♦ Employee Engagement: Walking your Talk is Accountable Behavior

By on May 18, 2012 in Uncategorized

When I was growing up my father used to say, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” He and my mother smoked, but they didn’t want their children to smoke.  Monkey see, monkey do. The MINUTE I got old enough, what did I do? You got it. I started smoking, but of course I HID my cigarettes because MY smoking wasn’t ok with the authorities in the house. The telling moment was when my mother asked me if she could bum a cigarette.

I have not smoked for many, MANY years but the story makes my point.  Everyone is a leader SOMEWHERE in their lives, and this blog is directed at leaders.  Everyone, young and old, has leadership roles.   Walking your talk applies everywhere.  It is rather fun to reach down into the core elements of leadership that apply EVERYWHERE, to people of all ages, and delves into basic areas of life.

Walking your talk applies to upholding principles, such as always tell the truth even when it is unpleasant, treat everyone with respect, listen to people when they are talking.. I mean really hear what they are saying without our opinion about it.

It also applies to some very basic rules of cleanliness.  If you want a clean work or home environment, you too must wash your hands after going to the restroom and I don’t mean just run your fingertips under the water.  I mean soap and sufficient warm water to remove bacteria.  Not when it is convenient, but every time you use the restroom.

Research in the UK revealed that more than nine in ten mobile phones are coated with some kind of bacteria, including E.coli, which was responsible for a number of deaths in Germany in June last year, and Staphylococcus aureus, one strain of which is better known as MRSA.

I belong to a Rotary club of 500 members, and every time I greet, a role of shaking hands with members coming into the meeting, someone whispers in my ear, “After you are done and before lunch, go wash your hands.”  Last week the greeters were all wearing white gloves!

My mother always used to say, “Cleanliness before Godliness,” whatever that meant, but she ingrained in us an adherence to the basics.  Not so much with smoking, but when it came to cleanliness, she definitely walked her talk, and so did

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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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