An issue that has recently been under some scrutiny by experts and reporters across North America is bullying in the workplace. Reports, survey results and general concerns have led the province of Quebec to become the first jurisdiction in Canada to create legislation outlawing workplace bullying, modelled after existing laws in France, Sweden and Belgium, and governments in North America are watching Quebec to see whether and how this law will work. Interestingly, a study conducted in the United States, as reported by the Globe and Mail back in March, 2005, concluded that bullying in the workplace is more likely to come from co-workers than from managers. The study found that a quarter of the respondents surveyed experienced some instance of bullying in the workplace, and of them 39% claimed the bullying was done by another employee, as opposed to the 14.7% who said it was by a supervisor (the rest, according to the Globe, reported bullying by external customers or non-employees). But bullying is not the only epidemic in the workplace that is being examined. Rudeness, according to organizational psychologist Dana Law, is also on the rise, and there is often a very fine line between rudeness and bullying. Both social problems are a form of “psychological harassment,” and can have similar detrimental effects on employee productivity, employee motivation, absenteeism, employee dissatisfaction, and even employee retention rates.

In general, rudeness and bullying in the workplace are on the rise, and there are several explanations for why this might be. In our modern, fast-paced, technologically advanced organizations, employees are expected to have more skills, have higher levels of productivity, and often are given greater workloads. The work environment has also become a more competitive one in today’s society. As a result of these increased stresses, people in general have become more self-focused and less inclined to think of others and their feelings. Yet another problem on the rise in modern workplaces, as outlined by an article published by the Globe in June, 2006, is the presence of “psychopaths,” particularly in positions of power, and this has in turn led to an increase in bullying. These psychopaths excel in the workplace because they generally can manipulate interviews and their bosses to their advantage, they are willing to take risks, and they exhibit high-potential characteristics that are desirable in employees. They also often lack the scruples that the rest of us have to prevent us from taking advantage of others in order to get ahead. These workplace psychopaths, whether or not in leadership positions (yet), have no qualms about abusing co-workers, whether through rudeness, bullying, or stealing co-workers’ ideas and blaming mistakes on others. Since they can be difficult to identify, due to their seemingly desirable and employable traits (including a strong drive and determination, among others), they often go unchallenged and continue to weaken the company by lowering morale and sometimes even pushing qualified co-workers to lower their own productivity or to leave the company.

It is important for organization leaders to be aware of these potential workplace problems, for the improvement of their own leadership behaviour, as well as to be able to recognize bullying and rudeness in other employees. The Globe offers some warning signs you can look for to identify psychopaths in the workplace, such as being deceitful, lacking remorse or conscientiousness, and being low in consideration of others. It is extremely important that human resources managers take steps towards identifying bullying or rudeness early on, though employee opinion and satisfaction surveys or company health surveys. Employees are not likely to stick around in an environment where they feel belittled, ill-treated or unappreciated, so it is up to management to recognize and deal with these issues before they begin to have detrimental effects on the organizations’ most valuable resource—human resources.

I read all the time about praise playing an important role in keeping employees motivated. It is a cheap, effective way to increase productivity and job satisfaction. Yet I also often hear statistics cited about how little praise employees are actually receiving from their bosses. In an article for Gallup Managing Journal, Tom Rath presents some interesting research results from different sources about the impact that the right type of praise can have on employees’ productivity levels and what that right type of praise is. These results, along with some useful advice on the right way to offer praise, should be enough to motivate managers to make use of this simple but effective motivational tool in their leadership style.

According to Gallup, regular praise of the right type can lead to:

• decreased turnover
• increased employee interaction
• fewer work-related accidents
• increased customer loyalty and satisfaction
• increased overall productivity

The right type of praise must have three characteristics:

1. it must be individualized
2. it must be specific

and

3. it must be deserved.

Praise is most effective when it is offered for something in particular that an employee has done that impressed you, not just as a general thank-you for “good behaviour” or to motivate an employee who has not yet had a turn in the spotlight. Proper praise cannot just be given as a regular employee appreciation program like having an “Employee of the Month.”
It should not have the appearance that employees are taking turns at being recognized. Real praise is given based on the preferences and accomplishments of individual employees, not at the convenience of the management. And how do you know what each employee’s preference is? Simple, according to Gallup—you ask. Rath suggests asking questions like:

• By what name do you like to be called?
• What are you hobbies or interests?
• What increases your positive emotions most?
• From whom do you most like to receive praise?
• Do you like your praise to be public or private? Written or verbal? Any other type of recognition?
• What type of recognition motivates you most? Winning a title in a competition or challenge, gift certificates, a meaningful note, a certificate, something else?
• What is the greatest recognition you ever received?

When it comes to giving praise, if you go beyond a simple “Well done!” whenever possible, it will make the action much more meaningful for your employee and positively reinforce whatever behaviour generated the praise in the first place. It only takes a little effort to properly recognize your employees for a job well done, and the results and benefits in employee motivation and for your company overall will repay your efforts tenfold.

SOURCE: TPS Performance Canada Ltd.

Do scorecards add up? While most of corporate Canada uses these management tools, few people think they actually work. Why?

An article in the May edition of CA Magazine by Robert Angel and Dr. Hubert Rampersad points out that scorecards rarely achieve sustained financial improvement breakthrough.

The article does not argue that balanced scorecards are fundamentally inappropriate as management tools. Quite the reverse, it supports the philosophy of balanced scorecards — but with a modified approach to implementation that has been proven to produce better results. Poor execution rather than the underlying concept is seen as the cause of the apparent performance shortfalls. Organizational scorecards need to be aligned with individuals’ scorecards to turn the balanced scorecard into a powerful tool for sustained organizational performance.

Research was conducted in late 2004, talking with more than 50 Canadian medium and large organizations. The overwhelming view seemed to be that balanced scorecards can be worthwhile in clarifying an organization’s strategy and that if this can be accomplished, improved results should follow. A few companies stated categorically that scorecards have made a positive difference in their organization’s financial results. A typical statement was, “We did not meet our financial goals previously, but since implementing our balanced scorecard, we have now met our goals three years running.”

