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Leadership
Lisa manages a group of people at a marketing agency. Like Lisa, most of the team is in their mid-30’s. They work long hours together and often go to dinner or drinks after work. Recently, over lunch, an older colleague told Lisa to be careful about making friends with her staff. “Don’t cross the line between being a manager and a friend,” she warned.
Good advice? There was a time when the answer was yes. For decades, it was considered best for managers to keep a personal distance from their employees. The school of thought was that friendship was a slippery slope to favoritism.
Today, however, organizational structures are losing their rigidity. Reporting lines are becoming fluid. Companies are decentralizing authority and moving toward team-based networks. According to a recent study by Deloitte University Press, “only 38% of all companies and 24% of large companies (>50,000 employees) are functionally organized today.”
As reporting lines blur, so do the lines between our professional and personal selves. It’s now considered okay, even healthy, to work with friends. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace poll found that workplace friendships increase employee satisfaction by 50%. Companies like Zappos, Google, and Dropbox encourage employee bonding.
Leadership is no longer about having positional authority. It’s about relationships. Leaders who build strong relationships with their team are in a better position to empathize with the needs of their diverse workforce and to handle the dynamic shifts in business cycles.
This doesn’t mean that you should become BFF’s with your staff. Save the sharing of innermost thoughts and crying-on-the-shoulder for close, lifelong friends. What it does mean, is that your team wants to be able to laugh and commiserate with you – to see you as both a leader and a human.
If you think about it, there are several similarities between being a good friend and a good leader:
- We all want friends and leaders who can hold us accountable without being unkind, and with whom we can be honest.
- We want friends and leaders who genuinely solicit our advice, but who are strong enough to take decisive action.
- We want friends and leaders who we can confide in and trust, without worrying that they will gossip about us with others.
You don’t have to be bossy or distant to be an effective leader. When you apply the principles of being a trusted friend to your leadership role, you’ll find that the line between friendship and leadership becomes invisible.
Question: Do you let your employees see you as human, or are you a never-let-them-see-you-cry manager?
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Leadership
“You will work all the time. If you’re very, very lucky you may sleep or eat.”
That’s an actual quote pulled from a review posted on Glassdoor – a site where employees and job candidates can anonymously post pros and cons about your company.
What’s that again?
Like TripAdvisor and RateMyProfessors, Glassdoor is taking advantage of the transparency revolution. It’s a database of company reviews, CEO ratings, and benefits information that lets the world know what it’s like behind the curtain of your organization – from interview to exit.
How big is it?
If you thought that Glassdoor was a small social media platform for people to complain about their jobs, think again. Launched in 2008, Glassdoor has a current valuation of $1 billion. It’s used by 34% of Fortune 500 companies, and has 30 million members from 190 countries who’ve contributed company reviews, salary reports, and photos for some 500,000 companies.
Why should I care?
In today’s market, your job prospects are making decisions about whether to work for your organization based on information provided by others. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer shows that people are far more likely to trust anonymous reviewers than company CEOs. It’s part of what Bob Corlett of HR Examiner calls the Amazonification of recruiting.
What can I do about it?
First, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Transparency is here to stay. The best employers use Glassdoor as an opportunity to gain competitive advantage in the market for top talent.
Second, breathe easy. The average company rating on Glassdoor is 3.3 out of 5, and 66% are positive. Glassdoor requires reviewers to provide both pros and cons, and enforces protocols like no foul language and NO REVIEWS IN ALL CAPS.
Third, you can follow these tips to reinforce your reputation:
1. Spring for an enhanced profile. With it, you can add customized content like photos, videos, and job postings. It allows you to put your best foot forward in a way that displays your company’s culture and personality.
2. Encourage reviews. It’s better to be proactive than reactive. Ask job candidates to post a review of the interview experience. Encourage employees to write reviews when celebrating milestone anniversaries with your organization.
3. Comment. Employee and candidate reviews are considered opinion, so take them as such, and respond in a kind and genuine way. Here are some best of examples for inspiration.
4. Reflect. If you get a negative review, take some time for the sting to pass, then reflect. As leadership guru, Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” If there is a kernel of truth in the negative comments, use this opportunity to reflect and address the underlying issue.
Finally, provide outlets for employees to vent. If they can speak up at a town hall or on a discussion board, they’ll be less likely to take out their frustrations in public.
