A Community of Effort

What happened to vacations?

Fred — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:55:39 +0000

…I didn’t get the memo…but I know something’s changed

When was the last time you took a vacation? I mean a real vacation, where you put aside your work, physically and mentally? Do you recall a time when you were able to unplug from your office, without feeling obligated to check in? A time when you could totally unwind, allowing your mind to rest? Let’s face it folks, in the United States, those vacations are a thing of the past.

We know that time to relax and refresh ourselves is critical to well-being and high performance, yet we continue to downplay the importance of “down time.” We live in the only economically “advanced” country that does not guarantee its workforce vacation time. Britain guarantees 20 days of vacation time, Germany 24, France 30 and Holland 50 days a year for government workers. For one of the richest countries in the world, this discrepancy is staggering. Yet, because it is “just vacation,” we treat it as a trivial matter to be ignored or brushed off.

As companies grow, so does the workplace culture that rewards individuals who continually work without taking time off, do not unplug when they get home and are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Profit or productivity may play a part in the development of the “accidental workaholic” as people work more hours not because they want to, but because they feel they have no choice. As companies place more and more value on those who rarely or never take a break, more people see no choice but to allow work to creep into many if not all areas of their lives. The boundaries between work and personal life continue to be blurred, crossed and swiftly eliminated.

While companies play a major role in the elimination of true down time, we as consumers are a contributing force. The U.S. culture relies on the market that is open 24 hours a day and expects businesses to be open every day. We need to have access to everything at all times. Could our culture support a month long shut down the way they do in Europe? Could we accept not having access to the places we shop every day and could they handle the possible financial shortfall?

We are a technologically equipped society in constant contact with many organizations. We can be reached by a multitude of devices. With cell phones, BlackBerry® and the iPhone, we are vibrating and ringing along lake sides, while we are on the water, at dining tables, bed side and even in the bathroom. We can and do conduct business anywhere, anytime and we are suffering from it far more than we realize. The time that is spent working 12-15 hour days and through our weekends, and our activity formerly known as “vacations” is keeping us from fully engaging with our families, our friends and ultimately ourselves.

What is the ultimate price we are paying for eliminating rest — one of our basic survival needs? If we don’t rest, how do we protect our health? Our well-being? Our personal lives? How do we not only maintain business, but also move forward? We are not Energizer Bunnies®, we cannot continue to go on and on without refreshing and replenishing our energies. There is no easy way out of this culture that we have created.

As organizational leaders and team members we are faced with this challenge and we must find a way to incorporate down time into our plans and our lives. We must look at the benefits that well-rested, refreshed members bring to the table. And we must also recognize within ourselves that our goal is not to just survive, but to thrive. In order to do that, unplugging and refreshing are as necessary as the air we breathe and the cell phones that are affixed to our ears.

New York’s New Mindset

Mickey — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:51:15 +0000

We often talk about inclusion as a means of creating higher performance, how tapping into the diverse experiences, ideas, and skills of people can transform and elevate organizational effectiveness. A great example is seen in Christopher Dickey’s book Securing the City, which chronicles how the New York City Police Department became one of the world’s premier terrorist-fighting agencies in the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.

Post 9-11, the NYPD faced a daunting reality: limited resources, a monumental task before them, and no time to waste. Many believed that the city’s sprawling diversity compounded the problem; with so many cultures at play (40% of the city’s population was born outside the United States), it was hard to see how the police department could effectively connect with all the neighborhoods and populations it needed to protect.

But Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen saw it differently. Recognizing that the force itself included officers of many different backgrounds, they asked members of the department to come forward if they were interested in anti-terrorism work and spoke another language fluently. Approximately 1,800 officers responded. Kelly and Cohen had the officers tested and found that 700 of them were native speakers in languages considered important to combating terrorism—languages like Farsi, Pashtu, Bengali, Urdu, and Arabic, among others. (By point of comparison, the total number of students graduating U.S. colleges and universities in 2002 with degrees in Arabic was 6!)

The department immediately began training these officers for their new duties. Some were sent into deep cover in NYC communities and neighborhoods; others joined online intelligence gathering efforts. Dickey’s book cites plots foiled, conspirators apprehended, and devious activities interrupted as a direct result of this culturally savvy police force’s ability to reach into new communities. By 2003, the FBI and CIA were contacting the NYPD for assistance in counterterrorism operations.

The force has also recognized the need for a global approach. The NYPD now has officers stationed in Paris, Tel Aviv, London—cities that, like New York, are susceptible to terrorist attack. These officers learn new methods and tactics and communicate them back to their colleagues in the United States. When the Mumbai attacks occurred in November 2008, three NYPD investigators were on site before the siege ended.

