Renaissance Leadership

Remembering the Great Pumpkin

One of my best bosses ever was Judi Hangen at AT&T.  As the Director of our telemarketing sales office for business accounts. Judi believed in always saying hi to each and everyone of her employees every day.  She also believed in thanking everyone for showing up and demonstrating their loyalty to both AT&T and our customers.  How did she do this?  She brought out the Great Pumpkin at work!

Every day, like clock work, Judi would walk around the aisles of our call center and carry a huge plastic pumpkin filled with candy.  She stopped at every desk and greeted each employee with a smile, a thank you and a treat; everyone loved working for her.  Even though she could've chose to sit in her office and drive the center's results simply through her management team, Judi always felt a need to connect with every employee in a positive way every single day of her job.  And it's a policy I have adopted ever since.

The Great Pumpkin is a fun way to say thank you every day to your team and reminds them how important they are to your company's success.  Even with today's carb and sugar conscious employees, you can hand out fruits or delicious treats such as South Beach candies in addition to small pieces of chocolate or Jolly Ranchers.  It's not the treats, it's the thought behind it that ultimately counts and if you want to maintain a high performing team, five minutes spent with the Great Pumpkin can lead to increased results, improved morale and years of loyalty.

Setting Sail in Your Leadership Journey:The Ritual of Beginning

I think one of the things many of us have forgotten in our leadership journey is the beginnings of it.  I was talking to a former client of mine who was recently promoted into management.  She felt no excitement about the promotion, nor did her company as she was merely given a pay raise and no congratulatory remarks from anyone, not even her senior leadership! 

One of my current clients just promoted someone within the organization into the role of Sales Manager.  And even with my encouragement, the President of the company simply gave the man a raise and didn't make any fanfare.  What's sad about this is that this is a small company who is rapidly growing.  This is the first time a sales manager role is in place and the company promoted someone from within the sales team to take on the management job.  The president realized he had neither the constitution to coach and develop people nor the focus to motivate his sales staff as his energies have shifted to retirement and succession planning.  And for the gentleman who got the promotion, he felt no sense of having arrived at a major milestone in his career.  His first week on the job resulted in the following assessment of his promotion: "More hassle and less pay is what I've signed up for."

This example is just one of the many I've read about in recent times and it points to a sad state of affairs in that we no longer celebrate successes.  It seems we're too busy to get to the next meeting or return that email within five minutes of showing up or we're too busy putting out the fires that result from a lack of planning.  And yet, taking that first step into your leadership journey is an important one and I think we need to make time in our lives to do that. 

Having some sort of ritual--whether it's a team luncheon where you say goodbye to your former job and hello to new responsibilities or you go out with your new boss to celebrate your promotion--is a very important process.  Getting an increase in salary is certainly great, but I think we need to honor the start of a true career milestone--making it into management. 

You'll only ever be a "first-time" manager once in your life; it's well worth some kind of celebration!  If your company doesn't feel this way about the process, then I think it's important you do something for yourself as you cross the threshold into leadership.  Perhaps you can go buy a high-end pen to sign your name with, invest in a new power suit to match your new sense of managerial power, or you could get your name imprinted on a custom business card holder.  I would even go so far as to invite your loved ones to go out for a special dinner at one of your favorite restaurants.

The point of this is that we are a culture who appreciates rituals--ones that represent a certain rite of passage: baptism, graduation from middle to high school and from high school to college, turning twenty-one or graduating from college.  These are all occasions we love to mark with a certain level of fanfare and excitement, so why not a ritual for when you see a true sign of career success and make it into management!

In fact, I would encourage you to celebrate each career milestone you achieve--when you make it to a Director Level, Senior VP or even President!  Or if you start your own company, take yourself out to celebrate the fact that you've signed up to be an Entrepreneur-one of the true American archetypes! 

When we find ways to honor ourselves and our achievements, it's a positive reminder that all that dedication and effort has started to pay off.  The phone calls, the emails, the Excel sheets will be waiting for you every day; the opportunity to acknowledge and truly honor your first day as a leader only comes along once.  Make the most of it as you set sail for the seas of change! 

Diverse Desk Game Leads to Creativity at Work

Want to conduct a free team building exercise that leads to increased creativity, productivity and morale on the job?  Try this:

The Diversity Desk Game

If your office environment is stagnant and unappealing, it could mean that your employees are also suffering from a lack of creative thought when it comes to thinking up new products and services or new ways to address business problems.

Studies show that an appealing and highly diverse work environment lead to increased creativity and productivity at work.  Wall art, toys, lighting, and even music facilitates a more dynamic and positively charged work space.  Even by placing your office furniture on a diagonal and provide a new perspective at work. 

To help you bring out the best in your employees, sponsor a Diversity Desk Game where you charge your team with building the the most unique and diverse office environment possible.  You can make this even more fun by having teams compete for creating the most fun and productive work space by examining the team's results within ninety days after they've created their new work space.

The goal of this is to create an environment where people are free to be themselves and also teaches a valuable lesson that there are always different ways to look at situations.  Just by sponsoring an office environment change also opens your employees up to new perspectives.  And the good news is that this team building exercise can be done with a small budget or even none at all--and it still works! 

