I am speaking today at the Women in Technology Forum being held at Microsoft Licensing, GP in Reno. In 50 short minutes, I hope to be able to persuade the women in my audience that because social business is the new business reality, having a good online personal brand is good for both her and the business she works for.

I realize most of my audience will probably never blog and are confused by twitter, but I hope to convince everyone about the value of having a good LinkedIn profile. A professional, current photo and a complete profile is really all you need to get started on LinkedIn.

I anticipate that majority of my audience will already be on Facebook, and I will emphasize the importance of having a professionally personal posture on Facebook. Professional discretion is realizing that just because you can post or even “like” something, does not mean that you should. We don’t need Facebook or any other online site to authenticate our personal lives.

Everything we do online creates a digital footprint. Instead of trying to conceal or erase that footprint, I think the only reasonable approach is to assume full responsibility for everything you say and do online. If you rely on technology to protect your privacy, you have not been paying very close attention the last few years. Any privacy we think we have online is truly virtual. A better approach to privacy is to make it an operational issue – never post anything, anytime, anywhere that you would not be comfortable with anyone seeing. If you operate like this, then you will not have anything to protect, hide, or erase.

The talk will be recorded, so I hope to be able to share clips from the talk in future blog posts.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Related Posts:

Recommendations For Social Business

Social Media For Business

Social Business Time

Facebook Noise vs. Spam

Below is the draft of my script. I’m sure it will change again slightly between now and then, but I’ve already spent about 12 hours just getting it to this point. If you take the time to read it, I’d appreciate it if you would share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Citizenship At Work

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” President John Kennedy gave us this mantra of citizenship in his 1961 inaugural address.  Two hundred and seventeen words before this now famous call to action, he told us why it matters with these words: “In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.”

Citizenship matters. Good citizenship has the power to transform not only countries, states, and local communities, but also organizations. Scientists in my field of organizational behavior and management have been studying citizenship at work since the late 1970s and the evidence strongly suggests our choice to be good citizens at work makes a difference. I want to be clear that I am talking about citizenship in the workplace; we all know people that think they are good citizens in the community but at work they either don’t carry their weight or worse are egocentric jerks.

“How can I help?” is the attitude of a good organizational citizen. Good organizational citizens help by exhibiting innovative and spontaneous behaviors and a willingness to cooperate with others.

Are you a good citizen at work? To what extent can you say you do these things:

• I willingly share expertise, knowledge, and information to help improve the effectiveness of others on my team
• I always try to lend a helping hand to those people on my team that need it.
• I try to resolve unconstructive interpersonal conflicts with my coworkers
• I touch base with other team members before taking actions that might affect them.

If you are doing things like this in addition to performing your job well, congratulations, you are a good citizen and I believe a credit to your organization.

From the C-suite executives to the frontline employees, everyone in the organization needs to see their citizenship as a personal responsibility and understand that helping others creates a sustainable competitive advantage. The evidence is clear that when aggregated over time and people, our citizenship adds up and helps our organizations become more effective.

All things being equal, an organization full of good citizens will outperform one void of good citizens. Studies have shown that across a variety of indicators, organizational citizenship accounted for anywhere from 18 to 38 percent of the variance in performance outcomes. If that were not enough, being a good citizen can also help us personally because when our boss sees us helping others, we often get a better performance evaluation.

Our attitudes, how we are lead, and to a much lesser degree our personality affect our willingness to be good citizens at work.

The evidence shows that more than anything else, our attitudes – specifically how satisfied we are with our jobs and how committed we are to our organization – determine if we are going to be good citizens at work. This is great news because we can change our attitudes. Even if our organizations don’t seem to care about our satisfaction and commitment, we should care.  We should seek work that we enjoy, people we enjoy working with, and people to work for who treat us right. And commitment, even more than satisfaction, merits our relentless pursuit. When we reach the point where we can say “I want to be here doing this important work with you,” our citizenship often flourishes.

Fairness and supportive behavior on the part of our leaders also matters. When our leaders help us, they help themselves by encouraging a work environment where the “helping virus” can thrive.

With the exception of being conscientious and agreeable, our personality has little to do with being a good citizen at work. Even if it is not our personality, all of us can learn to be more organized, thorough, and deliberate in the performance of our job. And even if we don’t naturally go out of our way to help others, when our leaders treat us with courtesy, dignity, and respect, we feel positive at work, and good mood moves people of all personality types to be better citizens.

