Dear Madeleine,

I think I have a generational disconnect going on. I am a millennial (though I was born in 1981, so many people think I am GenX) and I supervise a lot of young people right out of college—classic GenZ people.

I am really struggling with this notion of privilege. When I was a kid, privileged basically meant people who had special advantages and tended to be oblivious about how much easier that made their lives, and how easily opportunities fell into their laps. To me, anyway, it almost always meant wealth.

Now, however, the term privilege seems to be used pejoratively about anyone who has something that somebody else doesn’t have. I feel like the young people I supervise are always looking around for things they see as unfair or offensive.

Just last week, I was explaining that a big project had gone to another group. Someone said the reason we didn’t get it was that the other group’s supervisor has a friend on the executive team. I replied that the choice was made because it is a global project and the other team has a lot more members on the East Coast, which makes the multiple time zones easier to manage. Some people seemed mollified, but others doubled down on their discontent.

My point here is: who cares? There are plenty of projects to go around, and there is no value whatsoever in investing in the whys and wherefores of how decisions get made. I don’t understand the knee-jerk reaction to assume that when someone else gets an opportunity you wanted, it is for a nefarious reason. It seems as if young people automatically assume the game is rigged and they will always be on the losing end.

I keep reiterating the only thing that matters is that we work hard, stay out of trouble, and produce good work. At least in our organization, my experience tells me we are created equal. If we strive to be competent and keep our commitments, that’s what matters.

Am I simply from a generation that is overly optimistic? What am I missing here?

Gen Z Confusion

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Dear Gen Z Confusion,

There is a lot to unpack here: generational differences, notions about privilege, taking offense from—well—pretty much everything. I started doing some research on all of it, went down a massive rabbit hole, and got myself in a muddle. Then, to reboot my brain, I read your letter about five more times. Here is what I have for you.

I don’t think this is a generational difference. I don’t think this is about privilege. I think what you are dealing with are some individuals in your group who have developed the habit of looking for stuff to rail against. This habit is not limited to any one generation. It has probably been part of the human condition since the advent of Homo habilis—roughly 2.8 million years. For every innovative early man celebrated for figuring out how to use a stone as a new tool, you can bet there was someone throwing shade. This insidious habit is a little like pinkeye—extremely contagious and just as nasty.

This might help you better understand what you are dealing with: the behavior you are experiencing is resentment. Brené Brown (whom my colleagues and I call “Auntie Brené” because she is such a font of wisdom) says this about it:

“Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, “better than,” and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”

                                                                                    Atlas of the Heart, pg. 33

Some of your people are putting a lot of energy into pointing out the ways life isn’t fair. There are definitely those who will swear this is a defining feature of Gen Z, but I can attest that plenty of Boomers did it. It may be more common among the young. As people get older, they tend to develop some equanimity around the sad truth that life is not fair and learn to get on with things. At least the lucky ones do.

The question is: what can you do about it? The key is to identify the people who are infecting the whole crew and keep them from doing it.

You might start with a candid conversation with each of them, individually. As you prepare, there might be some value in understanding the part you play in the dynamic. I understand your question “Who cares?” means you don’t really care and you don’t think anyone else should, either. It is a valid point, and you are the boss, but being right isn’t going to help you here. The more you resist caring, the more resistance you will get from people who think you should care. So step one is to get curious.

You can start with some questions to better understand the grievers’ grievances. They may have some valid ones—and you might find yourself caring more than you expected to. Even if that isn’t the case, simply listening can be perceived as caring and can often diffuse negative feelings. Questions you might ask are:

• Do you think there is a lot that goes on around here that is unfair or unjust?
• How does this affect you in your day-to-day work?
• What do you think can be done about it?
• Do you think you should be getting more of something (choice projects, pay, time off, influence) that you are not getting? How might I support you in getting it?
• Do you think there is anything within my control that I should be doing something about?
• Do you see how your focusing on perceived unfairness might not be useful in group settings?
• What might be different if you focused on what is working well for the team instead of what isn’t?

This conversation alone may change the dynamic. If it doesn’t, you can make a request. Ask the most vocal grumblers to stay focused on the positive and keep their complaints limited to conversations with you so that you can troubleshoot them together.

You can also share with your entire team that you have noticed a tendency to over-focus on real or potential negatives, which bogs everything down, and you would like to experiment with how to shift it. You probably aren’t the only one to notice this tendency. You might be surprised by ideas generated by others on the team.

Consider working together to come up with a shared vision and credo for the team. It would be made up of the possibility of excellence and the team’s shared values—essentially what everyone on the team thinks is most important in terms of working well together, doing the best possible job at any given time, and what makes the team especially valuable to the organization. There might be someone on your HR or Learning and Development team who can help you conduct a workshop to do this. If you are on your own, you will find some guidance here. When the whole team has agreed on what behaviors are out of bounds, there is a much better chance you won’t be the only one having to shut down behavior that derails conversations.

Your best bet is to stop worrying about labels and treat each person on your team as an individual with a world view informed by their beliefs and experiences. Meet each person where they are. Influence them by role-modeling fairness, caring, and using any privilege you may have to advocate for those who don’t have it.

You may just win over the doom-and-gloomers to the sunny side of the street.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I am the COO and founder of what is now being called a “mature” startup. We have been around for 12 years but have not yet exceeded 100 employees or reached our revenue or valuation goals. The company still feels like a startup because we have been experimenting with our business model and the pace of innovation, and the constant pivots are relentless.

Some of our business leaders are tired of it. They are expressing attitudes that are not helpful, such as “If we were going to make it, we’d have made it by now,” or “What’s wrong with things the way they are? We seem to be doing fine.”

We are fine, but we have not achieved our full potential—nor are we as profitable as we need to be to attract investors. My original business partner, who is our CEO, has recently taken a leave of absence to deal with a family matter. He was exhausted. The last few years have been a slog and Covid was a massive setback for us. It seemed like the right time for him to take a break.

I am covering for him and struggling with the Eeyore-like outlook among some of my key people. I’ve been working on finding ways to inspire them. We put a lot more focus on self-care than any other startup I know. I’ve given feedback to some who are resistant to change and to what feels (to them) like risky ideas. It does not seem to be making a difference.

I still know in my heart that we are going to figure things out and break through, but I need everyone to be all in for this last push. How do I get my leaders on board?

Just About There

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Dear Just About There,

I’m a battle-worn veteran of a couple of startups myself—and now that I am nearing the last phase of my own career, your situation only confirms to me that startups are best suited for the young. I say this not to discriminate, but simply to point out that when the slog goes on for longer than anyone wants or expects, it can be hard to hold on to the giddy, cockeyed optimism required to stay in the game. The relentless pace of change can be exhausting, and you are going to need to find a way to tap into some of that initial startup energy you had at the beginning if you want to reach your goals.

I have a couple of ideas for you.

• Pay attention. Ask your people what specific concerns they have and listen in a way that makes them feel heard. I recently heard someone say “Clear communication is the oil that reduces the friction of living.” If your key people are turning into Eeyores (for the uninitiated, Eeyore is a character in the Winnie the Pooh stories who is depicted as having a bleak outlook on life), they probably need some attention. You may remember that Eeyore’s catch phrase is “Thanks for noticing me.” I wonder sometimes if leaders are afraid that listening and acknowledging people’s concerns means you have to do something about those concerns, when, in fact, simply listening often can make all the difference. You may think you are a good listener, and you probably are when you aren’t worn down by resistance. So if you want some technical tips on how to listen, you can find some here. For tips on managing constant innovation and change, you can access an excellent webinar here.
• Tap into personal motivations. It sounds like your leaders have run out of steam. There were specific things that drove them at the beginning, and anything you can do to help them get back in touch with those drivers will help. Maybe it was the promise of a big payout, or the ability to make an impact in the world, or the desire to be part of something cool and sexy. Whatever it was, help them remember it. Or maybe what matters to them has changed. If they are not going to be able to find it in their current role, it could be time for them to find another place that suits them better.
• Reclarify and rearticulate the vision. You and your partner had a big vision when you started. It is normal to assume that everyone has heard it and doesn’t need to hear it again, but that is incorrect. People need to be reminded of the big fat WHY all the time. It gets buried under the rough and tumble of the day-to-day slog. So dig for buried treasure, find the stories that will inspire, and tell them a lot more than you think you need to. This will undoubtedly bore you, because the vision is still so clear to you that you forget it is not as clear to others. Do it anyway.
• Stop giving feedback and start making clear requests. Feedback is tricky. We think if we do everything right when we give feedback, people will hear it, internalize it, and do something about it. That simply is not true. If you want your leaders to do things differently, you have to make a direct request. It needs to be crystal clear so that you don’t run the risk of it sounding like a suggestion. It is a request. For example: “Even if you disagree with the strategy, I need you to commit to supporting it and to make sure your team knows that you support it—even if you have your doubts.” You can point out specific dos and don’ts if you have examples. The kind of clarity you achieve with a direct request will help your leaders decide if they can commit or if they need to leave. This, of course, means some people may leave. But all you have is your people, and if your leaders aren’t with you, you need to replace them with leaders who are. This is harsh, I know. But it is true.
• Catch people doing things right. This is a classic bit of genius from Ken Blanchard and there is literally no situation in which it doesn’t apply. At the end of a long, grueling journey, it can be easy to pounce on every little thing that isn’t perfect. This can lead to an over-focus on pointing out what’s going wrong at the costly expense of directing focus on what is going right. You must make everyone feel that they are winning, even if it isn’t as fast or as evident as you would like.

It really does all rest on your shoulders, my friend. That is what leadership is. If it all goes sideways, everyone will blame you. And if you pull it off, you won’t get nearly the credit you deserve. If everyone could do it, everyone would be doing it, but it is the rare soul who has what it takes.

Put on your listening ears, share the inspiration, find and call out the best in people, and pray the gods will smile upon your efforts. Good luck to you.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I work in fashion manufacturing. I was promoted about six months ago. I manage the supply chain, timelines for delivery of goods, etc. I have a huge team and work all hours because I am in western Europe and my teams are in China, Mexico, and Vietnam.

When I took the job, things were a bit of a mess, and I am very pleased to have turned things around. I instituted new software and updated processes. We have worked through the kinks and things are humming along nicely.

My boss seems pleased with my work but told me the executive team is seeking more innovation in my area.

I have asked for more detail because I am stumped. I thought the place for innovation was in the design of the product, not in the execution required to get it to market. Taking the job felt like a big risk for me, and I am more confident now that I have had success. But my sense is that innovating requires taking risks—and there is no tolerance for errors that might impede our ability to deliver on orders.

I have zero confidence in my ability to innovate in this job. My boss is not offering any insight into what “more innovation” might mean for my group. Maybe I am asking the wrong questions.

Any ideas?

Zero Ideas

_________________________________________________________

Dear Zero Ideas,

You might be suffering from a language dilemma—because the crazy thing, ZI, is that it sounds like what you just did was innovate, and in a big way. You see yourself as someone who spots what isn’t working and does what needs to be done to make it work. A problem solver, perhaps. It probably didn’t occur to you that everything you did to fix the mess (trying new ways and working through the kinks) was, technically, innovating.

I would submit that the executive team sees you as an innovator because of what you just accomplished, and they are asking for more. So just for a moment, at least for the time you spend reading this, can you accept that you are already an innovator? It is a shift in your mindset that may require suspension of disbelief, but may be worth trying on.

Britney Cole, our vice president of innovation, has a lot of wisdom on this topic (you can read her most recent article here). She says the first step to innovation is to define it. Her definition: “Innovation is the discipline of applying ideas that solve problems in new ways to create value.”

Can’t you see yourself in that definition?

Another of Britney’s insights is that to be successful, innovation efforts need to have two specific things in place:

1. A person who is dedicated to continual improvement (you).
2. An innovation-friendly company culture.

As you seek to develop yourself as an innovator, you can rely on your natural talent for identifying problems and finding the best solutions. You can build on that talent by asking yourself these questions:

• What is working brilliantly (that might be applied elsewhere)?
• What pain points still exist in our business (that could stand improvement)?
• What new ideas have surfaced that might benefit from further inquiry (that perhaps we have discounted in the interest of efficiency)?

I suspect ideas will begin to pop immediately. For more guidance on what to keep in mind as you go, here is another article from Britney.

An additional suggestion, which I learned directly from Britney, is to apply the design thinking “How might we” approach to solving problems or making improvements. (Please forgive my total ignorance of your business, but I am going to make up a few examples based on your letter):

• Now that things are working well, how might we leverage technology to make them even more efficient?
• How might we minimize confusion caused by working across multiple time zones?
• How might we scale so that our business can grow more quickly?

It’s possible your organization may not be that friendly to innovation, so you may have to be a trailblazer to shift your culture. This might even be what the executive team is asking for. When senior leaders in companies want more innovation but have no idea how their culture actually discourages it, they tend to identify individual innovators and hope that they can help. It is a classic example of how lack of clarity at the top of an organization can show up; it is a bit of an “I’ll know it when I see it” attitude that is, frankly, irresponsible—especially since a culture of fear already exists that you will need to work against.

Here is an e-book about The Factors That Encourage and That Discourage Innovation in Organizations. This may help you identify the potential obstacles you could face from a systems standpoint as you seek to experiment.

It is totally fair that you require more detail, and you are probably right that asking more questions may help you get what you need. Your instinct to ask questions is right on the money. The key is to keep asking until you get the insight you need.

Here are some ideas. If none of these is quite right, I hope at least they will spark others that feel more useful.

• What will the executive team see or have if I innovate more?
• What results would make a difference to the organization?
• What is making the executive team most nervous about our business/ the marketplace/ the economy?
• What problems does the executive team see that innovation would solve?
• What is most important to the executive team, and is maybe not being addressed?
• Are there things our competitors are doing that we need to be doing?

And finally:

• If we rely on the above definition of innovation, how might our business add or create new value that would excite the executive team?

Your first step, ZI, is to shift your self-concept. That alone will increase your confidence. Continue to do the things you are good at: spotting problems and solving them. Keep asking questions. Go slow. Build plans and get feedback. Get buy-in every step of the way.

I suspect you will surprise yourself.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I manage a small team in a big company. Here is my problem. I start my day at 7 a.m. with a meeting, and then my entire day is back-to-back meetings. Almost every meeting generates work for me to do or to delegate to someone on my team—which requires another meeting.

When am I supposed to get all my work done? After ten hours of meetings, I feel like that’s when my real workday starts. But by then, I’m fried.

Thoughts?

Meeting-ed Out

__________________________________________________________________

Dear Meeting-ed Out,

This is a perennial problem for almost everyone. Unfortunately, substantially changing anything will probably require a shift in company culture. There has been so much written on this topic. You might think about collecting the facts and presenting them to HR to see if you can garner support for changing the collective habits in your company. If you are suffering, everyone else probably is, too.

But hey, trying to shift culture will result in—more meetings. Just what you don’t want or need. So what could you do short of that?

Some of what is required in your situation is a shift in mindset. Right now you are accepting any and all meetings. You might need to harness your courage and take control of your time. No one can do that for you. Here are some ideas that might work for you:

• Review your meetings and take a hard look at which ones are yours or your team’s. Those are the ones you have the most control over. Challenge yourself to see if any of them can be consolidated, shortened, or moved to bi-weekly.
• At the very least, you and your team could agree to implement “no-meeting Fridays.” We have implemented this in our organization, and it has made all the difference.
• Another thing you can do with your team is to make all meetings 30 minutes. It’s very easy to fill time, but there’s no law that says meetings need to last an hour.
• Patrick Lencioni wrote a great book called Death by Meeting. In it, he says there are four kinds of meetings: Daily check-in meetings, which should last 10 minutes max. Weekly tactical meetings: 45 to 90 minutes, max. Monthly strategic meetings: 2 to 4 hours. Quarterly off-site reviews: 1 to 2 days.

I’m not saying these rules are the only ones to follow, but at least Lencioni provides a framework that can show how some meetings are not necessary or could be better run.

• Look hard at all the meetings you are in. Do you really need to be in all of them? Can you send someone else on your team? If you are delegating, is it possible that the person you are delegating to should be in the meeting instead of you? If so, make sure they send you the bullet points about any decisions made in the meeting or actions to be taken as a result of the meeting. If you’re worried about perception of others, or being judged, share your reasons. You might start a trend.
• Request that any meeting you are invited to have an agenda sent out in advance. If there’s nothing on the agenda that requires your input, decline—and request that you be sent a transcript of the meeting.
• Block off focused work time on your calendar, and don’t accept meetings that are scheduled over that time period. You don’t have to explain to anyone (except your boss or their boss) why you aren’t available. If people really need you in a meeting, they will find a time that works for you. (Note: This may require some re-training of people who have become used to your being available all the time.)
• Finally, challenge yourself to use technology. Zoom now has a feature that can transcribe meetings. Almost all companies have technology you can use to have a quick chat, delegate tasks, etc. Not everything has to be a meeting.

This situation probably crept up on you over time. And it will take some time to unwind it. Be bold, be fierce, and be relentless, so you can get your brain and your life back.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I work on a team where I am the only member who is remote. Pre-Covid we all worked together at the office, but during the shutdown I took advantage of my company’s remote-work option and moved back to my hometown to be closer to my parents who need help.

Many of our meetings are still on Zoom because several team members still work from home a couple of days a week. But other times, everyone is together in a room and I am the only one on Zoom. There are often several side conversations going on at once, as happens when people are together in person. I have trouble hearing everything, and the group often forgets I am there. This past week, two people left the room and had a conversation about a situation that I should have been a part of. I know it wasn’t intentional, but it still doesn’t feel good.

What can I do about this? I am worried I am going to start missing more important things and my contribution may start to seem less important as time goes on.

Feeling Left Out

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Feeling Left Out,

Well, this sounds like no fun. You are suffering a bit from a collection of natural human unconscious biases. Primacy or recency bias, in-group favoritism, and others can easily add up to an effect that might be summed up as “out of sight, out of mind”. It isn’t personal, so the first thing you can do is try to not take it personally.

There are two specific avenues for you to consider. The first is to discuss your experience with your manager and enroll them in helping you to change this dynamic. It is incumbent on your manager to arrange things so that you feel included; but of course, they may not see it that way. So you may need to make it easy for them to help you.

To do that, you need to let your manager know that you frequently feel excluded during the meetings where everyone is face to face except you. You will want to be prepared with ideas about how the manager, the team, and you can all navigate these meetings differently. Any changes will require discipline—and your manager will need to role model any behaviors that will make a difference. If it is feasible given the situation with your parents, you might also propose coming to the office for a few days every month or every six weeks. The company may be willing to pay the cost of travel or split the cost with you.

The other thought is that it wouldn’t hurt if you could engage in regular one-on-ones with everyone on the team. The thing that happens when people are together in person is a natural water cooler-type informal connection. All the human stuff: “How are you doing? How are the kids? Is the puppy house-trained yet? Did you complete the marathon? Hey, is that a new car I saw you getting out of?” You know—just the small talk that results in people bonding. Even a 15-minute coffee break with each of your team members on a regular basis would make a difference. This practice helped virtual teams get through Covid and was naturally dropped when people felt the one-on-ones were no longer needed. But you do still need that connection, so you will need to be proactive to nurture your relationships in this “new normal” time.

You might consider asking someone on your team to be your in-room partner, who can take responsibility for actively including you in the meeting. Having an active advocate for you will always help. If that isn’t feasible, you will have to do it yourself. Don’t be shy about reminding people that you are still in the meeting when it becomes apparent that they have forgotten. This used to happen back in the days before video meetings, when there was one lone person on the speaker phone.

I can’t imagine you are alone in dealing with this situation. There are more hybrid teams today than ever before—and managers need to up their game to make sure everyone feels like part of the team. But you can also rise to the challenge by getting help, making requests, and piping up even when it might be uncomfortable.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a national mortgage company and recently took over a team from a leader who had led it for 37 years. Every single person on the team is more experienced in the business of the team than I am. And every one of them is very disengaged because their former leader clearly had checked out a long time before he left.

A lot of the processes—some of them possibly of no use whatsoever—are outdated and labor-intensive. When I ask why things are done the way are done, the answer is always a variation on “that’s just how we’ve always done it.” There are some time- and labor-intensive tasks where the owners aren’t clear why they are done or who cares about them.

All of my questions seem to be making people nervous. I am confused as to how this happened. The other parts of the company I have worked in are well run and up to date, and we were always asked to look for efficiencies. My manager has no explanation for me, and precious little guidance.

I am intensely frustrated with the condition of the team. It feels like everyone is lost in the land that time forgot. It needs a massive overhaul. I am pretty sure we don’t even need half the people on the team. I don’t want to scare anyone, but as the team leader, I can’t let things go on like this.

Any suggestions for how to approach this mess?

Need a Reboot

_______________________________________________________________

Dear Need a Reboot,

I understand your frustration and your confusion. It is uncommon these days to uncover parts of a business that have not been forced to slim down or to leverage technology to do more with less. For reasons you may never know, your predecessor was left to his own devices with little to no oversight. The people he left behind probably are either delighted to have a job they can coast through, completely burned out, or too bored and worn down to care.

I think you have a great opportunity here to rebuild your team from the ground up. At Blanchard, we define team leadership as an influence process focused on helping the team reach and sustain high performance. We define a team as two or more people working interdependently to achieve a common purpose with shared accountability for results. Let’s not call this group of people a “team” until they actually behave like one. You can find more detail on our thinking about teams here.

The thing that will trip you up is a deadly combination of too much, too soon, too fast. Slow and steady wins the race. It doesn’t sound like your manager is paying attention anyway, so why rush?

You might start by sharing your vision for the team with the team. This will be personal and sound something like, “Our team is an energetic and creative group that adds value to the organization by providing x, y and z.” You can share your plan to make some changes, but that you are committed to carefully planning each step so that all points of view are considered, nobody feels overwhelmed or left behind.

Next, outline some high-level goals—the first of which is to really understand all critical deliverables, who in the organization wants/needs them, and the purpose of each one. Once you have that figured out, you can brainstorm ways to go about delivering on them.

Then, get to know each individual on the team. Get detailed information about what they do, what they are good at, what they like to do, and how they see themselves contributing moving forward. You can assign specific tasks like research around software or updated ways to accomplish things to match skills and interests.

Create a first draft of a plan, get input from everyone on the team, tweak, and refine. Once you have a plan, you might think about creating a Team Charter.

A Team Charter is a co-created document that outlines:

• Your company’s vision
• Your company’s values
• Your company’s purpose: What does the organization do? For whom do they do it? Why do they do it?
• Team Purpose: What do we do? For whom do we do it? Why do we do it?
• Team Goals: What are the measurable outcomes the team is responsible for in order to achieve the team’s purpose?
• Team Roles: What are the key responsibility areas of each team member for achieving the team goals?
• Behavioral Norms: What are the behavioral expectations and team practices (strategies and processes) that the members agree the team should follow? What are the ground rules? These can include but are not limited to: communication, decision making, problem solving, and accountability.

Along the way, your group of employees will either be excited by the opportunity to make a tangible contribution to your company or they won’t. If you are vastly overstaffed for the work required of the team, this process will make it easy to identify the people you can probably get along without.

Stay focused on moving forward and let go of your distress about the past. Make a concerted effort not to criticize anyone or anything done in the past—the person responsible for it is gone, and it will just make people feel like you blame them. Let people know you have the backs of those who are all in on creating a future together. Put a road map together and move deliberately, step by step, toward your milestones. You will definitely have some bumps, but at least you will be acting as a team and creating a landscape that makes sense.

It will be an adventure, but it sounds like you are ready for one!

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I recently graduated from college and started my first job. The job I was offered was the one I wanted, but on my first day I was moved to a different department and given a job that does not come close to the description of the job I signed up for. The person who hired me is no longer my manager and my new manager has no idea who I am. I show up at team meetings and my manager calls me “Kid,” which I find demeaning. I am fairly sure he does it because he doesn’t know my name.

This all seems unfair to me. I don’t know anyone well enough to try to figure out what is going on. I recently reviewed my employment contract and there isn’t anything in it about what job I would be doing or whom I would report to, so I don’t think I have any recourse legally. I asked my parents, but they are so relieved I have a job, they just tell me to keep my head down and do what I am told.

It just doesn’t seem right to me, but I have no idea what to do about it.

Shunted Around

__________________________________________________________________________

Dear Shunted Around,

It probably isn’t fair, and it sounds pretty chaotic. I am sorry that your first job experience seems to have gotten off to such a rocky start. It must feel very disconcerting. I do have some ideas for you.

I agree with your parents, but not with their reason. The job market is hot right now and you would be able to get a different job if you wanted one. I just think it might serve you to give the situation a chance. Take a minute to step back and figure things out, get to know some people, and see if you will be able to make it work. Jumping ship at the very first sign of a challenge means you will never know what you might have missed. Stay and try to get a clear picture of the organization.

Seek to find answers to the following:

• What are the organization’s values? Do they have any, do they try to live by them, and can you align with them?
• Will you be able to use your strengths and find a career path where you are?
• Can you reach out to your new manager and make yourself known to him?
• Can you find people you like and can relate to?
• Are you interested in what the company does—its products and/or services?

Decide how much time you want to give yourself, and then, if you aren’t satisfied with the answers to the questions you have asked, you can start looking for a job.

The one thing I know for sure is that every organization out there is experiencing an unprecedented volume and speed of change. The one you are in is a perfect example of what I see happening everywhere. Political unrest, climate disasters, economic instability, and turbulent social transformation are all forcing leaders of companies to experiment rapidly to be as successful as possible. There is no blueprint available to help them—so if it feels like they are making stuff up as they go, that’s probably exactly what’s happening.

You are not the only one trying to just hang on for what may be a very bumpy ride.

It is entirely possible that your new manager can’t remember your name. He is no doubt just as discombobulated as you are. Our organization has many new people I am scrambling to keep straight, so I can relate. You can choose to take offense at being called “Kid,” or you can revel in the fact that you are so young that it makes sense for someone to call you that. The one thing you have on your side is time, which is a luxury you won’t appreciate until it’s gone. If your manager assumes your work ethic or your intelligence is lacking because of your age, that is a different story. In my experience, the term “Kid” is usually not ill intended. As you get to know your manager, you can respectfully ask that he not use it. But who knows—by then it might feel like a term of endearment.

Try not to fixate too much on fairness, although it is natural to do so. There is so much unfairness in the world and in large, complex systems. Save your ire for those moments when you are being asked to do unethical things or things you don’t know how to do with no training, or when you are seriously underpaid, or when your workload is unreasonable. The chaos and turbulence you are experiencing right now are unfair to everyone in the organization, so it isn’t personal. You aren’t being singled out.

Breathe. Take a step back. Stay open. Try not to worry so much. Just keep showing up and putting one foot in front of the other. Decide on what criteria about the job matters most to you and whether this position can meet them. Experiment with influencing and steering your ship through stormy waters.

You ultimately may decide you do have to leave, but you will have learned so much.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I need your professional advice on career goals or growth.

I worked in the construction industry for 25 years, starting out as an electrician and moving up to a field manager. I essentially went from pulling wiring through conduit to managing the entire field operation on very large, multi-million-dollar commercial and industrial projects. During this time I also was in the US Army National Guard and was called to active duty in 2002. I was wounded in combat and spent the next three years in and out of hospitals and physical therapy.

When I went back to work, I had a hard time with the physical aspects of my job. I decided to use my VA benefits and found a new job with the federal government as an engineering technician. I was technically still in the field, but now I was just making sure others did what they were contracted to do. It was easier work, fewer hours, and a much more secure future. I have done government work now in various roles for 15 years and have moved up the GS ladder in pay and responsibility.

The government is always pushing for individual and leadership development—“grow up, not down” kind of stuff. To be honest, I’m happy where I am. I don’t want more responsibility and I don’t really want to be a supervisor any longer. When I have said this to my current boss and to some past bosses, they have all asked me why I don’t just go back to the private sector if I feel that way. I don’t understand this, because the growth and development situation was essentially the same in the private sector.

Here’s my question: am I wrong? Should I grow even though I’ll be miserable? I know I won’t be the best I can be. I’m a very good leader but not a good manager. I can inspire others and motivate them to be part of the team, to be themselves, and to contribute all they can in their way. I have an open, creative, teaching mind but I hate the daily grind of supervising people, the miasma of mundane paperwork and budgets, and the sand in my eyes at the end of a long day of computer work.

I have 10 years left before retiring to just work when I want to work, so should I give the government 10 good years doing what I want or should I give them 10 years doing what they want? I’m at the most common rank in the management levels of government service. I have been more senior and could easily keep going on up, but I’d rather just take it easy and slack off on growing and doing.

I know it sounds like I don’t care, but that isn’t it. I just really like the way the job is at this level. Am I wrong in wanting this?

Done Pushing

________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Done Pushing,

No. Just No.

Thoughts and feelings are what they are and simply can’t be wrong. The only thing you can do that’s wrong is take an action you may regret without having carefully consulted your thoughts and feelings.

I tried to shorten your letter but I wanted our readers to get the whole picture. It seems to me that you have done more than your duty to your government by anyone’s standards. You’ve earned the right to create your life exactly the way you want it to be. And just who, I ask, is the arbiter of what anyone has earned or deserves? It also sounds like you do your job well and are satisfied with the compensation, so it is a fair exchange.

Long ago I worked with an opera singer who was immensely gifted and had put in long hours to develop her natural talent. She was on the brink of stardom when she realized that the life and career of an opera star wasn’t what she wanted. She was extremely religious and tortured herself with the thought that because God gave her the gift of an extraordinary voice, she was obligated to use it. At the time, I was specializing in working with creative geniuses, many with the overwhelming problem of having been born with multiple gifts. This includes the singer, who was also good at many other things. So the notion that you are obligated to develop and use your gifts just doesn’t compute when you have entirely too many. It took seeing the world through the eyes of these clients for me to realize a principle that I lean on to this day:

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

And that goes for everyone. Including you.

In the singer’s case, she felt beholden to God. In your case, you feel somehow beholden to your government. I can’t speak for God, obviously, but I will say that his ways are inscrutable and mysterious, so you have to listen to your inner voice and your heart. I say the only debts you owe are to yourself and the people you have made promises to.  It doesn’t sound like you are breaking any promises you made to your employer. And you would not be putting your integrity at risk for failing to accept a promotion.

Let’s face it—growth requires discomfort. Some people love being in a constant state of growth and relish the challenge. Others don’t. You might take a few years off to rest and then get bored and change your mind. Or you might not. It is not for anyone else to judge your choices; not that they won’t (ha ha), but it really makes no material difference to you. You can take the pushy advice lightly, say thank you, and change the subject. No use burning bridges, so keep your options open.

The most miserable, unhappy people I have worked with were almost all in a state where they had created a life that others wanted for them, not one they wanted for themselves. And the higher you go, the harder it is to undo those choices.

So no. You aren’t wrong. You get one life, my friend. Are you going to live it the way you want, or the way others want?

I hope this is helpful.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Feeling psychologically safe in the workplace has never been more important. The storm of the past two years has generated tidal waves of competing priorities and pressing demands, all vying for urgent attention. Hurricane-force winds of unrelenting and pervasive change continue to swirl around us. Without the critical lifeline of psychological safety, employees can feel as though they are drowning.

Leaders who create an environment of psychological safety do more than toss their people a life raft—they hop in alongside them and grab an oar of their own.

The Benefits of Psychological Safety

Cultivating a bedrock of psychological safety allows for honest communication. It creates a space where team members can feel safe enough to speak up—to share concerns, challenges, and questions with their leader and to voice when they are overwhelmed or burned out.

Conversely, an atmosphere depleted of psychological safety will foster secrecy and shame while the team member reports everything is fine—until they cannot pretend any longer. And who is usually left cleaning up the ensuing mess? The leader. Creating an environment where team members are secure enough to be candid can save the massive pain of rework, dropped balls, and valued employees leaving the organization.

Psychological safety is a requirement for innovation. When someone feels secure in their role with their team, and especially with their leader, it will translate into a greater willingness to take risks, think outside the box, expand beyond their comfort zone, and share creative ideas. In today’s fast-moving business world, this type of innovative ideation can be a game changer. It gives one permission to—in the words of Brené Brown—“dare greatly.”

Psychological safety is paramount to fostering a sense of community. We all know isolation is a pervasive and destructive force that can be especially acute in remote or hybrid teams. People need psychological safety to support one another and band together in solidarity and spirit. Deep-rooted connections with colleagues can act as a powerfully stabilizing force to protect morale and solidify loyalty across the team.

Best of all, psychological safety lets people be their best selves. When your team members feel safe, they can flourish—boldly sharing their most creative ideas, courageously and candidly talking about their workloads, and taking care of themselves and their teammates.

Model Psychological Safety

One of the most powerful ways to cultivate psychological safety with your people is to model it. A leader is like a master clock by which everyone else sets their watch. Your people listen to what you say, but, more importantly, they watch what you do. And what you do as a leader will be the single greatest determining factor of the level of psychological safety experienced by your team.

A critical aspect of this practice is to volunteer your own struggles, frustrations, fears, and failures. Talk about the experiences that shaped you as a leader. Tell people how you’ve grown from your challenges. Let them know what you’ve learned from your battles and what you’re still learning today.

Remember that trust can be counterintuitive; as a leader, you’ll often need to bravely gift it to someone before receiving it from them. Harness your own vulnerability as a superpower and watch it infuse every member of your team with safety, empowerment, and trust.

Have Regular Check-Ins

Another vital habit to promote psychological safety in the workplace is to check in regularly with your people. Make it a priority—and make it real. Don’t ask, “How are you doing?” Instead, ask, “How are you really doing?” Be willing to dive beneath the waterline to talk about their emotional climate. The depth of feelings shared will likely vary from person to person, and that’s okay. Meet people where they are. Allow your actions to intentionally communicate that you care about them as a person first; that you don’t see them as a human doing, but as a human being.

There’s a myriad of ways to do this other than in one-on-one meetings. For example, you can start a meeting with a slide that asks people to share how they are currently faring—kind of like an internal weather forecast. If people aren’t comfortable talking, they can share how they are feeling by picking an emoji. Cracking the door to meaningful dialogue can make all the difference in strengthening psychological safety.

Promote Wellness

Wellness and performance at work are closely linked—and a sense of well-being depends on psychological safety. That’s why, again, it is critical that you first model wellness behaviors in your own practices. A simple tactic is to start meetings five minutes past the hour and end them early, which gives people the permission to do this with their own schedules.

Remember that what you do is so much more important than what you preach. Don’t just tell people to take care of themselves; show them how you take care of yourself. Consider sharing a picture of yourself walking your dog in the middle of the day or eating lunch with your family.

Are you good about reminding your team members to unplug after work hours or during vacations? Here’s a harder one: do you send emails during off hours or on PTO days? Remember the master clock: everyone is watching you set the tone. Your people are going to imitate the example you set. Make it a sacred priority to share your wellness practices and witness how it liberates your team to do the same.

A Final Thought

Consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The goal may be self-actualization—ascending the pyramid—but you can’t grab that elevator without first building out the lower levels. Psychological safety is the vital foundation of the entire structure, allowing for transformative growth, rich team connections, and powerful self-awareness.

