Creative Reaction

This excellent Talent Culture post includes a (fictitious) letter to a CEO from the perspective of an employee, who wants to be more engaged in her job. Unfortunately, the CEO hasn’t allowed this to happen. Clearly her company, like many, has gone through some difficult times. The employee truly hopes her company will thrive. The CEO needs to do a better job communicating and connecting, and the writer diplomatically offers many excellent suggestions.

If you are a Manager, CEO, or owner of a company, no matter what size, do everyone a favor and read this post! Then take a few moments to think about the measures you are taking to retain your biggest asset – talent.

Owners and Mangers, if you aspire to motivate your teams; if you need them to commit to a vision or a greater purpose, read this Simon Sinek account of “servant leadership”.

Sinek witnessed first-hand an important, yet from a strictly personnel standpoint, costly Marine Corps policy, which exemplifies their culture. The lesson?

The strength of an organization is easily measured by the steps it takes to look after its own.  To what lengths does a company go to show its people that they matter?  An organization that shows commitment to its people can expect its people to show commitment to them.

If you are having morale, motivation and turnover issues within your organization, Sinek gives us plenty to chew on.

This really interesting article by CCL popped up in the newsreader today, explaining the hidden costs of companies which insist on over-managing their employees. These are the companies which feel they need to tell their employees (grown adults, mostly) exactly how their jobs should be performed. While “process” plays an important role in certain industries, not leveraging the experience of employees is shortsighted.

Anybody who does a job eight hours a day is going to see ways in which that job could be improved or simplified…

This is particularly true for Professional Knowledge Workers, where the costs are huge:

At best, it limits growth and innovation. At worse, it solidifies inefficiencies, undermines company goals and creates an environment where employees are unmotivated and disengaged.

So be sure to give some thought to employee engagement and motivation. It is far better for everyone to be working together toward the same vision. It could very well mean the difference between success and failure.

When leaders give people control over their work, stop telling them how to do their jobs and focus on the goals, the hidden costs are replaced with numerous benefits. Employee stress goes down, absenteeism decreases and engagement goes up. Productivity improves and innovation is possible.

There’s a fair amount of debate to the question, “which offers the best learning opportunities; successes or mistakes?”

Those who say, “successes” always seem to point to “stupid” mistakes, not honest ones, to discredit the learning opportunities of failures. Create a Culture of Successful Failure at Blogging Innovation puts mistakes in context and is careful to differentiate between “honorable” failure and “incompetent” failure.

Amongst many examples, the article points to Honda’s mistakes in bringing low-powered motorcycles to the U.S. in 1959, quoting Soichiro Honda, the company’s founder:

“Many people dream of success. Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. Success represents the 1 percent of your work that results from the 99 percent that is called failure.”

Are we being so risk-averse that we are loosing ground to our competitors? Are we giving our teams the opportunities and “space” to make mistakes and to learn? Are we commending “honorable” failures? There’s plenty to think about in the article.

Laughing Your Way to the Bank by HBR’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter caught my attention a few days ago, in which she explains the importance of a sense of humor and its role in leadership.

Aside from laughter’s healing properties, which alone can transform a business, humor can be used to unlock creativity, foster trust, and counteract the destructiveness of fear and worry.

So lighten up and be more successful!

An insightful post courtesy of Psychology Today discusses “the planning fallacy”, the phenomenon where, despite our best efforts, and even with the knowledge that planning is often wrong, we still cannot plan accurately.

In Why Planning is Counter-productive, Pt II, we discussed one tactic, which is to simply start doing and skip planning altogether!

If you must plan, Psychology Today suggests the following steps:

1. consider how long it has taken you in the past,
2. identify the ways in which things might not go as planned, and
3. spell out all the steps you will need to take to get it done

All of the above will make the time needed to complete the project seem insanely long and you will be tempted to not to believe this estimate, however, you must condition yourself to think this way. This can be applied whether you are simply planning your day or a multi-departmental project.

There’s a great post over at Management-Issues, entitled Anger Doesn’t Pay, where we learn that:

“individuals who are able to recognise their negative feelings, defuse them, and then choose a more appropriate response tend to be rated as a higher performer by their colleagues and are also more satisfied with their own performance.”

While the connection of performance with leadership may not be readily apparent, keep in mind that companies are becoming more collaborative and less bureaucratic.

If you are a hot head, and you want to change your behavior, there’s hope:

“It involves training people to be aware of their thoughts and feelings and take control of their behaviour by basing their actions on values and goals rather than their internal events”

It’s a quick read. Check it out.

This simple, thought-provoking post at Signal vs. Noise should resonate with those of us who own their own businesses. At issue: debt, profit and the freedom to succeed.

We are surrounded by companies whose focus seems to be survival/hunkering down/waiting for the economy to get better. And so they lower their prices “because they have to” thus commoditizing unique services. They advertise less or not at all.They look for ways to cut costs without realizing they are withdrawing from their clients.They fear entering new markets because that might anger their vendors.

It’s time to be blunt. That doesn’t work. Their businesses will fail, gradually or suddenly.

We need to price our services based on their value and in a way that pays the bills and allows for a profit. We need to study our markets and introduce products and services that meet current and future needs. We need to leverage technology to find new efficiencies, better serve our clients, and gain a competitive advantage.

Quoting the author,

“As long as you’re beholden to other people’s money, you’re ultimately beholden to their approval.”

“Once you start thinking about how your decisions and actions might displease the men with the money, you invariably shy away from the most controversial (and best) ideas.”

