What do leaders do and how do we improve the quality of what leaders do?
We have no way of knowing who is a good leader and what they do or how they do it. Why these dark ages?
We’re missing a spiritual component
Not talking about organized religion here. The word spiritual can be defined as the deepest values and meanings by which people live. We should be studying the deepest beliefs which animate the leader.
For example if a deep belief held by a leadership candidate is that he/she is simply better than others and it is his/her way or the highway, it should be recognized that no amount of training is going to have real effect until this basic lack of empathy is addressed.
Photo by Dave Cappleman via Flickr
At best the leadership training received by such an individual will be like water off a duck’s back and at worst may facilitate his/her success in saying the right things but clearly not doing them.
Check out David Rock for clear thinking in this area.
There is something called a patter song. It is created by placing too many words into a very short time interval, and setting it to music and seeing what happens.
Patter songs are simply fun. For any one who wants to speak more clearly and more professionally, I recommend learning one of the patter songs and reciting it out aloud.
When fully comfortable with the style of delivery, choose a non-judgmental friend or family member and recite the patter song to them and ask for constructive insights.
For those of us with PD it becomes even more essentially that we use the voice or lose it. Speaking can be a struggle for PWPs but it is worth it if a PWP can find the energy and concentration to learn to patter and thus turn around one symptom of PD.
I have had Parkinsons Disease (PD) for at least 12 years.
Besides having a loving, supportive wife and friends, I’ve been exceptionally fortunate that through a type of interval training I have been able to remain much more mobile and generally functional than would have been expected.
From time to time I’ll blog on this subject because PWPs (People with Parkinsons) are largely without voice (both literally and figuratively) as are their Care Partners (CP) who have to cope with an enormous burden.
Education
This was brought home in graphic form when a support group I’m a member of applied for a charity which high school students were raising funds for. Our application was not approved because
1. the young people for the most part don’t know what PD is and
2. they only wanted to give money towards finding a cure (our application had been for an exercise center for PWPs)
I am not critical of these young people as they are operating on available information and what they can relate to. My point is to make you aware of my motivations for blogging on this topic. More to come…
Gilbert & Sullivan…no, not Gilbert O’Sullivan of Alone Again (Naturally)…were a lyricist and composer team who lived in the late 19th Century. They collaborated to write operettas, what we would call musicals, which were wildly popular throughout the English-speaking world.
That’s nice you say. Why should you care?
Because you can learn something from them. For one thing the shows are fun and you can learn a lot about how to use the English language effectively. And for another their success demonstrates that a team can be highly creative even when the principals’ personality types clash and collaboration is a challenge.
Why were they successful as a team?
They were professionals who realized that each had something the other needed and saw results where clearly the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts. So team chemistry is important but so are results which can arise out of well-managed team dynamics.
Each of us owes a debt to these two men who died over 100 years ago. Why?
They created the template for the Broadway musical and fought for the rights of artists of all kinds to have the protection of copyrights. And they didn’t particularly like each other. More to come…
The controller of a college was telling me that flexibility didn’t work, that people took advantage of it to the exclusion of getting the job done, and that flexibility was unworkable in high pressure environments.
I asked her to describe her program for flexibility in the Controller’s department. The program consisted of a spreadsheet which all employees in the office had access to. People signed up for the schedule that suited them.
Deadlines and quality are not flexible.
The result: missed deadlines, lack of coverage, poor quality product. I asked her why she didn’t insist on deadlines being met and quality standard is being adhered to. She seemed surprised that I asked as she said that would work against flexibility.
My response was that nothing can get in the way of deadlines and quality; those aren’t flexible.
What is flexible is the how and where.
Flexibility has to be managed by the employees as well as the departmental manager. It is a mutual responsibility but the manager is ultimately accountable.
Photo by erin m via Flickr
Moral to the story: to be effective flexibility means being reasonable and reacting rationally to challenges employees have during the course of their careers with you. By contrast chaos and lack of accountability spell disaster not flexibility.
At any given time your pay is out of sync with your contribution. Why?
Because it is most feasible to adjust pay once a year. At that time, you will either be over or under paid. So viewing pay in any particular year is myopic and leads to disappointment.
But how else can it be viewed, you ask?
In my experience if pay can be viewed over a longer period of time there is much less anxiety over one particular year and more focus on “am I getting to my longer term goal”.
What do I mean?
Suppose I could tell you that 5 years from your joining my business you will double your base salary and in another 5 years you’d double it again…and further that in between each year would be relatively even so that you could count on a smooth quadrupling of your pay over 10 years. I’d suppose that many of you would jump at the chance.
Now I’d also tell you that this scenario is for full-time outstanding results and that other arrangements would build off this model. The result of this would be far less time spent of the topic of pay increases and more time serving customers and clients.
A frustrated boss once said to me, “What’s the purpose of annual raises? Why do we spend so much time on something which in the end seldom pleases and most certainly irritates everybody?”
I had just informed him of the feedback we’d received on a salary increase program which was highly competitive; the feedback was at best characterized as “what we expected” and at worst as “another sign of the gap between how valuable you say we are and how you treat us”.
Pay as a relationship band-aid
Photo by Pip Ha Taylor
What I learned from directing the compensation programs of two major professional service firms is that most of us rely on pay to make up for unsatisfactory relationships with the boss, and/or working too many hours without recovery time year after year. Pay level has to do with market value but true recognition which satisfies comes from a boss really valuing those who report to him/her.
How did you feel?
The saying goes that I may not remember exactly what you said to me but I do remember how you made me feel. In other words managers need to reflect on how genuine their concern for their reportees really is. And this doesn’t mean being “nice”. It means acting in ways that show you really want to help them progress.
When your reportees believe that you are authentic, then a lot of pressure is taken off compensation as the “fixer” of on-the-job problems. This permits compensation to be seen more clearly as a way to recognize market value both today and over a longer period of time.
by kmakice via Flickr
This is a statement most of us can agree upon.
The problem comes in determining what it means to contribute. Does it mean: who is the most valuable to the enterprise? Who had the best year? Who was on the most profitable team? Who went above and beyond? Who was the most engaged in his/her work? Who bailed out the boss?
The answers to these questions are often sought in lengthy meetings where performance and potential are discussed. In my experience however there is an inverse relationship between the time spent in these evaluation meetings and the quality of the decisions. However sincere the participants may be, most of these meetings boil down to “bitch” sessions where managers make decisions about employees most in the room do not know.
These decisions on evaluation ratings are the main factor in determining compensation-raises to base salary and bonuses. Yet most managers cannot convincingly explain the connection between the annual salary increase and the performance rating.
This failure to explain satisfactorily plays right into the belief by gen y that performance appraisals are of limited value. Their mantra is “if the criticism is valid, the feedback needs to be given immediately and not stored up as a gotcha.” We’ll explore some commonsense solutions to this dilemma of who to pay, how much and why while turning the spot light on this dysfunctional processes and suggest some solutions.
What do you think? Are you pleased with the system as it stands today in most organizations? How would you improve it? Let’s talk.
W. Stanton Smith 