I’m very pleased to feature this guest post by Joel Garfinkle. Joel is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world’s leading companies, including Oracle, Google, Amazon, Deloitte, Ritz-Carlton, Gap, and Starbucks. He is the author of 7 books, including Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. View his books and FREE articles at Garfinkle Executive Coaching. Subscribe to his Executive Coaching Newsletter and receive the FREE e-book, 40 Proven Strategies to Get Promoted Now!

Have you ever watched a figure skater glide across the ice and marveled at how easy it looks? So graceful, so beautiful, so effortless. It takes a lot of work to get to that point, though. Go down to the rink on a Saturday morning and watch the kids taking their first lessons as they stumble and fall and then get up to try again. It takes a lot of falls before you get good enough to make it look easy.

The same is true of many jobs. You get so good at what you do that no one realizes how hard you work. It’s great to be an expert at what you do, but it can sometimes backfire. If your boss thinks you’re hardly working—rather than working hard—he’s not going to want to give you any raises or promotions. It’s up to you, then, to make sure your boss knows what it takes for you to do your job so well.

For example, a local TV host in San Francisco named Ross McGowan was so skilled at interviewing his guests that his boss didn’t realize how much work went into the preparation for each show. He made it look easy, and as a result, when it was time to negotiate a new contract with his boss, the offer was much lower than he had anticipated. If he had taken care to ensure that his boss was aware of how much work, skill, and training went into making his interviews look so effortless, he may have received a better offer.

A passive approach doesn’t work when it comes to getting credit for the work you are doing. One of my clients, who worked at Amazon.com, thought his superiors would know what he was doing and value his efforts without any special effort on his part. This belief fell apart when he heard his co-workers getting praise at a meeting for work that he himself had performed. That was when he realized he needed to do something differently if he wanted to move up in his career, but he wasn’t sure exactly what he should do.

As we worked together, he learned how to be proactive about making sure he got credit for what he accomplished on the job. Every day, he would do something to sell himself to management and show them how valuable he was to the company. You can do the same thing, starting with three simple steps.

1. Keep track of your successes.

Most employees wait until their annual performance review is approaching, then try to remember what they’ve accomplished over the past year. If you’ve done this, you know how hard it is to remember everything. Make tracking your successes part of your daily routine. Every day, either at the end of the day or first thing the next morning, review what you have done for the day and record any significant progress you have made, projects you’ve completed, and goals you have accomplished. You won’t be able to tell anyone about your accomplishments if you don’t know what they are. If you keep track of what you accomplish on a daily or weekly basis, next time you’re updating your resume to ask for a promotion it will be a cinch.

2. Communicate your successes with your boss.

E-mail your boss at least once per week with an update. Let him know whenever you complete a project, and if possible, attach a dollar figure to it to validate your worth to the company. For example, if you saved the company $60,000 this week and you make $50,000 per year, you’ve already paid for yourself.

3. Tell others about what you have accomplished.

Your boss is not the only one who needs to know how valuable you are. Think of other people you can copy on e-mails, such as other department leaders to whom the results of your project are relevant. Engage in small talk with company leaders whenever you get a chance and look for opportunities to tell them about what you’ve been working on without sounding boastful.

As the leaders in your organization realize how much you contribute to the success of the department and the organization, you’ll be given opportunities to work on bigger and more important projects. Your visibility within the company will grow, and your chances of receiving a promotion will increase. Increasing your visibility at work helps you ensure that you’ll be paid what you’re worth and continue to move up in the company.

Thanks, Joel!

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. Please also help me with my new research by completing my employee survey!

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There is a difference between employees not speaking up at work because they don’t have anything to say about a specific issue and not speaking up because they fear the consequences of expressing their ideas. Managerial behavior can signal employees that it is unwise to speak up. But even when managers hold positive beliefs about the value of employee voice that manifest in encouraging behavior towards employees, some employees will still be reticent to share information they believe is risky.

The Academy of Management Journal recently published an extremely well done study by James Detert and Amy Edmondson (full citation below) that examined employee taken-for-granted beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate.  The authors found that “sometimes unwillingness to speak up is not experienced as intense, discrete fear but rather as a sense of inappropriateness; voice seems risky because it seems wrong or out of place.” (p. 481).

Through a series of four separate studies, they identified the following five beliefs employees can hold about authority figures that can cause them to exhibit self-protective silence:

1.     Negative career consequences of voice: e.g. if you want advancement opportunities in today’s world, you have to be careful about pointing out needs for improvement to those in charge

2.     Don’t embarrass the boss in public: e.g. you should always pass your ideas for improvement by the boss in private first, before you speak up publicly at work.

3.     Don’t bypass the boss upward: e.g. loyalty to your boss means you don’t speak up about problems in front of his or her boss.

4.     Need solid data or solutions (to speak up): e.g. unless you have clear solutions, you shouldn’t speak up about problems.

5.     Presumed target identification: e.g. it is not good to question the way things are done because those who have developed the routines are likely to take it personally.

