Some weeks ago we had dinner with dear friends. No dinner party is complete without a good story and this one was no exception. The story was told by our host who is a keen fisherman. It involved a salmon – and a pair of Kenneth Coles. Shoes are important to our host. He is the CEO of a large shoe store chain.
Our friend was escaping a very frustrating day at the office. Still dressed to deal he went fishing to relieve the tension, and eventually landed every fisherman’s dream - a 20 lb salmon. (This is his story – not mine.) The Kenneth Coles were mentioned frequently and appear to have stood the test of reeling in a 20 pounder while battling the currents and avoiding large sea-faring vessels.
What’s amazing about this story, other than the fact that I remembered it, is that I now know the name of a brand of men’s shoes. And this is important because I do not buy men’s shoes. Personally I avoid shoe shopping – it’s a painful experience for me. And because I find buying shoes so stressful – I see no need to be involved in the purchase of shoes for others. Good heavens my husband actually enjoys shoe shopping and probably owns more pairs of shoes than I do. I’ve no doubt he bonds with our children while the three of them are out shoe shopping. So why I ask you should I remember any brand of male foot attire?
I remember Kenneth Cole because someone told me a really good story. And if that isn’t a powerful business tool I’ll eat my shoe.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Only 21% of employees engaged
Only 10 percent of employees around the globe believe senior management treats people as the most important part of the organization - this according to a Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 workers worldwide.
The survey goes on to say that just 21 percent of the employees surveyed are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Thirty-eight percent are partly to fully disengaged. Towers Perrin has dubbed this the "engagement gap".
Firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees increased operating income by 19 percent and earnings per share by 28 percent.
It’s clear that the performance improvement opportunity for businesses today is in accessing discretionary effort and lessening the “engagement gap”.
People are fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work when they understand how they personally contribute to the organization’s goals and objectves. Supervisors and managers are best placed to make that connection for employees – far more so then say - the employee newsletter.
Are we investing our communication dollars in the right place?
The survey goes on to say that just 21 percent of the employees surveyed are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Thirty-eight percent are partly to fully disengaged. Towers Perrin has dubbed this the "engagement gap".
Firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees increased operating income by 19 percent and earnings per share by 28 percent.
It’s clear that the performance improvement opportunity for businesses today is in accessing discretionary effort and lessening the “engagement gap”.
People are fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work when they understand how they personally contribute to the organization’s goals and objectves. Supervisors and managers are best placed to make that connection for employees – far more so then say - the employee newsletter.
Are we investing our communication dollars in the right place?
Employess ARE the pieces of the puzzle
I am not a native of North America. And after 18 years living on this continent I still find the North American tendency to fully disclose rather confusing.
On the one hand it’s very helpful; a better understanding of the people you work with eight hours a day, five days a week certainly takes the guess out of the relationship. On the other hand my natural reserve is unsettled and I wonder if I too am expected to “spill my guts”.
This is not the model I grew up with.
The model I was raised with is long dead. In that model people went to work and left their problems at home. It was stiff upper lip all day long and kick the cat when you got home. Of course in those days people really did work eight hours a day and there was a cat at home.
The reality, then and now, is that we are all on a journey. And no matter how hard we try the private journey will intrude on the workplace. Most of us are able to see the connection between our personal and workplace travels. The truly productive among us are those who fully integrate the corporation’s journey into their own personal travels.
When the private and corporate journeys diverge – we’re in trouble. At that point we feel like our values are being stepped on and separation is highly likely.
When I was growing up it was the job of the employee to “buck up” and step in line. The tables have turned. Faced with 80 million retiring boomers corporations can no longer expect employees to abandon their own life stories in favor of the corporate story. Now the company must meets its employees half way and help them to integrate the personal with the workplace. It’s no longer enough to tell only one side of the story.
Highlighting individual stories of achievement is a good way of building the corporate story. It’s rather like a jigsaw puzzle; the corporation is the border and all the employees are the pieces in the puzzle.
On the one hand it’s very helpful; a better understanding of the people you work with eight hours a day, five days a week certainly takes the guess out of the relationship. On the other hand my natural reserve is unsettled and I wonder if I too am expected to “spill my guts”.
This is not the model I grew up with.