It takes years to build a reputation. Give employees a culture they can be proud of, and the tools to help them share it with the world.
Question: What does the concept of transparency mean to you and your organization? Is it feared or embraced?
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Leadership
“On the morning of April 7, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep.” Those are the opening words of Thrive, the 2014 New York Times Bestseller written by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.
That fall was her wakeup call. It caused her to re-think her definition of success and to seriously consider the impact of stress on her life.
Stress. It’s become such a prevalent part of our workdays that we’ve come to accept it as an occupational necessity. Yet, the long-term effects of stress can be lethal. Stress is a factor in 75% to 90% of all medical visits, and a factor in the six leading causes of death.
If you consider yourself a leader who thrives under pressure – if you work best under a deadline – you may be addicted to stress. According to Heidi Hanna, author of Stressaholic, “stress is a drug.” When we’re under the gun, stress releases dopamine and feeds endorphins to our brains which temporarily boosts performance.
As a leader, you have a responsibility to create a culture of performance. Over time, your time-crunched lifestyle can not only have serious health implications for you, but can have a debilitating impact on your organization.
Here are two practices that will help you navigate the path between stress and success:
Be Mindful. Our response to stress is something we inherited from our ancestors. It was a fight or flight response that triggered an ‘all systems go’ reaction in the body. When faced with a sabre-toothed tiger, that reaction was designed to improve our chances for survival by releasing a burst of cortisol to mobilize the body for action.
Although the sabre-tooth is extinct, our flight or flight mechanism is alive and well. Any time we face a threat – a deadline, a conflict with a colleague, a financial struggle – our body goes into stress mode. It releases cortisol causing our blood pressure to rise and our heart to beat faster. But, without a physical release of fighting or fleeing, the cortisol builds up in our system. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we can train our brains to recognize these sensations in the moment, and learn to react calmly instead of letting out our inner caveman. It’s a practice known as mindfulness.
As defined by Dr. Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.” The next time you’re in a stressful meeting, try the ABC method of mindfulness. Become Aware of the stress rising in your body. Breathe deeply and consider your options. Then Choose thoughtfully.
Build Margins. Today’s leaders are incredibly busy. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of you. And no one seems to appreciate the fact that you are a finite resource. Perhaps you don’t even realize this yourself. You can’t be an effective leader if your calendar is crammed with back-to-back meetings and your inbox is full of unread messages.
“To be truly effective,” says leadership expert Dr. Tony Baron, “you need to make time for margins your life.” You need to create white space, or times of reflection so that information can be turned into knowledge, and that knowledge into insight. Sometimes, you just have to stop and let the information catch up with you.
Building margins in our lives helps us get over our feeling of scarcity that leads to stress. We start by stressing that we never have enough time, that we cannot make time to truly connect with our employees, that there is only so much to go around.
Margin is not something that just happens. You have to fight for it. You can start by creating a time budget like this one from Michael Hyatt to help you focus on what matters most.
Stress is not going away, but you don’t have to be addicted to it. Make the choice today to be mindful and build margins in your life to build the resilience you need to manage it effectively.
Question: How does stress impact your ability to lead effectively?
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Leadership
At 11:21 a.m., Pacific Surfliner 763 glided into the Amtrak station in Ventura, California. The train was 12 minutes late.
As I gathered my things to step off, I worried that the delay would put us behind schedule. I was escorting five team members from San Diego-based Stone Brewing Company to the headquarters of Patagonia. We were on a culture field trip to study this 43-year old outdoor clothing and gear company. We wanted to learn about its mission and purpose, its values, its recruiting and onboarding practices, and about its commitment to social and environmental sustainability. We had four hours.
But as soon as we stepped onto the platform, I felt that we had been transported to another world. A world where Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, first set up shop in 1966 in a rented tin boiler room of an abandoned meat packing company 65 miles north of Los Angeles. A world that coexisted beside the rolling Pacific surf, not obsessed with squeezing every drop of productivity from the day.