This research is important because it shows that the boss is not always to blame for organizational silence. Individuals arrive at work with a set of implicit theories about work and authority figures that they learned via past direct and vicarious experiences. The authors conclude “managers appear saddled not only by their own actual behaviors inhibiting voice but also by subordinate beliefs about managers.” (p. 484).

If you want employee voice to become an operational priority, you are going to have to make changes to your selection, training, evaluation, reward, and promotion systems. My advice is to make employee voice an expected, measured, and rewarded behavior. Hire employees that can demonstrate a proven record of coming forward with specific suggestions and solutions at their previous jobs. Never promote to a position of management an employee that in addition to mastering the performance expectations of their assigned job did not also attempt to partner with managers to improve that job.

If you discover you have a manager that stifles employee voice, help them with training but don’t promote them again until they demonstrate that they understand how to encourage employee voice. If you discover you’ve hired an employee with strong self-protective beliefs about the safety of silence, help them engage in behavior at work that directly and specifically challenges those beliefs; otherwise, “it is unlikely that they will revise, set aside, or develop new implicit theories related to speaking up.” (p. 465).

Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comment section below!

Full citation: Detert, J.R. & Edmondson, A.C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-For-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3): 461-488.

Photo credit

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Learning and growth are the fulfillment of REAL interdependence. Your organization’s mission, vision, and to some extent even it’s values will change over time out of necessity. What your organization does, when, where, and how it does it must continually improve and adapt for your organization to remain relevant and strategically viable.

Yet your organization’s purpose, why it does what it does and why that matters, is steadfast. It’s your organization’s purpose – not it’s mission, vision or values – that enables and invigorates the interdependence of purposeful constituents. If you are either unwilling or unable to learn, grow, and adapt as your organization does, then you will lose the capacity to be a purposeful contributor.

Stop learning and growing, and you will become or force others to become either dependent or independent in your relationships at work. Your ability to work autonomously most of the time, yet know when and how to ask for help from others when you need, will erode. You will increasingly become either a burden or a stranger to those you work with. Your role at work will be void of meaning, and there will be no one to blame.

It’s your responsibility to keep that from happening. Real learning is the core technology of interdependent partnerships.

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Leadership liberates others by enabling them to find meaning and full responsibility in their roles. Are you waiting around for a hero leader to arrive on the scene to liberate you? I hope not.

Leadership is a relationship, which means you have to do your part by assuming responsibility for continuously developing yourself into an increasingly interdependent and purposeful partner in the relationship. Unless and until you assume full responsibility for yourself, you force others to assume responsibility for you.

Work hard to liberate your leader from the burden of having to worry about how well you will perform and how much you will care about the work you do, those you do it for, and those you do it with. Give yourself permission to do this work free from external sanctions and rewards. The primary barriers to empowerment are between your ears.

Your choices, as much as anything else, determine whether you will be restrained or liberated by leadership. If you never learn to liberate yourself, you’ll never be prepared to help others do the same.

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This short clip from the movie “We Were Soldiers” is one of the best examples of leadership I’ve found on film. I apologize for the film quality, but the lesson is valuable and worth your time. Here are my summary points from the film clip.

• Stop blaming people and teach them how to identify and solve the systemic sources of their problems
• Don’t remove performance expectations; instead, help folks meet and exceed those expectations
• Accept the person even when you can’t accept the performance
• You are a resource – never do the work for them

The goal of leadership should be to produce purposeful, autonomous employees that are interdependent with you, never dependent upon you. This is a process that takes time, effort, and continuous learning. The process starts with continually holding yourself accountable for your own self-development as a person and as a leader, then holding yourself accountable for helping those you’ve been given the privilege to lead become increasingly more autonomous and self-accountable.

Teach your folks how to solve problems and resist with every fiber of your being the temptation to do the work for them. Paternalistic leadership might make you feel good about yourself, but it makes your followers dependent upon you, and that’s not good for either them or you.

See yourself as a resource, not “the source”. Leadership liberates others by enabling them to find meaning and full responsibility in their roles. If you insist on trying to be an oracle of leadership, your folks will never reach their full potential, which means you will never reach your full potential and your organization will be mired in mediocrity.

Never get the socks and powder for your folks (from the film). Hold yourself accountable for leading others in a way that encourages and enables them to do it for themselves.

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Navy Captain Owen Honors is the captain of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Enterprise. Today, he was relieved of his command because of an unprofessional video he made and broadcast on the Enterprise several years ago, while he was second in command. Here is a quote from Admiral John C. Harvey Jr., the commander of the United States Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, concerning the removal of Captain Honors:

The responsibility of the commanding officer for his or her command is absolute. While Captain Honors’ performance as commanding officer of U.S.S. Enterprise has been without incident, his profound lack of good judgment and professionalism while previously serving as executive officer on Enterprise calls into question his character and completely undermines his credibility to continue to serve effectively in command.

First, I’d like to thank Captain Honors for his years of dedicated service to our country. You don’t rise to command an aircraft carrier without putting together a career of consistently stellar performance. There is no doubt in my mind that Captain Honors touched, improved, and protected the lives of thousands that served with him during his career. The dedicated service of men and women like Captain Honors helps sustain our great country.