On the other hand, a larger number agreed with the statement, “balanced score-cards don’t really work.” Comments included: “It became just a number-crunching exercise by accountants after the first year;” “It is just the latest management fad and is already dropping lower on management’s list of priorities as all fads eventually do;” “We found it very complex to implement;” and “If scorecards are supposed to be a measurement tool, why is it so hard to measure their results?”

There is a pervasive structural and cultural issue that impedes improved financial performance, and the aligning of individuals’ personal goals and ambitions with those of the organization, a prerequisite for sustainable culture change. Alignment means working through core values and critical success factors to link the organization’s vision, mission and core values on the one hand with the individual’s personal vision, mission, and core values on the other.

Traditional scorecard implementations tend to be insufficiently committed to learning and rarely take the personal ambitions of employees into account. Without a set of rules for employees that addresses continuous process improvement and the personal improvement of individual employees, the experience is that too little employee buy-in and insufficient change in the organization’s culture underlies balanced scorecard disappointment. The result, experienced in so many scorecard implementations, is that any improvements tend to be superficial and temporary.

Frequently in such cases, management’s efforts to improve performance were seen as divisive, viewed by employees as aimed at benefiting senior management compensation plans and fostering a “what’s in it for me” attitude among the employees.

Bringing people involvement into scorecards is a step-by-step process that not only involves individual buy-in but also stimulates individual and team learning. Given that the scorecard relies so heavily on knowledge that quickly becomes obsolete, an integrated approach to organizational improvement, development and learning is a prerequisite for scorecard success. The role of the finance department in this is crucial. While the balanced scorecard encompasses the entire organization from a human capital and operational viewpoint, the finance department is uniquely placed to drive the measurement of results. This is very timely, as CAs are finding themselves in the spotlight as leaders in managing and resolving performance exposures along with risk.

According to A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill, time and money are as important in attaining a comfortable work/life balance as work and family. Unfortunately, the way people spend their time and money often does not reflect what is important to them in this balance. In Life Matters, Merrill and Merrill offer advice on how to organize your life to prioritize what really matters to you. Their advice hinges on three important “Gotta Do’s”:

1. Validate expectations. Your perception of situations has a drastic effect on your thoughts, expectations, and actions. You must learn to align your expectations with reality — which means understanding what you can realistically expect from yourself and others — and set realistic goals.
2. Optimize effort. Once you have developed realistic expectations, you must put your efforts towards achieving what is realistic in all aspects of life, such as love, occupational success, etc.
3. Develop “navigational intelligence.” You must be able to make good judgements based on your personal priorities when faced with unexpected opportunities that might lead you to deviate from your plan or change your perceptions of what are realistic expectations. To do this, you must constantly define and redefine your values based on your experience and your personal insight.

Balancing work, family, time, and money

Here are some other tips from Life Matters on validating your expectations and establishing a balance in these four important areas:

• Ask yourself how you see your work — as a joy, a necessary evil, an escape? The pleasure and satisfaction you get from work affects how and why you work. Working primarily out of economic necessity, as many people do, can make people feel trapped and afraid of losing their jobs. Working to provide for loved ones, however, can be one of the most fulfilling work motives, if it is perceived as being an important function of family life and not as solely career- or material-oriented. Work should become a visible manifestation of your love for your family.
• Optimize your time at work by focusing on your specific role in the organization; being proactive about getting things done; doing work that utilizes your strengths and talents; seeking feedback and constantly striving to improve; and developing good, productive work habits.
• Connect your work to your family by participating in career days at school; sharing positive work experiences with the family; teaching your children to work hard and why it is important; and being aware of what is happening in your partner’s and children’s lives and keeping in touch through notes or e-mail.
• Ask yourself what your role in the family is. Is work where you contribute to your family, and home where you crash? While a satisfying home life does require both work and sacrifice, you should see both home and work as areas where you can contribute.
• Optimize time with your family by scheduling weekly “family time;” maintaining relationships and having one-on-one time with your partner and your children; showing an interest and getting involved in your children’s projects; and dividing household chores up among all members to maximize time and teach valuable lessons about responsibility and time management.
• Assess your relationship with time. Do you see time as too limited? If you are often frustrated with how much needs to be done in so little time, you may need to reassess whether your expectations are aligned with reality or to focus more on getting things done and out of the way.
• Don’t let interruptions irritate you as, particularly with the family, they may be an opportunity to respond to something that is more important to you that what you are busy with.
• Don’t keep yourself busy doing lots of little things to gain a sense of accomplishment; you will feel much better if you prioritize, focus on major tasks, and work on them until they are complete.
• Discern between things that are urgent and things that are important. Some things, like meeting a deadline or taking a sick child to the doctor, are both urgent and important. Others, like attending unnecessary meetings or making it home in time for a television show, may be urgent but not really important. Time wasted doing these latter activities could be better spent doing other important things, like building networks at work or having family time, that are not necessarily urgent.
• Optimize time by making weekly plans; prioritizing time-sensitive tasks versus any-time tasks; tracking your time to see where you are devoting too much to unimportant things or too little to things that matter most; and building relationships and relying on those you trust to help.
• Both money and time should be invested in things that will make our lives better, not just consumed. How you spend both time and money should reflect what matters most to you.
• Do not assume that having more money and nicer things will being you more happiness. Often, the price for luxuries is greater than just money and can include deteriorating health and relationships.
• How you manage your income is more important than your level of income. It would seem that an increase in income is the obvious way to solve financial stresses, but more money usually results in less time at home, a higher tax rate, and greater job-related expenses.
• Providing children with the best clothes, supplies, and schools does not necessarily give them better opportunities in life. Rather than working longer hours to make more money, you and your family would benefit more if you devoted that extra time to help your children develop character strengths such as integrity, determination, thrift, and the ability to prioritize and make sacrifices.
• Optimize your usage of the money you have by tracking your spending to see where it is being wasted or where it does not reflect what matters most to you, planning your long- and short-term financial goals and focusing on them whenever you are tempted to waste money.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” May 2005.

