Leadership Weekly Digest

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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The title of LWD two weeks ago was “Your_Co Has Died, Restart?”, we didn’t intend this to be prophetic. A few days after that post, the server we host this site on was hacked, and we faced this very situation! Unfortunately, our host wasn’t able to recover a recent backup, so we lost almost a week of data, including e-mail. As a result, there was no LWD for WK37, and a lot of time has been spent finding and recreating this site on a new host. Happy we found a great new hosting provider (CharlottezWeb) who were very helpful in getting us up and running quickly (thanks Jason)!

Balancing Profit and Purpose at Whole Foods: Red Fish Blue Fish by CV Harquail

This is the third time we have featured CV, which is some kind of record. We keep a close eye on her Authentic Organizations site for posts to highlight in LWD, because she is awesome.

Problem: You are selling your customers something they like, but it is bad for the environment. How do you stop selling the product without alienating your customers?

Answer: Colour code the products, based on their impact on the environment, so that customers can make better choices for themselves, and suggest that the products will the worst environmental impact will be phased out in the future.

In this case the produce was fish, and the company was Whole foods.

But by socially conditioning their customers with this color-coding system for several months before phasing out the products, Whole Foods is trying to get buy-in from the customer by encouraging them to make more sustainable, alternative choices. Customers may learn to enjoy more sustainable seafood choices before the unsustainable choices go away. — Jessi Schoner

If they had just pulled the products, some customers would have gone elsewhere in reaction to this unilateral decision. Instead they participate in the process which leads to better outcomes for the customer, the retailer, and fish stocks.

Can you apply this to something you are trying to change?

Why Great Teams Tell Great Stories by Michael Hyatt

Regular readers will know we are big fans of the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which explains how to turn ideas into action. They conclude that book with the importance of stories in helping make a message high-impact, memorable, and even viral.

Michael Hyatt builds on this observation by illustrating the impact that a story has in fostering innovation and consistently excellent customer service:

Breakthrough teams tell such stories frequently and with passion. It is a secret ingredient of their success. Stories are vital in helping individuals understand how world-class results are achieved and in making the possibility of doing so believable. Such tales have a way of perpetuating success. The listener retells the story and, more importantly, internalizes its message and becomes part of the story.

Mr. Hyatt provides a four-step primer on leadership storytelling:

Share the truth, nothing but the truth.
Catch their interest early.
Tie it to your team’s core values.
Keep it simple.

How Herman Miller Has Designed Employee Loyalty by Kermit Pattison

CV will not be the only repeat performance this week, as Kermit Pattison was featured in LWD WK34 for his article on Chip Conley’s Employee Pyramid.

This interview discusses how Herman Miller (yes, the maker of the cool office chairs) maintains an incredibly low attrition rate, with employees having a longish 14 average years of service. Brian Walker, CEO of Herman Miller, attributes this employee loyalty to the policy of encouraging employees to bring their ‘whole person’ to work:

We try very hard to let people bring their passions to work… All of our people have gifts and talents and are capable of doing more than their job classification. Our constant drive is to figure out how to mine that hidden talent and capability so we can use it to its fullest and so our people get the greatest enjoyment out of what they do.

This culture was fostered right from the very start with founder D.J. De Pree contrasting his view of the worker with that popularized by Henry Ford. De Pree stated “I want all of you here. I want the whole person.” This is in clear reference to Ford’s oft-quoted line ”Why is it that I always get the whole person, when what I really want is a pair of hands?”

This somewhat contrarian view of the worker continues to this day, which also includes a different perspective on the role of the superstar employee than you find in most of the corporate world: “We’re not as much about superstars as having a collective of 6,000 people who are very passionate about what they do and trying to bring all their gifts and talents to it.”

So how does Herman Miller maintain this culture?

Providing lots of opportunities to lead via the many ad hoc teams that are put together to solve problems. It becomes evident from watching their performance in these ad hoc teams who the new leaders should be.
Not placing too much stock in fixed job titles, previous education or training on determining where in the organization you will end up.
Creating cross-disciplinary teams that even span external partners. These teams deliberately create a design tension, to balance the competing desires of each function to find the best solution.
Looking to salary reductions and shortened work weeks to deal with major market perturbations (like the precipitous drop in sales after the dot.com bubble burst) instead of mass layoffs.
Being open with employees on the status of the business, especially when things are going to be tough.
Integrating social and environmental responsibility into everything they do. HM claims this helps attract the best people, who want to work for organizations who make a difference.

A selection of our recent posts:

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What if you could take risks, receive instant rewards when you succeed, and get a chance to start over without blame or penalty when you fail? This is one of the compelling reasons why people are so drawn to video games and virtual worlds. Organizations have embraced simulators to train pilots and soldiers for high-risk environments, and even to help in their recruiting efforts. Individuals play many hours of immersive video games, which takes them into virtual worlds that provide an escape from their real lives; some to the point of severe addiction. The new generation entering the workforce has never known a world without games or the internet (20 year olds were 5 when Netscape went public). What lessons can leaders learn from this important dynamic?

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted by David Wong

As you would expect, this article is primarily about the psychological methods that video game developers use to attract people to their games, and maintain their attention. So what does this addiction have to do with the workplace? Here is a clue:

It’s not that these games can’t be fun. But they’re designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it’s not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner’s manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards… The terrible truth is that a whole lot of us begged for a Skinner Box we could crawl into, because the real world’s system of rewards is so much more slow and cruel than we expected it to be.