But Captain Honors screwed up, and he must be held accountable. That comes with the territory of being a leader. It’s been his duty to hold others accountable to high standards, and now that he has fallen short, we too must hold him accountable.

The Navy did the right thing to remove Captain Honors so swiftly. It must have been very painful to remove an officer of his caliber, but unfortunately it was an easy decision to make.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

I’ve reached the point in my MBA class in Organizational Behavior where we are covering theories and philosophies of leadership. One of the concepts presented in the text we use is called authentic leadership. I’ve been aware of the concept for several years, but because I never really paid much attention to it, I realized yesterday that I did not understand it well enough to explain it to others.

I searched the highest quality peer-reviewed management journals for the most recent article on authentic leadership. I wanted to know 1) how is it defined, 2) how is it measured, and 3) where does it fit in the nomological network.  I found a 2008 article published in the Journal of Management entitled “Authentic Leadership: Development and Validation of a Theory-Based Measure,” by Fred Walumbwa and 4 other co-authors.

Here is how they define authentic leadership:

A pattern of leader behavior that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development. (p. 94).

Frankly, I think that definition is a mess. It’s too complicated, which makes it impossible for normal folks to remember. In my opinion, that renders it useless as a guide for behavior in the real world.

The scale they developed to measure authentic leadership is better than the definition. For some strange reason, they did not publish the full measure they developed, but they did share these 8 questions that they use to tap self-awareness (1 and 2), relational transparency (3 and 4), internalized moral perspective (5 and 6), and balanced processing (7 and 8). These 8 questions would be asked of the follower to determine the degree to which a leader was seen as authentic:

1.      Seeks feedback to improve interactions with others

2.      Accurately describes how others view his or her capabilities

3.      Says exactly what he or she means

4.      Is willing to admit mistakes when they are made

5.      Demonstrates beliefs that are consistent with actions

6.      Makes decisions based on his/her core beliefs

7.      Solicits views that challenge his or her deeply held positions

8.      Listens carefully to different points of view before coming to conclusions

I like those questions a lot, but the reliability of the subscales were disappointingly marginal (highest was α = .77, low was α = .70). Because it is very difficult to publish a study with a measure that has reliability below .70, it is risky for other researchers to use these measures in their own research; consequently, I don’t anticipate seeing a lot of high quality research on authentic leadership the way it was defined and measured in this study.

The nomological network established in the study was also limited. Authentic leadership was a significant predictor of follower satisfaction, follower job performance, and organization climate. In a separate sample, they found that authentic leadership predicted organizational citizenship behavior, commitment, and satisfaction with the supervisor.

My favorite part of the study was this statement by the authors:

In sum, the proposed view of authentic leadership suggests that authentic leaders show to others that they genuinely desire to understand their own leadership to serve others more effectively. They act in accordance with deep personal values and convictions to build credibility and win the respect and trust of followers. By encouraging diverse viewpoints and building networks of collaborative relationships with followers, they lead in a manner that followers perceive and describe as authentic. (96).

I think any follower that observed that behavior in a leader would simply call that good leadership.

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Power is the ability to influence others, while authority is the right to influence others. Those with titles and position often have little influence over others outside of their authority, while those with little or no authority can be very influential and therefore powerful.

Influence is the essence of leadership (Yukl, 2010). The effective use of influence is the measure of your leadership.

The manner in which a leader exercises power largely determines whether it results in enthusiastic commitment, passive compliance, or stubborn resistance. Effective leaders exert both position power and personal power in a subtle, easy fashion that minimizes status differences and avoids threatening the self-esteem of others. These leaders use power in ethical ways and seek to integrate the competing interests of different stakeholders. Effective leaders attempt to empower followers in ways that are appropriate for the situation. (Yukl, 2010, p. 494).

This is exceptional advice when it is your responsibility to influence others. Even when its “not your job,” I would encourage you to see both the opportunity and responsibility to influence others in everything that you do everyday.

Power is a learned behavior.

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Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, just gave a short but excellent talk on innovation, technology, and leadership. Here are his thoughts, mostly in his words, on leadership.

1.      What is the purpose of your business? Why do you matter in this world, and why should people care?

2.      Put people first and build great teams. The soft stuff is the real stuff. The best leaders hire over their head every time. Real leaders relish the moment when they realize everyone on the team is better than they are.

3.      The customer is the essence of business.  Surprise your customers and do things your competitors never imagined doing.

4.      Innovate your business model through IT. Unleash the power of information. Get the information to the worker where the worker wants it, when the worker wants it. Democratize information and workers can do amazing things. Leaders make the news, not report the news.

5.      Focus on results. You are your record. Start with the vision and the strategy, but focus on execution. Nothing motivates teams more than winning. Success is a force multiplier like no other.

Good leaders come in all shapes in sizes but have one thing in common. They have followers. They have high expections, are resolute in the face of adversity, and when everyone else says it can’t be done, they say “it can!” and they make it happen.

Never forget when you came from, and get better every day you live. The world needs more of YOU.

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