Tag Archives | Trust

Listening is a Power Source for Leaders

By on January 12, 2012 in Business, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, Trust

As the facilitator of CEO business support groups I held conversations with candidates for my groups to discern the likelihood that they would be good listeners.  I distinctly remember one CEO who told me, “I take only my own counsel.  No thank you.”  I had had candidates suggest it, carry that attitude, but never had it been so directly spoken.

So you are a leader.  If you are successful by financial standards you could fall into that trap.  As leaders, it can be tempting to read our own press and believe it.

Power is a reflection of effectiveness.   You could be the best at your profession — you might be the expert in your field. I have met leaders who, when they walk into a room all eyes turn.  If you have that power, you have a responsibility.  The more reference power, the more personal power, or the more expert power you have, the more responsibility is called for.

Consider that some people may have stopped telling you the truth, truth that could be useful.  They may have trouble being themselves around you.  If your presence is so overwhelming that others have to shade their eyes not to get sunburn, then you have missed an opportunity to be contributed to and frankly, to contribute.  The separation of inequality is a barrier to communication.

Bottom line is, being bigger than your britches creates a barrier to hearing the thoughts, observations, or desires of others.   Communication is lessened, altered, missed.

I was once advised, “Take advice from a rock.” Everyone has a contribution to make if you will allow it, even listen for it.  A little humility goes a long way to making others comfortable in your presence, giving you access to them and them access to you.

Do you have the experience of being powerful?  When do you tend to listen, and to whom?  When do you not?   Dialog is healthy.  I welcome yours here.

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Key Words for Affecting Employee Engagement

By on October 12, 2011 in Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, strategy, Trust, Values

I had the pleasure of interviewing John Schierer, Vice President of Human Resources at Cubic Defense Applications. I reached out to John because when at Cobham, he and consultant and author Sandy Asch had devised a comprehensive program for employee engagement that was extremely effective. I had read John’s article about that initiative and I wanted more.

In our relatively short conversation, I got something incredibly valuable. There are some key distinctions regarding Employee Engagement that, if you don’t know deeply what they mean and how to use them, will stifle any attempt to transform a corporate culture. I am clear John Schierer is a master in these distinctions.

Employee engagement means that people at work will give you their discretionary time and attention. They don’t just show up; they show up engaged, excited, and enthusiastic about making their unique contribution, and accountable for producing results.

Situational. That means you have to first understand the culture you are in before you can expect to garner employee engagement. This takes time, effort, and study. Where is the company in its organizational life cycle? Is it small and growing? Or large and complex? Is it in transition from one stage to another?

Desired Behaviors. Before taking on any transformational efforts, know the outcome you want — greater productivity, quality — improvement over the current state. Here, John collaborated with Sandy and came up with behaviors and created a code of conduct based on Sandy’s book, Excellence at Work: The Six Keys to Inspire Passion in the Workplace (World at Work Press, 2007).

Language. Having clear behavioral outcomes created common definitions, language and understanding for not only employees, but also for the supervisors. Language is unique to a culture, and having intentional language can add strength to the culture. New people pick up on it very quickly.

Alignment. If you hold values, or a code of conduct high, are those values/is that code of conduct in the performance appraisals and the compensation structure? Are you interviewing for preferences around those values? Are you asking employees about them through 360’s?

Buckets. If your language is built around alignment with those values that are aligned throughout the organization, then people will begin to express upsets in the language that mirrors the buckets that were formed. New employees will quickly align to the language and also begin to relate to the buckets. Structural integrity is very quickly discernable.

Transparency. If people know the mission and are aligned, they are self-informed because everything is transparent to them. Transparency is taught by being modeled. It can be tracked anecdotally, by learning where transparency is being rewarded.

Thinking in these terms will help you ask the right questions, so that if you believe, as the Jurdy cartoon suggests, that something is missing from employee engagement, you can look deeply for what will make a significant, measurable, positive difference, as John and Sandy and their team did at Cobham.

Perhaps you have terms that you have found key to employee engagement.  Please share by leaving a comment.

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Latest Edelman Trust Survey Shows New Approach to Trust Needed

By on March 15, 2011 in Business, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, strategy, Trust, Values

According to Robert Edelman, www.edelmantrustbarometer.com, the old, ineffective trust fortress focused solely on profit by a framework of control information, protect the brand and stand alone as a great corporation. This top-down approach doesn’t work any more. In the new trust architecture, the trust triangle has at the base what we do (profit with purpose) and shared values. This is now buttressed by transparency (how we do what we do) and engagement – the where, i.e. who communicates for the corporation. It must be both vertical AND peer to peer interactions).

I am a BIG fan of Robert Edelman’s because he has managed to quantify a very difficult phenomenon to quantify. Trust lives in the “in between,” it isn’t my job nor is it your job to foster trust, trust is in the realm of the relationship and we are both accountable for it. I liken trust to marriage — I have a friend who jokes, “marriage is an institution, and I’m not ready for an institution yet.” Marriage is an AGREEMENT between to people that implies a lot of behaviors must align for the marriage to withhold the test of time.

Similarly, trust is created and destroyed by the actions and words that occur over time between people. By the aggregate of those actions and those words, trust is either buttressed like a fortress or torn down.

Edelman’s message here is that today’s trust buttressing involves more than it used to for corporations, and the U.S. as an aggregate corporate community has been slipping, other countries have been gaining ground.

There is much that could be inferred by this slippage of trust. Suffice it to say, as Robert Porter Lynch says, trust is the bedrock of democracy and we are hanging by a thin thread. We just don’t know when or how our Tsunami might happen, and we are precipitously close to that event, or those events.

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