It’s better to be respected and not liked than to be liked and not respected
 

One of the critical things that a leader must possess is honesty. Not only in the sense that they ought to be honest in their behavior, but also in that they must call things as they see them. Without doubt, leaders come upon countless situations in which they must figure out the “right” way to say something to an employee or group of employees. For me, the easiest way to address these situations is to ignore the politics and just say what you believe to be the clearest, most honest communication you can put together. Often, people try to couch things in certain ways hoping that the desired message will be interpreted by the recipient.

I strongly encourage those around me to speak openly and candidly with the focus being overall performance. Sometimes, it may create negative feelings, but when couched in the choice of (1) saying something to make the person aware or (2) not saying something and hoping for positive change, there can be no clearer answer than to say something as clearly as possible.

Clarity counts

When a difficult situation arises, you have a couple of choices to deal with it: you can say something or you can say nothing.

For example, if an employee charged with an assignment does not perform to expectations, you can tell them or stay silent and hope they’ll somehow change. For sure, the best thing that you can do to prevent similar situations from recurring is to speak out clearly and without ambiguity. After all, how will they know that they missed expectations, or know how to correct things in the future, without a clear, unambiguous communication telling them so?

Of course, they may not find that type of communication easy to hear—they may hope you haven’t noticed the undesirable performance—but that’s the way it is. In my experience though, people very often respond to open communication with appreciation both for the honesty and for the opportunity to correct course going forward.

Straight talk may not be comfortable for you either

Delivering open, honest criticism can open you up to being labeled with less than desirable names. But, in a classic risk-reward trade off, it also can lead to being considered a clear, candid communicator.

Without such communications, individuals who perform less than ideally would not be given productive, fruitful criticism; and would not likely modify their future behavior or performance. If that’s tolerated, others in the organization who witness this may come to the conclusion that senior management simply doesn’t care about the quality of employee performance. This belief, if allowed to fester and pervade an organization, can undermine people and business alike.

To ensure the best team performance and outcomes, be sure to speak clearly, openly and as honestly as you can. To me, the risk of being labeled negatively is far less important than the gains in performance that come from plain speaking—let alone the respect which you’ll earn for demonstrating a commitment to candor and integrity.

Remember, it’s better to be respected and not liked than to be liked and not respected—even if it hurts.

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When making the numbers is mistaken for making the grade, the only route is downwards

Photo: © Yanik Chauvin - Fotolia.com

‘Management by Making the Numbers’ — today’s fashionable choice amongst the macho and the greedy — produces a debased kind of leadership. We can only keep a working environment worthy of a civilized nation by valuing some things more highly than making the numbers. That means accepting ‘the numbers’ won’t be achieved — should not be achieved — if the price paid is the loss of honesty, dignity, integrity and humanity as guiding principles of corporate life.

People under pressure to deliver ‘the numbers’ will usually do so by whatever means are simplest and least risky. In time, that leads to using various unethical approaches, in the same way that it’s easier to get rich by cheating and theft than by working hard. If all top management care about is hitting or exceeding target, they’re likely to overlook little things such bending the rules. They’re especially likely to ignore management bullying, since they can re-interpret it as ’strong leadership’ or ’setting high standards’, and the victims as ‘losers’ and ‘weaklings’. Read the full story

The perils of following the herd instinct

Photo: Carmem L Vilanova

When it comes to making decisions, choosing what’s important, or thinking about the world in general, it appears that many people are close to imitating sheep, following wherever the herd leads. If this seems harsh, consider the impact of fashion or following ‘industry best practice’ — both ways of choosing based entirely on doing whatever a chosen comparison group is said to be doing. Or think about the current problems with credit and mortgages. How many people made careful, fully conscious decisions about what debt they could handle or which types of credit were correct for them? How many jumped into the market because “everyone else is doing it” and the media was filled with stories about how to make mega-bucks on ’sure-fire’ investing in housing?

The most powerful weapon in the armory of the salesperson, scrupulous or not, is often that same appeal to fashion and conformity. Everyone else (or at least all the ‘right’ people) are doing it. You don’t want to be left out, do you? You don’t want others to look down on you because you didn’t have the courage, or sense, to get on board?

Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the problems, as well as the upside, of being ‘part of the in-crowd’ and allowing group norms to override your own instincts and concerns. Read the full story

Why values matter despite the way leaders misunderstand and misuse them

Photo: Adrian Scottow

We hear a lot today about values: ‘family values’, ‘traditional values’, ‘conservative values’, ‘liberal values’ — even corporate values. ‘Values-based leadership’ has become another in the long line of panaceas to solve the problems of corporate under-performance.