We were greeted at the station by Betsy, a company paralegal who padded alongside a well-loved, communal campus bicycle. Betsy escorted us on the 10-minute walk from the station to the Patagonia campus – a variety of repurposed buildings that included the company’s oldest retail store and Chouinard’s original blacksmith shop. She dropped us at the on-site café where we began our visit with an organic lunch. Over the café doorway hung a wooden sign inscribed with the company’s purpose statement:
“ Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
Throughout the afternoon, we spent time with employees who were passionate about being part of the still unfolding story of Patagonia, and excited about being a part of something bigger than themselves. Here are some of the top takeaways from the day:
1. Get clear about your purpose.
Not only did we see the purpose statement hanging in the café, we also heard it echo in the words of every employee we met. Employees like Heather in Quality and Logan in Environmental Responsibility understood how their jobs are directly linked to the company’s purpose.
Heather works in the company’s in-house lab to ensure all of Patagonia’s fabrics meet rigorous testing to backup the company’s pursuit to build the best product. “’Make the best’ is a difficult goal,” writes Chouinard in Let My People Go Surfing his book about the history and purpose of Patagonia. “It doesn’t mean ‘among the best’ or the ‘best at a particular price point.’” Heather uses a variety of machines, each with an affectionate nickname, to perform tests for things like pilling and elasticity. “Dale,” for example, is a machine that puts fabrics through abrasion tests. Patagonia guarantees its clothes for life. Heather takes that guarantee very seriously.
Logan’s team helps Patagonia codify and quantify its mission to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. The team ensures that the company meets B Lab standards and Benefit Corporation reporting requirements. B Lab is a nonprofit organization that certifies a company’s social and environmental benefit (hence the “B”) in the way TransFair certifies Fair Trade coffee. Benefit Corporations give directors the legal protection to allow a company to do more than return profit to shareholders. Logan is proving that doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive business objectives.
2. Hire people who want the same thing as you.
Chouinard describes his leadership style as MBA – management by absence. He started the business over 40 years ago as a way to pay the bills so that he and his friends could earn enough to go on mountain climbing trips. At today’s Patagonia, candidates for an open position must have not only the skillsets and experience for the job, but, more importantly, a passion for the outdoors and for environmental sustainability.
Chipper acted as our tour guide for the afternoon. He peppered his talk with surfer terms like “rad” and “gnarly,” and spoke with passion about Patagonia’s support of the organic cotton industry and alliances with mega-buyers like Nike and Walmart. Chipper walked us through the company’s 43-year timeline, and gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the production process. By the end of the tour, it was clear that Chipper was a highly knowledgeable and passionate advocate for Patagonia’s mission. What we did not learn until later, was that he was also a 13-time World Freestyle Frisbee champion, and had spent the entire morning surfing with summer interns – the living embodiment of Chouinard’s ‘let my people go surfing’ policy.
3. Hardwire your culture into the DNA.
By the end of the day, it was evident that Patagonia’s culture was part of its DNA. Our conversation with Dean in Shared Services gave us a picture of how culture was hardwired into its infrastructure.
He started with how Patagonia hires for culture fit. “It doesn’t matter what skills or experience someone has,” he said, “if they don’t fit our culture, their presence can act like a drag, weighing the entire company down.” The company will hold positions open for several months to a year, if necessary, to make sure they find the candidate who is a culture fit. Next, Dean emphasized that, while getting culture right in the customer-facing positions is important, it’s even more important with the infrastructure positions like human resources, legal and finance. Those are employees with touch points to every part of the company. Their decisions and behavior must reflect the company’s values in action every day.
Finally, Dean advised that we “lean in on everything to make sure it supports the culture, from the ridiculous to the sublime.” Once you are clear about your culture and you have carefully vetted people for fit, scrutinize everything – policies, procedures, benefits, systems – to ensure they support your stated culture. “Your core values drive business,” said Dean, “don’t let busy-ness get in the way.”
At 4:15, Betsy’s familiar face met us outside of the company store. We were full of stories and insight from the day’s field trip as we walked back to the train station. As we waited for the southbound Pacific Surfliner, we said our goodbyes to Betsy before she hopped on her bike and rode toward to shore to pickup up her 3-year old grandson for some afternoon paddle boarding.
Question: Do your employees understand your organizational culture and their role in supporting that culture?
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Leadership
What do
Charles Darwin,
Candice Bergen and
Michael Jordan have in common? They’re all
introverts.
So are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg. When we think about the personality traits that effective leaders need, we typically think of people who are charismatic, dominant, and outgoing. We think of extroverts. Especially in the U.S.
