Leadership Trends and Realities

3 Things Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! Did Right (And 3 Things They Did Wrong)

Dana Theus, President,
InPower Consulting

You have to have been living in a cave to miss the media frenzy that erupted after Yahoo! announced its new policy to bring telecommuters home to the office. Much of the noise came from the working-mom contingent upset at Marissa Mayer, the new mother recently appointed as the CEO in charge of bringing Yahoo! back to life. However, for leaders to learn the real lessons of this brouhaha, we have to look beneath the headlines.

While I don’t hold Mayer accountable for representing the interests of all working moms, it’s completely fair to hold her accountable for shaping Yahoo!’s corporate culture, which is what the move was intended to do. Yahoo!’s policy memo made an attempt to explain that ending telecommuting was balanced by other policies designed to give employees perks and organizational streamlining. However, the memo’s greatest irony – which really explains perhaps better than any other why this move might have been necessary – were the words blazing across the top of the leaked memo: “DO NOT FORWARD.”

Maybe the leak was the result of one or two sour-grapes employees, (the New York Times reports it was only aimed at 200 employees) but it still speaks to a culture in need of tightening up.

Yahoo! has been pretty tight lipped about the memo, saying only that the new policy isn’t an industry referendum on work-at-home policies , but sifting through the media explosion fallout, it’s clear that this is just one of many moves Mayer is putting in place to bring a more focused corporate culture to Yahoo! That said it seems pretty ham fisted. Looking at the work-at-home memo event from a corporate culture design point of view, here are some insights that other companies may want to emulate – or not.

3 Things Yahoo! Is Doing Right

1. Creating a comprehensive plan: This policy is not an isolated event. Mayer has been making changes for months designed to make Yahoo! a more pleasant place to work and bringing good vibes back.
2. Taking a stand. One reason corporate culture is too often unintentional is that leaders are afraid of upsetting people. In designing any culture change you want your most valuable employees to be happy, motivated and looking forward to coming to work every day. When you take a stand that motivates those employees, it’s going to demotivate others who like the way things are. Putting a stake in the ground – done well – accomplishes exactly this. Only Yahoo! will know if this move does the trick, but early signs say maybe it has, since some employees seem to be defending the move.
3. Communicating privately before you communicate publicly. According to the memo, “If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps.” This is the right thing to do. Culture-creation-by-email is a bad idea. Ultimately the way the culture you are designing is maintained and evolved is by human interaction. If a corporate culture were a physical structure, the employees are the reinforcing infrastructure in between the foundation (the leadership behaviors) and the facades (facilities, brand imagery, media etc.) So creating your culture person-to-person builds strength into the culture from the beginning of a redesign effort.

3 Things Yahoo! Is Doing Wrong (Maybe)

1. Not showing sensitivity for people who may get stuck in the middle: If this policy was only aimed at 200 people, or even if it wasn’t, clearly it could mean a major change for some people who’ve built a life around the old policy – a life that affect many others in their personal and family network. The reason the memo made such a media firestorm was because it was completely unqualified and made no mention of these complications.
2. Not using culture design memos to reinforce values. The memo did speak of the values of communication and collaboration, but by not addressing the major values behind many work-at-home policies – respect for employees as whole people and creativity – Yahoo! missed an opportunity to show how it is going to be addressing such values in the future. This left them open for criticism from employees and, as we’ve seen, everyone else including prospective employees. Perhaps the company doesn’t value these things, in which case, maybe the memo was just fine, and the criticism deserved.
3. Not using culture design initiatives to connect your internal and external brands. One of the reasons many people outside the halls of Yahoo! were shocked by the memo is because the broader market associates Silicon Valley company brands with innovative employee policies like working at coffee shops. They see the Yahoo! move as out-of-step with what a real cutting-edge tech company would do. While I don’t think this tempest in the media teapot is going to damage Yahoo!’s long-term brand any more than its struggling stock price, Yahoo!’s public relations team missed a golden opportunity to show how its culture design effort is related to, and underpins, its brand and market strategy. Tying your internal and external brand strategies, including making efforts to make them consistent to the point that leaks like this actually turn into media opportunities, is an innovative strategy all by itself. Perhaps Yahoo! is too busy trying to get its internal house in order to think much about opportunities like this, but for the rest of us, it’s a good case study of what might have been.

