Get Out of My Facebook!

If this blog had a subtitle, it would be The Intern Diaries: Day 1.  They arrived today, our new flock of team members – one each for technology, operations, marketing, client services, and communications.  Such a wealth of new energy!

In between getting the drill on who’s who and what’s what around The Gabriel Institute and the obligatory pizza lunch, I tried to get their take on networking technology.  The biggest divide I could think of was LinkedIn vs Facebook, so I was curious where they stood.  They’re onto the economy and there’s no false hope here.  Despite the fact they have an average of another year or so to go, they have no illusions about the job market they’ll emerge into.  But as I expected, they haven’t tuned into LinkedIn for professional networking yet.  Now they all will, and they will be able to put us down as their first business experience – and we’ll be able to tell the world how they did.

We also gave them the HR warnings about being careful what’s on their Facebook page.  The stories flew, and a new dilemma was brought to my hopelessly out of date consciousness: What do you do when your mother wants to friend you on Facebook and you just don’t want her as your friend?

So this is for our new interns’ moms – and dads too.  We tried that ‘be a friend to your kid’ stuff in the 70’s and it didn’t work all that well.  You’ve done a great job, so relax.  We know – we gave your college son or daughter a Role-Based Assessment and that’s why we brought them on board.  They are coherent – the best measure of maturity and potential ever devised – and they have solid Role preferences which we’re going to respect and develop.

So get out of their friendship places and instead, get them to share their Role-Based Assessment reports with you.  You’ll be very proud.

And, by the way, thanks for trusting us with them.  We know they’re precious to you.

Recognizing Women

Last week was a nice one for women in business.  Xerox named Ursula Burns the successor to Anne Mulcahy, effective keeping the magic number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies on an even keel.  This is no small thing for my generation, the ones who gathered in ‘consciousness raising’ groups and thought about how our sons and daughters lives should give them the same freedoms and responsibilities.  We were not as happy when eBay’s Meg Whitman was replaced by a man.  Back then in the early seventies we’d hoped by the new millennium  it wouldn’t matter.  We thought things would even out more than they have.

But enough of this whining, Dr. Janice.  You got recognized this week too.  Jayson Saba, a top analyst in the human capital industry, cited your company’s product in a LinkedIn discussion of assessments and integrity.

When I read this, my first thought was, score one for women CEOs!  Then I came to my senses.  No one does any of this themselves.  It’s the team that was recognized and the team has no gender.

Ursula, I hope your team, too, has no gender, no race, no age, no singular culture.  And I hope you get to feel like it’s great to be a CEO when you have a great team that celebrates with you every moment of recognition.

Coherent Conductors, Crabby Culture

The simplest definition of corporate culture I’ve ever seen was “the way we do things around here.”  But corporate culture is anything but simple.  It actually derives from the human infrastructure, the energy of the organization as determined by the predominating Roles and coherency of the people who get the work of the organization done.

So I was particularly interested in Daniel Rubin’s column in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer in which he mentions the predominant newspaper culture as “crabby, but effective.”  This is the setup to compare it to the culture at the US Census Bureau which, while it sounds less crabby, is also likely much less effective.  (If you want to know more, you really want to read the My Two Census blog – nonpartisan and written by presumably crabby political journalists, this is a gem.)

I bet they have a lot of Conductors in print journalism.  Dedicated to getting things ‘right’, using the power of the pen to do the work of the sword and, in general, teaching us the truth as they see it, of course they get crabby at times.  They don’t get nearly the respect they deserve, no matter what type of organization they work in.  But show me a bunch of coherent Conductors, with maybe a coherent Vision Former, a couple of Action Formers and a few Communicators and Curators and you’ve got a team that’s going to follow the Vision and truly give you the news that’s fit to print.

And it will be worth reading.

Will That Be One Hump or Two?

Jason Zweig (aka WSJ’s Intelligent Investor) had a great article in the weekend Wall Street Journal.  After giving examples of bad group decision making (as they say on Law & Order, ‘ripped from the headlines’) he concludes that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is an illusion, that it depends on the competency of the group.

I’d like to add here that what he’s talking about is entirely measurable.

Ineffective groups (aka committees) start out designing a horse and give you a camel.  Let’s just refer to that as being two humps off.  (This measure, of course, assumes they have designed a bactrian rather than a dromedary.)  You can quantify that in pounds of weight the horse would find burdensome, or the extra expense of feeding the resultant lumpy-backed horse or the lessened productivity caused by the extra weight.

It’s all entrely preventable if you select members of the group for their teaming characteristics and leave off those who are either rigid or diffuse.  It also helps to have Role diversity to avoid the tendency to jump in with agreement too early.

Moral of the story: If you always see things my way, you probably aren’t needed on my team.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Just when you think HR has learned that some assessments aren’t right for hiring, you open today’s Wall Street Journal and there’s an ad for a COO position being recruiting by a major search company that asks for a resume and “complete Myers-Briggs personality type test results.”  Then they refer to a free online knockoff of the original, which the publishers of clearly state is not appropriate for hiring.