A study by researchers at Stanford suggests that Western cultures value excitement, and that these values carry over into the behavior of leaders in those countries. Author and TED Talk contributor Susan Cain agrees. In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, she writes,
“The U.S. has become a nation of extroverts. The extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business. We moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. During the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. Abraham Lincoln is the embodiment of the culture of character, and people celebrated him back then for being a man who did not offend by superiority. But at the turn of the century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic.”
At a time when our headlines are full of messages from brash, assertive, outspoken leaders who love their own press, it may be time to consider the virtues of their quiet counterparts. Here are four ways introverts can turn their love of solitude and keen observational skills into effective leadership skills:
1. Listen first, talk second. Extroverts talk first and think later, because they express themselves more easily verbally. Yet according to Susan Cain, “There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.” Rather than rely on witty repartee, introverts listen intently to what others say and internalize it before they speak. They’re not thinking about what to say while the other person is still talking, but rather listening so they can construct the best reply.
2. Leverage your quiet nature. Remember the meetings where everyone was clamoring to be heard, until Bill — who never said a peep — chimed in? Then what happened? Everyone turned around to look in awe at how Bill owned the moment by speaking calmly and deliberately. He was tapping into the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln who said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
3. Soak up the ‘me’ time. Introverts spend a lot of time in their own heads. And they need this time. It’s how they turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into insight. So set aside ‘me’ time every day. Find a quiet spot to sit down and reflect. Even if it’s 15 minutes. Let the thoughts flow through your head and jot down any new ideas that percolate.
4. Let your fingers do the talking. Introverts tend not to think out loud. Speaking extemporaneously is not their strong suit. Take advantage of opportunities to prepare your thoughts in writing. You’ll have time to choose compelling and persuasive language that you can refer to when you’re speaking and can leave with others to make sure your key points stick.
In a world where being social and outgoing are highly prized, it can be difficult to be an introvert. But introverts bring extraordinary gifts to the leadership table that should be celebrated and encouraged.
Question: What is your primary orientation? How can you leverage the talents of those who are your opposite?
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Leadership
When we think of career advancement and leadership development, a good option is the use of a mentor. Whether you are a senior executive or an emerging leader, there is never a bad time to ask for the assistance of a mentor. Just as Plato had Socrates and Bill Gates has Warren Buffett, mentoring is an excellent opportunity for learning from a role model.
By definition, a mentor is someone with knowledge and experience that you can benefit from and is willing to share his or her acquired wisdom. The underlying idea is to improve yourself by connecting with their experience and insight. To get the most out of the relationship, here is a short list of things to keep in mind:
1. Define your need. Take the time to define your mentoring needs. Are you a technically-minded person who could polish your relationship-building skills? Are you a junior executive who could benefit from the experience of someone more seasoned? Once you have a solid understanding of your mentoring needs, make a list of those who can potentially fill the role.
2. Build the relationship. Learn as much as you can about the people on your list. Which ones have values that closely align with yours? Get to know them in a casual setting over coffee or lunch to see if you have a natural rapport. Don’t lead with “Will you be my mentor?” (That’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date.) Instead, get to know them. Start small and see where it goes.
3. Set expectations. Once you’ve found a good match, take the time to set expectations for the relationship. Will you meet informally to chat over business challenges? Should you set up a weekly call to discuss an initiative? Maybe you’d prefer an interview style where you go over a set of questions. Choose the style that best meets your mentorship goal.
4. Be prepared. If you’ve chosen wisely, there is a good chance that your mentor has just added you to an already busy schedule. Be respectful by showing up to your mentoring sessions on time and being prepared. If you agreed to do some homework, make sure you honor that commitment. If you chose an interview format, bring a list of carefully prepared questions.
5. Move on. The ultimate goal is to arrive at a stage where you will no longer require the services of your mentor. Just as you set expectations going into the relationship, be clear when you feel it’s time to move on. Don’t allow the relationship to end in an awkward fizzle, but bring it to an honorable close. Thank your mentor for taking the time and caring enough to invest in your growth. Chances are, your relationship will evolve into a long-term trusted friendship.
If you are the type of person who takes on challenges, you’ll likely have a series of formal and informal mentors along your career path. If you make the effort to manage these relationships well, they can be some of the most important connections of your lifetime. And when you get an invitation for coffee from a junior colleague, be prepared to use your positive experiences to pass it on.
