Category Archives: Communication

Personal Health Conversations: Yes, No, Maybe?

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Authored by Janice Gianinni.

As pandemic restrictions lift, employees and companies are planning or preparing to return to the office. A common concern arising is how much personal health information an individual is expected to share.

Pre-Covid when you met someone, you might say “Hi- So how are you doing?” to start the conversation. During Covid, that greeting for many became “Hi- so are you vaccinated yet?”

Regardless of the reason- as a conversation starter, simple curiosity, or genuine concern for self and others- asking directly about a person’s health status may impinge on their sense of privacy. That matters to some more than others.

So how do we engage in a conversation when we re-start socializing in or out of the office? What information do we need to know? Where is the line between what we can ask and what might be inappropriate to ask?

I wish I had a script to share with you to make this easy. Sadly, I do not.

I offer the following thoughts to consider before we say anything (Note: I always recommend that we think before we speak). Thinking through “different lenses” helps guide the conversation.

If you consider asking people personal health information such as “Are You Vaccinated?” what is your objective? Why? What are the potential consequences?

Putting yourself in another person’s position, what if you had a health condition where your physician did not recommend vaccination? How would you feel if someone walked up to you and asked about your vaccination status? Would you feel uncomfortable? Would you think that you must defend your decision and share information that is no ones’ business and violates your privacy? If so, do you want to put someone else in that position? Are you asking out of curiosity? Do you need to know? Will the answer substantively change what you do and how you do it? If not, then why ask?

Do you trust your colleagues to make responsible decisions? Do you think they would deliberately put you in danger? If not, then perhaps the conversation takes a different approach. Maybe you share your concerns so those around you can be deliberate in your presence. Allow them to avoid making you uncomfortable.

Some people are very private. If you would be such a person, how would you react to people asking intrusive personal health questions? Will it change what you do or how you do it?

It is reasonable to expect the company to have a return-to-work policy. Expectations are that any guidelines will be straightforward, to the point, address employees’ situations and concerns, and will be widely shared.

It is also reasonable to expect an environment where open dialogue is respectful and encouraged to clarify expectations and consequences for everyone – all employees and the company. Modifications, as adopted, are shared with everyone.

It is reasonable to expect that your personal health information is protected.

There are not easy direct answers here. The environment is a delicate balance among self, others, company, and customers. At some point, we will all settle into our new reality. Work-life will be different. Expectations will be different. The challenge at this point is navigating through these uncertain seas, maintaining our composure, respect for ourselves and others. The transition period may require acknowledging one’s discomfort and anxiety while simultaneously keeping it under control.

Unique Coaching Experience

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Authored by Eileen Nonemaker.

Most of my coaching clients have been trying to reach specific tangible goals either professional or personal. When DJ reached out to me, she was struggling to get involved in the community. She and her husband had relocated to the area a year prior and after having had a successful professional career in healthcare initiatives and marketing, she was having difficulty meeting anyone who would even talk to her about possible volunteer or work opportunities. She was very frustrated and was starting to take all the rejection personally.

After an initial conversation, we decided to move forward and DJ took the Attribute Index assessment, which I require of all my clients. This is an important step to assess where their strengths lie.

I was not surprised that she had strong people skills, but I was surprised that she had strong self-esteem, despite all the rejection she recently encountered. This was good as she could move forward from a position of strength.

My background is in sales and sales management and much of my coaching experience has been with sales folks or small business owners who are the major sales force in their organization. DJ’s goals were very similar to those of a salesperson developing a new sales territory. My approach was to treat this opportunity as a Sales Development Process focusing on the qualities of a successful sales professional. We also explored the steps of a sales process, the value of networking, and the importance of handling rejection.

Together we looked at the community and which organizations most closely aligned with her background and skills. She targeted the leaders of those organizations and created a strategy for approaching them. She created scripts for phone calls, drafted emails, letters, and an elevator speech.