As a leader, if you architect an environment of psychological safety, you are giving your people a spectacular gift. This gift will manifest in their attitude, sense of camaraderie, effectiveness, commitment to the team, and spirit of innovation. The world could certainly use more psychological safety these days, and it starts with leaders like you.

Dear Madeleine,

If relationships fail and one decides to pivot away from a toxic organization or situation, what is the best way to tell that story in a job interview?      

For example, I may be asked “Why did you leave that company?” My true feeling is it was all about the toxic culture. The objective truth might be more likely that I failed—ran out of patience, failed to make breakthroughs in those relationships, etc. Ultimately, it was a personal decision to leave based on my mental, emotional, and professional health and career choice. 

What do you think?

Preparing for My Next Step

______________________________________________________________________

Dear Preparing for My Next Step,

First, congratulations for having the guts to jump ship. So many just suck it up and stay miserable. It takes real courage to recognize an intractable situation and do what is needed to take care of yourself.

I consulted our Trust expert and coauthor of the just-published book Simple Truths of Leadership (with Ken Blanchard), Randy Conley, on this one. He says:

“I’d encourage you to be honest in a respectful way that doesn’t disparage your former employer or boss. I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews and have heard the good, bad, and ugly from people sharing reasons for leaving a past employer. The people who impressed me the most have been those whose integrity shined through in the way they explained their departure.

“A good way to get the message across is by using ‘I’ language to take ownership of your decision to leave, while clearly and diplomatically explaining that there was a misalignment between your values and theirs or the culture didn’t provide the type of environment in which you could flourish.

“Yours is a very common reason why people leave jobs, so I wouldn’t get too self-conscious about discussing it in a respectful and professional manner. Remember, your response shapes your reputation.”

I really can’t say it better than that. The only thing I would add is that it might be a good idea to prepare in advance some brief concise remarks about what you are looking for in the culture of your next job. Also, maybe add a little more detail about what you learned about yourself from the experience and what you might do differently in the future should you run into a similar bind. Your last gig made you hyper aware of what you don’t want, so how exactly can you use that experience to define what you do want? And if you are ready to own your part in having to leave, how might you apply that knowledge to build stronger relationships in your next job?

That will keep things on a lighter note—a positive vision of the future is always attractive. And you are ready for the inevitable behavioral interview question: “How might you deal with a perceived lack of values alignment in the future?” It will also assist your interviewer in assessing culture fit for your next potential opportunities.

Both Randy and I wish you the best of luck finding the exact right spot for your next career chapter.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

When we think of innovation, people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs tend to come to mind. The lone hero in solitude has a hold on our imagination, but the truth is that innovation is rarely the result of an inspired genius toiling away in a garage.

Groundbreaking innovation takes lots of people. Consider that more than 1,000 engineers worked on the first iPhone. More than 7,000 people worked on Curiosity (the rover on Mars). The takeaway? Innovation is a team sport.

Innovation doesn’t have to be splashy either. Call it micro-innovating. In fact, small and incremental changes can have an oversized impact on your work life. When to innovate? Anytime you feel your work isn’t serving the greater good. Micro-innovation can be extraordinarily powerful.

So how best to micro-innovate? Let’s take a closer look at what gets in the way of doing it and how you can harness your power.

Micro-Innovation Killer #1: To-Do Lists, Tunnel Vision, No Vision

A typical day: Most of us create a to-do list and strike items as we finish them. I know I personally feel a sense of completion and satisfaction when I click my task off my calendar. To-do items can become so ingrained in our routine. At its worst, checking off items becomes mindless, and we don’t even think about it. When that happens, our to-do lists have more meaning than the tasks themselves. Over time, the work loses significance, and we question why we do the things we do in the first place. Our perspective narrows and our thinking becomes siloed.

Purpose? Process improvement? Innovation? Forget about them because we’re so focused on completing a task—even if the task no longer serves a need. It’s easy to have tunnel vision and wear self-created blinders. And to be fair, we must make so many decisions in our personal life, it’s easy to turn it off at work. But, when our work is filled with tasks, we lose sight of our larger goals.

Micro-Innovation Killer #2: Fear Kills Creativity

Recently, I was speaking to one of my peers, a manager of individual contributors. She manages the leadership development at a large company and was making some updates to a program. She had asked one of her people for their honest opinion, wondering what they might change and how they might improve it. She loved the suggestions and wondered why the person didn’t share these great ideas sooner. The answer was disarming. The individual assumed that the choices were made for a reason and who was she to question those choices. She did not feel empowered to share her fresh perspective; there was no psychologically safe space to share her opinions.

How many people remain silent because of a fear? The majority. In fact, McKinsey found that just 26% of leaders create psychological safety for their teams. Where there is fear, there is little innovation.

Five Tips for Micro-Innovating

Innovation is one of those words that can be intimidating. But it’s inherent in our nature—or else we’d still be living as hunter-gatherers. We are attempting to improve our lives every day and innovate in the smallest ways. Whether it’s preparing meals on a Sunday before a busy work week, optimizing schedules with a planner app, using Microsoft Teams or Slack instead of email, we are always trying to improve our status quo.

Here are five tips to ignite your creative spark and start micro-innovating.

1. Give others permission to speak: Those ubiquitous “If you see something, say something” signs in the airport are relevant for innovating. A leader’s job is to make sure their people feel safe to say, “This task doesn’t feel helpful to what we are trying to achieve. I’d like to understand more about the importance of the task to the overall process—what do you see that perhaps I’m missing?”

Don’t expect your people to have an answer at the ready—and be clear that it’s okay they don’t have one. Pointing to areas of improvement is NOT complaining! They may not know how to fix the situation, but they have at least diagnosed that something needs improvement. They have ‘seen something and said something.’ And that can short-circuit a potential problem before it becomes a monumental one.

2. Ensure systems exist for people: Processes are supposed to streamline tasks, but often they become workplace handcuffs. When a process creates unnecessary administration or you get hints of malicious compliance, it’s time to rethink the process and suggest ways to streamline. Ask yourself these questions: “What are we trying to solve with this process? Are these actions having the desired impact on the experience we want to achieve? Does the system support us and the customer or slow us down?”

3. Always be learning: Innovation requires experimentation. This also means the willingness to fail. We learn through mistakes, bumps in the road, misalignments. It’s where we improve how we work together and how we meet the needs of our customers/business. The words of Thomas Edison, on the painstaking task of inventing the lightbulb, are a good reminder: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

You can speed innovation by having a learning mindset. Ask your people: “What do you see that I’m missing?” Then remember the iPhone and how it was an iterative invention driven by thousands of people. It takes time and patience. So be easy with your people and yourself.

4. Adopt the right mindset: Throw away your preconceived notions about innovation and focus on fostering a culture of innovation for yourself and your team. Be mindful of your emotional reactions and others by pausing before you respond. Be curious and open-minded and you will bring in multiple perspectives. Have courage to push through your fear of failure. Be resilient to overcome challenges you will face while converging and diverging along the innovation process.

5. Take needed downtime: Ever take a shower and a great idea comes while you’re shampooing your hair? Ever wake up in the middle of the night with a “eureka” moment? The brain needs downtime. When it gets a break, it can make new connections and serve up inspirations. So instead of relentlessly hammering away at the task, take a purposeful break. See what brilliant ideas spontaneously arise.

Micro-innovation is something for the ambitious and courageous. It requires the willingness to be wrong; to fail; to be resilient. All this can be humbling. And it likely will undermine your self-confidence at times. But what’s the alternative? Doing the same old thing over and over—even if it’s no longer useful.

Ready to rally your self-confidence, resilience, and fearlessness to create a small revolution?

Reading about how tired we are is fatiguing. So let’s try something different.

We’re built to want to be part of something that’s meaningful. We’re eager to learn. We love wrestling with a challenge. It’s in our nature and we can’t help it. So instead of focusing on how everyone is depleted, why not appeal to our better selves?

Here are things you can do to re-energize yourself and your team.

Make Meetings Energizing

Here’s an all-too-typical meeting: a leader doggedly works through a PowerPoint deck while a restless audience scrolls through social media, checks email, or stares vacantly at the slides.

How do you avoid this and make your meetings more dynamic? Make sure everyone participates!

• Invite people to ask questions, and then elaborate on their answers.
• Ask attendees to call on other participants to share insights.
• Compliment people when they make an insightful observation.
• Have designated people share best practices, then open it up for others to contribute their brilliance.
• Put people in break-out rooms where they work on and create solutions to a current problem (Called Highly Paid Experts Activity.)

If you really want to engage people, ask, “What can we do that will put us out of business?” The purpose of this provocative question is to identify a real-work problem that perpetually pops up. Then have your team fix it. You can end the meeting by having all team members share their inspired ideas and then piloting the best solution.

Beat Meeting Fatigue

What to do if your team is inattentive?

Here’s an obvious solution: Hold shorter meetings. Schedule meetings of 20 instead of 30 minutes or 50 instead of 60 minutes. This will reduce cognitive overload and meeting fatigue.

You could also assign a different team member each week to run the meeting. They would be responsible for gathering agenda items and creating interactive exercises.

Here’s a different suggestion: stop the meeting and ask, “Is there anything we should start doing so we aren’t so drained? What should we continue doing? How can we make sure we’re serving customers and each other at the highest level? If you were running this meeting, what would you do to keep everyone engaged?”

You want to spark a courageous conversation. Your goal is to discover why your people are frustrated. Listen to their answers and weave their solutions into the fabric the workplace.

Hold Short, Weekly One-on-Ones

What? We are recommending another meeting?! One-on-ones are something different. Hear me out.

One-on-one meetings with your people are one of the most powerful tools a leader has to re-engage a fatigued workforce. They’re also one of the greatest gifts you can give someone—you are creating a reliable space where they set the agenda and share what’s on their mind. Another benefit? Since your people know they have this time coming up, they’ll contact you less often about the little things.

Your first job is to just listen. That’s easy to say—but hard to do. Our minds are so busy planning the next big thing that we often listen halfheartedly. What are people’s favorite three words to hear from you? Tell me more.

Here’s a common example of halfhearted listening: instead of focusing on what you were saying, your manager was scrolling through their phone. Now think of a time when you talked with a boss who leaned in, heard what you had to say, and even confided their frustrations and hopes. As the direct report, how much effort would you want to give to the manager who was preoccupied versus the one who genuinely cared?

Make one-on-ones with your people meaningful by asking these questions:

• What’s most important for you to discuss today?
• What would make your life easier here?
• What is energizing to you? What would you like to do more of? What consistently drains you?
• What can we do to make our team more effective?
• What about your job makes you want to take the day off?

Foster Connectedness

Fostering connectedness is a great antidote for fatigue. We can get energy from being around other people. Leaders can create connection by building a culture where people get to know each other, celebrate successes, recognize accomplishments, and generously give praise.

One idea is do a round robin where people share the goals they are working on and you share why they are so important to the team and organization.  This not only builds community, but fosters interdependence.

The business world has historically been a conservative place. But we are living through a unique time. We all need to be inclusive and welcome one another with open arms. People will thrive when you make them feel that they truly belong and introduce them to the amazing talents on their team.

Be Caring

Show others you care. Everyone has been affected by the pandemic—and everyone needs some compassion and support.

If someone looks frustrated, request they stay after the meeting and ask: “What’s going on with you? How can I help you? Do you need more direction on anything? How would you like me to support your ideas?”

Leaders can forget to do this when they’re under pressure—or worry they may create additional stress. But that’s not true. As a leader, your caring words will energize and engage.

Take Advantage of Emotional Contagiousness

Emotions are contagious. Here’s an example that proves it.

We all know what it’s like when that certain person walks into a room. You’re laughing with your colleagues, and all of a sudden, the energy is sucked right out of everyone. The part of the brain that recognizes and reacts to these kind of signals moves incredibly quickly and is observing all the time. So how we present ourselves is extremely important.

Each of us has to decide whether we want to be an energy vampire or an energizer. If you’ve read this far, I know you want to be an energizer.

Think about what energizes you. If you’re not sure, look for things that excite you when you talk, when you share, or when you hear an idea that piques your interest.

We need to acknowledge negative emotions so people can let them go, and also embed positive emotions by calling them out and “catching” their positivity. Energy follows focus: to create a high performing, energized team, be sure you are helping your people pay attention to what’s important.

Engage Online Audiences

Online meetings are a breeding ground for disengagement. People easily get bored staring at a screen, so they start multitasking or don’t pay attention. The fact is, people who are online need interactivity every two to three minutes to keep them focused.

Your challenge is to inspire your people to participate so they feel energized when they leave the meeting. A great way to generate interest is to ask “What was your biggest success this week?” After someone shares, ask them how they achieved it. By doing this, you are engaging and empowering speakers.

Chats, breakout rooms, and polls are other effective tactics for engaging virtual learners. A game/contest at the end of a meeting can add spice. You can create a crossword puzzle or hold an impromptu quiz show where your audience tries to stump top performers/leaders. And remember: repetition and engagement are needed if people are to transfer what they learned to the workplace.

Give the Spotlight to Your Top Performers

Have an employee who’s knocking it out of the park? Ask them to share with the team what they’re doing that helps them be so incredibly successful. Let them share their secret sauce.

When you do this, you’ll energize the person who gets to teach. You’ll also give your team a huge gift because they’ll learn how one of their peers is successfully tackling a challenge. Now all of your people will be energized because you have painted a picture of what a good job looks like and had someone show what to do to achieve it.

So there you have it: Lots of tips to fight pandemic fatigue.

We’re passing through extraordinarily difficult times, but we can still bring energy and vitality to the workplace. When you share the gift of connection and engagement with your people, you’ll inspire them and help them thrive.

About the author:

Vicki Halsey is Vice President of Applied Learning for The Ken Blanchard Companies. She is the author of Brilliance by Design, Legendary Service: The Key is to CARE, and Leading at a Higher Level. Vicki is the co-developer of Blanchard’s Legendary Service, and SLII® training programs.

Trust is the foundation of success, and the pandemic is putting enormous pressure on it.

COVID has created a historic amount of stress and anxiety, which is testing the bonds of trust we have with each other. Making things more difficult is how seldom leaders and team members meet face to face these days, combined with how often the nature of technology causes us to misinterpret each other’s intentions. All this makes us liable to arrive at incorrect conclusions about trustworthiness.

Trusted leaders who have quality relationships with their team members are thriving. But leaders who have a trust deficit with their people are having a rough ride—and any chinks in their armor are being magnified.

Trust Comes from Behaviors

The challenge with trust is that most of us don’t think about it until it’s been broken. Trust is based on experiences—our interactions with individuals and leaders in an organization. It’s personal and fluid. We have to pay attention to it.

As a leader, consider whether you could be inspiring trust or eroding it. Now, take into account how the pandemic has made trust even more essential—and more fragile.

Four Ways to Build and Restore Trust

How can leaders diagnose their relationships and improve them? We teach the four elements of trust: Able, Believable, Connected, and Dependable (ABCD).

• Able: Can you do what you say you can do? Do you demonstrate competence? Do you have the skills, knowledge, and expertise to be good at what you do? Do you have a track record of success? Does your performance inspire trust in others?

• Believable: Do you act with integrity? Do you walk your talk? Do your behaviors align with your values? Do your values mirror your organization’s values?

• Connected: Do you really care about your people? How much care do you demonstrate in your relationships? Do you have your people’s best interests in mind? Or do you have a hidden agenda? One of the simple truths of leadership Ken Blanchard and I discuss in our new book, Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust, speaks to the importance of connection in building trust: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Our level of interpersonal connection with others is what fans the flames of trust in those relationships.

• Dependable: Do you honor your commitments? Are you reliable? Will you do what you say you’re going to do?

Leaders who study these four elements are able to build and restore trust. It’s common sense, but not common practice.

Here’s what I tell leaders when I give talks and run workshops: Keep it simple. Start with the basics. Demonstrate behaviors that align with the ABCDs. You’ll build trust and be viewed as trustworthy. It’s not complicated.

Trust, Psychological Safety, and the Extraordinary

Trust and psychological safety go hand in hand. Psychological safety is feeling safe enough to speak up, take a risk, or share ideas without fear of the consequences. And psychological safety translates into improved employee engagement, increased productivity, more collaboration, and behaviors that are required for corporate success.

The ABCDs of trust create an environment where people feel comfortable being vulnerable. That’s essentially what psychological safety is. Do you feel safe enough to be vulnerable in expressing ideas, sharing information, and speaking your truth without fear of punishment?

When people feel trusted and safe, the extraordinary can happen.

Look at it this way. There’s no need for trust if there’s no risk involved. We’re certain the sun’s going to come up tomorrow. That’s a sure thing; a guarantee. Trust isn’t required. 

But what if I’m in a group meeting with my boss, who says something that I know is wrong? It might be risky for me to speak up and tell the boss that they’re incorrect. Do I trust my boss to hear the feedback dispassionately? Are contrary opinions welcome? Or even encouraged?

Trust and psychological safety create a virtuous cycle. They foster safe environments, which allow people to flourish and accomplish the remarkable.

The ABCDs: Guideposts for a Tumultuous Time

The pandemic is a great trust experiment. It is forcing organizations and leaders to extend massive amounts of trust in new and different ways.

Just think back to March 2020, when organizations were rushing to get their people set up to work remotely and were scrambling to keep the lights on. Literally overnight, organizations extended massive amounts of trust to their employees to do whatever it took to keep the business afloat. In 2021 we started to settle into a weird new normal of hybrid work as some organizations started bringing people back to the office. The new COVID variants in 2022 are the latest gut-punch to trust between leaders and their people. But no matter what the pandemic throws at us, we have to continue building and restoring trust.

The pandemic is running its chaotic course and the great trust experiment continues. But there is good news in the midst of the tumult. The ABCDs of trust are lampposts that light the way to a brighter tomorrow. Use them and you’ll be better prepared to meet any challenges in your path.

Editor’s Note: Interested in learning more? Join Randy Conley and Ken Blanchard for a free webinar on January 26. Randy and Ken will be sharing key concepts from their new book, Simple Truths of Leadership. Use this link to register!

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a company that required everyone to come back to the office the second week of November. I thought it was too early, and was proven right by Omicron. The company is a traditional, conservative kind of place, and the CEO lost patience with the whole remote thing. I was happy to come back to the office because I was tired of not seeing people in person. We are a government contractor so we all had to comply with the federal vaccine mandate. I didn’t care—I was first in line to get my first vaccine, and then again when the booster became available. We all had to submit pictures of our vaccine cards.

I recently overheard a conversation I shouldn’t have heard, and now I have an ethical dilemma. I heard someone I know tell a friend that she got a fake vaccine card and hasn’t been vaccinated. They were laughing about it and ridiculing our HR department, which has worked really hard to manage our return to the office. (I only know because I have a friend in HR.) It makes me so mad that people think it is OK to play fast and loose with other people’s health and safety.

I am really torn about what to do. I haven’t said anything or tried to get advice from anyone I know. This is a company town where everyone knows everyone, and it could blow up in my face.

I am losing sleep over this. What do you think?

Blow the Whistle?

_____________________________________________________________________

Dear Blow the Whistle,

Well, this is a bracing question! And such a perfect representation of these very weird times.

Let me start by clarifying that I am no expert on ethics. I read a regular column on ethics and am constantly learning and reminded of my lack of expertise. I am also forced to examine my own unconscious biases and how my politics might sway my response. (Note: Anyone who wants to see an incredibly cool compilation of unconscious biases, click here). Unfortunately, this issue has become so political and divisive that it is breaking up families. I might lose a little sleep myself over this one.

Because I tend to think in the context of organizations, my first thought was that if you are a manager, especially the person’s (shall we call her Vax Card Faker? VCF for short?) manager, you would be obligated to confront VCF and escalate to HR because managers are de facto agent of the organization and owe a duty of responsibility as such. But it doesn’t sound like this is the case in your letter. It sounds like VCF is a peer, not even a close co-worker.

Because this felt so far over my head, I consulted our CHRO, Kristin Brookins Costello, who has impeccable integrity and is brilliant. She said:

“Everyone in the workplace shares responsibility to keep each other safe. Companies can and should look at the cards to ensure that they appear to be valid. That being said, there is no incredibly effective way to ensure card validity beyond the eyeball test, and there can be no expectation that the company can or should confirm the validity of every card. In the end, this is where trust and corporate citizenship come into play. It’s a team effort to keep the workplace safe.” 

I also googled a little and stumbled over this very interesting article: How Can Employers Recognize Fake Vaccine Cards? It gave me the distinct impression that it is really up to the authorities in the organization to monitor authenticity of vaccination cards if they feel strongly about it. I know plenty of people who work in companies that are not at all committed to the enforcement of mandates. Of course, when people got their initial vaccine and were given a flimsy, hastily created card, who ever thought it would become a legal document?

Ultimately, though, I keep coming back to your description of the conversation as one that you “shouldn’t have overheard.” That leaves me to wonder if you could have made more of an effort to make your presence known. But then, I recall a moment long ago in a ladies’ room when I was in a stall minding my own business only to overhear participants in my training session (I was the facilitator) rake me over the coals. Once I realized what and who they were talking about, I couldn’t for the life of me think of any benefit to drawing attention to my presence. So I can understand how this can happen. Still, it was an accident that you overheard something potentially compromising.

Deciding to be a whistle blower is a huge, sometimes life-altering, decision. Most people who do blow a whistle on bad behavior wish they could do it anonymously. But it is almost impossible to avoid consequences of standing up for what you think is right. You must weigh the worst-case scenario of escalating what you heard. The last thing you want is a reputation for lurking around, listening to conversations you weren’t invited into, and then tattling. In my Googling, I found some research on what motivates people who report lying: Nobody likes a rat: On the willingness to report lies and the consequences thereof. Fascinating stuff, really, and far too involved to dissect here. But it does raise the questions about your motivation.

Even if you could report the violation anonymously in a way that would never blow back on you, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What would your intentions and motivations be to report what you heard? Is it your anger at someone who feels differently than you do about how our government is handling the pandemic? Is it your sense of protectiveness for your pal in HR?
• Does the part of you that feels morally superior (and let me be clear, I am not judging you on this) want to see VCF punished? Are you 100% certain that one unvaccinated person will truly put everyone at risk? (Lately, it seems to me that everyone in California is getting COVID regardless of vaccination status!)
• What consequence do you expect might be imposed on VCF? What if she were fired and that caused any number of hardships that you can’t anticipate? Would her family suffer? Would her team be left shorthanded in the middle of a talent shortage? Would that make you feel good?

Whatever opinion you might have about the approximately 38% of unvaccinated people in the US, it is really not up to you to impose your viewpoint on others. If your organization were to directly ask all employees to report on scofflaws, it might be one thing, but no one has appointed you to be a compliance officer.

I keep coming back to tried-and-true principles that have stood the test of time:

• Judge not lest ye be judged.
• Mind your own business.
• Keep your own counsel.
• Don’t gossip.
• Nobody likes a tattletale.

If you were to follow these principles, you might decide to confront the speaker you overheard. Tell her you accidentally heard what she said, that you are going to keep your mouth shut, but that you have concerns. Even as I write this, it seems like a terrible idea. Why would anyone want to step into that bear trap? But it is an option, and at least it’s direct. I ran your question by several people and a couple of them said this is what they would do.

You have followed the rules and have done what you think is best. VCF is not following rules she doesn’t agree with. But who is to say who is in the right? Certainly not me. I would submit that it is the 100% conviction of being right that is causing strife, not just in the US but all over the globe. And I think you actually know this, or you wouldn’t be so torn.

So, here we are. I can’t tell you what to do. I am not at all sure what I would do.

I know two things for sure:

1. It is a good idea to hum or whistle as you go about your merry way so that you never accidentally overhear anything you shouldn’t, ever again. After my horrifying experience in the bathroom, I always clear my throat or shuffle my feet when people might think they are alone.
2. Every little thing a person does gives you one data point about their character and trustworthiness. Now you know a lot more about VCF than you ever wanted to, and if you ever must work closely with her, well, you know what to watch out for. Remember it is just one data point. No one is all good or all bad. We are all just muddling along trying to figure it out as we go.

I hope this helps.

I hope this will all be over soon.

I hope no one around you, or you, God forbid, gets desperately ill.

I hope we can all give each other a little more grace.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Tis the season for lists, and we offer ours: The five must-read blogs of 2021.

But our list is a little different. It shines a little light for L&D professionals trying to find their way in 2022. That’s valuable, considering that the past year has been filled with numerous challenges. Everyone is struggling to stay balanced and informed in the whipsaw environment of the pandemic.

Our five illuminating reads will leave you better prepared for the days ahead.

1. Designing Engaging Learning for a Hybrid Work Environment: Our 2022 L&D Trends Survey found that 53% of L&D professionals felt their virtual designs were not as effective as their face-to-face offerings. Ann Rollins, a solutions architect for The Ken Blanchard Companies, offers specific recommendations to lure learners and keep them engaged.
2. Keeping Your Best People from Resigning During the Great Resignation: The pandemic has unleashed a tidal wave of resignations. The cost to companies is unsustainable. Dr. Vicki Halsey shares six strategies to stem the tide of departures. One client found this post so valuable, senior leadership requested a deeper dive on the topic.
3. Does Your Team Know Who You Are as a Leader? Our chief spiritual officer, Ken Blanchard, shares what happens when people work for a Jekyll and Hyde boss. Then, in his inimitable way, he explains how creating a Leadership Point of View^TM  can bring positive results to a tricky situation. A worthwhile read no matter how your leaders are perceived.
4. Real Talk About Leading Hybrid Teams: Leading a hybrid/virtual team is different from leading an in-person one. Ask a leader now in this position. In this blog, Blanchard’s trust practice leader, Randy Conley, shares his 15 years of experience leading his own hybrid team. A timely read as the pandemic continues its unpredictable path.
5. 3 Prerequisites for Earning the Right to Coach Others: The ability to coach is what separates highly effective managers from average ones, according to the Harvard Business Review. Madeleine Homan Blanchard, master certified coach and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services, elaborates on the three mindsets leaders must have before they can become an inspiring leader/coach.

What’s keeping L&D professionals awake at night? How has the pandemic affected our ability to learn? What awaits in 2022?

We asked these questions to 800+ L&D professionals in an October 2021 survey. Jay Campbell, senior vice president of product development, and David Witt, program director, analyzed the data.

They arrived at three key insights:

1. People are overloaded, tired, and “too busy to learn”
2. The level of connection is dropping
3. L&D is stretched and dissatisfied with the converted offerings

Campbell shared the findings in a November webinar. Here’s a summary of them.

Insight #1—People are overloaded, tired, and “too busy to learn”

People are exhausted and professional development has suffered because of it—that is the key takeaway from the survey findings. Here are some comments by survey respondents that support this:

• “Understaffed and overworked. With our team on scattered hybrid schedules, team members are doing extra work.”

• “Burned out leaders who are struggling to effectively manage hybrid teams.”

• “Feelings of overwhelm and anxiety seem to be crippling our ability to get and stay focused enough to identify what learning is actually needed, learn, and apply learning.”

Respondents’ comments reflect the depth of distress across the country. About four in ten adults in the U.S. have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder during the pandemic, compared to one in ten adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019.”[1]

Our mental state effects our ability to learn. Someone in the throes of anxiety or depression will struggle to incorporate new information. With the country in the midst of a pandemic, leaders at all organizations are fighting to meet their daily responsibilities and setting professional growth to the side—something L&D professionals have witnessed.

Longer workdays is another culprit behind our weary state. The average workday lengthened by 48.5 minutes in the weeks following stay-at-home orders and lockdowns across the U.S. in March.[2]

The weight of the pandemic, psychological distress, longer hours at work—it’s no surprise that L&D professionals say that their people feel overloaded, tired, and “too busy to learn.”

Theme #2—The level of connection is dropping

An organization’s culture is like a tapestry. It is a weaving together of relationships based on shared values and norms.

The pandemic is starting to unravel organizational cultures.

“The tapestry is fraying. It’s weakening our feelings of social cohesion and teamwork. It’s disconcerting to see this happening,” noted Campbell.

Comments from survey respondents echo Campbell’s insight:

• “Learning how to be more connected when some are here some of the time, some are never here, and others are here all the time.”

• “Emotional disconnection, loneliness and lack of purpose…people are on a lone journey with little support and feeling very vulnerable.”

• “Weak relationships due to working remote”

Third-party data provides additional evidence of the phenomenon. An analysis of emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020 found “a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication.”[3]

What does that really mean?

“We are connecting less frequently, working in silos, and have smaller networks. The computer screen is the only place where we do connect. Isolation is the emotional state of the moment. It’s a strong word, but it’s the right one. At the same time, though, people like the flexibility of remote work, which has so many benefits,” Campbell shared. “We are all in the middle of a huge experiment.”

Theme #3—L&D stretched and dissatisfied with converted offerings

­When the pandemic struck, L&D professionals leaped into the breech and converted face-to-face offerings into virtual ones. Yet, they are dissatisfied with what they accomplished in 2022.

“L&D professionals all share a difficult challenge: converting a growing backlog of material to virtual delivery while lacking the resources to do it. And not knowing how to make the material engaging. This is a pressing need, but many are struggling to meet the challenges of the day,” said Campbell.

Learner engagement is another pervasive problem. Findings in the survey bolster this. In fact, some 59% of respondents said more learner engagement is needed in their virtual and digital designs, with concerns about ‘engagement’ appearing in one out of six responses across this large population.

Take a deeper dive into the findings of our L&D Trends for 2022. Watch the webinar here.

[1] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/#:~:text=During%20the%20pandemic%2C%20about%204,June%202019%20(Figure%201)

[2]  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/04/remote-work-longer-days/

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

“Five areas contribute to creating a psychologically safe environment in the workplace,” says Randy Conley, expert on building and maintaining trust. He joined Chad Gordon on a recent episode of the Blanchard LeaderChat podcast to discuss the importance of creating psychological safety.

Conley defines psychological safety as the beliefs individuals have about how others will respond when they are vulnerable and put themselves on the line. He describes the five most important areas to consider:

1. Leader Behavior. Leaders are always being watched; they set the example of preferred behaviors. In addition to being available and approachable, leaders must not only explicitly invite input and feedback but also model openness and fallibility.
2. Group Dynamics. Team members tend to assume certain roles, such as the “father figure” who offers sage advice, the “favorite” who can do no wrong, or even the “black sheep” who tends to stir up trouble. The interplay of these roles creates the group dynamics that will either encourage or inhibit psychological safety within the team.
3. Practice Fields. This term was coined by Peter Senge and described by him as one of the hallmarks of a learning organization. Just as sports teams, pilots, and even surgeons practice and work on skill improvement prior to the game, flight, or surgery, organizations need to create an environment where it is safe to learn and make mistakes without fear of being penalized.
4. Trust and Respect. Supportive, trusting relationships promote psychological safety. When team members and leaders are respected, individuals are willing to be vulnerable and take risks. A lack of respect shuts down communication and innovation.
5. Supportive Organizational Context. It is the responsibility of the organization to give employees access to resources and information to help them perform at their best. Working in a “need to know” environment creates suspicion, tension, and stress. Helping people feel safe creates a healthy, ethical culture where everyone can thrive.

Conley advises us all: “Don’t underestimate the personal influence you can have within your own team and the organization. Psychological safety starts with each one of us.”

To hear more from Conley’s interview, listen to the LeaderChat podcast and subscribe today.

Dear Madeleine,

I have just been promoted to a very big role in an organization I have been with for two years. I came from another highly respected, very successful company. One of my mandates when I joined was to change some entrenched outdated processes and create a new strategic plan for my business unit.

Ever since I joined my new company, anytime I mention something we did at my former company, people roll their eyes, and say stuff like, “Yeah, well, you aren’t at that company anymore,” as if my previous experience has no value at all. And it just shuts down the whole conversation.

Matters have gotten way worse since the company hired a new CEO from another big successful company and he brought in a whole crew from his former company. Essentially, almost everyone who has been here for more than three years is a member of Team Legacy (my labels) and almost all of them are hostile to anyone on Team New People.

Team Legacy is left over from the glory days of the company, which are over. Although our products and services are still super relevant, almost every business system is outmoded, inefficient, and clunky. I am forced to communicate with certain Team Legacy people using email because they refuse to step up to using systems like Slack and Teams.

Many people from Team Legacy are still convinced that they can’t get anything done in meetings held using web conference and are waiting to make some critical decisions until people can meet in person again. We were almost there, and then the Delta variant reared its head. Now another six months has gone by and there is no end in sight. All the folks on Team New People had already been using web conferencing before the pandemic to avoid the cost and wear and tear of travel.

My mandate is to make a lot of big changes fast, but I am constantly running into walls put up by the folks from Team Legacy. We have shared all the positive impact in terms of cost and time savings from all the new platforms we are trying to embed. I have used everything I know about proper change management, but we still have more people digging their heels in than not.

When I try to have the conversation with influencers from Team Legacy, all I get is, “You’re not from here, you just don’t get it.” I am tearing my hair out. I would like your perspective on this.

Not From Here

______________________________________________________________

Dear Not From Here,

This sounds so tough. And I can’t think of a single client who isn’t up against this kind of thing in one form or another. All the change in personnel and in requirements to comply with new systems and processes has left people feeling inept and unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they tend to lean on the people and ways of bygone days when they felt safer. People just want to be able to do their jobs well. Company cultures are built over time, and you’re attempting to shift one where you’re the new kid. As Stan Slap once said, “Never underestimate the ability of your culture to bury your strategy.” He is the master of stating the sad, scary truth. You can read up on his definition of culture here. Your challenge is huge and I have nothing but respect for what you’re attempting to do.

The job of a culture is to protect itself. Until the people steeped in the culture can see how what you bring to the table will help them, they will resist with every fiber of their being. The only thing that will save you is building relationships. One at a time. Person by person. Relationships in which you are vulnerable, are willing to show yourself, and, most important, willing to do so in a way that demonstrates that you intend no harm and have people’s backs.

My own team recently got a new leader who has been a huge proponent of using Teams—and it has been a long, hard road, let me tell you. She has had to loop back and teach all of us multiple times how to do things properly. She has had to be patient, generous with her time, and kind. I’m sure she thinks we are all a bunch of hopeless Luddite technophobes, but if she does, she has never let it show. She redirects—kindly—when we make mistakes or admit we don’t know how to do things even though she has shown us several times. I have been really impressed. The thing about culture is that it isn’t rational, so trying to effect it using rational arguments will get you nowhere. You’ll have to win hearts before you can win minds. It takes so much time—way more than you want it to take and probably more than you think you have. But you aren’t going to get where you want to go without making that investment first. Take a deep breath and a big step back and know you’re going to have to slow down before you can speed up.

Your first move is to examine the ways you and other members of Team New People (TNP) feel superior to members of Team Legacy (TL). Then you must look at the teeny, little things you say and do that telegraph that sense of superiority. Your first reaction will be that you don’t do any such thing—and I guarantee you’re mistaken. So cut it out. You can’t control the behavior of others on TNP, but you can sure control yours. You’re probably revealing a lot more judgment than you realize, and nobody likes to be judged. Nobody.

