Tag: management

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Engagement

Evangelizing Corporate Culture: Interview with Culture Consultant Donavon Roberson

Remember taking those career aptitude tests in high school? Back then the position of “Corporate Culture Consultant” didn’t exist. If it did, knowing what I know now, that’s what I would have chosen as my preferred career.

Lucky for corporate America, it’s a valuable role that exists today. That’s why I’m delighted to feature culture consultant Donavon Roberson in this interview.  He was among the first of Zappos Insights’ Culture Evangelists responsible for helping executives learn about Zappos’ respected culture. He was also my personal tour guide when I visited Zappos in 2008.

Donavon eventually left Zappos and went on to pioneer the position at several other companies, holding titles such as Manager of Culture Development and Dream Manager. He’s the founder and Culture Consultant for The Roberson Company that’s focused on “Purpose, Process, People and Performance.”

QSM: Please tell us a bit about your background, including how you ended up as a corporate culture consultant.

Donavon: I was a youth pastor for nearly 13 years and during that time I learned the value of living by vision and values. When I had the opportunity to work for Zappos, I discovered the importance of a company that lives for their vision and values. I have had the privilege being able to take my ministry background and my business experience and meld the two together. It’s all about moving the needle in the lives of others … culture development is about building into the lives of others so that they build into the business.

QSM: Based on your experience, what are some of the best things management can do to get employees to embrace a company’s culture?

Donavon: In my opinion, management should lead the charge when it comes to culture. They should embody the expression of and example of company culture. Management needs to ensure that they are operating in a way that is consistent with the cultural expectations to which they hold others.

It’s OK if they themselves aren’t an embodiment of every value; however, there should be an open appreciation for and expectation of living out the company culture at the very highest levels. With that expectation should come an inspection of the behaviors expressed. It is VITAL that management be held accountable to the culture and hold others to the culture.

The worst thing that management OR leadership can do is to live in a way that is counter to the expressed culture. There is often an aspired culture (the culture that we would like to have) and an actual culture (the culture that truly exists). Often these two cultures are at odds and employees pick up on that quickly. This can be toxic for an organization. What is worse is what I call the accepted culture — the culture that is counter to either of the aforementioned but that which is accepted as a normal way of doing things … especially at the leadership levels.

QSM: You’ve worked with both established and start-up companies. What challenges did you find in helping shape company culture in a start-up compared to working with more established organizations?

Donavon: The challenge in either company is scalability and sustainability. The culture that many start ups have isn’t scalable, meaning it doesn’t grow very well as the company grows. With growth comes aches and pains that can stunt development and progress. When a company is in the infancy stages, it is important to think about how the choices they make today will grow into the future (if growth is part of the long range plan).

Sustainability is the company’s ability to keep culture efforts or initiatives going and consistent as a company grows. Often times an effort makes sense at the beginning and can be easily managed with little to no effort BUT as you grow you must consider the time, effort and energy that cultural efforts will have on the bottom line and determine if it is worth the ROI.

QSM:  Building and maintaining a workplace culture is not a solitary endeavor. What’s the risk of serving in a position designated as a “Chief Culture Evangelist”?

Donavon: This is an interesting question, and I don’t know that I have definitive answer; however, I do have some thoughts that I would like to share. I have found that Wall Street isn’t ready to embrace the idea of a Chief Culture Evangelist or team dedicated to culture development. The greatest issue is ROI. There are some very logical conclusions why these roles would be valuable to any organization — leadership development, employee engagement, customer service, etc. However these conclusions aren’t necessarily reflected on the bottom line: the measurement of Wall Street and Investors.

I have found that many companies in the start up stage have the flexibility to have a dedicated “culture team” but when investors enter the picture that is the first team to take a hit.

QSM: What advice would you give to someone considering a career in corporate culture development?

Donavon: Advice that I would give is to determine standards and acceptable standards of measurements for success at the outset. How do you know when the culture team is successful? What does it look like when the culture team is successful? How is that reflected in the bottom line? And then continually go back and do the research and make the adjustments necessary to remain relevant and impactful.

QSM: Thank you, Donavon!