There were many aspects of the NYPD’s efforts that made their work successful, but a key component was tapping into the diversity of its workforce in new ways that spurred high performance, and adopting a mindset that saw cultural differences as additive. When leaders began to widen their perspective about what skills were valuable, they discovered a huge reserve of potential in its members that wasn’t being tapped.

Artifacts of Old Culture

Charles — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:32:26 +0000

The other day during a session with a leadership team and a group of change agents they had chartered to model inclusion, several members of the change agent group talked about their habits of deferring to authority. As the topic went around the room, people discussed the relative merits of deferring to seniority (tenure) or position or expertise. The emerging understanding was that position did not guaranty experience or knowledge about any particular problem or issue, so deferring to position might not make sense.

But what about seniority? Does it make sense to defer to tenure? And what about expertise? Does it make sense to defer when someone is the clear expert in a subject area? In the course of the discussion, no one said, “wait a minute. Why do we want to defer at all? What value does deferring produce?”

Maybe deferring is an artifact of the old culture in which assumptions about where knowledge resides and how decisions get made were largely hierarchical. In a connected organization, it may not make sense to defer even to expertise. What would replace deferring? Maybe engagement of perspectives. If I defer, I disengage and transfer responsibility to someone else. If I engage, I connect my knowledge and my perspective with another person’s without relinquishing responsibility.

Even if I’m not the expert, I have my point of view to contribute, which I may do by asking questions to understand enough of what the expert knows to connect her knowledge with my responsibilities. In this way, I make her expertise more valuable to me and potentially to her and to the organization. Maybe deferring is obsolete.

TED…The experience of a lifetime…every year

Fred — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:19:14 +0000

On 4-7 February I attended my second TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), marking the conference’s 25th anniversary. Unlike last year when I was at the “overflow” site in Aspen while the main event was in Monterrey, this year I attended at TED’s new permanent location (for now) at the Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, California. Although I was sad that Tara Whittle (who brought TED into my life) and Judith Katz were at Palm Springs (remote site this year, 400 people), and I missed them, I was thrilled to be with 1,300 people from 51 countries experiencing TED live and not on TV.

TED does not disappoint. It is a place where people unveil their latest inventions, discoveries, ideas, and scientific breakthroughs. It is seeing and hearing genius, and being inspired by it. People connect and join together to create something that changes the world and they credit TED with both the meeting and the inspiration. Google and Apple Macintosh are some of the inventions/concepts that were first unveiled at TED.But TED is not a place for longwinded speeches. Some presentations run 3 or 6 minutes. Major presentations (of which there are about 20 a day) are maxed at 18 minutes–no overtime, even for presenters like Bill Gates and Al Gore. Say it in 18 minutes or host Chris Anderson starts walking up the steps. There is also a TED University that happens a few times during TED in a separate room, before the main sessions. At the one I attended, there were 18 presentations in 1 hour and 45 minutes.

So TED is a fire hose of knowledge coming at you from fields and topics far and wide. It is TED’s job to put before us the latest and most brilliant thinking on earth (with a United States and California lean). It is our J-O-B as “TEDsters” (yes, there is a little of a cult feeling) to bring the information and knowledge into our being, into our thinking and work, and to make something out of it.

This year’s TED included presentations on:
deep space…………………………………..deep seas
robotics……………………………………….electric/green cars
food security and safety………………vertical farming
saving orangutans……………………….wind suit flying
making cheese…………………………….giving away shoes to the needy
giving away rice on the Internet….rock climbing
giant waterfalls in NYC………………..blowing glass
bring creativity to the layout of newspapers……dance and music performances
what young men are learning from porno movies about what women want

I want to share some context and to give you a portion of the view from walking about TED for 3 days (8:00 am to 11:00 pm every day including a gala every evening).

Once again I was stuck with the elitism of the whole thing. This year I tried to refine my calling them elites…they are mostly creative elites. They are fun to watch and talk with and be around, but they are not my hang-out-with-for-the-rest-of-my-life group. I think Judith’s and my attendance is part of the cosmic joke that has us show up in places where a Jewish woman from Queens and an African American man from the inner city of Philly would never have imagined. Walking around TED, I bumped into Arianna Huffington, Glenn Close, Forest Whitaker, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock (he performed, his 12th TED)–they are just hanging out for four days to learn and interact like the rest of us. There are few places where you can bump into Robin Williams and then sit next to Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) or chat with Richard Rockefeller…definitely the creatives and the wealthy.

As for content, below are a few of my thoughts regarding some of the presentations I attended. You can see many of the TED presentations online at ted.com.