Why We Like This Book: Living the 80/20 Way offers readers a shortcut to their personal destinations by pre-senting the questions that need to be asked along the way and providing a philosophy that can be applied to each step. By emphasizing focus and enjoyment while discussing work and success, Koch presents a road map that can help anyone get farther on his or her personal journey to success in business, life and relationships. Vivid stories about those who have embraced his lessons help to make them more actionable.

Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More

In Richard Koch’s previous book, The 80/20 Principle, he explained with numerous examples how 80 percent of results come from just 20 percent of causes or effort. For example, 80 percent of sales usually come from less than 20 percent of customers, fewer than 20 percent of drivers cause more than 80 percent of traffic accidents, and so on. In his latest book, Living the 80/20 Way, Koch examines the fundamentals of personal suc-cess and shows readers how they can apply his “less is more” and “more with less” ideas to their best 20 percent for better success with money, work, relationships and the good life.

Living the 80/20 Way does more than show readers how to do things differently: It also shows them how to “do less in total.” Koch explains that if we do more of the things that bring us joy, we can do fewer things in total and still transform our lives. Convinced that anyone can benefit by working less and fulfill-ing their passions more, Koch writes that rebal-ancing your life not only creates greater health and happiness, but it can also lead to far greater success.

Koch starts his book by explaining how the way most of us organize our personal and social lives is a mistake; we should live to work instead of working to live. His point is that if we have more self-confidence and the right philosophy, we can accomplish more than we do now, enjoy the work we do more, and spend less time working so we can spend more time with our families and friends. Koch writes that if we apply the 80/20 prin-ciple to our lives as individuals, “we could enjoy life much more, work less, and achieve more.”

A More Productive Way

According to the 80/20 principle, a small minority of causes leads to a vast majority of results. Koch writes that if we know what results we want, we can look for a more productive way to get those results. He explains that if readers apply the 80/20 principle to the way they organize their private and social lives, they can make more money, gain more status, get a more interesting job and make life more exciting.

Koch writes that getting more with less delivers on two promises:

1. It is always possible to improve anything in our lives, not by a small amount, but by a large amount.
2. The way to make the improvement is to ask, “What will give me a much better result for much less energy?”

Although expecting more with less might seem to be unreasonable, Koch writes that this is exactly the reason why improvement is possible. By deliberately cutting back on what we put into a task and yet asking for much more, we force ourselves to think hard and do something different. He explains that this is the root of progress.

Koch writes that the trick to getting more with less is picking activities offering a higher reward for less energy.

Blossoming Sidelines

Throughout Living the 80/20 Way, Koch asks many questions that force the reader to question the way he or she spends time. “Could you spend more time on the things you enjoy, even without quitting your day job? Could a hobby, interest or sideline in your life blossom into a new career?” Koch urges readers to find out by spending more time on the things they enjoy. By trying out new projects while you are still working at your normal job, he writes, you can experiment with different ideas until one clicks.

Time Revolution

Another idea found in Living the 80/20 Way is the dismissal of time management. We should manage those things that we are short of, such as money, he explains, and since we are not short of time, it is inappropriate to try to manage it. Instead of managing our time so that we can speed up, Koch writes that we should look to “time revolution” to slow us down and help us to do fewer things. Instead of writing a “to do list,” we should make a “not to do list.” Act less and think more, he writes. “Stop doing anything that isn’t valuable, that doesn’t make you happy.”

One of the primary points that Koch repeatedly returns to is the idea that the present moment is where we need to live. By confining ourselves to the present moment and enjoying it, he writes, we can be proud of our past and hope for our future. “The 80/20 view of time makes us more relaxed and ‘connected.’” Once we are connected, Koch shows us how we can focus on our best 20 percent and find the personal power, happiness and success that are waiting there to be sparked into life.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” June 2005

Why We Like This Book: Grzelakowski’s inspiration and passion for motherhood and its positive effects on the lives of powerful working women are apparent on every page of Mother Leads Best. Her personal connection to the subject and her investigative approach to exploring the effects of motherhood on leadership provide important observations and lessons from which all organizations can learn.

Fifty Women Who Are Changing the Way Leadership is Defined

As mothers are moving into the executive suite faster than ever before, they bring with them a new and distinct style of leadership. To document this emerging leadership trend, high-tech industry executive Moe Grzelakowski has interviewed 50 highly effective leaders who are also mothers and has turned their stories and ideas into a guidebook for using the skills of motherhood to transform good leaders into great ones. Mother Leads Best focuses on the impact that raising children has on a leader’s values, and how the empathy and compassion of motherhood can impact an organization in positive ways.

In her exploration of what mothers can teach others, Grzelakowski turns the lessons she has learned from each of her subjects into thoughtful insights about strength of character, confidence in the line of fire, and efficiency when it counts for a leader. After highlighting the adaptability, patience and other traits of the women she profiles, the author offers suggestions and exercises that can help readers assess and develop similar leadership traits.

The result of her journey into the maternal leader’s mind is a treatise on the value of motherhood in the executive realm and how all businesspeople can learn from the many roles motherhood demands. Grzelakowski also offers 50 women to whom working mothers can look as role models who have blazed the trail into working motherhood before them.

‘Dragon Lady’

The first chapters of Mother Leads Best dig into the organizational context in which working mothers are becoming powerful leaders at work and at home. This is where Grzelakowski confronts the sharp-tongued, amoral “dragon lady” stereotype and other pejorative terms used to describe female bosses.

With numerous stories from business experts and working mothers, she presents the tips and tactics that have made working mothers like herself even more effective and better leaders. These include getting a life, letting go of perfectionism, having more understanding of other people’s time, and other lessons that often emerge from the eye-opening world of motherhood. She also explores the way being a mother can help female executives gain perspective on themselves and their careers, and provides many inspirational anecdotes from women who have made the choice to add children to their busy lives.

The next part of Mother Leads Best is made up of six chapters that correspond to the various phases of the journey into motherhood: pregnancy, babies, the toddler years, elementary school, ‘tweens and teenagers. Each of these chapters offers numerous helpful suggestions about managing time and the traits that are required at each step of the way.

