Check out the my advice for the Big Three

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A lot of interesting stuff makes the rounds of the Internet. I received this scan and tracked through Google to Snopes (I love Snopes).

These remarks were made spontaneously  on a Voice of America broadcast that was heard in more than sixty countries.

It would be very cool if it had really happened in 1968, but that was literary license; the broadcast actually took place in May 1961.

But the seven years difference doesn’t matter. What matters is that his comments were prophetic and came true in far less time than many believed possible—right up until last week.

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Employee engagement is a hot topic these days; it’s also a function of corporate culture. And while managers may not be able to control culture there are many things they can do within their own department and even team.

One of the biggest is to show your appreciation of your people. Study after study confirms employees’ desire to feel valued; to make a difference and be credited for it. But how, with budgets cut below bone level?

Here are four simple actions that you can implement at no financial cost and that don’t require approval from anyone.

• Ask everyone, not just your so-called stars, for input, ideas, suggestions and opinions.

• Listen and really hear the response, discuss it, think about it.

• Use what you get as often as possible, whether in whole or in part, or as the springboard that leads to something totally different.

• Credit the source(s), both up and down, publicly and privately, thank them, compliment them, congratulate them.

If you’re sincere, you can’t lay it on too thick; if you’re faking it, they’ll know.

And if you’re foolish enough to steal the credit for yourself in the mistaken name of job security you’ll have the fun of explaining to your boss the plummeting productivity and soaring turnover that accompanies those thefts.

It’s easy to remember, just think ALUC.

Ask

Listen!

Use

Credit

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A couple of weeks ago David Zinger wrote a great post regarding the so-called war for talent.

“I have always been troubled by the so called “war for talent.” Now, I am beyond troubled, I am angry with the use of this metaphor for those of us who offer our best in organizations.”

Take a moment to read David’s comments—they are provocative, true and well worth the time.

But I want to focus on something else today.

I have a major problem with ‘talent’—and human capital and human resources and stars—but especially with talent.

As a manager, you do not hire talent, capital, resources or stars.

You hire people.

The people you hire are rated, in the majority of cases, ‘talented’, or even ’stars’, as a direct result of the skill with which you manage them.

I spent more than 20 years as a headhunter and I’ve seen below average employees turn into innovative contributors when exposed to a different manager and the opposite, when acknowledged stars suddenly become non performers because the management changed.

Actually, you don’t really hire people, you hire persons. Individuals with all the quirks, foibles, idiosyncrasies and idiotsyncrasies common to the human race.

And you hire them one at a time.

No manager ever hired a ‘workforce’; they built it, one person at a time.

Plural pronouns not allowed.

So no more talk about talent or resources or capital. Your job is the acquisition, care and feeding of your persons.

And why in the world would you involve yourself or your persons in a war?

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Jim Stroup over at Managing Leadership wrote a fascinating post on the effects of principles and political compromise on our Constitution.

For the political slant click the link, but I think that these ideas are just as true in the business world.

“If you rule out compromising your principles, then you become an ideologue.”

Can business people be ideologues? Of course.

Managers adopt approaches and then rigidly try to implement (inflict?) them on every organization in which they work with no consideration as to their appropriateness.

Robert Nardelli did that when he tried to impose stringent metrics a la GE on Home Depot, ignoring cultural differences and the realities of running a successful consumer business.

“…maybe they see a higher, joint goal of sufficient value… This sometimes takes a kind of discipline, stamina, and focus that can be stunning, and much more productive, powerful, and enduring…”

When senior managers open themselves up to input from all levels of their organization—instead of forcing the dogmatic use a certain methodology—the results include stronger engagement, higher productivity and more innovation.

In business, this means a focus beyond today’s stock price—a focus on the long-term, which is rarely appreciated by Wall Street.

Compromise isn’t synonymous with ethical lapse, either; it’s not an excuse to lie, cheat, steal or fudge the information or the numbers.

It is about listening to others; listening to those whose ideas are revolutionary; ideas that are atypical; ideas that buck the norm and go in a new direction and that takes a lot of guts.

In business, as in politics, compromise often means being willing to put your job on the line—but refusing carries the same potential cost.

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See all mY generation posts here.

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For years I’ve pushed my clients on the importance of communicating bad news along with the good and in the summer of 2006 I wrote a post about it.

Convincing executives that sharing bad news is as necessary as sharing good is similar to discussing global warming. Most agree that something needs to be done, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into action.

What’s forcing them to act is Web 2.0 and a multi-generational group of web-savvy folks with a belief in transparency and a willingness to spend their time promoting it using blogs and Twitter.

“Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company…[since] Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters. “We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.”"

That’s it in a nutshell.

Much of the transparency trend started with activists who created websites about companies where people could comment, make suggestions and vent their frustrations; now it’s pushed into the tech startups of Silicon Valley, but laggards in all industries are being dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality.

“Every industry has Web sites that cover its companies and eagerly publish rumors, from the Starbucks Gossip blog to DealBreaker for the financial industry and BlueOvalNews.com for Ford Motor. Web sites like Glassdoor.com and JobSchmob.com also encourage workers to vent about their bosses.