Juan Enriquez talked about the Economy. I was struck by a quote that he used that fits all our clients:

The key to managing crises
Is to keep an eye on the long term
While dancing in the flames
                                    Sir Philip Hampton
                                    Chair, Royal Bank of Scotland

And, in these times you must “Cut AND Grow.”

David Hanson is working on empathy in robots. WOW!!!! He talked about how Google search currently does not understand our intent when we ask a question and therefore gives us 100 answers, 99 of which are not what we are looking for…Some just the wrong category…right words, but not related to our meaning/intent. I took from David’s 18 minutes that as he programs robots with “empathy” it is one step from programming robots to understand our intent. So, robots will be/are able to think faster than us humans, to be more invincible than us humans, to have empathy, and understand intent.

The BIG Question becomes what is our value-added as homo sapiens at some point in time. It takes me back to TED 2008 and a BIG Question there (somewhat serious and somewhat not), but a WOW for me: Maybe we have this whole thing inverted with the machine, maybe we humans are here to enhance the evolution of the machine and not the other way around. Sure does seem like a case I could argue.

Bill Gates talked about how in a regular classroom, teachers are not told how good they are at their primary task of teaching students. For our KJCG clients (and others) it is redefining what is “good.” What is “good” leadership this decade? What should be measured? Should we still be focusing on feedback (maybe some) or on feedforward? (Yes, and a lot.) Lots of organizations are measuring leaders based on 80% delivery, projects, product process and 20% people. As one person said, we can get an 80 grade/B without the people part. This has to change. At minimum it needs to be flipped to 20%-80%. And we need to measure inspiring people to do their best work, to enable and facilitate partnership (person-to-person), collaboration (group/function-to-group/function) and inclusion (a system mindset and everyday behaviors). We need to change the feedback and feedforward for manager-leaders in our organizations. It needs to focus on how they inspire people, develop people, create sustainability with and through people, and create future leaders. And the most important source of feedback and feedforward is the experience of the people working with the leader.

One of the favorite statements that Judith Katz and I like to say is a quote from one of our favorite CEOs, Hal Yoh, of Day and Zimmermann:

                        “A leader’s job is to:
                                    Grow the business
                                                Grow your team
                                                            Grow yourself

If you are not doing all three you are not doing your job and doing what the organization needs of you.”

Ben Zander talked about three opportunities in every situation in life:

Resignation
Anger
Possibilities

I think there are probably a few more, and people often pick up one of these three. AND, Ben is probably one of the best “getting the audience thinking, learning and performing (singing)” entertainers/conductors there is. Always brings the crowd to its feet.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, talked about the next evolution of the web–Linked Data. Linked data is about bringing related data together in very user friendly ways and creating data-to-data relationships, meaning and connections. This fits what Judith and I are working on with our clients and our next book: The Connected Organization. We humans are seeing the future through our technology and it invites us to think about the human interaction possibilities.

Nandan Nilekani made several good points about India, but the one that struck me was that India (and China) are going to skip the Industrial Revolution.

Oliver Sacks, made an intriguing comment that we see with our eyes, and we also see with our minds.

It speaks to the need for people to imagine the change they want. Judith and I have been urging the people in our client systems to create new stories, create a “Shared Narrative” that becomes a reality in their minds. It is clear to us that to move change fast, people have to see it in their minds’ eye. And we need to point out examples of the change-in-action so people can see and “touch” it.

A comment from TED (who knows from where):

Say “YES” and let the idea go forward.

Sounds like a wonderful way to live life and to enable creativity and empowerment. It is all about finding the “Yes.”

Authenticity as an inclusive leadership behavior

Charles — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:14:55 +0000

A star client said something that caught our attention the other day. He said that leading today requires more revealing than it does concealing.

Here’s what I think that means: in times of great change like we are in today and probably will be forever, people look for ways to gain a foothold, a sense of confidence that things will be all right. They especially look to their leaders for signals of what’s to come. Leaders are often in a position of knowing things about the future that they cannot share or suspecting things that they think they shouldn’t share or fearing things that they have not sorted out for themselves.

This senior leader was saying that leading in these times requires revealing what you are thinking and feeling. It’s a prerequisite to being seen as an authentic person and, therefore, someone worth listening to. People have become very savvy about deception, especially with the number of scandals we’ve witnessed in business and government lately. Why should anyone believe you?

Authenticity is honest expression of your candid point of view, even when you are not sure what your point of view is. If things are truly unpredictable, and in these times that is more and more the case, then people need something to hold onto. They will gravitate to the people they trust and these will the ones whom they believe will be candid, open, and authentic about the state of affairs as they see it. In the absence of certainty, authentic connection, created by revealing what you truly think and feel about things, will have to do.