Renaissance Leadership

What the hell happened to Leadership?

There was a place in time when leaders actually lived out their values. For someone to speak of integrity, they had to have it. If someone spoke about honesty, they used to live by it. We used to live in a country where it meant something to be a leader. You had to have a vision, a commitment to something greater than you, and the stamina to carry out your vision and take others along for the journey.

Plus, leaders used to be humble enough to admit to a mistake and correct their course with a quiet dignity.

Not  so much anymore. Now we have people who think leadership is all about profits and making a fast buck at the expense of others.

Look at our tired health care system. It’s done nothing but create a further divide between the rich and the poor and the well and the unhealthy. Hospital executives don’t want you to come to their institutions to get better, they want you to come to their institutions so they can charge you out the ass for their meds, so the drug companies give can give them profits by shoving said meds up yours.

Reporting the news used to carried out with objectivity, professionalism, and a sense of responsibility to keep the public informed. Nowadays, executives in media departments only care about ratings and advertising dollars and what sells, thus reducing news—especially television news—to merely reporting on who was wearing what while they bought fresh produce at Whole Foods or whacked their girlfriend on the head. Forget about reporting on the harsh reality that racism is alive and well even though we’ve manage to elect our first African American president.

I won’t begin to comment on the lack of leadership in most corporations. There’s not enough space here and I might as well go off and write a book. 

But what I will say is that there are indeed woman and men out there whose spirit is not driven but the dollar, who truly care about making a difference for the greater good, and who understand that there’s a greater mission than a quarterly dividend when carrying out your goals.

We just need more of you to stand up and be seen so the majority of citizens see you to know there is a better way

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!

Why Diversity? Why?

Any leader who takes on a diversity program needs to think about the driving forces for wanting to take on such an initiative.  “Why are we doing this?” is perhaps the first and best question you can ask before ever initiating a diversity program.

I have found that most diversity efforts start for the wrong reasons.  Some companies launch diversity initiatives because they’ve read about it in trade magazines and see that everyone else in their industry is doing it.  So you have companies launching diversity efforts merely out of wanting to be in step with the industry.  Other companies pursue a diversity initiative in response to a legal issue; this is often done in response to a corporate crisis.  When companies take on diversity as a result of pending legal action, a lot of damage has often already been done (lawsuits, bad press, and staff erosion), which make it more difficult to fully realize the goals of their program.  Some companies pursue diversity out of misplaced altruism.

At the end of the day, for many, the answer should simply include the phrase “because it’s the right thing to do.”  Beyond the current legislature that protects employees basic rights, diversity efforts indicate that a company wants to provide the best possible employment experience and values the unique contribution each individual can make.

Focusing on diversity means that your company is interested in taking the different voices, with different perspectives, backgrounds, and ideas to help you identify opportunities for continual success and growth.  A strong diversity effort also implies your company is willing to be more competitive as the world continues to evolve more into a global marketplace.  Realize that your suppliers, your communities, and your customers are changing and so must your company in order to succeed.

I think one of the critical first steps once you've asked the WHY question is to immediately create an advisory group to help communicate the rationale for creating a diversity effort. At many companies, diversity is spurred by a serious issue that needs to be addressed, like high turnover, too many unskilled workers in a specific ethnic group, or not enough gender or racial diversity at higher levels in the organization.  This advisory group can also help you communicate the business imperative for taking on diversity and can assist in developing an implementation model to roll out the initiative throughout the organization.

But first, I encourage you to seriously consider the WHY question.  If you cannot truly answer that one, then ask yourself why you're even in business at all...

Talent Management: It's Not the Same Old, Same Old Anymore...

One important skill leaders must possess in today’s volatile environment is the ability to recognize talent; particularly in a multi-racial and multi-ethnic environment of diverse talent.

One of the issues I have with most executives and senior hiring managers is that they often fail to recognize talent when it does not look like them, does not think like them and does not perform like them. Leaders often just want to reproduce themselves because they can only see value in people they think can behave that they do; and, that is who they choose to select for the next generation of leaders. 

I think a major challenge for senior leaders is to understand that clearly the world marketplace is very different from when they were moving up in their organizations.  The world is more interconnected than ever before and our newer generations of employees share vastly different values systems, capabilities and beliefs. 

Leaders need to constantly assess the true talent in their organization.  And I think the best way to start doing this is to examine the top performers in the organization and review what competencies and skills these people offer.  I think it’s also necessary to get input from others to get a realistic people of how people perform as senior leaders may not often see the day to day proliferation of capabilities.  This means a commitment to leaving your office and having conversations with people about their work and how they view others. 

If you truly don’t know who the top talent is in your company and you don’t know why they are that way, it’s going to be more difficult when you assess where you want your company to go in the next several years.  Start today by being open and willing to put aside your views of what talent is and allow others to influence you—you’ll find many surprising things about how people approach their work and innovative ways to take your company to its next level.

