Management Craft

Two Ways to Think About Who You Are This New Year's Eve

As we jet into 2011, here are a couple of thoughts for how you can focus and frame your purpose and goals. First, what do you want to me known for? Simple but not-so-simple question. I was reading in the current Success Magazine about Ron Howard - amazing nice guy. Made me think about what I wanted to be known for. I want to be known as being generous with my time and support. What about you?

And here is a short but punchy post from Dan Pink called, There are two kinds of people in the world... Check it out and decide who you will be.

I hope you have a GREAT 2011.

Misguided Social Construction - Be Careful What You Talk Yourself and Others Into

Do leaders believe that the incentives they use will actually work? Maybe not, or not in the way we would expect - to improve performance. Check out this study from Harvard's (Emeritus) Michael Beer and Nancy Katz published in Human Resource Planning called Do Incentives Work? The Perceptions of a Worldwide Sample of Senior Executives. This is not a new study (from 2003), but still interesting and relevant. Here is a quote from the abstract:

"Our survey of 205 executives from many countries investigates their perceptions of the causes and consequences of using executive incentives. The most important reason cited for instituting bonuses is that bonuses motivate. At the same time, executives believe incentives only improve performance slightly, if at all. A more likely explanation for the use of bonuses may be to attract and keep executives; executives use theories about motivation as rhetoric to justify their actions. We also find evidence that the belief in executive incentives is a social construction, more prevalent among U.S. managers than among managers from Europe and Asia."

The bolded sentence is my emphasis. Like the power of placebos, conversations can create a powerful reality. We talk ourselves into actions, beliefs, and approaches. Sometimes coversations serve our goals, sometimes they don't. But what are the ramifications of widespread socially constructed realities that are not valid or helpful or accurate? Where might this be showing up where you work?

Need more examples?

• How about the value of performance appraisals? Lots of social construction here!
• Using SMART goals? Millions of managers mantra this approach.
• Some of you might think your organiation's evaluation of how well leaders model the values and mission are "truths" born from misguided social construction.

Remember the Emperor's New Clothes?

Managing Engagement - Oxymoron? #engagement

I love this post by Mike Cook over at Human Capital League called, A New Year's Wish List for Employee Engagement Professionals. Personally, I think every manager and leader ought to consider him/herself an employee engagement professional - but not in the way you might think.

Mike's post is a sassy and irreverent take on employee engagement systems, initiatives and measures. I love his thinking here, please do check it out.

Ironically, I was talking to a client yesterday about the conundrum of overmanaging engagement systems. This organization does a great job creating systems and regimens that increase manager to employee touch points. The system increases the NUMBER of touch points, but it cannot increase how connected and cared for employees feel. In fact, systems might hurt more than they help if managers focus on checking off the boxes to comply with the standards of the system versus waking up each day asking themselves how they can be most helpful, catalytic, fun, and inspiring. Or how they can model their passion for the work and mission. Instead of thinking about how to get employees engaged, perhaps our focus ought to be on how to be a more engaging leader.

As I read the paragraph above, I decided to underline all the words that should become "suspect" if they come up in a meeting to discuss engagement. Add to the list: communication meetings, competency, engagement goals, strategic initiative, and expectations.

#Leadership is a Contact Sport by @CoachGoldsmith

Marshall Goldsmith sent me a link to his wonderful article (co-authored by Howard Morgan) from Strategy + Business called, Leadership is a Contact Sport. Do you know the power of following up? (Hint - massive) Check out and share the article, it is very interesting. Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

"Leadership, it’s clear from this research, is a relationship. And the most important participants in this relationship are not the coach and the “coachee.” They are the leader and the colleague."

"In a way, our work reinforces a key learning from the Hawthorne studies. These classic observations of factory workers at suburban Chicago’s Western Electric Hawthorne Works, which Harvard professor Elton Mayo made nearly 80 years ago, showed that productiv- ity tended to increase when workers perceived leadership interest and involvement in their work, as evidenced by purposeful change in the workplace environment."

It is quite interesting to me that Marshall just sent me this link... I have been talking about the Hawthorne studies a lot lately and a mention of it will pop up in some research I am doing on new approaches to talent management systems.... Small, small, world.....Attention is amazing medicine...

 

50 Top Leadership Blogs

Here is another "Best of" List that can help find awesome bloggers and posts that will provide you with great New Year inspiration. Check out the list of top 50 leadership blogs and put these folks in your aggregators. I am pleased that Management Craft made the list under the "leadership and management" category.

20 Best Biz Blog Posts for 2010 #TMbythenumbers

Blogger Dan McCarthy was asked by DDI to put together a list of the 20 best business blog posts. Click here to check out all the great writers and posts. I am very pleased to have one of my posts included on the list.

Not only are these posts great, these are the bloggers you should be following.

Check it out and enjoy!

Are you a wolverine about your goals?

