Tag Archives | authenticity

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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Transparency takes Courage. Build your Muscle.

By on January 27, 2012 in Business, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, Trust, Values

I have read and re-read the bible on Transparency.  On page 42 of Transparency, authors Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman and James O’Toole state, “Transparency is one evidence of an organization’s moral health.”  Are these familiar names?  If you lead an organization, they should be.

So what is transparency?  Transparency is a choice, a value in an organization that optimizes candor (telling the truth regardless of the impact of that truth, fast and forward).  These authors assert that candor maximizes the probability of success.

Transparency has to be lived as a value from the top of the organization down through its toes, where it does the walking.  And it either walks its talk or it doesn’t.  Like pregnancy, there is no such thing as being partly transparent.  What would that be?  We’ll tell you the truth part of the time but not all of the time?  It’s up to you to guess which part is true, though.

Like humanity, this is a complex subject in application.  We have seen the absence of transparency in highly visible cases where leaders did not intend to dupe their stakeholders, reality just got away from them at Enron, British Petroleum (BP) and most of the global organizational financial failures that created our drop in economic safety in the world.   Reality was known in these cases, it was not transparent to those who could make a difference before the crisis.

Does transparency occur differently inside an organization with the lightening speed of the digital era, where things said cannot be retracted?  The magnitude of emails and sometimes-careless comments and thought, can complicate discerning transparency for actionable matters.

These authors assert that transparency begins at home, in your own organization, where you will build a muscle around being transparent so that when called for in the world at large, you won’t be left without capacity for it like BP’s ex-CEO Tony Hayward, who eventually got around to admitting BP was not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.”    They also call for leaders to empower transparency in both directions — enabling others to “speak truth to power.”

You do know what I mean.  And if you have built a muscle around screwing your courage to the sticking point to look into the mirror, and if you enable your people to show you a mirror, good for you!  If you have not, there is no time like the present.

Tell me your stories, your questions, your thoughts.

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The FINE Art of Getting Things Done

By on August 7, 2010 in Business, business planning, Perspectives, strategy, Trust, Uncategorized, Values

Clearly I have NOT mastered this fine art of getting things done, as it has been a month since I last posted something.  Since then, however, I have been educating myself in the fine art of managing my time and the productivity of others.  I am currently availing myself of interns, with whom I am getting systemic changes accomplished that daily demands would have me ignore.  Like moving into Cooler Email, for instance, lock stock and barrel for managing my business from software-as-a-service.  There’s more to the story — stay with me.

Without some troops I would not tackle a project like shifting the locus of my business from my computer to another system so that others could share it.  Having that locus of control shifted makes many things possible that weren’t possible before.

While I have them (before they move on with their REAL lives), Ipek (on the left) and Semih (on the right) are making possible this transition to Cooler Email and other great tools of productivity.

On a related topic, I attended a business gathering last evening where we talked about execution of strategy.  The overarching theme of the evening was that for there to be a shift in the collective consciousness of bringing our heart to the business world, and not just our head, we all need to work for the common good and make decisions with the common good in mind, not just our selfish interests.

This is a theme of mine, and fortunately not JUST mine!  Working for the common good means that as we go about our regular work, we bring in the fine art of considering how what WE do will impact others.

I have helped Semih find a school where he will get his MBA, and I will help Ipek get a job.  I met these two young adults through an earlier intern, Orcun, whom I helped find a job and in doing so I lost him as an intern.  He replaced himself by introducing me to his two friends who needed internships.  THAT, my friends, is the FINE art of getting things done!  When I released my need for Orcun to be my intern, little did I know that I would end up doubling my workforce of interns!  My deciding based on the common good turned out to be good for me, good for Orcun, and good for Ipek and Semih.

I think that’s the way the world REALLY works, and it is NOT intuitive any more than leaning into the curve on a motorcycle is intuitive.  It is a choice, and in the end things get done that should get done, even though in the beginning we don’t see the whole picture.

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