I’ve never lived in a world, or worked in an organization, that was void of rules. Rules can be a drag, but they can also serve as a very functional guide to productive behavior. Rules should always be purposeful, behavioral, very specific, and kept to an absolute minimum.

Rules should always represent minimum, reasonable standards of expected behavior, not stretch effort. For people with an internal locus of control that focus on group goals and hold themselves accountable to high standards of performance and conduct, rules are irrelevant. Good rules are only an issue for those that make bad choices.

Always stand behind, but never hide behind, your rules. Rules should be continually evaluated for their value and ability to serve the purpose. Eliminate or change a rule the moment it ceases to enable your people to work together more effectively. Rules are only as stupid as the people that use them as excuses to avoid improving systems.

Whatever you do, never bend the rules. If you make an exception to the rules for one person, you will send a discouraging message to the rest of your folks. If you bend a rule for one person, your standards and expectations will become ambiguous to everyone else. Bending a rule will teach people that you are willing to play favorites, unwilling to take the heat when the pressure is on, and unable to see the ethical gaps of your own behavior. If a rule no longer works for the group, change it.

Your behavior as a leader should teach people that “rule” is an innocuous four letter word. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Did you see this Tweet yesterday? Chrysler responded very quickly to this eye-sore with two posts on their corporate blog: the first one by an anonymous “blog editor” and later a longer one by Ed Garston, the Electronic Communications Manager at Chrysler. Here is an excerpt from the initial post:

This morning an inappropriate comment was issued from the Chrysler brand Twitter handle, @ChryslerAutos, via our social media agency of record, New Media Strategies (NMS). After further investigation, it was discovered that the statement was issued by an NMS employee, who has since been terminated.

Should the NMS employee have been fired? In my opinion, hell yes! If you’ve been given the big responsibility of speaking on behalf of a major global brand, you have to have very high standards of professional judgment. It’s safe to assume that Chrysler had a policy in place that prohibited the use of profanity when creating social objects with the corporate brand, and there is no way they did not explicitly make it a terminable offense. If you don’t hold this employee accountable for the totally unacceptable behavior, then the policy is worthless.

But I think the agency, NMS, should also be held accountable. If I were Ed Garston, I’d fire them today. Then I’d hire a different agency to help me build an internal infrastructure where only Chrysler employees spoke on behalf of their company.

Chrysler can absorb this snafu because they are a big brand. But how would something like this impact your business and your brand?

If you are a small to medium sized business, learn this lesson – no one can care more about and speak better for your brand than you and your employees. For the agency, it’s just another account and another stage where they have to fake authenticity. For you and your employees, it’s personal.

There is nothing your agency can say on your behalf that will move me to be intensely loyal to you and your business. Only you can do that. You can’t outsource the responsibility to care. And you don’t want to, because genuine caring will always be more powerful than advertising.

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Few things irritate me more than opacity and unfairness at work. If you have the privilege of leading people, one of the quickest ways you can lose your legitimacy in their eyes is to take away their voice. Before you make any decision that significantly affects the work your folks do, you better have the good sense to ask them what they think.  If you discount or ignore this aspect of professional courtesy, it’s going to cost you.

If your people perceive that you are being unfair or sneaky, they simply won’t trust you. Your ability to motivate and inspire people that don’t trust you is a delusion. But it’s a lie you will probably never see because you will frame the dissent and distrust as a problem with “them” instead seeing it for what it really is, something you caused with your own behavior.

In his book “Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager,” Gary Latham writes “failure on your part to put principles of justice front and center will kill worker motivation as feelings sweep through your team that some people are getting a better deal than others.” (p. 92).  He suggests that as you make decisions you think about the following five questions to ensure you are seen as fair (pp. 92-93):

1.     How will resources – salary, bonuses, office space – be distributed?

2.     Do you have agreed-upon processes or systems for determining who gets what (e.g. a salary increase, a bigger office) and why?

3.     Have you explained to your people the logic of your decisions as to who gets what?

4.     Are the agreed-upon processes for making decisions applied consistently?

5.     Have you taken your employees’ viewpoint into account before you make decisions?

I know some of you are thinking that all this fairness stuff is really just bullshit. It’s an unnecessary pain in the ass to ask people what they think. YOU are the boss – they are not – and making decisions is what you get paid for! If they don’t like it, they can get another job somewhere else.

I know you think this way because you behave this way. Your actions are killing your motivational rhetoric; unfortunately, you are the only one that can’t see it.

Where is the first place you should look if your employees appear unmotivated? Look in the mirror.

What do you think? Please share your comments below!

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In my new post at The Leader Lab, I lament the fact that while some of our best management research is very rigorous, it is not very relevant. Please visit the link in the previous sentence to read the full text of my article, or listen to me read it by accessing the podcast below. And as always, after you read or listen to the post, please share your thoughts!

