Work: Enjoying yourself shouldn’t be “Optional”

Posted on October 31, 2013

Today is Halloween.  I have “costume” duty after school.  I get to pick up my granddaughter, keep her engaged from 3pm until trick or treat time, dress her and have her ready to go when mom gets here to walk her through neighborhoods.  I’m expected to ensure she completes her homework before the candy consumption begins.

I’m considering the best way to accomplish this task; focusing on learning while in the midst of visions of wheelbarrows full of candy.  I don’t want to be a killjoy but the work needs to be done.  As I plan how to ensure an enjoyable afternoon while accomplishing our tasks, I can’t help but see the parallels between work and my grandbaby’s pre-Halloween experiences.

Everyday at work should be an enjoyable experience.  Everyone has targets, goals, and specific tasks to accomplish daily.  A strong leader should ensure those targets, goals, and tasks are clearly explained, resources are provided without resistance to accomplish them and at the end of those efforts there is a celebration.  Celebration?  Of course!

Whether the celebration is as simple as a broad smile and a Thank you! from leaders and managers, recognition and celebration should be integral to a day in the life of any employee.  While we aren’t children, easily satisfied with candy and prizes, we are human and recognition and celebration provide satisfaction in work that ensures it is enjoyable.

And as far as celebration goes, I hope leaders are more imaginative than a “thank you”.  Those are important but creativity, planning and focused thought surrounding how to make the celebration meaningful to each person and team are critical.  

Thoughtful Celebration/Gratitude Ideas:

1.  Flexible Hours.  This is at the top of the list for many reasons.  First, nothing says thank you like “I trust you” and providing flexibility in work hours sends that message loud and clear.

2.  The “It’s All About You” reward.  Find out what matters to an employee or team members.  If it’s working out, provide a month-long pass to a killer fitness class.  If it’s “wearing comfortable clothes” change things up and provide days, weeks, months of casual clothing opportunities.  The list is almost infinite based on the personalities and interests of folks and their teams.

3. The Morphing Trophy.  Get a big trophy and give it to the employee you are recognizing for the week. At the end of the week, they must return the trophy but they need to add one thing to it. (You would be shocked how many things can stick to a trophy.) Then next week give it to the next winner. At the end of the year, you’ll have a trophy with 52 things stuck to it. It looks hysterical and has lots of memories. At the end of the year, retire the trophy and put it in your reception area. Do it every year.

4.  Pick my Project.  After the successful completion of a project or tasks, allow an employee to pick a new or existing project she has an interest in to buoy her spirits and provide that feeling of adding value that helps make every workday enjoyable.

5.  Adult Education. Pay for one adult education class of their choosing. My preference? Gardening class.

6. A New Chair. Many employees sit for at least eight hours a day. Reward their exceptional effort with a new comfortable, supportive chair of their choosing.

7. The “Maid to say Thank you” option.  Buy the employee/team a week/month of housekeeping.  There is nothing more delightful than coming home to a clean house after a hard day’s work.

8.  Performance Hours. If employees consistently perform well, give them “performance hours” tokens they can redeem to take a longer lunch, run errands or use for personal reasons.

There are so many ways to provide that foundation and environment for enjoyable Work!  As the boss, it is also so easy to take the “fun” right out of work.  A thoughtless word, a forgotten thank you, and you’ve turned yourself from a leader into just another boss.

Be the Treat for your team that makes the difference.

Tone at the Top – Leadership is Everywhere

Posted on April 30, 2013

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being on “sabbatical” or between Chief Executive roles is the occasional consulting opportunity I selectively take.  On two occasions in my professional career, I resigned my post without a clear path to the next opportunity.   In order to fill the coffers (i.e. buy lunch), I scouted and accepted consulting opportunities within medium-to-large corporations.  My previous two resignations were driven by the ethical “tone at the top” problem that existed within the enterprise so I was curious how other corporations managed when ethical employees began to choose to do unethical things.   Essentially, what started out as a means to stay active in the market as a consultant, turned into one of the best learning exercises a leader can have.