Enough agony. Now for the ecstasy.

For those of us who are highly motivated by mastery, there is nothing better than the triumph of person over technology.  And for those of us who are highly motivated by affiliation, there is nothing better than doing it as a team.  Today our team finished our first videos on Role-Based Assessment and teaming characteristics!  And this was our first ‘review’:

Speaking as a performer who pays attention to production values kudos on the quality of the clips!   It captures very visually  the Gabriel Institute competitive differentiation.

Overall, that shifts the balance clearly in favor of ecstasy for today!

PS: If you are on Facebook, you can see them here:
A New Way to Know
People as Teams

First, Fire the Leaders

Another week, another crop of downsizings, and with few notable exceptions, HR people are telling me how they’re choosing the leaders over the non-leaders as the keepers.  And I’m groaning inside.

Has anyone figured out how companies run when everyone’s a leader?

For one thing, no one’s willing to make the coffee.

For another, the self-promotion rises and the effective internal communication falls.

There are loads of strategic plans (if they ever get out of the planning stage, that is) but there’s no one who actually prefers to DO something.

And no one fixes the little annoying things that threaten to jam the progress and no one loves tracking the instructions that tell you what to do to unjam them.

But it’s like someone made it a rule that being a leader is the only worthwhile position.  I’m going to riff on John Coltrane now and declare, unequivocally:

Damn the Rules, it’s the Team that Counts. You need all the Roles in your song, anyway.

Just give me some improvisation, baby.

Visions of Succession

Every so often I think about succession planning.  My own.  But I’m not planning on leaving.  I’m planning on sharing.  Let me explain.

I’m thinking that a lot of CEO problems are caused by people who think they can do a huge job well, all by themselves.  Up till now, our company has been small enough that I could do a credible job myself.  But as we grow bigger, I find it makes much more sense to work with someone else as sort of an extender.  If it was on a shelf at the supermarket it would be called CEO Helper.  I prefer the term VisionMeld(tm).

So how do you find someone to share?  Role-Based Assessment to start, for sure, but I think  asking the candidate to write a Vision Paper really should be part of every recruiting process.

The Vision Paper is a way of explaining to the leadership team of an organization what it is that they are expected to accomplish, the purpose for the venture.  It does not go into precisely how they to achieve it since that isn’t a problem for the CEO to solve alone.  It begins with a bit of the history behind the product or service and goes on to simply describe the end, the goal or the long-term, desired outcome for the organization.  Where most mission statements are vague and general, the Vision Paper is personal.  It’s the best measure of the ability to be an inspiring leader I have ever seen.  And the knack of inspiring and motivating others to follow your dream is the sine qua non of the successful CEO.

I asked a friend what he thought.  Ever practical, he concurred and pointed out that it’s a way of getting to agreement as to what the performance expectations will be.  “You’re just trying to find someone who can do the job.  To lead a company successfully, you need to know where you’re going and the Vision Paper is your roadmap,” he said.

I guess I’m just more mystical than he is.  For me, the energy that goes into writing a Vision Paper reflects back on the author in an almost magical way. If it resonates, you probably have a good basis for a VisionMeld(tm) – and for sharing and succeeding.

What Will Happen to HR?

I gave the keynote at Philadelphia SHRM’s meeting this week and since I’ve been getting a lot of calls and LinkedIn requests from senior HR people lately, I figured I’d offer my help to anyone who’s looking.  I never expected there would be that many.  More to the point, I never expected to be that many senior level, highly experienced, knowledgeable people with no prospects in sight.

One person lamented that companies just don’t care about people any more.  I’m not convinced that they ever did, at least in the sense that HR professional thought they should.

Seems to me that when we think that way, we pit HR, the protector of the worker, against the company’s stakeholders – often a whole lot of people who have a little bit of that company’s stock in their (dwindling) 401k.

What if we had a way of thinking about all the people involved in an organization – those who fund it, those who it serves, those who manage it – as if their interests were compatible?  If we did, I wouldn’t have to ask myself, what will happen to HR?

When Visions Meet

Do you remember those sped-up photos of cells dividing and multiplying until they reach the point where they change direction and something new and different emerges?

It’s like that with visions.  When two visions come very close, when they are mergeable in some way, if they are fed the energy of both sources they too become something new – a living, breathing organism of some sort.  Whether that is one being or an enterprise involving thousands of individual organisms acting together is less important than the mechanism: two original, pure visions, each dedicated to bettering the world in some way. coming together in an ecosystem that supports the human spirit, producing revolutionary progress that benefits the far off future.

I think sometimes when it is about to happen, one or both visions are overcome with the fear that they will be engulfed or destroyed by the other and the natural drive to merge them fails.  The trick is not to erect walls to keep fears out but to make them visible for what they are: the hobgoblins we keep alive with our distracted energy.

