Thursday, August 23, 2018

Leadership Lessons from Taekwondo


Since becoming a ‘solopreneuer‘, I’ve doubled down on my taekwondo practice.  In fact, I’ll be spending the next ten days in Italy at a training camp practicing 3-5 hours per day in the hot sun, followed by my green belt test.  My family is coming along and my kids, as you can imagine, are delighted to spend their summer vacation watching me break boards.

Breaking a board in one shot feels great but if you had to hit the board over and over without ever breaking it you’d probably give up, which you can compare to some workplace situations.  Patty Azzarello wrote a great article (here) about becoming one’s better self – with way better hair - when work doesn’t go your way.  She’s one of the best at navigating difficult workplace situations, but it’s also worth exploring why leaders have to expend so much energy navigating instead of leading. 

You could argue that’s part of what leaders get paid to do.  Given that businesses need to run profitably, some competition for attention, mindshare and resources is inevitable.  Besides, friction can be a positive creative force, up to a point.

However, past that point it’s just wasteful and erodes trust.  How do you know where that point is?  Oh, you'll know. 

After that ‘People don’t leave jobs, they leave bosses,’ meme went around for about the ten thousandth time, Christie Lindor resoundingly qualified that statement in a blog post that has received over 30K likes and more than 1000 comments, so I guess it struck a chord.  Here are the crib notes, but I recommend the entire article (and Patty’s):

Yes, people leave bad bosses but what they really leave is an entire organization.  Symptoms of the kind of culture people want to get away from include stagnant processes, increased toxicity in interactions, frustration with wasted time in meetings, lack of support from leadership during difficult times, gossip and bad mouthing, favouritism, and pockets of motivation being drowned in organizational inertia.

Wow, who knew?

Even a good boss in this kind of environment will lose people.  In fact, they may lose more than average because they are the ones coaching and developing people to be strong external candidates. In other words, if people are leaving in one part of the business, you may have a problem with a particular leader, but if people are leaving across the business, chances are you have a bigger problem. 

What can a healthy Taekwondo practice teach us about trust and motivation? Taekwondo is based on a martial arts discipline that is thousands of years old, when they never heard of new-fangled organizational models or open offices.  It’s strictly hierarchical and based on mutual respect between masters and students.  Advancement is merit-based but open to all.  New students are welcome and masters help and mentor beginners – it’s expected.  There are rules and forms and you follow them, period.  You work at your own pace but those who show up and work the hardest advance the fastest. 

And yet, although it’s very structured it’s also very creative.  You have to think and move fast, innovate by combining movements your muscles know by heart in new ways, and anticipate your opponent’s moves.  It’s a one stop shop for autonomy, progress, mastery, flow, and purpose.

There are real workplaces that follow a similar model.  My first job at one of the leading management consulting companies, for example.  The partners were responsive and generous with their time, project leads were expected to mentor, performance standards were applied fairly, and advancement was both merit and time-based.  In other words, there weren’t organizational limits on how many folks could advance so good people didn’t get stuck in career limbo, which creates unhealthy competition at many companies.  New hires were made to feel welcome with a proper orientation and a regular influx of new staff kept the organization fresh.  

I’m not going to say it was perfect - and believe me when I say the hours were long – but notice the similarities to a well-run martial arts practice. I’ve had many great jobs and work experiences since, but each time I break a board I wonder why more companies don’t put real effort into mentoring, recognizing contributions and creating opportunities for more individuals to grow professionally.  It costs money but it creates abundance.

Great leaders know you don’t engage people with surveys, performance evaluations or 2.3% merit increases.  You engage them by taking a genuine interest in their development; recognizing a job well done - or a board well broken; enabling them to master the moves; empowering them to try new moves; and helping them advance to the next level.

Here's me breaking a board.  As you can see, it's a team effort.



You may also like: How to Find, Hire and Lead Great Talent

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Give Me Compliments: The Definitive Video About Appreciation and Engagement

After many hundreds of thousands of words written and spoken about appreciation and engagement - some of them by me over at the Compensation Cafe and of course here at Working Girl - this guy Heinrich has hilariously boiled this rich and multi-faceted topic down to its definitive essence: https://tinyurl.com/nsna3dk



Saturday, August 18, 2018

The HR Journey from Productivity to Purpose

My last post Is HR Stuck in a Rut? asked whether HR can evolve beyond process efficiency and employee satisfaction surveys to take the lead on offering an inspiring employee experience.  Here are a few suggestions to get started:

Know Your Personas: Some HR solutions support tailored talent management practices, but what matters is in how you personalize.  If you do it strictly by job or employee category, you’ll miss important nuances like seniority, extroversion v. introversion, or individual goals and not surprisingly, the process will work better for some than others.  Like marketers, HR should view employees as customers and personas to be served up a tailored and personal experience. 


Design Thinking: HR people love to talk to other HR people and that’s awesome because it marks them as curious, friendly, and open.  However, it’s also important to get out there and talk to your internal customers about how you can better serve them.  If you got out there more, you might have dodged the open office bullet.  Stop falling for fads and best practices and go talk to people!

