2010 May

About LWD: The goal of this weekly newsletter is to bring to the fore quality articles –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those I follow on Twitter, and/or members of the Employee Engagement Network.

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3 Types of Employee Engagement Advocates: Which type are you? by CV Harquail

In a very thought provoking post, CV explores three different philosophies in the practice of employee engagement. Gains in employee engagement benefit both the individual employee, and the organization they work for, but what if the benefit is not balanced? People are very sensitive to perceptions of fairness, and this imbalance could be a huge barrier to improving the level of engagement. In CV’s taxonomy, the three categories of engagement advocates includes:

The Pollyadam/Pollyana – The practitioner that “expects that offering more meaning and fulfillment to the individual in exchange for more productive effort from that individual has no inherent conflicts. It’s a win-won for both employees and employer.”
The Transactionalist “doesn’t care about potential conflicts for the employees and the organization. The Transactionalist may or may not see the potential downsides for employees, and s/he may or may not see how Employee Engagement can be used in an exploitative way.”
The Tempered Radical “sees not only the inspiring promise of Employee Engagement for both employees and organizations but also the reality of poorly executed, cynically motivated initiatives…The ultimate goal of a Tempered Radical is not just an engaged workforce that finds meaning in work, or a company made productive through inspired effort, but a work/business environment that leads to flourishing across economic, social, and personal systems.”

The article, and the great dialogue in the comments, provided me with a more nuanced view of engagement practitioner ideology (conscious or not), and how important it is to be clear –with yourself, at least– on where you stand. If your goal is to make a lasting positive impact on organizations, you must help leaders understand that increased engagement can only be sustained if the employees share in the benefits as well.

This is awfully tricky, as each employee is bound to interpret these benefits through their own lens; this is why I see the key to engagement as being built on the front lines, in the relationship between manager and employee.

The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity by Austin Carr

So far LDW has focussed on the best articles that could be found each week on the topics of leadership and engagement, but we will depart from this mode to burn Fast Company in effigy.

First, to their defence, they are reporting on a ‘study’ by IBM and clearly state that this is the CEO’s perspective, and ‘integrity’ (52%) comes in a close second to ‘creativity’ (60%). It is really the IBM study that is doing the real damage here.

It was pretty clear that the article had struck a negative chord with their readership, the indignant comments came fast a furious. Many of them centred on integrity being usurped by any other attribute, and some went as far to suggest this is why NA business is in decline. Some focussed on the technical validity of a study, where the CEO’s were not asked to rank THE most important trait, instead rank a list, and others thought the study “comparable to asking kids what is important for lunch with the majority answering candy and ice cream.”

For your easy reference, here were the top 5 responses from CEO’s when asked what were the “most important leadership qualities over the next 5 years”:

@60% – Creativity
@53% – Integrity
@35% – Global Thinking
@30% – Influence
@28% – Openess (sic)

From an ‘integrity’ standpoint, things get even worse when you go abroad: “For example, in North America, 65% of CEOs think integrity is a top quality for tomorrow’s leaders, whereas only 29-48% of CEOs in other territories view it as such.” Time to put your investment money under the mattress folks!

So why do I and others take issue with integrity not taking top spot? The best research I have come across so far on the most important leadership attributes comes from Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman in their great book The Extraordinary Leader, where they characterize leadership capability with a tent metaphor. The volume of the tent represents the quantity of leadership capability, and they found that ‘character’ (where integrity fits) is so important to leadership capability, they made it the central tent pole, meaning that without character, there is no leadership. The poles at the corners represent “leading organizational change”, “interpersonal skills”, “personal capability”, and “focus on results”. ‘Creativity’ certainly plays in several of those, but people follow those that show strong character first, and a lack of character can undermine everything else. If you want to read more from Zenger, here is an interview.

How to Lead Without Saying a Word by John Baldoni (Note: This content is available for subsribers of the Harvard Business Review online or print version.)

I can’t imagine how Mr. Baldoni resisted the urge to entitle this article “What Leaders Need: More Bacon” (you’ll have to read the article for the punchline of that joke)!

A leader’s body language, and facial expressions, speak volumes; but as the article points out “…too often non-verbal cues are displayed to the wrong effect, that is, to display distraction, disregard or even distaste. Those in charge, especially those in very senior positions, must be careful not only with their words but with their body language.”

