Although I’m not an advocate of ‘paying’ for the demonstration of particular behaviours or competencies without a commensurate contribution or output, research suggests that employees deliver more consistent results when you emphasise the “how” as well as the “what” .

Chris Edmonds brought this to light in research he featured in his Cool Culture blog:

“Leaders typically focus entirely on performance and results. They do not naturally emphasise HOW results will be accomplished, which requires defining what values and behaviours ‘good corporate citizens’ must demonstrate in the workplace.

The result of this ‘performance-only’ emphasis:
- Performance is inconsistent when the boss is not present. Performance occurs most consistently when the boss is watching.
- Power struggles occur, driven by managers and staff, which creates a workplace of fear and intimidation.
- Employees rarely demonstrate discretionary effort towards goal accomplishment.

“… If a leader wants a high performing, values-aligned team, that leader must create the foundation with clear goals AND clear valued behaviours.”

If you want confidence beyond a doubt that your employees are consistently behaving in ways that deliver the results you need – whether you’re watching or not – then you must make it very clear to employees what behaviours you value. Failing to do so will result in the deviant behaviours described above as well as others.

So how do you do that? Strategic recognition is one answer. Structuring your employee recognition programme around your company values – making your values the reasons employees are frequently and specifically recognised at work – brings those values to life in the daily work of every employee so that everyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, knows what ‘integrity’ or ‘innovation’ means for them.

And if you buy into what Daniel Pink says about motivation, you make these rewards unexpected, immediately after the event and in terms which are meaningful for the individual.

Factors that serve to demotivate employees are stronger than those that motivate them.

For decades, “good” managers have concerned themselves with how to motivate employees – how to encourage their employees to give their best. New research from Jim Collins, co-author of Good to Great and Great by Choice, offers a new perspective (from the Financial Post):

Collins says that ‘the best leaders don’t worry about motivating people, they are careful to not demotivate them.’

He contends there are three key demotivators:

Lack of clarity and communication– When people don’t know what you need from them, they lose motivation to work hard on the tasks at hand. They question whether their work is valid and useful to achieving end goals.How to turn it around: Recognise employees in-the-moment to clearly communicate to employees what it is you need and expect that is of value to the organisation.
Lack of meaning and purpose– Without this clear communication, employees lose all sense of meaning and purpose in their work, two factors often identified as critical to employee engagement and happiness at work.How to turn it around: Help employees understand the deeper value their contributions by tying recognition to core company values and strategic objectives. This lets them know how their efforts are contributing to achieving larger goals.
Lack of progress– Recently identified through rigorous researchas the primary factor of employee engagement, progress is essential to motivation. Otherwise employees feel as if they are spinning in circles but never truly accomplishing an end result of valueHow to turn it around: Don’t wait until the conclusion of a project to recognise employee efforts and contributions – especially in projects that can last months to years. Keep employees focussed and, yes, motivated by recognising and rewarding progress along the way.

Thanks to Derek Irvine for this.

If you think you’re past it…. I found this useful and hope you do as well.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/09/0917_career_after_50/1.htm

Thanks to Erin Duggins for this…

In a recent showing of Grey’s Anatomy, there was a prevalent theme regarding leadership, and to what degree those with the best technical capabilities can rise to the occasion and make the best leaders.

The Grey’s Anatomy writers used a fictional “Gunther” exercise to exemplify this leadership theme. The “Gunther” exercise was suggested by attending physician, Dr. Miranda Bailey, to see how well the residents would work together to help save a patient’s life, and to see which one of the residents would reveal him or herself to be the leader (aka “Gunther). Chief Resident, Dr. April Kepner, who was selected last year because of her cool demeanor and expertise in handling crisis situations, had a difficult time getting any of her colleagues to listen to her; could not reinforce the use of standard operating/quality control procedures; and had little influence with them when it came to getting their cooperation or assistance in completing tasks. So who was the top contender for the “Gunther” designation? One would assume that Dr. Christina Yang, the resident prodigy, would be the obvious choice! After all, she was the most knowledgeable and skilled of all of the residents. Wouldn’t you want her to lead your surgical team if you ended up on the operating table? Shouldn’t she get to be the one that calls the shots? Well, if you picked Dr. Yang, then you were wrong. In fact, Dr. Yang crashed and burned in the leadership arena. “Gunther” turned out to be Dr. Avery Jackson, who wasn’t even on anyone’s radar screen. Why? Because, although he’s a solid doctor, his skill as a surgeon isn’t exactly awe-inspiring.