One thing I have observed first hand is that many different things drive ethical climate and often the idea of tone at the top as the main driving factor has mythical components.

For example, one of my executive positions allowed me ready access to the owner of the corporation.  There was little question he was an ethical person.  He had a sense of fair play, right and wrong, and regularly communicated the right message to his direct reports.  However, he had a marked aversion to confrontation and some misguided beliefs about qualifications required for strong managers.  He was hard-driving and focused outward and left the day-to-day benchmarking of performance to his managers without ever validating approach or metrics.  He had a tendency to hire in executive managers who were highly respected technologists or specialists in their field without validating their people skills or management experience.  He also disliked engaging with the employees on a one-on-one level and did not practice a true open-door policy.

During the four years I was with the company, I regularly observed the ethical tone of the culture being set at lower levels than the owner.  The effects became obvious in the financial statements within the first year.  The owner, desperate for an answer to what was failing, hired a big six (at that time, 6 existed) firm to analyze what was going wrong in his company of approximately 2500 people.  It was a fascinating, but disastrous, exercise.  The firm quickly discovered pockets of retaliation and entitlement behavior, malicious obedience, and creative incompetence.  Unfortunately, the firm identified the symptoms as the cause and the “fire the bad apples” reduction in force project devastated the company.  Sadly, they folded within 3 years of this exercise, never being aware of the true causes.  Active involvement, direct employee communication, open door policies, and avoiding abdicating management responsibility would have addressed the corporations problems over time.

Let’s talk about retaliation and ultimately the entitlement behavior.  This occurs when employees feel they are being mistreated and find ways to get even.  The potential for retaliatory behavior exists in every organization.  When employees feel they are unappreciated, treated unfairly or abused, their sense of “entitlement” is sufficient rational to motivate or justify behavior (often unethical) that would be unthinkable otherwise.

For example, in the previously mentioned corporation, several of the executive managers decided in order to boost EBITDA, a reduction in benefit costs was in order.  Included in those benefit cuts were training and certifications.  Now, this was a technology firm and as many technologists know, you are as desirable in the workforce as your last certification.  Unfortunately, much of the top-talent at this firm had been attracted via the owner’s promise of continued training and certification.  Many employees saw the revision of the benefits as a loss.  The corporation was investing heavily in sales, conferences, seminars, and client-engagement.  The employees began to selectively choose conferences, seminars, and clients that were in distant but desirable geographic areas.  They also began to book first-class tickets, expend higher dollars on client entertainment, and select higher-end hotels tied to conferences.  Employees found a way to “compensate themselves” and retaliate against the corporations new policy.

During one of my early-career consulting engagements, I was placed rather distant from executive management so I got to experience first-hand the tone being driven by the mid-level directors and managers.  Many divisions within this large company were healthy and the overarching corporate culture came through loud and clear.  Happy employees doing the right things for the right reasons abounded.  However, one division seemed to struggle dramatically.  It was the division I had been assigned to and I made it my mission to understand bottom-up what was creating the discordant tone.  It didn’t take long to identify symptoms of the problem.

My observations about unethical behavior at the employee level were easy and obvious.  The mid-managers regularly showed up at the office at 9 and left at 3:30.  They stood behind employees and consultants around 3:20 and started asking the question, “are you ready to go yet?”  The teams spent inordinately large amounts of their time preparing presentation decks (PowerPoint Slideshows) that were then passed up the chain to the “big boss” for presentation at some unknown conference or event.  There were no cross-team meetings, no collaborative initiatives, and no strategy or direction setting from the VP.  I regularly saw malicious obedience practiced.  On one occasion, the VP jumped three levels below him to an information security engineer and directed activity without knowledge of other conflicting events.  Rather than escalate the request to his boss, the employee responded as directed and created a 7-hour outage to a portion of the enterprise.  He knew he would create it.  He also knew if he responded with anything other than an affirmative “yes sir” he would be chewed out by the VP, or worse.