But what are values? Do you have them all along, learn them somehow, or choose them like you might choose a club to join or a coat to wear? Are they a tool to be used or something fundamental about each person — to be tampered with at your peril?

Values are beliefs of a special kind: beliefs that come with a large emotional charge attached to them. Our individual values are the origin and location of our sense of who we are. They matter because we feel, deep down, that they do. Heart and head are not necessarily aligned when it comes to ideas. It’s pretty easy to fill people’s heads with notions, opinions and fantasies. The media, advertisers and politicians do it every day! We pick up all kinds of thoughts with little care for what we’re doing. Fortunately, we drop most of them just as easily. Yet while we may pick up a belief of any other type almost as casually — and put it down as easily — our values quickly become part of us.

Values and emotions are totally intertwined. So are values and behavior. In many ways, behavior is driven by values. Whenever you do something “because it’s right” you’re acting on your values. They define you in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Changing or abandoning your values is tough and painful business. Most people never do it throughout their lives. Those who do experience it as transformative, whether for good or evil. Read the full story

We cannot live a life of balance by clinging to just one side

We live in a world of duality: love versus fear, right versus wrong, negative or positive, doing or being, and so on. Maybe that’s why one of the qualities of a ‘mature individual’ (not chronologically mature, but emotionally, psychologically and spiritually so) is the ability to hold and reflect upon both polarities at the same time, e.g., “light and dark” together. Many refer to this as enlightening state where you do not have to opt for one over the other, but can entertain both polarities, with curiosity and without judgment.

For many, at work in particular, living with duality results in stress and tension on a daily basis. Consider the tension people experience as they move back and forth on a continuum between under budget and over budget, team cooperation or team competition, bosses who are supportive and those who are bullies.

Stress and regret surface whenever we want to experience only one end of the continuum and reject the other as bad or wrong. People who live life from this “right versus wrong”, “good versus bad” mindset, make themselves face continuous pain and suffering. When we put all our attention on one end of any continuum of opposites (it doesn’t matter which end), our energy is out of balance. Accepting only one side of a duality and rejecting the other does not lead to wholeness. Read the full story

It’s infuriating when somebody makes a promise to you and then breaks it; or agrees to do something, then blows it off like it doesn’t matter.

I’m not talking about an occasional ‘can’t-be-helped’ situation beyond reasonable control, like late air flights, or a wreck tying up traffic. I’m talking about serial agreement breakers. The people who don’t much care whether they keep their promises or not.

Healthy and conscious relationships are open, honest, and safe wherever people are acting and being in integrity. One of the major foundation blocks of trust is that people keep their agreements.

That foundation begins to crumble when people feels betrayed because another fails to commit to or keep promises. It’s one common reason why many relationships at work (and outside) do not work well.

Promises and agreements

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘agreement’ as: “when people approve of or accept something; a decision or arrangement between two or more groups or people.”

The purpose of an agreement is to create harmony, so that two or more people can engage in an interaction without any subterfuge. Sticking to an agreement precludes any hidden agenda, duplicity or lack of transparency. An agreement is effective only insofar as it comes from a deeper, internal place of motivation. Seems simple enough.

Dis-agreements

Yet life at work often seems rife with disagreements, betrayals, dishonesty, and disharmony. Why should this be?

The underlying cause of not living up to your promises is that you have entered into some agreement knowing that your true commitment is half-hearted.

Often people enter agreements because: (1) they are afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t enter the agreement; (2) they want to feel safe in some way — mentally, emotionally, physically, psychologically, socially, financially; (3) they are giving to get; agreeing, in order to achieve some personal, self-centered goal; or (4) they want to avoid the discomfort of disagreement or conflict, so they agree to “go along to get along.” Such agreements never come from the right place — the place of integrity and trust.

Agreements, in and of themselves, never lead to safety, trust and harmony. Acting on agreements, consistently, is what leads to safety, trust and dependability. Effective agreements are always built on a clear purpose that leads to action. Whatever the excuse for entering an agreement that comes from a place of duplicity, follow-through and being in integrity never happens.

When agreements work

For your promises and agreements to work — that is, for agreements to generate safety, trust, harmony and dependability — you must first reflect, deeply and consciously: “Why am I agreeing to this?” “What is the true and real purpose underlying this agreement?”

