RealTime Leadership

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!

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.

Soccer is by far the world’s most popular sport.  In many ways, soccer, or football as it is known outside of America, transcends the sports world and is deeply embedded in the culture of most countries.  The hype and media saturation of soccer is going to increase steadily as we approach World Cup 2010 in South Africa.  The Confederation Cup Final, June 28th featuring the United States versus Brazil, was an exciting prelude to what we can expect next summer. 

Given the popularity of soccer globally, it is surprising that the metaphor of soccer and language of the game has not permeated the culture of business and the body of work that makes up leadership development.  That may be about to change with the recent publication of “The Collaborator: Discover Soccer as a Metaphor for Global Business Leadership” by Winsor Jenkins.

In the United States, the use of sport metaphors in business is quite common, but they tend to be related to American Football (“we really need to ‘punt’ on this one”) or baseball (“it’s better to hit lots of singles and doubles.”)  The author makes a great case for leveraging soccer as a tool to teach managers how to lead in a global business environment.  Soccer has several advantages over football and baseball, at least when it comes to serving as a business metaphor:

1. It’s global.  You don’t have to “translate” your baseball metaphor so your team members in India and Dubai understand what you’re trying to say.  As Winsor Jenkins says in the book, “Soccer is imprinted in the world’s DNA.”
2. A soccer team is the ultimate self-directed work team.  Unlike most sports, a soccer team receives very little communication or direction from the manager or coach during the game.  Soccer teams don’t wait for the “play to be called in” or the “manager to change the pitcher,” rather the team is forced to respond to changing conditions as they happen on the field.  This requires a high level of trust, communication and collaboration from team members, exactly the kinds of conditions we expect of our global business teams
3. Soccer is not position driven.  A soccer team consists of 11 players, and they are called upon to play both offense and defense for the full ninety minutes of the game.  So a good soccer team, like a good business team, consists of well-rounded players who can be called upon to perform various skills and roles.
4. Just about everybody can play soccer.  To play soccer one does not need to be extremely tall, or extremely large, or even small for that matter.  Although it certainly helps to be in good physical condition, great soccer players come in all shapes and sizes, and that is one reason, the sport appeals to a much larger audience globally than any other sport.  Soccer attracts diverse players and a good soccer team is able to leverage the diversity of their team members (skills, talents, functions, personalities, age, race, gender and cultural) to achieve results and win games. 

When you add all of this up, the author says, ” Soccer provides the best example of what the interdependent nature of the team experience looks like.”

As you consider creating the next “high potential” program or leadership development experience, take a moment to reflect on how the metaphor of soccer might advance the learning objectives you set out to achieve.  People tend to assume that “what works in America is the appropriate way to deal with people working in Europe, South America and Asia for example.”  Given that most people around the globe grew up with soccer and already understand the leadership principles embedded in the game itself, why not leverage that knowledge to help new managers lead business teams that “score goals” for your company?

SOCCER’S GLOBAL BUSINESS OPERATING PRINCIPLES:
1. Focus On Team – Not Position

2. Understand That Everybody Can Play

3. Embrace Diversity

4. Rely On Each Other

5. Promote Both Individual and Team Values

6. Seek Skillful, Adaptable Players

7. Charge The Team To Perform The Work

8. Empower Players To Win

9. Coach Teams To Respond To Changing Conditions On Their Own

10. Develop Partners On The Field

11. Achieve Cross-Cultural Agility

Source: The Collaborator – Discover Soccer as a Metaphor for Global Business Success

Trust can be difficult to define and measure, but there is wide-spread agreement that high levels of trust correlate with high levels of employee engagement.  RealTime Performance has done considerable work helping companies define values and identify competencies, and in almost every instance, establishing and building trust is designated a critical component for leadership development and organizational culture.  This result holds up across all industries, job functions and leadership levels.  There is no doubt that trust is important, but how valuable is trust to employees and to companies?

New research (Helliwell and Huang 2008) has found that a 10% increase in trust is equivalent to a 36% increase in monetary compensation.  To get to this result, the researchers took a two-step approach. First, they determined that income has an impact on life satisfaction, no surprise there.  Then:

If the influence of income on life satisfaction is significant, then the income-equivalent values of other significant determinants can be measured as the size of the change in income that would have the same well-being effect  as a given change in the other variable of interest.

And in this case, the “other variable of interest” is trust in management.  Using this methodology they were able to assign a monetary value to increasing levels of trust in the workplace.  The results were independently verified using data from three major social surveys.

Let’s consider the staggering implications of this study.  If a company is able to increase trust by 10%, it has the equivalent effect on employee life satisfaction as handing-out a 36% raise in salary or bonus.  For a company with a $100 million dollar payroll, we’re talking about a $36 million dollar value.   In other words, investing in an initiative to build trust has enormous potential.

All of this research begs the question, “how does an organization build trust?”  Last week I interviewedRoss Smith, a manager at Microsoft who faced this issue within his 85-person Windows Security Testing group.  Ross and his team came up with innovative strategies involving productivity games, wikis, social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies. 

What I find most interesting about Ross Smith’s approach is the way he encouraged his team to develop its own initiative for building trust.  He did not impose a solution from the outside, rather, he asked his team, “how can we build trust?” thereby involving them in the solution.  By taking this strategy he also demonstrated trust in his team, that they would come up with a worthy and valuable strategy.