The view from the inside…

This was not the post I was planning for today; I was actually working on another one which I have now put off until another time…because today I saw something on television that really inspired me. Having a home office affords me the luxury of flexible scheduling for my work time when I am not out working at a clients’ site or facilitating training programs. And let’s face it, the truth is that sometimes I have the TV on in my office when I work…it keeps me company and I usually have something on that I don’t feel compelled to actually watch but just provides a little background noise. But today I had the Oprah show on and I was stopped in my tracks by the subject.

The title of today’s show was Undercover Boss. The show was apparently inspired by an upcoming new series on CBS of the same name premiering next week. On this Oprah show, we see two CEOs of large, well-known companies who each went undercover in their own companies posing as low level employees working along as trainees with an experienced employee. Each CEO had an alias and a cover story and headed out to learn about their company from the inside as well as learn more about their employees. I am quite certain that neither Larry O’Donnell CEO of Waste Management, nor 7-Eleven CEO Joe De Pinto had any idea how much they actually would learn from this experience. Their stories are inspirational and a lesson to every CEO out there. As for me, by the time the Oprah episode was finished tears were streaming down my face.

Each of the CEOs met regular employees in unglamorous jobs who were joyful, motivated, and inspirational and completely dedicated to their customers and their jobs. Despite the seemingly mundane nature of their work, they performed their duties at high levels and their customers loved them. But the things that the CEO’s got to see about what really happens at that level in their organizations, and the personal toll it takes on their employees was enlightening. In each situation their discoveries lead to policy changes and life changing opportunities for those unsuspecting employees – who were just being themselves in the performance of their duties and treating the undercover executives the same way as they would treat any other co-worker.

We have known for years that the higher you go in an organization, the less you hear the truth…people either tell you what they think you want to hear or they withhold the real details fearing repercussions. The concept of speaking “truth to power” is nothing new and we are all well aware of how it can be very dangerous ground on which to tread.  And in the executive suite, it is also very easy to be so far removed from where the work actually gets done – from the employees who actually touch the customers that you serve – that you lose sight of how hard and demanding the jobs can be and how decisions made in the executive suite can impact the lives and the work of those employees. This is one of the reasons that anonymous 360® feedback processes have evolved as one important tool for leaders to get real feedback and information that they can use to determine their own development needs. But I think corporate America might have just found another one. The concept is not completely new, organizations have used undercover “secret shoppers” in all kinds of organizations to try to get the real view of how their customers are treated by their employees, but I have never heard of CEO’s going undercover themselves. And seeing the actual experience on video is really powerful. I’m still not sure how they explain the presence of the video cameras but that aside…this could be a very powerful learning process for executives.

Here’s the link to more information about today’s Oprah show and the two CEOs undercover.

http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Corporate-CEOs-Go-Undercover

Robert B. Parker RIP

Parker, the former English professor who wrote in the style of crime-fiction writer Raymond Chandler, died at his home in Cambridge MA at the age of 77. Of the 60 novels Parker wrote, 37 followed a former Boston detective turned private investigator named Spenser. The Spenser novels were favorites of mine – as was the television series based on them staring Robert Urich in the title role.

Parker was a fixture in Massachusetts and most of his novels took place there. His Jesse Stone novels were set in fictional Paradise MA, a town commonly believed to be Marblehead MA. And Rosalie’s restaurant in Marblehead owes a debt of gratitude to Parker since the Spenser character in one of his novels famously said “the best restaurant in Boston is not in Boston, it’s in Marblehead and its called Rosalie’s”.  Having lived in neighboring Salem for many years, Rosalie’s was one of my favorite restaurants too. I still remember how I loved their “Pollo Francese Alla Grand Marnier” and wish I had been able to get the recipe before I moved away.

Parker’s passing is very sad…he will be missed. A friend of mine said that Parker wrote “the best chewing gum for the eyes…” and indeed he did….and so much more.

It’s a matter of trust…

Today the topic of my post is trust. Why? Because it’s so important to all of us. Trust is difficult to get and keep and harder still to repair or regain when it’s broken or lost. Yet, it’s the glue that holds everything together…all kinds of relationships; friends, lovers, organizations and family alike. It provides the foundation on which effective teams are built. It’s core to keeping employees engaged and staying with their current employers. It’s hard to get – but worth it when you do….and the absence of it causes those same relationships to erode and die.

“Trust takes time to build, seconds to lose and twice as long to regain
as it did to build in the first place”             -         Annonymous

 It takes quite a while to amass a fortune by steadily putting your spare change in a piggy bank. If you smash the bank, you have to start over with a new piggy and daily deposit of your coins. Trust is like that. It’s a function of experience over time, but when trust is betrayed or lost you go back to zero, actually, less than zero since it will take even longer to over come the skepticism created when the trust was lost.

I could go on about the life lessons that I continue to learn about trust or the lack of it, but today I want to focus on just a portion of the topic of trust – trust as a part of teams and how they work.

When we assess team effectiveness, some of the key drivers of how effective that team is – depends on the trust that the team members have for each other inside the team; that communication inside the team is open and honest, that the team members “walk their talk”, that the team needs supersede individual personal needs, and team members help and support each other. In addition, the team has to have the right leader – a leaders whose skills and capabilities are well matched with the needs of the team.

Peter Drucker said  “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

 In Patrick Lencioni’s model of team effectiveness, he uses a pyramid to show the hierarchical progression of team development in much the same way that Maslow did with his Hierarchy of Needs (1954), where each need from the bottom up must be satisfied before we can move up to the next level. In Lencioni’s model illustrating the five dysfunctions of a team, the “absence of trust” is at the base or the bottom of the pyramid…which clearly says that without trust there is no foundation on which to build the team in the first place.

Let’s hear it for Right-Brainers!