The model I was raised with is long dead. In that model people went to work and left their problems at home. It was stiff upper lip all day long and kick the cat when you got home. Of course in those days people really did work eight hours a day and there was a cat at home.
The reality, then and now, is that we are all on a journey. And no matter how hard we try the private journey will intrude on the workplace. Most of us are able to see the connection between our personal and workplace travels. The truly productive among us are those who fully integrate the corporation’s journey into their own personal travels.
When the private and corporate journeys diverge – we’re in trouble. At that point we feel like our values are being stepped on and separation is highly likely.
When I was growing up it was the job of the employee to “buck up” and step in line. The tables have turned. Faced with 80 million retiring boomers corporations can no longer expect employees to abandon their own life stories in favor of the corporate story. Now the company must meets its employees half way and help them to integrate the personal with the workplace. It’s no longer enough to tell only one side of the story.
Highlighting individual stories of achievement is a good way of building the corporate story. It’s rather like a jigsaw puzzle; the corporation is the border and all the employees are the pieces in the puzzle.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Power to the people
I have a pen pal. Most of our communication is via email with the occasional phone conversation.
My pal Kenny is a busy senior executive who still finds time to talk to me even though he has never seen me and lives half a continent away. Pretty amazing, but then Kenny is rather special.
Kenny is the corporate ombudsman at KeySpan Corp., a Brooklyn, New York-based energy company. Before joining KeySpan he was a Roman Catholic monk.
You’d imagine that going from monk to manager would be quite enough stimulation for a single lifetime but Kenny keeps looking for ways to make corporate life better.
During our last conversation he shared with me his experiences with Open Space. Open Space Technology enables people to create inspired meetings and events. In Open Space meetings participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. In other words a group of anywhere between 20 and 200 people turn up at a session with no more than a theme - no agenda.
They spend the first part of the day setting up the agenda. People who are passionate about topics related to the central theme volunteer to run breakouts on that topic. Once everyone who wants to run a session has volunteered then they go to separate rooms and the remaining participants use their feet to take them to the subject that excites them.
Wow! Subversive. Talk about power to the people.
There are a whole bunch of things that excite me about Open Space but most of all I like that fact that it is so grounded in the positive. People are voluntarily seeking out what they are enthusiastic about.
Trouble with adopting something like Open Space is that managers have to have faith in their employees. They have to trust that employees really do have the best interests of the company at heart. And that, I believe, is the real challenge to the success of initiatives like Open Space.
I’d like to hear what you think.
Check out Kenny’s book The CEO and the Monk: One Company’s Journey to Profit and Purpose (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written together with KeySpan CEO Robert Catell and writer Glenn Rifkin.
My pal Kenny is a busy senior executive who still finds time to talk to me even though he has never seen me and lives half a continent away. Pretty amazing, but then Kenny is rather special.
Kenny is the corporate ombudsman at KeySpan Corp., a Brooklyn, New York-based energy company. Before joining KeySpan he was a Roman Catholic monk.
You’d imagine that going from monk to manager would be quite enough stimulation for a single lifetime but Kenny keeps looking for ways to make corporate life better.
During our last conversation he shared with me his experiences with Open Space. Open Space Technology enables people to create inspired meetings and events. In Open Space meetings participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. In other words a group of anywhere between 20 and 200 people turn up at a session with no more than a theme - no agenda.
They spend the first part of the day setting up the agenda. People who are passionate about topics related to the central theme volunteer to run breakouts on that topic. Once everyone who wants to run a session has volunteered then they go to separate rooms and the remaining participants use their feet to take them to the subject that excites them.
Wow! Subversive. Talk about power to the people.
There are a whole bunch of things that excite me about Open Space but most of all I like that fact that it is so grounded in the positive. People are voluntarily seeking out what they are enthusiastic about.
Trouble with adopting something like Open Space is that managers have to have faith in their employees. They have to trust that employees really do have the best interests of the company at heart. And that, I believe, is the real challenge to the success of initiatives like Open Space.
I’d like to hear what you think.
Check out Kenny’s book The CEO and the Monk: One Company’s Journey to Profit and Purpose (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written together with KeySpan CEO Robert Catell and writer Glenn Rifkin.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Tall tales and why we tell them
We changed the format of our blog and for a brief period of time all the blogs I had written since May disappeared. My first thought: “Someone on our team doesn’t like my blogs, they’re trying to get rid of them.”