When Grzelakowski describes how pregnancy affects the careers of upwardly mobile women, she offers this comment from Donna Lee, the CMO at BellSouth, who describes the mixed reactions she received when people at her work realized she was pregnant: “After the initial shock, they viewed me as much more approachable. Being pregnant softened my edge. It gave people a richer view of me — opened up avenues. They saw the human side.”

The Toddler Years

When Grzelakowski delves into the leadership lessons mothers learn when their children are in their toddler years, she explains that, as a mother, you prioritize and re-prioritize every moment based on your goals at that time, controlling chaos in a way that is meaningful rather than arbitrary. She points out that Lori Craven, the COO at Tekelec, feels much the same way.

Craven explains, “I changed routines. At home, it was more important to go to the park than to cook from scratch or straighten up the house. At work, I shortened the long conversations with people popping in my office after hours. I became a lot more efficient with my time.”

Priscilla Lu of InterWAVE says that having young children and working with a nanny also affected her schedule in a positive way, allowing her to let go of the many minute details of her job that used up her time, and trust other members of her team to take care of them. “I was able to do this because my children put everything I was doing into perspective. They stabilized my priorities,” Lu comments.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” June 2005

Why We Like This Book: High Impact Middle Management offers valuable management insight in a compact, easy-to-reference guide that provides mountains of hands-on advice about removing bottlenecks, overcoming skill deficiencies, and reducing error rates. By describing smart time-mastery techniques and clear examples of ways to help others make personal breakthroughs, High Impact Middle Management contains a balanced combination of specific management principles and practical applications to make them work.

Solutions for Today’s Busy Managers

Most people would agree that great people make a great organization. The real difficulty for most organizations is figuring out how to keep people great over a long period of time. According to management trainer Lisa Haneberg, keeping people great depends on the success of middle managers — those who have the power to either execute positive results or cause a company to stagnate. In High Impact Middle Management, Haneberg describes a distinct system that is made up of a set of principles that can help middle managers maximize productivity and profits while nurturing employee careers and creating a healthy work environment.

High impact middle managers, Haneberg writes, are timely and on target, know how to think strategically and transition well between tasks, and their ideas are provocative in ways that help move work forward. She adds that they also “produce results and imbue the workplace with energy.” To offer a positive vision of more effective middle management and a solid method for achieving a superior level of performance, she has created a management system called High Impact Middle Management, or H.I.M.M. Her system, she writes, gives busy middle managers an integrated set of practices and techniques that maximize results and success.

Who Is a Middle Manager?

Middle managers can hold the title of vice president, director or manager, and they are responsible for managing at least one function within the company. Although they are not CEOs, they are still expected to comprehend and participate in creating business plans, budgets and other planning documents. Since there are few resources that target the unique needs of middle managers, Haneberg explains that she wrote High Impact Middle Management to provide middle managers with the observations, tools and suggestions that can help them do their jobs better.

Haneberg starts her book by describing what the middle managers at Black & Decker did right to launch its new DeWalt line of power tools, and how their work made a significant contribution to this companywide achievement. To show other managers how to get similar great results, Haneberg describes the basic principles of the H.I.M.M. system. These include:

Principle #1: Being a middle manager is exciting. Middle managers are close to the action, but also get to make things happen while progressing in their career.

Principle #2: Middle management is a craft. Weighing competing demands and making choices about how to manage time takes practice and development.

Principle #3: Great managers do what others don’t or won’t. Great managers do things that others put off.

Principle #4: Beliefs determine behavior. Breakthroughs occur when beliefs line up to get a desired outcome.

Results-Oriented Responses

Haneberg also offers four other principles to complete the backbone of her system for making the work of middle managers more fruitful. She writes that H.I.M.M. builds middle-management capacity by developing results-oriented responses (RORs) that can have an immediate effect on work. By providing a chart that depicts both RORs and low-results responses (LRRs), she describes the choices that managers make and the ways they can respond to tasks more effectively.

For example, one ROR is “Being an Owner.” This entails assuming responsibility for the outcome, taking initiative to make things better and doing whatever it takes to get ideal results. It also means the heart is committed and the mind is engaged. The corresponding LRR is “Being a Custodian,” which entails doing only what is required, waiting for others to act, hoping someone else will take ownership, and avoiding unpleasant tasks. It also means behavior is compliant and the heart and mind are not fully engaged. By showing middle managers how they can focus their time and energy where they will create the greatest benefit, she shows them how they can improve their performance, results and career success.

To demonstrate how high impact middle managers think, Haneberg offers insights from a variety of people who have aligned their thinking with the larger objective and obtained positive results, including Michael Dell, Johnsonville Sausage CEO Ralph Stayer and FedEx CEO Fred Smith.

COMMENT: In any organization, internal relationships are key to employee engagement. Although The Relationship Edge in Business is largely written from a marketing perspective, the concrete principles of this book can be implemented to build and maintain relationships between managers and employees, and among co-workers within an organization, as well as in all other aspects of business interaction. What follows is an excerpt from Chris Lauer’s review of the book.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” April 2005

Building Relationships Is a Skill

If you nurture and leverage better relationships with your most important business contacts, including your customers, co-workers and managers, you will be more successful in your business life, Acuff writes. To build better business relationships, he explains, you must consciously, systematically and routinely work toward that goal.

To help others master the skills of developing superior relationships, Acuff offers a three-step process. His process involves the following:

1. Have the right mind-set. You have to think that relationships are valuable and believe that you are someone with whom other people would want to have a relationship. You must also think well of others and learn to think as much as you can from the other person’s point of view.
2. Ask the right questions. The goal of asking questions is to discover common ground. This could be mutual friends, interests or concerns. Acuff writes that if there is no obvious common ground and the other person is passionate about something that you know nothing about, your goal should be to learn from him or her.
3. Demonstrate your professionalism, integrity, caring and knowledge, and, when appropriate, do unexpected, inexpensive thoughtful acts based on what you’ve learned about the other person. This process can take weeks or even months of thought and care to apply.

