RealTime Leadership

“Get a feedback loop and listen to it. … When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.”

- Randy Pausch (1960 – 2008) was a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a best-selling author, who achieved worldwide fame for his speech The Last Lecture, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and having only a few months to live.

Most people, by now, know the story of Randy Pausch and his Last Lecture.    The book was a best-seller and the video of the lecture itself has been viewed by over 11 million people on YouTube.  The entire lecture is a powerful and moving presentation on achieving your dreams and living a fullfilling life. 

Being that I’m in the busines of helping organizations develop leaders, I found the lecture fascinating on another level – namely the insight it provides us into one man’s struggle to achieve his goals, to continually grow and develop as a person and to live a happy life.  The popularity of the book and the lecture lead me to believe that the insights shared by Randy do not apply to him only, and are really fundamental to the human condition.  We can learn from these insights and apply them to leadership development programs at our organizations.

One thing that Randy discusses is the importance of feedback.  During his childhood and into his college days, Randy had little use for feedback.  Like many of us, he didn’t initially see the value in feedback.  But at some point in our lives and careers we hit what Randy calls a “brick wall.”  This is a barrier that temporarily prevents us from achieving our goals.  Randy has a great attitude about these barries; ” Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”  Well, in order to break through these brick walls, we often need feedback from others to tell us what’s missing or what we need to do differently.  During graduate school, a professor did just that for Randy, helping him to see how his attitude was holding him back.

Through the course of his life, Randy came to appreciate feedback so much so that he would seek out what he called “feedback loops.”  These are processes that give us the feedback and information we need to continually improve and develop as leaders. 

Contrast Randy’s attitude and feelings about feedback with what we sometimes encounter with leaders who are receiving 360-feedback.   Through our leadership development practice at RealTime Performance, we deliver thousands of 360-feedback reports every year to companies like Emerson, Nordstrom, FedEx, Chubb and Johnson & Johnson.  Although many leaders do view 360 as a positive excercise, there is always that group of managers who perceive it to be a negative experience right from the start.

These employees mistakenly consider receiving feedback an unpleasant exercise to be avoided if possible and minimized if absolutely necessary.  Successful leaders like Randy understand that feedback is a special gift because it is something we can’t give ourselves.   We can go out and buy ourselves a watch or new clothes, but we can’t give ourselves the knowledge of how we are perceived by others unless we ask. 

Furthermore, the people who invest their time to provide us with feedback are often taking on a risk.  When someone delivers feedback, they risk damaging the relationship, especially if the feedback is critical or hits on a touchy subject.  Feedback comes at a price to the feedback-giver as well.  That’s why, feedback truly is a gift.

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow with our families, now is an appropriate time to take account of the many things to be thankful for at work.  As a leader, what comes to mind for me is the debt and gratitude I have for the people I have the honor to work with everyday.  So how do I, as a leader thank the many people around me who not only contribute to my success, but more importantly to the success of the organization?  One way is to simply say “thank you.”  But another more powerful and sustainable way to say thank you is to treat people with respect and acknowledge and encourage their full commitment and contribution throughout the year.

There are times, however, when the pressures of work kick in and deadlines need to be met, and it is easy to slip back into the mode of barking orders.  It is times like this when I try to remember a simple rule; “Treat your people as if they were volunteers.”

I did not come up with this rule, rather it was given to me as a “gift” by Vice President at a major global company, who I was interviewing for a leadership development project.  When I asked this individual to characterize his approach to leadership, he summed it up this way;

“In my mind, I like to lead people as if they were volunteers.  The fact is, the great people who work for me, the high-performers,   can leave at any time.  Their skills and expertise are in demand.  If I don’t lead them and treat them as volunteers, all I get is what I ask of them.  But if I ask them what they think and how they approach a situation, I get their full input, energy and passion.”

So let’s be thankful for the people who work for us this Thanksgiving, and let’s acknowledge the gift of their presence by treating them like the volunteers they truly are.  Happy Thanksgiving!

