Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s formidable CEO, periodically leaves one seat
open at conference room tables and lets all those in attendance know that they
should consider that seat occupied by their customer, whom he calls “the most
important person in the room.” The interesting part about many of our
organizations is that on your teams there are many actual customers watching
you do business every day. When we ask ‘are you customer driven’ and ‘do you
have a customer focus’, I wonder how they react watching you lead our company.
That Empty Chair routine is an interesting one. Wonder what would happen if you
routinely had an empty chair at your team meetings, your coaching sessions,
your staff meetings and made that same announcement. I wonder what the reaction
would be? It would be easy to ask, “And how could that help your customers?”
wouldn’t it? It could not be a one time, flavor-of-the-month kind of thing. It
would have to be what you were known for... a solid customer focus. 11+
million of them all crowding into that one chair sort of beats the ‘elephant in
the room’ pretty significantly, doesn’t it?
Are
you feeling overwhelmed, stuck or do you find yourself procrastinating? Do you
typically load your plate by taking on too much and expect to handle it all?
Are your goals realistic or a bit too ambitious?
There are times when tipping over your plate and letting
things drop so that you can start over is the best choice. Sort of like
cleaning off the kitchen counter or your desk and putting only the things back
that matter. Consider this plan:
Step 1: Make a list of everything that is undone or not progressing
the way you want. Include things you feel pressured about or anything you feel
you should, could, have to, or ought to do. Add all goals, projects, roles,
routines and things you consider both minor and essential to your life.
Step 2: Drop 50% of the items on this list permanently.
Yup, you heard me. Creating space to re-evaluate what you really want allows
you to make a clear decision about what you choose to add back into your life.
Step 3: Deliberately reduce the emotional or time
invested in the remaining 50% so that you have some “you” time and space for
self–care, re-energizing, thinking, planning, having fun...If you don’t put in
time to take care of yourself, even the best leader will burn out.
Step 4: Keep this list around you and only add back over
time the items that you really want.
Bottom line: Choosing this strategy can be a great way to
realign priorities and assist you in having more ease in your life. Doing a
clean sweep can jump-start enthusiasm and motivation when focused on the things
you deeply desire and choose to pursue. This can be a fun process that supports
you in working smarter rather than harder. As Danielle LaPorte would say (Fire
Starter Sessions. Click on link and scroll down to the video
on the site): A blank page
creates an open mind and an open mind innovates.
Our leadership bloggers, Mike and Jan from PeopleTek, posted an article that really resonated with me so I’d like to elaborate. The post, Top Companies - Top Leaders provides the list compiled by Fortune Magazine surveying 277,000 employees who were asked to rate management credibility, job satisfaction, camaraderie, pay and benefits, hiring practices, communication, recognition, and diversity.
The 10 most common answers were no surprise to any of us who follow transparent leadership methodologies, but my favorite “extra” was learning that one CEO posts his/her personal development plan for all employees to see and track results.
This leader ROCKS in my world!
So, are you brave enough to post your personal development plan for all your employees to see:
What you don’t know now but are trying to learn?
How they are being led by someone who might not be as knowledgeable as they presumed?
What you feel is important for you to become a better leader?
And…oh yeah…
That you’re not perfect, all knowing, etc.?
Trust me, most leaders would be scared to death to let their employees and peers reach into their secret little minds and learn the real truth about them. But folks, we need to become more transparent so the people around us will do the same.
Once we all become transparent, we can begin helping each other grow and our companies and people will benefit socially, personally, professionally and financially. Can’t beat that!
Drum Roll Please: Who will be the first person to step up and comment below to say, “Yes, I will post my personal development goals for all to see. I will begin the process encouraging transparency within my organization.” I dare ya!
BTW: We've done this at my company, and no one left because they thought their leaders were dummies! The opposite is true. We all know that it is safe to let others know what we need. By helping each other, we all grow into a more cohesive team.
TBD Consulting has a 21-year, proven track record for ensuring employee performance improvement which translates to employee performance success. Whether you need help developing an in-house training organization, create a Lean Academy, or simply need "extra hands" to meet your deadlines or ROI goals, please contact Jonena. She and her qualified staff are here to assist you with your organizational development, coaching and training initiatives.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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