Archive for category: Leadership

How to Cultivate Engaged Employees – 2nd in a series of 6 related Posts

If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Guideline #2 – Listen Seriously – And Show It

Author Vlachoutsicos believes managers are getting better at listening to employees but “their teams don’t always see it, or even recognize that it matters.” And like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if it no one hears does it make a sound?

I believe we need to be intentional about letting others know we’re listening and sincerely considering what they have to say. (Chaper 63 of my book Building a Winning Business is called “Leaders Listen.”) One simple way I do this is to make a point of hitting the Do Not Disturb button when I’m in the middle of a conversation with someone in my office. About half the time, the “live” person will tell me to go ahead and take the call. Unless I’m expecting a life or death call, I still send the caller to voice mail. I want the person who took the time to come to my office to talk with me to know he or she has my undivided attention.

It’s also helpful to write down things people tell you as they are speaking. This communicates to them that you are, indeed, listening and that you consider what they’re saying to be important enough to write down and remember!

I’ve also learned a little tip from talking with a counselor when communicating with my wife: paraphrase what you think you’re hearing the other person say. You might discover something amazing, such as you didn’t really understand what the other person was trying to communicate at all! This simple little technique can save everyone a lot of confusion, hurt feelings or anger. . . plus it greatly improves your odds of actually understanding what another is saying.

One of my mentors, Performark founder and retired chief executive officer Joe Lethert shared the best advice he ever received with me. It was, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.” That advice has served me well over the years, keeping me from jumping to hasty conclusions or rushing to solve a problem for which someone else already has found a creative solution.

How to Cultivate Engaged Employees — 1 of 6 related posts

Churchill was wise!

Harvard Business Review’s September issue is chock full of great articles, but one in particular caught my eye: “How to Cultivate Engaged Employees” by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos.  The author, a former international business person and current adjunct professor in the international MBA program at Athens University of Economics and Business, lays out six basic guidelines for encouraging employees to be engaged and excited about your mission. He believes, and I agree, that the behavior of managers can reinforce or destroy a sense of mutuality between employees and the organization. I’m going to explore each of the six guidelines in this post and the five that will follow.

 Guideline #1: Be modest

This might seem counter-intuitive to anyone who has worked hard to climb a business ladder. After all, hiding your light under the proverbial bush is not the traditional way to shine at work! But as managers we have to find a way to cultivate the light in others, which means standing back a bit so we don’t cast a shadow on employees (if you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor!). As I describe in chapter 57 of my book Building a Winning Business, leaders let the light shine on others!

This isn’t as difficult as you might think. Just make a concentrated effort to give away credit when it is deserved. And always err on the side of giving too much praise versus not enough. I believe it is important to give specific, sincere praise and to put it in writing when possible. Sharing credit will pay you back in spades as people become more energized and excited about their work, realizing that their effort is important and recognized.

Besides giving away credit, modest leaders take the blame and then quickly move on to coming up with solutions. I’m very intentional about pointing out my own past business mistakes, which I believe has helped to create a culture at Intertech in which people are not afraid to fail. Everyone has heard me talk my own mistakes and problems, so they know it’s ok to try something and fail themselves. As my father used to tell me, “If you do nothing, you won’t make any mistakes.

Last in the series: “The power of collective intelligence in organizations”

Working well with a vendor/partner is a two way street!

This is the last post I’ll make related to the work of MIT Professor Tom Malone and his interesting book, The Future of Work. Previously I told you about Malone’s concept of how technology is enabling collective intelligence at a level never seen before and how that is changing how people work.

Another trend Malone cites as a driver for radically different work is what he calls the “e-lance economy” comprised of electronically connected freelance workers or independent contractors that combine in unique configurations on a temporary basis to accomplish specific projects. An e-lance model already is common for the motion picture and construction industries. Malone predicts that this way of organizing will become more common in other industries.

That approach also is common in the IT world and is the model on which Intertech has been based since we started 20 years ago. I devote six chapters in my book Building a Winning Business laying out my thoughts on how to work effectively with vendors. Takeaways #39-#40 describes how to supplement your team with carefully selected vendors and to work the interview process. Takeaways #41-42 deal with the importance of communication and taking the time to get the project off on the right foot.

Just about what you might expect, right?

What might surprise readers is the chapter (#43) on how to be a good customer. Yes, you read that right. Working effectively with vendors of any type is a two-way street. Good customer-vendor relationships require both parties to participate, communicate and share responsibility for a successful outcome. I won’t reiterate everything in the chapter here but I will tell you that communicating – early and often – ranks high on the list!

Second in a series: “The power of collective intelligence in organizations”

Is a command and control hierarchy better than a communicate collaborate structure? Not sure? Read below.

My previous post on the concept of collective intelligence quoted Tom Malone, who is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management and Professor of Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the book The Future of Work. “Collective, global and human intelligence is growing due to technology and the Internet. This has never existed on our planet before,” says Malone.

But what does this mean for the way we run our organizations?

Organizations in the future will give employees “far more freedom, responsibility and power” says Malone and he provides some compelling models for designing companies of the future based on four different types of decentralized organizational structures: loose hierarchies, democracies, external markets and internal markets.

Loose hierarchies primarily are characterized by important decision-making occurring at lower organizational levels. AES, one of the world’s largest power producers, is an example of such a loose hierarchical corporate structure. Malone explains that AES operates on the basis of one important decision-making rule: employees don’t need approval of their decisions but they must seek advice for making decisions.

He says that democracies will replace old business models based on an increasingly outmoded industrial age. He sums this up as a shift from a “command-and-control” to a “coordinate-and-cultivate” management style.

I couldn’t agree more!

Takeaway #18 in my book Building a Winning Business  describes the importance of involving the whole team when defining values. Taking a page from business expert Jim Collins we employed the Martian Group exercise in which all employees are asked to pick the handful of colleagues who best exemplify the organization’s core values. This process helped us indentify the values we hold most dear at Intertech: positive attitude, commitment to delivering and professional excellence.