"Even the Longest Journey Must Begin Where You Stand"

The quote is from Lau Tzu, the Chinese philosopher-turned-management-guru -- and I like it for a couple of reasons. First, it’s so true: you have to honestly appraise your current situation in order to reach any goal. Secondly, no matter how bold your strategy, you can’t obfuscate the situation, thinking that strategy only needs to be stated to be accomplished. As any successful person will tell you, there’s a lot of sweat equity that has to be paid between where you stand and the journey you take.

As you probably know by now, I’m fascinated by data and passionate about analytics and how both will transform our businesses. However, it’s a journey not a sprint and begins with assessing what we call "the path to desired business results":

There are five key drivers of performance in any organization and while analytics might be the means to an end, these enablers are the catalysts. So, standing where you are now, it’s worthwhile asking the following questions:

Strategy: How will analytics help us compete successfully? Will we be able to differentiate ourselves in our markets using analytics?

Leadership: Are we as leaders prepared to commit the organization to an analytics based way of making decisions? Can we give the employees who will have to make this work the buy-in they need to be successful? Can we put aside our impatience and allow them to Think Big but Start Small?

Culture: Do we have data fiefdoms that refuse to share data or collaborate on projects? Do we celebrate the efforts of the early adopters, even if success isn’t guaranteed every time, in the spirit of discovery and experimentation? Analytics is all about experiments, testing, and doing it over and over. Have we made more of our decisions by the seat of the pants and been proud of it?

Employees: Do we want analytics to cascade down into the organization and, if so, are we prepared to properly train those whose jobs it will be to manage the technology that supports their business knowledge? Are we hiring employees for competencies that underpin the need for a broadly based analytics movement?

Customers: This is one area of most businesses that has received the most analytics attention so the questions here are: is our customer data in one place, is it at the lowest level of analysis possible and have we aggregated it across all of our channels?

The analytics journey is probably never ending as technology and competencies improve exponentially to deliver more insight with less complexity. But, knowing where you stand before you take the first step – or flying leap – will ensure that this critical initiative doesn’t crash and burn at the first turn in the road.

What is your analytics journey like? Are you looking first at where you stand or sprinting off for the unknown?

What Kind of a Boss Are You Anyway?

The title of today’s post came from a reader who sent me an email after my blog about employee commitment. There’s a lot of pent up frustration out there about us mangers, People, and it’s bound, as my reader suggested, to chase away your best and brightest.

As someone who likes to research a topic in order to develop it properly, I’ve done my due diligence and here is how some of the issues stack up. Do you recognize even one that applies to you? If so, there are things you can change IF you have the heart and mind to do it.

Don’t Believe All the Stuff You Read in Reviews: only Paris Hilton does that. Put your own boss’s comments in context. Is she bad about having productive performance conversations and the annual review (if you even get one) is rushed and bland? Maybe you should ask your team how you’re doing and really listen for feedback.

Are Your Bad Habits Rubbing Off on Your Staff? Are you continuously late to team meetings or do you regularly ask employees to work extra hours because you couldn’t get your act together? As Stephen Covey said, being in the thick of thin things means that the important things never get done – until they reach a crisis. Putting out fires is not the measure of a good manager or leader no matter how good that adrenaline rush feels.

Do You Show Genuine Respect for Other People? I confess: I absolutely hate people responding to email and texting during meals and meetings or continuing to work while I sit there for a scheduled meeting; and the only functioning brain in the room is mine because the other person erroneously believes in the myth of multitasking. It’s been proven that multitasking is less productive than attending to one thing at a time and following through on it. If you don’t respect my time or the purpose of the meeting, don’t call one -- or me.

You Went on the Leadership Courses; Now What? I’m not one of those people who believe that leaders are born not made although the potential needs to be there. Winston Churchill was a terrible peacetime leader but he understood what it took to lead in the darkest of times. I don’t think he went on a course to develop that skill set. The point is, leadership training can be generic and disconnected from either your job or your organization’s culture; making it very difficult to apply the content in everyday work. The best recipe is training that is a direct result of a good performance review (not filling up a predetermined number of annual training hours) coupled with mentoring and coaching. Being curious and unafraid to ask questions are also vital development tools.

As managers, too often we don’t take stock of our own performance and how it affects the people who have to make things work on the team. Are we lazy or in over our heads? Are we modeling the behaviors inflicted on us by our own bosses? When you find one day that your best people are leaving, you may need to own up to the fact that people rarely leave their jobs; they leave their bosses.