Since I had followed this same process three years earlier for myself, I was able to introduce her to some key community members that could refer her along and help open conversations within their networks. Over the next three months, DJ developed more confidence and was able to present herself as a valuable asset. She attended Chamber events and eventually volunteered at the Chamber office weekly. She was also invited to join the board of a local women’s networking group as a program chair. This role has introduced her to new people, expanding her personal circle as well as providing interesting, educational meetings for the members.

DJ was an excellent coaching client due to her strong desire to help others and to make an impact on the community with the knowledge and skills gained throughout her career.

Choose to be Interesting

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Commit to accomplishing at least one Executive Leadership Developmentpersonal or professional development activity every month.

Whether reading from a different source than usual, listening to a new podcast, or watching something on a subject that you know little about, grow your perspective.

Have something new to talk about with others. Choose to be interesting.

Are You Engaging?

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Are You Engaging?

I know that is an unusual question to begin a business column. But in this case I am not referring to purely your personal style. I am referring to how well you engage everyone who works in your organization.

Employee engagement doesn’t have to be relegated to some soft-headed, everybody-feelgood-and-sing-Kumbaya moments. It can deliver pragmatic outcomes that most execs would die for.

Ben Zander, conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks about the word symphony, which is derived from Greek συµφωνία, meaning agreement or concord of sound. He refers to it as sounding together.
Think about it. This means there is no more of the normal BS and distraction associated with “them and us” or “we and they” or “my area and your area.” It is just “us.”

Sounding together is a very powerful notion because without it, regardless of the talent of the players involved, the result is cacophony.

Scary Statistics

This lack of sounding together may result in American businesses only operating at one-third of their true capacity due to employee disengagement occurring within the workplace.

Gallup and Harris polls involving more than 10,000 employees across various industries indicate some potentially frightening findings. When reviewing the following points, consider the impact and implications on your organization’s top- and bottom-line financial performance, your ability to manage the business, your ability to achieve positive customer loyalty metrics and market share growth, and your ability to optimize the employee strengths in your organization:

  • Only 15% of the employees could identify the company’s most important goals.
  • 51% were unsure of how they were expected to help the company achieve goals.
  • Only 49% of all available work time is dedicated to companies’ most important goals.
  • 53% of American employees are unhappy with their jobs.
  • Only 29% of employees indicated they are fully engaged in their work.
  • 55% of employees described symptoms that point out they are disengaged from their
    work.
  • 16% of those surveyed indicated they are actively disengaged from their work.

 

Employee_EngagementLook closely. Only 29% of employees are truly engaged! That is the group that believes in the company and wants to make things better.  They clearly understand the business and how their work fits into the big picture. These employees are respectful of (and helpful to) team members and others, find opportunities to stay current in their field of expertise, and are willing to go the extra mile.

In contrast, disengaged employees are not risk takers nor committed to the company. They lack a sense of achievement in their work and advancement in their role is not important—they are just doing enough to keep their job. Actively disengaged employees are unhappy at work and act out the unhappiness. They like to be part of the problem and find it almost impossible to become part of the solution.

They spread discontent and consistently fall short of meeting performance expectations. Disengaged employees cause a significant loss in effectiveness and productivity. For example, if you have 1,000 employees with an average salary/benefits of $35,000, that adds up to $35 million per year. If your firm’s number falls somewhere between 33% and 71% for those that are not delivering a full hour of work for a full hour of pay, you are squandering somewhere between $10 million and $20.5 million in wages every year. That number does not even take into consideration how the behavior of those employees may have negatively affected the servicing of internal and external customers.

Without a doubt, every organization wants high performers who are talented, understand the business model and goals, perform above expectations, and model behaviors that influence others. These performers maximize
resources through creative insights—far greater than others—and produce high levels of results.

Low-performing employees who are actively disengaged abuse systems, disrupt interactions, and often become an obstacle to organizational effectiveness.  I believe an engaged workplace culture can be created and sustained when you consciously attract, hire, support, and develop people who look forward to using their collective talents, attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge to benefit your internal and external customers.
This involves everything from setting clear direction and living your espoused values to invigorating organizational capability and capacity because you have truly mobilized individual commitment. For it to be real, it must be something that is as natural a part of your operation as breathing is to a human being.