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Engagement

Why You Can’t Dismiss Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is intangible, but you can feel it and see it in action. It’s evident in how employees work together, how they treat each other (and customers) in the process, and how effective the collective organization is in pursuing its goals.

Corporate culture is a true reflection of the real values of an organization. And it’s the proverbial “elephant in the room” in places where the company’s stated values don’t align with actual values. That’s why culture dominates strategic execution (“culture eats strategy”) and why it can’t be dismissed.  According to Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of several classic books on corporate culture:

“We tend to think we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is.”

Here are more great quotes on corporate culture:

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” – Louis Gerstner

“The culture you create or the culture you destroy will determine the success of your business.” Rebecca L. Ray

“You can’t copy culture. …  Culture is very specific to an organization, the leadership, the employee mix and time. It’s not something you can just cut and paste into another organization.”  Tim Sackett

“A quick Google search on ‘how to create a great corporate culture’ reveals … really fantastic ideas, but they won’t ensure you a great culture. At best, they set the stage for great culture to (hopefully) arise and at worst, they are unsustainable gestures meant to game culture rather than create something genuine.” Susan Piver

“No matter how brilliant or insightful your business strategy is, a badly aligned culture will defeat it.” Don Peppers

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Engagement Training & Development

Best Lessons from Bad Bosses-Part 2

We all love great bosses and hate the bad ones. The only upside to a bad boss is what we learn from our experience working with that person: primarily what not to do and, occasionally, what to do.

Following up my previous post on lessons learned from bad bosses, here is more great advice shared by colleagues.

Understand Who’s Important

The best lesson I learned from a bad boss is — to kiss your subordinates’ butts. Put another way, be of service and work for YOUR TEAM instead of the other way around. You need your team to get things done. If you are there for them when they need you, they will be there for YOU. So, for example, if one of your team members needs an extra day off or a little resource boost on a project and you deliver, they are far more likely to help you when you need to pull together a presentation for YOUR boss.

A lot of bad bosses get it reversed. They are busy ingratiating themselves to THEIR boss and treating their staff like dirt. My favorite and best boss taught me this lesson in a big way. In some ways it felt like he worked for me. Whenever I needed resources or him to push something through the system, he was there. This was a huge help in my being successful. This also meant that when he came to my office on a Friday at 4:30 p.m. begging for help on his board presentation — you KNOW I was there, and happy to do it. — Ivana S. Taylor, Small Business Influencer, DIYMarketers.com
A Bad Boss Can Do Something Right

I learned that sometimes the rules need to be broken when something important needs to be done. Not unethically, but when a rule designed to solve one problem, creates a barrier to success, it can be the right decision to do the wrong thing.

We had a process whereby a certain form needed to be filled out. It was a form designed and created 40 year earlier by the founder when there was maybe 100 employees. We had over 2,000 at the time and the form was no longer needed. But no one wanted to stop using it because they feared the repurcussions. My bad boss simply stopped using the form. Two years later someone asked about the forms and he played stupid. We never had to do the form again. Nothing fell apart. Nothing stopped working. The world went on without it.

Lesson: The requirements of the past can stop you from creating a future. — Paul Hebert, consultant/speaker/writer for engagement, incentives and rewards

Don’t Ignore the Value of Engaged Employees

  1. Recognize the fundamental economics of having engaged employees, customers, channel partners, and communities, which is that: companies with highly engaged audiences relationships do better financially than the average company; relationships with customers and talent are a company’s biggest financial and brand equity asset; and disengagement has hard costs in terms of turnover, lower productivity, poor service, more accidents, less healthy people, and legal suits that can have a significant effect on the bottom line and brand equity.

  2. Empower and value people, rather than control them and treat them like statistics: people who feel empowered, act like owners and watch your back — people who feel controlled, act like slaves.

  3. Do as Tom Peters said:  “Manage by walking around.”  — Bruce Bolger, Managing Director, Enterprise Engagement Alliance

You Can’t Fake It + Other Important Lessons

  • Playing politics never pays — It’s shallow, transparent and short-sighted.  It may help you win the day, but it will lose you a ton of respect long-term with peers, superiors and subordinates.