As I watched this part of the storyline unfold, it occurred to me that this happens often in the real world. How many times have we erroneously assumed that just because one has positional authority that it makes him or her a good leader? How many times do we hire people based solely on of their technical skills and knowledge? How many times have you, as a hiring manager, written up a position description and requisite qualifications, and all of them had to do with skills and experience? Or, how often have we ignored leadership development for employees and focused only on those that have positional authority (i.e., first-line supervisors, mid-level managers, and executives)?

Given that government agencies are typically functionally organized, it is very easy to focus on hiring leaders that have high-levels of functional expertise. And I certainly don’t intend to communicate the message that functional expertise isn’t important. What I am saying, however, is that leadership: a) isn’t necessarily about those just in positional authority, and b) isn’t based solely on knowledge and ability, but has a large behavioral component as well — a component that is often ignored during selection, and rarely developed in employees who will ultimately assume leadership positions as they have more time in service. So all of this begs the question — what are the largest lessons that can be gleaned from this Grey’s Anatomy story line?

1. Leadership isn’t just about positional authority. It is something that can be demonstrated and developed at any level of the organization.

2. It is sometimes those that are not in positional authority that have the largest level of influence on a team or in an organization. This is especially important to remember when implementing large change initiatives. It is often those in positions of influence, and not necessarily positional authority, that can help an initiative succeed or shut it down.

3. When selecting leaders, technical skills are necessary, but not sufficient. It is important to determine what behavioral competencies are necessary for a potential leader to succeed in an organization from a mission execution and people management perspective.

4. In organizations that require a high degree of technical skill (e.g., medical professions, aeronautics, finance, etc.), it is important to differentiate between career paths for those that only desire to be technical experts versus those that have the capability and desire to be leaders. In bureaucracies like federal government agencies where promotion to leadership is in large part based on time in service, it is easy to have a large number of employees at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels who are functional experts, but don’t desire, or have the competencies, to be good team leaders or people managers. For those agencies that are able, it could be a good idea to have multiple career paths in their job series, which would facilitate planning for selection, development and promotion purposes.

5. One should not be awarded a leadership position just based on technical proficiency alone or time in service, just as one should not be blocked from obtaining management/leadership positions just because they aren’t the best technical expert or haven’t been with the agency since the agency’s creation. This phenomena is clear even in sports. How many of the great professional NBA players, such as Isiah Thomas and Larry Bird, have had awful coaching careers; while less revered players such as Pat Riley (L.A. Lakers and Miami Heat), Phil Jackson (Chicago Bulls) and Doc Rivers (Boston Celtics) have led teams to NBA championships? They may not have been the best in the game as players, but when it came to leading teams to victories as coaches, they were all stars.

Does this mean that all of us need to go out and have a “Gunther” exercise like the characters in Grey’s Anatomy to see which people will crash and burn, or rise to the top as leaders? Not exactly. However, it does suggest that we must go beyond old assumptions about what makes a good manager or leader — those things that are easier to measure, thereby minimizing leadership selection, development and promotion to “checking the box.” As it stands, leadership development is almost an exercise in segregation in that we limit our leadership development to those that are already in leadership positions. What the Gunther exercise should tell us is that there should be more equal opportunity in our leadership development programs because the people that rise to the top could be those that you least expect.

If I had to have a pin up boy, it would be Ken Robinson talking about creativity and education…..so very interesting.
See his latest talk on TED

By Lucy Kellaway from the FT

Last week I gave a talk to an audience of four dozen colleagues plus two teddy bears and a rabbit with one eye. The subject was: Who reads the Financial Times? And my thesis was that our readers are odder than you’d think.