Utter nonsense of course. It was nothing more than a technical problem. But I am human and like most of you I need to make sense of my world. So when something happened that I didn’t understand, I made up a story, namely that my colleagues hated my blogs and were hell bent on getting rid of them.
We do this all the time, especially in the complex corporate world. If relationships and communication are muddy we create stories to fill in the gaps. And frequently we don’t bother to go and check the accuracy of our interpretation.
But here’s the scary part. We then go and tell friends and colleagues our stories, who in turn tell others and these stories create a new reality.
This is not healthy. The only way to stop it is through open and honest communication. The basis for which is trust; strung together in this way these are four of the most challenging letters in our alphabet.
Utter nonsense of course. It was nothing more than a technical problem. But I am human and like most of you I need to make sense of my world. So when something happened that I didn’t understand, I made up a story, namely that my colleagues hated my blogs and were hell bent on getting rid of them.
We do this all the time, especially in the complex corporate world. If relationships and communication are muddy we create stories to fill in the gaps. And frequently we don’t bother to go and check the accuracy of our interpretation.
But here’s the scary part. We then go and tell friends and colleagues our stories, who in turn tell others and these stories create a new reality.
This is not healthy. The only way to stop it is through open and honest communication. The basis for which is trust; strung together in this way these are four of the most challenging letters in our alphabet.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick leaves storytellng legacy
Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop died yesterday after suffering a brain hemorrhage. She was 64.
Roddick began her beauty and retailing career in 1976 in a little hippie shop in Brighton England . She set herself apart by underscoring the ethical properties of her formulations, created with natural ingredients, and often sourced from the developing world.
In 2006, The Body Shop was purchased by L'Oreal Group, but remains an independently run company. Today there are nearly 2,000 body shop stores in 50 countries.
In addition to being a visionary entrepreneur Roddick was also a great storyteller. Here is a story from a woman who went boldly where others would not:
“My first shop was between two funeral parlors. They objected to the name Body Shop because of course they had coffins passing by all day. I remember thinking “they can’t stop me, but I can have some fun with this”. So I called the local newspaper - anonymously with the hankie over the mouthpiece - and told them I was being intimidated by “mafia undertakers”. It was my first free publicity and I have never paid for publicity since.”
Anita Roddick, 2007
Roddick began her beauty and retailing career in 1976 in a little hippie shop in Brighton England . She set herself apart by underscoring the ethical properties of her formulations, created with natural ingredients, and often sourced from the developing world.
In 2006, The Body Shop was purchased by L'Oreal Group, but remains an independently run company. Today there are nearly 2,000 body shop stores in 50 countries.
In addition to being a visionary entrepreneur Roddick was also a great storyteller. Here is a story from a woman who went boldly where others would not:
“My first shop was between two funeral parlors. They objected to the name Body Shop because of course they had coffins passing by all day. I remember thinking “they can’t stop me, but I can have some fun with this”. So I called the local newspaper - anonymously with the hankie over the mouthpiece - and told them I was being intimidated by “mafia undertakers”. It was my first free publicity and I have never paid for publicity since.”
Anita Roddick, 2007
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Good deeds lead to improved performance
Two weeks ago one of our partners did us a good turn. I was touched and amazed. It wasn’t something I had anticipated. I thanked our partner and went about my business.
Yesterday it suddenly dawned me how that one good turn had influenced my behavior. We’ve been working with this partner for a number of years and when the opportunity arises I always recommend their programs. But in the past two weeks I have mentioned them far more frequently. At some level I’m trying to say “thank you”, but for the most part this was entirely unconscious.
When I realized how my behavior had changed, I got to thinking about the impact of good turns in the workplace. What happens when a manager fully acknowledges an employee by giving him or her credit for an idea? What happens when a colleague passes some meaningful work along to a co-worker with no thought of payback?
I am reminded of a manager of mine from many years ago. He was quick to sing the praises of his employees and publicly acknowledged our ideas – even if he had coached us in developing those ideas. He always looked for opportunities to showcase our performance. This man was very well loved and those of us who worked for him were more than happy to put in extra effort. His simple acts of human decency produced real and concrete results.
In case you are interested, the partner organization I mentioned in the first paragraph is the Writing and Publishing Program within the Continuing Studies Department of Simon Fraser University.