Another regular occurence of destructive behavior was around creative incompetence.  Employees were regularly told not to communicate above their own managers, regardless of the situation or event.  They were also tightly reigned in on communication outside of their own division by the VP.  Corporate myth existed surrounding what happened to employees within this division if they every communicated above their “chain of command” even if the communication was positive, informative, or in one case, a warning of direct impending information security breaches and compliance.  I was not surprised when I popped open my laptop one morning and saw this corporation splashed across the front page internet news regarding an egregious breach of data confidentiality that ultimately created a $2 billion dollar breach and recovery.  I knew that many of the team had been escalating concerns about their lax identity and access management policies to the VP but he regularly shooed their concerns away citing “budget issues that could get him fired.”  Although I wasn’t with the corporation when the large, and very public, breach occured I can easily guess what drove these engineers with ethics to commit an unethical act of creative incompentence.  Ironically, the VP was fired.  The day after the public breach.

Most people, when thinking of “tone at the top” think in terms of corporate officers or very senior (CEO, COO, CFO) managers.  In fact, the top is relative.  It is most accurately characterized as the immediate supervisor of whoever is asking the question.

Knowing this, many of you may have a different appreciation of how you create the ethical climate.  Where you set the bar,  and what you intentionally or inadvertently communicate, speaks volumes about your ethical expectations of your staff and managers.

Whether you are at the top, middle or bottom, you have ethical responsibilities and obligations that are not to be found in any law, regulation or policy.  To be an effective ethical leader, you MUST attend to the tone being set by informal systems — with a focus on messages from the board, executive management, and you — about what it means to do the right thing

A New Chapter

Posted on September 9, 2012 Updated on September 12, 2012

Exploration and introspection are such powerful tools.  In the past two months, I’ve been exploring who I am, what I know, what I don’t know, what’s important to me, and what is unnecessary for me to hold on to in order to step into the next Chapter of my life.  I’m lucky.  I have a wonderful life partner and husband who is such a thinker.  I’m pretty certain he is compiling ideas, creations and thoughts even while he sleeps.  We’ve been doing a good deal of brainstorming.  We are both huge fans of Phoenix and Arizona in general.  He’s a native Arizonan and I figured out a while back that this was always going to be home for us.  We wanted to develop a business idea that would provide for us, friends, family and Arizona.

This month we are launching our brainchild, SmallStreetUSA.com.  I’ve been researching and putting finishing touches on the business plan and developing step-by-step components of the business.  Today I learned that we made it into the semi-finalists spot with SeedSpot.Org, an incubator newly birthed itself in Arizona.  I’m excited by the opportunity to meet and network with the good folks who have founded this start-up incubator as well as begin the journey to building out SmallStreetUSA.com.

A New Chapter… Stay tuned!

The Money has to be right (for both of us)

Posted on July 18, 2012

Many of us often make the mistake of not setting our basement on acceptable salary before we begin our search.  Commonly, folks assume that if they made 140K in their previous career position they MUST make at least 140K and often 10-20K more in their next opportunity.  That’s a mighty large chunk of change for doing nothing but making a decision to move into a new setting with a new opportunity.  The “basement” or lowest salary figure provides the foundation for “painting your picture”.  If you know your minimum, then you open the door to creative review of what you would like to do next.

Salary is a tricky thing.  While it is necessary to allowing us to live and thrive, it is not the only or most important indicator for career satisfaction.  I recently spent some time with a talented colleague.  She was struggling with what to do with her career search.  After a very difficult exit from her previous position, she was struggling with her accomplishments from her previous post as well as how to tie them into her current career search.  We started with setting a basement (lower than she had originally anticipated).  Then we talked about her passions, skills and things that held the strongest interest for her.  Setting a basement allowed her to look more deeply at what she really wanted to do next.  Her previous job in technology allowed for a much higher than typical salary but it did NOT provide her the satisfaction or excitement she had been seeking.  Essentially, she was dramatically limiting herself by setting up salary requirements as THE indicator for which career opportunities she would pursue.  The final conclusion was that she genuinely had a passion for non-profit causes.  Accepting that the salary would be lower than in a corporate setting as an IT Executive, she realized that her personal and professional satisfaction was not tied to salary but to an opportunity that would resonate with her philanthropic motives.