We’ve all had great bosses. Who were yours and what made them great?

Interest or Commitment: Knowing the Difference Could Change the Way You Manage

One of my clients recently sent me this quote from Peter Drucker that has had me reflecting on its true message and how it is applied, especially in business:

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you are interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”

For me, being interested implies a passive mindset whereas commitment seems active, which is confirmed by dictionary definitions: “the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose”. While interest is associated with curiosity about someone or something, commitment is the “act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action.” Interest is more cerebral perhaps while commitment is both cerebral and visceral. Isn’t commitment what we want and need in our organizations to be successful? When leaders talk about connecting to the ‘heart and the mind’ aren’t they referring to commitment?

I have a few thoughts on how to listen for and instill commitment day-to-day in our businesses:

Strategy: is business strategy a story that inspires people to bind themselves to the direction in which you want to go?

Leadership: before employees are committed, leaders have to demonstrate their steadfast fixity of purpose. It’s a trait not a slogan (“We are committed to our employees.” “We are committed to our customers.”)

Culture: is the business environment a community that binds people together to achieve a common purpose or a federation of possibly interesting activities?

Employees: is the hiring process geared more toward uncovering interests than discovering commitment?

Customers: do we expect commitment from our customers while only being interested in what they can do for us?

The late Peter Drucker’s ideas and writing continue to provide enduring lessons of what motivates people and moves organizations toward a higher level of performance. As I said to my client as we exchanged emails, Drucker was a no nonsense thinker who understood the duality of our 'heart and mind' selves.

Does anyone have a favorite Drucker thought?

Why We Love Predictions So Much & 3 of Mine

Have you had enough of the look-backs at 2010 and the predictions for 2011? Apparently, most people haven’t, which is just as well, judging by the number of blogs and articles hitting my RSS feeds, Google Alerts and email box. Why do we love predictions so much?

Humans are unique in the animal world in that we can detect and make meaning from complex patterns all around us that result in decisions about how we should behave, think, live our lives and so on. Predictions – our own and others’ – are aggregates of these patterns so we find them confirming or interesting or sometimes just weird but we pay attention to them.

We have a strong need to exercise individual control, some of which is cultural and some of which is human. Getting a handle on the possibilities for the future, gives us a sense of mastery, self-esteem and even optimism. We tuck these predictions away in our memory banks and they become part of our pattern recognition process.

According to Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of Health Psychology at UCLA, “positive illusions” about the future are mentally and physically healthy; they improve the ability to care for and about other people and they increase the capacity for creative and productive work.

As predictions seem to be so important to our general well being, I’ll offer three of mine for the business environment:

• CEO’s will be more open to experimentation at work BUT these experiments will be verified by analytics. Managing risk is still hugely important in this fragile economy. Trust but verify.

• Social capital will become a key hiring criteria for positions that influence business performance. The quality of a person’s relationships will become as important as her experience and skill set.

• Customers will be more quixotic than ever and companies will make even larger technology investments to try to predict their moods, behaviors and buying intentions. Whether these investments pay off will depend upon:
• Business Strategy
• Organizational Culture
• Quality of Leadership
• Employee Fit
• The Right Data, Metrics and Analytics

As a recent blog from IBM stated, there is no ROI from Business Intelligence unless someone uses it to make decisions.

Happy New Year and let’s get 2011 started!!

What are some of your predictions for 2011?

Waging the War on Bureaucracy: Is Management Obsolete?

Sorry if you choked on your doughnut while reading the title but, really, there has been so much written about CEO’s and their lack of ethics but their abundance of perks; about how leaders are failing every stakeholder they answer to and about how, like the dodo, management as a practice is becoming extinct.

How did things get this bad? Like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t we see Roadrunner aiming that anvil right at our heads?

Here’s my theory: we brought it on ourselves; we asked for the anvil. Why?

• We continue to hobnob with people who look like us and think just the way we do.

• We ignore social media as a passing fad or something IT needs to eliminate from employees’ Internet permissions.

• We haven't picked up on the fact that people are organizing online in communities that criss-cross time zones, date lines and borders to innovate, collaborate and create their own products and services. What's irrelevant are buildings and organization charts and titles.

• We talk engagement but secretly believe “they” are lucky to have a job.

• Change is for everyone else.

• We've been drinking the Kool-Aid of “shareholder value” as the only means to an end.

• And follow it up with a chaser of re-engineering as a synonym for de-layering, downsizing and off shoring (but, oh, that short term lift to the bottom line!).

• We are rock stars, aren't we?