I’ve just started working on one – I think of it as a VisionMeld – and will keep you posted on my progress.

The Bailout – Enron End Run Revisited

I was going to write something on the bailout but when I started thinking about it, I realized I’d already written what I wanted to say.  This was originally published in 2002.  The situation is just more of the same (snafu, for the literary) so I’m going to recycle it here.  My submission was entitled Enron End Run.

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The media update us hourly on the Enron situation about courts and lawyers, documents and shredders. They ask a lot of quality journalist questions, but I have one. How did Enron make such bad decisions? After all, they could afford the best executives money (stock options, deferred income, perks, golden parachutes, etc.) could buy.

Rarely are decisions made alone. Even when the guy (and in the US, it’s usually a guy) in charge wants something, there’s usually a team that needs to agree to it.That’s called getting “buy-in,” a rather unfortunate term considering the price that Enron execs will likely pay at some time in the future. Within a series of decisions, you’ll find a series of interactions of the people who make them, of opportunities for correcting a runner who’s straying out of bounds.

Any executive team decision is just one stop on their problem-solving mission. But when you analyze the series of their decisions, you see patterns that repeat, patterns woven of the interactions of the key players on the team. And at Enron, as at so many corporations, that team was missing a few key players.

A good executive team is diverse. Not in the sense of political correctness, necessarily, but in the sense of recognizing the value of differences in people’s styles, what team theory refers to as their Roles, as opposed to the things they do on a day-to-day basis, their tasks. One simple way in which diversity serves a team is that of the ten team roles, there are three that serve to contain action, to stop and think of the consequences, to converge on the true path of the team’s mission. In other words, getting things done in a business environment requires power and control. Enron had plenty of power. What they lacked was effective control.

I’m not much of a football fan, but I have a good friend who explains what I want to know in language I can relate to. Today I asked him about end runs. Are they common, I asked, wanting to know if they are as performed as often on the field as apparently they are off the field. Enron is not the first, nor will it be the last, playing the game this way. He explained that there are maybe six or so end runs in a season and that many teams don’t even do one because once you’ve done one, you’ve bent the rules enough to cause others to wonder if you can ever straighten them out again. I was intrigued when he told me that sometimes it is only two or three people on the team who know that they will be attempting an end run. I wonder how they make this decision. Is it in the passion of needing to win at all costs or is it thought out? Are the pros and cons given voice? And does anyone know how many team members were involved in the decision and how many just went along with it because it was a winning play?

Regulation, de-regulation, re-regulation: none of it helps when the problem lies in management. FASB, GAAP, IRS: all just letters, as in “the letter of the law,” worthless without the spirit and intent of the law. The new rules to come will further regulate “balance sheet partnerships” but will do nothing to insure against the poor decisions made by an “end run” team.

According to team theory, certain roles serve to move the ball, to further the overall goals of the team. Others focus the effort to move the ball in such a way as to end up winning the game. Without focus, the ball moves out of bounds and while the referee might miss this occasionally, sooner or later it’s going to be caught. In a professional football game, this pattern is caught in practice before the game. A player who constantly and needlessly runs out of bounds is not going to do well. The idea is to move the ball within the boundaries required. The better someone is at that, the better the player. The better the players, the better the team.

Did Enron have someone there who could provide the control over the power that the key players had? CBS News reported that they did. Robin Hosea, a senior accountant, worked in the benefits department. She apparently reported that some Enron departments were spending employee benefits money without approval from her department. She said she reported this to her superiors and was told to keep quiet. She was soon laid off. If money was spent this way, it constitutes a criminal offense. Her job in the company was to work on the team as a control agent. She was, in part, there to focus the efforts of the management on moving the efforts of the organization forward while keeping within the boundaries required. When they ignored her, they lost that essential focus. They lost the containment they so sorely needed.

Capitalism is arguably the most effective economic system ever developed but unbridled capitalism is based on greed. Now there is nothing wrong with a little healthy greed. That’s what motivates for-profit companies. But greed is powerful. If it is allowed to range unchecked, it will eventually destroy everything around it.

Governments are supposed to place various constraints on what actions a company may take in order to protect the welfare of the rest of society. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Far more effective are the constraints that an ethical, diverse management team, with its interplay of forces of power and control, places on itself. Without control to balance it, a team with an excess of power almost inevitably sets up the kind of conflict that led to the Enron collapse.

Enron executives were simply trying to make money. Most of them probably believed they were abiding by the letter of the law. In the end though, the company collapsed. Just consider what would have happened with that same kind of power and drive under tight and disciplined control, constrained and focused not by broad laws that regulate all companies but by cooperation with team members who were also interested in the long term interests of the company. Instead of free-ranging action with an eye on the short-term, they would have been focused and directed, power under control, to accomplish what they wanted without paying such a high price. It might have taken longer but it would have cost them – and their victims – a lot less in the end.