Remember the classic kid’s TV show, the Flintstones? Fred and Wilma Flintstone are a stone age couple who live in something that looks oddly like the 1950s with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Despite this, the show had nothing to do with either rock music or getting stoned. It did, however, have an episode which predicted that the Beatles were a passing fad. So much for prognostication! Fortunately, that episode is not the point of this article.
In one episode, Fred complains to Wilma that he can’t understand what she does all day. How hard can it be to take care of a house? Of course, as Fred swiftly learns, after he and Wilma make a bet, the answer is very hard. Fred, of course, makes a total mess of the whole thing. Now, obviously, the cartoon was playing off of social issues of the time and was intended to make people laugh. The obvious lesson, that a “non-working mother” is a contradiction in terms, is hopefully one that most people have figured out by now. The less obvious lesson is the much more interesting one: it is often impossible to gauge from the results, or from watching someone work, just how difficult a job actually is or even how hard they are working! Conversely, how people feel about the results has little bearing on how hard you worked to get them.
Read the rest at the CEO Refresher
I have a fondness for old time radio podcasts. Indeed, one of the big advantages of the iPod is that it created a whole slew of opportunities for those of us who want to listen to such things. One of my discoveries was a podcast of the Avengers radio show. Yes, there was one, although it didn’t really come from the Golden Age of radio, rather being adapted from the TV show. Nonetheless, listening to episodes of the Avengers pointed up four very important points:
1. Russian accents are only the second most villainous sounding accents. British accents are the most villainous, probably because they always sound like they have anti-social personality disorder.
2. British accents also sound heroic, at least when they aren’t the villains.
3. Old time commercials in a British accent sound like something out of Monty Python.
4. When word “helpless” is said immediately before “Emma Peel” you know someone is in for a very nasty surprise.
I’m not entirely sure what this means, although the first might reflect my image of Boris Badenov as the quintessential Russian villain. Since this year is the 50th anniversary of Rocky and Bullwinkle, perhaps Russian accented villains will make a comeback. I’ll leave that to James Bond (or Moose and Squirrel). What is more interesting is how well a 1960s cold-war espionage show holds up half a century later. Despite all our changes in technology and politics, and the much touted generational shift in the workplace, it should come as no big surprise that human nature hasn’t changed at all: people are still, basically, people, and John Steed and Emma Peel are just as suave and sophisticated today as they were fifty years ago. Despite all the noise about Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y, there are also some things about the workplace that simply haven’t changed, although our perception and understanding of them might have.
In my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” I discuss the twelve key elements of building a successful business. These elements are, in many ways, as timeless as John Steed and Mrs. Peel, if not always quite so sexy. They are, however, the key points that any entrepreneur needs to work with if you want to maximize your chances of creating a successful business.
Read the rest at Under30CEO
September 30th,2010
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If you missed my appearance on MYOB Radio on Sunday (or if you heard it and can’t wait to hear it again 🙂 ), you can listen to my interview on what makes successful leadership here.
I just got the word from McGraw-Hill: My book, The 36-Hour Course on Organizational Development, went to the printer today! Although the official release date isn’t until mid-October, pre-orders should start shipping by the end of September.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
Why Are They So Unmotivated?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about some “impossible to motivate” employee who is busily training for a marathon or something else that requires a tremendous amount of dedication, focus, energy, and, you guessed it, motivation.
What you’re looking for are those employees who approach their jobs with the same level of dedication and focus that they approach training for a marathon or other activity. It’s very hard to find those employees. It’s easier to create them.
Motivation comes from many sources. It starts with the culture you’ve built, the vision you’ve created for your company, the goals you set, and your hiring process. Those elements make up your foundation.
Ultimately, motivation is a strong desire to do (or sometimes not do) something. That desire can be imposed from without, or it can come from within and be supported from without. You want the second.
Remember, no one becomes an Olympic athlete for the money, although some Olympians might end up making a great deal of money. Top athletes succeed because they are driven to perform at a high level. The money and the adulation only reinforce that drive. The ones who are out solely for the money are the ones who are most likely to give up.
Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way
In the Japanese martial art of jujitsu, the practitioner learns to not respond to a push with a push or a pull with a pull. Meeting force with force only creates opposition. While you might be strong enough to win some conflicts, eventually they take their toll. When someone pulls, you push. When someone pushes, you pull or you get out of the way. You don’t oppose.
In jujitsu, the harder you make it for someone to stay on his feet, the harder it is for you to make him fall down. The goal is not to make it hard for your opponent to remain standing; the goal is to make it easy for him to fall down. The workplace is not all that different. Force creates opposition. Threats, fear, even many incentives, only lead to resistance. The very act of trying to force people to do something causes them to become suspicious and reduces their willingness to do it. It doesn’t matter how much they might want to do it.