Our attitudes, personality, and how our leaders treat us matters, but can never be an excuse. Citizenship is a behavioral choice, and even if ours is never encouraged or rewarded, we can never escape our responsibility to do the right thing. Here is the paradox of citizenship for me: the hardest thing I have to do as a citizen is to be fair to people that aren’t fair to me, care about people that don’t care about me, and help people that have thrown me under the bus. But if we ever hope to be effective leaders, we have to first choose to be good citizens.

As we choose to help others at work, we should try to help in ways that makes them increasingly less dependent on our help. The goal is to help others become more autonomous and capable of being interdependent with others at work. Dependent people wear us out with repeated requests for our help. Independent people wear themselves by never asking for help and short us by never providing help to others in need. Interdependent people are comfortable working autonomously, but they also know when and how to ask for help from others when it is necessary. So if we want to encourage interdependence on our team, we too must learn to ask for help from others in ways that ultimately makes us better at performing autonomously.

In his brilliant new book, Adam Grant shows that when we give our time, effort, and knowledge to help others, we create the powerful belief that they are worthy of our help. And when we genuinely seek help or advice from others for the purpose of learning from them, it is a subtle way to invite them to make a commitment to us. Asking for advice can open doors to gaining influence, and the more influential we are, the more helpful we can be.

The evidence also shows that good citizenship requires the willingness to challenge. But challenge absent helping only goes so far. Helping enables challenging to have a more positive impact on the performance of our team. The most effective challengers have a reputation for first being helpful.

As we challenge, we have to be willing to risk disapproval in order to express our belief about what’s best for our team. We must not hesitate to challenge the opinions of others who we feel are directing the company in the wrong direction. And we must recommend changes to policies or procedures that we believe inhibit us from doing our best work. These recommendations for improvement should come from a posture of partnership where we assume as much responsibility as we can for being part of the solution. Real partners don’t dump. They don’t wag their finger and say “this sucks, and so do you.” The rhetoric of the purposeful, partner citizen sounds something like this: This procedure is not working as well as it could be, I think these changes would be an improvement, here is all I need from you to be able to implement this solution myself.

Its time we stop thinking about the success of our organization as someone else’s job. Our fundamental responsibility is to perform our assigned work with distinction. There is no substitute for performance. As we master our assigned work, we should look for ways to partner with others to fix the crappy systems that constrain our performance. We also have a responsibility to care about the work we do, the people we do it with, and the people we do it for. There is no substitute for caring. We need to manage our time in such a way that we can first do our work well, and then look for ways to help others on our team improve the work that they do. And if someone is behaving unethically, we need to care enough to muster the courage to confront them, even if we stand alone. When we perform, care, and operate with integrity, we become worthy of the trust of other citizens.

There is a lot of interest these days in employee engagement. I like engagement, but the hype far exceeds the peer-reviewed scientific evidence. The same is not true for organizational citizenship, where we have three decades of excellent peer-reviewed evidence. I’m not really sure how I need to behave at work to satisfy the engagement gurus, but I’m crystal clear about the importance of first doing my job well, then looking for opportunities to help my organization and colleagues. I wish our organizations would spend more time and effort encouraging good citizenship at work.

Yet for us who choose to ask what we can do to help, it really is true that in our hands will rest the final success or failure of our course. But we are masters of self-deception; highly skilled at telling ourselves stories that make us feel good but simply are not true, stories like “there is no way I can make a difference around here”. But our circle of influence at work is larger than we think. People are watching us, and it is our responsibility to craft the stories others tell about us. Those stories about our behavior have the power to change the culture of our organizations. My challenge to you is to go forward from here and choose to behave in ways that will provide stories of good citizenship because the evidence is unequivocal that if you do so, you can make a difference in your workplace.

Thank you

Performance talks. When you engage others in talk about performance, is your purpose to learn how to improve and hold yourself to higher standards of excellence? Or is your purpose to cover your ass and figure out how to just do enough to get by?

If you worried more about performing, your talk would rarely center on you and your own performance. When your performance speaks for itself, others will talk about your performance on your behalf.

When you really perform, you never really have to worry.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Related Posts:

Don’t Be Compromised By Compromise

A Question Of Principle

ACT Change: Free Yourself From The System Of External Sanctions

These folks have been participating in leadership development and my talk will be the final session. I want to engage them in conversation about what they have learned so far and then share with them some of my thoughts about the process of leadership.