Industry will impact salary, but so too will size.  Start-ups are a personal passion of mine but I’ve long since recognized that salary (exclusive of stock options, ownership, and other compensation) would never be at the level of my average career salary range.  However, the joy of working in a start-up or entrepreneurial environment greatly outweighs a lower salary.  And, in my experience, success in a start-up setting can net you higher overall compensation over time without harming the company.

The objective is to ensure that you understand 1) what you need to satisfy your financial objectives and 2) what the company can comfortable bear and feel good about (i.e. value proposition you deliver to the company) before you begin to negotiate.  I’ve watched far too many people pass up brilliant opportunities because the salary was short their previous salary or torpedo a career by demanding more money too early in their tenure because they “undernegotiated” their need (i.e. they did not know their basement and set themselves up for dissatisfaction or personal financial risk).

Professional growth and development opportunity

Posted on July 10, 2012 Updated on July 10, 2012

The majority of people naturally work toward professional growth. Being able to develop ourselves as the “best possible person” in both job and life is fulfilling. A sense of pride and accomplishment comes from progressing through stages in our career. There have been numerous books written about career stage development and modeling. In general, most specialists in this field agree that a professional (1) has an identifiable base of knowledge from which he or she practices, (2) has acquired a mastery of that knowledge through extended education, (3) has autonomy in making decisions regarding application of that knowledge, (4) displays a strong commitment to the field, and (5) has a lifelong commitment to professional development. (Kerr, Von Glinow, and Schriesheim, 1977)

The stages are:

• Groundfloor or Entry Stage
• Colleague Stage
• Counselor Stage
• Advisor Stage

Groundlevel or Entry stage is easily understood. It is the time in a career where we first enter either our chosen profession or a new job within the profession. We are interns working to understand the organization’s structure, culture, and purpose. At the entry stage, our goal is to quickly acquire the basic or core technical skills and prove ourselves. To attain any level of career satisfaction, we typically work hard to move out of this stage by moving from dependence to independence. The most successful person seeks out professional opportunities. The driven individual takes advantage of training, inquires about mentor relationships with a senior professional, establishes strong peer relationships and requests career counseling in order to achieve more.

Many professionals find satisfaction operating at the Colleague stage. As long as continuing education or increasing responsibility occur, it is possible to thrive on independent work in this stage. Colleagues build at least one strong area of expertise and are well-respected. Colleagues often become independent contributors in problem solving and establish a professional identity. These are the folks who continue to expand their knowledge in their area of expertise. They often find themselves moving from independency to interdependency – establishing synergy with their greater team.

The Counselor stage signals a desire to take on responsibility for the growth of others. A counselor level person may not take on direct managerial responsibility but does provide professional growth facilitation to others. One of the most rewarding steps in professional growth comes from the ability to stimulate thought in others. Developing coaching and mentoring capabilities and initiating job enrichment and expanding (redesigning) opportunities for peers provides relevance and value during the counselor stage. It is at this stage of career development that the opportunity for self-renewal through job redesign, greater responsibility in decision-making and opportunities for special projects and formal and informal mentor opportunities present themselves. The value that the counselor stage presents is often under-estimated and provides a tremendous amount of personal and professional satisfaction.

Individuals in the Advisor stage play a key role in shaping the future of the organization by “sponsoring” promising people, programs and ideas. The sponsor has often developed a distinct competence in several areas of expertise and often has a regional or national reputation.