I held management positions for twenty years; I know what it’s like to slog away and then be rewarded for my efforts with a fancy title and a fancy car. The problem is, the Roadrunner is on our tails, with a stick of dynamite.

I am really raving about this issue because there is so much more that managers can do not only save ourselves but also to make a difference in our companies and to the employees who report to us. For a less heated rant, I recommend an article titled, The End of Management by Alan Murray, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 21st.

In my next blog, I may rant less and offer a few solutions to an issue I didn’t know meant this much to me – until now.

Segmentation: Not For Customers Only

These days, most of us know that if we aren’t segmenting customers in order to understand needs, retention patterns, expectations, profitability and so on, we can’t draw a straight line between our revenue generators and the results we want to achieve.

I’m reading an excellent book by Jac Fitz-Enz titled The New HR Analytics and, no, it’s not for HR practitioners only otherwise, I wouldn’t be reading it. The book is essential reading for those responsible for delivering results. Isn’t that all of us?

Dr. Fitz-Enz suggests that organizations are at the last gasp of the Industrial Age in terms of how we plan our workforces, improve our processes, use data and design our work. Trying to steer a new course using old thinking isn’t going to get us where we want to go. For example, he recommends capability planning, not workforce planning to support a business strategy. Workforce planning involves filling the same kind of jobs with broadly the same skill sets as we have now. Capability planning involves segmenting current and future skills into four categories:

Mission Critical: These skills are key to ongoing success and are necessary in any function; what Fitz-Enz calls a “make or break situation”. (Think David Petraeus)

Differentiating: Based on your current strategic direction or one that you want to execute on, what capabilities will give you a competitive advantage? These skills are similar to Mission Critical but not identical as their impact on the business is unique. (Think Steve Jobs)

Operational: What skills do you need or will you need to keep the company functioning? This is capability without which you would be less efficient, less productive and less effective.

Moveable: This is a critical segment. As the environment and a business’s response to it changes, the work changes but skills often don’t keep up with the change. The result usually is a build up of unnecessary costs and when they become a significant enough drain on results, leaders are faced with massive lay-offs and costly re-structuring.

Thinking "capability" and not "workforce" shifts the paradigm in terms of how your business acquires and builds necessary skills. You may hire Differentiating skills but bring in some Mission Critical skills on an as needed, project-by-project basis. You may outsource some of your Operational skills and will need to look long and hard at Moveable skills.

This is not a once-in-a-while event; it’s an ongoing process of scanning, evaluating and updating your game plan.

There is a growing body of opinion expressed by thought leaders like Jac Fitz-Enz and others who believe that what has worked in the glory days of the Industrial and Information Ages will not work in this Knowledge and Innovation Age. Tomorrow is already here; we should be asking the right questions about our capability and skills; otherwise, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Are you caught between the Industrial and Innovation Ages? Have you started building capability or are you filling jobs?

Let's Hear It For (the New) HR

A lot of us have taken a verbal swipe at the HR profession occasionally; some have written about it. After all, they are the “people people” not the hard-driving, analytical, results-oriented business influencers that the rest of us are. Right?

I had an amazing experience a couple of weeks ago when I volunteered for SHRM-Atlanta at a call in Help Desk for job seekers hosted by a local TV station. Here are some of the things I observed about my HR colleagues:

• They Get It. They not only have a good grasp of business strategy but also are good at formulating it. The organizers developed a mission critical style and approach to this event that was awesome to watch. During our two- day call-in, the organizers were tracking call types and other metrics to analyze how best to follow up and improve for the next call in. I know they also will be tracking and analyzing call resolution.

• They Are Savvy About Business. This group of HR professionals developed a program, including training, researched resources, screened volunteers and marketed the heck out of this event using every channel available including social media; on time and with a shoestring budget.

• They Give Back. SHRM-Atlanta has a vision of Working For a Better Atlanta and from the Board down to individual members; they are trying to live out that vision in all that they do. I don’t think this approach is limited to our local people.

• They Believe in Education and Development. HR professionals are credentialed and take their own professional development very seriously. I never sat for the PHR or SPHR designation but I understand that the curriculum is rigorous and maintaining the credentials requires annual continuing education including strategic coursework. How many of us can say that about our own professional development?

• They Are Collaborative. These HR professionals worked closely with the Department of Labor and the television station as a seamless team; adding their own particular talents to create something bigger and better than anything they could create alone.

• They Can Execute the Heck Out of an Initiative. That says it all.