I’ve framed my talk as the choices we have to make if we choose to engage with others in the process of purposeful change and continual improvement. I think everyone that engages in this process has to choose to be purposeful instead of egocentric, to master the performance of their given domain, to care about what they do and those they do it with, to have integrity, to trust and be worthy of the trust of others, to be fair, be willing to change personally, help as well challenge others, and to be a source of encouragement rather than discouragement. That is of course not a comprehensive list, but anyone that does these things is certainly a credit to his or her organization.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Related Posts:

Leadership Encourages Hope

The Wholesome Use Of Power

The Difference Between Management And Leadership

The evidence shows that if we really care about being effective citizens, we also have to be willing to challenge. A 2011 study by Scott B. MacKenzie, Phillip Podsakoff, and Nathan Podsakoff (citation below) showed that the combination of both helping and challenging behaviors had a significant, positive effect on workgroup task performance and ultimately organizational outcomes. Below are the items they used in the study to represent challenge-oriented citizenship behaviors (p. 574):

1, Communicate their opinions about work issues to others in the group even if their opinion is different and the others in the work group disagree with them

2. Are willing to risk disapproval in order to express their belief about what’s best for the organization

3. Do not hesitate to challenge the opinions of others that they feel are directing the company in the wrong direction

4. Often try to recommend changes in organizational rules or policies that are nonproductive or counterproductive

5. Are willing to voice their concerns about the direction of the work team or company

The study showed that both helping and challenging had a significant direct effect on the performance of the work group, accounting for 27% of the variance. It was then the performance of the group that had the direct effect on the organizational performance measures of sales, profit, and employee turnover.

The most interesting finding was that the helping behaviors enable the challenge behaviors to have a more positive impact on the performance of the group. Challenge absent helping only goes so far.

Our organizations need us to be willing to challenge both crappy systems and egocentric team members that have strayed from our shared purpose. This research shows that for our challenge to be most effective, we must first assume a posture of helping.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Citation: MacKenzie, S.B., Podsakoff, P.M., & Podsakoff, N.P. (2011). Challenge-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors and organizational effectiveness: Do challenge-oriented behaviors really have an impact on the organization’s bottom line? Personnel Psychology, 64, 559-592.

image credit

Related Posts:

The Mantra Of Organizational Citizenship

Thanking People You Lead Makes Them More Helpful

Autonomy Enables The Helpful To Perform

Fortunately, job satisfaction and organizational commitment are the two biggest drivers of citizenship behaviors. This is great news because we can change our attitudes. We should seek work that we enjoy, people we enjoy working with, and people to work for who treat others fairly. When we reach the point where we can say “I want to be here doing this important work with you,” our citizenship often flourishes.

Supportive behavior on the part of our leaders also enhances our willingness to help others at work. When our leaders help us, they help themselves by encouraging a work environment where the “helping virus” can live, grow, and improve the health or our organization.

With the exception of conscientiousness, our personality has little to do with being a good citizen at work. Even if it is not our natural inclination, all of us can learn to be more organized, thorough, and deliberate in the performance of our job.

Our attitudes, leadership, and personality are all legitimate reasons why we might chose to simply perform the specifics of our job description and never help others at work, but none of these can ever be an excuse. Citizenship is a choice, and even if ours is never encouraged, supported, and rewarded, we can never escape our responsibility to do the right thing.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Citation: Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Pain, J.B., & Bachrach, D.G. (2000). Organizational citizenship behavior: A critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for future research. Journal of Management, 26:3, 513-563.

Related Posts:

The Primary Barriers To Success Are Self-Imposed

ACT Change: Only You Can Empower Yourself

You Really Can Do Whatever You Want

When I entered the store, the customer in front of me was just finishing his order. There were three employees in the store – one taking orders and making coffee and two visible from the front counter preparing baked goods and other food. The owner was not in the store at the time.

I ordered a muffin and a latte. The friendly service provider handed me my muffin and then finished making the specialty drink for the customer in front of me. As he was delivering that drink to the customer seated in the lobby, two more customers entered the store. These were regular customers and each was greeted by name. The service provider then proceeded to fill both of their orders BEFORE he made the latte I had ordered and paid for prior to them entering the store. I stood and watched as both food and drip coffee was ordered, paid for, and delivered to two regular customers. Only then was my latte prepared and presented.

As the service provider was serving the second regular customer, he called for help from the two folks preparing food. One of them replied loud enough that I could hear it that she was busy making food; however, she came over to help even though it was easy to see she was not happy about having to do so.

This was a clear service failure and more of a crappy system than crappy people issue. There was no one “managing” the service encounter that morning. The person in the back preparing food should have been trained to jump in and help with a smile without being asked. When you are busy, it takes two people to take orders, prepare food, and prepare specialty drinks. One person simply cannot provide impressive customer service when the store is even slightly busy. If they know they do a considerable volume in drip coffee for regulars early in the morning, then they could set up a separate system where those customers could serve themselves and maybe even leave payment. I got crappy service this morning because of failures in staffing, training, design, and management, not because the young man serving me had a bad attitude. He failed me because the system failed him.

Shame I got treated differently than regular customers this morning. They don’t know my name, but they also don’t know I told over 100 students this semester alone that I frequent this business and like it; they don’t know that I wrote them a favorable Yelp! review over a year ago; they don’t know that I’ve even mentioned them favorably by name on this website in another blog post.

And they won’t know me, because I will never show my face in that business again. I work hard for what little money I have, and I want to spend it with local business people. I have reasonable expectations for service (e.g. finish my order before you start the next one), and when those expectations are not met, I always complain as a matter of principle. I sent the owner an e-mail this morning to alert her of my bad experience, and while she was very kind and receptive, her people did not tell her the whole story, so I came off looking unreasonable. Service recovery failure…. that’s enough for me to know I need to spend my money somewhere else.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Photo credit

Related Posts:

Why Employees Choose To Perform

Enterprise Cares? Not From Where I’m Standing

Return to Campo Reno

All things being equal, an organization whose employees exhibit citizenship behavior will outperform one whose employees do not. Studies have shown that across a variety of indicators of effectiveness (e.g. performance quantity, performance quality, operating efficiency, and customer satisfaction), organizational citizenship accounted for anywhere from 18 to 38 percent of the variance in performance outcomes. If that were not enough, the evidence is also clear that citizenship is as important as task performance when someone is asked to provide a subjective evaluation of our individual effectiveness.

When we choose to be good citizens by helping others at work, our organization benefits and so do we. Its time we stop thinking about the success of our organization as someone else’s responsibility. We need to master our assigned tasks and then manage our time  in such a way that we can look both for ways to improve the work that we do and to help others in our group or on our team improve the work that they do. We find meaning in our lives when we choose to do things that matter, and there is no reason why we can’t have every choice we make at work matter.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Citation: Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Pain, J.B., & Bachrach, D.G. (2000). Organizational citizenship behavior: A critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for future research. Journal of Management, 26:3, 513-563.

photo credit 

Related Posts:

The Mantra Of Organizational Citizenship 

Why Are You Waiting?

Patriots And Citizens

But I had a bad experience at the Starbucks located at Keystone and 7th Street Friday morning. I was in that location on Wednesday morning that same week and ordered a muffin with my cup of coffee. The price listed in the display counter was $1.95, but the register rung it up as $2.25. The young woman providing service that morning told me the new signs were on order and thought nothing of charging me a price different than the one advertised. I politely told her that they needed to change the signs to reflect the price they intended to charge customers. When I returned Friday morning, the price still said $1.95 and I was still charged $2.25 at the register. When I complained, the manager told the young woman “just give it to him for free.” I did not want it for free, I simply wanted to pay the advertised price.

The manager was very dismissive of my complaint and remarked “we are only human.” That’s an excuse, and customer complaints never merit excuses. What makes this so inexcusable is that is was was so easily avoidable. If you don’t have the right sign, then simply remove the wrong one and let customers inquire about the price. What really bothers me the most about this is they willfully chose to ignore my service encounter two days earlier when I politely pointed  out their error and gave them the opportunity to take action to recover. I could care less about paying an additional 30 cents for the muffin, but I do care a lot about the principles of charging what you advertise and responding to loyal customers.

I always complain about bad service. I spent over $10 for lunch at a different Starbucks that same day and got fabulous service. I will continue to be a fan of Starbucks and continue to spend money with them; however, it will be a long time before I return to the location at Keystone and 7th street.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Related Posts:

Customer Encouragement: The Cycle Of Success Spiral In Action

Gracious Leadership

If You Don’t Have Something Nice To Say

Citizenship matters. Good citizenship has the power to transform not only countries, states, and local communities, but also organizations. Scientists in my field of organizational behavior and management have been studying citizenship in the workplace since the late 1970s.

“How can I help?” is the attitude of a good organizational citizen. Good organizational citizens help both the organization and people in the organization by exhibiting innovative and spontaneous behaviors (Katz, 1964) and a willingness to cooperate (Barnard, 1938).

In future posts I will summarize what the evidence shows are the causes and consequences of citizenship in the workplace. I’ll also offer my two cents worth on why we should choose to be good citizens at work even if the people we work for or the people we work with don’t support, acknowledge, and appreciate our posture.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Related Posts:

Feeling Good By Doing Good

Evidence For Leading By Example

TEDxReno