It’s been said that every new business represents an attempt by its founder to reorder and improve the world in some way. If your business does not generate a profit, you will not be able to fulfill your own vision. And that’s the biggest tragedy.

(Related posts: Clients or “Grinders”, Monetize Doing What You Love)

Whitney Johnson blogs at Harvard Business Publishing about the perceptions and prejudices toward women in the workplace, and gives us much to think about.

She cites a few academic studies which confirm her own experiences in which she stood for something she clearly deserved and wasn’t treated the same way as her male colleagues.

My experience and this study indicate there can be a social cost when women negotiate. A cost that is consistent with the findings of psychiatrist Anna Fels: when we are giving something to someone else, we are feminine; when we are asking for something from someone, we are not.

A similar lesson is also presented in the excellent book Brain Rules by researcher John Medina. Both women and men have what seems to be an innate tendency to think that women who ask for something are pushy, yet men who ask for the same exact thing are not perceived that way.

Simply being aware of such perceptions and being conscious of them in our own decision-making and communication can make a big difference in our workplaces.

David Rock‘s Your Brain at Work blog explores the importance of dopamine levels in having a positive attitude and staying inspired. Managers and creatives can find a number of simple, practical suggestions, but since you probably do not want to spend your time wading through a bog of psychological wonkdom, I’ll do my best to make a pithy summary here.

Rock explains the tendency for moods to either spiral upward positively or downward negatively, and dopamine levels play a key role. Managers should pay attention to this for two reasons:

1. Higher dopamine levels correlate to positive, cheerful attitudes and
2. Higher dopamine levels are necessary for clear thinking.

According to Rock, dopamine is created in three ways;

1. Novelty – taking delight in new, often “small” things
2. Social Connections – at work and especially outside of work
3. Positive Expectations – being part of some bigger than oneself

Moods and attitudes are heavily influenced by those of others around us, so it is of utmost importance for managers to carefully guard their own attitudes and take time to be inspired. In addition, we should take a look at the above list, ensuring that our management skills and workplaces are conducive to positive, inspirational experiences.

I love this recent TED Video, which compares the leadership styles of various orchestra conductors, offering lessons for us all.

“After a decade-long conducting career in his native Israel, Itay Talgam has reinvented himself as a conductor of people in business.”  (from his Bio)

Talgam’s enthusiasm and passion are contagious. Set aside 20 minutes to watch this during your lunch break. It will be good for your soul.

This sobering Harvard Business Review article discusses the link between management and employee health, contrasting good and bad bosses, and the implications are startling.

Poor management practices can adversely affect otherwise healthy employees, raising blood pressure and increasing the level of stress hormones, setting the stage for heart attacks and strokes.

On the other hand, “a present and active manager, providing structure, information and support, counteracts destructive processes in work groups, thereby promoting regenerative rather than stress-related physiological processes in employees.”

There are  three specific behaviors you can exhibit to both reduce stress and lower the risk of heart disease in your employees:

1. giving information and sufficient control to employees in relation to their responsibilities
2. thoroughly explaining goals and subgoals and
3. effectively pushing through and carrying out changes

Read these carefully. Your management skills quite literally make a life or death difference.

Marshall Goldsmith offers some excellent advice over at Harvard Business Publishing, and while the post focuses on CEO transitions both good and bad, the broader message is one of successful transitions at every level within a business.

Small businesses may write this off as a concern only for large corporations, which would be a mistake. The continuation of vision is an important issue for businesses of all sizes.

Quoting Marshall, “You have a vision for the company. After putting in years to make this vision a reality, you find it important that your vision continue after you leave. By developing an internal successor, you can be assured your vision will be carried out after you depart.”

I would argue that succession planning is most important for a business in which success is largely dependent upon its culture or in which all the employees are working for a goal greater than themselves. If your company meets one or both of theses criteria, you certainly have something worth preserving!

Mike Myatt of Blogging Innovation has heard way too much about Equality & Team Building, the idea “that for teams to be productive, employees have to feel ‘empowered’ by having an equal voice”. In fact, he calls this “ridiculous”.

“Whether you look at athletic teams, military teams, executive teams, management teams, technical teams, design teams, functional teams, or any other team, you’ll find that the best of the best have structure, a hierarchy of leadership, a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and expectations, clear and open lines of communication, well established decisioning protocol, and many other key principals, but nowhere is equality found as a key success metric for teams.”

“Great leaders and highly productive organizations always focus on team building as a key priority”, says Myatt. If you want to be an effective leader of a productive company, read his post.

Much has been written about the transformation from an industrial/manufacturing economy to one of knowledge-based work, and yet many of our management practices cling to the past, especially in the way employees are motivated and compensated. In this TED Video, Daniel Pink discusses the “mismatch between what science knows and what business does”.

As it turns out, financial incentives are OK for mechanical and methodical tasks, but for for jobs where creativity and cognitive skills are required, such “extrinsic” motivators can actually dull creativity. For jobs where there are no clear methods and where every task requires a creative approach, the only worthwhile motivations are those that are intrinsic. Unless your employees understand their purpose, and work for a cause larger than themselves, it doesn’t matter how much money you pay for their talent; you won’t get their best.

(And boy did I grin when Pink mentioned “Results-Only Work Environments” and Google’s “20% Time”, both of which have been covered here at Creative Reaction.)

Managers and owners, your business’ survival depends upon you watching this 18:36 presentation. Schedule a time and a place to watch it. You’ll be glad you did.