Is there a theme here? I believe it’s that HR isn’t “Personnel” any longer or the group that processes benefits and payroll or nags us about performance reviews. There has been a sea change and it can only benefit businesses that are challenged to do more with less and yet do it with the best talent available. Your HR department just might be an untapped source of what it takes to lead an engaged company:

1. Strategy Development and Execution
2. Identifying and Developing Leaders
3. Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Teamwork
4. Providing guidance and influence in human capital development and management
5. Selecting, developing and training customer-focused employees through a performance management system.

So, before we put our HR colleagues back in their box on the organization chart, take another look at your HR department. Talk to them; invite a dialogue. Better yet, invite them to your next strategy session. You wouldn’t dream of leaving out the Finance person, would you?

Is your HR Department leading the way to organizational engagement? What are some of the ways you utilize its strengths in non-traditional ways?

What Drives Your Numbers?

Stephen Sadove is a leader I can follow. The CEO of Saks, Inc. was interviewed by the New York Times recently and was asked about his leadership philosophy. His response was that leadership drives culture, which drives business results. Mr. Sadove went on to say that while Wall Street never asks about leadership, culture or people, they actually are what drive numbers and results. Mr. Sadove, you are my hero.

Trying to define organizational culture is a little like nailing Jell-o to a wall: slippery, messy and just plain hard. But, when a leader understands that the harder- to -grasp organizational elements actually make up the engine that propels results, we are at least half way to having a company that truly is engaged. While many C-Suite occupants are comfortable with spreadsheets and analytics (and no one would argue their essential value), the numbers don’t happen by accident or in a vacuum. It takes a lot of deep searching to arrive at a culture design that supports the results you want.

I recently saw a presentation by Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix who, while not a fan of process, nevertheless, put the steps for embedding Values, Strategy, Leadership and People into a framework he calls Freedom and Responsibility Culture:

How Do We Define Success? For Netflix, business results are “continuous growth in revenue, profits and reputation”.

How Are We Going to Get There? Hastings defined the strategy as “rapid innovation and excellent execution”.

How Does Our Environment Support Our Strategy? Netflix’s culture specifically supports “effective teamwork of high performing people”.

What Would Jeopardize Our Success? For Reed Hastings, it is a culture that tolerates rigidity, politics, mediocrity and complacency.

From this high level, Netflix is able to articulate how its Values are embedded in its culture and specifically defines behaviors that will be rewarded and those that result in being cut from the team. There is no room for ambiguity in Reed Hastings’ vision of success, which means that employees know exactly what is expected of them (part of a team of high performing people) and how their jobs contribute to the company’s success goals (innovating and executing).

We are in an environment today which demands that we stand out in every way. To ignore organizational culture is to sabotage your business success.

Can you answer the four questions above for your company? Can your employees?

Done Here, Felt Everywhere: Behavior Matters More Than Ever

The Gulf oilrig explosion and its aftermath is an example of how what we do (or fail to do) impacts others we don’t know in ways we haven’t even considered. Did the relentless push to drill, baby, drill faster to save money and to get the oil (revenue) flowing as quickly as possible compromise BP’s values? Lives have been lost; livelihoods are endangered; ecosystems and economies may never recover. Even my condo in Hilton Head has seen an increase in rentals because vacationers don’t want to risk a holiday on the Gulf coast. The ripple effect will be felt globally through many channels in very quantifiable ways.

We are so intertwined and so connected, thanks to technology and the Internet; we are so darned global that more of us have the power to impact other people’s lives than ever. So, how we behave; how we treat others and how we build trust with employees and customers have an exponential impact on them, on others we can’t even identify and on our own businesses.

Leaders: this is where you come in.

The CEO of BP can hug all the fisherman in Louisiana he wants but if he put profit before ethical behavior (by short circuiting safety for example), what does that say to his employees in terms of their own behaviors? How should customers react? What has this done to BP’s prized Brand? Judging by recent loyalty scores for Toyota, for example, customers and would-be buyers take time to recover when confidence is shaken.

BP’s Values are Progressive, Responsible, Innovative and Performance-driven. It looks good on a web site but do they influence behaviors and decisions? Time will tell and the whole world will be judging.

As a leader, Tony Hayward needs to demonstrate how he and his company will rise above PR, litigation and playing the blame game to behave in a way that inspires confidence and trust. That behavior will ricochet around the world in social media channels and news outlets as fast as the bad news is traveling. His recent performance on Capital Hill suggests that this is not a lesson Mr. Hayward has learned yet.

