Posts filed under ‘Leadership Development’
The Cost of Incivility
Alex Pollock
The world of college football recently reminded us of the impact an individual’s behavior can have on the health and culture of an entire organization.
In their book, “The Cost of Bad Behavior,” authors Christine Pearson and Christine Porath highlight how destructive a particular type of bad behavior, “incivility,” is to American business. As many as 48 percent of employees experience incivility at work at least once per week, the authors say, arguing that the problem is more than just a minor inconvenience: it’s a “largely preventable ill that begs to be addressed.” Employees who experience incivility intentionally lowered their productivity, cut back work hours, lost respect for their bosses, put in minimal acceptable effort and sometimes even left their jobs- all because of disrespectful words and deeds, according to the authors. Workplace incivility comes in many forms and includes:
- Shutting someone out of a network or team
- Setting others up to look bad
- Spreading rumors about colleagues
- Leaving snippy voice mail messages
- Talking down to others
- Taking credit for the work of others
- Making demeaning or derogatory remarks
- Being aloof
- Belittling the work of others
- Using emails to send personal information instead of spending face-to-face time
- Failing to return messages
Civility takes time and effort. It’s not just about being “nice” but it’s about mutual respect. Some of the desired behaviors include:
- Assume positive regard
- Listen eagerly without interrupting
- Seek out and integrate diverse perspectives when making a decision
- Never act in a way that could be perceived as threatening or intolerant
- Maintain objectivity when conflict arises
- Be approachable to all people
- “Serve” rather than waiting to be “served”
How is all of this making you feel? Not sure? What can you add from your experiences? Do you need to add more civility to your mix? Begin by asking those around you a few questions like:
- Do I behave respectfully to all around me?
- Do I treat those on whom I closely rely better than I treat others?
- Do I keep control of my emotions regardless of the pressures I’m facing?
- Do I take out my frustrations on those who have less “power” than me?
I’m humbled by the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not believe that you can possibly escape the reward of your action.” Let’s make sure we’re excited about getting our reward.
Can engaged employees transform the U.S. economy?
Alex Pollock
Now that the world population has surpassed the seven billion marker, the “sustainability” word is getting lots of play once again. The call-to-action bugles are again warning us of a pending global catastrophe. What could suddenly create “worldwide peace, global well-being and extraordinary advancement in human development?”
In a new book, “The Coming Jobs War,” author Jim Clifton says a solution is the appearance of a whopping 1.8 billion “good” jobs. These are jobs that provide at least 30 hours of work per week and a steady pay check. Clifton believes that the country that can best achieve job growth coupled with GDP growth will be the dominant world force.
Can the United States be this global force?
Clifton believes the explosion of entrepreneurship that GDP growth requires won’t happen here until the country doubles its number of “engaged” employees: those who are using their talents every day, yielding great results, emotionally committed and are working consistently with high energy and enthusiasm.
This number currently stands at 28 percent nationally. Going from 30 million to 60 million engaged workers will “change the face of America more than any leadership institution, trillions of stimulus dollars, or any law or policy imaginable,” Clifton argues.
But as long as “one in five U.S. managers are “dangerously lousy,” these “high-energy workplaces” will elude us, Clifton says. “Fire all lousy managers today” is an imperative, he argues, because nothing fixes bad managers: not coaching, competency training, incentives or warnings. In his experience “bad managers never get better.”
What’s your reaction to his analysis? Clearly there is an opportunity for each of us is to contribute to the creation of these attractive “high energy workplaces” where we willingly give our best every day. We just can’t just afford to be a passive observer on this one.
Bad Hiring Decisions Haunt Good People
Alex Pollock
Why do bad hiring decisions haunt good people? I’m involved in making an important leadership staffing decision as I write and I’ve researched some of the latest thinking to help minimize the potential for a poor staffing decision and thus prevent the long term damage that it causes.
I’ve been guided in the past by the timeless “3 C’s” of character, competency and chemistry, but I wonder if I can embellish this based on recent research. I found the work of Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran in the book, “Why are we Bad at Picking Good Leaders” (2011) most useful. They described what they feel are the essential attributes of effective leadership under the headings of:
- Integrity: the foundational attribute, honest, ethical
- Empathy: feel with people, social savvy, combined with integrity drives trust
- Emotional Intelligence: evident self mastery skills: “know yourself, control yourself, and improve yourself.”
- Vision: forward-thinking with a sense of possibility and wonder, innovative
- Judgment: focus on the important while seeing the “big picture”, take decisive action
- Courage: the ability to “act with grace under pressure”
- Passion: the drive to achieve, learn and master
In hiring decisions I’ve been encouraged to do my homework by the axiom “ You will get what someone has already gotten… no excuse for surprises.” I found the techniques that Cohn and Moran suggest, such as scenario discussions to be most useful for determining whether a candidate does indeed possess the desired attributes or not.
Help me out please. Have you ever made a poor hiring decision? What lessons can you share from the experience? What attributes do you view as important for leaders to possess and what techniques to you use to assess competency during the recruiting process?
