, because it is really based on how employees feel about their job.  This is difficult for companies to manage to, so most resort to single items scored low on a survey. Employee satisfaction was easy to manage to because, like the employee, the company could see, touch, and measure it. What confuses engagement even further is that many of the surveys out there include questions related to commitment and satisfaction as part of the engagement equation.

Employees are engaged by three things at work. These three things are communication, development, and quality. These things are not obvious to organizations and usually are some of the major problem areas many companies have. Open and honest communication builds relationships and trust with leadership and between employees. Most organizations stuggle with communication (internal and external).  Development is more than having classes available or a training budget that no one uses. Development is about actively challenging employees to grow and helping them with the challenge. It is about assisting them to become something better and stronger then they were when they started with the company. Quality is a recognition of doing good work, that employees around you are doing good work, and that the management focuses on quality work.  If the company does not care, cuts corners, and puts out a shoddy product just to make more money, the employees will be the first to know it.

So, the discussion needs to turn from one of engagement to one of organizational and employee wellbeing. All things, satisfaction, commitment, and engagement should be evaluated to establish a baseline and then to measure effective improvement. For each category, the right things need to occur versus focusing only on statements and scores on a survey. Only then will wellbeing occur.