Without this internal clarity, agreements nearly always self-destruct sooner rather than later; and the fallout and collateral damage from such failed agreements can be extensive.

Once an agreement is broken, the first thing to erode is trust. That generates emotions like betrayal, fear, resentment, blame, guilt, and shame. Vague apologies and new pledges to make up for the broken agreement won’t help. The level of trust can almost never be regained to the degree that it existed when the agreement was made.

In working cultures without trust, there are no healthy relationships — just toxicity and a low-level-fever-grade type of agitation; and a continual watching of your back.

In contrast, when you create agreements that reflect integrity, authenticity, heart-felt purpose and accountability for one’s actions, you are creating a workplace culture that exudes safety, trust, harmony and well-being. Productivity, performance and conscious, healthy relationships grow and thrive in such workplace environments.

So, some questions for self-reflection:

• How would you characterize your relationships at work? Do you honor and keep your agreements, consistently? What would your boss, colleagues, direct reports, clients, friends, spouse/partner say?
• Do you create agreements with a win-win, or win(me)-lose(other) motive? Do you generally blame others when agreements break down?
• What is the level of trust in your relationships? How can you increase it?
• Have you been betrayed often? Do you enter agreements with a feeling that you’ll be betrayed at some point? Is trusting others a challenge for you? Why?
• Are your relationships characterized by communication and openness? How much do you trust people at work?
• Do you believe that work is largely “political”? Are you continually vigilant of who are your allies, opponents, adversaries, and “friends” at work? If so, why?

Technorati Tags: trust, honesty, openness at work, creating a culture of trust, making agreements that work, building co-operation, team-working, trust at work, relationships, corporate culture

Conversation is becoming a lost art, replaced by endless one-way talk and organized “spin”

This is a revised and expanded version of a post I wrote back in 2005. If anything, the situation I describe seems to have become worse since then, so I believe that it is well worth repeating.

“To converse” means to share ideas and learn from one another in the process. It’s a back-and-forth process that demands listening and talking in equal degrees. It has roots in the same idea that produces the word “conversion” in the sense of change. To converse with someone is to be open to being changed by what they say to you.

“Talk” is one-way. All those people endlessly talking into their cellphones, the TV and radio talk shows, the instant pundits on any topic, all of them involve people talking, yet rarely pausing or caring to listen. We live surrounded by egocentric speeches and constant chatter that amounts to little more than fear of silence.

Go to any meeting in any organization. What will you discover? People who spend their time between bouts of talking thinking about what they will say next. People eagerly seizing on someone else’s words as the excuse for talking themselves. People “taking positions” and telling other what they think, what matters to them. Fine . . . but is anyone listening? Instead of conversations, there are endless presentations: one-way, carefully prepared speeches with limited “feedback” — to which the presenter pays little attention, given the enormous effort already put into those words and pictures. How could anyone who merely listened to them have a better idea that the one who prepared them?

No one listens. No one is open to persuasion. Attendees are briefed to make specific statements, regardless of what’s said after they arrive. Like politicians toeing the party line, they have open mouths and tightly shut minds. Many — maybe most — decisions are made before the meeting ever takes place. The presentation offers a series of pegs on which to hang more one-way talk.

Those strong and silent types are usually neither

Organizational hero-leaders are like John Wayne, strong and silent types, hiding themselves behind the action-man exterior. Part of the proof of their action credentials is that they act as if they cannot communicate in any other way. They have no time for mere words; action is all that matters.

Image from WikipediaYet acting without explaining — or seeking ideas from others — amounts to little more than more egocentric dominance. When you act first and explain afterwards, you are passing the message that you know best; that other people’s input could not possibly change your opinion. Read the full story

On 30th Street in Boulder, CO there is a sculpture of a man chiseling himself out of a block of stone.

The man’s head, torso, arms, and thighs have already been carved from the stone. His right hand holds a hammer above his head ready to strike a chisel he grasps in his left hand. He is forming his right knee.

The message for me is one of individuality, self-actualization and self-determination. I feel the sculpture evokes these questions:

• Am I a self-made person? Am I self-directed? Am I as autonomous as I can or want to be? Am I self-responsible and can I self-manage?
• Am I moving forward in my life? Am I a continuous learner?
• How am I creating my life? What does it mean to be me?

This sculpture represents both the present state and potential of a self-made, self-actualized person; and points to the complexity of emotion, struggles and triumphs of life.

What are you chiseling from the stone?