So let me ask you again:

Are you engaging?

Culture Clash

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We live in a multicultural world where globalization is much more than a buzzword. Understanding cross-cultural
communication has become a necessity for conducting business. Although many people view the challenge as being external to their business, for many companies, the true challenge is dealing with the cultural clashes within.  We were aware that any time people operate multiple locations or divisions, they are subject to a potential culture clash. But in preparing to help a build a team within a multinational client, we realized this can apply to much smaller organizations, even those operating locations across the street from each other.

Communication_Cultire_Clash

As you review the list that follows, think of these elements as being on a continuum of sorts. Where would you place the various departments of your organization and the personalities that run them?

Waits for relationships to mature vs is proactive and tolerates higher risks. How do people mentally approach new situations and people?

Deferential vs highly assertive. How do people tend to operate when they disagree with authority figures?

Hierarchical vs self-directed work teams. How are decisions usually made and implemented?

Punctual to the second vs we will get there when we get there. How do people approach
the notion of being on time?

Always looking to help others save face vs engages in direct, frank communication.
How do people speak with each other and treat the other’s ego?

Avoids confrontation vs believes that confrontation is expected and okay. What is their tolerance for, and appreciation of, confrontation as a tactic to get things done?

Never wants uncertainty if it can be avoided vs thrives on the unknown and the thrill of the hunt. How comfortable are people with the notion of uncertainty?

High reliance on the team’s instincts and resources vs high reliance on individual efforts. How do people initially expect any challenge to be overcome?

Growing revenues vs controlling costs. Is there a default operating style and mantra
when faced with a challenge?

Do it right the first time vs we will have time to do it over. What is the most common answer when push comes to shove?

Maintaining unwavering quality standards for our customers vs maintaining the production schedule or timeline. Which outcome do people believe is usually rewarded with the biggest bonus or promotion?

Operating with a process vs operating by seat of the pants. Is planning, thoroughness, and professionalism rewarded or just barely tolerated?

Watching functional metrics vs watching business metrics. Does each area operate as a fiefdom with numbers that trump the enterprise’s numbers in importance?

As you are mentally assigning people and areas to the descriptors above, think about how quickly misalignment and disagreement about what is “right” can negatively impact an organization’s ability to function at a high
level.

In a large organization, the same production department in two different locations can be operating as though they are distinct corporate entities with very different cultures.  How many unnecessary battles will have to be waged by other departments just to get things done? What is the magnitude of the hard and soft costs being absorbed there?

When each department operates to suit its desired style, hiring and grooming someone who will succeed at the company over the long term can be challenging. As people change functions or get promoted, the characteristics they were praised for by their previous manager can get them criticized in their
new role.

This can lead to people being gun-shy about taking on new internal assignments for fear of committing self-imposed political suicide.  They may see it as more desirable to leave your organization, in which case all the training dollars invested in them may end up helping your competition.  Rather than leaving organizational culture development to chance, why not manage it like any other resource.

This article originally published in American Executive Magazine

We Don’t Read Minds

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As I coach executive teams around the world, one area that creates significant improvement is developing a better understanding of the nuances of goal achievement. Corporate CEOs are usually not in the dark about the potential power of goals, but many fail to truly capitalize on them.

I usually see the wheels fall off the truck in three areas. I’ll address one shortcoming in this article: not publicizing a list of corporate goals and objectives in priority order.

Without a publicist like this, people at every level of the organization are forced to guess at the most important criteria for making decisions.  I believe that when executives don’t want to commit to a prioritized list, it is the
equivalent of playing “stump the chump” with their people. I’ll provide an example to illustrate.  Let’s say there was an organization that had only two goals. One was to provide outstanding customer service; the other was to maximize profitability. The ranking of these two goals was never communicated to the people in the organization.