Motivators for Professional Development:

* Becoming involved in strategic organizational planning
* Achieving the respect of others in the organization
* Engaging in innovation and risk-taking
* Understanding complex relationships
* Achieving a position of influence
* Sponsoring individuals, programs, and people
* Increasing responsibility
* Expanding knowledge regarding relevant issues
Developmental Opportunities:
* Opportunities to utilize expertise and influence
* Complex and challenging assignments
* Increased responsibility
* Involvement in strategic planning
* Opportunities to represent the organization to internal and external groups
* Obtaining resources
* Career counseling
* Retirement planning

It is important to note that no stage in professional development is superior or inferior to any other position. Each of us owes it to ourselves to examine which stage resonates with us at any point in time. Each stage provides opportunities to achieve a level of self-examination and comfort that determines where we are most comfortable fulfilling our personal and professional goals.

Special credit to Roger A. Rennekamp, Ph.D. and Martha Nall, Ed.D on their Professional Growth: A guide for Professional Development. Many of their ideas are not only well-formed but provide a strong foundation for what we regularly see in leadership and corporate positions.

Corporate Gardening – Situational ability to hire, mentor, and grow people

Posted on July 5, 2012

I waited until after we received rain in Phoenix to complete this segment. Sounds risky, but I listened to the weather report and a 30% chance of rain in Phoenix in July is a higher chance than it sounds. Sure enough, we woke to drizzle and a pleasantly cool 4^th of July. My plants were delighted and our friends were too. No 100+ 4^th of July for us. As a matter of fact, the temperature remained in the 80’s all day making an outdoor celebration just perfect and my plants (and friends) got a brief respite from an overwhelming heat.

I promised garden analogies in my last post. Not simply because the parallels between gardening and management are obvious, but I am an avid gardener as well as devoted servant leader and the similarities resonant for me.

Some owners often make the mistake of saying they are building a company. You can build buildings and infrastructure but in reality companies are grown, not built. As with gardens where the key elements are the plants, PEOPLE are the key elements that allow a company to grow. Like plants, people come with their own genetic encoding and personal motivators that drive how and when they grow and develop, as well as what motivates them to grow.

The reason situational ability to hire, mentor, and grow people is a critical driver may already be obvious. To grow a garden one must prepare the soil and create the conditions that lead to optimal growth. A manager needs to know what types of people, from skills to personality fits, are needed.

After all, if the garden is for flowers and not vegetables, a gardener will shop only for flowers, and will look for the best plants for the weather, pest, and weed conditions the garden will inevitably experience. Similarly, a manager should have clear job descriptions for all positions and a powerful interview strategy to identify the best possible people to add. She should have a strong understanding of the people who are currently working within the company, what motivates them, what they believe they are doing and why (i.e. the vision) to assure good hires and complimentary fit.

A good gardener is always inquisitive about the conditions of the garden. Is fertilizer needed? More water? Less water? Are there any unwanted pests, weeds, or diseases? Gardeners ask these questions and make any needed adjustments because they know what kind of results they’ll get if they simply give a plant an intimidating look and bark out a command to “grow!” Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed owners and managers who try this technique in the office. Typically, the result is the same as a gardener would experience; no growth and in the case of the employee, de-motivation. Even more challenging is when the manager tries again, using the same technique, and then blames the employee when nothing happens (i.e. no growth, no change in motivation, etc.) If a gardener were to take this tact and then complain that his plants were not growing at the expected rate we would all think he was fairly loopy. However, this happens in companies so frequently and yet very few question the technique or the logic.

In gardening, there are three key risks that young plants must be protected from: Weather, Weeds, and Pests. Without the watchful eye of the gardener, advance planning, and risk mitigation these risks can have strong, daily, and often detrimental effects on the “corporate garden”:

In Phoenix, AZ weather is synonymous with sunshine. That sounds pleasant but with the sun comes crushing 110+ day temperatures. Our weather zone makes it challenging, but not impossible, to produce vibrant, bountiful gardens. However, typically, it’s not the day to day sun or rain that we worry about, it’s the sudden changes that cause problems. Strong winds, unexpected frosts, flooding, are all examples of conditions that can wipe out young plants. In our corporate garden, it is also the unexpected that causes significant risks to be realized. Sudden changes in priorities, funding changes, staffing changes can wipe out high potential ideas, energy and effort as quickly as a frost will kill a plant. It is critical, as a servant leader, to protect the people and their innovative ideas from these conditions wherever possible by insulating them from the unexpected situation/risk.