  • Communicate clearly (not in code) — There’s no excuse for allowing ambiguity to cloud judgment, direction or execution. If your style of management is to expect your team to predict or guess what you mean and want, that’s terrible leadership. Not all news is good news, but people want clarity, not innuendos.

  • Invest time with your team — Absentee management never works. You can’t hide behind emails. And it’s never a good idea to look annoyed when one of your team members wants to see you or ask you a question. Successful management requires time, it requires an investment in spending time with your team to make them better, allow them to become more autonomous and productive. That just takes time, but it creates results, loyalty and longevity (for you and for them).

  • Superficial optics will backfire — This particular boss told us she wanted us to be at our desks as much as possible, so that people walking by would see how hard we are working. She literally said that to us. You can imagine what that did to her credibility.  — Matt Heinz, president, Heinz Marketing, Inc.

Special thanks to Ivana Taylor, Paul Hebert, Bruce Bolger, and Matt Heinz for sharing their lessons learned from bad bosses.

You’re invited to share
What lessons did you learn from your experience with a bad boss?

 

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

Best Lessons from Bad Bosses-Part 1

This post is inspired by Boss’s Day. I hope you’re fortunate to work with a really good boss. If not, take heart – there are valuable lessons you can learn from your experience.

I asked several colleagues to share their best lessons from bad bosses. Here are their horror stories and lessons learned.

It’s Just as Easy to Demoralize a Team as It is to Build Them Up

I had a boss who decided to change his Windows start-up theme to be Full Metal Jacket. On startup and shutdown, his computer would remind us that we were all equally worthless. After he quit, employees from around the company remarked how happy they were he was gone. The new manager removed all themes from his machine, and found more positive themes for his team to use on their computers. He also made a point of managing by walking around, and thanked his employees often for the effort they put in to make customers happy.

Both took the same amount of time and effort. One built the team up and found them recognized for customer service every year for the next 10 years. One tore the team down and made the rest of the department look down on the team, as if the manager thought they were useless, they knew they could treat them badly too.  — Phil Gerbyshak, Social Selling Training and Social Media Strategist
Blind Siding an Employee Doesn’t Help
One particularly bad boss I once had many years ago suddenly turned on me. It came “out of the blue.” I had been a “star” one moment, and the next I could do nothing right in her eyes. It did not end well for me. Here are a few of the lessons I learned:
  • Stay alert to the proverbial “handwriting on the wall.” There may have been signals I was missing. Like a drop off in communication from the boss.
  • Keep your boss in the loop at all times on everything you are doing. Run the risk of over-communicating, especially if you suspect something is “up.”
  • Determine what your boss’ priorities are and get into alignment with them. Do whatever you can to support your boss. And make her “look good.”
  • Be professional, personable, and positive at all times. Be accountable. Deliver with excellence to your clients. That way, if the tables turn on you, you can walk out the door with your head held high, knowing that “it was not about you.”
  • Sometimes the power plays that happen in a corporate environment result in some folks winning, and other folks coming out with the short end of the stick.  — Terrence Seamon, author of “To Your Success!” guide for transitioners; “Lead the Way” leader’s guide to engagement; and “Change for the Better” change agent’s guide to improvement.

How NOT to Treat an Employee

I think my lesson is (was) that the fastest way to kill enthusiasm and commitment in young talent (or even older talent for that matter) is for the boss to publicly humiliate someone in front of others, when the someone had only good intent and was trying to do their job. We all have to learn, we all make mistakes, we all need coaching and guidance. But there is a right way to handle ‘teaching moments’ and a wrong way.

When I was a young, aspiring channel marketing manager at a small software company, I worked for a Sales and Marketing VP who was promoted too fast and not mature enough for his role. He had no patience or interest in the details of actually making a business run. When on several occasions I asked questions in group sales meetings that he thought were stupid, uninformed or otherwise too tedious, he delivered stinging, humiliating responses to me – a young female – in front of a room full of mostly men sales reps. I grew to hate him, and the bitterness and resentment I felt is still called up writing this, almost 20 years after the fact. The channels business for that company also failed, because the leader in charge of it would not do what it would take to make it a success, and my own sense of urgency about taking care of channel partners certainly took a hit after my experiences with this guy. It took a long time to overcome that feeling and fear of opening my mouth in meetings. — Owner of a Strategic Communications Consulting business

Special thanks to Phil Gerbyshak, Terry Seamon, and a colleague (who’s still so traumatized by her bad boss experience that she wished to remain anonymous) for contributing to this post.

