2010 July

LWD 2010WK29 – Lasting Lectures, Ego & Taking the High Ground

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.

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Remembering Randy Pausch by Erica Diamond

Image via Wikipedia

Randy’s inspiring ‘Last Lecture’ helped push me to do something I love –this business–, and is something everyone can benefit from (and includes many of the topics we often feature here)!

The internet being filled with many great writers, and many Randy Pausch fans, I thought I would be able to find someone doing a tribute to Randy on the 2-year anniversary of his passing; the internet didn’t disappoint, and Erica Diamond fit both criteria quite nicely.

Thanks Erica, and thanks Randy!

High Ground Maneuver by Scott Adams

: Image via Wikipedia

Looking forward to a Dilbert comic making light of a thinly-veiled iPhone4 that stops working when it comes into contact with the human hand? Sorry to disappoint, but Scott Adams describes in his blog how Steve Jobs masterfully performs a “high-ground maneuver”, to get Adams to put his stylus down, and put antenna-gate to bed.

Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words: “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”

[...]

I call it the “High Ground Maneuver.” I first noticed an executive using it years ago, and I’ve since used it a number of times when the situation called for it. The move involves taking an argument up to a level where you can say something that is absolutely true while changing the context at the same time. Once the move has been executed, the other participants will fear appearing small-minded if they drag the argument back to the detail level. It’s an instant game changer.

[...]

If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 in particular to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to “all smartphones have problems,” the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

And this is yet another example of why Steve Jobs remains at the top of my list of people for whom I would work for free. Consider your own high-ground maneuver when addressing your audience on a highly contentious subject (but you’d better have the proof to back it up).

Ego: The Biggest Threat to Employee Engagement by David Bowles

While there are MANY threats to Employee Engagement, David makes a great case for Ego being one of the biggest. It is particularly insipid because those with large egos are handicapped when it comes to seeing their role in a problem.

In last week’s LWD we saw a great description of humility from Clayton Christensen, which –based on David’s use of Ego– seems to be its opposite:

One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others.

David describes the behaviours evident when encountering the large ego, and you can clearly see the lack of ‘esteem with which [they] regard others’:

Here are some of the symptoms:

She takes credit for projects which you started and carried out

He never hires people smarter than himself

He “licks up” [Eewww!! -ed.] and “kicks down” in the organization structure

She cannot take criticism

He is a perfectionist and one can never “do it well enough” for him

She never allows anyone else to make any significant decision in her area

Certainly anyone that displays this kind of behaviour will be a real engagement killer (!), as David illustrates:

You can hopefully see the short step to engagement: you are there at work to share your talents and skills and help the organization succeed. You love your job, but your boss….oh no, your boss is an ego-maniac! You didnt know that at first, your radar didnt send out a code red alert when you had the interview, but you found out later that something was very very wrong. All the things which I described above, started to happen. You arrived at the job ready, willing and able to engage but now…now the thing you most want to engage in is finding a new boss there or perhaps leaving the organization for a new job.

David points to attitudes in the executive suite (hiring like-minded people, the “nice fit”), and outlandish executive compensations as two contributors to this dynamic.

So what can you do about ego? David points to BMW as a good example of a company that has directly addressed some of these issues (and I would say, with a successful end product):

I love this quote from BMW’s press office, talking about how the company restrains top management bonuses in relation to what average workers receive :

“We don’t just want to build sustainable cars. We also want to have sustainable personnel politics. We think this is good for the company culture”.

[...]

So what can be done about [ego challenges]? Certainly try and be a bit more like BMW and introduce a sense of fairness into the “personnel politics”, as they call it… Try to hire those with talent but less ego….interview for this trait, become acquainted with the signs, avoid it at all cost… As an excellent blogger Gwyn Teatro recently said, we need more humility in the workplace… Then we can create the conditions under which our workers feel that they are part of something, that they are respected, that they are there to perform their best in the highest interest of the organization, not to feed someone’s ego! Feeling and knowing that, they will gladly engage.

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen

Many of you will know Christensen as the author of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma‘ where he provided insight on why disruptive technological change can cause dominant companies to fail, and what to do to avoid it.

In this post, there isn’t really one theme that I want to highlight (the post is about using good management practices in your personal life), but rather a bunch of statements that Christensen makes that I found really valuable. The first has to do with providing advice to experts:

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove [the Chairman of Intel] what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

The second, has to do with management (and every manager should consider printing this and pasting it to their desk for when inevitable frustrations arise):

Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

The third has to do with his observation of fellow Harvard Business School classmates (including Jeff Skilling of Enron infamy), and their tendency to be ‘successful’ but unhappy:

People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

When people who have a high need for achievement… have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward… In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement.

While there are many other great nuggets in this post, which make reading the whole thing a must, the last I will share is his observations on the definition and value of humility:

One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

LeBron Lends Lesson on Loyalty by Adam Morris

I’m not sure which personnel change has received more coverage, Obama firing McChrystal, or LeBron James leaving Cleveland for Miami. Certainly the situation is very different, in the first case it was the attitude of the subordinate in question, in the latter it seems the ownership may be the ones with the bad attitude.

Morris points out in his article that LeBron is deciding to leave a team that offered him more money ($30M more!), the ability to play in his home town, and a very loyal base of fans, for a chance to play on a team that has a better chance to win a championship. But is that really the reason?

As an organization, you might do everything right but inevitably you will still lose a star employee. Sometimes, it’s out of your control. What you can control is how you handle these situations. There is nothing to be gained by burning a bridge that doesn’t need to be burnt. Who knows, perhaps you and that star employee might want to reunite one day.

That was a lesson that Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, apparently was never taught. Within an hour of LeBron’s announcement, Gilbert posted this scathing Open Letter [available via Morris' post] to Fans on the Cavaliers website. This provides great insight into the type of leadership at the top of the Cavaliers organization and demonstrates why they were unable to earn LeBron’s loyalty. After all, loyalty is a two-way street and it’s similar to respect in that it must be earned, not demanded or assumed [Emphasis Psyche].

Morris does his best to be diplomatic, by suggesting that it was ‘out of Cleveland’s control’, but I think his last comment really nailed truth of the matter, and certainly what leaders can learn from this example!