Ergonomic Success Requires Leadership
Walt Rostykus
Over the years, I’ve met environment, health and safety (EHS) managers who are convinced that by driving safety and ergonomics through a grassroots approach, some day the initiative will catch on with supervisors, managers and company leaders as an infectious commitment.
“If you build it, he will come” may have worked for Ray Kinsella in the movie “Field of Dreams”, but let’s get real folks: This approach is a shot in the dark for quickly and effectively improving and sustaining safety and performance in the workplace.
Indeed, the key elements of leadership in maintaining an effective and sustainable ergonomic improvement process are no different than those of an EHS system, company culture, or any other aspect of a business. The bottom line is that leadership must occur from the top.
A wise person once noted, “What interests my manager motivates me.” This is the key to leading a safety and ergonomics process over time. Think about it: At work your priorities and activities are guided by how your manager tracks and measures your performance. It is our experience that when managers, engineers, supervisors and employees have a clear understanding of their involvement in the effort to improve workplace ergonomics (and they are held accountable to those expectations), effective workplace changes are made.
Yet leading an ergonomics process is not usually intuitive to many in top management roles. As an EHS manager, however, you are in a position to coach top management on the few things they need to do; simply put, they need to hold their direct reports accountable for ergonomics performance (see my prior blog on effective goals and metrics for ergonomics). The four most important things they can do to make sure this happens are:
- Set clear expectations (responsibilities, goals, roles, targets)
- Provide people with the resources, tools and training they need to meet their responsibilities
- Visibly and actively monitor and track progress
- Take action when expectations are not met
Fortunately this four-step approach is not foreign to managers and supervisors. They follow some form of these steps to complete work, build widgets and manage production. Leaders in safety should apply the same approach (accountability) to influence, guide and lead their organization to success. It’s all about planning, managing and following through.
Kurt, my climbing instructor from several decades ago, was a great illustration of how not to lead by example. His immortal words “Do as I say, not as I do” sent a mixed message. While he told us to wear the correct helmet and always climb while belayed, he climbed bare-headed and without a lifeline. He was technically knowledgeable, but clearly not a leader.
On the contrary, Dave Packard, Bill Hewlett and Bob Hall were true leaders, who set expectations for performance (including safety) and held people, including general managers, accountable for the quality and safety of their workplace.
Whether you base your company ergonomics program on Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) models, the Safety Management System, lean manufacturing or continuous improvement, strong and visible leadership by people in top management is critical for ensuring that engineers design tools to fit the first time; employee teams reduce exposure to work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD) risk factors before injuries occur; and that employees adjust their own work stations to best fit them.
If improving ergonomics is a priority for your organization, does your top management team lead by example? Have they set performance expectations, goals, and clear roles? Do they track performance?
If not, what have you done to best prepare them to lead?
More Pay is Not the Way
Alex Pollock
As I write, the storm clouds are gathering around the already sputtering national and global economies. Companies are reacting to this stiffening headwind by toying with the idea of re-engineering initiatives, requiring even more effort from employees while reducing spending, including employee compensation packages.
With employee engagement levels still stalled in many organizations from the 2008-2009 recession, how can we best motivate employees, who are, after all, our greatest resource?
“Current research seems to suggest a mismatch between what science knows and what business does,” Daniel Pink writes in his book, ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’. What do we know for sure?
- We are internally motivated to learn, create and better our world
- Coaxing us with external rewards and threatening us with punishment demotivates
- Goals we set for ourselves are positive, while those that are thrust upon us can have negative effects
- Higher pay does not guarantee greater engagement
- We yearn to be treated ‘fairly’
- Extrinsic rewards should be unexpected and offered after the task is complete
- Praise and useful feedback are much less damaging than cash and trophies
- People who are intrinsically motivated are better coworkers
I’m challenged by Pink’s thought that “effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.”
What has been your experience with finding ways to keep yourself and coworkers motivated and committed to your organization? Do you agree that “more pay is not the way”?
Are You a Victim of Network Inbreeding?
Pat Perry
Are you a victim of inbreeding…network inbreeding, that is?
Herminia Ibarra, a blogger for Harvard Business Review, describes an inbred network like this:
“For the past fifteen years, I have asked the executives I teach to list the people with whom they have discussed important work matters over the past few months. Then, I ask them to fill out a grid in which they identify who knows whom among the people on that list. Invariably, most of the people they talk to also know and talk to each other. This kind of network, while cozy and cohesive, is, simply put, inbred. It also tends to be internal, operational (not strategic), and historical, an artifact of the executive’s past work history and not his or her future possibilities. It turns out that this kind of network is also deadly for collaboration.”
I believe it is a common trap many, if not all, of us fall into quite unconsciously. We are comfortable with our own, we want to relate with others who share the same challenges. But what we are inadvertently doing is narrowing our perspective and the ability to gather different thoughts to forge truly new ideas. According to Ibarra, it’s especially beneficial for us to diversify our thinking by interacting with professional from all levels of experience.
“The research is clear,” she writes. “For a more innovative and profitable result over time you are better off with a mix of newcomers and old-timers.”