Each of us has a choice as to how we use our innate talents to be productive and creative in our lives; and whether and how we will move through the challenges, road blocks, bumps in the road and other obstacles that might stand in the way of our personal and professional growth, development, and evolution. That is how we chisel our sculpture.

For some of us, the block of stone represents “stuckness:” immovability, being motionless, fixedness, the status quo, and being dead in the water, a destination. For others, the block of stone represents potential: possibility, creativity, self-actualization, capacity and becoming, a journey. Read the full story

Facing the truth about what you are doing is the only way to avoid predictable — and often nasty — consequences

Conservatism may be the chosen political stance of many people in business, but it’s a poor way to create a better future. If you want to build a stronger business, a better and more satisfying career, or a more satisfying life, you won’t do it by sticking with the way you think and act today; nor by looking only to the immediate future.

The current orthodoxy is to deal primarily with the short-term and focus on the results for the next quarter; but we’re already seeing the nasty consequences of that throughout the financial sector of the economy. A conservative mindset is not your friend if you want to thrive in a world of constant change; especially not if you want your life to change in significant way. The major drawback to a short-term, conservative, risk-averse mindset is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s static.

Cause and effect 101

It’s amazing how little attention people pay to the processes of cause and effect. Causes produce effects; same causes produce same effects. There’s an old saying that the best definition of insanity is doing something again and again, while expecting the outcome to change. If there’s any link between an action and a corresponding result, repeating the action is extremely likely to repeat the result.

When the connection is positive and short-term — so people see a certain action quickly produces an outcome they like — they seem fully aware of the link and follow it consciously. But when the outcome is negative and occurs some time in the future — behaving in a certain way is very likely to lead to unpleasant long-term consequences — they seem to find the link harder to grasp, especially if the action is pleasant or comforting in the short term.

Facing up to the truth

Smoking provides a good example of how people ignore reality to focus instead on what they would like reality to be.

The negative consequences of smoking are well known and factual. Yet millions still smoke. Logically, being aware of the health consequences of smoking should make any sane person give it up, if they smoke already; or refuse to start an addictive habit they are very likely to regret.

It doesn’t happen like that. Instead, people admit to the insanity of smoking, then go on doing it. The reason has to be that the pleasure is real and here today, while the threat seems more theoretical and far off in the future, if it ever happens at all. Many smokers admit the danger, then quickly point to someone they know, or have heard of, who smoked heavily all his or her life and lived to be 90. You could equally logically point to someone who smoked for a week and contracted lung cancer. When you’re dealing with probabilities, any single instance is statistically irrelevant.

The thinking, habits, consequences equation

What has this to do with business life, work and self-development? The answer can be expressed in a simple equation: Old Habits + Old Thinking + Short-term Viewpoint = Predictable Consequences.

If you stick with habits and thoughts that are comfortable and undemanding, and don’t look much further ahead that next month or next quarter, expecting any different outcome from what you’ve experienced up till now is so illogical it can be described as form of insanity.

Changing slowly

To produce slow, measured change you could try changing one, or perhaps two, of the terms in front of the equals sign. For example: Old Habits + Old Thinking + Longer-term Viewpoint = Potential for Different Consequences.

I say “potential” because those old habits and thinking will hold much of your life in place until the longer-term viewpoint starts — very slowly — to change them. The same would be true if you changed the habits, but kept your current ways of thinking and short-term outlook. There would be some change, but your old-style, short-term thinking would keep pulling you back towards the way you’ve always reacted to events until now.

Speeding up changes

To make major changes, you must change habits and thinking and viewpoint at the same time: New Habits + New Thinking + Longer-term Viewpoint = New Consequences.

If you do that, the laws of cause and effect will ensure fresh outcomes and paths through life. When people have some life-changing experience, they often describe it as having turned their lives upside down. They can’t even think as they did before; nor can they bring themselves to fall back on their old habits or see the world in the old way.

That’s how you can create your life-changing experiences. Open your mind to new thoughts, lengthen and broaden your outlook and try new ways of behaving. You can definitely expect different results to come about if you do that.

To change externals, change inside first

When you choose to alter your life in this way, inner change precedes outer change. You change yourself in the way you choose and new consequences arise as a result. When outer change forces inner change on you, it’s nearly always due to some traumatic life event.

That’s what happens when you stay fat, dumb and happy until the universe forces you to make a major course correction. It’s likely to be painful. Wouldn’t it be better to choose change than be compelled to experience it through an unexpected and life-altering trauma?

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