Then it’s time to get to know everyone on TL whose buy-in you need. Schedule one-on-one meetings where you both answer questions that are designed to increase connection. Check out this old chestnut from The New York Times: The 36 Questions That Lead to Love. Yes, I know these questions are designed to facilitate a romantic relationship, but there are some great ones that would be perfectly reasonable to repurpose in a professional setting. This will allow you and each of your people to begin seeing one another as an actual human being instead of a member of TNP or TL. It will give you insight into what is important to each person, how they want to be treated by you, and what will make them feel acknowledged and successful. You can then tailor your communication style in future 1:1s and even in moments in team meetings.

As you’re doing that, you’ll want to articulate your vision for your department: a clear vision of a possible future for your group and how it makes an invaluable contribution to the success of the company. Ken has excellent advice to get you started here. Once the vision is articulated and shared, you can work with your team to formulate the goals and action steps that will help you move toward it. Don’t worry, you’ll still have final say on the goals and the action steps, but if your team is involved in shaping the plan, they will be much more likely to get behind it.

It’s entirely possible that some folks on TL won’t be able to make the transition needed to be successful in the new culture you’re forming. That’s okay; eventually, they will self-select out and find an organization they will be more comfortable in.

As you go, the next time someone says, “You’re not from here, you just don’t get it,” instead of letting it shut the conversation down, try saying, “You’re so right, I’m not, so please help me get it.” Stop trying to persuade and convince people. Just ask questions and listen, listen, listen. People will talk if you listen, and when they talk they will provide clues for where you can find openings. People will have great ideas about how to effect change—then, when you implement those, it will have come from someone on TL. This is the age-old strategy of letting people think something was their idea. It’s still around because it works.

Stop talking about your expertise and how great things were at your old company. Instead, talk about the expertise of the people on your team and how to leverage it. Talk about things that are going well in your new company. Especially, share examples of how people on TL are supporting and benefiting from the changes. Your previous experience does have value, but nobody will care about any of it until they care about you. I once worked with a wonderful speaking coach who said, “They won’t buy the message until they buy the messenger.”

Leadership is hard and getting harder every day. Stan Slap also said, “If leaders could get where they needed to go by themselves, they would go there and send a postcard.” It’s funny because it’s true. You won’t get anywhere without your people.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t what you were expecting. And it’s probably going to be a lot more work than you signed up for. But I guarantee you’ll be successful, eventually, if you try even some of this.

At that point, you’ll be an experienced technical expert and a true leader. So go forth and win some hearts. You will be amazed at what you can all accomplish together.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

First released in 2015, Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture by Stan Slap offers a message to leaders that is even more important in today’s work environment. Slap indicates that if you really want your business to operate at maximum performance, you need to understand the critical difference between your employees and your employee culture.

Unfortunately, employee culture is one of the least understood concepts for leaders to embrace. Slap’s comprehensive research shows that leaders who do understand it are able to energize their workforce and build loyalty even through difficult times. He provides specific steps managers and leaders can put into practice immediately to improve employee culture.

The first part is to recognize that employee culture is a viable living organism with its own purpose, beliefs, and rules. It has the power to make or break any plans management wants to put into place. Leaders who learn to serve that organism service the organization as a whole. Part of that is treating people with the honor and respect they are entitled to, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.

As Slap says, “Be human first and a manager second.”

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Stan Slap, listen to the LeaderChat podcast and subscribe today.

To hear Stan Slap and Blanchard thought leaders talk about employee culture and the currently changing work environment, join us for a complimentary, five-part webinar series on Returning to the Workplace: Exploring a Hybrid Model. Register for any single event—or all five—using this link: https://www.kenblanchard.com/Events-Workshops/Returning-to-Workplace-Series.

A misnomer is floating around—the concept of return-to-work. This phrase conjures up images of coming back from a sabbatical, a leave of absence, or maternity/paternity leave. But today, return-to-work is used to describe how employees should return to the location where they did most of their work prior to the pandemic.

We have to be clear: this term is not about returning to work. Employees have been working—hard.

The issue employers are struggling with is the decision to return-to-office—and to what degree they should accommodate employee preference. Just as important is the question of what employees can do when they are not aligned with their employer’s desires—and subsequent policies—about returning to the office full time. How do organizations develop a strategy that both addresses safety and shapes policy? How do leaders flex and have conversations with their employees when preference and policy aren’t aligned?

Balancing Safety and Increased Flexibility

Most organizations today are trying to determine if formal policies should dictate an employee’s work environment. Prior to the pandemic, work-from-home policies existed but weren’t widely adopted.

Now, as requirements begin to relax, organizations find themselves at a crossroads. What policy updates should be made, if any? Should organizations mandate that employees be vaccinated and return to the office? When should organizations encourage working remotely vs. working from the office? How should organizations accommodate employee preference?

For instance, Microsoft has prioritized physical, mental, and emotional well-being to guide decision making. The office is a place where employees and teams can choose to come together to innovate and collaborate. The focus isn’t on return-to-office, but on flexibility in the environments where employees and teams prefer to do their best work.

Enabling People to Do Their Best Work

Leaders have an opportunity to interpret evolved policies and navigate their people’s anxiety, uncertainty, and preferences in a way that is a win-win for both employer and employee. Keeping an open mind and flexing leadership styles based on each employee’s individual needs is leading in a way that allows for a hybrid approach to management.

To lead employees through continued change and evolution, leaders must:

• Adopt a learning-focused mindset. Employees are going to have concerns about returning to the office. Leaders need to explore the views of each employee and realize the leader’s and the organization’s views may contrast with those of the employee. Even though many employees are ready to return to the office, not all are.
• Identify blind spots. Organizations and leaders are making assumptions about what employees want right now. Some employees have strong feelings about continuing to work remotely rather than returning to the office five days a week. How might leaders partner with their employees to develop a plan that honors organizational policy as well as individual employee preferences?
• Be curious. Leaders must ask what employees want—genuinely ask, and listen to the answer. Leaders also need to ask if they see themselves remaining with the organization if there is a mandate either for continuing to work from home or for returning to the office. When leaders are sincere and humbly inquisitive, employees are more apt to share and less likely to minimize their needs and feelings.

This is a time to be transparent and direct about the direction of the organization and the strategy for whether to return-to-office. It’s also a time to listen attentively to employee preferences and desires—consider it a temperature check of your team. Otherwise, all the productivity gains made with remote work will reverse and employees will look for new ways to do their best work—at a different organization.

Editor’s Note: Would you like to learn more about successfully navigating the future of the work environment? Join us for a free webinar. Over the next five weeks, The Ken Blanchard Companies® is hosting weekly webinars focused on the different aspects of work post-COVID. Join us for one, two, or all five events. The series is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies. Learn more here.

About the Author

Britney Cole is Associate Vice President, Solutions Architecture and Innovation Strategy at The Ken Blanchard Companies. With more than 15 years’ experience in organization development, performance improvement, and corporate training across all roles, Britney brings a pragmatic and diverse perspective to the way adults desire to learn on the job.

Dear Madeleine,

I am so frustrated with what I am calling the “in-person addiction” in my new company.

I started here two months before COVID sent everyone home. It was very much a traditional “everyone comes to the office” place before that. I am surrounded by people who are still struggling with the virtual aspect of our work. Everyone is complaining about working from home and all the web conferencing. Many are juggling home-schooling their children along with their work commitments.

My boss is convinced that everyone is less productive working from home—and that may be so with other groups. There is a bit of an attitude that we are going to wait this thing out but, frankly, I have doubts that anything is going to change soon. If we could just shift the mindset we could really get some very cool things done.

I came from an organization that was much more geographically spread out. In fact, my entire team was virtual and in different time zones. It worked great! I just don’t get it. I am far more productive when I don’t have to deal with a commute and the time it takes to get dressed and do hair/makeup. I do have kids at home, but they have always known Mommy has a job. We have created a daily routine that works well for all of us. I am not saying it is perfect—and I will be grateful when they go back to school—but geez. I think people let their children get away with bratty behavior.

My problem: how do I get my colleagues out of their constant moaning about our new way of working? I mean, it’s been six months now, with no end in sight. How do I prove that my new team is crushing it (because they are) despite the WFH thing? Most importantly, how do I develop the relationships I need to influence the way I need to move forward on my very ambitious goals? Many of my colleagues act like they aren’t going to trust me until we can spend time in person together. How do I get everyone to get on board with reality?

Way Ahead

Dear Way Ahead,

I understand your frustration. I led a completely virtual team in our very “headquarters-and-in-person-centric” company for years! We all worked from home for two decades before virtual was the norm, and it was a constant battle to remind people we were out in the field making things happen. Now at least the playing field has been flattened for virtual teams—but it sounds like for you, things have just gone flat.

Here are your concerns, in order. You want to:

1. Get your colleagues to stop complaining.
2. Prove that your new team is highly productive virtually, and that others can be, too.
3. Influence your new colleagues in this virtual environment.

Let’s unpack all of this and look at what you can control, what you might be able to control with some help, and what is probably out of your hands.

You can’t make your colleagues change but you can change your own attitude. I wonder if your colleagues feel your judgment and if that might be getting in the way of building strong working relationships. I am not doubting your superiority at working virtually, but nobody likes to feel inferior. If senior leadership seems willing to suffer the consequences of waiting it out, you may be asking a lot to expect the extra effort required to shift the collective mindset. I suggest you focus less on how to fix your colleagues and more on how you can add value and—without blame or judgment—be a role model for how to operate in this new environment.

Regarding the kid thing: If you are betraying your opinion that your colleague’s children are bratty, that is not going to win you any friends. You can think whatever you want, but I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself. Nothing causes people to get defensive faster than someone criticizing their kids. You got a serious head start creating a culture of “Mommy works” in your own home—and it may be a little unfair to expect your colleagues with kids who are suddenly at home to crack the whip and get everyone to behave. One thought on that topic is for you to create something you could share with colleagues about how you managed it—something like “Tips for Getting Your Kids to Respect Your Work Time.” I Googled around and, I have to say, there isn’t much out there. You must have some good ideas based on your experience! My memory is dim—my children are grown—but I am pretty sure I resorted to threats of bodily harm, which is probably not recommended.

The first stop is a conversation with your boss re: your concerns about the disdain for the virtual WFH office. There are two issues here: the fact that your boss seems resigned and unenthusiastic about how to help people people be successful virtually, and the fact that you are not able to get acknowledgement for how well your team is doing. I think the approach for both is curiosity. You might ask questions like:

• Is it your experience that people are not being productive working from home? What are you seeing that leads you to that view?
• May I show you how my team and I are handling things? Might that be helpful?
• Do you worry that our lack of productivity could hurt us long term? What are your thoughts about how might we counteract that?

With any luck, you can shift your boss’s perspective with open-hearted inquiry. Your confidence could be catching if people don’t feel belittled by it.

Now let’s talk about your need to make friends and influence people. The #1 key is to get curious and interested in each and every person—and show it. Make the time and put some real effort into it. You might check out Keith Ferrazzi’s new book, Leading Without Authority.

Some ideas:

• Set up individual time with each person and do a “Getting to Know You” questionnaire. Provide the questionnaire in advance and be ready with your own answers. You can be creative and ask whatever you want, but make sure the person knows they can choose not to answer what they don’t want to answer! Favorite book or movie, pets and their personalities, favorite job you’ve ever had, fantasy travel spot, what would you do if you won the lottery? Favorite holiday and why? What is something I would never know about you if you didn’t tell me? What is your superpower? Hobby? What is your least favorite work task? Are we all sick of Zoom calls? Yes, but this would be a fun one!
• Suggest social distancing picnic lunches or coffee or happy hour (BYOTreats) at a nearby outdoor spot.
• Create an opportunity for your team to do a group Pecha Kucha over Zoom (20 slides, 20 seconds each) and everyone gets the same assignment—again, you can make it up. A Day in The Life is a fun one, or My Life Story. The idea is to use images and photos to create a super efficient story. Stories are powerful and people remember them.
• Our company has some amazing on-demand free webinars for increasing productivity when working from home and leading virtually. You could share these with select folks who are open.
• If you think you might have already done some damage, do ask for feedback and clear the air. If people do give you feedback, do not defend your position, simply say “thank you.”

You can’t change people, but you can be a role model for the behavior you think is appropriate in the situation. And you can extend an invitation: anyone who is interested in how you are sailing through what seems like a big challenge can ask for your help.

Compassion, humility, patience, and generosity will go a long way for you right now.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Diversity, always a weighty topic, has become a profoundly important concern over the past several weeks. Nevertheless, many people and businesses continue to struggle in their attempts to address the issue. In her latest book, Diversity Beyond Lip Service, La’Wana Harris relies on her experience as a Certified Diversity Executive, ICF Certified Coach, and global leadership development professional to offer guidance to help individuals, leaders, and organizations effectively navigate this crucial period in history.

Harris explains that to build a sustainable culture of inclusion, we all must become aware of our own biases and then do the self-work to move forward with actions that have a positive impact. The brilliance of the book lies in Harris’s COMMIT model, which is designed to serve as a call to action for those who want to be part of the solution. This process emphasizes the following directives:

Commit to Courageous Action. First, determine the contribution or difference you want to make by creating a culture of inclusion. Then define what success looks like and how you will measure it, and set specific goals.

Open Your Eyes and Ears. Become mindful about what you see, what you overlook, and what you will stop tolerating.

Move Beyond Lip Service. Decide what you need to take responsibility for in order to raise the bar on inclusion and define your actions.

Make Room for Controversy and Conflict. Address what scares you about diversity and inclusion and identify both what you can stop doing and what you can say no to in order to become the best version of yourself.

Invite New Perspectives. Recognize the ways you are changing, the choices you are making, and how you will stay aware of the perspectives of others to remain vigilant.

Tell the Truth Even When It Hurts. Understand how being inclusive honors your values and how the stories you tell yourself represent cultures different from your own.

Above all, Harris recognizes there isn’t a quick fix to this issue. She reminds us that true change will take place only when people make a fundamental shift in how they approach diversity. She points out that traditional efforts have been oriented from the outside in—we’ve spent decades telling people what they should think, say, and do in relation to diversity and inclusion.

Harris suggests an inside-out approach instead—one that helps individuals go deep within their own beliefs to first understand their biases and then do the self-work to begin their journey to diversity appreciation.

The best part is the how-to steps provided by Harris in this thoughtful and important book. If you want to be a leader who ignites innovation in your team and brings out the best in everyone, read Diversity Beyond Lip Service today.

To hear host Chad Gordon interview La’Wana Harris, listen to the LeaderChat podcast and subscribe today. For more information on La’Wana Harris, go to lawanaharris.com or find her on LinkedIn.

Dear Madeleine,

I manage a large team of creative professionals in a US-based advertising firm. My company went to an unlimited PTO plan 18 months ago. Covid-19 weirdness aside, I am finding that my people are not taking time off and seem burnt out. I am confused by this.

I talk to each of my direct reports on a regular basis about how critical it is for them to take time when they are not on the hook for work. Back when PTO was a liability for the company, we would force people to take at least two days around normal holidays to reduce the load. Now when I encourage my people to take time, they make excuses like “it’s so hard to come back from time off,” and “project overload.”

I tried to get all team members to commit to taking time this summer and submit dates so I can manage workload and project flows, but no one is committing. Some say they aren’t comfortable traveling, but still.

Last year, I tried to institute the second Monday of every month as a mental health day with no meetings so that people could use the time to clean up email and task lists, organize, or take a slow morning. Although my group was enthusiastic, no one ended up doing it.

The research shows that people who take time away from work are more creative and productive. I can’t force people, obviously, but I really believe in vacation and downtime. How can I encourage people to take better care of themselves?

All Work

Dear All Work,

I am so accustomed to letters about how to get people to work harder that this is a breath of fresh air! There is a lot of interesting research about the unlimited PTO experiment now that it has been around for about ten years. Here is an article I found that might be helpful to you.

Your concern about your people does you credit, but you must let them be adults and figure this out for themselves. As a manager, the only way you can make proper energy management an issue is if you can objectively call out that an individual’s performance is suffering. In this case, you can request that the person take a couple of days or even a week—but even then, it will be up to them to get their performance back to standard in the best way they see fit.

The other big influencer on this situation is whether you are role modeling the behavior you are seeking. Are you taking time off? And I mean really taking it? Or do you answer emails and take phone calls when you are supposed to be off? My favorite is the email that comes in that says “I know you are on vacation, but I was hoping you might ….” If you actually respond to those, you are literally training your people that there is no such thing as real vacation. You are also sending the message that you don’t trust people to make decisions or to operate without your supervision for a week.

I am not saying it is easy to take time off—of course, the more committed and invested you are, the more challenging it is. Take it from the woman who goes to Mongolia, where cell phones don’t work, to unplug—I know. But I agree with you that getting away is important, so I have made a big effort to make myself do it. You send a strong message about what you expect from your team by setting the example.

Some other ideas might be:

• Talk to other managers in your company. What are they doing? How are they handling the unlimited PTO thing? Counterintuitively, it does seem that the biggest problem with unlimited PTO is that people take less time off because they are worried about peer competition and perception. Possibly there needs to be a cultural message from senior leadership that people are expected to take a certain amount of time.
• Guidelines from HR? Have you received any? Maybe they were sent out and you missed them? There may be some help there.
• Make sure your people know they won’t be punished for taking time off.
• Conversely, don’t reward the martyrs who make a big, heroic show of long work hours. That would send the wrong message. I don’t mean there won’t be the occasional big push for the odd, unusual project. Constant heroics in this area means the team member either is not equipped to do the job or they have too much work. It was all fine and well to boast about all-nighters in college, but that just is not reasonable in real life.
• The two things most employees (especially parents) really want are flexibility and autonomy. They want to know that as long as they get their work done on deadline at quality, they can do what they need to do to take care of themselves and the logistics of life. I recently heard about a manager who requires her people to put on their Out of Office notice when they take a bathroom break and post on their IM exactly what they are working on at any given moment. Who wants to have someone breathing down their necks like that? Not me!
• Is performance suffering? If your people are crushing it in terms of creativity and they seem happy, maybe this isn’t even a problem; it’s just you looking for problems to solve that don’t need solving.
• Do some research on sabbaticals. You may be passionate enough about this topic that you want to propose a sabbatical program for your organization. We provide coaching for individuals who participate in a highly structured but way out of normal work paid sabbatical for a global software company. Each individual who participates reports that it is an exceptionally fun and impactful experience. Many companies provide paid time for sabbaticals. It seems to be a very effective way for employees to refresh and renew.

You are right to care about the personal sustainability of your people—but, ultimately, it isn’t your responsibility. You can only create the safest and most inspiring environment for your people. The rest is going to be up to them.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

Dear Madeleine,

I know I should be grateful to have a job, and I love the company I work for. BUT. My whole company is madly trying to stay afloat and reinvent itself and I have more work coming at me than I can possibly do. I am working 16-hour days. I have my laptop in bed with me until midnight and get going again at 6:00 a.m.

My husband is retired and is good natured about it. He says I need to set some boundaries—but everyone is working as hard as I am. We are all doing what we need to do to survive the changes in our business and the resulting economic disaster.

I had all kinds of dreams about this last chapter of my career and they did not include feeling like I am part of a startup. Been there, done that, hated it then. I am angry, overwhelmed, and exhausted—but more than anything, I feel so disappointed. And then I judge myself, knowing that so many people are so much worse off than me: sick, losing loved ones, out of a job, homeschooling children while working full time, not to mention all the kids with canceled proms and graduations. What do I have to complain about?
And yet, here I am feeling out of sorts and not able to pull out of it.

Thoughts?

So Disappointed

Dear So Disappointed,

You bet I have thoughts. And a lot of similar feelings. I spent a couple of days feeling sorry myself because I wasn’t going to get to see my daughter pick up her Master’s diploma in her fancy cap and gown and yuk it up with all of our pals in New York City. And don’t get me started on how hard it has been to let go of our collective dreams for her gorgeous wedding in July. I mean, we argued over whether we should have broccoli salad (my vote: gross) and about 127 other details. And OMG, the band was going to be the best! And now—nothing. “Come on,” I tell myself. “People are dying. Get over it.” So I let myself have my sad little pity party for a weekend, and then I did get over it.

You must allow yourself to have your feelings. Just because someone else is suffering more than you are doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to acknowledge what a big fat bummer your own reality is. In fact, if you suppress your feelings, you will just end up feeling numb—or worse, you could start acting out: smoking, drinking too much, drugs, overeating—we are apparently having an epidemic of this kind of thing right now. So don’t do that. But you also don’t want to ruminate on your feelings by going over and over the same sad story in your head. That won’t help you; you’ll just get stuck in a nasty rut.

What will help is to break all of this down. Part of what is going on here is a mashup of all the facts, thoughts, and feelings until it feels like a car alarm is going off in your head. Let’s tease everything out so you can deal with each thing, one at a time.

The absurd workload: Your husband is right. You need to set some boundaries. Laptops do not belong in bed. Yes, I know millions of people watch TV on their laptops in bed, or goof around on YouTube and social media. So let me rephrase: work does not belong in bed. Yes, that’s better. New rule for you: NO WORK IN BED. You need your rest time and your sleep, and you will not be able to keep up this pace without health consequences.

I don’t care if everyone else is working as hard as you are. You are the one who is in pain. Put up the hand and say no. You know perfectly well what you can do in a reasonable workday—maybe that is 10 hours or even 12, but 16 is just sick and wrong. You are not saving babies from Ebola here, but somehow you have gotten yourself into life-or-death mode. The adrenaline and cortisol being released in your system will hurt you if you don’t cut it out.

Break down your work requirements and tell your boss and your team what you can do and what you can’t do. My experience is that the reward for good work is more work, not a break. Your boss is depending on you to cry uncle and tell him when you can’t do another thing. If you suffer in silence, the work will just pile on. You had gotten into a nice work rhythm before the Covid Fun House Crazy, so you got out of the habit of having to say no when enough is enough. Flex that muscle and use it now. I promise the entire organization isn’t going to go down the tubes because of you. If the company isn’t going to make it, the extra four hours you take to exercise, meditate, and sleep is not going to make the difference.

Suddenly trapped in a startup: Well. Yes. I can relate. I have been part of three startups—and the last time I said “never again.” Startups are a young person’s game, honestly, because they do take just about every drop of blood and sweat from each overtaxed employee.

The problem is this: every business is kind of a startup right now. Everybody is scrambling to figure out how to win or even operate with the new business landscape and restrictions. My own company is in the same boat. I keep hearing things like pivot, iterate, and fail fast, experiment! It is exhausting. All I can say is, this isn’t going to last forever. Your company will figure it out and things will settle down. This doesn’t change anything I said in the last section. It is reality and all you can do is adapt. Get some boundaries, take care of yourself, and do your best. This too shall pass.

The dashing of your dreams: This is a big deal. Bet you didn’t think I was going to say that. And I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t studied neuroscience. I’m fascinated by one little neuroscience tidbit about the chemical reaction that occurs in our brains have when explicit expectations are disappointed. Research shows that when we have an expectation of something good and it is not met, our brains actually stop producing dopamine for a time.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is generally thought of as a feel-good chemical. It is released when we experience pleasure or anticipate a reward—cupcakes, wine, the perfect find on sale, juicy gossip. When we anticipate something good, our dopamine receptors are primed for the rush, and when it doesn’t come, the entire dopamine delivery system grinds to a halt. It feels terrible. In fact, it sets up such a negative downward spiral that it can affect our mood, and then our performance.

We intuitively know this. Think about the times you have strived for an outcome but tried really hard to manage your own expectations. We know disappointed hopes feel lousy, but unmet expectations feel even worse. So you, my friend, are the victim of perfectly reasonable expectations that are not being met. Your dream has turned into a nightmare. This is increasing your stress levels, decreasing your creativity and problem-solving ability, and probably affecting your confidence, too. The fact that you are not alone is no consolation.

What can you do about it? Reframe. Rewrite the story about how this part of your life was supposed to go. Define the narrative you had, and then redefine it. It might sound something like this: “Well, I thought this part of my career was going to be four-day work weeks, during which I could focus on my cherry-picked projects. I was going to do yoga every day and cook gourmet meals every night. But all that has changed now. My considerable wisdom and experience is now needed to creatively respond to this new challenge and rise to occasion by working at an accelerated pace again.” And so on. Focus on the strengths you can bring to this challenge, and what exactly will make you feel proudest when it is all over. Reset the expectations you had for this chapter of your life and keep them centered, as much as possible, on what you can control. You will find yourself in an upward spiral very quickly and start feeling a lot better.

If you need to wallow a little, go ahead. No one will blame you. But then do your work, untangle the yucky mess, deal with each thing one by one, and get that spiral going up.

Your husband will thank you, and your colleagues will too.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

I had an upsetting experience yesterday. Amid our current environment of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty, I find that people are generally behaving pretty well. I’ve noticed this at the grocery store, which I now visit only about once every ten days. Social distancing is in effect, with dots or X’s every six feet marking where customers should stand—and yet, there is still a great deal of humanity to be found. One shopper helps another reach something on a high shelf; a woman encourages the person behind her with fewer items to go ahead of her in the line; friendly clerks smile behind masks and plexiglass in spite of working long hours.

So what was the epic failure that was so upsetting? A clerk who stuck to the rules—and I mean stuck!

A shopper with 19 items inadvertently stepped into the “15 items or fewer” line. Upon discovering this, the clerk refused to ring up the last four items and told the customer she would have to put everything back in her cart and go to a different line. The woman apologized for her mistake and politely asked the clerk to make an exception (meanwhile, the lines were getting longer). He again flatly refused—rules, after all, are rules—and repeated that she could not be rung up in his lane and would have to move. No other solution was possible; he was entrenched in upholding the 15-item rule.

The woman burst into tears. The stone-faced clerk still wouldn’t budge. Finally, the frazzled customer turned to the lines of captive shoppers witnessing the scene and cried, “Does anyone think this is right?”

A solution suddenly appeared in the form of a fellow customer who took the four offending items, paid for them in her lane, and handed them back. The total? A whopping $4.32. The woman walked out crying, leaving the customers around her dumbfounded that the clerk couldn’t or wouldn’t find a reasonable solution. In fact, he seemed a bit grumpy that another customer had stepped in!

Now you may be thinking: “Rules are rules, and they are in place for the common good.” Well, yes, that’s true. But think about the purpose of the rule—in this case, customer convenience and speed. Did it make sense to upset a customer? To hold up the people in line behind her? To harm the reputation of the store, lose that customer for life, and generally anger everyone else within 30 feet of the woman? Of course not.

Would it have been a better decision to keep the line moving, thus letting people exit the store and speeding up the experience for the 20 people waiting outside to get in? Of course. Wouldn’t it also have been better for the clerk to say “I see, you made a simple mistake and I’ll ring you up—but in the future, please pay attention to the 15 item rule,” thereby meeting the underlying purpose of the rule? Yes, that would have been better.

When someone bursts into tears, empathy is certainly better than hidebound insistence on following an arbitrary rule meant to keep things speedy. That transaction took 14 minutes. The customer could have been happily out in seven, if a bit chagrined at her miscount. Now the store has lost at least two customers—I doubt she will be back, and I’m done. For good.

What’s the culture like in your organization? If customer-focused decision making on an issue this simple is absent like it was in this woman’s experience, then innovation, adaptation, creativity, and customer service are in real jeopardy. Don’t let this happen in your organization. Rules, yes—but use a little common sense and compassion, please. Especially during these trying times.

About the Author

Patricia Overland is a Coaching Solutions Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

Marcus Buckingham believes some basic assumptions about work are simply no longer true in today’s business environment. He shares his insights in his latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, coauthored with Ashley Goodall.

Lie #1: People care which company they work for.

Many companies use their corporate culture as a recruitment tool. Although it is true that people will join a company for their projected culture, people will stay—or leave—because of the team they work with every day. Team members who truly care about one another and have each other’s backs create their own culture. Leaders who observe and understand what makes teams perform well, and then encourage that behavior in other teams, will create a stronger organization.

Lie #2: The best plan wins.

Executives spend months developing a strategic plan, getting it approved by the board, and then disseminating it through the entire organization. The more rigorous and detailed the plan, the longer it takes to develop—and during that extended amount of time, reality probably changes. Planning is a good way to scope a problem, but what leaders really need is intelligence. Smart leaders empower their frontline people to deal with situations immediately and then check in regularly to see how they can help. Buckingham’s research indicates that this method lowers turnover and improves productivity while it builds an intelligence system that outperforms a complicated planning system.

Lie #3: The best companies cascade goals.

It has been common practice for a CEO to have annual goals that are cascaded first to the executive team, then through each department structure, to the individual level. The problem? Things can change over a year—but fewer than 5 percent of people go back to look at the goals or recalibrate their need. Truth be told, goals work only if you set them yourself. Freethinking leaders know what they need to accomplish, take the responsibility to explain it to team members, and then set goals they can achieve. The best practice is to cascade meaning—not goals.

Lie #4: The best people are well rounded.

Companies spend time defining competencies they want employees to develop—and then spend more time trying to improve people’s weakest competencies. This practice creates employees with just-average performance. Freethinking leaders look for the skills that people do well and leverage those skills. High performers usually do something a little differently than others—and that difference, when used intelligently, can be a competitive advantage.

Lie #5: People need feedback.

Feedback is a tricky subject. On one hand, if you don’t give any feedback and ignore someone, it destroys them. On the other hand, if you approach someone saying you want to give them feedback, their brain pattern looks almost exactly like fight-or-flight brain waves. The person feels like they are being attacked. Many times, feedback isn’t helpful because it isn’t delivered in a way that helps the person learn how to change a behavior. When freethinking leaders see someone doing something that works, they ask the person what they think worked well and why. This line of questioning as a method of feedback serves as the learning moment. The interrogation of the action—good or bad—is the most important conversation.

Lie #6: People can reliably rate other people.

Forty years of research shows that ratings of the performance of others is more a reflection of the person doing the rating than the person being rated. We simply can’t rate other humans on things like strategic thinking, creativity, business knowledge, or overall performance. Accurate rating of other people’s performance takes a much deeper conversation based on observations—it’s not about selecting a number on a scale.

Lie #7: People have potential.

Of course people have potential. The danger comes in identifying certain people as high potential, because doing it presupposes that others are low potential. By creating these designations, we are deliberately not seeing 85 percent of our people. The truth is that everyone has potential—but we have never found a way to measure just how much potential they have.

Lie #8: Work-life balance matters most.

Work-life balance is a great aspiration, but it is important to remember that balance is stationary. So, if you feel like you are totally in balance, you are probably stagnant. The trick is to find activities that give you strength in work and in life, and then spend as much time as possible on those things. Of course, none of us can spend 100 percent of our time being happy. But if we are deliberate about spending time doing things that invigorate us, it lessens the chance of us burning out and increases the chance of us being happier and more productive.

Lie #9: Leadership is a thing.

The main thing Buckingham wants leaders to know about the power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique. If we see this as a problem that needs to be fixed, that’s a shame. But if we make a home for the unique individuals, we can build work environments where people are seen and challenged to become a better version of themselves.

You may completely agree with what Buckingham has to say in this book, or you may question some of it. Either way, once again, he’ll give you something to think deeply about.

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Marcus Buckingham, listen to the LeaderChat Podcast, and subscribe today. Order Nine Lies About Work on Amazon.com.

For more information on Marcus Buckingham, go to www.freethinkingleader.org

After surveying more than one million employees from a wide range of organizations, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton have found that leading with gratitude is the easiest, fastest, least expensive way for managers to boost both performance and engagement in employees.

Unfortunately, it is also one of the most misunderstood and misapplied skills in business today.

During their research, Gostick and Elton heard over and over that people feel not only underappreciated at work, but sometimes even under attack. The authors call this the “gratitude gap.” In their latest book, Leading with Gratitude, they dispel common myths about leaders expressing gratitude and offer eight simple ways to show employees they are valued.

The myths Gostick and Elton identify may sound familiar:

• Fear is the best motivator.
• People want too much praise these days.
• There just isn’t enough time!
• It’s all about money.

Leading with Gratitude is filled with compelling stories featuring respected leaders such as Alan Mullaly of Ford Motor Company and retired American Express chairman Ken Chenault. The stories illustrate that these myths are simply excuses that can keep managers from building an honorable work environment by expressing their appreciation for a job well done.

The authors explain that gratitude isn’t about showering employees with thank-yous and high fives. They offer eight practical examples that demonstrate how leaders can first gain clarity about how people contribute and then show gratitude in specific ways that will be meaningful to individuals.

Practicing the act of gratitude can be as simple as letting people know their suggestions are valued by soliciting their ideas and acting on them. Another way is by assuming positive intent, especially when errors happen. Instead of getting upset or blaming someone for making a mistake, assume the person was doing their best and then use the situation to learn what you could be doing differently as a leader.

One of the most useful tips is to walk in your employees’ shoes. Getting a better understanding of what it takes for people to do their jobs will uncover ways you can collaborate to solve problems, improve processes, and enhance the customer experience as you build relationships by showing empathy. The best way to start is to look for small wins that will lead to bigger wins.

Perhaps my favorite suggestion in the book is to practice gratitude at home. Gostick and Elton remind readers not to get caught in the trap of putting our best face on at work and leaving it there when we go home. Showing appreciation and empathy for loved ones should be a common practice—and I think a gentle reminder is a good thing.

So remember to express gratitude often, tailor it to the individual, and ensure it reinforces corporate values. And don’t forget to praise your peers as well. Leading with gratitude creates engaged, high performing employees, a stronger organization, and better results.

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Adrian Gostick, listen to the LeaderChat podcast and subscribe today. Order your copy of Leading with Gratitude on Amazon.com.

Dear Madeleine,

I am about four months into a new job as a senior executive in a large global infrastructure company. I report directly to the EVP of Operations, who is the person who brought me into the company. I manage a huge team of fellow engineers, and so far, so good. (I’m an engineer also.)

The problem is that my boss and I are being bullied by my boss’s peers on the executive team. It’s true that my boss was brought in by the CEO to implement change, but the response from the rest of the executive team has been unreasonably negative. We are interrupted and challenged on every assertion we make—all of which is supported by data.

This situation has grown worse over time. After a recent meeting, one of the other EVPs actually cornered me and said my boss and I don’t belong in the organization; the CEO doesn’t know what he is doing; and the rest of the executive team is going to set him straight.

I feel threatened and confused. My boss and I are used to producing results that contribute directly to the bottom line and shareholder value, and I can’t understand what is going on here. What would you recommend?

Lost and Confused

_____________________________________________________________________

Dear Lost and Confused,

I’m sorry. Your situation sounds rough. You’ve had the great good fortune of spending most of your career working with reasonable people—which, in my experience, makes you an anomaly.

In my world view, human beings behaving reasonably is a rare and precious thing. But listen—can you blame anyone for exercising their God-given right to withhold cooperation in the face of what feels like a mortal threat? Think about it. Anyone who has made it to the senior executive ranks of a billion-dollar global company has a number of things to lose when change comes: power, money, status, influence—and that’s just for starters.

This is a straight-up political situation. You can examine it using John Eldred’s Model for Organizational Politics. Eldred, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, says that any political situation will have two dynamics: power balance and goal confluence.

