When I was around 18, I worked as a shift manager at McDonald’s Corporation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the assistant managers that helped me get promoted and then trained me was a man named Don Griffin. I admired Don because he cared about the work that he did and he cared about me and the rest of his employees. He was also very focused on producing results for the company. Don had a huge influence on my work ethic and basic management philosophy.

Over the years, I’ve never forgotten Don telling me “Performance talks, bullshit walks.” I could count on hearing it every time I tried to give Don an excuse for poor performance. That simple concept still influences how I interpret almost every interaction I have with people in my various work related roles.

I’m OK with folks dropping the ball and making occasional mistakes, and I’m OK with people not delivering as promised from time to time. We all do it – including me. But I have a very low tolerance for folks that won’t accept responsibility for their mistakes. I’ve never known anyone commit to fixing a problem without first admitting “I screwed up.”

Don still lives in the Tulsa area, and he and his wife have a son named Bret.

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

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I had the great pleasure of delivering this presentation on “The Progress Principle” to a group of folks at Arvato Digital Services here in Reno last week. I spoke to them in June this year with a presentation entitled “Empowering Work Relationships.”

They are getting ready to go through some pretty significant organizational change, but instead of talking about how to deal with change or stress, I decided to talk about the concept of inner work life from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s fantastic new evidence-based management book. I think we all realized that we can’t stop change, but the best way to “manage” it might be to make sure we take care of each other by choosing to focus on helping others make daily progress in meaningful work and to be catalysts for our organization and nourishers to our colleagues.

I also stressed my strong belief that there is no substitute for either performance or caring. At the end of every day, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you gave your best effort to perform your given responsibilities, that you tried to improve the work that you do, that you demonstrated good citizenship by helping others as needed, and that you sincerely cared about what you did, who you did it with, and who you did it for. If you ever reach the point where you can no longer do that in your current job, then it’s time to either change your behavior or change jobs.

Helping others make daily progress in meaningful work that they care about can’t insulate us from the mess of change, but it might be able to inoculate us from it’s most harmful effects. Change might make us sick sometimes, but it can’t kill us without our complicity.

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Thoughts, feelings, and motivations comprise an individual’s inner work life. Inner work life manifests in behaviors that matter at work – performance, citizenship, and withdrawal. Inner work life is driven by events at work – events that signify progress, events that support the work itself, and events that support the person doing the work.

Events that support the work itself are second only to the progress principle in their ability to affect the inner work life of folks in your organization. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer use the term catalyst to describe things that facilitate the completion of work and the term inhibitor to describe the absence or negative form of a catalyst.  It’s very important to keep in mind that “catalysts and inhibitors can have an immediate impact on inner work life, even before they could possibly affect the work itself.” (p. 102).

Catalysts and inhibitors are a direct product of an organization’s culture, which “is created largely by the words and actions of leaders, beginning with the organization’s founders.” (p. 108). The three main aspects of culture that shape specific catalyst and inhibitor events at work are (p. 109):

• Consideration for people and their ideas. Do managers at all levels honor the dignity of employees, value their ideas, and serve as examples of civil discourse?
• Coordination. Are systems and procedures (e.g. performance evaluation) designed to facilitate coordination or competition between individuals and groups?
• Communication. Open, honest, and respectful communication is perhaps the most powerful force for sustaining progress, coordinating work, establishing trust, and helping people understand that what they think and do matters.

One of my favorite sayings from Bob Sutton is “the law of crappy systems trumps the law of crappy people.” The most effective way to change the culture of any organization is to change its systems, the way it works. The first and most important change must occur between your ears – a discontinuous change in thinking about your role as a leader and your relationships with your constituents.

Change the way you think, and you will change the way you behave. Change the way you behave, and you will change the way others think and feel about you and ultimately how they behave toward you. Change the way you and your people relate with each other, and you can partner with each other to fix the crappy systems. Continually fix the crappy systems, and you can begin to affect positive change in the culture of your organization.

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

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My daughter played in her first volleyball game of the season the other night. This is her senior year, and she a captain on the team, so she wants to have a good year. Her team won a hard fought match, but my daughter was disappointed with her performance. Her serving, passing, and defense was consistent, but she struggled with hitting. Her hitting started strong, but she got blocked a few times in a row early on and from that point on her hitting game changed.

She held back.

