Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Leadership

These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions

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These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions Engaged employees are more likely to be effective, stay with your company, and nurture a favorable corporate culture. To gauge employee engagement levels regularly, run a pulse survey and ask these two questions:

  1. To what degree are you proactively engaged in improving the tasks you’re responsible for? Does your workplace actively seek your ideas to make those improvements?
  2. To what degree do the processes that you are working with enable you to be highly successful in your job?

Seek ideas meaningful for improvements from people on the job. Demonstrate commitment to taking significant action and follow through.

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  5. How to Start a Hybrid-Remote Work Model

Are Layoffs Your Best Strategy Now?

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Are Layoffs Your Best Strategy? We’re in a demand slump; if you think downsizing will cut costs and shore up the bottom line, consider the unexpected consequences of layoffs.

Hefty severance pay, outplacement services, and other direct costs can add up quickly, and indirect costs can be substantial. E.g., losing experienced employees can precipitate lasting damage to your business. The direct costs can wipe out any short-term financial benefit if new hard-to-find employees are to be hired and trained within six to twelve months when the downtrend stops.

Then there’s the trap of believing that things will get better soon and downsizing the smallest number of people in anticipation of a quick turnaround. And when that expected miracle doesn’t materialize, you’ll wind up making successive cuts. That’s awful for the morale of the employees spared. The best employees won’t feel indebted to soldier on and may start casting around for new offers, terrified that they will be among the next to be cut.

Idea for Impact: Layoffs may not be the best strategy for grappling with hard times. Examine not just the cost of labor but also the value created by labor. Consider the trade-offs and try furloughs, pay cuts, job sharing, and scaled-down hours instead, depending on when you foresee business rebounding. You’ll spread the pain of the downturn more broadly, keep talented employees, earn loyalty, and better position your company for recovery.

Wondering what to read next?

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  4. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  5. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

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Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth? Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

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Giving Feedback and Depersonalizing It: Summary of Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor’

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It takes finesse to tell your boss and colleagues what you really think and address conflicts with urgency. When individuals are hesitant to talk frankly to each other, unresolved conflict can wreak havoc on productivity and culture.

'Radical Candor' by Kim Scott (ISBN 1529038340) Former Google and Apple executive Kim Scott’s bestselling Radical Candor (2017) can help if you struggle with delivering honest feedback with the subtlety that suits the relationship. To avoid turning criticism into a personal attack, Scott suggests phrasing feedback using a “situation-behavior-impact” recipe (identical to the Manager Tools’ Feedback Model I’ve recommended for years): describe the situation where the problem behavior appeared, the other’s specific actions, and their impact. Instead of “You’re sloppy,” tell, “You’ve been working nights and weekends, and it’s taken a toll on your accuracy.” Scott also extends directions on how to educate to deal with conflict, strike positive solutions, and foster a fertile conflict mindset that everybody embraces.

Recommendation: Speedread Radical Candor. If you condone the narrative inconsistencies, excessive name-dropping, and banal Silicon Valley tenor, this text will teach you how tactful conflict and giving honest feedback can be an impetus for positive change. Bruised egos and problems nipped in the bud are better than the alternative—stalled projects, mediocre work, and resentment that festers on.

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  4. Never Skip Those 1-1 Meetings
  5. Management by Walking Around the Frontlines [Lessons from ‘The HP Way’]

Why Groups Cheat: Complicity and Collusion

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Why Groups Cheat: Complicity and Collusion News broke out that Ernst & Young revealed this week that its employees cheated on ethics exams. The accounting behemoth is being fined $100 million. That’s one of the biggest fines ever levied against an audit firm.

It’s absurd that specialists responsible for keeping things straight and steering moral enterprise cheated on ethics exams! Ernst & Young’s leadership evidently disregarded the internal reports about the cheating. Perhaps because when people identify so strongly with a group, they’re much more swayed to view the group’s actions positively and accept that group’s norms.

Research by Vanderbilt University’s Jessica Kennedy and colleagues suggests that high-flying people are sometimes more inclined than low-ranking people to adopt what their group recommends, even when it represents an ethics breach. Power sometimes provokes people to so strongly want to identify with their group that they’re willing to overlook when the group’s collective actions cross an ethical line. This affinity is, therefore, urged to sustain transgression instead of stopping its spread, especially when the odds of being caught and punished are slim.

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Employee Surveys: Asking for Feedback is Not Enough

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Employee Satisfaction Surveys: Asking for Feedback is Not Enough

Nothing undermines employee trust faster than inviting employees to provide feedback about their work experience and then not following up.

Don’t take the employee satisfaction survey results at face value. Don’t discount the importance of the findings by brushing them off, “the data were what we expected” or “there were no real surprises here.”