Large organizations are filled with people doing good turns every day and increasing the profitability of their organizations.
Yesterday it suddenly dawned me how that one good turn had influenced my behavior. We’ve been working with this partner for a number of years and when the opportunity arises I always recommend their programs. But in the past two weeks I have mentioned them far more frequently. At some level I’m trying to say “thank you”, but for the most part this was entirely unconscious.
When I realized how my behavior had changed, I got to thinking about the impact of good turns in the workplace. What happens when a manager fully acknowledges an employee by giving him or her credit for an idea? What happens when a colleague passes some meaningful work along to a co-worker with no thought of payback?
I am reminded of a manager of mine from many years ago. He was quick to sing the praises of his employees and publicly acknowledged our ideas – even if he had coached us in developing those ideas. He always looked for opportunities to showcase our performance. This man was very well loved and those of us who worked for him were more than happy to put in extra effort. His simple acts of human decency produced real and concrete results.
In case you are interested, the partner organization I mentioned in the first paragraph is the Writing and Publishing Program within the Continuing Studies Department of Simon Fraser University.
Large organizations are filled with people doing good turns every day and increasing the profitability of their organizations.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Showtime of dancing to the same tune
Last week my eleven year old son, together with 79 children ages 9 to19 performed in a Broadway-type extravaganza. It was the climax of an intensive month long program; six hours of practice a day, a faculty of eight instructors, 33 song and dance numbers, 44 lines of dialogue, a total of 900 costumes. It culminated in three highly professional and entertaining performances.
What’s the secret to success of a program like this? In part it’s good old fashioned organization. There was a very well thought out master plan and everything was geared toward achieving that plan.
But to achieve a well thought out plan the players need to be committed and working toward the same goal. That’s where business plans often fail. The senior executives develop wonderful strategies that employees can’t see the rationale for, can’t figure out what it means for them personally and as a result don’t bother to make them happen.
This plan succeeded because every child understood and joyfully supported the end goal. The children may not have been aware of the details of the master plan, but they embraced the destination and their individual roles in achieving the plan. Each child completely understood that he or she was absolutely vital to the final act and by extension the journey.
Just imagine if all your employees felt the same way? Perhaps business has something to learn from the arts.
What’s the secret to success of a program like this? In part it’s good old fashioned organization. There was a very well thought out master plan and everything was geared toward achieving that plan.
But to achieve a well thought out plan the players need to be committed and working toward the same goal. That’s where business plans often fail. The senior executives develop wonderful strategies that employees can’t see the rationale for, can’t figure out what it means for them personally and as a result don’t bother to make them happen.
This plan succeeded because every child understood and joyfully supported the end goal. The children may not have been aware of the details of the master plan, but they embraced the destination and their individual roles in achieving the plan. Each child completely understood that he or she was absolutely vital to the final act and by extension the journey.
Just imagine if all your employees felt the same way? Perhaps business has something to learn from the arts.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Still focussed on product
I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with a senior executive from a large multinational. This guy is one smart cookie. Any communication or change management professional working for him had better know what he or she is doing – because this guy can see through the bullshit.
Until very recently his organization operated under a PR-style model for internal communications. Not surprisingly it didn’t work. This savvy exec was quite clear that superficial internal communication - driven by product – was not good enough to take his company into the future.
Actually it’s not good enough for any organization.
That’s not to say that communication products like newsletters, podcasts and web sites don’t play an important part in the communication mix. However, the role of manager as communicator is, I would argue, pivotal. And if that is the case, then the role of the communications professional is to facilitate the conversation and develop the process and tools to support it.
Why are communicators still focused on product even when their execs are looking for something else? I’d be interested to hear your views.
Until very recently his organization operated under a PR-style model for internal communications. Not surprisingly it didn’t work. This savvy exec was quite clear that superficial internal communication - driven by product – was not good enough to take his company into the future.
Actually it’s not good enough for any organization.
That’s not to say that communication products like newsletters, podcasts and web sites don’t play an important part in the communication mix. However, the role of manager as communicator is, I would argue, pivotal. And if that is the case, then the role of the communications professional is to facilitate the conversation and develop the process and tools to support it.
Why are communicators still focused on product even when their execs are looking for something else? I’d be interested to hear your views.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