The author provides some good advice on how to avoid non-verbal pitfalls:

Practice relaxing your facial muscles in the mirror: You have to walk the line between looking ‘botoxed’ and appearing too intense or unapproachable, relaxing the facial muscles is key. I might even go as far to suggest video taping of a session you are leading to see how your expressions and body language may not match your intentions.
Invite inspection: You may find others to be in a better position to express how you are coming across. The author suggests feedback is particularly useful after meetings with intense discussions.
Keep your powder dry: Passion has its place, but use it strategically. If discussions are getting particularly intense, it may better serve the organization for the leader to maintain quiet confidence; only speaking calmly and with conviction when you have something of real substance to add.

Omissions? If you think I have missed a really good article in the area of Employee Engagement & Leadership, there is always next week! Drop me a line in the comments below

Mentoring, Coaching, Motivating, Inspiring, etc. Setting up mentoring relationships in organizations used to be a lot of work; HR had to find the time, or perhaps a specific ‘leadership development’ function. With many inexpensive or free off-the-shelf options to create social networks within an organization, there is no good reason to exclude any employee that wants a mentor, wants to mentor, or both.

With the addition of some supplementary materials to help create a good mentor-mentee relationship (yes, mentee is a real word, even if my computer’s dictionary doesn’t like it), this can foster great internal networking, personal growth and a boost in engagement. That said, these traditional mentor-mentee arrangements aren’t for everyone.

I recently discovered a few new flavours of mentorship, that I thought I would share:

In a great article called ‘Mentoring Millennials‘, Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd discuss several alternative approaches to the traditional mentor-mentee arrangement. Their summary is driven by the new organizational dynamics created by the large cohort of Millennials entering the workforce, and their propensity for being ‘attention sponges’ (hey, you grow up with video games and see what happens to your need for instant feedback!). For our purposes, I am presenting some of the methods they detail as alternatives to the traditional approach.

Reverse Mentoring

“This approach shifts the responsibility for organizing mentoring to line employees, who learn from senior executives by mentoring them.” I heard of a similar concept where parents would bring their kids to work to help teach them about the internet. I like this approach because it creates a win-win situation for all the parties involved. Mentor-mentee relationships always result in this win-win (IMHO) but often the more senior individual is challenged by the many activities that suck up their time. This way, the senior person can address some of the ‘below the line’ things that aren’t getting done (learning about a new technology, new process, whatever…) while the junior person gets to benefit from the feedback, and the relationship they create with someone further up the ladder.

Group Mentoring

“Using an online platform, one mentor can work with several mentees at a time—sometimes in different locations—on skills like generating sales leads or leading teams. The circles take advantage of platform features such as community forums, document-sharing spaces, group polling, and calendars that announce events and mentor availability.” This form of mentoring is actually enabled by the new social networking tools I mentioned a the start of this article. Because this form of mentoring can be topic-based, and get input from several potential mentors, it may be really well suited for people who are desiring mentorship of more of a technical nature, instead of the ‘soft skills’ mentorship often associated with the typical relationship.

The HBR.org article also discusses a couple of other methods that sound more like sales pitches for specific tools, so I’ll let their marketing departments share them with you. They include “Anonymous Mentoring” and “Mentoring with [Twitter-like] Micro-feedback“. In general, I found the article very valuable and worth a read (if a subscriber) or a paid reprint.

One more I wanted to add that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the HBR.org article:

Peer Mentoring or ‘Coaching’

The traditional mentor-mentee relationship, or the ‘reverse mentoring’ approach mentioned above, suggest that there should be some kind of separation in the hierarchy between the mentor and the mentee; I have found this to be entirely unnecessary. Some of my best personal experiences as a mentor have come when mentoring (or coaching if you need another word) people who were pretty much a lateral when it came to the hierarchy and/or years of experience. Especially in large organizations, the variety of experiences that people in two different parts of the organization can have can be quite drastic, and much can be learned from sharing those different experiences. This can also be a great outlet for an individual who clearly wants to move into a management role, and may need a trial run –because of lack of opportunity or maturity– as a mentor before making that move.

Hopefully you have come away with some new ideas on how to look at mentorship!