At the BizBook Lab, and phrase "he's a wolverine" or "she's a wolverine" has come up in conversation several times. What does it mean to be a wolverine? The way we are using it in the class is to describe people who ensure they get to their goal by doing anything possible. They don't give up and they are driven.

Wolverines make success happen through extreme focus, high energy, and proactive resilience. Would people describe you as being this driven? What about your team members - how resolute and proactive do they think you are?

As we roll toward the new year, it is something to think about. What's important enough to you that you might show this level of focus and drive? As managers, we cannot expect our employees to be more driven and engaged than we are or are perceived to be - it is up to us to set the initial bar high enough to illuminate and inspire excellence.

Heading to a Pow Wow Workshop Meet Up Think Tank

I am in the Salt Lake City airport, heading to Portland to attend the BizBook Lab. I am looking forward to thinking A LOT, creating, and having some great conversations.  My expectations are that it will feel more like a weekend workshop than a conference and more like a meet up than a meeting. And because it is also about sharing my "songs" with the "earth" (word with readers) it will also feel a bit Pow-Wowy, I think. There are some really smart people teaching and attending, so it might even be like a business book think tank.

What a great combination of experiences! Let's call it the PWWMUTT. And this got me thinking.... Why not have a PWWMUTT at your workplace?

• People dread meetings but LOVE meet-ups.
• Conferences are often boring but workshops and think tanks get our mental juices flowing.
• Pow Wows are exciting, fun, and cathartic.

I bet there is an important business opportunity or problem that would offer a perfect opportunity to use a PWWMUTT. Give it a try. If you are a manager, start the year off with a bang with a departmental PWWMUTT. Here are a few distinctions:

• Keep the group small.
• Set high - revolutionary - goals (for the type of experience, not a prescriptive agenda, that is a meeting) and get people thinking before the event.
• Invite the right people - smart, engaged, and diverse.
• Expose your group to some fresh ideas and thinking - heck, ask each of them to bring fresh ideas in with him or her.
• Facilitate informal but great dialogue.
• Use several formats within the PWWMUTT to change things up and allow people to build relationships.
• Gather and discuss the right topics! Something that matters. Something people care about.

I will let you know how my PWWMUTT goes. Will you do the same?

Work/Life Balance Not So Important?

I am doing some research and came across this interesting study published in the Journal of Management and Organization called, "Work–life balance or work–life alignment? A test of the important os work-life balance for employee engagement and intention to stay in organizations." Louise Parkes and Peter Langford assessed 16,000 Australian employees. Here is a brief snippet from the abstract:

"We also explored how individual and organisational variables were related to work–life balance aiding further development of theory integrating work with other aspects of life. Results showed that of 28 organisational climate factors, work–life balance was least related to employee engagement and intention to stay with an organisation."

Fascinating results that might seem a bit counterintuitive. The factors that ranked toward the top of the list (out of the 28) included:

• Change an innovation
• Mission and values
• Rewards and recognition
• Organization objectives
• Involvement
• Career opportunities
• Leadership
• Customer Satisfaction

By the way, also near the bottom of the list along with work/life balance was teamwork, facilities, and talent. All of these factors are positive and important and help improve the workplace, but it is interesting to contemplate the relative differences in impact to engagement and juxtapose these findings with our assumptions and practices.

Do these results surprise you? I am not surprised that work/life balance ranked near the bottom because very few highly engaged people I talk to seem to be focused on this (less engaged employees seem more interested in this). I am also not surprised by the relative importance of change and innovation and find that most of my clients are struggling with the pace of change combined with a need for greater innovation.

Another quote from the study that gives us a good bottom-line perspective:

"By comparison, aspects of the organisation such as effective change management and belief in the mission and values of the organisation were strongly correlated with engagement."

You can get the entire paper here (there is a fee). How could you use this information to start a fresh conversation about how to best engage and retain your talent?

Is HR Inert? Should we design HR systems with this belief in mind? #HR

OK, the word "inert" might be a bit dramatic, but here is the gist of the idea. I was talking to a very smart man recently and he said something that I know but had not thought about much.

The day-to-day life of an employee has little to do with HR.

Simple thought, I know, but so true. And perhaps quite profound. If we were to design best practices based on this little idea, what might that mean? I think it might change how we define HR, talent management, and all the other sub-set buzz words out there for HR type stuff.

The first personnel departments came from two primary places. 1) The need to work with emerging labor unions. 2) To help busy visionary leaders test and manage their theories that great workplaces were also more productive and profitable. In both cases, HR was born from a managerial function.

So what if we looked at it this way again? More like a part of management and leadership versus a separate function or purpose. Great HR is critical and makes a difference. But let's not kid ourselves that it is anywhere as influential in the overall retention and engagement of talent as the day-to-day workplace and management culture. How ought this idea impact how HR professionals spend time?