I say “maybe” these issues were mistakes and lost opportunities for Yahoo! because the most important parts of culture change will only visible inside Yahoo!, to be felt by the people who work there. That’s where real culture change takes place and that’s where the ultimate measure of success will be judged.

This post originally appeared on Smartblog on Leadership (@SBLeaders).

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Different-but-Good - What We Can Learn From Women In Leadership

Different-but-Good – What We Can Learn From Women In Leadership

Dana Theus, President,
 InPower Consulting

I spoke recently to a group of women and men about how modern leadership styles are shifting and increasingly embracing strengths that women in leadership naturally bring to the table. After the talk many women thanked me and one, I’ll call her Suzanne, said in essence, thanks for making me feel less crazy. I asked her what she meant and she told me an interesting story.

A Clash of Styles

In short, Suzanne is the COO of a small company and has an all male staff reporting to her. She reports to “the boss,” an older gentlemen who founded and built the business. Since she came into this position, he’s ceded much of the day-to-day management to her and she’s changed things a bit. Here’s what Suzanne has done.

• She’s replaced his micro-managing style with giving direction and getting out of their way.
• She’s shifted some of the daily prep work from the evening to the morning, to let employees go home when they’re tired and prep when they’re fresh.
• She comes in on weekends when necessary, showing her support.
• She let’s them off for family events.

Her results are strong and her crew loyal. Her boss’s reaction? “You’re letting them walk all over you!”

Internalizing Success

After my talk, Suzanne said she realized that even though her boss didn’t seem to appreciate her tactics, he did appreciate her results and let her lead the way she wanted to now that he saw what she could produce. But he was still verbally unsupportive. Her big ah-ha in our discussion was that she didn’t have to buy his perspective on what made a good leadership style. And this gave both of us a big ah-ha as we walked to the next session.

What if women didn’t listen to all the leadership woo-haa and stereotype that says leaders have to be tough and boss over their employees? What if we were all just secure in our results? Would we change the opinion of our bosses and employees by simply leading effectively in our own special way?

There is plenty of data that says women are good leaders, and yet many of us, like Suzanne, don’t really internalize our success because others – or the culture in general – tell us we’re soft.

I say it’s time to own our success and accept that we can embody a different-but-effective leadership style.

Different-but-good

What kind of differences lead to success? I asked Suzanne what she did that made her boss think she was a softy. Here were a few things she said that I think we can all learn from.

• Expand your definition of success. While her boss holds her to financial and performance standards, she has expanded her own definition of success to include employee moral (which helps with turnover), operational order (indicating everything’s getting done) and empowerment (rewarding those who handle issues in the field instead of bringing her into every snafu).
• Nip problems in the bud. Don’t let a problem fester. Jump on it before it escalates and empower those who are near the solution to implement it.
• Be calm and respectful. While her boss is confrontational and micro-managing, Suzanne fosters employee moral and productivity by building consensus instead of yelling at them or ordering them around.

Thinking about it this way it all makes sense, but when your boss is sneering or yelling at you, it’s harder to feel confident. This is why we all have to take a deep breath and call on our inner power. We need to take time out to appreciate what we do well, to gain insights from others who appreciate our style and to be self-critical enough to explore our own boundaries and styles. If you don’t have a boss that does this, then find peers, colleagues and mentors who will help you gain this important perspective. As Suzanne is learning to appreciate, just because your style is different doesn’t mean it’s not the better way if you still get the job done.

Dana is a research-based advocate for talent innovation and women’s leadership change initiatives that produce business results. As a leadership and management consultant she helps companies establish leadership teams capable of tapping into their full range of inner resources – individually InPowered and gender-partnered as a group. She also designs culture-shaping initiatives to integrate leader’s personal styles, corporate brand identity and innovation strategies. The result is improved productivity, profitability and meaning. Certified as a facilitator and trainer in The PRIMES methodologies, and as champion in Lean Six Sigma, she brings a full suite of leadership development tools and insights to every engagement. Dana is President & CEO of InPower Consulting (www.inpowerconsultinginc.com)

Gendership: A Guy's Perspective

Dana Theus, President, InPower Consulting

When I interviewed Mike Howard, Chief Security Officer at Microsoft, on the subject of leadership, we also had a great conversation about the role he sees gender and diversity playing in modern organizations. I listened to understand Gendership – the partnership of women and men working and leading together – from his perspective so I could share his insights with you.