I told her the next time she gets a shot blocked she needs to come right back and hit it at the same girl even harder, and to continue to do so until she forces that person to make an error or miss a block. Her opponent needs to learn quickly that she has no intention of quitting or holding back. She needs to transfer the doubt from her head into her opponent’s head. If that tactic does not work and she gets taken out of the game, it won’t be for lack of effort.

The summer before I started my doctoral studies at Oklahoma State University, I was in Oklahoma on business and took the time to travel to Stillwater to try to meet some of the faculty in the program. I met briefly with Raj Basu, the only professor in the office at the time of my visit.

Raj told me he had recommended that I NOT be accepted into the Ph.D. program because he felt my GMAT scores were too low. He did me a huge favor by being brutally honest with me. I left Stillwater that day discouraged, but I returned in the fall determined. In every class I took, I looked around the room on the first day and told myself that every one of the other students were probably smarter than me, but not a single one of them was going to work harder than me. It was grit, not intelligence that got me through the program.

Grit is like a muscle – it can be developed with consistent and focused effort. But if you don’t use it, you can lose it.

Don’t hold back. You can’t win every time, but don’t lose for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes and get back in the game more determined than ever.

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

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I Am Responsible For My Success And Failures And For Continuing To Learn From Them

Growth through excellence should be the top priority of most businesses. Money that does not hit the top line never has an opportunity to hit the bottom line; consequently, if your business is not growing, it’s probably dying.

What’s the single most important thing you can do on a daily basis as a leader if you want to grow your business?  Invest in and impress your employees. Your people can be an inimitable engine of competitiveness, but only if you make their development a priority. Wishful thinking won’t grow your business.

Loyal customers delighted with your products and service drive sales. Impressive operations are never a matter of chance. Impressive operations occur through punctilious design and consistent execution.

Your employees are the key to both the execution and the continual improvement of the system. If your employees are not impressing your customers, then your customers aren’t being impressed – except maybe by your competitor’s employees. In addition to knowing your systems better than you, your employees are also increasingly socially networked boundary spanners, which makes them a rich source of learning and suggestions. Partner with them to improve the work you do and you will also strengthen their satisfaction and commitment.

The single most important thing you can do if you want to grow your employees is to grow yourself. Your own personal learning and development constrains the growth of your employees, which means it also constrains the growth of your business. Growth scales.

Taking care of yourself and your employees is taking care of business.

After you watch my short video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I taught three different classes last semester, one at the undergraduate level and two at the MBA level, including one I delivered for the first time. It’s a lot of work teaching three different subjects to three different audiences. I got my evaluations back today from all three classes and many students thought I did a very good job, most thought I did an acceptable job, and a few thought I should have been fired yesterday.

If you are going to have high expectations of yourself and others, there is no way you can make everyone happy. High expectations by definition means you have to take risks and try some things you’ve never done before, or make changes to established methods in search of continual improvement. When you take risks, some things are not going to work as well as you thought they might, and from time to time, they might even suck.

When you challenge adults to accept full responsibility for their own learning, you accept the risk that many will not embrace that challenge. Some will lead their entire lives never even understanding the importance of that challenge. Even though I know their self-imposed mediocrity won’t be my fault, it still means I have to continuously improve how I deliver that challenge and how I live up to it myself.

A student said to me this semester “I’m waiting for you to teach me something.” I just about came out of my skin. The prison of that paradigm awaits everyone that surrenders to it’s normative expedience.

Freedom of thought and expression is a wage of accountability, never a privilege of mere participation. Self-doubt, dissonance, and rejection come with the territory of high expectations.  If you are not willing to embrace the messy parts of who you are, how you do your job, and what others might think of you, then you can never invite and encourage others to do the same.

If you are willing to seek the edge of chaos, you will soon learn that some of the most amazing people you will ever have the honor to meet were there long before you arrived.

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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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Leading by example is a central premise of most popular leadership philosophies and formal theories. The idea is that leaders provide a role model for the critical behaviors they want to see from their followers. As popular as this idea is, you might be surprised to know that there is very little empirical evidence to support the efficacy of leading by example in field studies of actual employees and their leaders. Leading by example is often inferred, but it has rarely been directly measured and evaluated for it’s effect on behavior.

A recently published study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below) provides some much needed evidence-based support for leading by example. This study of 67 separate work groups involving 683 total employees in a large Israeli communication organization looked at how the leader’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) affected the citizenship behavior of the group. The idea is that group members would be more likely to believe going above and beyond the formal job description to help the organization or fellow employees (OCB) is a worthy thing to do if they see a leader they identify with doing the same.