Dov Seidman, author of the book, How, says that we all now live in the “Era of Behavior”. He argues that too many of us are behaving by situational values or whatever the situation allows. Sustainable values on the other hand inspire us to do what should be done in every situation; they strengthen relationships for the long-term and reinforce our reputation in the global networks that drive our brand performance.

If how we behave doesn't match what we say on web sites, in annual reports or corporate communications, how successful do you think we will be with issues like employee engagement, customer commitment or organizational culture change? Behavior matters. End of story.

We Don't Own the Customer Relationship and What We Can Do About It

Ah, those halcyon days when companies owned the customer relationship and decided what the buyer needed to know and when she needed to know it. When advertising on television or in newspapers were the only way to capture the attention of a rapt audience. We built it, however indifferently, and they came.

Well, that was then and here we are now. I came across again a great book published ten years ago, titled “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and its preamble struck me as more true now than when it was first published. “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it.”

In thinking about how our companies can change the conversation with customers, I believe it’s the whole company that engages and creates the moments of truth. Frankly it amazes me that I can still come across stories as I did last weekend in the New York Times about the complete failure of a major airline to deal effectively with a reasonable request for a refund. It wasn’t just the unbelievably difficult voice mail navigation or the lack of a human to speak with or the conflicting information provided by different departments but also the arrogance of a senior employee who blamed the customer for not being able discern the difference between a Customer Refund Department and a Customer Relations Department (huh??). Oh yes, we still hold our customers hostage, but those opportunities are fewer and the more often these stories are repeated online and the dinosaur company that still doesn’t get it is named, the more the customer manifesto gains strength. Did this story just make you sit up? Remind you of your own company? Uh oh.

Here are a few thoughts in the context of engaging the whole company to create effective human networks:

Strategy: How do you define your market? It’s a human network of conversations that are smarter and more informed than ever. If you aren’t providing information and support, your markets are finding it among themselves and making you irrelevant.

Leadership: Are you having a conversation with your markets or providing talking points, corporate communications and PR? Markets can move quickly – away from you.

Culture: is it command and control you seek or hands on knowledge and respect?

Employees: This group is remarkably like your markets because they, too, are human beings who want information, support and conversations. Are you building networks for them to have meaningful exchanges? If you think your intranet fulfills this requirement, look at it again. Or, read about what Proctor and Gamble did to build its very successful networks for employees and customers.

Customers: They have a voice and they want to use it. You have a voice and they want to hear it. Not in brochures or web sites that have no substance. Not in the scripted “dialogue” with your call center. As the Manifesto summed it up, “You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.”

We can invest in all the technology and processes our CFO will allow but if we don’t build in the human desire for connection and conversation, we will be talking to ourselves.

Five Things I Learned From the Men on a Submarine

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about customer (no)service during a recent buying experience and it prompted some interesting discussion with Adrian Bashford in Ontario. People who responded to the blog were unanimous in their agreement that leadership is accountable for the customer relationship. That led to the question: where do leaders learn skills other than finance, marketing and operations? Adrian suggested that the lack of military training in our leadership ranks over the past few decades might be at the heart of the problem. My first reaction, was “heck no” but it got me thinking about an experience I had a few years ago when I spent two days with the officers and men of the USS Nebraska at the King’s Bay Nuclear Submarine base in Georgia. Adrian might be on to something.

• Values Guide Every Decision: every man knew the Navy’s core values and the expectation that behaviors and decisions were guided by those values.

• It’s About the Mission: The purpose of each 3-month trip under the ocean was well understood by all men on the boat; it was the plan of execution.

• Train to the Mission: training was embedded in every task during a voyage and was reinforced during dry dock periods. Every training session included an After Action Review. Nothing long or drawn out, just What Happened? What Was Supposed to Happen? What Accounted for the Difference? What Will We Do Differently Next Time? During those days and nights at sea, the men were engaged in learning and studying for their exams to move to the next position.

• Only Warheads Exist in Silos: the men worked in cohesive groups, teaching their jobs to others and learning new jobs from more experienced men. The most dangerous element of a voyage is fire and each man not only knew what he was supposed to do but how to do another man’s job if necessary.

• Every Man is a Leader: rank did not preclude a man speaking up if he felt that a decision by a superior went against either the Navy’s Core Values or the Mission. This was an expectation that was constantly reinforced by the Captain and the Chief of the Boat.

It's a lot easier to run a business or manage one when people know what the expected behaviors are and act accordingly; understand why they are doing what they are doing; cooperate to achieve common results and are confident that if they speak up, they will be heard. If you’re aligned with Mission and Values, everyone is a Leader and everyone understands the accountability piece.