I’ll have more great lessons to share in my next post, so stay tuned …

 

 

Categories
Engagement

What Matters in Recognition and Employee Engagement: Interview with Zane Safrit

I met Zane Safrit by phone several years ago when he interviewed me on his radio show, and we’ve stayed in touch to share our work in employee engagement and organizational leadership. Our most recent conversation centered on employee happiness as a factor in employee engagement.

Zane has held numerous positions ranging from customer service rep to CEO over the course of his impressive career where he applied employee recognition and engagement for positive results. He’s now a successful business consultant helping companies do the same. He’s also the author of Recognize THEM!: 52 Ways to Recognize Your Employees In Ways They Value and The Engaged Hiring Process: A Simple Plan to Help You Hire the Best. Zane’s latest book, First, Engage Yourself, shares do-able steps that managers can use to create a culture of engagement. I’m honored to feature him on my blog.

QSM: Zane, let’s start with the of importance of recognizing employees. What matters in recognition that we’re not doing?

Zane: The “What” matters less in employee recognition than the “Who.” The employee in employee recognition matters most.

  • How do they like being recognized? A personal note, a conversation – informal or formal, a gift, a plaque.
  • When do they like being recognized? Are they a morning person or an afternoon person? That depends on their work demands and those who deserve recognition are very committed to their work – their team, their customers, their integrity. Choose the time when it interferes the least.
  • Where, in private or in a meeting, standing in front of the group or with the group?

Use their name, articulate what’s being recognized and why, communicate why and how it matters to you and those around you. Then find the right venue to share that recognition. The right venue is the one that matters most to the person being recognized.

Otherwise, they will have difficulties digesting this just dessert, and the recognition loses its impact at best and is counter-productive at worst. Like a politician popping up at an event for which they deserve no credit, you’ll give a speech, blah blah, leaving the recipient feeling awkward. You’ll have missed a great opportunity to honor that person and build a relationship with trust and engagement.

QSM: If employee recognition is so basic, why is it so difficult to apply/practice?

Zane: Employee recognition is built on the virtues of compassion and empathy. They’re innate, we’re born with them. Like seeds, they only need a chance to set roots in our behaviors and perceptions. After that we’ll find the means to nurture them or not.

Too much of our culture fails to nurture those qualities. That’s being generous to say it like that. Too much of our culture degrades, denigrates, demoralizes those who show empathy and compassion, patience, forgiveness.

In too many corporate cultures, careers are built and rewarded on the basis of denying compassion and empathy. The hard-charging, tough-minded, gets-things-done-no-matter-what manager is rewarded with perks and privileges and moves up the career ladder. Employees watch, learn and change. They change their behavior and attitudes to better emulate those they see moving ahead.

Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

So, as long as the rewards are weighted towards disengaging behaviors many people will change to deny their natural tendencies or they’ll favor the development of other, less healthy tendencies of narcissism, arrogance, betrayal. That will keep it difficult to engage in healthy, sustaining ways with each other.

We have the choice. We can create our own conversations which lead to cultures. It’s always a choice. And it’s understandable which choices are taken.

QSM: Do you think employee engagement is still relevant? Where do you see engagement 5-10 years from now?

Zane: I have a love/hate relationship with the term “employee engagement.”

I love it for serving as an umbrella under which we can gather to discuss, debate, create and clarify the many activities, issues and factors related to creating a place to work where we’re proud, happy and productive.

I hate it for its sterile academic tone and because it’s being co-opted by too many experts who’d rather you engage with them than with each other: your peers and colleagues and direct reports.

What happens 5-10 years from now? We’ll always have engagement and the best organizations – the ones with the highest purpose that are most sustaining and most profitable – will have the highest engagement. That being said, expectations of and definitions of best will change. We’ll see significant changes to institutions, social norms, organizational climate, the economy, politics. Those will change the expectations around what’s considered engaged, what’s our highest hopes for an engaged workplace or community and what we need to survive.