When I worked in Residential Markets at AT&T in 1985, we constantly decorated our call center to keep everyone's perspective fresh about having to answer the phones and take billing questions day in and day out.  A splash of color here, a slinky there and a poster of my favorite rock bands always put a smile on my face even when a customer wanted to argue over a twenty-five cent phone call as if the world was ending tomorrow. 

The Diversity Desk Game can do wonders to improve your work environment--try it and let me know what happens!

Books Bring Teams Together

Want an inexpensive and education way to build a high performing team?  Want to create meaningful dialogue at work?  Try starting an office book club!

Book clubs are nothing new, but thanks to Oprah and the Today Show, more and more folks are reading again for personal pleasure.  So why not take advantage of this opportunity at work as well?

Once a month, pick a relevant business book and purchase them for your team.  Give them a deadline to read the book and then plan a team meeting where all you do is discuss the book.  In fact, you could create a set of questions about your company for them to reflect on while they're reading the book to make it more meaningful to your business needs. 

Sins of Omission and Talent Management

According to one Executive Jobs Website, an article talking about workplace discrimination states that discrimination starts at the top in many organizations.  A survey the article features reports that people still find discrimination in their workplace – about 54% of the respondents! 

However, the article is not clear as to what type of discrimination the respondents are experiencing.  I find it interesting that most people think that discrimination is visible, as if it’s something you can easily identify, punish the bad guys and protect the innocent.  I find in most of my experiences that discrimination is rarely blatant and rarely that evident, and that the most powerful way to practice discrimination today is simply to ignore the career of an executive or a manager.

In today’s marketplace, if you are not being actively promoted and championed, you’re not likely to be on any fast career track or any kind of successful career track.  And what I have seen and actually experienced is that rather than blatantly and explicitly discriminating and denying people opportunities, what senior leaders do is simply don’t spend any energy  at all or make any effort to champion people.  And, by most definitions, that wouldn’t be discrimination.

It’s a subjective response that executives can make all the time as to who they want to spend their time with and why. In today’s hypersensitive areas of legality around discrimination, rarely do I find overt discrimination.  What I see is more of a “sin of omission,” where executives simply let careers in their company languish from a lack of effective succession planning.

Purpose That Recognition!

I'm constantly amazed when companies think that a good recognition program consists of cash awards--as if that's what will motivate everyone to want to contribute more to their company.  And when they look at their turnover rates year after year, they still find that their best people are leaving. 

I think the big question a company often leaves unanswered when trying to design a recognition program is WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACHIEVE?

Imagine being able to answer that question and then putting together a cohesive and competent recognition plan! 

If you're trying to reduce turnover, a nice cash incentive-based program might put some of your talent over the edge in terms of stress just to get a few extra dollars in their pay slip.  If you constantly reward only your Top Ten Employees, the rest of them (hey...that's 90%) might starting wondering to themselves "why bother" and slowly REDUCE their productivity because you've decided to neglect them with any extra perks.  Perhaps you offer such meaningful recognition programs as a "special parking space" for a month or use of the restrooms on the executive-level (and no, I'm not kidding about this...I've seen it done...). 

If you're the one in charge of developing a recognition program, you might want to consider taking the following best practices into account from the National Association of Employee Recognition:

• Have a well-defined and well-written strategy
• Have buy-in from Senior Management
• Have good measurements for success (Have you increased employee satisfaction?  Are people using their rewards?  Has customer satisfaction improved?  Has turnover reduced?)
• Create a robust communications plan to promote your program and provide updates
• Train people on the program
• Plan for public celebrations
• Include scalability and flexibility in your program so you can add or change elements over the long term

I advocate an annual look at your recognition programs to come up with a current theme.  It keeps the program fresh and people will appreciate a variety in the rewards.  As we have more Baby Boomers staying on the payroll longer and an increasingly Generation Y employee looking for meaningful work that allows an appropriate work/life balance, you have to look at your recognition programs from diverse perspectives to make sure people appreciate them.  In other words, survey your people from time to time to see what kinds of recognition they want.

Take an Extra Minute Before You Hire

Want to find out if your job candidate was really paying attention during the interview?  Want to see if he or she can truly organize their thoughts well?  Want to see if your candidate can retain information and present it in a clear and concise manner?

The next time you have to recruit and hire employees, establish the practice of having them write up the "minutes" of the interview and send them to you.  I've used this practice on several occasions and it amazes me how this one exercise can distinguish one candidate from another. 

There are a lot of people who are great at interviews; they can talk their way into a job quite well.  However, some of these folks have trouble putting their thoughts on paper and that potential superstar you thought you were hiring can turn out to be a major dud.  Having people send you the minutes from their interview demonstrates if they were listening to you and also paying attention to their own dialogue. 

I had a person tell me a story in the interview that they conveniently left out when they sent in the minutes.  When I questioned the person, she said "well, as I was writing the minutes, I realized I wasn't telling the truth!"  Needless to say, I didn't hire this person for the job. 

If you're going to use this practice, I encourage you to tell your candidates upfront that you require them to do this.  To wait until the end of the interview isn't fair to them and could catch someone completely off guard.  In one instance, I provided the major sections to my candidates as to I wanted in the minutes to allow them to still focus on the interview as opposed to worrying about how to organize their thoughts. 

Try this and let me know what happens!