Isn’t it better to build the foundation at the front end instead of trying to fix things in the organization that should never have broken? Is your mission inspiring? Have your values retained their meaning over time? What do you do to learn the hard(er) skills of leadership?

Values Matter: Is Your Compass Pointing to True North?

I read an interview the other day with the CEO of a major retailer who talked extensively about the impact of the company's values, called Foundation Principles, on how the company is run. I consult with clients on strategy, so I'm interested in companies that 1) have actually thought about their Values; 2) have articulated them; and 3) lead by them. Values can be the compass that guides business decisions, large and small and in my view are necessary precursors of a well designed strategy.

There are seven Foundation Principles according to the web site and each one is articulated in detail. It is interesting that the CEO blogs on the site, so at some level, he models the Leadership=Communication Principle. Job postings on Careerbuilder.com described the company history and its Principles, a departure from the usual list of job requirements. That seemed to follow the 1=3 Principle whereby one great hire is better than 3 good ones. The posting would attract those who feel a fit with the culture.

There are a lot of leaders who truly believe that their companies are run according to established values so I decided to do some research to find out if employee and customer comments mirror the Principles. Customer comments and reviews that I found were full of high praise and good reviews so the Principles of Creating Mutually Beneficial Relationships and an "Air of Excitement" seemed to be part of the customer experience. Then I looked for employee feedback and found quite a few recent ones that unfortunately were not all positive. On a 5-point scale, employees rated the company a 3.1 and gave the CEO a 47% approval rating. Why the disconnect with the other data?

Extreme views generally get posted but as there were as many 5's as 2's, the scores were not negatively skewed. Not one negative comment was about pay. Many mentioned a new scheduling system; others talked about their manager or losing a benefit or lack of a career path. They talked about how things "used to be". It's easy to dismiss disgruntled employees' rants except that sometimes, they are leading indicators of something amiss internally. Unhappy employees today; unhappy customers next week.

The funny thing about values is that when you talk about them, institutionalize them and use them as key differentiators, people tend to take them seriously. Especially employees and customers. They think you'll really do what you say. This company's values don't need to change. That's the point of values: they are enduring. They guide and are the foundation of culture, strategy and engagement. They are a bulwark against lapses of judgment. A couple of thoughts:

• Listen to your employees. Let them talk and be involved. If they are involved in a dialogue internally, it's less likely they will be ranting externally.
• Walk the talk. At all levels. Middle managers are accountable, too.
• Clear, credible communication. Communicate the tough decisions in a way that employees understand the "why".
• When your employees describe your values as "Kool-Aid", it's time to take a long look at your culture. It could be broken and that is hard to fix on the fly.

Is your company built on a foundation of values? Can your customers sense them in their interactions with your employees? Do your employees believe that your values are more than a plaque on a wall?

Skies Are Friendlier When People Are Engaged

I read a good article the other day by Mila D'Antonio called The Strategy That Fuels Customer Engagement. The article outlined so clearly how a good company can stumble and recover with a laser-like focus on the five key areas of any business: Strategy, Leadership, Culture and Employee and Customer Engagement. And, what JetBlue discovered along the way has added to its understanding of the direct and quantifiable impact of these elements on business results.

When a company blunders, as JetBlue did on Valentine's Day 2007 at JFK Airport in New York, when thousands of passengers were stranded for hours aboard planes, one course of action that has become popular is to not respond to the incident at all or respond only if pressed and, if at all possible, pass the blame to someone else. Instead, JetBlue took responsibility and created its Passenger Bills of Rights. Its founder and CEO paid the ultimate price with his job. But, dig a little deeper, as the article outlined, and you'll discover that JetBlue took a systematic view of the problems and, rather than engage in a short-term PR exercise, overhauled the way employees and customers viewed the company, for the long-term.


JetBlue's strategy is to differentiate itself through a customer-and employee-centric culture. Leadership would not tolerate any declines in employee or customer perceptions of the airline as a good place to work or a good flying experience. The changes started with a plan for improving employee engagement results as the thinking was, if the company improved those metrics, customers would receive great experiences (what we call the Spillover Effect).


What the JetBlue executives learned was:

• Engagement is highly correlated with the liklihood that an employee would recommend JetBlue as a good place to work.



• JetBlue's revenues are closely tied to engagement so small improvements in key driver metrics generate big results.



• Key drivers of crewmember engagement are pride/personal commitment, brand, crew leaders, executive leadership, team/people and work environment.