Women in a Man’s World
Mike started his career on patrol as a police officer in Oakland, California in the mid 70’s. He had the privilege, he said, of working with the first female patrol officer in Oakland and this experience has stayed with him through his entire career in the CIA and now at Microsoft. One particular incident stands out in his mind, especially when he hears male colleagues say “women just can’t hack it.”

He was on duty in the middle of the night when his radio blared that a female officer was in a car chase, pursuing some rape suspects not far from where he stood. Running on foot towards her location he arrived and found her – all five foot five inches of her – with both suspects on the ground and a shotgun aimed at their heads. Since that time, when men he’s worked with doubted the abilities of women, he remembered that image and knew they were wrong. “Just because you’ve never seen a woman perform like a man doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” he says knowingly.

In that experience, and over ensuing years of intelligence and security work, Mike has seen plenty of other reasons to admire what women bring to the table. He is particularly appreciative of the ways in which, when men start to let testosterone escalate a situation, a woman can step in and help de-escalate things so they don’t end up badly. “Any time you can resolve a situation without violence, that’s the best outcome,” he says.

His observation tracks with a similar dynamic that Air Force Lt Gen Fedder identified when I interviewed her; when women enter a room filled by macho-types, the men become more polite. When the men become more polite, more ideas are tolerated in the discussion, they are explored in more depth and better decisions get made in the end.

Women and Risk
I was curious about Mike’s experience working with women and men in security and intelligence and whether he’d experienced any meaningful difference in how the two genders handle ethics and honor.

“I haven’t seen any difference in how men and women approach honor,” he responded. “But there is a difference in how they approach risk,” which can have ethical implications.

In his experience, men are more willing to take risks – ethical and otherwise – and this can mean they get into trouble more often. “I’ve seen both men and women try to do more than they should and get hurt,” he observed, “but women approach risk in a different way.” As a result, men tend to get hurt more often. His observations are consistent with my research into the subject of women and risk, in which it seems that women tend to take more considered risk than men in many instances.  Mike and I both observe that women are not risk-averse, they simply approach risk differently.

Women and Leadership
Mike’s primary observation about women in senior positions is that their presence supports his strategic leadership goal to create a diverse decision-making environment. In his experience, whenever there are a diversity of views, thinking styles and backgrounds in the discussion, the decision that gets made is better. He actively includes women in his leadership team for just this reason and encourages all his leaders to do so as well. Women are not well represented in the feeder fields for corporate security such as law enforcement and the military, he notes, but “I suspect we will see more women getting in the field as demographic and age shifts take place with baby boomers moving on.”

In the meantime, I’m glad Mike’s there to help bring up the women that are there now into leadership in such a challenging and important field. Thanks, Mike!

Are you, or do you know, an INpowered woman (or man!) we should consider for an interview? Power isn’t always about title. Contact us to propose an interviewee and subject. (Not sure you or they are INpowered? Get smart on the 5 Principles of InPowerment.)

Dana is a research-based advocate for talent innovation and women’s leadership change initiatives that produce business results. As a leadership and management consultant she helps companies establish leadership teams capable of tapping into their full range of inner resources – individually InPowered and gender-partnered as a group. She also designs culture-shaping initiatives to integrate leader’s personal styles, corporate brand identity and innovation strategies. The result is improved productivity, profitability and meaning. Certified as a facilitator and trainer in The PRIMES methodologies, and as champion in Lean Six Sigma, she brings a full suite of leadership development tools and insights to every engagement. Dana is President & CEO of InPower Consulting (www.inpowerconsultinginc.com)

The Antidote for Toxic Corporate Culture

Dana Theus, President, 
InPower Consulting

In a recent leadership development workshop I ran, one woman bravely spoke her truth about the reality of the toxic corporate culture they all worked in. It was dysfunctional. Managers were petty and their pettiness was only overshadowed by the pettiness of the leaders above them. All these great ideas we were generating in the training – all this great energy – how could they keep it alive when everyone went back to their regularly scheduled work life the next day?

