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♦ How we Listen for Trust, or Not

By on May 11, 2012 in Business, Culture, Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, Synergy, Trust, Values

Based on reputable research, no doubt leaders could do more to warrant our trust. BP’s CEO Tony Hayward admitted the criticism of the oil spill and subsequent inability to stop the damage was ‘entirely fair.’  Ok, it was an event, a mishap.  Let’s look at an ordinary, reoccurring issue in the news lately, CEO pay.

Who is culpable, for instance, for extraordinarily high CEO wages?   Considerable finger wagging has been going on in the press at CEOs about this.  It isn’t the CEO who sets his or her own salary; it is the board of directors.  Yet boards of directors were invisible to the press in these stories.  Often our assumptions may lead us to conclusions that malign others without full consideration for the facts.  This disturbs me greatly but I know I have done it, too.  Why is that?

Walking with a friend, I mentioned a situation that was just this kind of wrongful maligning, and she asked me, “How long does it take to find a witch?”  She was referencing the days in Europe from 1480 to 1700 when legally sanctioned and official witchcraft trials resulted in from 40,000 to 100,000 executions. It was decided someone was a witch, and that person was immediately burned at the stake.  Perhaps it is popular to not trust CEOs because the media are on a CEO witch-hunt.

While we’ve moved beyond flagrantly burning people at the stake, we still do character assassinations every day in the form of judgment and gossip.   Some of this finger wagging and witch-hunting and broad-brush painting is projection — making someone else responsible for what we, ourselves, don’t want to be responsible.  So I ask myself, is my promise about business leaders leading with integrity and love and listening for people’s greatness about convincing leaders to be that?  Or is there some culpability in how I, and others listen for a leader to be great?

I believe there’s a pandemic malaise that creates its own dissonance and a noise within which leaders are trying to lead.  The expectation that leaders should be responsible for all wrongs is abdication of personal responsibility, and in the United States anyway (where I live), it is a serious problem.

I would like for EVERY individual in an organization, be it government, non-profit or for-profit, to SEEK OUT and TAKE UP their part in building successful entity, using the energy they spend criticizing leadership and putting it into taking personal responsibility to own their own accountability for results.

For more on this topic you can request on this website, www.accountabilitypays.com, the larger thesis from which this excerpt was taken.

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Vision is Mapping a Future and Steve Jobs is a Visioning Icon

By on May 4, 2012 in Business, Culture, Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Leadership, Trust

♦ Leaders Leading Leaders

Seeing into the future is rather like running in heavy fog eyes wide open.  I was recently invited to participate in a strategic planning session for a not-for-profit organization where the CEO wants to see 30 years out into the future.

I proposed a people analysis as part of this process because there is an assumption that some of those folks who are currently in the organization will still be there to carry out this vision.  Some will not, the math doesn’t work.   Age is not your friend in this exercise.  Or in Steve Jobs’ case, illness was not his friend nor was his illness our friend.  I don’t know about you but I miss him!

In the fuzzy environment of the global financial crisis, technology advancements, and unpredictability of the environmental issues, there is something exciting about skipping all of those considerations and saying “this is where we WANT to be.”

Our favorite recent runaway successful leader Steve Jobs said, “ A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them.  Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.” That is vision in the face of a crumbling economy, yes? At Accountability Pays we use all Apple products.

Vision is an inside job that belongs to the leader. Moreover, it differentiates a successful leader from an also-ran leader.   But it isn’t enough to just envision the future, without giving it legs.  Warren Bennis said, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

Jobs could have believed in putting quality products into the market and flopped but general consensus says he tenaciously adhered to a winning combination of innovation AND a veracity about quality AND an incredible sensibility for design to differentiate those products from ANY competitor.  He had the capacity and the drive to translate his vision into more market share than any company anywhere in any industry.

Here is a teaser quote to send you on your way to visioning.  Who said this?  “Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?”

Your comments are welcome and invited.  Feel free to give your examples, your stories.

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Authenticity is Core to Effective Business Dynamics

By on April 28, 2012 in Breakaway Success, Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, Trust

Why, I often ask, is the human resource function shuffled off to the Human Resource department as if the hands don’t need the head for full functionality?   People are the source of results, they manage the systems, they pull the levers, they produce the results. What is more important? People are the JUICE, the GLUE, the SOURCE.

Transparency is core to trust, which has been covered in prior blogs.  So is authenticity.   Here is what the foremost author on emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Primal Leadership:  Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence says about authenticity and leadership.

“The triad of self-awareness, self-management, and empathy all come together in the final Emotional Intelligence ability: relationship management.  Here we find the most visible tools of leadership — persuasion, conflict management, and collaboration among them.  Managing relationships skillfully boils down to handing other people’s emotions.  This, in turn, means that leaders be aware of their own emotions and attuned with empathy to the people they lead.

“If a leader acts disingenuously or manipulatively, for instance, the emotional radar of followers will sense a note of falseness and they will instinctively distrust that leader.  The art of handling relationships well, then, begins with authenticity: acting from one’s genuine feelings.”

 

In building the biotechnology company Amgen, that “over the next 20 years went from a struggling entrepreneurial enterprise into a $3.2 billion company with 6,400 employees, they delivered consistent profitability and growth.”  How did CEO George Rathman avoid what is called by Jim Collins the “entrepreneurial death spiral?”  Amgen was a culture of discipline. Rathman “understood that the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline — a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.”  Jim Collins, Good to Great.

If you have been following my blogs you know Jim Collins sings my favorite song.   Get the right people paired with discipline and business grows, authentic dialog and transparency are natural expressions in the organization.  Get the wrong people and it is impossible to get great results from poor performers with excuses in lieu of results. Before dismissing these people, however, some authentic mirror work is required to determine if it is their ineptitude, or your lack of leadership that is the source of poor performance in results.  Last week’s blog invited the possibility that you are accountable for everything.  Certainly you are accountable for choosing to fire, tolerate, or educate poor performers.  Before choosing, are you measuring what matters?

In a fully functional, authentic business environment, your key executive team will have authentic conversations making it popular to take responsibility, to seek failures sooner, to be completely transparent.  And Daniel Goleman points out that fully functional leaders have conversations that include real feelings, not posturing and not pretending.

Is this your daily experience?

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