I particularly liked her suggestion to spend time with younger professionals because I think we often overlook the value of the emerging leaders among us. Changing our habits could do more than help us become more comfortable with social media; it might help us better prepare our companies for the leaders of tomorrow.
Think about it. What does your network look like? Do you have a well-diversified network, or not? What are some of the surprising professional insights you’ve gained from those outside your usual network?
Pat Perry is President of the NAEM Board of Directors. Follow her on Twitter at @pitterpatperry.
Staying Connected
Megan Lu
Every Friday, I, along with every PG&E employee, receive an e-mail from the CEO. It provides a link to the CEO’s blog in which he shares the issues that are on his mind – issues and challenges facing the company, how we’re going to rise to meet them. He also recognizes employees and teams for their successes.
The title of the e-mails (and the blog) is always the same: “Staying Connected”. When I first joined PG&E I thought that was a clever play on words; after all, we are a utility. It’s our business to help people “stay connected”. Recently, during a particularly busy day at the office, it occurred to me that “staying connected” isn’t something that’s only applicable to the CEO.
During the course of a typical business day, I have interactions with many people.
- Working with my direct reports. We update each other on current hot topics, what progress has been made on projects, what steps were to come next, with whom we had to partner, how we are going to communicate and where we are going as team.
- Meeting my internal business clients. I meet with the leadership teams of my internal client business groups regularly. We talk about their issues, how Environmental Operations can help them face those challenges. I also provide updates on new requirements their team may have to comply with in the near future, and work with them to achieve compliance.
- Working with a cross-departmental team. We were pulled together to address a concern by one of our external customers. Before our initial meeting, there’s a flurry of e-mails to prepare. What message would we send? How do we send it? How do we address their concerns? What do we need to do before we meet?
- Maintaining external/agency relationships. There are meetings coming up with some regulatory agencies to review the work done to date on plans to be submitted for their approval. We confer internally to go over questions, options and expected questions. Then, we make sure we provide open, transparent and clear communications with the agency to demonstrate our commitment to compliance and doing the right thing.
- A former colleague contacts me via LinkedIn. We exchange e-mails and catch up on what’s happened since we worked together. It’s always great to keep in touch; plus those former colleagues are always valuable resources when I’m trying to solve a particularly difficult issue.
As environmental professionals, it’s imperative for us to keep the communication flow going in order for us to be successful at what we do. At the end of the day, it’s clear that “staying connected” is a significant portion of my job. I “stay connected” over the phone, face to face, by e-mail and by social media.
How do you stay connected?
Megan Lum is Manager of Environmental Operations, Shared Facilities for Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
Would you fire your boss?
Alex Pollock
I recently read that 24 percent of employees in the United States would fire their bosses. Does this surprise you?
Well, workplace engagement research supports that if workers feel their supervisor cares about them as a person they aren’t as likely to want to fire them. Is this problem limited to the U.S. workplace? I don’t think so.
Gallup studies of 4.5 million employees in 112 countries indicate that fewer than one in every two employees feels strongly that they have a supervisor who cares about them as a person. With data now showing a link between workplace stress and medical issues such as coronary heart disease, “organizations need to take the workplace environment and the quality of employee/manager relationships seriously, because the health of employees may have an enormous effect on the bottom line in lost productivity, absenteeism and insurance costs’” according to Dr Jim Harter, Chief Scientist in Gallup’s workplace management practice. (From the book “Decade of Change”)
What’s your reaction to this research? Are we just bad at picking good supervisors and managers or is the issue more complex? With all the efforts to appear “green” and globally sensitive to the outside world, do companies now need to dedicate effort at regaining the hearts of their employees? With all the talk recently about reinventing and reinvigorating the American economy it seems to me that upping employee engagement would be a great place to start. What do you think?
Round pegs, square holes: Making room for creative people in the workplace
Alex Pollock
I recently started thinking about innovation during my recent dive into the important contributions Scots have made to intellectual progress between the 18th and 20th century. From science (James Watt) and philosophy (David Hume) to literature (Robert Louis Stevenson), medicine (Alexander Fleming) and commerce (John McAdam), creativity and innovation abounded. Why?
What are the elements that unleash the creative talents? And how can we nourish and appreciate creative talents in our workplaces?
According to Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, authors of “Mobilizing Minds,” “most companies today were designed for the 20th century. By remaking them to mobilize the mind power of their 21st century workforces, these companies will be able to tap into the presently underutilized talents, knowledge, relationships and skills of their employees which will open up for them new opportunities but also vast sources of wealth.”
The outdated practices the authors refer to include operating systems designed for semi-skilled workers, such as detailed work process, ineffective incentive programs and demotivating performance evaluation systems focused on goods and services rather than ‘continuously delighting the client.’
Author Stephen Denning argues that suppressing creativity poses long-term risks. In his book, “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management,” he writes that “the fact that current management practices prevent a full human flourishing is in itself an economic, management, social and moral problem of the first order.”
Yet calling for employees to be more innovative and creative in cultures that have suppressed “human flourishing” is demanding the impossible.
Could this be part of the reasons breakthrough “sustainability” solutions are proving to be so elusive? What do you think about the role of creativity in the workplace? What do you think we need to do to encourage fresh thinking?