Power balance describes the degree to which each person possesses position or personal power. When the power balance is high, power is shared or is relatively equal. When the power balance is low, one person has significantly more power than the other. Goal confluence measures the degree to which each person’s individual goals are in alignment with those of the other person.

These two dynamics form a quadrant of contingencies.

• When power balance and goal confluence are both high, a dynamic of collaboration is created. Relationships are naturally easy to develop and maintain.
• When power balance is high but goal confluence is low, there is equal footing but each foot is going in a different direction. Negotiation is possible.
• When power balance is low but goal confluence is high, power is irrelevant because both parties are going in the same direction. Each person can influence the other.

It looks like this:

The most dangerous quadrant is when power balance and goal confluence are both low.

The party without the power feels dominated and oppressed by the other.

Because oppression and domination are extremely uncomfortable conditions, the individual who is dominated will respond in one of four ways: they will submit, submerge, engage in open conflict, or sabotage.

I suggest you meet with your boss and use this model to analyze your situation. The EVP who attacked you has some power, for sure, but your boss has the backing of the CEO.

Questions to ask:

• Does the CEO have the backing of the rest of the executive team?
• Does he have position and personal power? If so, is it enough to protect your boss and you?
• What are the goals of the bully in question? Is it at all possible that you can achieve some goal confluence?

It is awfully tricky to adapt to political situations when you aren’t used to them. No one wants to think of themselves as a political person, but when the sharks are circling you have to rise to the occasion or end up on the losing end of a battle you never really understood.

The good news is that you have the analytical skills to think this through and to plan smart and measured action to protect yourself and eventually achieve your mandate.

Welcome to the boardroom! It is not a place for the faint of heart.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I am smart, I work hard, and I am a pleaser. These qualities have made me very successful. I am now a senior manager in a fast-paced, high-pressure service business.

My problem is that I have created a monster in my boss. She is so used to my pleasing perfection that she pretty much expects me to be perfect all the time now—which, of course, is impossible.

Any teeny infraction gets a comment now. Here’s an example: She asked me for an outline for a report to the board and gave me the deadline. I don’t usually miss deadlines, but I was traveling that day. My five-hour flight was delayed and the internet on the plane didn’t work, so I sent the report as soon as I landed (about 11:45 p.m. in her time zone).

In my mind, I met the deadline with fifteen minutes to spare. I expected to hear “Well done—you got it in!” Her response? “How do I get you to submit your work before five minutes to midnight?”

This is driving me crazy. How do I get her to cut it out?

Not Perfect

Dear Not Perfect,

Your boss’s behavior does indeed sound frustrating—and for a pleaser, every little criticism can feel like being poked with a sharp pencil! In short, the way to get her to cut it out is to tell her to cut it out. Nicely. But let’s rewind and think this through.

It sounds as if you have been telling yourself a story about how you have both gotten into this muddle together. I suggest a reframe. Ask yourself if the story you have made up about this situation is really serving you. Then you can go to your boss and say, “So here’s what has been happening, and this is the story I have made up about it. I am hoping we can change this dynamic.”

Is it possible the story you have created is based on other relationships you have had in the past? Most of us interpret situations based on previous experience, so that may be at play here. In this case, I think there is a new story available to you—a much simpler one about the lack of explicit expectations and clear agreements.

You interpret a deadline as midnight on that date. It’s possible that your boss assumes everybody interprets a deadline as the end of the business day. When you talk to your boss about her criticisms, tell her it is your goal to please her and make her job easier. But to do that, you need her to be crystal clear about her expectations—all of them—so that you can be sure to never disappoint her.

The next time she makes a snide comment that catches you off guard, point to where the discrepancy was between your understanding of the expectation and hers. You are allowed to stand up for yourself, and you should. She can be more disciplined about clarity, and you can say “ouch” when you feel it.

I don’t necessarily agree that you have trained your boss to expect perfection, but I do think you may have led her to believe you have a thicker skin than you have. Let go of the whole “perfect” story – and rewrite it about how unspoken expectations and assumptions can catch all of us wrong footed.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Hi Madeleine,

I work in a membership organization with a very old-fashioned outlook and a hierarchical structure. I am not a manager, but I did have one direct report at a previous employer. I am very interested in management and leadership and intend to have other management roles in the future.

Management practices here, although not toxic, are very poor. A couple of examples: beyond the broadest headline results, no one is allowed to know the decisions made at the monthly senior management meeting, even if you submit a topic for consideration. You certainly can’t attend in person to present. Offices are in an open plan that is set apart from the senior managers, who never venture out of their areas to engage with their teams.

I’m not planning to remain here very long, but I need to gain some specific skills and knowledge before I move on. My question is this: do you have any suggestions on how to deal with poor management, apart from sucking it up and learning more about how not to do things? I feel very much alone in delivering my objectives, although my manager fondly believes she is supporting me.

I know I can’t singlehandedly change this organization’s culture. I do my best to be professional and positive, but I am often seething inside. I’d be very grateful for your perspective.

Seething

Dear Seething,

I think in some organizations, your point of view might be sought out and welcomed—but probably not in yours. The passionate experts of best management and leadership practices will all tell you that the people and organizations who most need improvement are the ones who are the most oblivious and the most resistant to it. It is the way of the world, sadly.

It is possible your organization would be open to hearing your opinions during your exit interview, especially if you are an exemplary employee. And, of course, you can always write a review on Glass Door, or leave some of your favorite management books lying around the office. If your manager actually seems to care about supporting you, clueless though she may be, take the opportunity to ask her questions and seek to understand her experience, approach, and point of view. Understanding and walking in another’s shoes may help you manage your rage.

Which brings me to the seething thing, which is cause for concern. Anger can be useful. It can help you identify your own needs and values, which in this case is clearly happening. However, unexpressed anger can literally make you sick or cause you to blow up at work in a way that will tank any chance of getting a glowing recommendation. So I encourage you to find a way to simmer the seething. How, you might ask? The most obvious way is to get out of there as soon as possible—but you know that. You say you have some specific knowledge and skills to gain before moving on, but I wonder if those are worth the cost. You have made the decision, though, so you may have blinders on to the possibility that you could acquire those skills someplace more aligned with your values.

If you insist on sticking with your plan, here are some other ideas:

• Pay attention to what is working at your organization. They can’t all be total buffoons. The more you obsess about what management does wrong, the more evidence you will find to support your case. We all do this. It is a form of confirmation bias, and it is worth noticing in yourself. Flip what you pay attention to and start to notice what they do well, or even half decently.

• Meditate. Ten minutes of meditation has been shown to lower blood pressure—significantly—and keep it down for the whole day. Google it. There a million apps that will help you.

• Get more exercise. A couple of extra kickboxing classes a week wouldn’t hurt. Just calm down some of that adrenaline.

• Find the humor. Create a stand-up routine for your group of friends. Start a funny anti-bad-manager blog. Where do you think Dilbert came from?

• Vent with a friend who doesn’t mind it. Set a timer for seven minutes and just let ‘er rip. Then stop and move on.

Ultimately, if you really can’t change a situation, your only choice is to change how you respond to it. You have an opportunity right now to make the decision to choose a different response. Until you can get out, your best bet is to challenge yourself to do that. Treat this like the AFGO (Another Freaking Growth Opportunity) it is. AFGO’s are never particularly welcome or fun, but they sure are valuable.

Sorry.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Drawing a page from his newly released third edition of Leading at a Higher Level, bestselling business author Ken Blanchard asks senior leaders, “Have you set up your organization to be high performing?”

Blanchard identifies seven focus areas to make sure that a company is positioned to be the employer of choice, provider of choice, investment of choice, and corporate citizen of choice.

1. Information and Open Communication—people have easy access to the information they need to do their job effectively. Plans and decisions are communicated so that they are clearly understood.
   
2. Compelling Vision: Purpose and Values—leadership is aligned around a shared vision and values. People have passion around a shared purpose and values.
   
3. Ongoing Learning—people are actively supported in the development of new skills and competencies. The organization continually incorporates new learning into standard ways of doing business.
   
4. Relentless Focus on Customer Results—everyone maintains the highest standards of quality and service. All work processes are designed to make it easier for customers.
   
5. Energizing Systems and Structures—systems and structures, are integrated and aligned. Formal and informal practices make it easy for people to get their jobs done.
   
6. Shared Power and High Involvement—people have an opportunity to influence decisions that affect them. Teams are used as a vehicle for accomplishing work and influencing decisions.
   
7. Leadership—leaders think that leading is about serving, not being served. Leaders remove barriers to help people focus on their work and their customers.

Blanchard also offers a quick 14-question quiz and a link to a 60-page Leading at a Higher Level eBook summarizing the key points.

You can access both here at Blanchard’s recent blog post.

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a small company in a small city. I really like my job, but the atmosphere in my office is so toxic I am not sure I can live with it.

This is my first real job. My immediate boss took me under his wing, taught me the business, and he has my back. He is not without his flaws, but I have made my peace with them and I appreciate everything he has done for me. His boss is the owner of the company—a great guy who hired me and gave me a chance.

The problem is that each man trash talks the other one when the other one leaves the office. Our space isn’t very big—just an office manager and eight or ten guys at any given time—so everybody hears it. Then, when the absent one comes in, it is all “Hey, how are you?”—buddy buddy.

It is weird and off putting. Is this normal office behavior? Should I try talking to my boss? If so, what should I say?

Hate the Trash Talk

Dear Hate the Trash Talk,

No. It isn’t normal. It’s messed up.

I am sorry you have to deal with what sounds like a negative and hostile work environment. You sound like a nice kid who expects adults to behave themselves. I guess it is a rude awakening to know that even fundamentally decent people can get into bad habits. Talking trash behind another’s back is essentially gossip and it can be hard to resist the little hit of pleasure it can provide. I personally have to resist gossip with every fiber of my being, but still succumb at times and then feel bad about it.

I wish I had pithy words for you, but frankly I think both your boss and his boss are unprofessional and immature and would not respond well to your feedback. In the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of your office, you could always drop a hint like “Hey, I am going to get some lunch—don’t talk trash about me while I am gone.”

On the other hand, you really don’t want to be stooping to the middle-school behavior of your supposed betters.

One option is to take your newfound valuable experience and go search out a better work environment. Of course, they will both say terrible things about you when you are gone, but who cares?

Another option is to just roll with it. It seems to fit with the good-old-boy-type culture of the office and probably doesn’t mean anything. You can just observe, let it roll off your back, and remember it when you think about the culture you want to have in in your next job and the culture you want to create when you are the boss.

Keep in mind that bad boss behavior is often as instructive as good boss behavior. You can take the opportunity to notice the urge to gossip in yourself and practice rising above it. Don’t join in. Don’t say anything at all unless it is to defend the person who is not there. Be the model for the behavior you would like to see in your bosses.

Honestly. It makes you wonder where the grownups are, doesn’t it?

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

If someone asks my opinion about their organization making a shift to a coaching culture, I won’t say “think again, my friend”—but I will say “let’s think this through before you go spending a lot of money on consultants and a lot of time and energy rallying the troops.”

Who am I to say anything? I am a passionate advocate for all things coaching. I have devoted the last thirty years of my life to the ideas and technologies that have emerged from the birth and maturity of the coaching profession. I am a champion for leveraging coaching professionals in all areas of life and work. I have created classes and taught managers and leaders to apply coaching tools to increase their effectiveness with their people. I have taught coaching skills, the coaching mindset, and variations of coaching processes to HR and OD professionals—folks who are tasked with being mentors in organizations. I have spent the last twenty-five years deploying coaching in diverse forms in companies all over the world. And I have worked with several organizations seeking to implement a coaching culture.

Here are a few things nobody (except me) will tell you about creating a coaching culture:

Culture Change Is a Very Big Deal

Creating a coaching culture is culture change. That statement alone should make any experienced organizational citizen pause and cringe. It is not unlike asking an individual human being to change—to literally alter their personality. And we all know how rarely that succeeds. Culture change is huge and it is difficult. It takes years of dedicated—actually, let’s go ahead and call it obsessive—focus. And never mind senior level support: if the CEO isn’t frothing at the mouth to make it happen, forget it. In fact, the CEO will need to fire any senior executive who isn’t walking the talk, and for that they will most likely need Board approval. Do you see the problem here? There just isn’t a way to do it halfway. It’s all or nothing, from the very top to the guy who delivers the water.

A Coaching Culture Is Not for Everyone

Each organization must define what coaching culture means to them. I can tell you what I think it means but that won’t help you; it will only give you ideas. Many organizations I’ve worked with became so bogged down trying to get agreement on the definition that the effort actually died of its own weight before it got past the first stage. Other organizations, through their efforts to define and distinguish exactly what kind of culture they wanted and needed to succeed, realized they did need culture change—but the culture they needed was not a coaching culture. It was something else. I considered this outcome a success.

Coaching Is Service

The dirty little secret of coaching that nobody really talks about is this: being an effective coach involves being a better person. Asking people to coach is quite literally asking people to become the absolutely best part of themselves. Many people are drawn to being a coach. Many describe it as a calling. And this is accurate—because coaching is a form of service. It requires the coach to practice enormous self-regulation and demonstrate a highly refined way of relating to others. It requires the coach to put aside all distraction and be fully present in service to another. It requires the coach to manage their impulses to interrupt, solve the problem, or give the answer. These things are much easier for a professional whose only agenda is the success of the individual they are coaching. To do this as a manager or a leader—to constantly balance the needs of the organization, the team, and the individual—requires a very special kind of person. Most people who are successful in organizations are successful precisely because they do have good answers, they do forge ahead, they do solve problems, and they do not let the development of others get in their way. So for them to shift to a coaching culture, we are literally asking these folks to stop the behaviors that have made them successful and exchange them for behaviors that will make others successful. The top sales manager who crushes the numbers every year by scaring the living crap out of his people cannot be exempt. Good luck with that, my friend.

Every Employee MUST Buy In to the Culture

A coaching culture only works if every single individual contributor is fully engaged, bought in, and ready to give 100% to the job. This might seem obvious, but it must be said: for coaching to succeed, the players have to want to be coached. They have to have a strong desire to grow, develop, and improve. They have to be eager for feedback. They have to have a deep locus of control. And these are all traits the organization will need to hire for—they cannot be instilled in people. They can, however, be coaxed from folks who have been beaten into numb submission by nasty, stupid, or just plain careless managers. So a certain number of employees will need to be asked to leave and replaced. Can you imagine a more unpopular reality?

For a long time, coaching was a fad. I am thrilled to report that it seems to be here to stay. But I want to be clear: creating a coaching culture in an organization isn’t a quick fix, and it isn’t easy.

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

The first edition came out in 2006 and featured the best thinking from 18 different authors, summarizing the key concepts from all the Blanchard programs at the time.  The new edition continues that tradition. Now featuring the work of 25 authors, this edition includes four new chapters: Building Trust, Mentoring, Collaboration, and Organizational Leadership.

“The umbrella concept,” says lead author Ken Blanchard, “is servant leadership—the idea that people lead best when they serve first.

“There are the two parts of servant leadership,” explains Blanchard.  “First, the strategic or leadership part of servant leadership is identifying the target: the purpose of your business, your picture of the future, and the values that will guide your decisions.

“Once a target and vision are set, how do leaders execute or accomplish that vision? They must turn the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside-down to begin the operational or servant aspect of servant leadership. This is when you diagnose the individual or team in terms of their skills and motivation to get the job done. You identify the competencies and commitment that need to be developed.  Now your role as a leader is to provide the direction and support people can’t provide for themselves.

“Using a situational approach to leadership through SLII®, leaders must diagnose development levels, says Blanchard. “If individuals or teams are new to a task, the leader needs to provide direction.  If individuals or teams are lacking confidence or commitment, the leader needs to provide support.”

Blanchard points to the new chapter on Organizational Leadership, where the same concept can be applied to an organization as a whole.

“Organizations, like people, can be at different levels of development.  As a new C-level leader, you need to identify the organization’s development level, so you can apply the right leadership style.  We’ve seen too many situations where new CEOs—wanting to make a quick impact—enter organizations and immediately go to their favorite leadership style rather than to the one that is needed. We include two well-known case studies in the new chapter that show the benefits of a good match and the negative consequences of a misdiagnosis and bad match.

“We’ve all seen the negative consequences of poor leadership. Our goal with this book is to provide the next generation of leaders with a road map and curriculum for great leadership.

“This involves focusing on both people and results,” says Blanchard. “You cannot sustain performance over the long term with an either/or approach. The market demands innovative, agile solutions. This requires a both/and approach to management that places equal emphasis on results and the needs of people.  That’s the success formula today’s top companies are using to attract the best and brightest.

“When you lead at a higher level, people work together in a way that excites customers and gets results. Leadership is something you do with people—not to people,” Blanchard continues.  “And profit is the applause you get for creating a motivating environment for people so they will take good care of your customers.

“We hope to inspire leaders to go beyond short-term thinking and zero in on the right target. We want to teach leaders to empower people to unleash their incredible potential. Finally, we want to encourage leaders to ground their leadership in humility and focus on the greater good. It’s a tall order, but we think this book provides everything a leader needs to get started.”

Would you like to learn more about creating a higher level of leadership in your organization?  Join Ken Blanchard for a free webinar on January 23!

Ken Blanchard on 4 Keys to Leading at a Higher Level

January 23, 2019

9:00 a.m. Pacific / 12:00 p.m. Eastern / 5:00 p.m. UK Time / 5:00 p.m. GMT

In this webinar, best-selling business author Ken Blanchard shares key concepts from the newly released third edition of his book, Leading at a Higher Level. Ken will share a four-step approach to building an organizational culture that leads to engaged people and improves long-term business results.

Participants will explore:

How to set your sights on the right target and vision. A compelling vision tells your organization who you are (purpose), where you’re going (picture of the future), and what guides your behavior and decisions (values). Ken will share how a compelling vision creates a strong organizational culture where everyone’s interests and energy are aligned. This results in trust, customer satisfaction, an energized and committed workforce, and profitability.

How to treat your people right. Without committed and empowered employees, you can never provide good service. You can’t treat your people poorly and then expect them to treat your customers well. Ken will explain how treating your people right begins with good performance planning to get things going. It continues with managers who provide the right amount of direction and support that each individual employee needs to achieve those goals and performance standards.

How to treat your customers right. To keep your customers coming back today, you can’t be content with simply satisfying them. Instead, you must create raving fans–customers who are so excited about the way you treat them that they want to tell everyone about you. Ken will share how companies that create raving fans routinely do the unexpected on behalf of their customers, and then enjoy the growth generated by customers bragging about them to prospective clients.

How to have the right kind of leadership. The most effective leaders realize that leadership is not about them and that they are only as good as the people they lead. These leaders seek to be serving leaders, not self-serving leaders. Ken will explain how once a vision has been set, leaders move themselves to the bottom of the hierarchy, acting as a cheerleader, supporter, and encourager for the people who report to them.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to create a culture where leaders who are grounded in humility and focused on the greater good can create organizations where both people and profits grow and thrive. This both/and philosophy, Blanchard contends, is the essence of leading at a higher level.

Use this link to register for 4 Keys to Leading at a Higher Level.  The event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Dear Madeleine,

I work in a professional services firm and we have an open-space concept. Almost everyone is on the phone all day or reading complicated documents.

We have one assistant who supports a whole bunch of the senior people, and she sits right near me. She is an idiot, and loud to boot. Every day she has a new theme, and she works that theme all day – Rainy Days and Mondays, happy hump day, hot enough for ya? Every person who walks by her desk, every single phone call. Clichés on repeat all day long.

I am at the end of my rope, it has gotten under my skin to the point that I can’t even trust myself not to say something rude or even mean to her. She is a scourge to everyone in the office. I have talked about it with my boss, who incidentally has an office with a door. But what would anyone say to her? I use noise cancelling headphones with loud music as much as a I can but when I am on long conference calls, that doesn’t work.

I dream of blessed silence and being able to just sit and do my work without fantasizing about slapping her. Help.

Annoyed

____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Annoyed,

Get over it. The only thing you can do right now is change your attitude about this. Play a game with yourself about what the cliché will be today. Count how many times she says it and start a betting pool. Remind yourself that all the annoying things she does are simply mechanisms to get herself through the day and she is probably dealing with stresses you don’t know about. Take the woman to lunch, get to know the woman and find something that will make you love her.

Re-frame this situation and take a deep breath and decide to let it roll off your back and smile and be kind.

Absolutely do get creative and try to find a quiet place to do focused work if you can. I worked with one manager who used to take his laptop into the emergency stairwell when he needed some quiet time.

This woman has been sent by the universe to test you. You are failing the test. I have failed this test, I kid you not, I left a yoga class I loved once because of the ridiculous breathing shenanigans of the woman on the mat next to me. Who was the one with the problem? She had a great class, so, it wasn’t her.

Let it go. Focus on what is important and you will be surprised by how the sound fades into the background.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Hi Madeleine,

Earlier this year I joined a consulting firm that works with companies in my previous industry. I had taken a break to get a management degree and got a taste of consulting doing an internship that was part of my program.

I believed consulting would be a different world where I would learn a lot—but now, seven months in, I recognize that I learned a lot more five years ago when I started my career as an entry level employee.

My workload isn’t interesting or challenging. My peers are all younger than me, and all they do is complain about their jobs and bad mouth others. And when I told my supervisor how I feel about my job during my midyear review, she didn’t seem to care.

I’ve always had opportunities in the past to work with people my own age or older—people I could learn from who knew more than I did. I’m worried that I’m stuck in the wrong job and that it will negate the five years’ experience I had when I came here.

Please help!

Feeling Stuck

Dear Feeling Stuck,

Everyone is motivated to work for various reasons—the need to pay the bills is usually number one. But it is clear that you deeply value a safe and collegial working environment. A learning environment, challenging work, and adding value also seem to be very important to you.

It sounds like you are not going to get any of those where you are now. But you are only “stuck” if you are being held hostage. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case, so … go! Go as soon as you can. You haven’t let so much time go by that you have lost the value of your previous stint. In fact, you might think about going back to your old company, perhaps this time in a management position.

Honor your own experience and instincts. Find yourself a job where you can excel and a working environment that brings out the best in people.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

If you are a leader looking to improve your organization’s current culture and work environment, here are five steps used by change practitioners that can help with your next change initiative.

1. Look at what needs to change. Ideally, a leader should do this collaboratively with the organization’s leadership team or the entire management team. Examine culture and behavior norms as well as strategic goals. Ask these questions: “How big is the gap from where we are today to where we need to be?” “What cultural behaviors do we want to keep?” “What behaviors do we need to get rid of?” Describe the ideal state. Now ask: “What will people be doing differently?”
2. Create a scorecard. What are the leading—and lagging—indicators of success? Prioritize short-term as well as long-term goals. What are expectations within the next six months? By year one? By year three? A scorecard allows everyone to see the targets as well as the progress.
3. Get feedback. Leaders need to embrace feedback to understand where they may be helping or hurting the change process. Leaders set the tone for organizational culture. When the culture isn’t working, the leader must look in the mirror and ask “What am I doing that may be either serving or not serving our culture?” It may be time for a 360° leadership assessment.

A good 360° assessment is one that gets specific. The best ones I’ve seen have the leader  work with a coach to create questions for the leader’s direct reports, peers, and boss. The coach conducts the interviews, pinpoints themes (similar responses from three or more people), then prepares a report and delivers it to the leader.

4. Be a role model for receiving feedback. A best practice for receiving feedback is for the leader to share with their team what they learned and what they are committed to improving, and then to ask the team to help keep them accountable. This is where the shift in culture begins to take shape. The leader is demonstrating that they are serious about the change and that they personally believe it “starts with me.” Leaders who take responsibility for what’s working and what’s not, and for the behaviors they personally need to embrace, will be the ones who can look back months or years later and be proud of the culture they helped create.
5. Get a coach. You’ve heard that behavior change, no matter how small, can be difficult. Habitual behaviors are often years in the making. Regular coaching sessions help leaders not only make needed behavior shifts but also practice those new behaviors. Some coaches will even shadow a leader and give them timely feedback.

Today’s companies need to be agile and reinventive to keep up with the changing demands of their clients—and the organizational culture plays a significant role in whether those demands will be met. The culture can determine whether people will embrace a change or block it.

The leader sets the tone for leading the change to create a new culture. When implementing change in your organizational culture, use these five steps to get management and employee commitment to making a difference!

About the Author

Joni Wickline is a Vice President with The Ken Blanchard Companies. You can read Wickline’s posts as a part of Coaching Tuesday here at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

“In this model,” says Blanchard, “Leaders assume a traditional role to set the vision, direction, and strategy for the organization—the leadership aspect of servant leadership. After the vision and direction are set, the leaders turn the organizational pyramid upside down so that they serve the middle managers and frontline people who serve the customer. Now the leader’s role shifts to a service mindset for the task of implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership.”

Many organizations and leaders get into trouble during implementation, warns Blanchard.

“When command-and-control leaders are at the helm, the traditional hierarchical pyramid is kept alive and well. All of the organization’s energy moves up the hierarchy, away from customers and frontline folks who are closest to the action. When there is a conflict between what customers want and what the boss wants, the boss wins.”

Blanchard suggests that leadership, learning, and talent development professionals correct this situation by philosophically turning the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down—putting customer contact people at the top of the organization and top management at the bottom.

“This philosophical mind-shift reminds everyone in the organization that when it comes to implementation, leaders serve their people, who serve the customers. This change may seem minor, but it makes a major difference between who is responsible and who is responsive.”

The next step, according to Blanchard, is to align policies, practices, direction, and support to remove barriers for the people who are taking care of customers. This high-investment approach to talent management is designed to bring out the best in everyone.

“Servant leaders are constantly trying to find out what their people need to perform well and live according to their organization’s vision. In top organizations, leaders believe if they do a good job serving their people and showing them they care, the employees will, in turn, practice that same philosophy with customers.”

The Biggest Barrier to Servant Leadership

In looking back at all of the organizations he has worked with over the years, one of the most persistent barriers to more people becoming successful servant leaders is a heart motivated by self-interest, says Blanchard.

“As a leader, you must ask yourself why you lead. Is it to serve or to be served? Answering this question in a truthful way is so important. You can’t fake being a servant leader. I believe if leaders don’t get the heart part right, they simply won’t ever become servant leaders.

“Managers who somehow have themselves as the center of the universe and think everything must rotate around them are really covering up not-okay feelings about themselves. This is an ego problem that manifests as fear or false pride. When you don’t feel good about yourself, you have two options. You can hide and hope nobody notices you, or you can overcompensate and go out and try to control your environment. I always say that people who feel the need to control their environment are really just scared little kids inside.”

“I learned from the late Norman Vincent Peale that the best leaders combine a healthy self-acceptance with humility.  As I learned from Norman, “Leaders with humility don’t think less of themselves—they just think about themselves less.”

An Old Model for a New World of Work?

Blanchard explains that leaders with a servant heart thrive on developing people and helping them achieve their goals. They constantly try to find out what their people need to perform well. Being a servant leader is not just another management technique. It is a way of life for those with servant hearts.

“When I first began to teach managers back in the late 1960s I met Robert Greenleaf, who was just retiring as a top AT&T executive. Bob talked about servant leadership—the concept that effective leaders and managers need to serve their people, not be served by them. It was entirely new thinking then. In many ways, Bob is considered the father of the term servant leadership.”

It is much easier for people to see the importance and relevance of servant leadership today than it was back then, says Blanchard.

“Today when people see you as a judge and critic, they spend most of their time trying to please you rather than accomplishing the organization’s goals and moving in the direction of the desired vision. ‘Boss watching’ becomes a popular sport and people get promoted on their upward-influencing skills. That role doesn’t do much for accomplishing a clear vision. People try to protect themselves rather than move the organization in its desired direction.

“Servant leaders are constantly trying to find out what their people need to be successful. Rather than wanting their people to please them, they want to make a difference in the lives of their people—and, in the process, impact the organization.”

Servant Leadership: The Power of Love, Not the Love of Power

A few years ago, Blanchard received a letter from a man in New Zealand with a line that he believes sums up his leadership philosophy.

“The man wrote that he felt I was in the business of teaching people the power of love rather than the love of power.

“I believe the world is in desperate need of a different leadership role model. We need servant leadership advocates. Spread the word to everyone who will listen! And remember: your job is to teach people the power of love rather than the love of power.”

Would you like to learn more about creating a servant leadership culture and leading at a higher level?  Join us for a free webinar with Ken Blanchard!

Servant Leadership: 4 Keys to Leading at a Higher Level

Wednesday, September 12, 2018, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / 12:00 p.m. Eastern / 5:00 p.m. UK / 4:00 p.m. GMT

In this special event for leadership, learning, and talent development professionals, best-selling business author Ken Blanchard looks at servant leadership and how to create an others-focused culture in your organization.  You’ll learn how to:

• Set your sights on the right target and vision. Great organizations focus on three bottom lines instead of just one. In addition to financial success, Ken will share how leaders at great organizations measure the satisfaction and engagement levels of their employees as well as their customers.
• Treat your customers right. To keep your customers today, you can’t be content to just satisfy them. Ken will share how to create raving fans—customers who are so excited about the way you treat them that they want to tell others.
• Treat your people right. You can’t treat your people poorly and expect them to treat your customers well. Ken will share how treating your people right includes setting clear, meaningful goals, providing day-to-day coaching, and finally, setting up performance reviews so that there are no surprises.
• Develop the right kind of leaders. The most effective leaders recognize that leadership is not about them and that they are only as good as the people they lead. Ken will share how servant leadership principles can guide the design of your leadership development curriculum.

Ready to take your organization to the next level?  Don’t miss this opportunity to explore how to create an others-focused culture and leadership development strategy based on the principles of servant leadership. The event is free courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

REGISTER USING THIS LINK

“Part of effective communication between manager and direct report is a mindset and part is a skillset. Both are required,” says Phillips. “It’s easy for managers to convince themselves they don’t have time for quality conversations, especially when they aren’t particularly interested in having them and don’t really know how to do it.

“Every manager I’ve worked with has so much of their own work to do all day, every day, that some can’t see their way clear to spending time with the folks who work for them—other than performance reviews, rushed interactions, or crises,” explains Phillips. “Conversations between these managers and their people are mostly manager-led directives of ‘this is what I want you to do; here’s how to do it.’ The manager is focused on getting stuff done and on what needs to happen—not on their direct reports’ career growth or needs.

“Unfortunately, when individual contributors in this scenario become managers, they treat people exactly the way they were treated. Sub-quality conversations become a cultural norm.”

The good news, according to Phillips, is that managers can learn to be more effective in their work conversations.

“If a manager has the right mindset and training, it’ll drive the right behavior,” says Phillips. She recommends focusing on three specific conversations to get started.

The Goal-Setting Conversation

“All good performance begins with clear goals. Effective goal-setting conversations begin with clarity—what to do, by when, and what a good job looks like,” says Phillips. “Be specific—and don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s critically important to take the time to make sure both parties are interpreting the same words in the same way to avoid misunderstandings.

“Conversations and relationships can go sideways when people interpret things differently but don’t have a conversation about that interpretation. Never assume!”

This leads to the second important conversation at which managers need to excel—giving feedback.

The Feedback Conversation

“A friend of mine recently told me I tend to hijack conversations,” says Phillips. “The funny thing is, I was just about to tell her she does the same thing! We discovered that what I interpret as hijacking and what she interprets as hijacking are two different things.

“We talked about how, when she’s talking and pauses to think, I rush in to fill the empty space.  It goes back to my experience at home. In my family, you talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and there are no pauses. So when my friend goes silent, I fill in the gap and start talking about something.

“Then I explained to her that I feel she hijacks the conversation when I tell her about something happening in my life and she immediately turns it into a discussion about something that’s happening in her life. It’s related, but it still feels to me like she is making it about her.

“Because we are committed to our friendship, we’re willing to discuss things that are uncomfortable and to consider each other’s point of view. That’s important at work, too. Managers and direct reports need to have the type of relationship where they can talk honestly. When a manager cares about a direct report as a human being—and vice versa—they build up an emotional bank account they can draw from.  That allows them to have difficult conversations when they need to.”

Sadly, the word feedback has a negative connotation in business today, says Phillips.

“People seldom think of feedback as praise or recognition. When people hear that word, they think at best it’s going to be constructive criticism. But it rarely feels constructive—it just feels like criticism.

“It’s another area where most managers don’t have the skills they need—especially feedback around performance improvement and redirection. Managers are so concerned about how someone might respond to feedback, they tend to avoid it altogether.”

One way managers can be more successful when preparing to give feedback is to make sure they are coming at it from the right place.

“Your feedback can’t be based on your own personal agenda,” says Phillips. “It has to be about helping other people be successful or otherwise improving the team. If you come from a personal agenda, your feedback will come across poorly.

“In my conversation with my friend, she gave me the feedback about the way I hijack conversations because she wanted our conversations to be better.  I knew that, and it gave me a chance to think about my behavior and run it over in my mind. That was a good learning for me—to recognize that behavior I picked up from my family might be misinterpreted when I’m dealing with other people.”

The One-on-One Conversation

Listening and focusing on the other person’s agenda is especially important when managers conduct one-on-one conversations with their direct reports, says Phillips.

“It’s easy to fall into the manager’s agenda, where one-on-ones can turn into a review of how the direct report is doing on each of their goals. At The Ken Blanchard Companies, we teach managers to schedule semi-monthly one-on-ones, where the agenda is driven by the individual contributor and what they need.”

The manager’s primary role is to listen and provide support, says Phillips.  Senior leaders are generally better at this than are new managers.

“At the senior levels of an organization, a VP typically will have more experience asking a direct report how things are going and finding out what the direct report needs to succeed. As you move down to the frontlines of an organization, managers are less experienced at taking the lead in a conversation like that.”

Especially at the frontlines, Phillips observes, managers and supervisors need training in how to have effective one-on-one conversations. Otherwise, the direct report is likely to default to the manager and ask the manager what they want talk about.

“It’s important to teach managers to ask open-ended questions about what an individual contributor’s needs are. Suppose the direct report comes into the meeting with a blank piece of paper and says, ‘What do you want talk about?’ The manager should take that opening and say, ‘Let’s talk about some things you are working on. Let’s list the three or four tasks, discuss your development level, and talk about how I can help you.’ Eventually, that direct report will become more proactive and learn to take the lead in those conversations.”

It’s a process and a joint responsibility—one where everybody benefits, says Phillips.

“Leaders influence through the power of their conversations. Train your managers—and your individual contributors—in the skills they need for more effective conversations at work. It’s one of the best ways to improve performance and satisfaction.”

Would you like to learn more about improving the quality and frequency of conversations in your organization?  Then join us for a free webinar!

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT 101: 3 CONVERSATIONS ALL MANAGERS NEED TO MASTER

Wednesday, August 1, 2018, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Managers influence and lead through the words they use and the communication skills they apply. In this webinar, Blanchard senior consulting partner Ann Phillips will share the three types of conversations managers must know how to conduct.

1. The Goal-Setting Conversation—how to set goals collaboratively with a focus on motivation.
2. The Feedback Conversation—how to praise performance when it is aligned and how to redirect performance when it is off track.
3. The One-on-One Conversation—how to set aside time to hear from direct reports using high levels of inquiry and listening.