We now know, following the storming of his compound in Tripoli, that Colonel Gaddafi was a keen reader of the FT’s How to Spend It supplement. But what about the daily paper?

As I talked, my colleagues listened politely. This may have been because they were interested in what I was saying. Or it may have been because of the stuffed toys in the audience. I had planted these cuddly animals there myself in response to some research from an expert in ethics at Harvard University who has found that people behave better when teddy bears are in the room. The presence of a bear apparently makes adults more inclined to “engage in pro-social behaviours” – which I think means being honest and polite.

On the face of it this doesn’t sound terribly plausible. The only example I can think of where a grown-up goes around with a teddy bear is Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. His bear, Aloysius, didn’t obviously encourage pro-social behaviours at all: its owner disappears into dissolution and alcoholism in Fez. But then, as Lord Flyte was a person invented by Evelyn Waugh, this example may not be conclusive.

Sreedhari Desai, the academic who carried out the research, argues that toys make us more ethical because we associate them with children and with purity. Even a packet of crayons, she says, can make us 20 per cent less likely to cheat. To fill boardrooms with the toys of our infancy could work wonders for corporate ethics. If she is right, the soundtrack to office life should no longer be bland piped music, but “The Wheels on the Bus” or “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”.

Maybe this isn’t entirely nutty. They keep donkeys with racehorses to calm them down. And it’s certainly true that the presence of real live infants takes an ugly edge off our behaviour. I’ve noticed that when colleagues turn up to work with their babies people don’t swear so much but gather around the child, look sentimental and say “ahhhh” a lot.

But bringing a live baby into work as an ethical aid has various drawbacks. Babies make a noise and are distracting, and it’s not terribly nice for them having to sit through long meetings all day.

Teddy bears, on the other hand, always behave impeccably, have a high boredom threshold and set an excellent standard for others to follow.

However, their helpful influence during my speech was not decisive, as people tend to listen quite politely anyway. So last week I gave the teddies a second, tougher test and planted my three soft toys in the FT’s morning news conference. This can be a harsh, testosterone-fuelled occasion, with two dozen ruthless journalists playing politics, and so I was keen to see if the teddies would soften things up a bit.

Alas the results were not so promising. Journalists arriving in the conference room glanced at the bears with suspicion, preferring instead to take the seats near the editor rather than sit next to a cuddly teddy bear.

Conference progressed as usual, the only hitch being when one person feared that the bears might be hiding a camera and considered calling security.

Recovering the bears from the meeting room, I positioned them around my desk. One colleague passing by glanced at me with concern and asked if everything was all right at home. Another said the one-eyed creature was giving him the creeps.

So with journalists, teddies don’t seem to have the required ethical effect. However, I have noticed toys at work having another effect. I know one man who has a child’s dumper truck on his desk, which he loves to play with when on the phone. But if someone else comes along and plays with the truck he starts to get upset.

Toys may conceivably deter us from acting unethically as they make us think of infants. But I can think of a rival thesis that someone else at Harvard might spend a few years working on: toys in the office don’t make us think of babies, they make us act like them.

This was filmed in April 2011 and talks about some of the issues that are being talked about after the riots. It seems we have the answers available to us. We just need to implement them.

Drayton Bird recently found this: “Introducing the worlds most dynamic and revolutionary jobs website”

Many comments ensued on his Facebook page and blog.

Someone sent in this quote which every marketer should read.

George Orwell:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

And this recent article in the Guardian by Martin Amis about his father on the use of language, is worth reading.

The link to the book on Amazon is here

From Havard Business Review, an interesting review of LinkedIn by Judith Hurwitz

Do here first two sentences sound familiar:

I joined LinkedIn in 2007. I can’t remember why.

The full article is here

It will be interesting to see how this works.

Facebook already use “likes” to influence the Bing search engine.  This is Google’s answer.

Read more here