To be fair, I do hear from managers who insist that force works: they make sure their employees know who is boss and what will happen if they don’t toe the line. There are problems with this approach. Constantly pushing people means that you can’t see where you’re going. All of your effort is going into the act of pushing. Sometimes they’ll feel like you’re going too fast. Sometimes they’ll mistake an attempt to change course as a shove and resist, or they’ll go too far and step to one side, leaving you to fall on your nose. The more you push, the harder it is to hit that moving target.
You want the employees who know where to go and why they should go there—and who understand how to get to their destination without you constantly having to force them to do it. You want a team so dedicated that if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run you over.
Understanding motivation is the first step to getting such a team.
(just in time for this article, I’ve even managed to get comments working properly (maximum spam blockage/minimal hassle) on my blog!)
While it is well known that rolling stones gather no moss, it appears that they are pretty rough on McChrystals. Recently, the news has been filled with headlines about General Stanley McChrystal and the story about him in Rolling Stone. Agree or disagree with how the situation was eventually resolved, it offers some important lessons for businesses.
While everyone has days when they aren’t happy with their boss, their job, their clients or just about anything else, what you say and how you say it makes a big difference. In General McChrystal’s case, perhaps the most striking elements of the article was not what he said, but what his staff said. Occasionally expressing frustration is normal. Open disrespect in the general’s staff is not, and says more about his opinions than anything he said. This attitude sets the tone for how the general and his staff will interact with others, people who, in a business environment, might be viewed as internal or external customers.
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
August 5th,2010
Published Articles | tags:
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conflict,
culture,
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Stanley McChrystal,
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What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.
Read the rest at ERE.Net
When I speak about innovation, one my favorite examples is how B&N was beaten in their primary market, selling books, by upstart Amazon.com.
Even now, B&N doesn’t quite get it.
Case in point: my book appeared on Amazon.com for pre-order over a week ago. It finally showed up on B&N, and there are few small errors. Nothing major, but it makes it look unprofessional: screwing up the formatting of the title, which is, I grant, minor.
Far more amusing is who they’ve listed as the author: Honore de Balzac.
This may come as a surprise to the folks at Barnes & Noble, but Honore has been dead for a while.
Okay, this isn’t a major issue, but it illustrates a point: when the primary image people have of your “bookstore” is virtual, it pays to get the relevant details right.
On the other hand, if you want to get a brand new book by Honore de Balzac, I guess now’s your chance… 🙂
This is the short version of an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The full version will probably be out in a month or two.
It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)
Read the rest at Ere.net
January 2nd,2010
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hiring,
leadership,
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organizational development,
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recruiting,
success,
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Why do we take off our hats when entering a building? There’s no reason for it; it’s something we do. It’s part of our culture. While it probably had meaning at some point in time, that meaning is now lost. But we do it anyway because culture is bigger than we are. In fact, culture is not only bigger than we are, it’s bigger than almost anything we can imagine. Culture is not just what we wear, what we eat, or what religion we believe in. Culture is a vast ocean that informs and directs our thoughts, perspectives, and views on how to approach the world and other people in it. According to MIT’s Ed Schein, culture is everywhere; it is such a pervasive part of our lives that we are not even aware of it. This gives rise to several questions: What is the value of culture? How is culture transmitted? And, of course, what is culture?
Why do we take off our hats when entering a building? There’s no reason for it; it’s something we do. It’s part of our culture. While it probably had meaning at some point in time, that meaning is now lost. But we do it anyway because culture is bigger than we are. In fact, culture is not only bigger than we are, it’s bigger than almost anything we can imagine. Culture is not just what we wear, what we eat, or what religion we believe in. Culture is a vast ocean that informs and directs our thoughts, perspectives, and views on how to approach the world and other people in it. According to MIT’s Ed Schein, culture is everywhere; it is such a pervasive part of our lives that we are not even aware of it. This gives rise to several questions: What is the value of culture? How is culture transmitted? And, of course, what is culture?
This article was originally published in the January/February 2010 Analog Science Fiction/Fact. You can read the rest by
clicking here.
December 21st,2009
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It’s easy to put together a group of knowledgeable and skilled individuals, but a team of high performers is not the same as a high-performance team. Just think about the Olympic Basketball Dream Team of 1992, made up of top American players. While they certainly played great basketball, the team never performed at the level people expected, given the skills of the individual players. Transforming your group from a set of people who happen to be going in roughly the same direction into a high-performance team isn’t always easy, but the results are always worthwhile:
Read the rest in The Imaging Executive
December 7th,2009
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conflict,
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leadership,
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