In The Relationship Edge in Business, Acuff presents the stories of real people who succeeded in their jobs because of the relationships they created with those around them. Throughout, minor clients become giant customers, small favors become lifetime friendships, and customer loyalty becomes valued connections in a person’s life.

Even the Jerks

One key to relationship success that Acuff presents is “Think well of others (even the jerks).” He writes that, although this is not easy, relationships that are not what you want them to be can usually be traced to a failure to implement the three-step process completely. Making superficial judgments about someone based on sketchy information can hold you back, he points out. Asking the right questions in the right way for the right reasons can have better results.

To help others build stronger relationships, one of the pieces of advice that Acuff offers is to imagine that every person has the words “Make Me Feel Important” tattooed on his or her forehead. He explains that this tattoo is a command that, if heeded, will help us sell more, manage better and even be more effective parents. By fulfilling people’s deepest human desire — to be important — people will want to do things for us. Listening to others, talking about them, noticing them, learning something from them and doing something special for them helps them feel important.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” April 2005

Why We Like This Book: O’Hara-Devereaux presents compelling stories of pioneers who have been able to lead the hero’s journey and share their leadership lessons with others across generations, cultures, times and places. Her unique perspective turns principles and organizational tools into strategies that can resolve the pains of transformation and help organizations thrive in the future.

Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation

The global business environment is currently experiencing a number of dramatic changes that will forever shape the future of organizations. According to internationally renowned business forecaster Mary O’Hara-Devereaux, the turbulent stock market, worker migration and major changes in strategic planning require organizations to shift their focus to navigate through the rugged business landscape of the next decade. In Navigating the Badlands, the author uses dramatic stories of successes and failures from companies in a variety of industries to create organizational models for moving forward in rough business terrain.

From Industrial Age to Information Age

O’Hara-Devereaux uses the metaphor of traveling through the badlands of the American West to describe the next 10 years of struggle and transition that organizations face today. To help companies bridge the space between the end of the Industrial Age and the “full promise of the Information Age,” the author provides them with tools and warnings that can prepare them for the road ahead. Her goal, she writes, is to soften the ride to creating a “vibrant, equitable, and fully integrated global society underpinned by robust economic growth worldwide.” She explains that today’s leaders and organizations are mismatched with the needs we will face in the new global reality.

O’Hara-Devereaux draws her observations and prescriptions for success from her extensive research, which has taken her from the villages of Africa to the businesses and governments of Asia and Latin America to the technology centers of California’s Silicon Valley. With a team of researchers that included economists, technology experts, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians, she examined the turbulent times of the past to make better sense of the foreboding future terrain.

Navigating the Badlands is organized around four themes that are both interlinked and distinct: globalization, new leadership crucible, organizational metamorphosis, and social choices. Regarding social choices, O’Hara-Devereaux explains that stepping up to the international plate and “making the right choices to create a global commons is essential.”

Eight Principles of Transformation

Although she covers all these themes with many suggestions, she primarily focuses on the journey of organizational leaders across the badlands and the transformation that organizations will need to undergo to achieve success. O’Hara-Devereaux writes that a successful journey requires principles of transformation to guide the way, as well as “a new leadership paradigm to anchor them.” Her set of principles is made up of the following:

• Scan, Scout, Steer. Strategically improving all leaders’ readiness to identify opportunities and risks, and providing necessary resources, enables them to act quickly on emerging opportunities.
• Act With Integrity. Integrity includes honesty, coherence, connectedness, wholeness and vitality.
• Seek Collisions. Surprise encounters with outsiders create the optimal diversity firms need.
• Learn Rapidly. Trial and error efforts constitute a critical pathway for accelerating learning.
• Engage Cultures. Authenticity, courage, resilience, adaptability, persistence and a sense of humor will help.
• Innovate Radically. Seek out heretics and mavericks.
• Make Decisions Fast. Leaders must nurture an action-oriented stance throughout their whole company.
• Execute With Discipline. Survival requires organizations to create cultures that can execute masterfully with focus, self-possession, poise and confidence.

SOURCE: Review by Chris Lauer, from Soundview “Speed Reviews,” April 2005

Why We Like This Book: Blue Streak offers more than the tabulated lists of strategies and tactics an organization has used to bring down costs and increase profits. Instead, Peterson’s work explores the personality and methods of a company’s founder while providing a wealth of details on which a complete story of the startup can be built. What emerges is the human story glowing behind a successful organization. By revealing the thoughts of the people at JetBlue, she taps into valuable business and customer service lessons.

Inside the Upstart That Rocked an Industry

Five years ago, entrepreneur David Neeleman moved from Utah to New York with his wife and nine children to start a company that would entice jaded travelers into loving the airways once again. Despite giant obstacles (a recession, 9/11, etc.) he has seen success beyond his wildest dreams: His company, JetBlue Airways, consistently makes a profit while growing rapidly and garnering great customer satisfaction ratings. In Blue Streak, editor and author Barbara S. Peterson follows the company from its inception to its current status as a role model for all other ambitious upstarts.

Tracking JetBlue’s improbable journey from startup to major player in the airline industry, Peterson presents the story of a company whose tight organizational culture often appears cultlike, and whose success is undeniable. As she weaves together interviews with more than 75 company insiders, from mechanics on the runway to CEO Neeleman himself, Peterson reveals the steps that were taken along the company’s path to industry success.

Using her skills as a veteran reporter, Peterson digs into her subject by submerging herself in the company and even attending JetBlue’s training for flight attendants. In her introduction, she describes the anxiety she experienced as she flipped through JetBlue’s training manual for guidance: “Think in terms of difficult situations, not difficult people.” She notes that there are no mentions of “passengers” throughout the manual because JetBlue prefers employees to refer to those who use its services as “customers.”