Don’t miss this opportunity to evaluate how your organization is currently addressing performance management. Learn the elements of masterful performance management and how to apply these principles in your own organization. Ann will share tips and strategies you can put into practice immediately. The event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Register today!

Dear Madeleine,

Our company went to “unlimited PTO” about 16 months ago.  The idea was to try it out for a year and re-evaluate.  The re-evaluation period was moved to the 18-month mark, so it hasn’t happened yet.   

You would think the problem would be people abusing the policy but I have the opposite one: my people are not taking any vacation.  Back in the day when we had a “use or lose it” policy, I had to stay on people’s cases to take their PTO and they would, but now that time off is at the employee’s discretion, I can’t get people to take their vacation. 

I have a team of nine folks and every single one of them seems to feel worried about taking reasonable time off. I am worried that people are going to burn out.  Can I make my people take time off?  What to do? I feel like I need to call a…

Time Out

Dear Time Out,

This is certainly an interesting and trending topic, and you are not alone trying to navigate the dynamics that come with such a big change.  I found an interesting post on this that may help you.

Based on my experience with clients and my own team, I would have anticipated that people not taking time off would be the problem with unlimited PTO.  In fact, the first time I heard of it a couple of years back, I thought, “Oh God, people are never going to stop working! They’re just going to work themselves into an early grave.” In some cultures this is literally true, but that is because of a cultural expectation that people work massive amounts of overtime.  

In Western cultures at least, it would seem that giving people the option to manage their own workload, get their jobs done in the agreed upon timeframe, and take care of their personal lives with flexibility could only be a good thing.  Such an approach treats people like responsible, sensible adults.  But in some organizations many people are burdened with unreasonable workloads.  Some employees are poor judges of how long certain tasks will take, so they take on too much.  Other employees burden themselves by taking on more than they should.  The very ambitious sometimes seek to assure their promotability by simply outworking their peers.  It is up to the manager to figure this out and gauge the proper workload for each person.

In certain sectors people are going to be more affected by high performance pressure than others, making it feel unsafe for people to take time off.

People avoid taking time off for many reasons: For example, they:

• Feel they are indispensable and believe nobody else can do the job they do.
• Worry their customers will be upset by their absence.
• Succumb to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)—they don’t want to miss getting in on an exciting project.
• Fear being judged—they don’t want to be seen as a slacker.
• Bank their hours for a “rainy day”—rather than taking a big vacation, they save their hours in case an unexpected illness or emergency requires them to be out of the office

You, as the manager, need to discuss PTO with every person you lead.  Each individual is going to have a different concern and you can work with them to alleviate those concerns.  You can also work as a team to assure that plans are made in advance and people are properly covered during their time off.

The benefit of the unlimited PTO policy is that it provides people with flexibility in their work day to attend to family or other personal matters without having to submit paperwork.  The danger is that people won’t take the time they need to rest, play, and get a change of scenery—activities that research shows are critical to mental and physical health.

You are the leader of your group.  Make it clear to your people that you expect them to take vacation time, rest time, time to go to doctors’ appointments, and other kinds of self-care. Show them you mean it by doing these things yourself. Have you planned your own vacation?

Love,

Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

My long-time boss recently left and I finally got a chance to be a manager. But soon after I stepped into the role, upper management informed me I needed to cut at least three people from my team as part of a massive company restructure.

I messaged my old boss and she told me this kind of situation was one of the reasons she left. She advised me to do the same thing!

I feel betrayed by my old boss. In four short months I’ve gone from being ecstatic over my new role to being in despair and exhausted. Should I just quit like my boss suggested and try to find another job? What do you think?

Completely Overwhelmed

Dear Completely Overwhelmed,

What a cruel disappointment. That just stinks. The first thing you need to do is calm down and reduce the amount of adrenaline racing through your system. Take a big step back and a lot of deep breaths. I know you feel terrible right now, but you are going to figure this out.

If you just throw in the towel because you feel betrayed and disappointed, I know you will regret not having given this your best shot. Am I projecting? Possibly. I personally have a high tolerance for risk—and I have some whopping failures to show for it. But I’ve learned an awful lot from them.

I suggest you tighten your shoelaces and show up for this challenge. If that is what you choose, here are a few things you can do to stay grounded.

• Get your new boss on your side. Find out what is most important to him or her and in what order. This person must know you are not equipped to deal with this situation, so be honest about it and ask for very clear direction.
• Get to know your HR partner. Take her to lunch. Get him on autodial. If you have to let people go, get all the help you possibly can. It is a terrible thing to have to learn to do, but as a manager it is essential. The best advice I have for you is to be kind, clear, direct and brief. Do not waver. Take personal responsibility to the extent possible. Decide what needs to said and say only those things. If you can get your HR partner to join you—or even to lead the meetings—all the better.
• Figure out who else in the organization you need to have on your side. Relationships are going to be what gets you through this. You can read an article on that here.
• Get smart about change. Start with this great blog post and go from there. You will need this information to manage yourself and your people.
• See if the company will provide you with a coach. If they won’t, find one and pay for it yourself. Make sure the coach has experience working with new managers who need to ramp up fast. If there was ever a time to get help, this is it. Get as much help for yourself as you possibly can.
• Put your sanity and self-care first. This is going to be a marathon and you need to take care of yourself to go the distance. So go to the gym or take a walk. Leave work at a reasonable time. Get your sleep, stay hydrated, and lean on your friends.

Surprise! Things change quickly. Life can throw insane curve balls. Sure, you could decide to leave, brush up your LinkedIn profile, and start networking. But wouldn’t you rather try to rise to the occasion and either win or go down fighting? I won’t judge you if you wouldn’t. I promise.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Do’s and Don’ts When Creating a Servant Leadership Curriculum

You have to resist the temptation to treat a servant leadership initiative as just a training intervention, says Blanchard senior consulting partner Bob Freytag. “Instead see it, ideally, as a gradual way of being.”

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You have to resist the temptation to treat a servant leadership initiative as just a training intervention and instead see it, ideally, as a gradual way of being—a slow, consistent approach that embraces hiring practices, vision and values work, and teaching and encouraging the skills that allow leaders to enter into a deeper trusted partnership with their people.

“A mindset of partnership and safe conversations are the cornerstone of any successful program—but you need to have the vision and values in place first,” says Freytag. “You also need alignment at the top.”

In developing a holistic approach, Freytag points to research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies that looks at the connection between leader behaviors, impact on the work environment, and the way employees make decisions about whether or not they will support the mission of the company.

“People always have a choice —we call it discretionary effort,” says Freytag. “Compliance may work in the short term, but if you truly want the type of commitment and effort that sustains high performance, you have to tap into something more. You have to meet people’s needs. You have to make it safe for people to tell you what they need. It’s about reciprocity. If you can identify and help others take action on what they hold most dear, they will do the same for you.”

Freytag believes a partnering approach—managers and direct reports working together to achieve goals—is best.

“A partnering approach requires higher skill levels in conversation, listening, receiving and delivering feedback, and coaching—but it’s the only way I know to consistently deliver sustainable results and achieve high levels of performance with the workforce,” says Freytag.

Turning into people’s needs

Freytag says servant leadership is a partnership that makes it safe for people to express their needs on the job. It’s about leaders being approachable and turning toward their direct reports in a spirit of partnership to discuss those needs and provide support.

“As a leader, you must realize you don’t have to know it all. You must listen to learn—and make every person you talk to feel heard. When you do that, you set up a sense of approachability. People start bringing their concerns to you because they see you are not only well-intentioned but also available to listen. Your focus must be more on them and less on yourself. This is an essential of coaching. Servant leaders understand that they are always leading by example. Servant leaders also choose and behave so that they reflect the very behaviors they wish to see in the workforce.”

“When having discussions with some leaders in my past, I’ve had some give me their full attention and acknowledge my position only to let my suggestions fall on deaf ears and go nowhere. As a result, I didn’t really feel heard. The leaders I have had the highest affinity and respect for are those who were willing to have a discussion and to do more than just acknowledge my point of view. They got their arrogance and pride out of the way so they could hear my comments. They didn’t have to agree but they certainly made me feel heard.”

“As a servant leader, you have to raise your hand and show others it’s okay to raise their hand if they don’t know the answer. Leadership is about leading by example. You’re always doing that—it’s your choice whether the example is a good one or a bad one.”

Once you give yourself a heart check and are working on being more open, approachable, and available, Freytag says you’re ready to return to the basics of performance management—goal setting, coaching, and review—but with a different mindset.

“So what does it mean to serve—and what do you do differently? We use an operational leadership model called Situational Leadership^® II (SLII®.) SLII® teaches leaders first that people have needs and how to diagnose the different levels of needs people go through on various tasks and goals, and then how to help their people with those needs at their level.

“When aspiring servant leaders take a situational approach, they learn how to help their people grow and develop by meeting their needs for competence and autonomy. It’s a great model that lets leaders know where they are in a conversation. Using this approach puts the leaders focus on the needs of their people first and foremost.”

Freytag asks himself a simple question at the end of every performance related conversation to make sure he stays focused on meeting the needs of others.

“I ask myself: is this person more or less dependent on me on this topic as a result of this conversation? If they are more dependent on me, I’ve missed an opportunity. If they are less dependent on me, I’ve helped them grow and develop competence—which meets a basic psychological need. Now they feel more viable and are able to thrive. That’s a practical, real time, conversation-based perspective. It’s how you stay valuable to others.”

For leadership, learning, and talent development professionals considering a servant leadership initiative in their organizations, Freytag offers some caution on going too big at first.

“Don’t start with the training initiative right away. Start a little smaller—begin with vision and values. Where are you going? What’s important and why? Where are the gaps? I always guard against going too large or too fast with the aspiration of a large-scale training intervention, especially at the beginning of the conversation.”

Freytag also encourages senior leaders to walk the talk.

“It can be as simple as catching others doing things right. Develop recognition programs that recognize when others exhibit behaviors that serve the needs of others. Demonstrate that you value both relationships and results. Slowly you will plant the seeds and prepare the soil for a larger initiative. Once that gets rolled out through the ranks, you can focus on feedback, listening, and accountability.

“Now, piece by piece, you are building a servant leadership culture—and creating a work environment where people can grow and thrive.”

Would you like to learn more about creating a servant leadership curriculum for your organization? Then join us for a free webinar!

Creating a Servant Leadership Curriculum

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Join Blanchard senior consulting partner Bob Freytag as he explores how to create a servant leadership curriculum in your organization. In this special session designed for leadership, learning, and talent development professionals, you’ll learn:

• What servant leadership is—and what it isn’t
• Research on self-oriented vs. others-oriented leaders
• The power of vision, values, and purpose
• Identifying your Leadership Point of View
• Taking a 4-step head, heart, hands, and habits approach to skill development

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to apply servant leadership principles to improve satisfaction, performance, and engagement in your company. You’ll walk away from this session energized and encouraged with fresh ideas to apply in your organization.

Register using this link!

Editor’s Note: This guest post is by Hunter Young.

Think about this past week. Did you go to a business where you received below average customer service? Did it make you feel unwanted? Did you feel like leaving right then? If you answered “yes” to these questions, you’re not alone. Thousands if not millions of customers receive poor customer service every day.

Customers should always be the top priority for every business. Whether you are selling cheeseburgers or Louis Vuitton purses, your main focus should be your customer. Why? Because customers fuel your business—in fact, without them, there is no business.

In her webinar Taking a Top-Down, Bottom-Up Approach to Service in Your Organization, Vicki Halsey explains the importance of Legendary Service®—the title of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ customer service training program as well as the book coauthored by Halsey, Kathy Cuff, and Ken Blanchard. The focus of the webinar is the importance of caring for your customers. Halsey and Cuff use the acronym CARE for qualities needed in a service provider: Committed, Attentive, Responsive, and Empowered. These four elements of Legendary Service® are the core values everyone should follow when dealing with customers—whether you are a manager behind the scenes or a customer-facing service provider on the front lines.

First, you must have a clear goal in mind, Halsey explains. “All good performance starts with clear goals.” Your goals give you a service vision that sets the stage for how you will treat your customers. And remember: you must Commit to serving both your internal and external customers.

Although it is extremely important to give your external customer the best experience possible, serving your internal customers—your peers and direct reports—is just as crucial. Because as a manager, if you don’t demonstrate a sense of caring for your employees, how can you expect your employees to care about your customers? “You have to treat your people the way you want them to treat your customers,” says Halsey. It starts with the top leaders and goes all the way to the front line.

Attentive is the next element in the Legendary Service® model. Once you have clear goals in mind for your service vision, you must identify your customers’ wants and needs. Attentive service providers ask questions, actively listen, and then confirm that they understand.

The next step is to be Responsive. Actions speak louder than words. Doing what you say you’ll do will exceed a customer’s expectations and increase the chance they will return. And don’t forget to express your appreciation to the customer. After all, they could have easily gone to one of your competitors instead of to your business.

The last element in the Legendary Service® CARE model is Empowerment. As a manager, you should empower people to take initiative, ask for the help they need to succeed, and share innovative ideas. You will unleash the full extent of your power when you empower others. Even when it seems impossible, turn that “I can’t” into “How can I…?”

Halsey explains that the best leaders are situational. The Situational Leadership® II model can help a manager identify the amount of direction and support an employee needs at their current development level on a particular task or goal.

Here are some takeaways from Halsey’s webinar:

• The most effective leadership is a partnership.
• Work together with your employees to set a service vision.
• Teaching is very different from telling.
• Set goals, stay connected, and give feedback.
• If your employee does not know the most effective way to complete a task, first work with them to find the best way to do it effectively and then build a platform for them to be able to work through the task in the future.

Following these simple guidelines with your employees will go a long way for individuals, customers, and the business as a whole. Providing Legendary Service will have a more positive impact than you can imagine.

If you would like to learn more about Legendary Service® and Situational Leadership® II, follow this link to view Halsey’s webinar presentation.

“Every time, in more than six years of asking that question, almost every hand would go up,” says Rognlien. “Then I would tell them, ‘Great, now it’s your responsibility not to mess it up.'”

In his new book, This Is Now Your Company: A Culture Carrier’s Manifesto, Rognlien shares that every person must own their contribution to the organizational fabric of a company, no matter what role they are stepping into. It begins by owning your role.

“If the definition of culture is the sum total of all of our behaviors, then you can start tipping the culture in another direction by changing your behavior.”

To help with that, Rognlien suggests organizational leaders encourage higher quality conversations between managers and direct reports. He says most companies don’t have an environment that allows people to sit down with their managers and ask, “How are we going to get through this together?”

Rognlien describes this relationship as a 50-50 partnership, meaning the direct report has just as much responsibility for clear goals and performance feedback as the manager.

“You are half the relationship. If you know more about something, or if something specific requires special care or attention, then you’d better be willing to have that conversation.”

Rognlien goes on to discuss personal branding, feedback, and leveraging your strengths. He closes the interview by discussing a hot topic in today’s organizations—unconscious bias. He explains that bias exists in every organization—and that some biases can actually be helpful and support organizational values.

“At Facebook, for example, we had a bias for moving quickly. When interviewing or working at Facebook, if you were moving slowly, you would feel it—the bias for speed was ever present. That’s an example of a conscious bias that is useful and has served Facebook well.”

Rognlien explains that the unconscious form of bias accumulates over time without being recognized and it can lead organizations to act in ways that go against stated values. While he believes organizations can’t completely eliminate bias, he suggests steps can be taken to bring it out into the open.

“Our goal is to create people and organizations who are comfortable talking about unconscious bias. We have to stop being afraid and we need to have those conversations.”

In closing, Rognlien encourages listeners to step into their fears.

“The only way you will know if something isn’t going to work is to try and fail. If you can learn something from it, was it really a failure?”

Be sure to listen through to the very end of the session, where Ken Blanchard shares his key takeaways from the interview!

Halsey points to some natural connections between The Ken Blanchard Companies’ flagship training program, Situational Leadership® II (SLII®), and the newly released Legendary Service® training program:

Set clear goals. “Goal setting is a key component of both our Legendary Service and SLII program offerings,” explains Halsey. “We are firm believers that, at both the organizational and individual level, all good performance begins with clear goals. In Legendary Service training, we teach the importance of having clear organizational and individual service visions. This spells out who you serve, how you do it, and what the benefit is to the customer. In our SLII training, managers learn how to take organizational goals—such as a customer service vision—and turn them into meaningful individual goals and tasks that inspire direct reports.

“With both programs, managers need to be as clear as possible about what a good job looks like. This can be a little more difficult than it seems on the surface—for example, when there are conflicting priorities. Managers are often asked to hit output quotas at a high-quality level and under a certain budget. In a call center, this might translate into solving each customer’s problem the first time, with current staff who must maintain a call volume of more than 20 calls answered per hour. That can be a challenge. The best organizations get clear on what is most important and set specific, trackable, and attainable goals while maintaining motivation and avoiding burnout.”

Once goals are set, be attentive. In Legendary Service training, Halsey teaches the importance of attentiveness—focusing your attention on the needs and wants of the customer. In SLII, the focus is on the needs of the direct report who is working with the customer.

“You have to treat your people the way you want them to treat your customers. In Legendary Service, we teach people how to uncover the spoken and unspoken needs customers bring to the interaction. We teach service personnel how to ask questions, actively listen, and confirm that they understand what the customer is looking for. In SLII, we teach managers how to be attentive to their employees’ needs by diagnosing their development level on a specific goal or task. From there, the manager can offer different levels of direction or support.”

Halsey explains that most organizations don’t give managers the time to properly diagnose an employee’s level on a given task. Instead, they use a tell-and-do approach. “Managers simply assign tasks such as, ‘Be sure to ask each customer if they’d like to sign up for a credit card, you must maintain a certain call volume, or process a certain amount of claim forms.’

“What’s missing is the manager taking the time to assess each employee’s development level on each task. Is it new to them? Have they done it before? Are they committed to it? Or are they just going through the motions?”

Be situationally responsive. “Every new task requires an assessment of an individual’s competence and commitment to carry it out successfully. If the person is new to the task, you have to respond by providing direction. If their commitment isn’t there, you have to focus on providing support and rationale.

“In Legendary Service, this is taught as being responsive to customers by acknowledging feelings, offering solutions, and gaining agreement. The goal here is to treat the customer the way they would like to be treated—the Platinum Rule,” says Halsey. “When working with direct reports using SLII, this means identifying the amount of direction and support the direct report needs on that task and then gaining agreement on providing it.”

“This part is critical,” explains Halsey. “If we don’t diagnose and we don’t use the right leadership behaviors, we are not giving people what they need to serve customers at the highest level. As managers, we are not modeling a serving mindset.”

Be empowering. Empowerment is the final element in the Legendary Service model—and it is all about teaching people to take initiative, ask for the help they need to succeed, or to share innovative ideas.

“You want to help people step into their power,” says Halsey. “A big part of that is taking a look at the policies, processes, and procedures being used in your organization. Are they helping your people serve your customers or getting in the way?”

Managers must take a measured approach, says Halsey. “Empowering isn’t about delegating the responsibility for service to others. Instead, it is working together to set a service vision, providing training on being attentive and responsive to customers, and then consistently asking for ideas on how to improve the process.

“There is a big difference between telling someone what to do versus teaching them how to do it. It’s taking the time to identify what needs to done and then taking the time to diagnose development level of both internal and external customers and provide the direction and support people need to succeed.

“As a manager, you have to make a conscious decision to slow down and discover where your people are through skillful questions and listening. Then you have to show you care by adjusting your style to respond in a way that provides what they need.”

“It all adds up to showing people you CARE—you are Committed to service, Attentive, Responsive, and Empowered,” says Halsey.  “It’s a great model for creating a service culture internally with your direct reports—as well as externally with the people who purchase your products and services.”

Would you like to learn more about combining Legendary Service and Situational Leadership® II to create a culture of service inside your organization? Join us for a free webinar on May 23!

Taking a Top-Down, Bottom-Up Approach to Service in Your Organization

Wednesday, May 23, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

In this webinar, Dr. Vicki Halsey, coauthor of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Legendary Service program, will show you how to take a top-down, bottom-up approach to customer service that will engage everyone in your organization.

Vicki will show participants how to apply Legendary Service concepts to create a customer mindset for all associates in the company, and then layer on an additional level of training for managers with SLII to bring the learning full circle.

Participants will learn:

• How to apply Blanchard’s 4-step CARE model (Committed, Attentive, Responsive, Empowered) to interactions with internal and external customers in a way that improves teamwork, collaboration, and performance
• How leaders can supercharge performance by improving their goal setting, day-to-day coaching, and performance management skills using SLII principles
• How to turn the organizational hierarchy upside-down so that everyone is focused on serving customers first

Don’t miss this opportunity to create an organizational culture that is aligned, integrated, and focused on the customer!

Register Today!

By combining the ratings of issues rated as very important or extremely important, researchers at The Ken Blanchard Companies were better able to rank the issues presented.

For example, 69 percent of respondents identified “Developing systems and processes that make it easy for clients to do business with the organization” as either very important or extremely important.

The complete list is below.

Most Important Customer Service Improvement Issues

1. 69% Developing systems and processes that make it easy for clients to do business with the organization
2. 64% Improving skills to diagnose the customer issue or need
3. 64% Developing empathy for the customer’s feelings and situation
4. 59% Improving listening skills
5. 58% Improving problem-solving skills
6. 57% Understanding the appropriate communication style to use with the customer
7. 56% Empowering people to utilize their authority to make decisions about how to support the customer
8. 56% Training people to be polite to the customer
9. 43% Making product improvements

To address these issues, Kathy Cuff and Vicki Halsey, co-creators with Ken Blanchard of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Legendary Service training program, recommend that senior executives focus on three critical areas.

Define a Service Vision. If your organization doesn’t articulate clear standards, guidelines, and a picture of how they want employees to interact with the customer, your customer-facing employees will be left to define this for themselves. This undermines the organization’s ability to create a consistent and cohesive customer experience.

Measure Customer Loyalty. According to our survey, 12 percent of respondents said their organizations do not measure customer service and another 16 percent said they didn’t know if their organizations measured customer service. This leaves the organization blind to customer needs and opinions, unable to make improvements to current products, and lacking information necessary to innovate with future products and solutions.

Train Employees. Training employees teaches them how to communicate effectively, become proactive problem solvers, and take ownership for creating a stellar customer experience. Without training, people aren’t always clear on what’s expected of them or what good service looks like. That can undermine the customer experience and your organization’s profitability.

“Service is an organizational culture issue,” says Cuff. “Our goal is for everyone in the organization to see customer service as their job. Whether you’re an individual contributor, a manager, or the CEO of an organization, you must recognize that you can make a difference within your own realm of influence.”

“That begins by being committed to customer service, setting a vision, measuring results, and offering widespread training,” adds Halsey.

You can download the research and learn more about Halsey and Cuff’s recommendations at a free resources page on The Ken Blanchard Companies website.

A new infographic just published by The Ken Blanchard Companies identifies that poor customer service costs organizations in excess of $300 billion dollars annually.

Statistics shown in the infographic include results from a recent survey conducted by Blanchard involving more than 500 leadership, learning, and business development professionals. Survey results reveal that 78 percent of respondents have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience. And a whopping 89 percent have begun doing business with a competitor following a poor customer service experience.

Survey results highlight three common mistakes organizations make that limit their customer service effectiveness.

1. Failing to Define a Service Vision. 19 percent of organizations have only some degree of defined service vision. And another 14 percent have little to no service vision.
2. Failing to Measure Customer Loyalty. 12 percent of respondents said their organizations do not measure customer service and another 16 percent said they didn’t know whether their organizations measured customer service.
3. Failing to Train Employees. While 76 percent of respondents agree that customer service is everyone’s job, only 20 percent said their organizations provide training as a means for improving levels of service and only 15 percent provide training to managers of customer-facing personnel.

“Our approach with the Legendary Service program goes beyond traditional customer service training,” says Cuff. “Service is an organizational culture issue. Our goal is for everyone in the organization to see customer service as their job. Whether you’re an individual contributor, a manager, or the CEO of an organization, you must recognize that you can make a difference within your own realm of influence.”

“That begins by being Committed to customer service,” adds Halsey. “It continues with being Attentive to customer needs, Responsive in taking action, and finally, Empowered for the next opportunity to serve.”

You can download the infographic, access the research, and learn more about Halsey and Cuff’s recommendations at a free resources page on The Ken Blanchard Companies website.

Take an Inside-Out Approach to Improving Customer Service Scores

Customer service expert Kathy Cuff believes that organizations need to take a look at how their culture impacts service. That starts by recognizing that everyone has internal customers. “It’s about looking at the relationships and mindset within the organization.”

You can check out the entire April issue here. Want Ignite delivered to your InBox each month?  You can subscribe for free using this link.

Dear Madeleine,

I have a wonderful team. They are all very different, with different strengths and skill sets, which I think makes us well rounded. They lean on each other when they need to problem solve. My problem is that my boss seems to have it in for one my people—let’s call her “B”.

We just finished performance review time and I rated B as “meets or exceeds expectations” on all of her goals, which is accurate. She needs to improve in a few areas, but so does everyone else on the team, including me!

My boss thinks I am too soft on B and that I should put her on a performance plan and try to manage her out of the organization. I am mystified by this because B does a respectable job, is dependable, and everyone on the team seems to like working with her.

How should I handle this situation?

Stumped

Dear Stumped,

This is not good and confusing indeed. I think you need to go back to your boss with all of B’s goals and competencies and walk through them together to get more detail on exactly what B needs to improve. Tell your boss you can’t do a PIP if there is nothing you see that needs that much improvement. Ask if they have heard feedback they haven’t shared with you. Hopefully this will shed some light.

If your boss just can’t explain things to your satisfaction, it may be that they have personal ulterior motives. If this is the case, you have a real problem—probably one you can’t solve. What ulterior motive could your boss possibly have, you ask? I have a bit of a jaded view on this, having been coaching in organizations for twenty years. I keep thinking nothing can surprise me anymore, only to find myself being surprised, once again, by how badly people can behave. I will resist the temptation to speculate, but ask yourself Why on earth would my boss want B gone?

You might ask B what her experience with your boss has been without revealing that your boss is not a fan. That might tell you something.

It’s possible your boss is responding to organizational pressures. I recently worked with a client who was in the same position as B and it was because she was an early employee who had a very large base salary. It was very clearly a policy from top brass to thin the ranks of folks with high salaries. But here I go, speculating.

As you explore possible motives, you will have to decide whether to take your boss’s side or stand up for B. So now is a good moment to examine your values—and possibly brush up your LinkedIn profile and resume. Now I am sounding alarmist and I’m sorry, but I want you to be prepared.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

In a recent video interview about the release of The Ken Blanchard Companies new Legendary Service program, co-creator Dr. Vicki Halsey shares how vision, learning, and self-reflection can be used to improve service.

An Inclusive Service Vision

“You need a service vision as a first step,” says Halsey.  “Otherwise, people can see service as someone else’s responsibility that’s not really related to their own job.”

To illustrate her point, Halsey shares a story about work she did with the major league baseball team the San Diego Padres.

“We when began our work with the San Diego Padres, they saw themselves as being in the Sports Entertainment business—so employees taking tickets or selling drinks really didn’t have a service vision.”

That’s what led Halsey to work with the Padres executive team to develop a vision all of their employees could rally around: the business of Making Major League Memories.

“Now what is everyone trying to do?  They are trying to deliver a major league memory. A great service vision like this can make it easier for each employee to know how to behave on a day-to-day basis to really serve people at a higher level.”

The Gift of Learning

Halsey also suggests service providers get into the learning business by teaching their customers about their products and services.

“People love learning—including the distinctions of how your product was created, what makes it exceptional, and how it makes them, the customer, exceptional for purchasing it.”

Halsey shares a fun story of how one car dealer used this approach with her husband to increase his loyalty.

“This dealer sat with my husband for two hours, teaching him the history of the engine and everything that had gone into that car. As a result, over the years, my husband has gone back to that dealer again and again to buy new versions of the same car.

“Teach your customers,” encourages Halsey.  “It makes them feel smart and keeps them loyal to your organization.”

A Little Self-Reflection

Finally, Halsey recommends taking a second look at your beliefs around customer service.

“Customers are the reason we are in business—so we need to be responsive in the way they want us to respond. Are we empowering our people in a way that lets them bring the best of who they are to the moment of care when they are serving others?

“Our Legendary Service program gives you a chance to look at your customer service vision and values and choose what you want to be remembered for so that you can create those lasting memories of care that drive customer devotion.”

Use this link to see Halsey’s complete interview, along with other resources, in the Research & Insights section of The Ken Blanchard Companies website.

See service as everyone’s job

Cuff recommends that organizational leaders begin by expanding responsibility for customer service to everyone in the organization—not limiting it to a specific department or group of people.

“The best organizations understand the importance of creating a consistent culture of service throughout the organization. They don’t provide training for just one or two departments or for the front line. They recognize that everyone has customers—either internal or external. Legendary Service starts with a serving mindset and a culture of serving others.”

Be sure to measure incremental improvement

Next, Cuff recommends that leaders create a process for measuring improvement.  The challenge, according to Cuff, is to capture incremental improvements.

“Leaders need to have ways of benchmarking how they are doing—and they have to do it in a way that the customer doesn’t see as a waste of time.

“I have to admit, half the time I don’t fill out service forms unless my experience was either really bad or really great. Organizations need to make giving feedback interesting for customers so that they want to do it. This way, the organization is able to continually evaluate how it’s doing and then use that data to keep improving.”

See direct reports as customer #1

Finally, Cuff recommends that senior leaders encourage managers to see their direct reports as their number one customer.

“Are your managers setting their people up for success? No matter how much training you offer, people won’t deliver Legendary Service if they don’t feel valued by their organization and by their direct manager.”

An Inside-Out Proposition

Cuff believes that better customer service is an inside-out proposition that begins with the individual.  The good news is that this approach pays dividends both personally and organizationally.

“If you constantly look for opportunities to surprise your customers, you’ll be amazed at how much more joy and satisfaction you’ll get—not only from your work but also from the pleasure you provide to others!”

Interested in learning more? You can see Cuff’s complete interview using this link to The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Legendary Service resource page.

In a sense, developing a servant’s heart is a lifelong journey. It is my belief that you finally become an adult when you realize that life is about what you give rather than what you get. The shift from self-serving leadership to leadership that serves others is motivated by a change in heart. Servant leadership is not just another management technique. It is a way of life for those with servant’s hearts.

When some people hear the phrase servant leadership, they associate it with soft management—they think you can’t lead and serve at the same time. Yet you can, if you understand that there are two kinds of leadership involved in servant leadership: strategic leadership and operational leadership.

Strategic leadership has to do with vision and direction. This is the leadership aspect of servant leadership. The responsibility for this visionary role falls to the hierarchical leadership. Kids look to their parents, players look to their coaches, and people look to their organizational leaders for direction.

Once people are clear on where they are going, the leader’s role shifts to a service mindset for the operational leadership task, which is all about implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership.

How do you make your vision happen?  In a traditional organization, all the energy in the organization moves up the hierarchical pyramid as people try to be responsive to their bosses instead of focusing their energy on meeting the needs of their customers. Bureaucracy rules, and policies and procedures carry the day.

This creates unprepared and uncommitted customer contact people who are trying to protect themselves, and it leaves customers uncared for at the bottom of the hierarchy. This scenario doesn’t do much to move the organization in the desired direction toward accomplishing a clear vision. Servant leaders, on the other hand, feel their role is to help people achieve their goals. To do that, the traditional hierarchical pyramid is theoretically turned upside down so that the frontline people, who are closest to the customers, are at the top. Now the frontline people are responsible—able to respond—to the needs of the customers. In this scenario, leaders serve and are responsive to their people’s needs, training and developing them to accomplish established goals and live according to the vision.

Servant leadership is not soft management; it is management that not only gets great results but also generates great human satisfaction.

Interested in learning more about the relationship between servant leadership, customer service, and the role of managers and senior executives?  Join me for a free webinar on Creating a Culture of Service.  I’ll be sharing thoughts, strategies, and tips on how to create an organization with a servant leadership mindset and a servant leadership skill set.

Servant Leadership: 20 Tips & Strategies from Today’s Top Leaders

In a recent Servant Leadership in Action Livecast, over 3,200 leadership, learning, and talent development professionals had an opportunity to hear from 20 of the contributing authors in a new book co-edited by Ken Blanchard and Renee Broadwell. The book, Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results features 44 short articles that take a fresh look at servant leadership principles and how they can be applied in today’s organizations.

You can check out the entire March issue here. Want Ignite delivered to your InBox each month?  You can subscribe for free using this link.

That surprises some people who might expect him to point to his company’s flagship leadership program, Situational Leadership® II, or his best-selling business book, The One Minute Manager®.

Blanchard explains he is proud of the concepts within those products and how they have been widely accepted around the world. But over the last decade, he’s realized that the reason the concepts are well recognized is that they are examples of servant leadership in action—which he believes is the only way to achieve great relationships and great results.

“The world is in desperate need of a new leadership model,” explains Blanchard. “Too many leaders have been conditioned to think of leadership only in terms of power and control. But there is a better way to lead—one that combines equal parts serving and leading.”

In a new book, Servant Leadership in Action, coming out in March, Blanchard has invited more than 40 leaders from diverse backgrounds and industries to share their experiences with servant leadership. Here are a few of their stories.

Southwest Airlines

Colleen Barrett, president emeritus, Southwest Airlines, explains how servant leadership has been a key principle of success since the airline’s founding.

“For more than 40 years all of the leaders at Southwest Airlines have tried to model servant leadership. Herb Kelleher, our founder, led the way clearly—although I don’t think he knew what the expression servant leadership meant until we told him. Herb and I have always said that our purpose in life as senior leaders with Southwest Airlines was to support our people. At Southwest, our entire philosophy of leadership is still quite simple: treat your people right and good things will happen.

“We try in every way to let our employees know they are important and empowered to make a positive difference on a daily basis. Servant leadership isn’t soft management—it’s simply the right thing to do.”

That level of support manifests itself in many different ways at Southwest.  Barrett tells a heartwarming story of servant leadership in action that happened at Southwest a few years ago when a grandfather had to make last-minute reservations to be with a dying grandchild.

“The man was away from home in an unfamiliar city when he learned his grandson was dying and had only a couple of hours to live. The grandfather was desperately trying to get to him.

“Without any managerial intervention, our reservation agent directed the grandfather to head to the airport while she started working to clear obstacles from her end,” Barrett said. “She called the ground ops station at the airport, got hold of a ticket agent, and explained what the situation was. The ticket agent bought the grandfather a ticket with her own money, then went to the TSA checkpoint and told them she would be escorting a passenger who needed to make a flight. She then contacted the gate and explained the situation. The gate attendant, in turn, notified the captain on the flight.

“When it was time to push back, the pilot asked the ticket agent how close the grandfather was to arriving and learned the man was still about ten minutes away. The captain thought about it for a moment, then walked out of the cockpit to the front of the airplane and explained the situation to the passengers. He said, ‘We are going to wait for this gentleman. I think it’s the right thing to do.’ After listening to the captain’s explanation for the delay, the passengers broke into applause. When the grandfather arrived ten minutes later, he couldn’t believe the captain had held the plane for him. The captain’s response was, ‘Sir, this airplane wasn’t going anyplace without me—and I wasn’t going anyplace without you.’”