Sitting next to my daughter on a long plane flight yesterday, I borrowed one of her school books containing 50 short essays from a variety of authors. One of the essays was The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. I was really only familiar with the first few sentences of the first two paragraphs, so I made an effort to read the entire thing for the first time that I can remember.

The last 30 words of the last (long) sentence really struck me:

…for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

I see a strong and clear leadership message in those words that applies to both our individual and collective behavior in organizations.

There can be no independence without interdependence. The individual rights we have are the fruit of the tree of interdependence. Any harvest of independence we are able to reap is entirely dependent upon the depth, strength, and continued healthy growth of our roots of responsible interdependence.

Leaders should realize that independence and autonomy hold powerful value for most employees. There is a lot of credible evidence to back that up. But autonomy is not a gift, its a privilege and a shared responsibility. Leaders should never constrain or obstruct employee autonomy by denying folks the ladder of meaningful responsibility. Doing so not only limits what you and your people can achieve, it also just might earn you a revolt.

A management consultant posted a message on Twitter last week that read something like this: “I believe in individualism, not collectivism.  #leadership”

I can’t speak for Thomas Jefferson, but my reply to that is “bullshit.”

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Yesterday I participated in a chat about leadership over on Twitter hosted by Lisa Petrilli and Steve Woodruff. The topic was power and the intent was to discuss the ideas of Jeff Pfeffer from his new book Power: Why some people have it and others don’t.  There were so many people participating in the chat that I personally can’t call it a conversation, but suffice to say the leader’s use of power to get things done was overwhelmingly viewed to be undesirable. I understand what folks were trying to say in quick-fire bursts of 140 characters or less, but I was frustrated.

Power is not a four letter word. Like it or not, power is the heart of leadership. No achievement or failure of any significance has ever been or ever will be accomplished void of power.

As I have written here before, your beliefs about power differentiate your behavior and character as a leader. What are you willing to do to get power?  What are you willing to do to keep it?  Do you use your power to serve yourself and your inner circle, or do you use your power to serve others regardless of what they think of you? Do you treat those that have no power and authority differently than you treat those that do?

Give me a week to watch what you say and do at work as you interact with your boss, your direct reports, and your peers, and I can tell you exactly what you believe about power. Your words and actions will manifest your beliefs and assumptions independent of your level of awareness of your power paradigm.

Beyond what you think about power, your words and actions toward others will also reveal your feelings about them and yourself. Is your leadership primarily about your personal passions and insecurities, or is it about something bigger and better than yourself?

Power is the heart of leadership. Is yours an opaque and selfish heart, or is yours an open one, where the people you’ve been given the privilege to lead are invited to examine, challenge, improve, and share a purpose worthy of everyone’s highest contribution and sacrifice?

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Not much, according to a meta-analytic study of 92 separate studies recently published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior (Judge, T.A., et. al. 2010. The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. 77: 157-167.)  The authors concluded:

…level of pay had little relation to either job or pay satisfaction. This indicates that within an organization, those who make more money are little more satisfied than those who make considerably less. Moreover, relatively well paid samples of individuals are only trivially more satisfied than relatively poorly paid samples…The results of this review – the first quantitative review to appear in the literature – suggests that earnings are only weakly satisfying to individuals even when they confine their satisfaction to an evaluation of their pay.(p. 162)

Wow. For employees, these findings suggest that if you want a good job (one you are satisfied with), then pay should not be at the top of your shopping list. Other things like interesting and autonomous work and leadership that is more relational than transactional are better predictors of job satisfaction.

For employers, the authors suggest three important implications (p. 163):

1. Don’t mistake satisfaction with motivation. Pay can be used to motivate workers, even if it cannot be used to satisfy them.

2. Having a satisfied workforce is important, but being a pay leader, by itself, is not a good strategy for improving the job satisfaction of your workforce. Look to other things like better supervision, a better work environment, and jobs designed to be engaging.

3. A policy of high pay dispersion does make sense if the most highly paid workers are the ones you want to retain.  High pay is potentially satisfying to the extent that an individual worker looks at her/his colleagues that are paid at or above market levels and perceives a significant difference.

Be careful with number three. If you are going to adopt such a policy, make sure the requirements for achieving significantly higher pay are unambiguous, available to all, and consistently applied. Nothing will poison a satisfied workforce faster than the perception of unfair and disinterested management practices.

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I’m reviewing the seventh edition of Gary Yukl’s classic textbook on leadership entitled “Leadership in Organizations.” As textbooks go, this one is excellent – easy to read and packed with both contemporary and classic research on leadership.