Any gardener knows that weeds left unchecked will take over a garden and rob the plants of the nutrients they require for growth. Likewise, in a corporate garden setting weeds are the distractions that arise from the culture and slowly choke out enthusiasm, motivation and powerful ideas by diverting the necessary resources to other areas. This doesn’t happen overnight (typically), but rather gradually over time. A seasoned gardener removes the weeds as they surface rather than letting them form a stronghold. A seasoned manager will do the same thing.

Pests come in many forms, but always come from outside the garden. Their goals often involve consuming the plant for their own purposes and needs, then leaving it when it is no longer of interest or offers feeding material. In the corporate garden, these pests come from all directions. They could be people that are outside a project team that want to involve themselves (i.e. put their “stamp” on an idea) so they can selfishly take credit later. The pest could be an individual who does not understand a vision, or corporate direction and continuously gets in the way of innovation or moving ideas and concepts forward by complaining about the “change” even after large scale change management issues and communication are in place. These pests can be an individual or an entire department. In any case, it is critical for managers to be on the lookout for Pests, and repel them as efficiently as possible.

Finally, when a garden is not being managed, it will simply keep growing, but in another direction than what was intended. Corporate gardens, and the beautiful people who make up the fabric, require a tremendous amount of attention and care. The more collaboratively and cooperatively senior management works together to ensure the attention is on the people and what they need to be successful, the higher the probability of an abundant harvest; year over year.

Early Morning Musing

Posted on July 1, 2012

It’s five am.  Nothing earth-shattering about that time except that I haven’t seen it for years.  Why do I keep waking up at 5 am?  My professional and personal world changed last week.  For the past two years, I’ve been running and growing a technology firm.  It has been wildly challenging and rewarding beyond measure.  While growing the company (330% in 18 months) was fulfilling, it is what it took to produce that growth that is the real story. 

Because I continue to wake up early, mainly due to processing events and some level of grieving, I think I will take this time to explore the experiences of the past 20 months.  This exploration will be most heavily focused on the stellar employees who I hired in, and who quickly became collaborative colleagues in the quest for professional success.  But I will weave in experiences that come from my 20 years in the C-Suite and what I’ve learned.  No person becomes “great” overnight —  it takes a tapestry of experiences woven together to produce a “powerhouse” leader and frankly it is the people behind and beside me that create that leader over and over each day.

I was a manager/leader first.  Over the years, I realized that perhaps I had it backwards.  In order to be a powerful leader, I first needed to serve. I had to figure out a way to measure my transition from a “leader first” (i.e. power/money being the drivers) to a servant leader.  I had to ask myself the following questions about the folks who worked for me.  Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Stay tuned as I talk about what I learned on my way to producing professional fulfillment in unexpected ways.

Hello world!

Posted on July 1, 2012 Updated on July 1, 2012

Greetings and welcome to my blog.  Who am I?  Wife, mother, daughter, friend, and C-level executive for twenty years.  If you want the professional details – go to LinkedIn.  You’ll find lots of details but the short bio says I am a Business-focused Executive with experience in ensuring technology empowers and supports highly effective management throughout the business. Stand-out abilities include ensuring delivery of quality products and services and strategically focused management decision making. Successful in finding ways to ensure technology is never an afterthought but rather forms the basis for competitive capabilities and advantage.

More importantly, I’m a “people” person.  I’m not really an extrovert so when I say I’m a people person, what I mean is that I love all the complexity that people present.  Learning who they are, what makes them tick, what their strengths are and what demons they are challenged by in daily life.