Synovus Financial

James Blanchard (no relation to Ken Blanchard) is the former CEO of Synovus Financial—a company whose servant leadership culture goes all the way back to 1888 when the founders of Columbus Bank and Trust Company were in the cotton mill business.

One day when a woman was working on a loom in the mill, her skirt got caught on the machine. The hem ripped and her life savings came spilling out on the floor. The hem of her skirt was the safest place she knew to keep her money. That day, the founders decided they could do better for their employees—so they started a bank that would serve as a trusted place for their workers’ life savings. The Synovus culture of service began the moment that woman’s savings spilled onto the floor.

“Over the years our name changed and we grew,” says Blanchard, “but our servant leadership culture endured and became even stronger. A few criticized us, saying the approach was too soft and permissive. So we had to prove it was the exact opposite—that people who were loved, respected, and prepared would perform better. Servant leadership led to higher performance and there was nothing permissive about it. We loved our people and we expected high performance. I believe when you truly care about someone, you not only love them but also expect the best from them and hold them to it.”

That approach has paid off for Synovus. In 1999, the company was named Fortune’s No. 1 Best Place to Work in America. They were on the list so often, in fact, the magazine asked them to stop entering and made them the first inductee into the Best Places to Work Hall of Fame.

“It was a great validation of our aspirations and our actions,” says CEO Blanchard. “I have been retired from Synovus for years but the pursuit of a servant leadership culture at Synovus was my greatest and most favorite satisfaction.”

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen

When Cheryl Bachelder accepted the role of Popeyes CEO in November 2007, the company had been struggling.  Relationships with franchisees were not at the level they needed to be. Even so, a comment from a veteran franchisee caught her by surprise: “Don’t expect us to trust you anytime soon.”

Bachelder and her team decided to focus on servant leadership principles for turning around business performance.

“We began calling the franchisees our ‘number one customer.’ More important, as servant leaders, we began treating them that way. Our first principle was to respect and admire our owners’ passion for their work. Next, we listened to their needs and we accepted our roles and responsibilities in making things right. Finally, we put our owners’ interests above our own.”

The approach was a huge success. Relationships and business outcomes flourished. During the period from 2007 to 2016, under Bachelder’s leadership, Popeyes became a prosperous enterprise again. Franchise owners were served well: 95 percent rated their satisfaction with the Popeyes system at good or very good and 90 percent said they would recommend Popeyes to another franchisee.

“When we started, we didn’t know servant leadership would drive our success. We didn’t have a plaque in the office that stated our purpose and principles. What we did have was a team of leaders who were willing to put the success of the people and the enterprise before their own interests.”

The Power of Love, Not the Love of Power

A few years ago, Ken Blanchard received a letter from a man in New Zealand with a line that he believes sums up his leadership philosophy. The man said, “Ken, you are in the business of teaching people the power of love rather than the love of power.”

Servant leaders are constantly trying to find out what their people need to perform well and to live according to their organization’s vision. Rather than wanting employees to please their bosses, servant leaders want to make a difference in their employees’ lives and in their organizations. In top organizations, leaders believe if they do a good job serving their employees and show they truly care about them, the employees will, in turn, practice that same philosophy with customers.

Blanchard says, “We need servant leadership advocates and I nominate you. Go forth and spread the word to everyone who will listen. And remember: your job is to teach people the power of love rather than the love of power. After all, servant leadership is love in action.”

Would you like to learn more about servant leadership principles and how to apply them in your own organization?  Then join us for a free livecast on February 28!

Servant Leadership in Action Livecast

February 28, 2018 from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Join best-selling business author Ken Blanchard and 20 other successful leaders for an in-depth look into the concept of servant leadership and how it can transform the culture and performance of your organization.  You’ll explore:

• What is servant leadership?
• How does it work in today’s organizations?
• The role leaders play
• How to get started
• How to keep it growing

You’ll hear personal and powerful stories from 20 of today’s most inspiring servant leaders. You’ll be motivated to act after seeing how others have achieved great relationships and results in their organizations through servant leadership.

Attend this online event to:

• Gain a clear understanding of this proven leadership model
• Learn the fundamentals of servant leadership
• Discover how other companies have achieved results
• Acquire ideas of how servant leadership could look in your organization

People lead best when they serve first.  Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how servant leadership principles can take your organization’s performance to the next level.

The event is free courtesy of Berrett-Koehler Publishers and The Ken Blanchard Companies. To learn more, visit the Servant Leadership in Action Livecast registration page.

Dear Madeleine,

I work with a large team and I am getting overwhelmed by the number of requests to donate to different causes.

I am one of the few people on the team without kids, and I have never asked my coworkers to donate to causes I support. But I am barraged by requests to buy wrapping paper, cookie dough, give to school fundraisers, etc., for people’s kids. Other colleagues are forever walking, biking, and running to raise money for various causes. And don’t get me started on Kickstarter campaigns.

I do feel fortunate and I do give back by volunteering at an animal shelter, so I feel like I do my part. My big dream is to travel, so I have been trying to put all my spare cash in a kitty to save up for that.

I know these causes are good ones, so I am always torn—and I feel like if I don’t give, people will judge me. What do you think?

Bled Dry

Dear Bled Dry,

I get it. It would be nice to have unlimited funds to just give all the time–the research shows that it gives humans great pleasure to do so—but clearly you don’t have that kind of money.

Most of the causes you are approached about probably are completely worthy, as you’ve said. And you have every right to save for your big trip. Half of the problem is the tizzy you get thrown into every time you get a request. The kind of mental gymnastics you are forced into is exhausting and is not serving you.

So here is what I suggest—it will be fair to all requesters and will stop constant noise caused by all the requests. Look at your finances and decide what you can afford to give on an annual basis while still saving for your dream. It doesn’t have to be a lot—maybe $200 or something like that. Then, you give a small amount, say $5 or $10 dollars, to anyone who asks, until you reach your pre-determined limit. Then you tell folks that you have maxed out your giving budget for the year. Done.

You will be secure in the knowledge that you thought it through, made some choices, and are sticking to your financial plan. People can judge however they please—and honestly, some will judge no matter what you do. The important thing is that you know you are doing the best you can.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I had my first baby three years ago and now have another one on the way. I am an attorney in a New York law firm and the main breadwinner in our family. My spouse works from home and does the lion’s share of the child care.

As soon as I started showing and announced my pregnancy, the managing partner of our firm—who has been my mentor since I was a third-year associate—called me into his office and talked to me about going “mommy track” and not being serious about my career. He told me he was dumping me as a mentee and was going to find someone else.

I am tough, but it was everything I could do not to burst into tears. I had thought he understood my plans. I feel betrayed and I want to go back and confront him—but I’m not sure he isn’t right. I resent how much I am missing of our first child’s babyhood and am often jealous of my husband. I’m not sure what to do. Help.

Mommy Tracked?

Dear Mommy Tracked,

It is awful to be rejected by someone who you were sure had your back—and also to be questioning your own big plan on top of everything else. From a social neuroscience standpoint, your brain is on tilt right now. It is probably best to take a step back, think things through, and get yourself on an even keel before making any rash decisions.

Let’s start with the personal rejection piece. There are a couple of techniques you can use to lessen the emotional impact of what the managing partner did. If you are like most of us, ever since it happened you’ve been thinking about the things you should have said. Regrettably, this creates a loop that is self-perpetuating—the more you think about it, the more you think about it.

To reduce the emotional grip the conversation has on you, I have a couple of techniques you might want to try. The first is called labeling. To do this, you simply tell the story of what happened and label each emotion you experienced at each moment. For example: “When my managing partner started out with ‘I see you have another bundle of joy on the way, and I am disappointed in you,’ I was shocked at his rudeness.”

Another method is called distancing. You recount the events as if they happened to somebody else. For example: “She walked into the managing partner’s office expecting to talk about the holiday bonus and instead was attacked out of the blue. She was utterly dumbstruck…”

Now let’s address the ambiguity of your future, given that you are doubting your original plan. Uncertainty is very destabilizing so be gentle with yourself. I am not an expert in gender politics so I can only share my point of view here. Having been born at the very tip of baby boom tail, I grew up hearing the assurance that I could have it all: not just work but significant work that generated revenue—and romance and marriage, and children.

Having worked the entire time I raised my kids (who are now in their twenties), I found that women can have it all, just not necessarily at the same time. And not necessarily in all institutions. For example, if you want to have a front row seat to your kids’ childhood, you can be an attorney—but you may not be able to be a partner in a big NYC law firm. It has been my experience that moms who struggle to give 100 percent at home and 100 percent at work benefit most from doing what they love and are good at, in a way that offers them flexibility.

My point here is, now that you have experienced the reality of your dream, you may want to revise it and possibly shift your priorities. Let me be clear: I am not advocating the merits of one path over another. I am advocating that you choose your turn at this crossroads with your eyes wide open.

Take stock. Talk with your spouse about how you feel—just airing your feelings may reveal something important. You may decide to go the warrior route and prove yourself to your managing partner with renewed vigor. Or you may decide to make some changes to your plan. Either way, if you tell yourself and your spouse the truth as you are experiencing it right now, you will soon know what is right for you.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I am a VP of international sales in technology. We are a fast-paced and very lean startup, so we barely have any HR department and no employee manual yet—certainly no one who can help me with this.

I recently hired a young woman who is just great. She is smart, quick, she goes the extra mile, and she’s crushing her numbers and making friends in the organization. She is quickly becoming my secret weapon. But she has no idea how to dress.

Her taste in work clothing is wildly inappropriate. She dressed perfectly for the interview phase, but now the heels are sky high, the skirts are too short and tight, and the necklines are way too low. People’s eyes literally go wide when she walks by.

I am no fuddy-duddy. I don’t care how she dresses on her personal time. I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea about her. She is so smart and talented and I want to keep her from hurting herself professionally. But I feel the need to reel her in before clients start judging us for her lack of judgment.

What can I say and how can I say it without hurting her feelings or having her think I am somehow judging her or harassing her? I know people in the company have begun to talk about her. I need to do something about this fast.

Victoria’s Secret Not Welcome Here!

Dear Victoria’s Secret Not Welcome Here,

Well, there is some good news: she dressed appropriately for the interview, so you know she has some sense about what is suitable. You have that going for you.

You absolutely must give her feedback and make a clear request. Be clear, direct, and nonjudgmental, make a direct request, and give her a timeline for compliance. Let her know you think her work is terrific and this is not a reflection on her overall professionalism. If you have enough of a relationship, you might go so far as to note that you are partially motivated by your desire to see her succeed and grow as a professional and that you don’t want her choice of clothing to undermine others’ perceptions of her credibility and competence.

You have to have someone else with you in the meeting—preferably someone from HR, even if they are in benefits. If you really don’t have anyone, try to find a trustworthy female peer. This conversation needs to be private, but not hidden.

Your new star may very well have only one or two appropriate outfits and may be trying to get by with her regular wardrobe. Clothes are expensive, and it is time consuming to shop. You may consider offering her a wardrobe allowance so that she can get herself up to snuff quickly.

She may also be trying to express herself and build a brand, which is a thing these days. In this case you can acknowledge her strong sense of style, but say that you need to ask her to channel it. It is hard to get it right for women, but there are excellent sources for guidelines.

If you Google images of “professional attire for young women” you will find lots of helpful photos. You can suggest she find a couple of looks that suit her and build from there. You might also suggest a role model in your organization—a woman who dresses appropriately—if there is one.

Timeless rules of thumb exist for women who want to look impeccable at work. When I was first starting to work in the corporate environment, I had almost no professional clothes and I got feedback from my boss. “Your blouse has to have sleeves; your skirt needs to be no higher than 2 inches above the knee and your heels no higher than 2 inches.” I still remember it because it was so specific, and I have used it ever since. My boss was kind and nonjudgmental. I was embarrassed but I was grateful because I just didn’t know.

She may get defensive and that’s okay—just let her vent. Don’t get caught up in any drama. But you must be clear, direct, and neutral. Remind her that you are on her side and want nothing but success for her. Decide exactly what you are going to say in advance—and do not fall into the trap of discussing it. You will only get yourself into trouble. Tell her you are only going to give her this feedback once and you aren’t going to be the wardrobe police because you didn’t sign up for that job—but you expect to see some changes.

I expect this will do the trick. I sure hope so.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

“Some people in organizations don’t realize that the quality of their work experience depends on their being a good follower,” says Fowler. “They don’t know how to manage up—to help their leaders give them what they need to get their work done.

“As a result, leaders are left to guess what their people need, and they often don’t guess correctly.  Direct reports must accept responsibility for knowing and communicating to their manager what they need to succeed.”

In a recent video interview, Fowler explains that organizations need to develop more self leaders—people who take responsibility for working together with their managers to set clear goals, diagnose development level, and get the day-to-day coaching they need to succeed.

“Our Situational Leadership® II program helps leaders understand that they need to be flexible and match their leadership style to the development needs of their direct reports.  In our Self Leadership program, we teach individual contributors the mindset and skillset to communicate what they need.  When direct reports can meet their leader halfway, the potential for achieving goals and peak performance improve exponentially.”

Fowler admits that seeing leadership as a partnership is going to require a mind shift in organizations—especially organizations that still see the primary responsibility for the performance management equation as being the manager’s sole responsibility.

“The focus on the manager as the seat of power is a relic of the old command-and-control approach to leadership,” Fowler explains. “When top leaders believe the only people who need training are those in a position of authority, it limits opportunities for creativity, innovation, and optimally motivated employees. Why not train both sides of the equation? Continue to invest in your managers, but leverage your investment by training the other side of the partnership—the direct reports. Don’t ignore half the equation. Make effective leadership everyone’s job.”

Would you like to learn more about leadership as a partnership?  Join Susan Fowler for a free webinar!

Self-Leadership: The Rest of the Story

Online—September 28, 2017

In this webinar, best-selling author Susan Fowler reveals three key strategies for taking advantage of your organization’s greatest secret weapon–individual contributors. Research finds that organizations using Situational Leadership® II as the foundation of their leadership culture generate real results. But, current and compelling research also finds that success is maybe even more dependent on the proactive behavior and self leadership skills of individuals you depend on to execute and achieve organizational goals. The good news is that proactive self leadership is a trainable skill.

Susan Fowler will share how combining Situational Leadership® II training for managers with Self Leadership training for direct reports creates a 1 + 1 = 3 impact. Leadership is best served as a partnership. Managers and direct reports both have a role to play. Don’t suffer the opportunity loss of just training one half of the equation. Discover the power of equipping both managers and direct reports with the mindset and skillset to set goals, diagnose development level, and match leadership style. Learn the rest of the story for improving alignment, communication, and performance.

Register today!

Hi Madeleine,

I just started a new position with an organization that is pretty young in the association world. I accepted the job because everyone gets along really well and works as a team to accomplish yearly goals.

This type of culture is something I didn’t experience at my previous place of employment, but I was intensely craving it.  

I am in a leadership role and am responsible for creation and development of programs. My position is fairly new and the person who held it before me is still with the company. 

Here are my questions: 

• I love the close bond everyone has with each other, but it’s hard to see where I fit in with the team. Everyone has strengthened their bond over time and there is no way I can catch up. We have fewer than 10 people in the office. How do I develop relationships with everyone when it appears cliques are already established? 
• There is a ton of ambiguity in my position since it’s fairly new. What questions should I ask to get a clear understanding of expectations? 
• When is too soon to make organization recommendations? From an outsider’s perspective, I see a couple of things that if changed would benefit the organization. However, I’ve been on board for less than four months.  

Looking for Friends 

Dear Looking for Friends,

First, congratulations on finding the culture you’ve been looking for. It sounds like you have a terrific opportunity to thrive and make an impact. Now to your excellent questions.

Don’t worry about making friends—instead, seek to create amicable and productive working relationships. This will take the pressure off you and everyone else. The people who will end up being your friends will emerge as a byproduct of you being yourself and producing great results over time. You can’t force it.

Since it is such a small office, I’d suggest asking each person for a one-on-one meeting—either an official in-office meeting, or a coffee or a beer. Start with each person by asking about them, their role, and their goals, which will help you understand how to support others in achieving their goals while you pursue your own. Then ask them what they love about their jobs and what they think their strengths are. This will help you know who to go to for help in ways they will appreciate. This part of the meeting will endear you to just about everyone—because you can’t underestimate how delighted people are to talk about themselves!

After that, to find out about their expectations of you, ask simple questions like:

• If I am successful in this role, what will we have in six to nine months that we don’t have yet?
• What do you think a home run would look like?
• Is there anything I should not be focusing on?
• What can I do to make your job easier?
• What do you think I need to know?

Listen carefully, take notes, don’t argue with what you think are terrible ideas, and don’t make any promises. Do brainstorm around ideas you think have merit, ask questions, and say thank you.

You should definitely spend some time with the person who previously had your job—and make sure you understand what their hopes and dreams are for the role.

Now let be me clear: I am not suggesting you actually have to do everything people think you should do. You may decide to do some things based on these conversations, and you can give credit to whoever’s idea it was, but mainly you are getting to know people, developing relationships, and acquiring a bird’s eye perspective of how you can add value to the organization.

While you are at it, let each person know they can always feel free to come to you with further ideas or feedback. So now you have opened a door and made sure people know it will stay open.

Presumably, your boss has given you some clue as to what is expected of you. If not, after all of your interviews, you can formulate your own thoughts about priorities and run them by your boss to make sure you are on the same page. Then you will have a plan you can feel good about.

Regarding how soon is too soon to make recommendations, now is definitely too soon. There is nothing like fresh eyes for uncovering inefficiencies or outmoded processes. That’s what makes it so hard to keep your mouth shut. But if you are smart, you will do exactly that. Over time—and there is no rule of thumb about how much time—you will understand why things are done in certain ways. You will be right about some of the potential changes, but you will have to earn the right to voice a strong opinion. How? By keeping your head down, being easy to work with, and doing excellent work. When you begin adding unquestioned value to the organization, people will ask you for your opinion and you won’t have to worry if it is welcome or not!

As you move forward to craft your action plan and launch yourself into execution, make sure you include many people in your plans and activities. Before you know it, people will be coming to you to share ideas and get input on their projects, good things will start happening, and you will be “in.” Stay focused on your work and you won’t even notice it happening—you will just wake up one day and realize that it has.

So happy for you. I am sure you will be brilliant and have as many friends as you need.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

In this model, leaders have to be prepared to play two different roles in the organization.

The first is a strategic leadership role: setting the vision and direction for the organization. As Blanchard explains, “All good leadership begins with establishing a compelling vision for your organization that tells people who you are (your purpose), where you’re going (your picture of the future), and what will guide your journey (your values).”

Blanchard describes how the traditional hierarchical pyramid works well for setting the vision and direction of the organization. While leaders should involve experienced people in this phase of leadership, the ultimate responsibility remains with the leaders themselves and cannot be delegated to others.

But once people are clear on where they are going, the leader needs to turn the company’s organizational chart upside down.  Mentally and symbolically, this illustrates the critical need of leaders to serve the people who are closest to the customer when it comes to implementation.

Many organizations and leaders get into trouble during the implementation phase, says Blanchard. “When the traditional hierarchical pyramid is kept in place for implementation, who do people think they work for? The people above them. All the energy of the organization moves up the hierarchy, away from the customers and the frontline folks who are closest to the action. When there is a conflict between what customers want and what the boss wants, the boss wins.”

Leaders Working for their People

Blanchard shares a great story about when his daughter, Debbie, was in college and working at Nordstrom. One day over lunch, she said, “Dad, I have a really unusual boss. At least two or three times a day, he asks me, ‘Debbie, is there any way I can help you?’ He acts like he works for me!’” Blanchard smiles when he recounts the story. “That’s exactly right, Debbie,” he said to his daughter. “At Nordstrom, you’re able to say ‘no problem’ to a customer without checking with your boss. That’s why they’re known for their great service mindset.”

Blanchard also points to a mirror vs. window metaphor Jim Collins uses in his best-selling book Good to Great.  When things are going well in an organization run by a top-down leader, that type of leader tends to look in the mirror, beat on their chest, and declare, “Look at what I’ve accomplished.” But when things go wrong, this leader looks out the window to see who to blame for the failure.

“Servant leaders approach it in the opposite way,” says Blanchard. “When things go wrong, they look in the mirror and consider what they could have done differently. When things go well, they look out the window to see who they can praise.”

“What kind of leader would you rather work for?” asks Blanchard in closing. By combining equal parts serving and leading, a servant leader creates a balance that produces both great results and great human satisfaction.

You can read the complete article in the July/August issue of Chief Learning Officer.

A visionary/direction, or strategic, role—the leadership aspect of servant leadership; and

An implementation, or operational, role—the servant aspect of servant leadership.

The visionary role involves establishing a compelling vision that tells people who you are (your purpose), where you’re going (your picture of the future), and what will guide your journey (your values).

When Walt Disney started his theme parks, he was clear on his purpose. He didn’t say “We’re in the theme park business,” he said “We’re in the happiness business.” Why the distinction? Because being in the happiness business helps keep Disney cast members (employees) aware of the company’s primary goal.

Disney’s clear purpose for his theme parks also helps his people understand the company’s picture of the future, which is “To keep the same smile on people’s faces when they leave the park as when they entered.” After all, they are in the happiness business!

The final aspect of establishing a compelling vision for Disney theme parks was to identify values that would guide staff and management on their journey. Disney parks have four rank-ordered values, called the Four Keys: safety, courtesy, the show, and efficiency. Why is safety the highest ranked value? Walt Disney knew if a guest was carried out on a stretcher, that person would not have the same smile on their face leaving the park that they had when they entered.

The traditional hierarchical pyramid is effective here in the leadership aspect of servant leadership. People look to their organizational leaders for vision and direction. While these leaders may involve others in the process, the ultimate responsibility remains with the leaders to establish a compelling vision and define strategic initiatives for their people to focus on.

After the vision and direction are set, it’s time to turn the organizational pyramid upside down and focus on implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership. Nordstrom excels at this. Their leaders work for their people—and now the focus and the energy flows toward the customer, not toward leadership. This one change in mindset makes all the difference. Nordstrom’s servant leaders help their people live according to the company’s vision, solve problems, and achieve their goals.

Our daughter, Debbie, worked at Nordstrom when she was in college. After she had been there about a week, I asked her how the job was going.

She said, “It’s going well, Dad, but I have a really strange boss.”

“Oh?” I said.

“At least three times a day, he says to me, ‘Debbie, is there any way I can help you?’ He acts like he works for me.”

“He does,” I said to Debbie. “That’s the Nordstrom philosophy—they’re all about serving rather than being served.”

For years, Nordstrom employees were given a card with just 75 words printed on it. It read:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

I love to tell the story about a friend of mine who went to Nordstrom to get some perfume for his wife.

The salesperson said, “I’m sorry; we don’t sell that brand in our store. But I know where I can get it. How long will you be in the store?”

“About 30 minutes,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll go get it, bring it back, gift wrap it, and have it ready for you when you leave.”

That’s exactly what she did. And she charged him the same price she had paid at the other store. Nordstrom didn’t make any money on the deal, but what did they make? A raving fan customer.

So you see, servant leadership isn’t a strange concept at all. Large organizations like Disney and Nordstrom have been practicing it for years and doing pretty well. How about you and your company? Give servant leadership a try—you’ll be surprised at how it will help you achieve great relationships and great results.

“No. It’s not a panacea,” says coaching expert Patricia Overland in an article for Chief Learning Officer. “Determining when coaching is a good investment can be challenging.”

Overland shares a couple of examples from her experience when a leader may not be ready to learn and apply coaching skills. Overland explains that offering coaching without addressing these underlying beliefs is usually a recipe for failure.

• If they prefer command and control: They just want people to do their jobs.
• If they don’t value innovation: They just want people to do things the way they’ve done them before.
• If they have a negative attitude about people: They believe that people only do what they have to.
• If they have a negative attitude toward coaching: They know all the answers and think coaching is a flavor-of-the-month methodology.

For those leaders ready for coaching, Overland points to a research study conducted by Human Capital Institute and The International Coach Federation which found, “A strong coaching culture positively correlates with employee engagement and financial performance. Nearly two-thirds of respondents from organizations with strong coaching cultures rate their employees as being highly engaged, compared to only half from organizations without strong coaching cultures. In terms of financial impact, 51 percent of respondents from organizations with strong coaching cultures report their 2015 revenue to be above that of their industry peer group, compared to 38 percent from all other organizations.”

To be successful at coaching, Overland identifies five must-haves that need to be in place:

Environment: Before coaching, managers should let direct reports know they’ll be doing things a bit differently. Set the stage, get permission to coach and check in frequently to ensure this new way of leading is hitting the mark.

Trust: Trust is a foundation for any coaching relationship. The manager’s role can be especially hard because they have both perceived and real power over direct reports. Getting people to talk openly and honestly about their needs, motivations and skill level takes patience, practice and trust.

Intent: It is important to begin by being very clear about objectives and goals. If a manager notices that coaching is going off track, they should examine their own motivations and beliefs. It can be powerful to say, “That didn’t go the way I intended” and start again, working to be more supportive and encouraging.

Action: Development is good. Development with focused action is better. The purpose behind great coaching is to influence some kind of change in mindset and behavior. Encourage others to take specific actions that are focused on achieving a desired outcome. This moves coaching beyond much disdained navel gazing to a strategy with real bottom-line impact.

Accountability: Leaders who use coaching skills help others commit to behavior change. Even with the best of intentions, people get sidetracked, work gets reprioritized, and sometimes life just gets in the way.

Coaching effectively supports long-term and sustained employee development encourages Overland. “Consider the higher engagement levels, trusting relationships and financial health to be gained from a shift to a coaching culture — and say yes!”

To read the complete article at Chief Learning Officer, click here.

“The research shows that the front line people are the ones who are essential to making your initiatives work—whether it’s implementing a change or a customer service program. You have to depend on those self leaders to make it happen.”

In Fowler’s experience, when L&D professionals equip individual contributors with the mindset and skillset of self leadership, they build a healthy and empowered workforce that is productive, innovative, and committed to getting results for their organizations.

In developing the learning design for the new Self Leadership training program from The Ken Blanchard Companies, Fowler begins by addressing mindset—Challenging Assumed Constraints, Activating Points of Power, and Being Proactive. This mindset is a real shift in perspective for most individual contributors who come into a training not understanding the benefits of self leadership.

Fowler explains that without the right mindset, individuals are less likely to embrace, learn, and apply the skills of Setting Goals, Diagnosis, and Matching (getting an appropriate leadership style), which are taught later in the program.

“Our Self Leadership program provides the skills individual contributors need to take the initiative and be responsible for their own success—for example, to proactively clarify goals and seek out the direction and support they need.”

Fowler is excited about the opportunities a renewed interest in self leadership offers to organizations—and she is appreciative of new research that helps make the business case for investing in self leadership training.

“When we first offered our self leadership program back in the early 1990s, we knew it worked from the results our clients were achieving, anecdotal data, and our own impact studies. What didn’t exist back then was outside empirical research that made the case for investing in individual contributor training.

“Over the last 15 years, there’s been a relative explosion of academic research that confirms our experience. Current research validates our approach to self leadership, which includes proactive problem solving, asking for feedback, selling your solutions, and negotiating for authority.

Blanchard’s own research into Employee Work Passion informs other aspects of the program.

“Teaching self leaders to activate their own points of power is important in helping them understand that they shouldn’t depend on someone else’s power to get the job done. In every case, the program teaches participants to challenge assumed constraints and take positive action.

“Performance in organizations is often stalled because employees don’t know how to ask for what they need when they need it. Our Self Leadership program teaches individuals the mindset and skillset to proactively take the reins, achieve their goals, and accelerate their own development.”

PS:  Interested in learning more about the Blanchard approach to creating a culture of self leaders?  Join Fowler for a free webinar on May 31–Creating a Culture of Self Leadership. It’s complimentary, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

In reviewing research for the redesign of Blanchard’s Self Leadership program, Fowler found compelling evidence that suggests the single most essential ingredient in organizational success is the proactive behavior of individual contributors.

Drawing on research from several recent studies (see references below), Fowler points to individual behaviors that lead to broader organizational success.

• Proactively seeking feedback
• Learning how to sell solutions to problems
• Taking charge to effect change
• Getting needs met for direction and support

The bottom line? Organizations benefit from training their workforce in self leadership skills.

As Fowler shares in the video below, “Leadership is a two-sided coin.” Organizations are best served by investing in not only traditional leadership training for managers but also self leadership training for direct reports. When leaders and direct reports have a shared purpose and a common language, the results are that much more powerful.

What’s the Impact of Having Self Leaders?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q18t_ya_OhA

For more information on the impact self leadership can have on overall organizational success, check out Blanchard’s new white paper, Developing Self Leaders–A Competitive Advantage for Organizations, which looks at the correlations between a self leader’s proactive behaviors, optimal motivational outlooks, and the intentions of employee work passion.

You can download a copy of this white paper at the Blanchard website.

References

Goal Orientation and Work Role Performance: Predicting Adaptive and Proactive Work Role Performance through Self-Leadership Strategies. Marques-Quinterio, P. and Curral, L. A., The Journal of Psychology, 2012.

Serving one another: Are shared and self-leadership keys to service sustainability? Manz, C. et. al., Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2015.

Thinking and Acting in Anticipation: A Review of Research on Proactive Behavior. Wu, C. and Parker, S., Advances in Psychological Science, 2013.

Self-leadership in organizational teams: A multilevel analysis of moderators and mediators. Konradt, U., AndreBen, P., & Ellwart, T., European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2008.

Dear Madeleine,

I am an attorney with a state government agency. I run a team consisting of a few other attorneys and paralegals and administrators. I have been here four years and I love the office, my boss, and the work.

About six months ago my boss hired a new person—who is a peer to me—to run another team that does work similar to what my team does. She is a bully. She literally yells at everyone in the office. She storms out of meetings, goes and talks to clients behind my back and tells them all the things she thinks I am doing wrong.

She is wreaking havoc with everyone in the office. I now time my lunch so I don’t run into her in the break room. She is so unpleasant that it is literally taking a toll on my health and I am considering taking another job. But I love it here and was hoping to finish out the last few years of my career here. What do you think?

Bullied

Dear Bullied,

I consulted our talent engagement manager who has just completed his Ph.D. dissertation on workplace bullying. The field is quite new and there is a lot that is still not known or understood about workplace bullying and how to stop it. Workplace bullying, it turns out, is quite different from what happens in school.

The leader in this field is Dr. Gary Namie, whose website is http://www.workplacebullying.org/. This is an excellent resource that will help you to frame your own experience and find potential ideas for what to do.

From reading your letter, though, I can point out that you do have power here. This person is not your boss, and you have a good relationship with your boss. This is good because it means the bully does not have the power to retaliate against you, so you can actually stand up to her. Be ready to set boundaries with her—“Do not contact my clients without my express permission,” “Do not yell at me,”—because you can and you should. You have already given her power by allowing her ridiculous behavior. You can tell her that her behavior is ridiculous and you won’t allow it.

It sounds like you are not the lone target—the bully treats everyone horribly. This is good also, because it means you have not been singled out for ill treatment. Bullies often target one person who is a threat and try to break them down systematically. Possibly this person is not so much a bully as just plain awful, possibly nuts, and eventually HR will figure it out and she will be fired. You can make their job easier by documenting every single interaction in which you feel threatened, whether it happens specifically to you or you observe it happening to someone else. When things come to a head—which they inevitably will because your boss can’t allow it to go on forever—you will have your ducks in a row.

In the meantime, since you have a great relationship with your boss, you might share with him that you are considering taking another job because this person has made things so unpleasant. But also tell him that you love it where you are, you enjoy working with him, and you were hoping to stay. You could actually pull the “It’s her or me” card, which is a rare card to have in your hand. You are probably the kind of nice person who wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, but that’s what I’m here for. This could be a good wake-up call for him. Often, bosses are at a loss when they realize their new hire is a terrible mistake, and they put their heads in the sand and hope it will go away. This is not going away.

Mostly we don’t get what we deserve; we get what we fight for. Stay strong, Bullied. If you really need to go, then go. But it sounds to me like you can fight and win this one. So put on your armor, get up on your horse, and try.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine

My question is: how does an organization scale their management team and keep skills sharp as they grow?  We are a software development services shop and we are growing fast—we currently have 30 people in management positions.

It’s getting more difficult each day to make sure everyone is managing from the same playbook.  We have seen many of our customers reach this stage and fail.  We don’t want this to happen to us.

Growing Fast

Dear Growing Fast,

Well, thanks so much for asking! How smart you are to notice the chaos out there and to be extremely intentional as you grow. I will try to keep this short because, honestly, the answer could be a Ph.D dissertation, and also because I need to keep this from being a long plug for everything we do here at The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Begin with the end in mind.  I have two words for you: Vision and Values.  Vision means that you know exactly where you are going and how you are going to get there.  The book to help you with this is Full Steam Ahead. Values means identifying what is most important to you in your culture and your employees.

A lot of lip service is given to values—but once an organization decides what they are and prints them up, they are generally forgotten. All you have to do to see what happens when organizations do this is to read the news. If you don’t want your employees writing blogs someday about what a nightmare it is to work for you, you can avoid it right now at the beginning of your journey.

The organizations that last and make it are the ones with values that are used to make decisions. You are still a small shop. You and the other founding leaders can get together and work to get crystal clear about where you are going and what is most important about how you’ll get there.

Next, you need absolutely solid operational leadership.  Jim Collins nailed it in his book Good to Great. Collins says you have to get the right people on the bus, in the right seats, and get the wrong people off the bus. This means keeping the people who can be aligned with the vision and values and who have the right skill sets and attitude to go the distance.  It sounds so stunningly simple, but I can assure you it is fiendishly difficult to achieve. It’s much easier to start with this idea rather than having to retrofit later.

Finally, you will want to absolutely bullet proof your day-to-day performance management—and I can say with confidence that our Situational Leadership® II model is what you need. Learn it and teach it to every manager in your organization, because it is a no-brainer.  Seriously, I managed people for a decade before I stumbled over it and thought, “OMG where has this been all my life?” I just can’t imagine how anyone manages people without it.  Well, actually, I take that back, you don’t have to imagine it—all you have to do is look around at all the terrible managing that is going on.

The fundamentals are:  it starts with crystal clear goals and tasks for each employee. Then the manager and employee work together to assess the employee’s competence and confidence on each task or goal.  From there the manager and employee identify the right mix of direction and support so the employee gets exactly what they need to win.  Finally, the manager and employee check in regularly to go over goals, tasks, and development needs so there is no confusion. As Ken Blanchard says, “Common sense, but not common practice!”

If you focus on these fundamentals, the good news is that you won’t have to be worried when it comes time for performance reviews.  As you probably know, many companies are getting rid of them—see our recent white paper here.

I suppose you were hoping for something a little less involved.  Sorry.  But if you have your company’s vision and values articulated in a way so that there can be no confusion, and if you have the right people in the right jobs and everyone actually knows what their job is, you will be ahead of the game.