Yukl concludes his book with his opinion of the 10 most effective leadership functions for enhancing collective work in teams and organizations. But he reminds us there is no recipe for leadership, and these 10 functions can and should be performed by anyone, anywhere in the organization. Here is Yukl’s list:

1.      Help interpret the meaning of events

2.      Create alignment on objectives and strategies

3.      Build task commitment and optimism

4.      Build mutual trust and cooperation

5.      Strengthen collective identity

6.      Organize and coordinate activities

7.      Encourage and facilitate collective learning

8.      Obtain necessary resources and support

9.      Develop and empower people

10.  Promote social justice and morality

I want to stress again that these recommendations, while subjective, are based on Yukl’s interpretation of the best theories and empirical findings of the extant research on leadership. What do you think of this list? Is this list missing anything significant?

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My Bottom Line

I am going to recommend that you read Samuel A. Culbert’s (with Lawrence Rout) new book “Get Rid of the Performance Review: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing – and Focus on What Really Matters.” You should know that I got my copy to review free of charge from the publisher. It’s a good book, not a great one, but it’s an important book because it is one of the few that makes a serious and impassioned case for abolishing the performance review.

I agree, performance reviews suck. Everyone involved – those that give them as well as those that receive them – dreads the process.

How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces? In part, it’s because the performance review is all executives have ever known, and they’re blind to the damage caused by it. In part, it’s because few managers are aware of the addiction to the fear that reviews create amongst staff, and too many lack the confidence that they can lead without that fear. In part it’s because HR professionals exploit the performance review to provide them a power base they don’t deserve. And it part it’s because few people know an alternative for getting the control, accountability, and employee development that reviews supposedly produce – but never do. (pp. 1-2).

The efficacy of the performance review is based on a number of false assumptions, almost all of which Culbert addresses in his book. The biggest false assumption is that the honest, accurate, and helpful subjective assessment of performance can take place in relationships where the boss has all the power and the employee has none. This mirage of efficacious subjectivity is most notable when the boss has an implicit or explicit numerical distribution to meet (e.g. make the average rating 7 on a scale of 10, only 10% can be rated excellent) that is something they in-turn are rated on, and when the performance evaluation is linked to pay actions.

Performance appraisal is a charade.

As much as I concur with the premise of the book, I have to tell you honestly that I really don’t care for the authors’ writing style. I’ve read one other book by Culbert and I didn’t like that one either (although I agreed with the premise of the book). I love sarcasm, but Culbert is in my opinion overly sarcastic in his style. He is very hard on HR in the book, and everything he says is true and the criticism is in my opinion merited. My concern is that his sarcastic and overly wordy style will be a distraction that will allow folks to miss or dismiss his very valid message.

The other big shortcoming of the book is the description of the performance preview, which the authors’ suggest is the remedy for the performance review. The performance preview is:

An ongoing dialogue between boss and subordinate, where each of them is responsible for asking the other: What can I do to make us work together better and get the results we’re both on the hook for? The focus isn’t on the past and how one person screwed up, but on making the system work better in the future. (p. 147).

I love that, but I wish he could have provided more solid examples of companies that have abolished performance reviews and replaced them with the performance preview or some other credible process. I think a lot of people will read the book and dismiss it feeling they still don’t have a better alternative.

In the end, the authors nail the issue for me when they state:

Keep in mind that improvement is each individual’s own responsibility. Only you can make yourself better. The best you can do for others is to develop a trusting and safe environment where employees can ask for feedback and help when they see the need and feel sufficiently valued to take it. Getting rid of the performance review is a necessary, and affirming, step in that direction. It provides employees with a relationship where confiding need, admitting mistakes, and asking for help, coaching, and guidance is increasingly likely. And it provides bosses a practical motive to share impressions and to help out (p. 215).

Read the book with an open mind and decide for yourself.

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I am a big fan of Christine Livingston. I first met her on Twitter and have been following her blog A Different Kind Of Work for almost a year now.  Christine is a coach and consultant who’s purpose is to “help professionals navigate career change.”  She writes some of the best stuff I’ve ever found on approaching the intersection of work and life in ways that just make better sense.

A few days ago, I got the pleasure of meeting Christine in person when she did me the tremendous favor of speaking to my International Organizational Behavior class in London. She gave us a very generous offering of her time and wisdom. My students loved it and so did I.

She was also kind enough to let me show this video of her “in action” addressing a question from a student. Christine had just given the students a quick introduction to Transactional Analysis, and someone asked a question about how to deal with an overly demanding or even potentially abusive boss in these tough economic times, where too many companies treat employees as if they are lucky to have a job and behave as if they care less about what employees think and feel at work.

I encourage you to watch the video for Christine’s insightful response in her own words. I’ll share with you a brief quote from her response that captures the essence of her perspective:

You are who you are at the end of the day; you deserve to have your own experience and for that to be appreciated and respected.

I concur 100%. Thanks, Christine!

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