The results showed that group members were likely to engage in OCB to the extent that they believed it was a worthy behavior, and their beliefs about the value of OCB were affected by both the leader’s actual OCB and their belief that the leader was a worthy role model. As a leader, you need your people to do more than what’s written in their formal job descriptions to help the organization and each other. This research suggests that to get this critical behavior from your employees, you need to exhibit it yourself. Your folks will not go above and beyond the call of duty at work unless they see you doing the same.

This research has implications for critical behaviors other than OCB. For any behavior you need to see from your followers, you are most likely to get it from them if they believe the behavior is worthy of their effort. This research suggests that one way to facilitate behavior you want to see from others is to practice it yourself, but that only works if they actually see you practice it and believe in your leadership. Leading by example won’t work if your folks either never see you, or when they do see you have little respect for you as a leader.

Once again, the evidence supports what most of us strongly believe – leading by example works. As a leader, you will be most effective if the things you ask your folks to do are things you are actually doing yourself.

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

Full citation: T. Yaffe and R. Kark. (2011). Leading by example: The case of leader OCB. Journal of Applied Psychology.

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The evidence for work engagement got a big boost from a study just published in Personnel Psychology (full citation at the end of this post). The authors first defined what engagement is and is not, identified several key antecedents and consequences, and then tested their model in a meta-analysis of 200 previously published studies of six different measures of engagement that met their criteria.

I was disappointed that the authors did not provide a concise definition of engagement. In their two page definition of engagement (darn academics), they do identify two characteristics that must be present in any valid approach to work engagement (pp. 91- 94):

1.     Engagement should refer to a psychological connection with the performance of work tasks rather than features of the job or organization. “Thus, a measure such as the Gallup Workplace Audit does not conform to this conceptualization because it refers to work conditions not the work task” (p. 91). Did you catch that? Gallup does NOT measure engagement – something I’ve stated here previously.

2.     Engagement involves the simultaneous and holistic self-investment of physical, emotional, and cognitive resources to work. Engaged folks experience a connection with their work on multiple levels.

The results of the meta-analysis first showed that work engagement predicts work performance over and above job satisfaction and organizational commitment – the two most consistent predictors of performance. The effect of engagement beyond satisfaction and commitment is not large, but it is significant.

Both characteristics of the job and characteristics of the individual are significant predictors of work engagement. The characteristics of the job that enhance engagement are task variety and task significance, and the characteristics of the individual are conscientiousness and positive affect. An interesting finding of the study was that autonomy, feedback, and transformational leadership have little effect on employee engagement.

Good quality evidence is mounting that work engagement does matter. Please understand that this conclusion is only valid if you have defined and measured engagement correctly. There are a lot of very popular measures of engagement being peddled by consultants (e.g. Gallup) that cannot claim support from this evidence. And please keep in mind that if engagement is not your cup of tea, this research confirmed once again that good old employee satisfaction and commitment are still some of the best drivers of employee performance.

If you want engaged employees at your workplace, you must first assume responsibility for providing jobs that give employees the opportunity to perform a variety of tasks that they perceive to be meaningful. It’s very difficult for employees to be engaged when their jobs are mundane and they have not been shown how what they do really matters. With good jobs in place, now hire conscientious and positive employees. Please don’t miss the fact that unless and until you make informed decisions as a manager, employee engagement will remain elusive.

Full citation: Christian, M.S., Garza, A.S., & Slaughter, J.E. (2011) Work engagement: A quantitative review and test of its relations with task and contextual performance. Personnel Psychology, 64: 89-136.

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photo credit: LifeSupercharger

I spoke about social business yesterday at the Northern Nevada Chamber of Commerce Bizflash. Last year I spoke to them about personal branding, so I knew this time I needed to deliver something fresh and insightful. Preparing for this presentation forced me to learn a lot of new things and find new ways to say things I already knew.

I also made an impromptu decision to wear a wireless lapel microphone and to leave my jacket off. I never do that. I almost always speak wearing a jacket, and I almost always just project my big voice, even in a large room. I was very relaxed while I spoke yesterday, and I think it made a difference.

I tried a new exercise during the presentation using three different color note cards that did not work so well. It only had a minor effect on my presentation, and I think I know how to fix it to make it better next time.

Have you tried something different to attempt to improve your performance lately? If not, why not? If so, what did you learn? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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