The upside to getting all of this even kind of right is incalculable.  It will mean staying in business when your competitors flame out.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

This guest post is by Doug Hung, Director, Blanchard Taiwan.

Every year, China conducts a nationwide college entrance exam for all high school graduates. The exam spans two days and covers Chinese, foreign languages, mathematics, and a student’s choice from one of the humanities (politics, history, geography) or sciences (physics, chemistry, life sciences).

Students are also required to write an essay to demonstrate their critical thinking and analytical capabilities.

In 2016 the national exam board provided a pair of portraits as the essay prompt. Students were asked to write an 800-word essay based on the picture.

In the top example, a student is shown receiving a perfect score of 100 and a resulting kiss on the cheek from a pleased mother, while the other student receives a below 60 percent failing grade with a resulting mother’s slap to represent disapproval. In the bottom example, the passing student scores 98 percent but doesn’t meet his mother’s standards, while the other student barely passes and gets an approving kiss.

This essay prompt points to a truth that is often overlooked when measuring performance at work—the subjective nature of measurement.

Corporations set elaborate guidelines for performance reviews, designed to promote and enhance meritocracy. Yet in reality, all systems have flaws—and when they are carried out by individuals, who have inherent bias, performance evaluations can often overstate or understate an individual’s actual contribution within the organization.

Every organization has both stars and laggards. We tend to shower stars with praise and opportunities; yet, as stars take on more responsibility, the likelihood of them making mistakes gets higher. Is the organization prepared to reward them or to criticize their failures?

On the other hand, oftentimes little is expected of low performers, and organizations are known to direct a substantial amount of resources to manage them. When laggards demonstrate initiative or spurts of excellence, teams seize the moment and shower them with praise in hopes of continuing progress. If an organization and its stewards really hold performance standards equally across all types of performers, all performance results should be treated equally.

Whether one believes management resources are better spent strengthening stars or improving low performers is a matter of debate. The reality is that managers do—and should—inject subjectivity into their evaluations.

The key is to recognize that performance reviews should be clear in definition but flexible enough to acknowledge the nuances that come with human interaction. Failure to do so undermines faith in the objectivity of any performing benchmark.

We all use metrics to measure others and ourselves. As companies continue to examine their performance review processes, we should remember that all metrics are ultimately references of an individual’s contribution. Performance reviews must be used to encourage people to excel. This can be done only through an approach that is objective, constructive, and judgment free.

I am a COO in a multi-national import business. Our founding CFO has a foot out the door and we want to promote our comptroller, Bridget, into the job. She is lightning fast, ahead of the curve on international issues, articulate, and can really stand up for herself in what is—let’s face it—pretty much a man’s world. She has her MBA and she seems to be ambitious.

The problem is, Bridget has no idea how to dress. This may seem superficial, but we are all charcoal-suit- with-the-white-shirt guys. She dresses like she buys her clothes at Victoria’s Secret and she wears way too much makeup. Her unprofessional appearance totally distracts from her good qualities.

So far she has worked behind the scenes so no one has said anything. But if she were promoted we would need her to take part in client meetings—including in Asia and the Middle East—and she would need to look professional and upscale.

No one knows how to approach Bridget about this. We are actually considering just passing her over and starting a search. What do you think?

Buttoned-up Suit

___________________________________________________________

Dear Buttoned-up,

I think it would be sad for both Bridget and you—not to mention expensive in both time and money—to pass her over and launch a new search before making an attempt to solve this problem. What a waste if you have someone already on staff who is almost perfect.

I have to wonder: where is your HR department in all of this? I can only assume they are also buttoned-up suits and don’t even see this as their problem since you are the one writing. You obviously believe in this woman and want to see her succeed, so I encourage you to make the effort—but you will need to tread lightly.

It would be absurd to overlook someone who knows and gets along well with all of you, who will have zero learning curve about the company, and who is incredibly competent. But I understand the dilemma and I believe Bridget needs to hear the feedback and act on it. This is no small feat, but it can be done. It is not that unusual a situation but there are some big hurdles here—so you have to decide if they are worth the effort.

Have the talk.

It would be ideal if you could find a female executive who could have a talk with Bridget—but it sounds as if that might not be an option. So someone—maybe your HR person, maybe you—is going to have to man up and sit down with your whiz kid. In the conversation, make it crystal clear that her current way of presenting herself may well be holding her back—and that she needs to literally show the executive team that she is willing and able to up her game to be considered for this promotion.

This needs to be handled sensitively, but if it is clear to Bridget that the person giving the feedback really has her best interests at heart, it could work. I am speaking from experience. I went from being an actress to working in the corporate world and had no idea how to dress. My new boss, whom I trusted, gave me feedback after my first client session: my skirt was too short, my heels were too high, and I shouldn’t wear sleeveless blouses. I was truly embarrassed, but I knew it wasn’t personal and I was grateful because I knew my boss had my back. I went shopping and started a collection of what I considered work uniforms.

Be specific.

When talking to Bridget, use neutral language to describe the problem. Be very specific without adding value judgments. An example: “We think you are great at your job—but in order to consider you for any promotion, we need you to dress more professionally. You’ll need to wear blouses that have short or long sleeves and that fit properly, are not revealing and do not gape. Your heels should be no higher than 3 inches, and the length of your skirts and dresses should be no shorter than 2 inches above the knee.” (I would say no higher than fingertips of extended arms, but some people have short arms and anyone over 50 really should not be using that rule anyway.) Emphasize that clothes should fit properly and not be tight.

If you aren’t really sure, consult a website—there are tons. Here is one: What Is Professional Business Attire for Women?

Offer assistance—and understanding.

You might consider offering Bridget a wardrobe budget so that she can quickly and completely rebuild her work wardrobe. This process takes years for most of us. It would help to suggest a personal shopper as well, and equip Bridget with pictures of what you would consider to be appropriate. Also, think about gifting her with a lesson from a professional makeup artist to help her find a daytime appropriate work look.

Dress and presentation are rooted in culture and deeply personal. Many people see how they dress as a fundamental form of self expression. You can have conversation about this. Women who dress provocatively in the workplace are often following a role model that makes sense to them; or they really enjoy making an impact; or they simply believe it is what is expected of them. I have worked with many employees over the years who see the way they dress as a political statement and feel, therefore, that clients should be okay with it. But nothing will ever make it okay for an outside consultant to wear Birkenstocks to a meeting at Goldman Sachs. I often compare dressing for success to wearing a costume to make the right impact on a specific audience.

Present rationale—and time line for the shift.

Make it very clear that this is not personal—it’s because you believe she will be more effective if she is able to match the way she presents herself to the culture of the organization. Certainly remind her that in her personal life she can, of course, wear whatever makes her happiest.

Set a reasonable target date for when you expect to see a substantial change in how she presents herself. Expect that you will need to give her a few second chances—and when she shows up at work wearing something unsuitable, gently but specifically point out to her what is inappropriate.

Be realistic about the outcome.

Finally, keep in mind that she may not be able to make the shift. I have seen it happen a couple of times. This would also be sad but at least you will have made the effort, and she will have been given the  opportunity. Some people will never compromise their self image for any reason.

This is a tricky situation. It touches on gender equality issues, personal identity, and the compromises we all make to fit into our tribes of choice. But it is not as if you are a nasty boys’ club asking her to wear tighter, shorter skirts. That would be a real problem. You want to invite her to be in your executive level club—where you know she deserves to be. But to get that invitation, she needs a costume change.

Let me know how it goes—and good luck!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I manage the logistics department of a global aeronautics engineering company. My job is intense—my whole team works like crazy when we are on deadline and relaxes a little bit when things aren’t so hot, which still means 50-hour workweeks. I think it is important for people to get a bit of a break because when we are on, we are 100% focused and we cannot make errors. 

So I came in to work on Monday to find that my boss—who has been amazing—has been fired! No reason given. Enter a new boss, someone who was apparently hired to vastly increase our output. I am sick at heart at the unfairness of it all, and I have no idea why they let my boss go. He was smart and funny, really cared about us, ran a tight ship, and always made really good decisions. I want to call my former boss to find out what happened and to share how sad I am to see him go. Is this something I can do? I am so worried about my team. 

 Shell-shocked

Dear Shell-shocked,

I am so sad for you; it is terribly jarring to come in to work thinking it is business as usual only to find someone that important is simply gone.

You have no way of knowing why he was let go, so be careful of assumptions. The fact that your boss’s replacement is already in place leads me to believe it was all very carefully planned. Your company has probably just given no thought whatsoever to managing the human side of big change. That is pretty normal.

There is no law that says you can’t contact your old boss. There is no reason whatsoever not to maintain the relationship with someone who was obviously an excellent leader and someone you admire. You might ask him to be a mentor to you. He may be able to share what happened or he may not; either way, it’s possible he will have some tips to offer on managing your political landscape.

Be careful of rumors about why the new person was brought in. You don’t actually know what your new boss’s mandate is, or how he will execute on it. I understand that you are worried about your future—the brain, after all, hates uncertainty—but give yourself a break and try to relax until you know what is going on.

You can, however, prepare. Get your ducks in a row and update the job description, performance plans, scorecard, or output stats for each of your people so you are ready when the new boss asks for them. Be ready to make your case for the ebb and flow of work being critical to the work product.

Finally, try to manage yourself. Change is hard under the best of circumstances and it sounds like your company is scoring an epic fail on helping you and your team with this one. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be a good leader for your people, providing them with perspective and reassurance until you all know more. You can also be a role model for staying open to possibility and the potential of new and better ways of doing things.

Breathe deeply and stay grounded.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

This post is by Paul Murphy, Director of Channel Sales, Asia-Pacific.

It is commonly assumed that leadership behaviors are driven by the cultural norms of a given country or region. But research shows that organizational culture is actually a much stronger driver of leadership behaviors than is country or regional culture.

For example, an employee at a large US multinational in China is far more likely to use the behavioral norms of that organization than those of her home country. Similarly, an English manager working for a local Japanese firm is much more likely to embrace the behaviors of that firm than those of his home country.

What does differ dramatically inside multicultural organizations is the way people communicate. A US manager wanting to take a directive approach with an employee will likely use very clear and concise language, whereas a Chinese manager in the same location may use a more subtle and circular message to direct an employee. Both managers are being directive, but their communication styles are very different.

It is easy to confuse leadership style with communication style. In Situational Leadership® II, we learn that leaders must apply differing degrees of directive or supportive behavior depending on the development level of the direct report.  The challenge is not to look at which style of leadership (directive vs. supportive) is most appropriate in a certain culture, but to take a closer look at how we communicate that style with each other.

Here are a few things to remember:

• All cultures have both supportive and directive leadership. However, the way these styles are perceived may differ. Just because an employee perceives that their manager isn’t being clear doesn’t mean the manager isn’t being directive.
• Pay attention to leadership style and communication style. It is possible to act in a supportive manner while communicating in a way that may be perceived as directive.
• Position your organizational culture as the key driver of behaviors. Make allowances for communication styles, but still identify desired directive and supportive behaviors for leaders.

Leaders from any background, though they inevitably have a preferred leadership style, should be able to learn to flex their style with a bit of training. However, their communication style may still be misunderstood by colleagues from different backgrounds if their communication styles are misaligned.

Use these tips to keep your focus on communicating the right leadership style appropriately!

About the Author

Paul Murphy is the Director of Channel Sales, Asia-Pacific, responsible for all aspects of the indirect channel business within APAC for The Ken Blanchard Companies. Paul is based in Hong Kong and can be reached at paul.murphy@kenblanchard.com

Dear Madeleine,

I work in HR in a small company and recently had to let someone go. The process is never pleasant—and to make matters a bit more complicated, the terminated employee was a bit of a gossip. 

Now that she is gone, many employees are upset and have been speculating out loud about the reason she was terminated. Those who were involved in the decision are professional enough to not share the details that would make the reason clear—and, of course, as an HR professional I am also unable to do that. 

The objective side of me sees that I cannot be responsible for the perceptions of so many people and that I need to accept the damage that has been done, keep a strong visage, and stand by the company’s decision. However, I am human and I cannot help but feel that the loaded comments and meaningful glares I’m receiving are unjustified and there has to be some solution. I knew coming into the HR field that not everyone would like me, but in a small company I feel this could have a lasting negative impact on my image. 

What do you think? 

Quite Vexed

Dear Quite Vexed,

Being in HR is tough. You know way more about people than you ever wanted to know, and you have to keep it all to yourself. You are constantly fighting a deep psychological need to be included as part of the “in group”—a need that will never be adequately met at work.

I recently read a thread on a LinkedIn HR group about being friends with people at work. The folks in that group definitely seemed to agree that when you are in HR you can’t be true friends with anyone at work, although you can have friendly acquaintances. I have received the same advice being married to an owner of a family run business—but I will confess that I am hopeless at not bonding with people I really like and respect.

Your solutions, I would say, are as follows:

If in fact the employee was fired for cause, then you do have a problem because you really can’t share details.

If it was a position elimination, work with your colleagues to craft a statement explaining the business reason for the change. In the absence of information people make things up, and what they make up is usually way worse than the truth. People might be treating you poorly because they are afraid about their own jobs, so it would help a lot if people knew that their jobs were safe. Providing some kind of brief, reasonable explanation will help.

If this person was fired for being a nasty gossip and there is nothing you can say, you must face the comments and the looks head on. Get the veiled aggression out on the table by saying something like “Please don’t judge me based on assumptions you are making.” The response will almost certainly be denial, but this should stop the behaviors. When you feel as if you are being subtly bullied, calling the bully out is often the best way to make him or her back down.

Finally—and this is the most critical thing—remember that to survive in HR you are going to have to develop a very thick skin—thicker even than you expected. You also must take care of yourself by building and nurturing a very strong network of friendships outside of work so that you can get your needs for inclusion and social connection met.

You can also develop connections with others of your HR tribe online. Check into the LinkedIn group I mentioned: Linked: HR #1 Human Resources Group, or find a group like it.

There are a lot of people out there like you, many in small companies feeling a little lost, lonely and isolated. And there is a lot of support to be had.

Hang in there!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Hi Madeleine,

I am a hotel manager for a high end property in a large metropolitan city.

I am trying to create a program where department heads and midlevel managers at the hotel can come together to chat candidly about their career goals and how to achieve them. I have a vision to devote 30 to 60 minutes each week to this new program. 

Any suggestions on what sort of things I should focus on in that time duration?

I’d also appreciate your suggestions on what to call these meetings so it sends a good message. Thanks for any feedback. 

Developer

Dear Developer,

Well, isn’t your team lucky to have you! I applaud your desire to develop people; it’s not as common an idea as you might think—despite our best efforts to spread the word.

With the amount of time you are devoting, it will be important to generate consistent value that hits your goals. I have some thoughts about how to do that:

• First, get input. Ask the folks you’re inviting a couple of questions, such as: “What would make you attend?” “What would you want to get out of it?” “What would you want to give?”
• Second, you might want to think about starting with a small cohort of your very best people. Meet someplace nice, make it visible, and spread the word that the group is by invitation only. This way when people are invited to join, they feel singled out for something positive. The group is seen as a reward—an elevation of status.
• Don’t be surprised if people are a little skittish at first about sharing their aspirations. It may make them feel exposed and vulnerable. They need to feel safe before they open up. Starting with something relatively broad like discussing current goals. Ask each person for one goal they would want to share with the group to get accountability and support. By choosing what to reveal, they feel a sense of control.
• Consider discussing higher level management topics like servant leadership, building trust, managing change, leading teams, personal development, or time management, to name a few. Invest in a couple of good leadership books—I’d suggest you start with the greats (Drucker, Bennis, Maxwell, Dupree, Blanchard, Collins, or Goldsmith, for example) and discuss concepts from them.
• For those who don’t consider reading that much fun, excellent lists are available of current top management thinkers. Provide links to short blog posts for ideas that spark discussion.
• Alternatively, each session could be driven by a question such as: What makes a good leader? How should a leader deal with someone who is late all the time? What do you know you should be doing as a manager but don’t quite know how?

In terms of what you might call your group, consider tying the name of the group to one of the stated values of your organization. For example, a value at Zappos is to “Deliver Wow with service.” They might call a group like yours The Wow Club.

Here are some other idea starters: Future Focus Conversations, Career Maps, Plan A Club , Brainstormers, Opportunity League, Look Ahead Club, Onward and Upward, Growth Guild, Career Club, Career Alliance, Rising Stars, or Talent Incubator.

There is always the possibility of a clever acronym—maybe something like LEAD—Leadership Exploration And Development, or MILE—Maximum Impact Leadership Effectiveness.

(You might get more ideas in the comments.)

Do let me know how this works out!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I am a regional VP in a global asset management firm. I am stationed far away from headquarters as I am responsible for all of the projects in my region. My boss and his boss hold regular conference calls I am expected to attend. I am often tasked with presenting plans and budgets to a room full of people, when I am the only one on the phone.

Here is the problem; both my boss and his boss constantly interrupt me when I am speaking on these conference calls. They also interrupt me in regular conversation—and I am used to that—but I hate it when they do it on these calls. It disrupts my flow and I think it makes me sound like I don’t know what I am talking about.

I am often the only woman in these meetings. I have tried to convince myself that that doesn’t make a difference, but I wonder. What do you think?

Interrupted

Dear Interrupted,

I did a spit take when I read your last lines, only because there are reams of research showing that men interrupt women far more than they interrupt other men. And, sadly, women interrupt other women more than they interrupt men. (See Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language for more on this.)

But there is no woman working in business—wait, scratch that—there is no woman anywhere who needs research to tell her that. Ladies, I can hear you laughing out there. It is simply a fact of life. Let’s not turn this into a discussion about gender differences or inequality, because that conversation is being conducted elsewhere by people who know a lot more than I do. Instead, let’s focus what you can do.

The whole conference call thing exacerbates the situation; being the lone disembodied voice on the phone only adds to the level of challenge—and I know, because I lived it for a decade. Here are some tactics to try.

First, prepare. Get some time on the calendar with your boss and his boss before each of these meetings. Go over the highlights of your presentation and suggest places where they might chime in with additional material or add color commentary. Tell them that when they jump in on top of you it weakens your effectiveness as a presenter, and request that they let you manage the flow during your presentation. This is a completely reasonable request. Even if they don’t comply, you will have a stronger grasp of your narrative and not get distracted by interruptions. Also, you can take note of moments when the substance of what they interject might have been stronger if presented in another more structured way. Of course, that will depend on your relationship—and how much goodwill is present—with both parties in question. You will be the best judge of that.

In your preparation, make sure that you practice being loud enough, that you can be briskly paced without rushing, and that you are super concise. It might be possible that you invite interruption by being hesitant or—the kiss of death—long winded and repetitive.

Second, leverage technology. Given the ease and availability of video technology these days, there is no reason for you not to be on camera. Things are always better when everyone can see each other. A global asset company must have video conferencing available; but if not, use Skype or Zoom. If you work from home, make sure the area behind you looks spiffy and professional—and make sure you also look spiffy and professional, if only from the waist up. Nobody needs to know you have bunny slippers on underneath the desk. If you don’t have an office, use a conference room. I don’t care if it is 5 a.m. your time, it really makes a difference to make the effort.

Finally, put up the hand. The truth about people who interrupt is that they generally aren’t even aware they are doing it. They are extraverted thinkers who are afraid to lose their thought or idea in the moment. Or they are impatient and excited about the topic.

Okay, some really are just jerks, but not as many as you might think.

But remember: these folks interrupt only people who allow it—plain and simple. So practice a new behavior and some language that sends the signal “cut it out.” The key is to never sound annoyed, but to keep an anticipatory look on your face like you can’t wait to hear what they have to add once you are finished. I hate to tell you to smile but it never hurts, especially in the US. In the US that is true for both genders.

Examples:

“Please let me finish.”

“Hang on a sec, I’m not done.”

“Can you hold your idea until I complete my thought?”

I mean it when I say practice, so enroll a friend or significant other and practice lines like these with different scenarios. I can’t tell you how many clients I have worked with—more women than men, but this is a fairly common situation—who have done this and have seen it make a huge difference. If you commit to becoming someone whom others do not interrupt, you can make it happen (unless you run for President of the United States, in which case, apparently, all bets are off).

To be fair, it is incredibly challenging to do this with a boss—and harder with a boss’s boss. So think about initiating this move in a private meeting, rather than in a group. Once a person gets the request once or twice, they will often cease and desist.

So be prepared to be brief, concise, and compelling in your presentations. Self identify as someone who does not get interrupted. And practice putting up the proverbial hand. Honestly, you have made it to VP in a global asset management firm—everyone thinks you are smart and worthy of respect. Be bold.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Often, 20 to 35 percent of value-added collaborations come from only 3 to 5 percent of employees, according to a recent study shared in a Harvard Business Review podcast with Rob Cross, University of Virginia professor and coauthor of the article Collaborative Overload.

“As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance,” says Cross.

The downside? This kind of collaboration usually comes at a cost—not only to the person who is shouldering the load but also to the organization. Here’s why.

When someone is called on to be involved in everybody’s projects, sooner or later an organizational bottleneck is created when numerous groups are waiting for the person to work on their job. This is not healthy for the organization or for the overworked individual, says Cross. When one person is in extreme demand from several sources, that person will eventually suffer from burnout.

Wondering if you may be an excessive collaborator? Your calendar can offer some hints. Over the past four months, how many times have you:

• been involved in projects outside your core responsibilities?
• received routine informational requests about projects that you don’t need to be part of anymore?
• been asked to make routine decisions when you are not adding value?

All three of these questions point to signs of either a poorly designed role or one that has experienced scope creep. For example, you are unable to let go of old projects that could now be handled by others or you are still part of an archaic approval process put in place years ago that doesn’t really serve the organization any longer.

Cross explains that bottlenecks, burnout, and turnover can affect the performance of an entire organization. Don’t let yourself become a pinch point. Begin in small ways to remove yourself as an assumed collaborator by saying no, shifting priorities, and placing buffers in your work life.

Finally, if you are a manager, make sure you are not inadvertently asking people to become overloaded bottlenecks themselves. For example:

• Do you ask people to be always on?
• Who do you pick for assignments—is it typically the most connected, overworked people?
• Do you ever choose people for tasks who are less busy and could quickly learn the job?

Take a look at your culture and what kind of work ethic it encourages. Don’t put yourself, your people, or your organization at risk of burnout.

To learn more about the risks of collaborative overload, check out the complete article at Harvard Business Review. Are you a podcast listener? You can hear Rob Cross discuss these concepts on the HBR Ideacast.

This post is by Paul Murphy, Director of Channel Sales, Asia-Pacific.

Since China really started opening up to inbound investment over the last 30-plus years, there have been numerous stories of how challenging it can be for foreign executives to lead local staff in China. We have created a certain mystique about this concept and the belief that it is simply something that non-Chinese must struggle with.

Given the importance of China in the world economy and for many multinational corporations, this belief is hugely important. Is it really accurate though?

Just as an executive from the United States would notice differences in workplace norms in Germany or an Indian manager would need to develop new skills when leading a team in Brazil, there are inevitably differences to be found between China and other countries or regions around the world.

However, the fundamentals to leading a team in China do not differ in any significant way from leading in any other country. Simply put, these are

• Set clear goals that are easily understood.
• Identify the level of competence, motivation, and confidence of your direct reports for each of these goals.
• Adjust your own leadership styles and behaviors to best support the above.
• Check in frequently with your individual team members to assess their progress with these goals and adjust your own leadership styles where appropriate.

Although the fundamentals are the same, the ways your team members work with you might differ. Their comfort level in communicating their needs and concerns is often a challenge. You may find they are less willing than Western staffers typically are to highlight problems or a lack of motivation they are facing. As a result, patience and a need to interpret more nuanced messaging are definitely valuable, but it does not change the need to follow the above process in order to successfully lead your team.

Ultimately, whether you are heading to China and are concerned about how you can lead your team or you are in another part of the world and work with Chinese colleagues, do not worry. If you are a good leader in your home country, you will be a good leader in China. Follow leadership best practices, listen, learn, and be patient. You will see great results.

About the Author

Paul Murphy is the Director of Channel Sales, Asia-Pacific, responsible for all aspects of the indirect channel business within APAC for The Ken Blanchard Companies. Paul is based in Hong Kong and can be reached at paul.murphy@kenblanchard.com.

Hi Madeleine,

I work in the health profession and I’ve just accepted a position in management at a new facility. I don’t know the staff at all. All I know is that the senior leadership wants a change in the management at the facility.

What advice would you have on how to tackle a new job at a new place with a heavy agenda? What should I do first???

 New Healthcare Leader

Dear New Healthcare Leader,

Well, congratulations! Isn’t this exciting? It sounds like you have a great opportunity here! I can’t tell from your letter if the facility is new overall, or if it is just new to you. If it is actually new, this could be good because you won’t have the burden of history—it can be hard to make changes when it’s “always been done that way.”

If it is just new to you, you will need to spend some time asking questions and listening to understand the culture of the organization. Working with people to change things begins with understanding and meeting them where they are.

In terms of change, you will want to press senior leadership to understand what exactly the prior management did wrong, so you don’t repeat those mistakes. If they won’t tell you, it was probably something illegal, immoral, or both. I imagine this won’t be a problem for you.

What they must tell you though is what a good job looks like. This answers the question, “How will you know you are successful?” You say “heavy agenda” but you have to make sure you know what it really is. Ask them for crystal-clear goals, and if they don’t provide them, come up with your own and present them for approval. Some senior leaders simply don’t have the skills or the patience to articulate the vision or the goals of the organization, so if they won’t do it, do it for yourself.

Once you have your goals set, work with your people to get their goals super clear. Also, spend as much time as you can getting to know your people and assessing their strengths. Work with each of them to ensure that their goals leverage their skills, interests, and talents.

Once everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing, make sure they are getting the proper direction and support they need to do it. Make sure everyone, including you, has a short-term goal that they can achieve so that you all have the experience of early success together. Share stories of any and all wins. People will remember stories and it will feel good.

Finally, we have a lot of books here at The Ken Blanchard Companies, but the definitive one on this topic is not by Ken or any of us. It is The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins and I have worked through the book with many clients. Google it, read summaries, and be sure to look at the templates of what to do in your first 30, 60, and 90 days. I highly recommend it.

Best of luck in your new role!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I read last week’s column with interest because I am also a fairly new manager in a small organization who isn’t sure whether to speak up about a problem. I have five direct reports. Two of them have come to me to say they have seen an employee who reports to another manager stealing things such as office supplies, toilet paper, and teabags and coffee from the break room.

I was going to stay out of it—until I actually witnessed her emptying half a box of artificial sweetener packets into her purse! I was sitting close by, and she didn’t even seem to care that I saw her do it.

This behavior strikes me as really odd. I would assume people know they are not supposed to help themselves to items meant to be used by people at work.

I have no experience in how to deal with this. Should I tell my manager? Should I tell the person’s manager? I kind of hate to get her in trouble, but I also don’t want to send the message that the behavior is okay.

Unsure

Dear Unsure,

You really need to say something. As a manager, you represent the organization so your silence has power. Now that you personally witnessed this behavior, to not report it would be seen as condoning stealing. Stealing is a strong word for this kind of petty theft, but it is technically the truth.

I guess it might be possible the offender doesn’t realize what she is doing is wrong. It may simply be that her own manager needs to talk to her about it.

The more likely scenario is that she does know it’s wrong and either has some kind of underlying compulsion she needs to deal with or is hostile in some way toward the organization. Perhaps she feels she is underpaid and therefore entitled to these extras.

So you need to tell someone—it could be your own manager, the manager of the offending party, or if you have an HR person you could start there. Even if you feel a little like a rat, it is the right thing to do.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

As you’ve probably noticed, the political situation in the US has gotten completely out of hand, with presidential candidates running amok. I don’t know what your political opinions are, but I am hoping you can help me with my untenable situation.

Both my boss and one of my direct reports are super, emphatically, enthusiastically—let us go so far as to say insanely—supporting one political candidate whom I find repugnant. In the past we have had witty repartee about politics, but nobody has a sense of humor about this anymore. It is beginning to feel personal; almost dangerous.

Yesterday, I was standing in the hallway and saw my boss pass my employee’s cubicle. They laughed about some new development and high-fived each other. My boss caught the look of horror on my face.

I am actually worried about my job now. What can I do?          

—Surrounded

Dear Surrounded,

Well, I guess it is too late to warn you to strap on your seat belt. We knew it would be a bumpy ride, but who saw this crazy fun house ride coming? On the other hand, I have been listening to the new musical Hamilton, which has drawn my attention to the fact that political opponents used to challenge each other to duels, which often ended in a death. Did you know that in 1804, US Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel? They had been lifelong friends and colleagues. I find this remarkable. So, as nutty as current affairs may feel, we have actually come a long way.

Are you really worried about your job? Because if you are serious, you should probably have a chat with HR and start documenting every event that makes you feel unsafe. You could have a hostile workplace on your hands. At the very least, HR could deliver a warning to your boss.

But to answer your question “What can I do?”—it is an age-old adage that you should never talk about politics or religion in polite social company. This is your opportunity to practice extreme self-regulation. This means:

1. Keep your mouth shut.
2. Find and maintain your sense of humor. Just because nobody else has one doesn’t mean you can’t.
3. Absolutely refuse to take any of it personally. Develop a mantra—something like This is not personal—that you can repeat to yourself when you start feeling hot under the collar.

It’s hard to do this when you care as much as you obviously do. But taking the high road will make you feel like the better person. Perhaps you could channel all of that passion into volunteering for your candidate.

And for goodness’ sake, VOTE!

Love Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

I was out of town with a friend of mine who is building a new home and we needed a measuring tape to measure some things in the kitchen. We found the tape at a nearby store and took it to the counter to check out. The young man checking us out picked up the item to scan, but the price did not show up. As we all know, this happens from time to time, so he paged a runner to go to the aisle and find out the price.

After a couple of paging attempts, it was apparent no one was going to answer the call. Since the cashier could not leave the counter to check on the price, he told us to just take the measuring tape—for free. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. My friend felt strange about taking it and offered to walk back and get another one or write down the information for him, but he kept insisting she take it for free, saying, “No one will ever know.”

This item was under four dollars—not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things—but think about the underlying attitudes this behavior represents.

• Does this sound like an employee who was surprised no one answered his store page for a price look-up? What does this say about an internal expectation of responsive service in this store?
• Does this sound like an employee who was proud to work at this store and who felt like a part of the team? Or was he just trying to move things along—even to the point of giving away merchandise?

Attitudes matter. If each employee at the store felt this way and allowed at least one customer a day to take something for free—or a similar scenario—think about how quickly those cases would add up and impact the store’s profitability. Sure, some customers may have said “Great, thanks!” and left, but no one feels good when standards are lowered. It reflects poorly on the store, the individual employee, and even the customer if they accept the trade-off.

Serving customers is not about giving away the store. It’s about demonstrating a genuine, caring attitude toward them and making them feel taken care of and responded to. If you want your employees to know the difference, do these three things to help them serve your customers at a higher level—a level that makes everyone proud of every interaction.

1. Onboard your people with the right amount of training before they have customer contact so that they are ready to answer questions and serve customers with the right information.
2. Share company financial information with employees—it will educate them and give them a sense of ownership in the business.
3. Train all employees on the skills you would like them to demonstrate in providing legendary service to customers. Don’t expect people to know what a high level of service looks like—show them what it looks like in your work environment. Then hold all employees accountable for using those skills on the job.

While the young man probably thought he was serving the customer, my friend felt uncomfortable not paying. She gave him four dollars, saying she knew it wasn’t more than that, and asked him to ring it up when he found out the information. But the damage was done. My friend didn’t feel good about the experience at all. She walked out of the store vowing to find a better place to shop the next time she needed similar products.

Low standards don’t benefit anyone. Teach your people to serve at a higher level. When they do, everyone will feel better about the experience—and your customers will come back.

About the author

Kathy Cuff is a customer service expert and coauthor, together with Ken Blanchard and Vicki Halsey of the book,Legendary Service: The Key is to Care.

Pretty heady stuff.

He realized he couldn’t drive people to be more just, client focused, and service oriented. The only way a radically different culture would emerge was through employees working together and making their own decisions to find new approaches for managing people’s wealth.

This powerful executive recognized that only through the power of tapping people’s honest and authentic need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence (ARC) would he be able to achieve the results he was looking for—a high functioning, self-motivated organization.  He realized that any driving for adherence to new policies and procedures would undermine people’s sense of ARC—and his firm’s cultural evolution.

It was a great bit of insight on his part. And it’s something we can all learn from as we endeavor to build highly motivated work environments.

• When you pressure people to perform, the pressure you create has the opposite result of what you intended. Pressuring people erodes their sense of autonomy.
• When you focus on metrics as priorities, people fail to find meaning in the metrics for themselves. When people feel used as a means to your end, it diminishes their sense of relatedness.
• When you drive for results and declare you are holding people accountable for those results, you are also sending the message that you don’t trust people to perform or achieve their goals. You undermine their sense of competence.

Here are four alternatives.

1. Encourage autonomy by helping people appreciate the freedom they have within boundaries. What is within a person’s control? What options do they have? Identify areas for creativity and innovation.

2. Deepen relatedness by engaging people in conversations about their values and aligning their values with the company’s goals. For example, help an employee who has a value for service explore how his service might improve through the company’s new approach.

3. Build competence by providing opportunities for training, clarifying expectations, and illuminating the unknowns. Don’t assume people know how to cope with change. Don’t try to sell change by sharing how the organization will benefit. Focus instead on helping people deal with the personal concerns they have for how the change directly affects them.

4. Teach leaders the skill of conducting motivational conversations. If leaders don’t know how to facilitate people’s shift to optimal motivation, they will default to what they know: driving for results. Leaders also need to practice optimal motivation for themselves. Leaders with suboptimal motivation tend to drive for results from others.

If you want real, sustainable, high quality results, stop driving yourself crazy trying to hold people accountable for outcomes that are not connected to individual needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence (ARC.)  Instead, help people satisfy those needs. When people experience ARC, they thrive—and you don’t need to drive.

About the Author

Susan Fowler is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies who heads up Blanchard’s motivation and self leadership practices.  Susan is also the author of the business best-seller, Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work… And What Does.

Using the acronym UNITE, the authors explained that the creation of a collaborative work environment rests on five foundational principles.

Utilize differences. Organizations need to appreciate and be open to people and ideas that may seem at first to be outside of the mainstream. The best companies seek out creative thinking from all corners of the organization. The focus for leaders is to make sure that all ideas are surfaced for consideration.

Nurture safety and trust. New ideas will flourish when people feel safe to share them freely without fear of judgment. Leaders need to give people space to experiment and innovate, view mistakes as learning opportunities, and encourage risk taking. Trust is also generated through transparency—when leaders share knowledge about themselves and are clear about expectations.

Involve others in crafting a clear purpose, values, and goals. Instead of seeing purpose, values, and goals as something always originated by senior leaders, the authors recommend that everyone be involved in the process. Doing it this way encourages a sense of camaraderie and ownership in the group. Leaders follow through by reinforcing what was agreed upon, demonstrating supportive behaviors, and walking the talk.

Talk openly. Underlining the importance of utilizing differences and creating an environment of safety and trust, the authors shared the benefits of people talking openly without worrying about upsetting the status quo. There are benefits to creative conflict—but only when people can vigorously debate ideas without getting personal.