Couch Potato Comforts

In mid-1999, JetBlue was a paper airline that had no planes, no name and no license to fly. At the end of 2003, Peterson reports, it was one of the most on-time and the most full airlines in the country. By mid-2004, the company had made a profit in more than sixteen consecutive quarters and was ranked among the top 10 airlines in the country.
Exploring the reasons for JetBlue’s success in a business environment where other airlines were racking up losses of $20 billion since 2000, Peterson points to many of the differences between traditional airlines and JetBlue. For one, the language used by those in the company is unique: Employees are “crew members” and supervisors are “in-flight support specialists.” Secondly, there are many elements of its flights that differ from its rivals and that add to the company’s bottom line, including:

• No meals. Serving snacks instead creates enormous cost savings.
• No rolling carts. Carts clog the aisle and slow down the service. Also, the massive serving carts used by other airlines are one of the biggest causes of on-the-job injuries.
• Seat-back TV screens. No fee is charged for their use.
• Crew members help customers stow their carryons in the overhead bins. This improves punctuality by shaving about 10 minutes off the boarding time of each flight.

Peterson writes that it is with “this mix of couch potato comforts and solicitous service that JetBlue has upended an industry.” Not only does Blue Streak describe how JetBlue beat sizable odds in one of the toughest businesses and during one of the worst periods in that business’ history, but it also depicts how an unassailable brand was created in a business where brand loyalty no longer exists.
Throughout Blue Streak, Peterson returns to Neeleman’s vision of figuring out what customers need, and giving it to them. By describing the ideas and culture of this unusual company, she provides a deeper understanding of why JetBlue is the first postderegulation airline to reach major airline status in only five years. While assessing how it got where it is today, she provides the basis for speculation about where it will go over the next five years.

Four Success Secrets

During her years of observing the company from its inception and interviewing many of its people, Peterson found four secrets that JetBlue has used to become the epitome of success. These are:

1. Focus on customer service. While going through flight attendant training, Peterson learned that JetBlue trains its employees harder than anyone else.
2. Keep prices not just low, but fair and easy to understand. Neeleman explains that customers “know we’ll treat them fair and give them a fair deal.”
3. Don’t abuse coach passengers. JetBlue crams fewer people into its coach section than any other airline.
4. Minimize the really big hassles. JetBlue does not overbook its flights. If a passenger is delayed more than an hour, he or she will be compensated.

References: Employee Survey

For many years I worked in the corporate environment in large organizations. These organizations had substantial Human Resource and Information Technology departments. When it came to running an employee survey it was only natural that they should use these vast resources. Typically response rates to employee surveys were less than 25%. These response rates were considered to be the norm and aside from a few comments lamenting the low response rate, no one paid much attention.

Today I am on the other side of the fence. I have worked with corporate clients for the past nine years providing various kinds of employee surveys. Recently, I had the opportunity of speaking with HR staff from several organizations. These organizations were scouring the internet to collect questions so that they could create their own employee survey. Once they assembled these questions they were planning on running their own survey process in-house.

At first blush this does not sound like an unreasonable approach. However, I asked the HR staff to consider the following.

Read Article: In-House Employee Survey

References: Presenteeism

In the past few years the terms “employee engagement” and “employee disengagement” have emerged to more fully describe the employee’s level of motivation and commitment to their job. An engaged employee is considered to be passionate about their work and emotional connected to their work and to their company.

Disengaged employees are those employees that are at work but their minds are not necessarily on their jobs. The term presenteeism has also been used to describe disengaged employees. There minds are somewhere else. They could be thinking about their children, their upcoming date, a party, last’s night basketball game or be engrossed thinking about their own personal problems. From a productivity perspective this may not be that serious for a person working manually on repetitive tasks. However, in the advanced economies of the world such as those found in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere, where the contribution of knowledge workers to the GDP is greater than that associated with production workers in the manufacturing sector. Mental performance is the key determinant of productivity and profitability. In this setting if an employee’s mind is not on their jobs they become a significant liability to their organization. The mind today is the ultimate productivity weapon.

Read Article: Presenteeism: Another Dimension

Summary - It’s easy to talk about developing leaders. Turning that talk into action is hard. Here’s how you can do it.

Compared with number five, the other items on a typical CIO’s to-do list are easy. But turn Johnny - who’s a terrific programmer but also a guy who mumbles, forgets to say hello to his coworkers and has only the vaguest notion of what the company actually does - into a leader? Now that’s a tough one.

Can leadership be learned? Can it be taught? And is it important enough for busy IT managers to place high on their list of priorities?

Apparently, the answers are yes, yes and you betcha. In a recent CIO Web site survey of more than 300 information executives, 78 percent said that inculcating leadership in their staffs was their most important job. Sadly, more than half of those who recognized its importance said they didn’t spend enough time on it.

Read Article: Teaching Johnny How to Lead

References: Customer Surveys

A key strategy for quality monitoring is listening to your customers. Prospect and Customer surveying is an essential listening tool that can give you valuable information about your prospects and customers expectations, customer satisfaction and strategies for improvement.

But just listening to your prospects and customers is not the only strategy; you must be ready to take action once you get that valuable feedback.

So how do you get started? Before you even think about writing your survey questions, it’s important that you have a clearly defined statement of what your survey will achieve and a good understanding of what you will do with your newly acquired feedback from your prospects and customers. If you don’t have a clear understanding of how you will use that data you acquire, the survey will have little or no value. Some of the questions you may want ask yourself before you start down the survey path are:

Read Article Customer Surveys

Leadership

Daniel Goleman in his book Leadership That Gets Results (Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000), refers to the fact that one leadership style is not appropriate for all situations. He shows that truly effective bosses vary their leadership style according to situations. He identified six leadership styles:

Do what I tell you. Goleman calls this the "coercive" style of leadership and it is the least effective of the six. Nobody likes to be bossed around. But in a short-term crisis it can mobilize people quickly.

Do as I do, now. This the "pacesetting" style and it’s the second least effective. This leader is obsessed with doing things better and faster but doesn’t make expectations clear. "If I have to tell you, you’re wrong for the job," she thinks. As a result, responsibility and initiative evaporate because people focus on second guessing her expectations. Pacesetting can be effective with highly motivated, competent teams, however, if used in combination with other styles.