Larger companies need to learn that lesson, too, said Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, which helps big companies use social media. “There are hold-out companies that still wish there was traditional P.R. control of the message, but that day is long over.”"

The only thing a company can do that’s worse than silence is to lie or fudge the truth.

Many years ago a rumor started at a Siemens facility in Arizona that the company was going to move to a new location about 70 miles away. The management hotly denied it and many of the engineers who they relocated there trusted them and bought homes. About nine months later the company did indeed move and most of those people lost money when they had to sell their homes to keep their jobs.

Lies aren’t smart, but this one was particularly stupid and unnecessary; the story outlasted the executives who did it and tainted their recruiting efforts for years.

The moral is simple—tell the truth, without spin, and tell if first.

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With the economy in turmoil and companies laying off right and left it’s easy for manager’s to lose sight of one of their prime responsibilities—preventing/reducing turnover.

Retention is even more critical when layoffs are happening, since the need for productivity goes up, not down.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post that I think will be even more useful now, so here it is again.

As a manager, who are your customers?

Customer service is a major topic these days, as is employee retention, but do they really have anything in common? You bet!

No matter your position, from CEO to team leader, your people are your customers.

That’s right, customers. That makes you an ESM—employee service manager.

Why do you service your people? To help them achieve their full potential;

• assure high productivity;
• lower turnover; and
• create an environment that’s a talent magnet.

How do you service your people? By

• cultivating the kind of MAP that truly values people and understands how important it is to manifest that;
• offering high-grade professional challenges to all your people and, then, making sure that they have the resources and all the information necessary to achieve success;
• fostering fairness so that people know they are evaluated on their merits and favoritism plays no part; and always walking your talk and living up to your commitments.

What’s in it for you?

• Better reviews, promotions and raises;
• increased professional development;
• less turnover and easier staffing; and
  
• what goes around comes around—everything that you give your people will come back to you ten-fold!

These are, or should be, basic tenets for managers at any level—how do you grade yourself on each? How would your people grade you?

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Whether you’re an executive, manager or worker, you’re constantly presenting choices to those around you that require them to agree or disagree with ideas and actions; do this or do that; support or not support an initiative.

From design reviews and marketing campaigns to ordering lunch people constantly argue for their side.

Do those arguments matter? Are they really influencing those who aren’t adamantly on one side or the other?

In a New York Times Op-Ed Sam Wang, an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton, and Joshua Gold, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss new research of whether people who say they’re undecided, in fact, really are.

Although the discussion is focused voter claims to being “undecided” in the upcoming election, the research applies equally well to any situation.

“Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a second, decision-making is thought to involve two parts, gathering evidence and committing to a choice… brain activity in the parietal cortex rises as evidence is gathered, eventually reaching a tipping point (though it’s not yet known which brain regions drive the final choice).

Inherent to this process is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Commit early and you can get on with your life. Take more time and you might make a wiser or more accurate decision.”

How often has someone asked you if you’re seeing a movie Friday and you respond that you haven’t decided yet? Is that true or are you just unaware that you’ve already made an internal decision, but that you’re not yet ready to share it?

In business you need a balance between speed and accuracy that isn’t always easy to achieve, so it makes sense to take advantage of your undecideds by learning enough to recognize what is holding them back in a given situation.

Then, when they’re undecided on the direction for the new multi-million dollar marketing campaign or won’t commit themselves to the architecture of a new product you’ll know both the weight to give their indecisiveness, as well as how to get past it.

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Even before the economic meltdown you heard constantly about all the reasons you needed to do things differently; all the problems inherent in hiring managing a four-generational workforce; all the new technology you needed in order to succeed.

In short, all the changes coming up, down and around the pike.

And as everyone know, change isn’t easy.

A few months ago IBM produced and excellent research study called The Enterprise of the Future (requires free registration), which was the basis of a series I wrote at Leadership Turn.

There’a new module out called Making Change Work and it offers up some interesting stats.

“Over a two-year period, the percentage of CEOs expecting substantial change climbed from 65 percent in 2006 to 83 percent in 2008 but those reporting they had successfully managed change in the past rose just 4 percentage points, up from 57 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008… The major obstacles to implementing change in an enterprise are centered on people and corporate culture. Nearly 60 percent of the executives and project managers surveyed say changing mind sets and attitudes is the biggest challenge to implementing change in an enterprise, followed by corporate culture at 49 percent. These challenges were flagged as more important than shortage of resources, highlighting that these problems are seen as inherently more difficult to solve even if given sufficient resources. “

Lots of advice on inaugurating change and how to make it happen smoothly, but I think that this study is a great place to start. It has four sections

• Real Insights, Real Actions
• Solid Methods, Solid Benefits
• Better Skills, Better Change
• Right Investment, Right Impact

packed with solid information and useful information on what global bosses are doing.

The information is useful whether your company is global or local, because you’re both dealing with the same problems—people and the need to change corporate culture in order to survive and thrive.

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