A much discussed article by Tony Bingham, the President of ASTD, appeared in the August 2009 T+D Magazine under the title “Learning Gets Social.”  In the piece, Tony delivers a shot across the bow for many learning and development departments, saying basically, if we all don’t get on board and start leveraging and supporting Web 2.0 technologies for learning, we’re simply going to be deemed irrelevant by the businesses we support.   The article quotes Karie Willeyard, CLO of Sun Microsystems, saying:

If the learning organization doesn’t get into that 70 percent and use social media, they’re going to get left behind.   They’re going to become irrelevant because people are going to be able to post and share knowledge with one another without the learning function.

The fact is, most employees are already embracing web 2.0 collaboration and sharing tools without the learning function, and the numbers are growing every day.   Two major trends t are fueling this shift to informal learning:

1. The Millennial Generation – those born between 1977 and 1997, essentially grew up with the Internet and are familiar with learning and sharing information online.  As the Baby Boom generation retires, this is the generation that is currently moving into the workforce and changing the landscape.  By 2014, it is estimated that the Millennial generation will comprise 47% of the workforce.  
2. Technology – continues to make it easier to share, collaborate and learn online.  Today, if someone wants advice on how to become a better leader, they use Google, Wikipedia , Twitter, LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 technologies to address their unique learning need immediately.  They don’t sign up for the management training course offered next quarter.

The collective force of these two trends is transforming how employees learn, shifting the model from a didactic model to a collaborative model.  Tony Bingham makes the case for how Millenials are changing learning landscape:

In education, they are forcing a change in the model, from a teacher-focused approach based on instruction, to a student-focused model based on collaboration.

I refer to this as a shift from the “Sage on the stage” model to the “guide on the side.”  Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the sharing of information and make it easier to collaborate with colleagues.  The widespread acceptance of these new technologies is rapidly increasing the shift to delivering learning at the point-of-need, giving employees the information they need when they need it.
Although the Bingham article is a great wake-up call to the learning profession, it fails to address the critical question of what can or should be done to address informal learning.  Bingham ends the article by saying:

“The pieces are there, and now is the time to connect those pieces to create a learning masterpiece that meaningfully demonstrates the critical importance of each and every one of your roles.”

Huh? This sounds to me like he is encouraging the learning profession to continue with its command and control attitude of dictating learning.  What’s needed, in my opinion, is for the learning profession to focus on supporting and fostering the technologies and experiences that will allow and empower employees to collaborate, share and learn on their own accord.  The “learning masterpiece” Bingham refers to will evolve on its own if we give employees the tools to share and collaborate, and then trust them to do the right thing.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is a joint venture between Gallup and the health management company Healthways.  The Index is designed to measure the overall well-being of the United States and its various regions by randomly administering a comprehensive survey measuring the overall mental, physical and emotional health of individuals across the country (Hawaii and Utah top the list). 

Healthways being a client of RealTime Performance, I have been following the index carefully and I was struck with a report released earlier this month on the relative well-being of different professions.  The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index found that Business Owners are the happiest, most engaged workers in the workplace today.  On one level, these results are exactly what we might expect, but if we dig a little deeper into the data, there are some important findings that offer insights into how to increase employee engagement among regular (non-owner) employees. 

• Working longer hours does not automatically equate with low engagement.  Business Owners work more hours than any other job category, yet they have the highest well-being.  This tells us that longer hours are detrimental to employee engagement only if the employee is not passionate and does not feel “ownership.”
• Lower pay does not necessarily mean lower well-being.  Although Business Owners make less than Professionals and Managers/Executives,  they have higher overall well-being than these other job categories.  What this tells us is that pay is important, but other intangibles such as passion, engagement, and a sense of ownership more than make up for lower pay among Business Owners.

A Wall Street Journal article about the study noted:

“Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment. “

So one way to increase engagement among employees is help them discover what their passionate about, and then give them the freedom to pursue that work on their own terms.  This, of course, means we have to trust that employees will make good decisions and do the right thing for the company.  I have written previously about the overwhelming evidence connecting trust and engagement. 

In addition, my good friend and colleague Brad Federman recently wrote a the book Employee Engagement where he underscores the important role trust plays in driving employee engagement.