QSM: As a business professional, what do you think should be taught in schools (K-12 and college) to prepare students to be engaged, productive members of the workplace?

Zane: I love this question! It ties in with the question about if it’s so basic, why’s it so difficult to practice.

I think these negative reinforcements, rewards for the wrong behavior start as children enter school. No, this isn’t a diatribe about teachers or even common core and standardized tests. No, this started when John Dewey began lining kids up in rows of desks to sit silent and only raise a hand when called on and to work diligently, by themselves, to memorize only what’s presented and to never-ever ask Why, What if, Why Not? That prepared them, us, to sit in orderly rows of cubicles and look to the manager and bosses for direction and appropriate behaviors.

I’m not a childhood education expert. I don’t have kids. I don’t even have a pet. And I’ve never stayed in a Holiday Inn Express, either.

However, the skills of communication and collaboration, of team-work and team-building, of helping, of recognizing what makes each child unique as well as what commonalities are shared and, yes, of competition should be taught. Writing, debating, creating, art, theater, rhetoric, painting, drawing, music, athletics especially with team sports, those should be funded once again. These are all activities that help children learn to listen, to understand, to communicate ideas and find common ground, to collaborate and create together and to embrace diversity of ideas, even failures. These are activities that nurture those innate virtues of compassion and empathy.

Standardized tests work well with testing equipment not people.

Teachers, I believe, want the resources and mandates to teach to learn not to pass those tests.

I hope this stirs a discussion.

QSM: Thanks, Zane!

To continue the discussion, I invite you who are reading this post to comment: What do you think should be taught in schools to prepare students to be engaged and productive members of the workplace?

Categories
Engagement

Overcoming Intention Deficit in the Workplace

Move aside attention deficit – not the clinical kind but the one found in the workplace where people are overwhelmed and/or distracted by constant communication from too many directives, emails, text messages, phone calls, social media, etc.

A serious consequence of this distraction is intention deficit, or more aptly, intentional deficit. It’s not that managers and employees lack intention – defined as “a determination to act in a certain way.” What they often lack is the actual doing or proactive follow through of an intention particularly when it comes to strategic or business-specific planning, special problem-solving, idea-sharing, and training/development. I hear about it from my clients, workshop attendees, and colleagues: they know what needs to be done but they’re so overwhelmed they’re not always able to follow through or follow up on their efforts. They tell me they’re so busy putting out fires that they don’t have the time to prevent most of them in the first place.

Being intentional involves:

  1. Focus and clarity – clearly knowing what one needs to do and why, and
  2. Deliberate thought and action – investing the time to make it happen.

Here are several ways to overcome intention deficit in each of these areas.

Focus and clarity

  • Explain your organization’s purpose and direction; i.e, your mission, goals, strategy, and rationale.
  • Clearly communicate what’s expected of employees to achieve those goals.
  • Reinforce the above often – including any changes in direction and strategy – and share progress/results so people stay on track or can adjust accordingly.

“The biggest lesson has been the importance of constantly repeating the mission. It means spending meaningful time with everyone that joins, even if that’s in a group setting. It means bringing the team together every week to talk about all of our projects, progress, and vision. Most importantly: It means focus, to keep everybody moving in the same direction.” David Karp, Tumblr CEO

Deliberate thought and action

  • Commit to and invest the time to accomplish what needs to be done in special meetings or retreats for planning, problem-solving, idea-sharing, or training.
  • Create a comfortable climate that encourages nonjudgmental thinking and discussion. It’s important to disconnect yourself and others from any technology that diverts your attention such as cell phones, email, and social media. (Note: This may be difficult for some people who are always plugged in. Remind them that the messages, emails, tweets, and posts will still be there.)
  • Know the end goal – what you’re trying to accomplish in a special session – while also staying mission-focused.
  • Set up appropriate “next steps” – such as interim or progress report(s), resulting strategic or action plan(s), additional meeting(s) – and just do it.