Read Article: Situational Leadership Styles

Summary of Talk by Mitchell Max. Shares Insights From the Beyond Budgeting Round Table

By Zayna A. Khayat, The Boston Consulting Group

"The budget is a relic from an earlier age. It is expensive, absorbs far too much time and adds little value", comments Mitch Max of the specialist management consultancy The Performax Group. At a recent SLF research briefing entitled "Slaying the Dragon: Managing Performance Better Without Budgets", Mitch Max shared stimulating research findings from the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, of which The Performax Group is an associate member.

Budgeting Controls Performance

Four fundamental processes underline the budgeting process that nearly all organizations endure annually:

• Set strategic goals
• Set business targets/allocate resources/make plans
• Generate the budget
• Control performance to keep results on track with the budget

The result? A performance contract that is fixed. Results are expected to be achieved within a fixed period (normally one year), with a pre-defined ceiling on revenues and floor on costs. Controls to ensure results are on track occur at predefined time points (i.e. monthly, quarterly). And rewards for performance are predetermined through a negotiation process with senior management. In all, more than a year in advance of executing on a plan, employees commit to saying ‘I will deliver X for someone else by a stated period of time, and will get Y in return’.

Read Article: Manage Performance Better Without A Budgeting Process

Steep increase in antidepressant use, study shows Researchers examine rise in expenditures on pharmacotherapy for depression by Jessica Whiteside

Oct. 15, 2002 – Canadians’ use of antidepressants has soared by more than 300 per cent over the past two decades, says a study by researchers at U of T and The Hospital for Sick Children.

The study, published recently in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, found a 353 per cent increase in prescriptions for antidepressants (from 3.2 million to 14.5 million) between 1981 and 2000. Correspondingly, Canada’s population increased one per cent annually during this time.

“If you see such a high increase in a particular group of drugs, you have to ask important questions such as are more people sick or are more people being diagnosed?” says Professor Gideon Koren of U of T pharmacology, pediatrics, pharmacy, medicine and medical genetics and The Hospital for Sick Children. He co-authored the study with Professor Thomas Einarson of pharmacy and pharmacology graduate student Michiel Hemels. “First, it’s fair to say that more people are diagnosed. There is more awareness, better understanding and less embarrassment by people to admit having depression. But a question remains, Is there more depression? While there are many possible causes - the collapse of the family as a source of strength, stress and the need to work more hours - I don’t think we can point to one factor as the only or most important one.”

Read Article: Steep Increase in Antidepressant Use

What HR needs to Learn from Marketing

During the earlier stages of my career I was fortunate to have worked for a large corporation that had a management development program for up-and-coming managers. This program combined formal management courses with on the job training. The job training involved assignments to different divisions in the company. Two learning goals were mandated by these assignments:

1. Acquire knowledge in a new discipline
2. Learn about the different parts of the organization, experience their challenges and understand how they contribute to the success of the whole

My formal education was in environmental studies with a specialty in ecology. One of the key principles in ecology is that ecosystems are made up of interdependent elements. A change in one part of an ecosystem will result in changes in other parts of the same system. Without knowing it at the time, my classmates and I became “systems thinkers”. This ability to see systems has guided my decision making throughout my life in business and in my private affairs. Naturally, I thrived in this opportunity to be a part of a management training program where I was able to experience different parts of the organization and see first hand how each part related to the whole company.

Read Article: Employees As Customers

See Reference: Employee Engagement

The Gallup organization has placed the term employee engagement on the map. There contribution to understanding the underlining factors of employee motivation has been a significant contribution. There is however, an important piece missing in Gallup’s work. There are two parts to employee engagement:

1. the employee and their own unique psychological make up
2. the employer and their ability to create the conditions that will promote employee engagement.

Gallup’s work does not fully address the first part. A the reader may be aware, Entec Corporation assembled an eclectic team of experts in strategic management, organizational development, leadership, behavioral psychology and psychiatry who were asked to develop a model of employee engagement. They determined that there were five factors that are primary drivers of employee engagement:

1. Employee emotional wellness
2. Department practices
3. Leadership behaviours
4. Corporate practices
5. Vision and values

Read Article: Employee Engagement

See References: Customer Loyalty

Customer Loyalty (the relationship) is not defined as how customers perceive their relationship with companies, as most often a customer rarely thinks they have any relationship with any company.

Customer relationship management is a popular concept but the concept itself is actually its biggest barrier.

The development of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketing practice has made more and more people realize the importance of strong customer relationship in building sustainable competitive advantages where their markets "perceive" this thus, generating sustainable profits in the long run.

However, current popular CRM marketing practices often produces disappointing outcomes. Surveys show a surprisingly high rate of failure has been reported for CRM practices. The failure rate of CRM systems ranges from 50% to over 80%. The more popular this marketing practice gets the more people who realize that the current CRM practices hardly manages customer relationship.

Read Article: Customer Loyalty

^{Professor Dalton Kehoe, York University and Entec Corporation Associate}

Walking the Talk on "Human Assets" - NOT!

It is widely proclaimed that we are in a knowledge-based economy where highly-skilled individual employees are vital to organizational success. In fact, many organizations find themselves competing for the top talent and seek to be "employers of choice." As a result, some variation on, "People Are Our Most important Asset." is commonly pronounced. Despite these statements of good intention, the research tells us many companies still see their "valuable human assets" as either instantly expandable or simply expendable.

Even though we have moved from an economy of physical performance to one of mental performance, the central managerial mantra remains: "Do more; do it faster." Our 21st century approach to this management style, so far, has been to add two other stress-inducing commands: "Do it with fewer resources." and "While you’re working harder, get up to speed on another new "app" or data management system after works hours or on the weekend." Current management practices demonstrate little recognition that a mentally and emotionally healthy work environment is essential to support knowledge-based work.