Show that you’ve listened to what employees are saying. Initiate strategic conversations with selected employees and explore critical issues in more depth. Establish cross-functional teams to react to the survey’s findings. Let the team consist primarily of non-senior employees. A senior manager could sponsor and support—not manage—the team and see an action plan through.

Idea for Impact: Employee surveys, focus groups, and discussions that don’t change how an organization functions ultimately undermine employees’ faith that their leaders really care what the employees think. Close the communication loop.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Giving Feedback and Depersonalizing It: Summary of Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor’
  3. Can You Be Terminated for Out-of-Work Conduct?
  4. Are Layoffs Your Best Strategy Now?
  5. What To Do If Your New Hire Is Underperforming

Fear of Feedback: Won’t Give, Don’t Ask

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Fear of Feedback: Bosses Won't Give, Employees Don't Ask Most bosses are uncomfortable about evaluating their subordinates. The prospect of delivering bad news makes them uneasy. They fear that employees will react to even the mildest criticism with anger, stalling, or tears. They don’t know what to say. As a result, they often do everything they can to avoid saying anything at all.

Most employees, for their sake, are fearful of uncovering what their bosses really think of them. They don’t want to know how they’re doing because they are afraid they aren’t doing very well. So they don’t ask. They wait to be told.

Idea for Impact: Giving and getting feedback may be difficult, but it won’t get any easier if you wait.

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  2. Never Criticize Little, Trivial Faults
  3. Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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CDC Grappling with Imperfect Science - Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

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Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas

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When Hewlett-Packard (HP) Norway appointed Anita Krohn Traaseth managing director in 2012, she implemented a “speed date the boss” program. She invited every employee from every organization level for an informal, five-minute conversation based on three themes. She encouraged people to bring their big ideas on innovating individually and collectively.

  • Who are you, and what do you do at HP?
  • Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on?
  • What do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? Or, do you have a talent or skill you don’t get to use now in your position?

Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas - Speed Date the Boss

Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Krohn Traaseth’s initiative defined the roadmap for her tenure. It pushed HP to become one of Norway’s top workplaces within three years. HP Norway improved every major organizational performance measure, such as staff turnover, customer satisfaction, top-line growth, and bottom-line performance.

Not only that, her discussions uncovered that there were 30 skilled musicians on her payroll. HP Norway formed a band, which played live to 1,800 company executives in Barcelona in 2013, gaining better visibility to her Norwegian outpost.

Following Krohn Traaseth’s success, other HP divisions and employers have now introduced the concept of ‘Speed Date the Boss’ initiatives in other countries.

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Krohn Traaseth’s program was so successful because, as the top boss, she showed that she was willing to listen. She also openly modeled her willingness to listen to her management teams and foster their engagement.

  • When employees see the boss willing to receive honest feedback and no one’s head rolls, they’re more likely to speak up.
  • Soliciting ideas directly from employees individually, rather than holding brainstorms, takes the edge off group dynamics. Group settings aren’t where all employees feel free to share their best–and bold—ideas.
  • Rank-and-file employees can be a great source of innovation if only their leaders listen to them. Organizational innovation doesn’t have to trickle top-down or emanate from the R&D team. The best way to produce great ideas is to start by generating many ideas. Encourage everyone on your team to think, contribute, and participate.

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'Good Enough for the Bastards' by Anita Krohn Traaseth (ISBN B00MVXFK4K) PS: Anita Krohn Traaseth is now the CEO of Innovation Norway, a state-sponsored project focused on promoting innovation and economic development. She’s the author of Good Enough for the Bastards (2014,) a Norwegian version of Sheryl Sandberg‘s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013.)

Cf: See my guide on preparing an action plan at a new job by collecting the expectations of all the people with whom your new role interacts.

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  2. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  3. Never Criticize Little, Trivial Faults
  4. How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time
  5. Management by Walking Around the Frontlines [Lessons from ‘The HP Way’]

How to See Opportunities Your Competition Doesn’t

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'Different' by Youngme Moon (ISBN 0307460851) Harvard strategy professor Youngme Moon’s Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (2010) describes how many companies pursue the same opportunities that every other company is chasing and thus miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing.

In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become … Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.

Moon argues that the companies and brands that see a different game win big. Such innovators don’t just try to outcompete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they redefine the competitive landscape by embracing unique ideas in a world crammed with me-too thinking.

European airline Ryanair unleashed a new wave of relentless cost- and price-leadership by charging customers extra for everything beyond a seat itself. If you want to check a bag, you pay extra. If you want an airport agent to check you in and print your boarding pass, you pay extra. If you want food and drink, you pay extra. Later on, Spirit Airlines took the price-obsession further by charging for carry-on bags too. After a rough rollout and customer defiance, paying for carry-on bags has become the new normal.

Idea for Impact: Being different is what makes all the difference. If you do things the same way everyone else in your field does things, why would you expect to do any better? What are you doing to raise your game—not just to stay in place, but to get ahead?

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