Leadership Transition Troubles and Self-Esteem

An recent article in the on-line edition of The Wall Street Journal speaks to the issue of executives engaged in career transition and succession planning and how many Baby Boomers are struggling to transition themselves from the executive suite and back onto the street.

The article speaks mainly to the rise in popularity of CEOs who wish to remain on payroll either due to a lack of retirement planning or simply the fear of no longer being a Very Important Person.  The piece also describes how a shift in leadership in some companies actually created chaos and resulted in the departure of several senior team members. 

What surprises me about this article is that it doesn't address the root causes of these issues: self-esteem and the lack of it. 

Face it, in corporate cultures today we place a high and unrealistic regard for our senior staff. As you move up to the top of the ladder in many places, not only do the paychecks get bigger, but also the perks, which feed on the egos of far too many a CEO who often learns to take him or herself far too seriously.  Drive into the garage of some of our larger corporations and you'll see that the entitlement begins in the parking lot: reserved spaces close to the door as if leadership shouldn't have to walk more than 20 paces to enter the castle where they rule on high. 

The open-ended expense accounts, the travel perks, the use of plush limo services, the free tickets to sporting events and sitting the company box, and the Executive restrooms all tend to feed the ego.  And the reason why so many executives are having issues concerning their pending retirement is that without the all important job title, the endless pampering and the constant care and feeding of their personalities, many leaders truly lack healthy-self esteem.  Most executives tell me that without their jobs, many of them would truly not know what to do with themselves. One CEO admitted to me that he devotes himself to work because he has no idea how to relate to his wife or children (most likely because he cannot control their fates in the same way he does for his executive team and thousands of staff!).  His identity is so closely tied with his job; he has no idea who he really is outside of his work.  This, unfortunately, is a sad reality when we scan the halls of our Fortune 1000 companies. 

While there may be major increases in technology, new and improved ways to engage customers and a surplus of ideas on how to improve businesses, there's an epidemic lack of self-esteem that begins at the top of the organization and trickles down to the front-line rank and file managers.  Think about those wonderful folks at Enron or Tycom, or America's most famous hotel diva, Leona Helmsley.  It's not that these people were ultimately too greedy or mean, it's that they all lacked healthy self-esteem and a highly imbalanced sense of self-esteem often leads to behaviors which appear cruel, vicious, and generally evil. Your self-esteem impacts your corporate policies, your culture and climate and your customer satisfaction.

Don't believe me? 

Ask the person on the other line of the phone as to why they don't sound too enthused about providing stellar customer service the next time you want to dispute a charge on your credit card bill and you might find out that some executive has administered an unrealistic policy that doesn't allow people to take rest room breaks until call volumes reach a certain level.  Ask yourself what kind of company would do that and why such a policy would exist.  You'll find you can just go the top of the organization to find out that fear, which comes from low esteem, is the culprit that induces such ridiculous policies.

There are a lot of metrics and policies and office politics that come about because someone takes their power far too seriously and feels they have to control every aspect of their people to maintain their existence at the top of the heap.  And while you might think I'm over-exaggerating, just look at how women still make less on the dollar than men do, how some organizations still can't manage their race relations, and why executives do all they can to tread lightly around the issues of domestic partner benefits for fear it's making a statement about advocating rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered employees. Dig a bit deeper and you'll find self-esteem is at the core of all these issues!

Another clue that your self-esteem might be creating some issues is to look at how much you use the word DESERVE.  People with self-esteem issues often feel as if they deserve something to make up for the lack of respect they have for themselves. Watch how often people say "I deserved that promotion more than her," "I have been here for ten years and he's only been here for five, I should be the new Director," or my personal favorite "I'm the boss around here, you do as I say and not as I do."

I suggest leaders start examining their relationship to their self-esteem every day and discover how it shows up.  One way is to ask yourself "where do I lose power in my life."  Think about your decisions and discern whether or not you're acting from a place of confidence and heart or a place of fear.  There is a difference.  You can also ask "where could I potentially be doing harm with my power."  That can be a real eye-opener for some!  The main thing is to start looking at the role your self-esteem plays in the thoughts you have, the choices you make, and the behaviors used to carry them out. And realize that this is not always easy to do--even when you're onto the notion that something now needs to change.

Self-esteem is one of the major challenges you'll ever face in your lifetime.  In fact, I think it ranks up there as one of the most important things you need to learn how to manage--even more important than having competencies such as strong interpersonal skills, decision-making abilities and a sense of vision.  Without healthy self-esteem, the rest of these are truly not possible.

Over the years I've coached a lot of clients and ultimately self-esteem is what shows up as the real issue I need to address. It is something you can learn to develop, but it requires a lot of letting go and taking on full accountability for your thoughts and actions.  And the reality is, your self-esteem will always be a moving target--you just have to learn how to engage with it in a very productive way.

Whether you're at the beginning of your leadership career or you're facing the inevitable stepping down to join the gainfully post-employed, I encourage you to spend some time with your self-esteem now and really learn how to work with it as opposed to letting it left unattended to create chaos throughout every aspect of your entire company.  That kind of succession planning only results in one thing: total extinction.