2010 June

About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.

You can also subscribe to the RSS Feed for LWD.

The Runaway General by Michael Hastings

I was reviewing this great article to identify the leadership attributes of Stanley McChrystal (the “general who sleeps 4 hours a night and eats one meal a day”) for LWD, before this very article got him fired.

I was really impressed with the candour that McChrystal and his men used with each other, but this same candour became the general’s downfall. The ‘badass’ nature that served McChrystal so well as commander of the special operations forces, killed his career when it didn’t mesh with the high-profile role as commander of all US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. As I read the article, I didn’t even notice when he had crossed the line-that-shall-not-be-crossed by a US general: insubordination of civilian rule.

There was a LOT of coverage of what became a huge human resources and foreign policy issue for Obama. Does Obama fire his top Afghan commander, risking even more turmoil in an already complex conflict, or does he risk sending a message that a military commander may be untouchable because of his importance to the mission? In the end Obama had no choice, in a true Democracy, the military can never be seen as contesting civilian authority.

The Afghanis had a very hard time understanding all the fuss, as I am sure did the Pakistanis, for they don’t really understand or practice true democracy; They have a long tradition of military rulers regularly usurping power from anyone that may be elected by the citizens. To protect McChrystal, Hamid Karzai went as far to say (via his spokesman) “[Karzai] believes that Gen. McChrystal is the best commander that NATO and coalition forces have had in Afghanistan over the past nine years”.

All that said, McChrystal’s unfortunate demise will obscure many of his positive leadership attributes. But not here at LWD! What can we learn from General Stanley McChrystal:

Candour helps build strong loyal teams, but candour has its place: McChrystal’s candour helped build a team where “I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.” But where this became a career killer was to give a Rolling Stones reporter an inside view of this candour which extended to personal attacks. Encourage candour in your organization, but some down hard on people who make personal attacks, it can clearly lead to very bad outcomes!
Spend time at the front lines of your business, but be authentic: After McChrystal’s dismissal, I wanted to learn a bit more about General Petraeus, his x-boss-and-now-replacement. I watched a video of how he talked about visiting the front lines ‘without a huge platoon’ backing him up. He seemed so fake, basically conducting photo ops (while protesting this was exactly what he was not doing). In McChrystal’s case, he seems truly authentic, which is the only way that you get the desired impact: “He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. “The [expletive] lads love Stan McChrystal,” says a British officer who serves in Kabul. “You’d be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like ‘Who the [expletive] is that?’ And it’s [expletive] Stan McChrystal.”"
If you want your people to take risks, you have to be seen taking risks: Some might say it was taking risks that killed McChrystal’s career, but in this case there seems to be no goal that the risk is tied to (if there is no goal, why create risk?). Not even Rolling Stone really knows what motives the Pentagon had on OKing the piece; they guess it was to improve recruitment. On the other hand, the article clearly shows that McChrystal has survived many previous calculated risks before, and this is the only way to show your people that they should also take those calculated risks. If you don’t take risks yourself, your people never will.

11 Techniques for Making Training Stick! by Zenger & Folkman

In their hour-long webinar 11 Techniques for Making Training Stick, Zenger & Folkman cover a lot of the ground from their great leadership works including ‘The Extraordinary Leader’. If you haven’t read any of their work before, I would make reviewing this webinar a priority, as it will introduce you to many of their concepts and research findings including: evidence for the benefits of focussing on strengths vs. weaknesses in employee development, and the tight link between leadership effectiveness and employee engagement.

While this webinar is primarily a sales pitch for their upcoming conference, and their books, it contains a lot of content that makes it a worthwhile use of an hour. The focus of the webinar summarizes the ’11 Techniques for Making Training Stick!’ including their very own ‘Bermuda Triangle‘:

Create a culture of accountability for development
Establish accountability between participant, manager and trainer/coach [their 'Bermuda Triangle of Vanishing Responsibility']
[...] Participants must complete a detailed personal development plan
Define what participants are to do differently on “Monday morning”
Create visibility regarding participant’s actual implementation
Make development a positive experience
Build a support system by involving others
Create opportunities for immediate implementation
Abandon negative beliefs and behaviours
Present a clear vision of the pay-offs to organization and individual
Create structure–a system to promote change

They provide some very concrete examples and benefits of using this approach which will hopefully help make your training a more positive experience with much greater impact to your business and personal development.

The ABCs of Employee Engagement by Marylene Gagne

This article links three elements to employee engagement:

A – Autonomy – “Employees need to feel that their behavioural choices come from them, not imposed by some outside source.”
B – Belongingness – “Feeling like we belong and feeling that we can meaningfully connect and exchange with coworkers is a feeling that makes us secure and calm.”
C – Competence – “People need to feel competent in order to try hard.”

These have clear parallels to Dan Pink’s three pillars of performance and self-satisfaction:

Autonomy – The desire to be self-directed, very important for complex creative tasks predominating today’s work place.
Mastery (like Competence) – “Our desire to get better at stuff.”
Purpose – [the only one that doesn't clearly fit with those above, but has some links with 'Belongingness'] – A reason to do a job beyond a pure profit motive.

So is this a case of ‘imitation being the sincerest form of flattery’, or two people that have landed at very similar conclusions via separate investigation? It turns out it doesn’t really matter, since when you are close to being right, you will probably find many other people that will agree with you [we like security, purpose and mastery].

The Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle (EEBT), a metaphor for mystery, misdirection and disaster in the work place, can actually have many different shapes and sizes.

A model for improving employee engagement

The 'EEBT'

This week we will talk about the EEBT ‘Co-Deceptive State’. In our experience, this state is more common than the ‘Perfect Storm’, but can be just as perilous for employee engagement.

A well-meaning manager can spend a lot of time understanding what an employee wants out of work, but if the employee’s self-perception is far out of whack the manager can become complicit in assigning roles or tasks that continue to frustrate the employee. There may be strong agreement in career-advancement opportunities, but the employee will struggle to meet goals to take that step, and suffer from poor job fit. Without being able to execute effectively on established goals, the manager will be wary of giving the employee higher-stakes assignments that will prepare for that next promotion, and the employee may end up being resentful of the manager for not following through on career advancement commitments.

It looks like this:

: EEBT Co-deceptive State

How Did It Come to This?

Inevitably, the statement ‘the customer is always right’ leads to a lot of debate. While some people will say, ‘ask your customers what they want’ the discussion typically ends with someone quoting Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In other words, if all you do is ask the customer what they want, you miss out on an opportunity to add value in a way that the customer didn’t expect. Henry ford was in a unique position to see a new opportunity that the layperson did not: a mass-produced car.

Much like Mr. Ford, the manager needs to leverage their own unique position (experience, broader view of the business, objective view of the employee’s behaviour and abilities, etc.) to gain a better understanding of the employees innate talents and motivators. The co-deceptive state can happen when the manager relies too much on the employee’s (incorrect) opinion of themselves, instead of other means at the manager’s disposal.

Several things can increase the chances of this happening: If a person wants to be something they are not, they can certainly put on a good act, which may be very hard for even a seasoned manager to see through. The high paced work environment drives many managers to reduce the amount of time they spend monitoring their employees’ performance and behaviours. The increasing prevalence of teleworkers and geographically-dispersed teams can make it difficult to gain a good understanding of an employee. Finally, some managers just don’t have the knack for reading people (but are good at other aspects of management). If you are having trouble thinking about your own experiences with this, think back to the first few years of your career; who were you trying to be?

Sources of Engagement

Previously, we discussed some of the key elements of engagement, and it is worth noting how this co-deceptive state has a negative impact on these elements:

A Feeling of Security
A Sense of Purpose
To Satisfy a Desire for Mastery

Lets talk about Bob (not his real name), who has been made a member of a team deciding on technology direction for a high tech firm. Diligence in his past roles has shown that he is able to become a subject matter expert in any technical topic, and has proven that he can facilitate complex discussions with the top technical talent in the organization. What Bob and his manager don’t know is that 1) Bob has an innate desire to help and develop people, and 2) he just can’t bring himself to care about the technology in question. Based on biannual performance reviews, both the manager and the employee generally agree on the employee’s skills, strengths and motivators.

Security: This employee can’t help but feel insecure. He is surrounded by people who debate the subject matter with a passion that the employee just can’t find in himself. How can Bob compete with people that have so much passion for the technology? He is exhausting all his ‘self-control’ trying to stay remotely as interested as his peers in the subject matter, and wonders what is wrong with him.

Purpose: Bob understands that what the group does is important, it helps define the future direction of the company, but the purpose is very misaligned with his own (unknown) inner purpose, to help & develop people. Each week Bob finds himself asking, “Is this really going to be my contribution to the world?”

Mastery: Bob, is a fabulous guitar player. He practices –on average– 5 hours a week and most of his friends regard him as the ‘best guitar player they know’. He clearly has a desire for mastery in the things that he is passionate about, but in his job this is absent. He is constantly trying to find his niche, where he can find the purpose he desires; as a result he is falling behind his peers in his level of technical competence, and never feels ‘in the zone’. When his peers take home technical papers for review, Bob just picks up his guitar.

Bob’s manager is constantly perplexed at Bob’s unwillingness to grasp new opportunities that would extend his technical capability. They had agreed upon Bob’s development targets, and his next career move: an external representative in technical standards. Bob’s manager just can’t see how Bob will be able to take that next step; while his peers get into heated debates about the minutia of a new technology, Bob just seems to stare off into space.

How can you diminish the EEBT?

There are a lot of ways to approach the challenge of reducing the area of the EEBT. Suggestions for the Co-deceptive State closely follow the suggestions for the ‘Perfect Storm’, with the exception that the manager and employee already seem to be communicating.

For the employee, they can use assessment tools to better understand themselves, like the Strong Interest Inventory, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Career Drivers, 360 surveys or our favourite, the Clifton Strengthfinder. Another useful approach is to write down occasions where they experienced a state of flow –being “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity”– and trying to identify what were the common elements in those experiences.

The manager can suggest that the employee use the techniques above and then discuss the results. Or, independently and where possible, a manager can dig into the employee’s past roles and discuss with past supervisors where they tended to express their talents and motivations most. Asking peers about their perceptions of the employee can be a great resource for either the employee or manager.

Once their is a better understanding of the employee’s key strengths and motivators, techniques like Job Crafting can be used to make the existing role much more engaging for the employee. In cases where there just isn’t a way to create an alignment between the employee’s talents and motivators, and the business objectives of the group, other roles within the organization should be explored. Employees are a valuable asset, and engaged employees are many times more valuable to your organization.