I don’t know how often you will read a book review or an endorsement here, but every once it a while I suspect I will be so moved by a book that I will feel obligated to talk about it. So here is my first…. The book is called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and it’s written by Daniel H. Pink. Pink, a former White House speech writer for Vice President Al Gore, has produced a well-researched, and entertainingly written book that explores the assertion that we are moving from the “Information Age”, characterized by Left-Brain Thinking and are moving into an age of High Concept and Touch which brings Right-Brained Thinking more into play.

Pink’s book not only takes us on a easy- to-understand examination of how the brain works, but also packs the pages with exercises and references to books, seminars and websites so that we can actively exercise our Right-Brains to be ready for the future that Pink contends is already here.

The opening paragraph to the book…“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBA’s who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning-makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

Think about the implications of this – for parents who want to equip their children for the future, for our schools and what we teach people about the skills that will be important for the next generation, or for business leaders who want to prepare for and even get ahead of the next wave. For all those you have always been right-brainers and have been made to feel “less than” by a period in time where your skills and contributions have been overlooked and undervalued, this book is for you.

A long time ago I went though series of assessments to determine if I was left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant. What I discovered is that I am one of a small number of people who is center-brained – meaning neither side was dominant. When I think about that now, I understand more about what that means and it has served me well in my current career. There are elements of my job that are very left-brained and other elements that require my right-brain skills. Well, both sides of my brain loved this book and hopefully you will too or at least it will be an enjoyable exploration into something you may not have thought about before.

Are you talking to ME?

Yes, it’s a wink and a nod to Robert De Niro. I think I still have him on my mind from seeing the most recent Kennedy Center Honors program on television last week – Mr. De Niro was one of this years honorees. But it’s a good segue to a very common missed opportunity for employers. These days every employer is concerned about employee retention and engagement. Even those who have done serious downsizing are very concerned that as soon as the job market loosens up, some of their remaining employees will go elsewhere and they will be left short staffed. Now, there are a number of factors that contribute to an employee being engaged – which we will get to in later posts – but one of the most critical elements for any employee to be able to learn, grow and develop (also critical to engagement), is being able to get helpful, usable feedback. And in a day where budgets are tight and we have to figure out how to do more with less, it’s important to note that IT’S FREE and relatively easy to master providing.

Now, here’s the interesting part. Even with the opportunities that currently exist for an employer to provide formal feedback to their employees – it still gets missed! Instead of providing feedback directly TO the employee, the employer writes ABOUT them – like they’re talking to someone else.  Take the comments on a performance review ….written in the third person….or the comments on a 360° feedback survey…written in the third person. “Sally did a great job with this years revamping of the orientation program.” Or “Bill seems to have been exactly the right choice for the sales executive position.” I’m not sure how this came about. Somehow, over the years, managers have learned that they should write ABOUT their employees and not TO THEM when they are providing formal feedback. Who are those comments for anyway?? Human Resources? The File god? Think of how much more meaningful and powerful it would have been if Sally had read this in her performance review… “…Sally, you did a great job revamping the new hire orientation program this year…”

We wouldn’t dream of using the third person voice when we’re talking directly to Sally -  then why do we do it when we’re writing a document to her to provide (what we hope is) meaningful feedback? It is a mystery to me…but very easy to remedy. I have been on this bandwagon for most of my career, so those of you who know me professionally will recognize this argument…and many of you have already converted to only using first person language when you provide feedback in any form. As for everyone else, please consider giving it a try…it will take a little getting used to, but I think you will find that the result is much more powerful feedback and trust me when I say that when you’re on the receiving end of this kind of feedback, there is no mistake that you’re talking to ME!

A brand New Year!

Well, it’s that time of year when we think more about endings and beginnings, and with this New Year we also start a brand new decade…it’s seems like only yesterday it was 1991 – a year that changed the trajectory of my life, and sometimes as the song goes “I long for yesterday”. But we can’t turn back the clock or go back to when we were younger – so we move forward…a little older and, I hope, a lot wiser and maybe even willing to share what we’ve learned with others.

2009 has been a challenging year for just about everyone…and it’s certainly been no different for me. In addition to the business challenges, I’ve lost friends and friends of friends to disease and old age, but some amazing things have happened as well – I’ve reconnected with a couple of dear friends from whom I’d gotten disconnected over the years, my grown up daughter Erin moved in with me, I’ve learned a lot this year about social networking-among other things, joined a book club and made friends with a whole new group of people, took advantage of the patches of work down time with a variety of home and garden projects and major purging of my garage, closets, kitchen cabinets and the ugliest project of all – my home office! Most of us (consultants) are packrats with work materials and that bottomless stack of articles that we just might need some time in the future – even though we might be quite fastidious in the rest of our lives. If you ask any one of us what project we dread the most, it’s probably cleaning out our office.  I’m taking a break (ahem, procrastinating) from that task right now as I write this post…but I am determined to finish before the clock strikes midnight on Dec 31^st.

Soon, it will be a brand New Year, and I for one will start it with a cleaned out workspace, a lightened load, a rested brain and a fresh new page to start on. On the work front, 2010 is already looking better than 2009 and 2008, so I am very grateful for that. And I have this brand new blog to work on and share with those of you who care to follow me and read along. I’m just learning how to do this so I’m hoping you will be tolerant, or if you’re learning too, you can be confident you’re not alone. Most of what will be here will be about leadership and lessons learned – by me and others, and those lessons sometimes come in the most interesting forms, so I hope they will serve to inform, inspire and entertain you. Don’t be surprised if there are some personal posts that show up as well. I will welcome your comments and feedback and try to take advantage of every mistake so that I can continue to learn more.

So welcome to my blog and welcome to 2010, I’m looking forward to an exciting new year. Cheers!