RealTime Leadership

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.

Often when working with clients to design and deliver leadership training, I’m told to create an experience where participants have fun, are fully engaged in the program and learn new skills.  Recently, I partnered with a client, a major U.S.-based insurance company, that decided to raise the bar and set the expectation that learners would also apply what they learned back on their job in a way that impacts business results.  

To achieve this goal we applied the 5As Framework to the design and implementation of a training program for a group of  high-potential managers as part of a regional leadership conference.  The program we delivered was Interplay, a one-day business simulation where groups of 4 to 5 learners work together as a team to manage a business.  In this case, the management teams where running small start-up organizations that were competing with large established insurance companies. 

Interplay is a demanding program that keeps participants engaged at a high-level.  The friendly competition between teams allows for a lot of fun with cheers for the winning team and collegial encouragement for the teams that are struggling.  And throughout the day there are multiple opportunities to learn new skills around business acumen, teamwork, communication, decision making and strategy.  The most important and most powerful learning objective is for participants to understand how their decisions impact a company financially and drive value for shareholders.  Thus, Interplay met the criteria of being fun and engaging, and also taught new skills.  However to ensure the skills where applied and business outcomes where impacted, we applied the 5As Framework:

Anticipation

An SVP  kicked off the event by communicating to the participants how important this training is to their success.  The leader reinforced that the individuals in the room were selected for their management and leadership skills, and the company truly believed in their potential.  The SVP also set the expectation that the participants were expected to learn new skills, apply them back on their job, and help their department and the company achieve it’s business goals.  This short speech helped participants anticipate success and open their minds to the possibility of learning new skills.  It also reminded participants that they are expected to both apply new skills and achieve results. 

Alignment

The first exercise of the day invited participants to review 10 learning outcomes from Interplay and select the 2-3 that are most important to them personally.  In addition, we invited participants to share within their groups why these outcomes where so important, especially with respect to their current jobs and responsibilities at the company.   Already, the participants were aligning learning outcomes with activities and results on their job, yet in a traditional sense, the “learning” had not yet started.

Alliance

There were six vice presidents and six Interplay teams participating in the program.  Throughout the day, the vice presidents rotated from team to team, so they got a chance to observe and engage with each team.   The V.P.s offered feedback, coaching and guidance, enriching the learning process.  Later that evening, each V.P. was assigned a group of participants where, over dinner, they continued to coach and reflect on the learning.

Application

At the end of the day, when the energy and excitement was at its peak, we asked participants to personally reflect on their own Interplay Success Map.  A Success Map is a document that explicitly identifies the linkages between the learning outcomes of Interplay, applications of that learning on the job and organizational results.  For example, one participant identified the following linkage:

Interplay Learning Outcome: Understand how an investment in people development impacts business results.

Application on-the-job: Spend more time and resources at my regional office, getting to know my employees better, taking the time to coach and development them, and invest in employee development.

Impact on Results: Higher retention and increased employee productivity.

This participant now clearly understands the linkage between the learning outcome of Interplay (importance of people development) on the business outcome (employee productivity).

Accountability

Once the Success Maps were created and discussed at each team, we announced the “winners” of the Interplay simulation to great cheers.  Thus we ended the day on a high-note with a burst of positive energy.  But there was one more important message to be delivered before participants walked out the door.  The SVP took the stage again and challenged everyone in the room to take the Success Map back to their offices and share them with their direct supervisors.  If additional ideas or thoughts came to them on the plane, continue to add to the document.  And finally, the SVP let them know that he was personally going to follow up with their supervisors to ensure that a conversation took place, and results where being measured.

The high-potential leaders in the room were not daunted, rather they were motivated to truly apply their new skills and achieve business success.  They wanted to be accountable for their learning.  In fact, they expected nothing less for their leaders and their organizations.

  One of the great business challenges of the 21st century will be building the capacity of large, complex organizations to change and evolve continuously in order to deliver ever-increasing value to customers.  In the world of leadership development, we often think of this pursuit through the narrow lens of developing individual leadership skills and competencies through training.