A customer calls in at 4:50 on a Friday afternoon requesting a special shipment. What response will the customer hear on the phone?  If maximizing profitability is perceived to be number one by the person handling the call, the customer will hear, “We’ll get right on it first thing Monday morning.”

If providing outstanding customer service is perceived to be number one, the customer will hear, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen, and it will be on your dock when you open Monday morning.”  Now, assume that the request or shipment is not handled until Monday morning, and the GM gets an angry call from that customer.  The GM rips into the person who decided not to ship the order, and says, “I don’t know
what you were thinking—without customers, we don’t have a business. Don’t let that ever happen again!” The person apologizes profusely and swears it won’t re-occur.

Angry Boss CC

The phone rings on Friday at 4:50 just four days later. This time, everything is shipped out and arrives first thing Monday morning. On Thursday morning, the GM receives the overtime and expense report for the previous week.  Furious, the GM rips into the person again:  “We aren’t running a not-for-profit here! If we  don’t control our costs, we won’t have a business.What part of that don’t you understand?”  The person apologizes profusely and swears that they will try to do better the next time.

During seminars, when I ask, “What do you think will happen the next time the phone rings Friday at 4:50?” Many people laugh and say, “They won’t answer it.”

While that answer is humorous, my experience suggests an alternative does probably occur—because I have dealt with the aftermath.  At 4:52 on the third Friday, the person who answered the phone takes off for the office of the GM and says, “What do you want me to do about this situation?”

The GM makes a decision and doesn’t think twice about it. After a while, though, the GM gets frustrated and says to me during a meeting, “You know, it drives me crazy that no one will make a decision around here. What ever happened to people being willing to take responsibility and make a simple decision?” Keep in mind that this story only revolved around two goals. Imagine the confusion and inefficiencies when there are five, or 10, or more goals being worked on simultaneously in an organization.

Before I agree to help any organization improve its decision making abilities, I ask a simple question: do you publicize a list of goals in priority order? When they say they don’t, I know where I have to begin.

The Upside of Upside Down

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Whether they refer to them as raving fans, zealots for their business, loyal customers, or long-term clients, most executives today are trying to ensure their companies get and keep profitable customers. 

I often talk with executives about their current organizational structure and how personal and organizational power and communication flows within their organization.

Communication Flow Direction: Three Examples

Most likely, your org chart looks something like Figure 1. In this configuration, the perception of power by all concerned flows from high at the executive level down to low at the individual contributor level. It tends to follow the overall level of authority granted to those levels.

Power-Communication Flow

More often than not, it also reflects the overall direction of communication within your organization, with much more coming from the top down than from the bottom up.

When I ask where customers appear on the chart, many times, the answer is below the pyramid (Figure 2). Why is that so potentially devastating? Because it can lead to people paying more attention to internal politics than to the needs of customers.

Here is a real-life example from several years ago that shows how things, however well-intentioned, can run amok.

A food service company that was running deli-style restaurants in office buildings would typically staff them with two to four people because that level was considered productive and profitable. The food service president expected a report to be on his desk each business day by 2:00 pm. In an effort to not disappoint the boss, accounting staffers developed the habit of calling each restaurant between 11:30 am and 1:00 pm to get the final numbers from the day before.

The accounting department never thought about the fact that they were taking what limited staff the location had away from serving customers to feed the corporate monster’s need for data. Indeed, the accounting staffers did
not see store-operation employees as their customer and were disconnected from the real business the  company was in.

What makes this story even more pathetic is that their customers probably thought that they were paying a premium to receive fast, convenient service. Let’s face it, we don’t go into an establishment like that for a gourmet dining experience—we just want to grab something quickly and run back to our desks.

The deli staff, who are paid minimum wage, are unlikely candidates to say to callers from the main office who are working on a report for the president, “Tell the president that he’ll have to wait, I’ve got to make a bologna sandwich right now.” The fear of losing their jobs was too great, and so customers waited and fumed until the daily phone call was finished.