• These six dimensions of engagement are now mapped to revenue growth and shareholder value.

• Listening to employees in terms of what they like about JetBlue and their jobs has resulted in many cost-saving ideas and efficiencies.



• Data gathering is only part of the story. Real insight comes from taking the right qualitative and quantitative approach, including linking behaviors and outcomes to hard results like shareholder value and growth targets.



• Designing an engaged company is not an event or a rah-rah program but a systematic approach to questioning the status quo, learning and adapting in order to execute a successful strategy.

Leaders make mistakes; it's how you recover from them that people remember. The core elements of the business are interdependent and should be viewed that way because they impact your results in a big way.

What drives engagement at JetBlue isn't necessarily what drives engagement in your organization. What are your engagement drivers?

What is This Engagement Thing?

For about a year, I've been receiving Google Alerts with tags that contain the word 'engagement'. Sometimes the articles or blogs have useful information; sometimes they are just sales pitches.

Nevertheless, the concept of engagement in the workplace is fascinating because, for me, it's a "Duh" kind of idea. Isn't it common sense that when people are engaged in what they do, they perform better; they are more attached to the organization and they contribute at a higher level than less engaged people? Ah, but common sense isn't common practice.

We are complex creatures, we humans. We tend to be engaged by an idea or a cause that is meaningful, maybe bigger than ourselves and which enriches our lives. Unfortuately, in a lot of workplaces, work has been reduced to activities and tasks. Senior mangement may not even be recognized (see Undercover Boss) or is the sender of an occasional email. Financial performance is not shared or discussed widely and the company's Mission is engraved on a plaque in the lobby. Maybe it's time to connect the dots and see that for an employee to be engaged, the organization must be engaging. It's easier to see how the concept works in a model:

Vision and Mission: They are foundational elements of an engaged company. People know what you stand for and why you exist. Decisions are based on these elements and behaviors are driven by them.

Strategy: Engagement starts here. People see the "big picture" and hear about organizational strategy because it's part of everyday activity. They are part of something bigger than the jobs they are paid for and can see how their work fits in.

Leadership: Listens actively and communicates frequently. Leaders are trustworthy and believe evangelically about the potential of the company, the people who work there and the customers they serve.

Culture: The way things really get done in an organization; the stories and the rituals; the practices and the collective tone. If Strategy is the Head of the organizational body, Culture should be the Heart. Culture can deliver or derail any leader's strategy if it isn't designed to support it. Cultivating an engaging environment is a key priority.

Employees: The lifeblood, the true asset of every company. Most of us WANT to be engaged but our companies often don't give us sufficient reason. I agree with Dan Pink in his new book, Drive. People are motivated by Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery, assuming basic needs are met (Thank you, Abraham Maslow).

Customers: The reason we get up every day and go to work, remember? As Peter Drucker said so often, management is about knowing what your Purpose is, who your customers are and how you're going to make a profit. Designing an engaging customer experience is an Outside-In job.

So, engagement is not a slogan, a program or a one-time initiative. Connecting the organizational dots is what engagement is all about. What do you think?

Reviving Our Resourcefulness

In a presentation I wrote late last year, I suggested that 2009 was the year of resilience. Companies that weathered the economic storm were flexible, prepared and displayed a spirit that carried them and their employees and customers over the waves that were crashing around them. Maybe we were battered but we were standing.

For 2010, I suggest that we and our businesses build on our resilience and harness our resourcefulness to be successful. In my blog a couple of weeks ago, I predicted that companies would be Bold or Bewildered this year. Bold companies will be resourceful. Americans and the businesses we've built have demonstrated for the past 234 years that we can be inventive and practical; optimistic and realistic. In 2009, we made do with less and hoped for the best. In 2010, we need to make better with the same and achieve greater results.

In a new book called Identity Economics, economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton suggest that an economy works well when people personally identify with it, so that their self-esteem is tied up with its activities. The military has known this and employed it with its mission-critical message. Few soldiers enlist for the pay, so why are they willing to sacrifice their lives? It's because they believe in the cause, in themselves and in one another.

While few jobs can match the cause of defending one's country, it's not a stretch to suggest that our businesses cannot be resourceful with a disinterested and insecure workforce. It's time to restore that faith in what we all are capable of doing in our organizations. Here are a few thoughts:

• Have a Mission that clearly articulates your Purpose. Leaders have to carry that banner wherever they are. They talk about it. They write about it. They act on it. Do it often enough and employees will believe it, your customers will feel it and your competition will worry about it.