So, there is a lot of research and development going on to keep people locked into things when they ‘aren’t fun’. That sounds an awful lot like work for most people, doesn’t it?

Why do video games succeed in holding our attention where work often fails? After all, the rewards in games are virtual, while your job is paying you real money! Mr. Wong suggests that developers intentionally create effort-reward environments that include elements known to create job satisfaction. He points to Malcolm Gladwell, who describes the 3 things you need to be satisfied in your job (and sounds remarkably similar to the models described by Dan Pink‘s and Marylene Gagne summarized in LWD2010WK25):

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day) [Pink: Autonomy] - Example: “You pick your quests, or which Farmville crops to plant. Hell, you even pick your own body, species and talents.”
Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition) [Pink: Mastery] - Example: Come on… it’s complex… no pithy summary in this digest! Just play World of Warcraft for an hour, and you’ll see.
Connection Between Effort and Reward (you actually see the… results of your hard work) [Pink: Purpose] – Example: “When you level up in WoW a goddamned plume of golden light shoots out of your body.”

Game (& social media!) developers spend much of their time considering the motivations of their target audience, because it is directly tied to the success of their product. Shouldn’t a leader be doing the same thing with the same motives? Right now, it seems the developers are winning.

Gaming Can Make a Better World by Jane McGonigal

When I shared the article above with my Triiibe, I got the following video as a rebuttal, and it was a good one! It seems that not all people focussed on the addictive nature of video games are purely motivated by personal profit; Jane McGonigal suggests that video games can in fact save the world. She knows how outlandish this sounds, and deals with that directly in her TED talk:

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here.

To stay true to the ‘digest’ nature of LWD, I’ll summarize what I took away from this video:

First, was that the time people spend online gaming is already measured in timeframes comparable to human EVOLUTION. World of Warcraft has long since surpassed 5.93 million YEARs of game play; to put this in perspective, this is approximately how long ago our ancestors decided to try and walk upright! To go along with this, the average 21 year old will have spent over 10,000 hours gaming (sound familiar?), which is the equivalent of perfect attendance from grade 5 to graduation from high school; a completely parallel educational track.

Another observation, was that we clearly need more ‘Epic Wins‘ in the workplace. Online worlds make this possible because: people are willing to trust you to help them save the world, the level of the challenge is closely matched to your capabilities with a bit of stretch, they include an inspiring story with a sense of purpose, and they give us constant feedback. How close can the workplace come?

This is particularly important for the next generation of workers, and it is important to understand what these 21 year olds have been spending 10,000 hours getting so good at, as McGonigal illustrates:

Urgent Optimism - She defines as extreme self-motivation or “the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success”; this is the idea that an ‘epic win’ is always possible.
Social Fabric - “Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric”. This comes from research that shows that we like people better, even if they have pwned us; gaming with others is built on a level of trust (same goals, same rules, time commitment, etc.) that is necessary to foster collaborate online.
Blissful Productivity – We are actually happier working hard, because it makes us feel optimized as human beings, but it has to be the right work for each of us.
Epic Meaning - A desire to be connected to planetary scale problems, of great significance to mankind [Elven-kind anyway -ed.].

These four elements comprise a new workforce of (what McGonigal) calls ‘Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals’, who are looking for something significant to be a part of. So now you know that they are there, how are you going to use them?

Watch the full video for some concrete ideas that Jane McGonigal is working on, including how to reduce our dependence on oil. If you want some insight into how these 21-year old ‘SEHI”s think, check out this post on HBR Blogs from 21-year-old Seth Priebatsch: “Welcome to the Decade of Games“.

Permission to Make Mistakes Usually Means Fewer of Them by Heidi Grant Halvorson

It just wouldn’t be fair to leave you without some kind of practical advice on how to produce part of the engaging environment that video games create (so far, we have introduced mostly big concepts to make you go ‘hmmmm…’). At the start of this post, we talked about how great it would be to “get a chance to start over without blame or penalty when you fail”, and this post provides the ‘why’ and ‘how’ to replicate this in your work environment.

Many leaders understand that if they want creative and competitive solutions, their people need the ability to make some mistakes. This is counter-balanced by the anxiety felt by business leaders to protect the resources they are responsible for. If a leader suggests that they want their employees to take risks, won’t this increase the number of costly mistakes?

It turns out there is evidence to the contrary:

So how can we motivate employees to approach new responsibilities with confidence and energy? The answer is simple, though perhaps a little surprising: Give them permission to screw-up.

This counter-intuitive outcome stems from the emotion that accompanies taking risks, and causes us to screw up: anxiety. In fact, “Countless studies have shown that nothing interferes with performance quite like anxiety does–it is the productivity-killer.“

The author provides 3 steps to improve performance, reduce anxiety, and actually reduce mistakes in new challenging activities:

Acknowledge that the project is difficult and unfamiliar, and that you expect your employee will need some time to really get a handle on it. They may make some mistakes, and that’s okay.
Remind your employee that you are there as a resource, to help them when they run into trouble.
Let them know that you are confident they have what it takes to eventually master this new responsibility.

P.S. (Grant?)