Enter, Reality

I welcomed this dissolution of the kumbaya moment, because acknowledging the reality of a situation – warts and all – is a critical step to claiming our own personal power to deal with it. (Reality, that is. Not warts.) In addition to giving me a chance for a short pep talk, I also jumped on this opportunity to demonstrate to these rising leaders how, even within the larger culture, they had the personal power to create their own little “culture bubbles,” with different agreements within their sphere of control on what would and wouldn’t be tolerated. (Chris McGoff has a wonderful and actionable definition of culture as the line between what a group does and doesn’t tolerate. Check out his PRIME, CULTURE

Together we developed some cultural bubble definitions that could survive within the larger, more toxic culture. And then we had an illuminating conversation. I asked them to choose the single most important principle (chosen from The PRIMES , universal principles of group dynamics) to promote into the toxic culture in order to change it. The results were conclusive: INTEGRITY  got 13 votes and the next most popular on the list only got four votes. The group believed that INTEGRITY had a better chance – beating out its closest competitor by more than 400% – to impact the culture for the better.

An (Anti) Poison Pill?

It got me thinking about culture-making projects I’ve worked on where everyone accepts defeat at the outset, because “Cultural change is impossible. Toxicity wins.” These projects stand in stark contrast to the situations where culture change happens spontaneously when new leadership comes in and – just changes it.

I believe it’s true. I believe that a value and practice as simple and strong as INTEGRITY could actually become an antidote to toxicity in corporate cultures. I believe it because I’ve seen it work and it invariably works best (but not only) from the top down. When toxic cultures bubble from the bottom up, it’s because leadership allows it to happen; but truly healthy cultures can only flow from the top down. Leadership shoulders the responsibility for being this kind of change and beingthe change is not the same as modeling it. When you model an attitude, it’s as though you’re wearing a jacket, which everyone including you knows you can take off when the door closes. Cultural change only happens when behavior is consistent behind and in front of closed doors.

So what chance does a single principle have to “infect” an entire culture for the better? With enthusiasm like a 400% greater popularity index, INTEGRITY is a leading contender for a simple antidote to cultural toxicity.

If It Was Easy….

So why hasn’t anyone invented this little red pill yet? The reasons are numerous, of course, but I would say that it comes down to a simplistic understanding of what integrity actually is. When I do PRIMES Leadership Development trainings  –  I always ask people what integrity means to them. People consistently use the definition we use: do what you say you’ll do. So simple. The reality of life makes following this little six word maxim challenging, of course, but primarily because we’re so used to saying what others want us to say, regardless of what is actually doable. If you know your boss wants to hear that you’ll make it back for the 3pm staff meeting when your client meeting wraps up across town at 2:45, how often do you just say, “sure boss, see you there!” and just show up late? How often does s/he let you get away with it because it’s what they want to hear?

Living in integrity has other benefits too. It buffs up your personal brand and helps you live in alignment with your higher self. Literally, you have nothing to lose. Working in integrity isn’t so hard if you give yourself permission to:

• Be precise about what you commit to based on factors under your control (e.g., I’ll leave the client’s office no later than 2:50 and come straight back to the meeting.)
• Be the first to recognize your own breaches of integrity (they will happen!)
• Be consistent so that others come to believe your word is your action.
• Let go of the guilt that you can’t do everything you or everyone else wants you to and enjoy the fact that you’re living in integrity!

Try it. Create your own little “culture bubble” of integrity. Teach your team to do the same. The higher up you are, the broader impact you can have. Go ahead, be the antidote. I dare you!

Dana is a research-based advocate for talent innovation and women’s leadership change initiatives that produce business results. As a leadership and management consultant she helps companies establish leadership teams capable of tapping into their full range of inner resources – individually InPowered and gender-partnered as a group. She also designs culture-shaping initiatives to integrate leader’s personal styles, corporate brand identity and innovation strategies. The result is improved productivity, profitability and meaning. Certified as a facilitator and trainer in The PRIMES methodologies, and as champion in Lean Six Sigma, she brings a full suite of leadership development tools and insights to every engagement. Dana is President & CEO of InPower Consulting (www.inpowerconsultinginc.com)