Playfulness: Gamification utilizes well-understood principles to motivate people to do more of what you want them to do and have fun while they’re doing it.  It introduces a spirit of friendly play and – depending on what is more appropriate – facilitates cooperation or competition.  It’s a topic by itself that you can read more about here.

Mastery and Progress: On demand learning is a great time and money saver and quite a few organizations have done an amazing job implementing creative and engaging modules.  Yay!  But now that you’ve made it possible for employees to learn in 5-minute intervals between meetings, it’s worth exploring the benefits of allowing dedicated time for coaching, mentoring, knowledge sharing and professional development.

Trust: No matter what you say, people will look at what you do.  If your organization fails to pay out bonuses, if your leaders exclude or attack people, if new ideas fall on deaf ears, or if people feel taken for granted or stuck in place, you won’t have an environment where people want to bring their most creative selves to work. 

Joyful Workspace: It’s been proven that bright colours and feelings of abundance can create feelings of joy and endless possibility, so why do so many workspaces look like this?  I’ll just leave that out there.



Experience Design:  We know in our hearts that employee surveys are blunt instruments at best, and that satisfaction is a poor predictor of performance.  Maybe it’s time to shift focus to creating purpose and opportunity at work so people want to be there, feel connected to their work, and believe their contributions matter and will help them achieve their personal goals.

Note that none of these suggestions require high tech solutions to get started. The HR journey begins – like any journey of discovery – not at a conference but with a piece of paper, a sharp pencil, a pack of sticky notes if you’re feeling agile, and your customers.

Is HR Stuck in a Rut?


A bit more than three years ago I left the HCM world to re-enter the world of purchase-to-pay and supply chain finance.  There had been some exciting new developments, not the least of which was supply chain finance.

As I re-engage with the HR world, however, I get a sense of de ja vu because there don’t seem to be many new developments or thought leaders.  The topics are amazingly similar to what they were three, five, even ten years ago: Performance management is still broken, the war for talent continues, and HR technology still promises to solve everything from talent acquisition to employee engagement.

Meanwhile, industry experts are still talking about how to do the same things better while surveying HR practitioners about HR priorities and best practices.  It’s quite the echo chamber so perhaps it’s not a huge surprise so little has changed.

There are a few fresh voices talking about things like employee experience, design thinking, behavioural economics, the gig workforce, holocracy, gamification, etc.  Some of it’s pure nonsense, or ahead of its time, but at least it’s new.  And some of the tech trends are truly exciting.

Nonetheless, after three years focused elsewhere, it feels like HR has gotten itself stuck.  Is it fear of failure?  Is it an ingrained tendency to follow rather than lead? Or is it just easier to talk about the same problems with like-minded colleagues than it is to rethink them completely?

Don’t Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk

Here’s an example of what I mean: If diversity and personalization are drivers of creativity and innovation, why do HR processes continue to trend toward standardization?  And if outcomes matter more than activities, why do organizations continue to measure things like number of training modules or performance evaluations completed?

I mean, sure, if you’ve taken the time to roll out an LMS or a performance management process – despite the fact that for more than a decade, experts have claimed performance management is broken while offering new best practices to break it in more up to date ways – you want to understand your participation rate.  I totally get that. 

Understanding your numbers is fine as you don’t confuse a high participation rate with success.

One of the problems facing HR today is confusing activity with outcome.  And it’s not just HR, because we humans latch onto anything we can measure.  The problem is that when it comes to people, some of the most important things can’t be measured.  So, in a way, it’s worse when HR does it.

And don’t bring up AI or block chain now as the magic dust or I’ll have to come over there.  AI and block chain won’t help measure the unmeasurable, although machine learning will likely have a huge impact on personalization.  At best, they’ll help you do a better job measuring or making sense of the things you already try to measure.  At least for a while.

Just kidding.  I totally won’t come over there.

Time to Rethink HR Conferences?

I know, they're really fun.  However, instead of talking about the usual tech trends and topics, why not talk about how to apply behavioural economics to innovation or incentive strategies?  Or how to ensure managers are inclusive and promote a culture of trust where innovation can flourish?  Or how to apply gamification principles to motivate the entire organization to achieve the impossible?  Or how to create healthy workspaces that inspire creativity and play?  Or introducing a 4-day work week?

Someday AI will know us better than we know ourselves, but it’ll still be a while before a a bunch of code – be it ever so elegant, unbiased and networked - understands people well enough to make accurate predictions about individuals in a fast-changing environment.  And quite frankly, HR will have about as much to do with blockchain as they do with SSL or Unix, i.e. you’ll use it without knowing you’re using it.  I don’t mean to be insulting but let’s face it, the business isn’t looking to HR to figure out distributed encryption or machine learning.

So why not use the time to talk about how to enable people to bring their best and most authentic selves to work?  My post The HR Journey from Productivity to Purpose suggests some ways to help you do that.


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