Empower yourself and others. Some leaders need to learn how to let go. True collaboration can never exist if people constantly look to the leader to solve problems. So don’t wait for someone else to decide it’s time to collaborate—everyone is responsible for creating a collaborative environment.

When people are busy, it’s normal to want to focus on getting individual work done. To combat this urge, the authors remind us of an old adage: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster shows the way. The book is now available online and in bookstores. You can learn more on the book’s website—or, if you’d like to listen to the author webinar I attended, be sure to access the full recording.

Interested in getting your team together for a live event? The authors will be conducting a second live webinar on October 21 as a part of the monthly webinar series from The Ken Blanchard Companies. The event is free. You can learn more or register using this link.

The top industries for service: Televisions & Video Players (score 86), Credit Unions (score 85), Internet Retail, Internet Brokerage, Full-Service Restaurants, Automobiles & Light Vehicles, Personal Care & Cleaning Products, and Soft Drinks (6-way tie at 82)

The bottom three for service: Federal Government (score 64), Internet Service Providers (score 63), Subscription Television Service (score 63)

And while industry averages are important benchmarks, the more important question is “Where do you currently stand with your customers?”

For Kathy Cuff, asking that question is the start of doing something about it. Cuff is co-author, together with Ken Blanchard and Vicki Halsey, of the book Legendary Service: The Key Is to Care.  Cuff believes that improving customer service is a five-step process that begins with identifying what an ideal culture of service looks like and then taking action steps to turn that vision into a reality.

Looking to improve your customer service scores? Here are five areas to explore:

1. Ideal Service. Do employees recognize the importance of service and focus on performing tasks with the customer in mind?
2. Culture of Service. Do employees use the organization’s vision and values to guide decisions in daily interactions with customers?
3. Attentiveness. Do employees treat internal colleagues the same way they treat paying customers? Do all personnel strive to create lasting and positive first impressions?
4. Responsiveness. Do employees demonstrate a willingness to serve and maintain a positive attitude even in difficult situations?
5. Empowerment. Do employees look for ways to do their job better, provide the “extra touch” for customers, and share ideas for process improvement?

A little bit of work in each of these five areas can have big results. Customers notice when organizations truly care and value their business.

You can learn more about this philosophy in Legendary Service: The Key Is to Care—or check out a webinar Cuff is conducting on 5 Keys to Creating A Customer-Focused Company.  Even if you can’t attend live, the event will be recorded and all registrants will receive a copy of the presentation and handout. Learn more here.

During our work together, the learning leaders and several senior leader pilot participants got into a fascinating debate about the qualities of a great coach.

One participant kept trying to get across his concept that the coach must have positive intent and must care about the person being coached, but seemed to have trouble finding the right language. He finally blurted out, “Loving. A coach should be—loving.”

There was silence in the room and then everybody turned to me, the subject matter expert. What could I say? First, I laughed—and then I admitted he was right. In my opinion, the coach who’s going to make the biggest difference is the one who loves the people who are being coached. Love is the secret ingredient almost no one talks about. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of coaching—and you can’t really teach it. It’s certainly not considered an appropriate topic of conversation in most corporate settings.

Here’s the most interesting part: I was in the room with a group of senior level medical engineering geniuses who all began to nod their heads yes. The group ended up deciding not to actually write the word loving in black and white in the participant materials, instead opting for more indirect ways of expressing it. But there was an implicit agreement among the group—all of whom have self selected to be role models for coaching—that loving is, in fact, a quality they will be cultivating. And do you know what? I believe they actually have a chance of shifting their culture.

About the Author

Madeleine Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 130 coaches have coached over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

While on the call with the client, it dawned on me just how important their jobs are –a recent study shows that most students make up their decision on what school they want to attend within 15 minutes of being on the campus. As a parent of two college students, I can attest to the power this first impression has and how it will influence the experience and where the student wants to attend.

So let’s look at your organization.  What are the impressions that your company makes on customers, or potential customers?  Here are three things to keep in mind when you want to make a good first impression:

1.  Try to look at things from their eyes.  Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.  What would you notice about the store, product, service, or in this case, campus, if you were seeing it for the first time as a customer?

2. Now, dig a little deeper. Survey your customers to find out what attracted them to your company.  Pick their brain about what stood out—and what possibly needs to be changed.

3. Continue to look for ways to make “new” first impressions with your customers. Don’t get too comfortable with doing things the way you have always done them—that may not be the impression you want to make in the future.

I will be going to pick up my son in two weeks at his college, and I have to say, I am looking forward to not only seeing him again, but driving on the campus and seeing what MY first impression is of the facilities.

About the author

Kathy Cuff is a customer service expert and coauthor, together with Ken Blanchard and Vicki Halsey of the new book, Legendary Service: The Key is to Care.  Use this link to read more of Kathy’s posts on service.

Liberman’s basic point is that people are having trouble keeping up with the amount of tasks added to their plates and the pace of change occurring in their organizations. Recession-driven layoffs, restructures, and job modifications have forced people to take on extra work, new job duties, or assume different roles and it’s taking a toll. As job scope increases, people feel overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to accomplish, and it leads even the most engaged employees to gravitate toward focusing on the least complex, simple tasks they can control, rather than focusing on the most important and complex issues that need to be addressed.

According to Liberman, much of the fault lies at the feet of senior leaders. Whether it’s pursuing the latest management fad, reorganizing on a whim, or doing a poor job of managing change, senior leaders can be prone to lay the blame of organizational failure at the feet of employees who aren’t performing up to snuff, not taking into account those same employees are still trying to come to grips with the previous round of changes. Wharton professor Peter Cappelli says, “Today, work demands are through the roof. Not just the amount of work but challenges that employees do not know how to meet, in part because they may not be achievable.” Workplace frustration leads to insecurity which leads to a lack of trust and confidence in leadership.

I can identify with these conditions. The team I lead has experienced increased job scope and responsibilities over the years as our business has grown more complex and demanding in today’s global economy. “Task saturation” is a word we’ve used to describe this condition and the insecure, frustrated state of mind it induces. Here are six strategies I’ve found helpful to deal with this “performance anxiety” in the workplace:

1. Create a safe and trusting environment—The number one job of a leader is to build trust with his/her followers. Fostering a culture of safety is essential for trust to not only survive, but thrive. People need to know they can count on their leaders to look out for their best interests, protect them when necessary (even from themselves sometimes), and to genuinely care about them as people and not just worker drones showing up to do a job. Simon Sinek speaks to this truth in his insightful TED Talk, Why good leaders make you feel safe.

2. Ask people for their opinions—One of the most tangible ways leaders can combat frustration and insecurity in the workplace is to ask people for their opinions. But asking is just the first step; you have to do something with what they tell you. The higher up a leader rises in the organization, the easier it is to lose touch with the daily frustrations and battles your employees face. It’s easy to oversimplify the problems and solutions our people face and dismiss their expressions of frustration as whining or griping. Listen with the intent of being influenced and be willing to take action on what you learn.

3. Start, stop, continue—As you consider your next round of corporate restructuring, job modification, or process improvements, ask yourself these three questions: What do we need to start doing? What do we need to stop doing? What do we need to continue doing? I’ve found it’s easy to keep adding new tasks while continuing to do the old tasks. It’s much, much harder to identify those things we should stop doing. We can’t continue to pile more and more work on people and expect them to perform at consistently high levels. There is only so much time to accomplish the work at hand. As an addition to the start, stop, continue strategy, I’m seriously considering adopting a strategy from the simplicity movement: for every new task I add for my team, we have to eliminate one task. Enough of task saturation!

4. Manage change, don’t just announce it—Managing a change initiative involves more than just announcing a new strategy. That’s the easy part! The hard part is actually implementing and managing the change well. People go through specific stages of concern when faced with a major change and leaders need to be equipped to address those concerns throughout the process. By addressing the information, personal, and implementation concerns of employees, leaders can be much more successful in helping their people adapt and endorse the change initiative.

5. Focus on development of boss/employee relationship—One of the primary factors in an employee’s success, satisfaction, and engagement on the job is the quality of the relationship with their boss. Intentional effort needs to be placed on cultivating high-quality boss/employee relationships founded on trust and mutual respect. Frequent and quality conversations need to occur regularly between the boss and employee so the boss is aware of the daily challenges faced by the employee and can work to remove obstacles.

6. Foster empowerment, control, and autonomy—People don’t resist change; they resist being controlled. Much of today’s workplace frustrations are caused by workers having a lack of empowerment in their role, little control over what effects them at work, and scant autonomy in how they perform their tasks. Leaders can build engagement by focusing on the development of these three qualities in the work people do.

Workplace frustration and insecurity is like organizational high blood pressure—it’s a silent killer. This silent killer is not always evident through outward symptoms, but it’s always lurking underneath causing damage day after day. We have a choice…will we do anything about it?

Randy Conley is the V.P. of Client Services and Trust Practice Leader at The Ken Blanchard Companies and his LeaderChat posts normally appear the fourth Thursday of every month. For more insights on trust and leadership, visit Randy at his Leading with Trust blog or follow him on Twitter @RandyConley.

In its own research into employee work passion, The Ken Blanchard Companies has found significant correlations between perceptions of leader behavior, employee affect, and subsequent intentions to stay with a company, endorse the organization as a good place to work, and perform at a high level.

So why don’t more organizations invest in developing their leaders? What keeps them from taking steps in the right direction?

“For a lot of organizations, it’s just not part of their founding DNA,” says consultant and author Scott Blanchard in the latest issue of Ignite. “Some companies don’t grow up with it.”

That can be a challenge for managers and individuals looking to grow and develop within those cultures. People who want to develop and grow will find themselves plateauing or hitting the wall early without a clear process for developing themselves and others.

For leaders looking to take some steps toward reinvigorating themselves and others, Blanchard recommends four areas to focus on—understanding yourself, building relationships, producing results, and charting careers.

Step 1. Understanding Yourself

Great leaders begin with a profound understanding of themselves. But Blanchard cautions that in order to get an accurate picture of yourself, you have to get input from others. Self-understanding can’t happen in a vacuum.

“The best leaders do 360s so they can compare their self-perception to the perception of people around them. Inevitably, poor leaders are ones who either don’t care or who have an inaccurate awareness of the way they’re coming across to others. And that’s what Dilbert and the pointy-haired boss are all about. Don’t be that guy. Nobody wants to be that guy.”

Step 2. Building Relationships

As a next step, Blanchard recommends developing and constantly improving your skill in building relationships with people. If there’s one thing to remember, it’s that fundamentally, the art of building relationships centers on serving people.

In Blanchard’s experience, the reason this is so important is the different way that people perceive the actions of leaders who are focused on others instead of solely focused on their own agenda. When people perceive that their leader is coming from the right place and then buy in to that person, they feel safe, they forgive a leader’s mistakes, and they are more willing to put themselves out, try a little harder, and achieve more.

Step 3. Producing Results

The first two steps set the foundation that allow a leader to push people toward better performance. The third step is to learn how to work together with others with the explicit intention of generating better results. And it is not in a manipulative way explains Blanchard. “Leadership is something you do with people—partnering with them in the accomplishment of goals—it’s not something you do to them.

“You’re looking to leverage that interpersonal capacity to produce better results. Great people want to perform at a high level. A leader’s job is to help them get there.”

Step 4.  Charting Careers

In today’s work environment the opportunity to grow is more important than ever before. Growth is the currency of this new economy. People recognize that their ability to grow and learn new things is what keeps them valuable. In this fourth and final step, you—as a leader—must ensure that this is a part of your skill set.

Your goal as a leader is to let them know that you are a partner in their career journey,” says Blanchard. “It’s finding ways that people can grow by giving them a chance to excel in their present job but also looking at what you can do to provide them with opportunities for the next leg of their career.”

It’s a journey that begins with a better understanding of yourself and then expands to include a better understanding of others and how to work together to achieve common goals. This will result in benefits for both the individual and the organization.

To learn about Blanchard’s approach check out Developing Yourself and Others , or join Blanchard for a free webinar on March 19, Leading Yourself and Others to Higher Levels of Performance: A Four-Fold Approach

One of the most persistent beliefs leaders tell themselves and employees is that if you can’t measure something, it does not matter.

I can easily refute that belief with two questions:

1. Do you love your partner/spouse, mother, father, or children?

2. If yes (no one has answered no yet), then tell me precisely how much.  And when you answer, please pick an amount and a unit of measure.  So your answer would be something like, “I love my children 12 gallons,” or “I love my husband six kilometers.” 

Naturally, that’s absurd.  The love you feel matters a great deal and yet seems impossible to measure.

Employee motivation is a bit like that.  It matters a great deal to the well-being of your employees and the financial success of the company.  And yet it seems impossible to measure.

But that’s the thing—it is remarkably easy to measure.  Here’s how.

1. Using yourself as a test case, the first thing you will want to do is upgrade how you think about measurement.  Most often you’re thinking in terms of numbers.  Instead, think first in terms of categories.  Then you can think of numbers.
2. Specifically, think in terms of these six categories—or types—of motivation.

• Inherent – You do something because it is fun for you personally
• Integrated – You do something because the purpose and deep meaning of it serves others and is in harmony with your own deep sense of purpose
• Aligned – You do something because it is compatible with your goals and values
• Imposed – You do something because you want to avoid a hassle, drama, or feeling guilty
• External – You do something to gain something outside the task and yourself such as money, status, or reputation
• Disinterested – You do not do something because it just does not matter to you.

3. Create a table featuring the six categories above and tally your thoughts, feelings, and what the running dialogue in your head is saying about what type of motivation you experience on each specific situation, task, or goal.
4. What pattern do you notice?  Most coaching clients with whom I have used this simple technique notice a pattern pretty quickly.  In fact, for everything on their to-do list, they usually realize they are experiencing one or two types of motivation.  In time, one of them will become the most clear.
5. BAM!  You just measured your motivation by discerning what type you are experiencing.  And, the tally you came up with reveals how intensely you feel one type over the others. 

Now you may ask does measuring your motivation using that simple technique even matter?

It absolutely does, because the type of motivation you experience has a big influence on how you go about your daily work—and your probability of success.

More specifically, research reveals that your motivation type has a lot to do with how much creative, out of the box thinking you bring to your work. It greatly influences how persistent you are in the face of tough challenges.  It not only explains, it determines how enthusiastic, frustrated, or bored you feel about the minutia of your work.  And over time, the type of motivation you experience has a lot to do with the decisions you make to stay with the company or leave for somewhere better.

In future posts in this series, I’ll share with you equally simple techniques for shifting from one type of motivation to the one you want to experience.  That’s remarkably straightforward, too.

You probably already have a sense of which type of motivation would most help you succeed.

The first step is to measure what type of motivation you’re experiencing on each task, goal, or situation on your list.

So, start tallying!  After all, motivation matters—and now you can measure it!

About the author:

The Motivation Guy  (also known as Dr. David Facer)  is one of the principal authors—together with Susan Fowler and Drea Zigarmi—of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Optimal Motivation process and workshop.

We all know leaders aren’t perfect. But why do they continue to hold those interminable, aggravating, and results-free “walks in the park”? One theory is that leaders use meetings to provide confirmation of decisions they’ve already made. Consciously or subconsciously, they push conformance to their decisions and plans—and that occupies a lot of meeting time.

So attendees, wanting to “get this thing over with,” learn to become members of the dutiful herd. They go along with whatever seems to be the politically safe outcome.

A Brief History of Herd Behavior

Let’s recount a summary of Dr. Solomon Asch’s research on conformity and herd behavior, starring you. (Asch was a social psychology pioneer in the mid- to late twentieth century.) Dr. Asch puts eight people, including you, around a table in a meeting room. You think all attendees are just like you, but actually the other seven are actors. Asch has scripted their roles. So you’re the only real subject.

Photo by Nyenyec Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Asch walks to the front of the room and says he wants to find out about visual perceptions. He puts two posters in front of the group: a benchmark poster depicting a single vertical line, and a selection poster showing three lines of different lengths that are labeled A, B, and C.

Then Asch asks all eight attendees, individually, to select which of the three lines (A, B, or C) on the selection poster match the length of the benchmark line. He repeats this through several trials, with different posters. You are positioned so you hear most of the actors’ answers before you choose. Sometimes the others unanimously select what is clearly the wrong answer, all of them choosing the same distractor.

What would you predict happens in this experiment?

One-third of the “lone” subjects select the same wrong answers the actors choose. They cave in and join the herd.

Three-quarters of the lone subjects conform with the wrong answer at least once.

Separate research at New York University comparing “yes-sayers” to “straight-shooters” corroborates Dr. Asch’s findings.

Remember that in Asch’s research, the wrong answers were obviously incorrect. Most topics at meetings are nowhere near as tangible. Imagine how much easier it would be to go with the herd on issues that were more vague, particularly when the leader has taken a firm position. If the meeting were addressing strategies or mission accomplishment or similar topics, it would be much easier to abandon one’s position and elect a compromised solution.

Three Tips for Better Meetings

Here are three steps to counteract the tendency toward herd behavior at meetings:

1. Concentrate. There must be a focused clarity on the real issue. This should begin with pre-meeting agendas as much as possible, so people can start objectively thinking about potential positions to take. At the meeting, keep the focus on the agenda item under discussion.
2. Collaborate. Communication and idea sharing need to occupy a major part of the meeting. Leaders should encourage people to stand up and be counted. Add transparency to your team’s group norms. Hold each other accountable for candor. Anything else is unethical. Fraudulent. Unacceptable.
3. Initiate. Meetings ultimately should result in an action plan for the team—a roadmap that includes who, what, and when. If you employ laser clarity on post-meeting behavior, chances are high that the team will deliver to the meeting’s expectations.

When describing the attributes of an outstanding team member, we frequently include the word loyalty. Some well meaning leaders see candor and honesty as potential indicators of disloyalty—but actually, it’s the other way around. Pioneers should be honored, but frequently they are punished. Leaders should be informed, but frequently they are shielded. High performing teams are willing to tell it the way it is. This may be uncomfortable initially, but the long term payoffs are priceless.

About the author

Dr. Dick Ruhe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies.

One of the most perplexing questions in business is how to think about people.  On the one hand, we realize that we need each other if our organizations are to achieve what the founders, current leaders, and employees—people all—wish to achieve.

We are reminded that there is no “I” in team, and that all great achievements come at the hands of people working together.  We read company values statements that say, “People are our greatest asset.”  A personal approach.

On the other hand, we are implored to “get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus.” It sounds so simple.  We’re told to hire slow (to ensure we have the right people on the bus) but fire fast (when we decide someone shouldn’t be on the bus.) An impersonal approach.

Leaders’ persistent ambivalence about people—and subsequent impact on motivation—was writ large at a global manufacturing company recently.  By any measure, the company has fallen on hard times.  Even after several rounds of layoffs, it is still wrestling with the right formula for success.  After another setback, the COO implored the employees to “take the [issue] personally” requiring some staff to return to working at company offices instead of home offices because the company needed “all hands on deck.”

That sounds reasonable.  The COO wants the employees to really feel it.  But, consider that those employees had survived years of deep and painful layoffs, so they most likely had been really feeling it for years.  The question is whether that approach will engender deep commitment.

Leaders imploring employees to take it personally at one time but not at another time may seem insensitive and one-sided.  Our research into employee motivation reveals employees have a need for warm and supportive relationships that are balanced, rooted in fairness, and free from ulterior motives.  In other words, just like when we were in grade school, no one wants to feel used.

Where do you stand?

Where do you stand on the “it’s not personal, it’s just business” belief?  What links do you see between your beliefs about business and your employees’ motivation?

Senior leaders—indeed, every leader—would do well to recognize the inherently personal, interconnected, and human dimensions of work and organizational life.  When senior leaders implore employees to take it personally only when it suits them, they increase the likelihood that those employees will see the senior leaders—and the company—with the same kind of ambivalence.  In that case, the negative cycle of “it’s not personal, it’s just business” continues—and never ends.  We should be careful not to blame employees for that, though.  After all, they learned it from their leaders.

About the author:

The Motivation Guy  (also known as Dr. David Facer)  is one of the principal authors—together with Susan Fowler and Drea Zigarmi—of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Optimal Motivation process and workshop.

That’s the question I was looking to answer when I asked 700 webinar participants what they experienced most often in their organizations.

I showed them a 2×2 grid with Plan along one axis and Execution along the other. I asked the participants to identify where they saw initiatives ending up in their organizations. More than 375 people responded. Here’s where they located most initiatives in their experience:

Bad Plan – Good Execution (13%) 
Good Plan – Good Execution (4%) 
Bad Plan – Bad Execution (8%) 
Good Plan – Bad Execution (74%)

The problem, as this group saw it, was execution.

Are these numbers unusual?  No. In Navigating Change: How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation, authors Donald Hambrick, David Nadler, and Michael Tushman reported similar research numbers with 70 percent of their respondents also falling into the category of Good Plan – Bad Execution.

What does it mean?

Planning and strategic thinking get things started, but it’s in executing that we find the greatest opportunities for improvement. When you look at organizations, you frequently see the vestiges of prior intentions—evidence of previous flavors of the month. But execution is what it’s all about.  Unexecuted plans are a waste of time … they accomplish  squat.

Execution is people. It’s fixing little things in the plan, and sometimes big things. People are the implementers who can see those things.

But how do you get people on board with embracing a plan and working with it, or refining it as necessary, to bring it through to a successful conclusion?   People—particularly powerful people—may be sensitive to others suggesting changes.  Conversely, people might be reluctant to rock the boat when dealing with a plan put forward or supported  by a senior executive. But that is exactly what is necessary if you want to successfully beat the odds identified in the grid above.

3 ways to improve execution

Here are three ways you can improve the odds of successful implementation with your next initiative:

1. Include street-wise operators in the planning group. We need real-world thinking when we plan. Lack of reality = little to no execution.
2. Hold people accountable for making the plan work. Measure against standards that are appropriate for the initiative.
3. Establish crystal-clear norms around communication. During execution there is no such thing as “better left unsaid.” People who feel threatened by a change may hold back on giving critical feedback or recommending fixes. Make sure people speak up, and make sure you listen hard when they do. Peter Drucker said that, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

Think about an initiative currently underway in your organization.  How would you evaluate it in these three areas?  If you can see that conditions are not where they need to be to provide a decent chance for success, encourage people to share this message with others.

On your own teams, recognize someone who identifies a fly in the ointment. Help identify ways to improve implementation of an existing plan. Remove an obstacle to execution.

From a personal perspective, apologize when someone identifies something that should have been included in the original idea. Involve them in helping to fix it. Thank them when they do. Plan how you’ll incorporate what you learn in the next initiative.

Encourage still other people to share the same message. Wash, rinse, repeat. You’ll be glad you did—and the improved execution will show it.

About the author

Dr. Dick Ruhe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies.

PS: You can experience the entire original webinar by using the following link: http://webex.com/web-seminars/enroll_recording/662336164?sid=KBC081109rec.

Executives from leading companies in the US, Canada, and Europe will be sharing stories of how they have successfully met these challenges through development programs that teach leaders how to co-create, co-design, and collaborate more effectively.

That’s the type of leader Blanchard believes is needed to effectively turn the organizational pyramid upside down.  As he explains, “We’ve seen the negative result of self-serving leadership where all the money, power, and recognition moves up the hierarchy.  Self-serving leaders think that leadership is all about them and not about the best interests of the people they serve.  They forget about acting with respect, care, and fairness for all involved.”

Blanchard’s dream is that someday everyone will know someone who is leading at a higher level.  Self-serving leaders will be a thing of the past and leadership around the world will be composed of people who, as Robert Greenleaf said, “Serve first and lead second.”

Helping Blanchard spread the word will be several best-selling business authors each sharing a unique perspective on leading in today’s world.

Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers, will be sharing her research into the traits of leaders who “multiply” the talents of the people they serve.  She will also look at some of the ways that leaders accidentally diminish the performance of direct reports through behaviors they may be unaware of.

Dr. Henry Cloud, clinical psychologist and bestselling author of Boundaries for Leaders, will share how saying “no” to some priorities allows leaders to better say “yes” to others. Cloud will look at how human behavior, neuroscience, and business leadership can come together to improve performance and increase employee and customer satisfaction.

Matthew Emerzian, author of Every Monday Matters will explore the impact that one person can have in this world.  Drawing on his own liberating experience of spending one day a week in service to others, Emerzian will share how small, seemingly inconsequential acts of service can have a big impact in your own life and the lives of others.

Are you ready to serve?

In his book, The Secret: What Great Leaders Know—And Do, Ken Blanchard, along with co-author Mark Miller outline five areas a serving leader of the future needs to excel at.  How would you assess your leadership in these five areas?

1. See the Future.  Leadership is about taking people from one place to another.  What is your team’s purpose? Where do you want your team to be in five years?  How many members of your team could clearly explain the group’s purpose and goal to others?
2. Engage and Develop Your People. Once vision and direction are set, a leader’s job is to turn the hierarchal pyramid upside down so everyone is focused on helping those closest to the customer.  How are you encouraging the development of your people? To what extent have you successfully engaged each member of your team?  What have you done to suggest to your people that when it comes to implementation activities, you work for them?
3. Reinvent Continuously.  Great leaders don’t rest on their laurels.  How often do you review: How can we do the work better? How can we do it for less? What systems or processes can we change to enhance performance?
4. Value Results and Relationships. Serving leadership requires a balanced approach to results and people—it’s not an either/or question.  To what degree do you have high expectations for both results and relationships? How many of your people would say that you have made a significant investment in their lives? What are the ways that you have expressed appreciation for work well done in the last 30 days?
5. Embody the Values. In today’s age of transparency, being bold enough to lead others requires authenticity and trust. Do people know where you stand, what they can expect from you, and what you expect from them?  How well do your daily activities align with your personal values?

Review these five areas often, (you’ll see that the first letter of each factor spells SERVE to help you remember.) Continually doing a good job in each of these areas is a significant task—don’t be too tough on yourself if you see a couple of areas for improvement.  Every step you take in this direction will bring you closer to leading at a higher level.  Get started today!

PS:  Interested in learning more about Blanchard Summit 2013?  Use this link to download a brochure or request an invitation.

My previous blog challenged you to complete five common statements related to motivation. It wasn’t much of a challenge. These beliefs are so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that they roll off the tongue. What is a challenge is to let go and replace these statements with beliefs that promote an optimally motivating workplace.

In Part 1, we flipped the first statement: It’s not personal, it is just business, became If it is business, it must be personal.

In this post we explore the second eroding belief: The purpose of business is to make money (a profit).

We will explore the other statements in upcoming posts.

• We need to hold people ___________.
• The only thing that really matters is _______.
• If you cannot measure it, it _________ ________.

Your Beliefs Determine the Way You Lead

When you hold the belief that money is the purpose of business you are likely to over-emphasize results. You are apt to resort to pressure to motivate people to get those results. You may be tempted to employ questionable ethical practices. When given a choice, you might choose quantity over quality, short-term results over long-term results, and profits over people.

Consider how an alternative belief would generate a different approach to your leadership. How would your decisions and actions be different with the following statement?

The purpose of business is to serve.

Think how this reframed belief might alter your organization’s dashboard metrics—or at least the content and quality of the goals. How might reframing goals so they focus on internal as well as external service, quality of people’s efforts as well as the results of their efforts, or celebrating learning and growth in addition to accomplishments, change the way you lead day-to-day?

Hard-nosed businesspeople will push back on these ideas with a traditional argument, “You can serve all you want, but this soft stuff doesn’t make you money and if you don’t make a profit you will go out of business. Then you won’t be serving anyone.”

It is true that a business must make a profit to sustain itself. But it is an illogical leap to conclude that profit is therefore the purpose of business. You need air to live, plus water and food. But the purpose of your life is not to just breathe, eat, and drink. Your purpose is richer and more profound than basic survival. And the more noble your purpose and developed your values are, the more they influence how you live day-to-day. When you believe that the purpose of business is to serve, you lead differently. Your decisions and actions are more likely to cultivate a workplace that supports people’s optimal motivation.

The nature of human motivation is not in making money. It is in making meaning.

Ken Blanchard says, “Profit is the applause you receive for serving your customers’ needs.” I would add “and your people’s needs.” Research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies found definitive evidence that organizational vitality measured by ROI, earnings by share, access to venture capital, stock price, debt load and other financial indicators, is dependent on two factors: customer devotion and employee work passion[1]. It does not work the other way around—organizational vitality is not what determines customer devotion or employee work passion.

Leaders who focus on serving their customers’ needs and satisfying their people’s psychological needs will enjoy organizational vitality. The old sports analogy works equally well in business: Focusing on money and profit is like playing the game with your eye on the scoreboard instead of the ball. In business, service is the game you are playing. Keeping your eye focused on customer service and people development will result in scoring—both to the bottom line and in other more meaningful ways that sustain high performance over time.

Try this for the next month: Challenge the notion that the purpose of business is to make money. Try changing that outdated traditional belief to an Optimal Motivation belief: “The purpose of business is to serve—both your customers and your people. Money is a by-product of doing both of these things well.”

Watch how your people respond to your changed belief. Then notice the results and accept the well-earned applause.

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About the author:

Susan Fowler is one of the principal authors—together with David Facer and Drea Zigarmi—of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Optimal Motivation process and workshop. Their posts appear on the first and third Monday of each month.

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But discussing trust can be a tricky issue.  How do you tell someone that you don’t trust them without them taking it personally?  To help with the process, Cynthia Olmstead, founder and president of TrustWorks Group, recommends stepping back from personal assessments of individual trustworthiness to instead focus on the behaviors that are leading to that conclusion.  By focusing on behaviors, you can begin a dialogue that allows trust to be discussed openly.  Olmstead recommends looking at four factors to help uncover some of the behaviors that might be eroding trust in a relationship.     

• Ability—do leaders demonstrate competence through expertise, experience, and capability in getting the desired results?
• Believability—do leaders walk the talk of a core set of values, demonstrate honesty, and use fair practices?
• Connectedness—do leaders interact with staff, communicate and share information, provide praise, and give recognition?
• Dependability—do leaders take accountability for their actions, and consistently follow up?

Once you’ve identified the behaviors that are causing trust levels to decline, think about ways that they could be rebuilt.  In order to be perceived as trustworthy, you have to act trustworthy.  Using the same four categories, Olmstead believes that leaders can look at their behavior and make changes accordingly. 

To learn more about these behaviors and improving trust in your organization be sure to check out the online article With Trust, It’s a Leader’s Behavior That Counts Most or learn more about a complimentary webinar that Olmstead will be conducting on May 20, Trust: The Critical Link to a High Energy Workplace.

Great leaders personify trust. What are the behaviors that generate trustworthy feelings in others? Identifying and acting in ways consistent with trustworthiness is one of the first ways to begin cracking that code.

It’s an approach that allows Southwest’s leadership to expect more—and receive more—from their people than other airlines.  Because employees know that leadership is on their side, leaders can confidently challenge and hold people accountable for meeting expectations.  It’s a business version of tough love that only works when employees know you care.

Interested in trying a little leadership love at your organization?  Here are three tips for getting started:

1. Communicate your organizational mission and vision. Barrett explains that at Southwest, they are first and foremost in the customer service business—they just happen to express that service by providing airline transportation.
2. Define the values that will guide behavior. At Southwest values start with safety and practicing the golden rule–treating people as you would like to be treated–as a foundation.  Three additional values of Warrior Spirit, Servant’s Heart, and a Fun-LUVing Attitude guide employee behavior on a day-to-day basis.
3. Combine caring with high expectations. Leaders at Southwest treat their people with respect, strive to bring out their best, and love their people for who they are.  In return, employees are expected to buy into the company’s mission, and to practice the company’s values with each other and customers.

What’s the level of leadership love in your organization?  Do employees know that leaders truly care about them?  It’s an essential ingredient at Southwest that has helped to create long-term success and a fun-loving culture in a challenging industry.  What could it do for you?

Win an Advance Copy of Ken and Colleen’s New Book!

Would you like to get a sneak peek at the unbound manuscript version of Bringing LUV to Leadership?  Rarely made public, we have a small number of extra copies from the proofing and review process that we are giving away this Friday.  To be entered into the drawing, just sign on as a fan at Ken Blanchard’s new Facebook Fan Page by 12 noon Pacific Time, Friday, April 9.  Everyone who is signed up as a fan by that time will automatically be entered into the drawing.  Good luck!

Immediately after the webinar, Chris and Bob will be answering questions here at LeaderChat for about 30 minutes.  To participate in the online discussion, follow these simple instructions.

Instructions for Participating in the Online Chat

1. Click on the COMMENTS link above 
2. Type in your question for Chris Edmonds and Bob Glaser
3. Push SUBMIT COMMENT 

It’s as easy as that!  Chris and Bob will answer as many questions as possible in the order they are received.  Be sure to press F5 to refresh your screen occasionally to see the latest responses.

We hope you can join us later today for this special complimentary event courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.  Click here for more information on participating.

• Part of the reason is that culture is hard to define in most organizations. It operates in the background while other, easier-to-measure aspects of corporate performance—like goals and tasks, preoccupy leadership discussions.
• Senior executives greatly underestimate the power of an organizational culture plus very few leaders have ever had any real experience in dealing with culture change.

For executives who know that their organization’s culture is not what it could be, Edmonds and Glaser recommend taking a three-step approach:

1. Examine the existing culture—look at the underlying beliefs and assumptions that are influencing people’s existing behavior. Especially look at getting senior leaders to examine their own personal beliefs about getting things done in the organization.
2. Define the desired behavior—don’t assume that everyone agrees what good behavior looks like.  Take the time to formally define values in behavioral terms. Gather input from employees and boil it down into clear, actionable items.
3. Hold people accountable for living the stated values—once the values and behaviors have been identified and defined, the final step to creating a culture that works is holding people accountable

A strong, working culture helps to create satisfied employees who feel cared for, trusted, and respected, which increases engagement and ultimately leads to better productivity. To read the entire article, click here.

For organizations considering open collaboration, Gabor recommends a clear-headed look at the challenges associated with the change and she identifies seven essential strategies to making it work including:

1. Creating a clear leadership message
2. Collaborating with customers
3. Building a culture of trust and open communication
4. Cultivating continuous improvement
5. Building a flexible innovation infrastructure
6. Preparing your organization for new skill sets
7. Aligning evaluations and rewards

The article points out that “open collaboration is a complex, all-embracing process, requiring genuine commitment from corporate leaders, a willingness to abandon many venerable corporate customs, and an appetite for unleashing and managing disruptive change across the organization.”  But Gabor also encourages organizations to move forward and continue to develop their approach to open collaboration, because for those that do there are great benefits as well.

Sometime today or tomorrow, be sure to read—or save, this article—it’s one of the best on collaboration that we’ve seen. 

And if you are looking for a little additional inspiration and insight on the subject, check out the on-demand webcast of Pass the Ball: The Power of Collaboration.  This is a presentation Ken Blanchard did together with Cisco WebEx in June as a part of their Pass the Ball initiative. Ken shares his thoughts on getting others involved, how a philosophy of “none of us is as smart as all of us” helps everyone accomplish more, and the difference between serving and self-serving behavior.