Creating a Learning Culture
However, an adaptive and flexible organization is the result of a true learning culture.  To create such a culture requires going far beyond individual training to include team learning, organizational learning and customer learning.  In his new book, Developing a Learning Culture in Non-Profit Organizations, Dr. Stephen J. Gill writes about how organizations can overcome the inherent barriers that prevent a true learning culture from taking hold.  Although Dr. Gill addresses the non-profit audience, the barriers and potential solutions are the same for corporations looking to become more innovative and adaptive to change.

Individual versus Organizational Learning
Dr. Gill advances the theory that, although individual leadership development is important, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.  Effective learning cultures like Toyota are concerned with developing the leadership skills of their managers, of course, but they never lose focus on the more over-arching goal of building organizational capacity to continuously improve performance through the Toyota Production System.

What Dr. Gill is really talking about here is teaching the organization to learn how to learn.  As you focus on developing the latest training programs and action learning experiences for your employees, spend some time reflecting on how these efforts interact with and support the overall learning culture of your organization.  As you begin to consider your plans and budget for leadership development in 2010, ask yourself, how is your organization supporting:

    1. Individual Learning – are you establishing an alliance between the learner and their boss to provide feedback and support to the learner?  Is the learner accountable for results based on applying the new learning?  Is individual learning aligned with critical business outcomes?
    2. Team Learning – are you establishing learning and performance goals for teams?  Are you fostering true dialogue on your teams?  Do teams at your organization practice the principles of continuous process improvement?
    3. Organizational Learning- do you have a clear vision for the future and is everyone committed to that vision?  Are there connections established between various functions in your organization so that knowledge sharing and integrated learning can occur?  Do you regularly assess your organizations learning culture?  Are you leveraging social media to connect people to other people and ideas?

   4. Customer or Community Learning- In Dr. Gill’s book, he calls this community learning, but in for-profit corporations, you might think of this as customer learning or stakeholder learning.  Are you listening to your customers and stakeholders, and incorporating their knowledge and contributions?   Does your organization depend on a healthy environment, strong communities or robust economies?  What is your company doing to ensure sustainability in these communities?

RealTime Performanceand Dr. Stephen Gill recently developed an Organizational Audit to help our clients identify opportunities for enhancing and developing a learning culture.  Our collaboration with Dr. Gill has evolved into an ebook that will be published next month titled “Getting More from Your Investment in Training: The 5As Framework.”  More on this book soon.

One of the long-standing assumptions about leadership in today’s wired and global economy is the critical importance of multitasking.  With information coming at us through email, RSS, Twitter, smart phones and the like, the ability to perform multiple actions at once, quickly prioritizing tasks and making decisions, would seem to be an important contributor to leadership success.  However, the more this vaunted “skill” comes under scrutiny, the more doubts there are about the correlation between multitasking and good leadership. 

The most recent assault comes from a study published by Stanford University that discovered multitaskers are not better than unitaskers.  Writing about multitaskers in New York Times, Ruth Pennebaker recently summed it up:

They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

This research echoes my own experience with multitasking – namely that it is difficult if not impossible to do effectively.  In addition to being incompetent, many multitaskers run the risk of alienating their peers and subordinates.  Daniel Goleman and others have demonstrated the importance of emotional intelligence in a leader.  One of the critical components of emotional intelligence is the ability to listen to others and “be present.”  It is very difficult to be present for your employees and customers when you’re talking on the phone while checking email at the same time.

With the growing popularity and ubiquity of technology, the critical leadership skill that is missing today is the ability to concentrate on one task and to authentically be present to those around you.  I believe it is easier to slip into reactive multitasking mode then it is to have the presence of mind to block out what is not important and to focus on the emotional leadership skills that allow us to collaborate with others and inspire employees to do their best.

John Medina, the author of Brain Rules produced a series of videos on why multitasking is ineffective: