We use the terms in our common every-day language, but I believe we often undervalue the importance of consideration and conscientiousness are to our lives and our careers.

The term “consideration” has two quite distinct meanings.  One meaning of consideration is as a legal doctrine requiring, among other things, “Something promised, given, or done that has the effect of making an agreement a legally enforceable contract”.  A promise is just a promise until at least one party has some skin in the game.  And there is probably a lesson here somewhere, but beyond what I’m hoping to make.

The other meaning of consideration involves deliberate thoughts, words and actions that express a value for others.  The Army has written a handbook called “Consideration of Others” which they describe as “actions that indicate a sensitivity to and regard for the feelings and needs of others and an awareness of the impact of one’s own behavior on them”.  The program goal is to make each individual Soldier aware that his or her attitudes and actions critically affect unit combat effectiveness.  I’m proposing that we need the same sort of consideration in our homes and in our workplaces.

The list of consideration actions, attitudes and values that might get us thinking along the right lines might include:

– Listen intently to the ideas and concerns of others.  Actively listen to them, consider what they actually say, help them when they find it difficult to articulate their points and strive to identify what they are feeling.

– Be patient with others.  Even when you feel frustrated or overwhelmed, don’t let negative emotions overflow onto this innocent person.  Patients means you give others time to explain themselves to you fully.

– Be discrete at a rule, not as an exception.  Even when something you share about someone is harmless, it sends a strong message that you value the this person enough to error on the side of discretion.

– Be empathetic toward others.  One of our deepest desires is “to be known” by trusted others.

– Be forgiving of wrongdoing.  In many cases, punishment does little more than tell the person that you are not a trusted colleague, and will only result in a more distant relationship.  Where you have latitude to do so, forgive!

Conscientiousness has less to do with “what” you do, and more to do with “how” you do it.  Being patient (as we mentioned above as an act of consideration) is not very effective if you do it irregularly.  Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being thorough, careful, or vigilant. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well. Conscientious people are efficient and organized and exhibit a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement.  They are generally organized and dependable and tend to exhibit carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation. Conscientiousness is one of the five traits of the Five Factor Model of personality and is an aspect of what has traditionally been referred to as having character. Though science has defined conscientiousness as a personality trait (a relatively stable and enduring quality of a person), this does not mean that it is unchangeable.

Most people will stop picking a scab when it becomes painful enough and threatens to damage the skin permanently.   If you see clearly the destruction that lacking consideration and conscientiousness have on your quality of life, you’ll leave those little scrapes and bruises alone.  Poking and prodding at them only makes them worse.

For many, this purposefulness is the renowned mark of their lives.  

But while it extends to the boundaries of their personal lives, they do not carry it into their lives of work.

And this is such a tragedy for all. 

I cannot imagine the joy I would miss if I were to consider my vocation only a means of provision for my family or a place of personal achievement-if this place of work were more:

                      for taking than for giving

                      for seeking acclaim more than offering encouragement

                      for being cherished more than giving love

Some of the greatest moments of my life have occurred during the countless hours I spend at work.  And this should be of no surprise as I offer up my most conscious and alert hours to this calling. 

I consider the skills and talents I possess

                      first freely given as a gift to me

                      and now holding the promise to serve as a blessing to others.   

There remains a significant gap between leadership theory and practice.  The foremost question to address is “why”?  Are existing leadership theories lacking?  Are practicing leaders failing to understand and lessons from leadership scholars?  I think both are true to some large extent.  Perhaps overlooked in all our focus on leaders is the critical role of the follower.

Ones identity as a “follower” is not a romantic one.  To prove this to yourself, imagine you are in the company of your colleagues at work and are asked to 1) raise your hand up high and 2) recite these 4 words…

“I AM A FOLLOWER”

I asked my students to do this in class, and then ask them to report how they felt about making this statement.  Without exception, their responses were negative.  The very word “follower” (outside the context of religious following) is one that conjures up feelings of weakness of will, low self-worth, a lack of ambition and feelings that we must lack important leader qualities.  It also implies, in our western society, that our career success will be limited as we have effectively “closed the door” on leadership positions in our future.  I’m here to say that this thinking is rubbish, and I’d like to use some logic to explain my position a bit further.

When I was an undergraduate, I needed 1 credit hour to satisfy a humanities requirement for my degree.  I had NO interest in any of the offerings, and logic was the only 1 credit hour course offered that I could take in my full-time schedule.  So, off to logic I went.  The teacher was good, the class was easy, but I didn’t have any idea what I was learning or how I might ever be able to apply it to my life.  Boy was I wrong.  This one class changed my world.  The experience changed my thinking and it sharpened my ability to discern from words what we could establish as truth, and quite importantly, what we could not!

Let me apply what I learned so many years ago to the following statements about leadership

1)     If you are a great leader then you have great followers. 

In logic, modus ponens (MP) is the proposition that “if A then B”.  And this, I believe, applies to leadership.  If a leader is great, they must have many great followers.  This is true because we define leadership as the perceptions that followers have of their leader.  All of the literature on transformational leadership points to a relationship where the leaders influence “transforms” followers through intellectual intercourse, emotional wooing and individualized consideration for each follower.  We call this assumption a partial (because not ALL followers of great leaders are GREAT followers) universal affirmative.

(see my earlier post on transformational leadership here)

So we have established MP (every great leader has some great followers) as a partial universal affirmative (truth) that we accept.  To validate this rule we must examine the proposition that “if not B, then not A” (this is called modus tollens (MT).  Here we need to determine if it is true that a leader (a) without great followers (-b) is not a great leader.  And the literature, again, supports this claim wholeheartedly.

This far we have simply demonstrated an inexplicable connection between great leaders and great followers based on what we know from the literature.  Great leaders have some great followers, else they are not great leaders.

However, what has not received attention is the proposition that

2)      If you are a great follower, then you have great leader(s)

And here, I propose, we are reaching deeply down toward the roots of our crisis in followership.  We have simply turned statement (1) on it’s head and stated the inverse here to apply our logic and determine the truth.  If we apply MP, we can unanimously agree that this statement is not true.  Many men and women serve as great followers of less-than-great leaders.  Moreover, when we apply MT (if not B then not A), we would have to conclude that if you do not have a great leader, you cannot be a great follower.  This clearly fails our test of logic and we must “denying the consequent” in logic jargon.

I labor here to recall my logic lessons and write such a lengthy post for you because I believe this is the fallacy that leads to mediocre organizational performance.  It is an “easy out” for people who don’t understand the true significance of followership.  Followership does not depend entirely upon leadership, it depends on character.  Perhaps you parents taught you lessons like “it’s not what you do when people are watching; rather it is what you do when they are not”.  Likewise, your quality of followership shines most brightly not under the direction of a great leader, but under the leadership of something much less.

Rather than frame followership as some form of weakness, we should celebrate it as an act of strong will, of high self-worth, of high ambition and as preparation for the leadership roles that await us.  Following well leads us to leadership.

When I first saw this some years ago I was struck by the profound truth that the key to any movement was not really that someone was so bold as to stand up and lead, but that someone was so bold as to be an early follower.  Effective followership does require a confidence in the leader, but perhaps we undervalue the importance of the bold and confident follower who takes on the minor leader role and gets things done.  What about the faithful employee who you can always count on to tell you the truth.  What about the follower who follows through on a vision that they don’t entirely understand or share with their leader.  Isn’t this an act of bravery?  Isn’t this boldness?  Isn’t this what we need more of in our organizations?  Then why all the talk about leaders and the neglect of the important role of followers?

I think the answer is easy.  We romanticize the notion of leading, and we think that the greatest rewards go to those who lead.  But I’m not entirely convinced that this is true.  First of all, I don’t envy the work load of the leaders I know.  The president of our University, for instance, gets to stand up during  convocation with a big medallion around his neck and a 3 pound ring on his finger looking like a rock star.  It all looks quite glamorous as I sit in the front section of the audience with my fellow faculty.  He and the Provost also come to speak to our school and answer our questions once a year and I think to myself “now HE’S the man”.  But when I think about his life a bit more I quickly realize that he has 9 convocations to reside over and 10 or 15 school forums to speak to each year.  His schedule must be packed from early in the morning until late in the evening.  I know my own College Dean attends a few evening events every week.  What must the presidents evening schedule look like?  It looks glamorous to sit at the head of the table for meetings, but this doesn’t allow for much “nodding off”.  These leaders are expected to, well, “lead”.  I’m not sure it’s all that it’s cracked up to be!

But then we think of all that money a leader makes.  Our college president, from what I’ve heard, is the highest paid president in our university system.  Our state has public disclosure of state employee salaries, and he is listed as making 200k for .41fte (full time equivalent).  I don’t know exactly what that means, but let’s assume it is a way to keep his annual salary a bit less conspicuous and that his actual salary for a full fte is  then 318k.  I know one professor in our college listed at nearly 300k.  He’s worth every penny!  My point isn’t that leadership doesn’t pay, it does.  But there are many who are not in such high leadership positions that make very nice salaries.

When I worked for KPMG Consulting (now Bearing Point) I never told anyone my salary, but my colleagues did talk about theirs constantly.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I made 20 and 30k more than some people who had more rank (and much more responsibility) than I did as a senior consultant.  I was perfectly contend making my salary given my responsibilities and “following” their lead.  In my experience, leadership means “responsibility” and “accountability” and a lot of hard work!

But if that is what you really want for your life (as if work isn’t already all-consuming in life), then learn to lead the right way; be a brilliant follower!  A brilliant follower is someone who can be trusted, someone who is reliable, someone who is honest, someone who is smart in matters that count, someone who knows how and when to cover his boss’s ass, and someone who truly knows how challenging the role of “leader” can be!

I often get questions about survey instruments from prior students of professionals I’m affiliated with in one way or another.  I’m generally correct in assuming they intend to implement their own survey instrument in-house, and often without very much support from others in the organization.  Often, but not always, I think managers develop surveys to validate our own way of thinking.  The danger in this is that it can result in a type of self-fulfilling prophecy as our choice of questions and the wording of those questions can very easily “lead”.  I’ve had two of these notes in the past two weeks, so I thought I’d share my general advice. Here is one such note:
___________________________
I have a question…

I am working on a project for work where we are doing a questionnaire for performance feedback. I know from doing some reasearch projects years ago that there are some fundamentals to questionnaire design to ensure that you have efficiently worded questions and structure. I also know that for most doctoral programs this is a big deal in the primary research area. Can you recommend a good book/guide on questionnaire design that could help guide us in this effort?

Kevin
___________________________

Hey Kevin,

Well, the issue of “scale development” is a complicated one. If you wanted to measure job satisfaction, there are many highly validated measures of that which are preferable over making your own. Reliability and validity are the issues we face when developing questionnaires. However, when you want to measure perceptions that are not captured by existing scales that have been validated in research, you end up making your own using as much common sense as you can. In this case, your best choice is to find someone who had done this in the more academic fashion (for a research paper that is scrutinized by reviewers who understand psychometrics). If that is not an expense your firm is willing to incur, you can (sometimes) “entice” an academic to work for free in exchange for giving them access to interesting data that they can use for a publication. Performance feedback is a common survey type, but the hardest question is “what do you really want to know”.  This is where an outside facilitator can really be of objective help to you. If you’re stuck with doing this yourself, common sense prevails. Simply draft up a set of questions that you think you want to ask then:

1) Have others review your questions and discuss with them “what they think the question is really asking”. This is where you find that your perfect wording is sometimes misleading.
2) Alter your wording so that you are asking your questions more plainly. Keeping is simple is the key.
3) Discuss how generalizable each question is to each respondent. Someone from one area of the firm may interpret the question quite differently from someone in another functional area.
4) Do a small pilot study launching your survey to a select random group of employees and review the results.
5) Debrief these individuals and have an open discussion about how they interpreted the questions.
6) Modify your questions as needed.
7) Add LOTS of qualifying questions to include year of tenure with the organization, year of tenure in this functional area, age, gender, ethnicity, managerial experience etc etc..
8) Launch your final survey (with fingers crossed)
9) Analyze your data using more than mean scores on items. You should ask important questions in several ways and average responses across similar questions. For instance, if it’s very important that you have a good measure of employee satisfaction with supervisors, you’ll want to know which supervisor they are referring to (not necessarily the name of that person, but the level of manager they are to that person ; direct supervisor, senior coworker etc.. Don’t assume anything. Satisfaction to one employee means something different to another employee. Hence, you need to identify the elements of management behavior/attitude that you want to ask about.
10) Finally, look through your data using statistics (t-test or ANOVA will work fine) and look for “more of the story”. You may not be looking for it, but may find that female subordinates reported statistically significantly less satisfaction with their female superiors than with their mail superiors. This type of findings raises more questions, and is what often leads to a follow up survey in order to understand it more fully.

Well, that is a mouth full. Surveys are easy to write, but very challenging to create, deploy and analyze in a valid and reliable way. If you company can afford some help, it is well worth the minor expense.

There are books out there that cover these issues, but they will essentially elaborate on what I have shared above. The statistics used in the analysis are not difficult to calculate, but interpretation is another matter. A statistically significant difference between two groups does not mean that it is necessarily material in your workplace. Conversely, a non-statistically significant result can be practically very important for your organization.

In the end, a survey of this sort will require the participation of a group of key people who share an interest in finding out the TRUTH. This is another reason that ousiders are used, they lack the biases that organization members tend to have based on their past experience.

Call to chat if I can be of more help.

Dean

The first answer is that leadership is among the most studied and published areas in management. There are many theories (both practical and theoretical) that aim to guide the academic and the practitioner to a better way of leading. Second, there are so many contingencies (personality, industry, culture) that influence the leader-follower relationship, that the notion of “one size fits all” never applies. Third, our society places a high value on leadership. World cultures emphasize that if you are a great leader, then you are a “great man”. Fourth, leadership is the pathway to career and financial success. If you want to be rich and powerful (perhaps even famous) be a leader! Finally, leadership is power, power give access to money and resources, and these things attract the attention and gain the good will of those around you. So, it’s really no wonder why people search for leadership materials on blogs, in business magazines, newspapers and academic manuscripts. I’ll continue to publish on this topic, but my focus is going to change in future posts. Given the already romanticized notion of leadership, it’s time we focus more of our attention on the responsibilities and burdens of being a leader. To be a leader is also to be an effective follower, so here to I will direct some of my attention. Particularly the “up-and-comer” who dreams of her career success needs a greater sense of what it means to follow effectively before she can become the leader that effectively serves others and her organization!

If you haven’t read my last post, you may want to go back and read about learned helplessness (LH) here.  Now that you know what LH is, it’s time to address the issue of how you might 1) identify LH and 2) break the cycle of helplessness others are experiencing.

First of all, not all people who don’t exert effort at work are “helpless”.  Some are lazy, some are frustrated, other are just stubborn or mad.  Determining the cause of this poor performance has major implication for how you should address the situation.  Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to determine if this person is LH by assessing the situation.  You do this by briefly interviewing them.  I recommend you ask them the following questions:

1) Do you feel like you’ve tried hard to complete the task you’re struggling with?
2) If you knew you would succeed, would want to work hard to complete this task well?
3) Have you experience significant frustration in trying to complete this task in the past?
4) Have you had any success at accomplishing these tasks when you’ve tried hard?
5) Do you feel like you’ve just tried everything possible and are wanting to give up altogether?
6) Is an obstacle in your way, or do you feel like you lack the necessary ability?

Note that, at times, removing an obstacle (#6) is all that you will need to do to help this person complete a task and break the cycle of learned helplessness.  Even if this obstacle is not one that other employees face, it may be the source of frustration and failure for your employee.  Simply remove this obstacle, facilitate success and celebrate the accomplishment with your employee.  At the core of Robert House’s “path-goal” theory is the notion that a good manager is one who facilitates the success of his/her employees by removing barriers.  Every good manager should be diligently “clearing a pathway” for the success of every employee.  

People responding positively to most or all of these questions (save #4) may be indicating that that they are experiencing learned helplessness.  It is important to note that we are all, at time, truly helpless.  Learned helplessness is not simply being helpless, it is when a person experienced helplessness in the past, and simply cannot see that circumstances have changed.  They may be helpless regarding a particular task, or they may generalize this helplessness to a broad array of work activities.  It is most common for people in this helpless condition to feel overwhelmed, frustrated and despondent to help from others. They are often embarrassed by feelings of failure and often dislike discussing them.  Others might express a heightened sense of anxiety or apprehension about their work.  Hence, a gentle and supportive approach is needed here.  Like depression, this condition tends to persist until the person gets the right type of assistance.

Though there is no pill for learned helplessness, there is a solution.  But what NOT to do in response to LH is perhaps just as important, so lets talk about this first. Most manager (unintentionally) respond inappropriately to a performance deficiency of this sort.  Given that this person, by definition, does not believe that further effort will lead to a successful outcome, “cheer-leading” will not work.  In fact, encouraging someone with LH to try harder is about like encouraging someone stuck under a ten ton boulder to “push harder”.  It only proves to the person that they are helplessly stuck.  In their mind, they’ve already tried every trick in the book, and no amount of encouragement will change the outcome (only highlight their failure to succeed).  They are stuck, and no amount of effort will change that perception.  So don’t “cheer-lead” fist.  Save that for when you begng to see some success!

What an individual with LH needs most is supportive help.  This help may not be like what you are used to offering.  They may need more hand-holding, and you might need to demonstrate the task for them a few time, then walk them through the process letting them get their hands dirty a little bit at a time.  When they succeed at all, encourage them and point out their successes even if they aren’t completing the entire task on their own.  Keep reinforcing the correct behaviors, carefully avoiding what they are doing wrong as much as possible.  This will build their confidence and reestablish their belief (gradually) that they can do the work autonomously.  Once they have mastered the task, celebrate and encourage!!!  Leave them to the task, but with the promise that they can call on you any time for more assistance.  You will become their hero.  Don’t be overly concerned that they will rely on you too much or too often for assistance.  Most people don’t want constant assistance, they want to feel a sense of achievement that comes from completing a task alone.

the Chief People Officer!

Granted, it’s a title with the potential of sounding a little precious, like the “Vice President of Happiness,” “Brand Evangelist,” “Digital Overlord” or other Silicon Valley labels that dress up what are really garden-variety gigs.

But the Chief People Officer position isn’t a rote, phone-it-in role – nor is it a cutesy name for the traditional human resources function. It’s a strategic shift in how we think about people, culture and enterprise value over the long term at a company. It’s about redefining culture so it’s not jellybeans, Nerf guns and free lunch. At Reputation.com, we certainly like those things but candy and eats alone don’t drive enterprise value. In my mind, culture is actually about the three or four aspects that are unique to your company that can be leveraged into business success.

Here are some of the other reasons we’re convinced we need a Chief People Officer (and why you do too):

• You need more than traditional HR, which centers on people, process and policies.These are important aspects and they need to get done. But a CPO’s focus should be on building culture – facilitating an environment that enables the best possible way of working. And while Human Resources falls under the Chief People Officer, calling the CPO an HR person is like thinking of your Chief Financial Officer as an accountant. They play in the same space but the strategic focus is completely different.

• A CPO will reset the definition of culture with you. Chief People Officers understand that culture doesn’t equal happiness. (Note: happiness can certainly be the byproduct of a great culture). But too often, we equate culture with lifestyle and perks, the ephemeral fun stuff that makes up the bulk of articles on companies with the “greatest cultures.” In reality, perks are the nice-to-haves. There’s nothing wrong with them but the foundation of a culture rests on business goals, not masseuses and organic meals made to order. It’s asking, what can we do to identify, attract and retain the talent we need to drive enterprise value?

• Chief People Officers focus on the culture trifecta: people, value and capacity. They know it’s about who is working for you, the value they generate for the business, and what’s needed to turn that value up to its full capacity. Is it revamping the recruiting process so you hire people who feel a strong affinity for your mission? Is it coaching managers on how to inspire and reward employees? Is it exiting leaders who leach toxicity into your workplace? What changes, large and small, can you make to get to that capacity?

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140113152732-11281694-we-just-hired-a-chief-people-officer-why-you-should-too?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0
by: Michael Fertik

Most of you have probably seen television documentaries or read stories about how elephant trainers control their huge wild animals in captivity. A full-grown male African Elephant can measure 7 ½ meters in length and weigh 6 tons or more. But a baby elephant is quite manageable in size and strength and is easily restrained to a small area with one end of a chain fastened to its leg and the other to a good sized tree. The elephant soon learns that escape is impossible. However, this inescapable condition is soon outgrown. The questions then becomes, why doesn’t the animal escape? Because it has over-learned that the specific act of escape from the restraint is impossible. Not only this, but the animal submits to the overall authority of its master because its submission to the restraint is generalized to other areas. This intelligent animal learns at an early age that it must submit to the will of its master. It is quite amazing to see these mammoth giants being guided around by a puny rope or ridden like a pony on steroids. But this is only possible because of the conditioning that the animal experienced early in its life. In essence, the elephant has learned that it is helpless, that it can not escape and that it must submit to the will of its master.

Dr. Martin Seligman, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I is widely accepted as the father of learned helplessness. His work on learned helplessness began in the animal laboratory of Richard Solomon at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid 1960’s. Solomon was studying what is called avoidance behavior. Avoidance behaviors are established when subjects learn that a warning stimulus or signal (in this case a light) is followed by an averse stimulus (in this case a mild shock). These researchers were studying the ability of dogs to learn the warning stimulus and avoid the averse stimulus. In essence, they were conditioning (training) dogs to expect a shock if they did not react appropriately to a warning light.

What they found was that dogs could and would act (be motivated) by their own expectations that an averse stimulus (shock) would result if they did not act. However, these results were logically problematic for the researchers to explain. If what they were seeing was simply a tendency to be motivated by the absence of a shock, then wouldn’t these animals be equally as motivated to engage in all behaviors (eating, grooming, barking and pooping) that were not followed by shocks? This mystery led to further experimentation in order to determine the conditions under which dogs would develop such expectations. Clearly, eating and other normal animal behaviors were not motivated by a desire to avoid any clear averse stimuli.

In 1967, Overmier and Seligman first began a set of experiments designed to discover what conditions were required for the development of this avoidance behavior. Dogs experienced one of two laboratory conditions. The animals were first treated with either escapable shocks ( shocks that could be terminated by a response) or inescapable shocks. These same dogs were then tested in a different apparatus (a different setting with a different averse stimulus). What they found was that the animals that had received the escapable shocks first learned normally in later conditions. However, animals that had initially received the same shocks but under inescapable conditions failed to learn later. In addition, future studies showed that an experience of escapable shock “immunized” the animals so that a later exposure to inescapable shock was without effect on later learning. Overmier and Seligman had made an important discovery, but they had yet to come up with a viable explanation for this behavioral phenomenon.

Although there were many well developed theories that offered insights into the behavioral contingency that Seligman and Overmier had discovered, none of them explained the phenomenon adequately. The researchers knew that the animals that experienced inescapable shocks were learning that their responses to the shock and the termination of the shock condition were independent of one another. The realization that these two factors (shock and escape response) were independent of one another meant that, like the giant elephants, the dogs did not expect that any attempt to escape would succeed. Given this learned condition, the animals’ escape response discontinued and they lay passively while receiving the mild shocks. This phenomenon became known as learned helplessness.

The findings of this animal research apply reasonably to our experience as humans. We know that initial failures (like an inability to escape shocks) can have a powerful influence over our belief that further efforts will result in different (and better) results.  Seligman and others went on to perform experiments with humans. What they found was that the same consequences appeared in people with animals, but the effects of helplessness were moderated by the person’s ability to rationalize what was happening. Since animals have limited rational capabilities, it stood to reason that human would react to the induction of helplessness conditions differentially, depending upon how they perceived the circumstances.

Seligman explained that learning helplessness in humans is modified by their explanatory style.  A person’s explanatory style is what influences their “self-talk” or their explanations for what they experience (the causes of our successes and failures, escape or inability to escape). Seligman found that people with optimistic explanatory style were far more resilient toward conditions of learned helplessness. Unfortunately, not every person has an optimistic explanatory style.

Do you see learned helplessness happening in your workplace?  What would you look for to identify these people? I’ll follow-up this post with answers to the questions: 1) what does learned helplessness look like and 2) how can I help someone who seems to be experience it?  Here is a link to the next post!