Staff members brought together for a specific purpose in a setting with minimal distractions tell me they’re better able to focus on the topic at hand. An added benefit of participating in a well-run intentional session is that employees appreciate the opportunity to work with their colleagues in a face-to-face setting, especially in silo’d organizations.

Focused attention and intention. Communication and collaboration among employees. The ability to move forward and/or resolve issues. What are you waiting for?

“Never mistake motion for action.”  Ernest Hemingway

 

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing Training & Development

My Top 7 Blog Posts

Reviewing my blog’s top posts over the past few years, I was surprised with the popularity of my “favorite employee engagement quotes” posts. So I’ll continue to share the best quotes on workplace engagement compiled from both current and classic articles on the subject.

Here are Quality Service Marketing’s top seven blog posts:

A special thank you to my many blog readers for your continued encouragement and support!

Categories
Engagement

Amazon’s Workplace Culture Takes a Hit

Amazon’s culture has made the rounds of the press and blogosphere, based on a recent NY Times article, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” Sadly, I’m not surprised as I live near the Amazon warehouse in PA where employees suffered during a heat wave due to insufficient air conditioning. There were also complaints during the winter when employees, who were evacuated for a fire alarm, had to wait outside the warehouse in freezing temperatures. These workers were not allowed to retrieve their coats or warm up in their cars, possibly for reasons of theft prevention.

There are pro’s and con’s to every workplace; it’s all relative based on the industry and the culture set by senior executives. These quotes [cited in the NYT article] from former Amazon white-collar employees reinforce an ambitious, yet callous culture:

“Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

“A lot of people there feel this tension: It’s the greatest place I hate to work.”

There are also Amazon employees who disagree with the article, including CEO Jeff Bezos who defends its culture.

As an advocate of an engaged workplace, I’m wary of organizations that still use forced ranking for employee performance. What I find most discomfiting is the fact that Amazon owns Zappos, well-known for its uniquely positive culture. Realistically, no workplace is perfect – not even Zappos.

My takeaway from all this? We now have a scale of workplace engagement from A to Z: with Amazon at the lower end and Zappos at the upper end. Where on this scale would you want to work?

 

 

 

 

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

The Three Most Important Questions You Need to Ask in Human Resources

In addition to the fine folks who work in Human Resources (HR), or in the absence of an HR function, everyone who is responsible for managing or supervising employees needs to consider three critical questions from the employee’s perspective. Answers to these questions are key to strengthening employee engagement. Note: Nonprofit managers can also apply these questions to volunteers who serve in their organizations.

  1. Does my employer care about me and my work?
    People need to know that managers recognize and respect their roles within the organization and will support their efforts to do the best job possible.
  2. What difference do I make?
    Employees and volunteers also need to know how their efforts contribute to the organization’s mission and goals. This includes having a clear line-of-sight as to how their work impacts customers or clients, co-workers, stakeholders, the community where the organization is located, and the organization’s overall success. (Think of the NASA janitor who wasn’t just cleaning floors — he was helping to put a man on the moon.)
  3. What’s in it for me?
    Addressing this question gets to the heart of why an employee’s work matters and why s/he should stay with the organization. Considerations include the meaning and purpose of the work involved, the quality of the workplace culture (how employee- and customer-focused it is), and basic benefits,

How do you learn the answers to these questions?
A variety of listening posts are available in most organizations, including (but not limited to): employee engagement or satisfaction surveys … exit surveys … management by wandering around (MBWA) … everyday conversations with employees … and “engaging conversations – open-ended, non-judgmental conversations with each employee about passions, aspirations and opportunities.”

Ask first, then listen for understanding.

 

Categories
Engagement

People to People: Favorite Quotes on Collaboration

From important historical figures and contemporary business leaders, here are my favorite quotes on how working together makes a difference.

“The value in human interaction is greater collective wisdom as a result of improved communication and collaboration.” Michael Katz

“In speaking, we humanize ourselves. In listening, we bring our worlds together. In learning, we create understanding.” Yvonne DiVita

“More people would rather enjoy the camaraderie of smart collaboration than be lead, persuaded or managed.” Kare Anderson

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

“Never do anything about me without me.” David Zinger