OK, the topic of feedback isn't stand-up comedy funny. It's funny as in odd because there are so many contradictions surrounding it. Here are five practices to help managers bring feedback to life as the performance-enhancing tool it is capable of being:
If you’re looking for a breath of fresh leadership air and some hope in this world after watching CEOs doing the Perp Walk or the Resignation Shuffle, read the interview, "We Had to Own the Mistakes" with Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman and CEO, in the July-August, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. While Schultz is no stranger to our world as an iconic founder of one of the world’s most successful and formerly fastest growing firms, one might argue that he didn’t earn his leadership stripes until faced with the unexpected challenging of turning the firm around.
The best learning opportunities in the workplace occur when individuals or teams come face to face with a vexing problem. These situations provide outstanding growth opportunities and a great chance to generate and implement innovative and creative solutions. Of course, the manager has to play by the rules. Unfortunately, there are still a few managers and leaders out there that insist on spoiling these ripe learning opportunities by requiring you to follow a specific approach or steps in solving a problem.
Every once in awhile, my second favorite publication, Harvard Business Review, serves up some fascinating content that leaves me scratching my head and wondering. In addition to some excellent content, the April, 2009 issue summarizes a couple of potentially pointless studies in the Forethought section. One asks: “Are Great Companies Just Lucky?” and the other serves up, “Employee Happiness Isn’t Enough to Satisfy Customers.” Both articles offer up some interesting premises and are backed by well-pedigreed professionals that seem to have conducted a fair amount of research to conclude that luck is important and employee happiness is not the silver bullet of customer satisfaction. My reactions range from, “OK, and the point is…?” to “Huh?”
Most of us can recall working with someone that had such a strong, negative impact on the work environment that you could literally feel the emotional mood swing when this person walked into a meeting. For some unknown reason, perhaps a karmic-imbalance in the universe, these toxic characters have the unnerving and disconcerting tendency to be great survivors. While it is easy to intuit that toxic employees are value destroyers, we’ve been short on hard data about the true impact that these individuals have on the work environment. Until now.
Welcome back for this week’s double-shot of leadership motivation. I’m taking my leadership cues this week from Michael Beers, a Harvard Professor with a forthcoming book: High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage. While I’m not certain that a Harvard Professor is the first one that I seek out to help me lead my way out of a crisis, I like what he has to say. Mr. Beer’s focus is on building high performance teams and organizations on the back of what he describes as high commitment leaders.
Intuitively, it makes sense that leaders that are more engaged and engaging tend to elicit better responses and better results from their teams. Perhaps nice people can finish first. Now, the father of the concept of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman (What Makes A Leader), along with Richard Boyatiz are pushing the envelope by integrating new research in social neuroscience with their studies of effective leaders. Their recent Harvard Business Review article, Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership, is fascinating reading for anyone intrigued by the role that our biological makeup plays in our leadership abilities.
It seems that Yogi Berra was right (that’s the former Yankee player and manager, not the Jellystone Park character on the lookout for a quick meal). One of the reasons that so much business writing and advice sounds familiar is that we conveniently keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, allowing new generations of pundits to dispense similar advice in new packaging. In a short piece entitled Learning from Heroes found in the March, 2009 Harvard Business Review, Jack Covert and Todd Satterson suggest that this recurring pattern in business actually mirrors the hero’s journey found in mythology.
The first article is Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators by Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach and Gus Vlak. Article number two ratchets up the innovation theme with Reinventing Your Business Model by some true heavy hitters.
It’s an exciting time to be leading as the pendulum seems to be swinging away from a style of leading and working that minimized the value of the individual to one that emphasizes empowerment, creativity and the freedom for groups and individuals to think and act. It’s hard to imagine a future where this formula does not produce winners.