When we flip the pyramid over (Figure 3), it puts the customers on top of the hierarchy and creates a service delivery model that makes it easy to see who everyone on the company is really working for.

Here’s how things should be set up:

  • The individual contributor is focused on doing what it takes to attract loyal customers.
  • The supervisor/team leader helps keep the organization out of the way of the individual
    contributor.
  • The middle manager keeps the organization out of the way of the supervisors who are
    trying to help the individual contributors.
  • The executive team is there to ensure the organization keeps out of the way of the
    middle managers who are helping the supervisors help the individual contributors,
    all in an effort to attract and keep loyal customers.

Here’s an acid test. Ask yourself and your managers,

“Unless something is mandated by law or regulation, if our customers wouldn’t gladly pay for something we are doing, why are we doing it, and how can we eliminate it?”

Managing Passion

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I was thinking about the methods that are currently in vogue as organizations attempt to execute the business of  the day.

Specifically, I was thinking about the role of passion as a management tool. When missing, the environment feels flat to those working in it—the corporate version of Austin Powers’

“Have you lost your mojo, baby?”

I am hesitant to refer to passion as a management tool because I don’t want to advocate manipulation in its most negative form. Instead, I want you to approach this as a form of booster rocket that you can adapt and use to get to where you want to go faster.

Almost every exec will admit that the more people in the organization who understand the strategic plan and the objectives, goals, and tactics that support it, the easier it is to execute.

Almost every exec will admit that when people in the organization are really engaged (because they understand their role and willingly accept their responsibilities), it’s infinitely easier to lead them and successfully execute annual business plans.

If that is the case, why do so many leaders shy away from proactively tapping into the endless stream of human potential that is unleashed when fervor exists and is cultivated?

If fervor speeds up execution, why leave it to random? Why not manage it?

Passionate Managers

Managerial Talent

The term managerial talent has been defined as “the behavior exhibited by a manager that increases the amount of productive, constructive, and profitable behavior on the part of others in the organization on a daily basis.” In all my years of consulting, no one has ever had a problem with this definition. But that doesn’t make it any easier to live that standard, does it?

Changing behaviors and improving results on a daily basis is tough to do even when we have no choice. In fact, one could argue that if the people being led don’t subscribe to this philosophy, there will be a great deal of pent up frustration about why the goal-posts seem to be moving every day.

Step Function vs. Rising Curve

As an executive, part of your role is to ensure that your managers know that they must operate so their teams make a gain and then hold the gain. It may help to envision a step function versus a continually rising curve.

Rising Curve

The hold part is more critical than most realize. It is more than simply not backsliding— that’s only part of the equation. Without the hold part, people won’t ever get to enjoy a feeling of victory because whatever they just accomplished a moment ago isn’t good enough now. Not a very motivating environment.

Before the age of the knowledge worker, people were usually treated as extensions of a piece of machinery. As long as they were fulfilling their functional responsibility, they could check their brains at the door. Many times during my career, I have heard one person say to another, “I need three bodies to work in this area.” Not a very enlightened view of people is it? What is the likelihood that high levels of managerial talent are running rampant in an environment like that?

Pursuing Organizational Success

How many people in your firm are going about accomplishing their tasks but not really helping you achieve organizational success as much as they could be?

  • Is it because they aren’t passionate about their role?
  • Is it the way they are being led?
  • Is it because they don’t know the end game?
  • All of the above?

 

Upon his retirement from HP, David Packard said to his employees,

“You shouldn’t gloat about anything you’ve done; you ought to keep going and try to find something better to do.” (Emphasis added.)

In addition to the obvious message from David recommending that HP people not rest on their laurels, it seems there is a more important takeaway. You can help ensure that there is greatness to be had in the future of your organizations by encouraging people to tap into their passions and following them through.

Help your people align their passions and interests with what is needed by the business— the “better,” if you will—and then enjoy the ride together.

This article is republished from American Executive Magazine