• High Aspirations, Modest Resources: A phrase coined by Sir Richard Branson when asked how Virgin Airways took on British Airways and won the transatlantic air war. Keeping vision and strategy clearly in mind; conveying their importance and making decisions based on both creates an authenticity that people recognize and like. Branson said that his winning secret was creating a "we're all in this together" mindset by involving everyone who worked for him and their customers in the process of defining a fun, cost-effective and different flying experience.

• Make Better With the Same: Notice I didn't say do more with less. What have you got in your company that hasn't been used, deployed, exploited or improved in a long time? Employees' ideas? Loyal customers? Old procedures? Half-used technology? This is the time to harness the brainpower you have, the revenue you've acquired, the technology you've bought and the processes you've grown and take a critical look at how you can get more out of what you have.

What are your companies doing to make 2010 better than 2009? Are you hunkering down or rediscovering how resourceful you are?

Late Night Showdowns: Lessons in Leadership

Whether you are Team Conan or Team Leno, playing out a dysfunctional company battle in public shines a light on the role of leadership and strategy in a situation like this. As long as we are being asked to be voyeurs, maybe there are some lessons to be learned and applied in our own organizations.




1. Hope is not a strategy; arrogance is no substitute for intelligence: How much research and analysis went into the ultimately disasterous decision to opt out of 10PM prime time drama in favor of a bland copy of a great brand? Strategy doesn't have to be a dusty, hidebound process of number crunching and Death by PowerPoint presentations until the next cycle in a year. Strategy is the means by which we decide how we are going compete successfully; it's a dynamic process that continuously examines the larger external world along with the opportunities and pitfalls that are present.


2. Listen, gather feedback and act: What input did customers -- in this case, the affilitates -- have to the decisions that were handed down from 30 Rock? Were other key people with a vested interest in the ongoing health of the network asked for their insights? What about other employees and viewers?



3. Creative destruction + Risk assessment = Success: Any bold company has to engage in some creative destruction otherwise it ossifies and becomes a dinosaur. In this case, did anyone at the top ever throw out the crazy idea that risk as well as reward should be investigated?



4. Loyalty is a two-way street: it seems there was a cavalier idea that the two key employees would loyally support decisions that would not benefit their career aspirations. Money isn't always the answer. If you want loyalty, be trustworthy.



5. You Know Where the Buck Stops: the key executive in this drama did own up to the mistake, albeit somewhat late in the day and with many caveats. Another key executive, however, displayed monstrous ego by savaging one of the star players in the media. Inexcusable. You get the big bucks; you fall on your sword when the situation warrants it. You and your company will be better for it.



The behavior of the two key players was insubordinate but I believe they reacted to poor leadership and a failed strategy.


A strategic mistake is an opportunity to learn valuable lessons. If no risks are taken, no innovation is possible. Are there other lessons we can learn from this sad situation? Did you ever make a mistake that became a great opportunity?

Bold or Bewildered: Do You Have Momentum for Success in 2010?

I was in London for New Year's Eve, watching the fireworks over the Thames with Big Ben tolling and the London Eye outlined in brilliant colors. There was a palpable "something" that rippled through the crowd as we watched the end of one decade and the dawn of a new one. Maybe it was a sigh of relief or an inhale that signaled expectation. Did you feel it too?


I think what I experienced on January 1st was momentum: a sense of drive and energy to leave the past year and embark on the present. When I returned to the States, I did some mind mapping of the Economy, Consumers and Business Response. A great exercise. I recommend it.

So, based on the maps, I came up with quite a few root causes that drove my predictions for businesses in 2010. Here are a few in no particular order:

• Companies will be Bold or Bewildered.

• Customers will extract every penny of value from all purchases, especially discretionary ones.

• Bold companies will make growth decisions but not in a stupid way.

• There are two types of Bewildered companies: those that have many opportunties and/or are on the cusp of making quantum leaps and those that are stuck and don't know which way to go.

• Access to financial capital will continue to be limited.

• People are fed up with what they read and hear about Wall Street, government and less-than-stellar- leadership in both public and private sectors. Their emotions will drive significant changes in the way they think about all institutions.

• The temporary workforce is not just a cover story in BusinessWeek. I talked with a client recently who is already implementing a plan for a temporary workforce in a key functional area.

In future blogs, I'll be exploring these and other trends and how they impact our lives in and out of work.

I'd like to know from you: How are you creating success in 2010? What is your company doing to proactively respond to the shifting mood of the country? Do you have a strategy? What are some of your predictions for 2010?