Large scale research on the causes and effects of stress in the workplace, demonstrate that the traditional approach to efficiency is undermining the "knowledge worker’s" mental and emotional health the way production line "speed ups" used to numb the minds and break the backs of previous generations of workers. This effect shows up in societal level data recently reviewed by Canada’s Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health. They give us a "big picture" view of what this approach to efficiency costs us all every year: US - $200 billion in absenteeism costs and $75 billion depression; Canada - $20 billion in absenteeism and $8 billion in depression.

In a recent, national study of a variety of workplaces, Carleton University business professor, Linda Duxbury reveals these significant trends from the last 10 years: job stress has risen, while job satisfaction and employee commitment to their organization has fallen. Technology is seen as increasing, both workload, and also stress. More people are working longer hours and individual efforts to balance home and work life are failing. As she says, "when it comes to choice between work and home, work always wins."

Read Article: Leadership Affects Your Bottom Line

See References: Employee Engagement

Stress-Related Illness At Work Can No Longer Be Ignored By Organizations Striving To Be Competitive. Why Does Health Matter?

Workplace stress, anxiety and burnout are becoming more and more pronounced and widespread throughout the workforce. In July 20, 2000 the Economic and Business Roundtable on Mental Health published a study, "The Unheralded Business Crisis in Canada - Depression at Work" [1] that showed that the cost of these and other mental illnesses at work is growing exponentially. Unfortunately there are many other hidden costs that can also be ascribed to this source of unhealth or "dis-ease". Organizations where staff are working under conditions of debilitating stress or along side others who are over-stressed experience:

• decreasing employee satisfaction;
• increased use of Employee Assistance Program services (EAP);
• social and work disruption caused by individuals who under-perform or who are often absent, increasing the stress on everybody;
• increased conflict;
• lowered innovation and collaboration and motivation;
• decreasing meeting of deadlines; and
• most serious of all, a reduced quality of customer service.

Read Article: Employee Engagement

See References: Employee Wellness

I read two unrelated articles in the November 11, 2004, issue of the Globe and Mail. The first article was reporting on the most recent study by Professor Linda Duxbury of Carleton University and released by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The study is intended as a discussion paper between work-life conflict and the demands on the public health care system. Dr. Duxbury has done an excellent job of mining the database she and her colleague Chris Higgins from the University of Western Ontario developed from survey results of some 31,500 Canadian employees.

They have presented compelling information on "role overload" experienced by 58% of the respondents in their survey. Put very simply people are working harder than ever and they are burning out. Statistics were released last year that showed the average rate of absenteeism in Canada has increased from 8 person days per year to 9 person days per year in 2002.

Read Article: Committing Corporate Lobotomy

See References: Management, Leadership

Most people think motivating employees is largely about pay. This is a simplistic view, which isn’t particularly helpful for team leaders and managers who are trying to get the most out of their people in challenging times.

Most organizations don’t have the money to simply give more to their people. And employee surveys find at best, money is a short-term motivator, which doesn’t compare to a variety of other incentives.

Consider this list of motivators:
1. Give employees authority along with responsibility. It is easy to tell an employee they are responsible for accomplishing a particular task or goal. It is easy to say they will be held accountable if they don’t succeed. The hard part is, giving up a measure of control so that the employee has a certain degree of authority. A recent survey found 66 percent of employees say managers want them involved in decision making, yet only 14 percent feel they have been empowered to make those decisions.

   Read Article: Motivating Employees

See References: Employee Engagement , Mental Health

In the last few years a great deal has been written about employee engagement. Several definitions of employee engagement have been suggested. All of the definitions share similar themes. They refer to employees being committed to their work, being passionate about their work, being emotional connected to their organization and to their coworkers. After the publication of the book, First Break All the Rules, the Gallup organization became well known for the research in this area. Buckingham and Coffman, who coauthored the book, provided numerous illustrations of the connection between, good people, good managers and successful companies.

In the late nineties Entec Corporation was examining a flood of statistics that showed the rapid increase in the cost of absenteeism as it related to mental disabilities. For example, in 1998, in a telecommunications company with 34,000 employees, the cost of absenteeism due to mental disabilities had reached 35% of the total cost of absences. We also examined drug use statistics at various companies and noted a significant increase of drugs usage for various types of emotional disabilities. At one of our client organizations, with 3,500 employees, between 1997-2001, there was a five fold increase in the use of drugs such as Welbutrin, Prozac and other drugs that are typically used for treating depression, anxiety disorder and burnout. In their May 1999 report, The Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health estimated that the cost of depression to business in the US was about $60 billion per year.

Read Article: Employee Engagement

See References: Administration

Universities are complex, ambiguous, paradoxical and at times infuriating places. They also have a nobility of purpose and offer a richness of experience – intellectual, cultural and social – that are found in few organizations. In this environment the university administrator, especially one not from the academic ranks, is constantly struggling with a difficult, dynamic balance. The academic community is a primary source of the very richness we value, but many of its members tend not to embrace "corporate" priorities and perspectives. The administrator is expected to protect the particular interests of the members of this community, and at the same time serve the goals of the institution as a whole. This requires the achievement of a complex equilibrium in the face of unrelenting budget pressures, the uncertainties and upheavals associated with a much more competitive world, and the ever sharpening focus of public accountability. Self-fulfillment also demands a balance in personal life if one is to avoid succumbing to the enormous pressures that arise. Consequently today’s university administrator faces unprecedented personal and organizational challenges.

Read Article: University Administration

See References: Employee Engagement

Recently my clients have mentioned that they have read some of the articles and research published by Dr. Linda Duxbury and others on work/life balance and have asked me "how do we operationalize this?" The question arose out of our work with companies in measuring employee engagement and organizational health.

My response to the question was that the first thing employers must realize is that work/life balance is different for everyone. For example, a young married mother with two children is facing different pressures and challenges than a middle aged employee with young adults in high school or university and aging parents. Work/life balance for a young single employee would look completely different again.

These differences are further amplified by the nature of work. I know of one couple that works in the automotive sector on the assembly line. They work for the same company. They have two pre-school children. In this particular case they were able to arrange different shifts for themselves so that one works days while the other works nights. Since finances are tight this arrangement allowed them to take turns being with their children while the other spouse was working.

Read Article: Work Life Balance