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Confessions of a Recovering Workplace Gossip

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

So you’ve never gossiped, you say – never talked about a colleague behind her back, never spread a juicy rumor. Congratulations! I don’t believe you.

Okay, I suppose it’s possible. But most of you out there have probably indulged in this bad behavior at some point. I’m sorry to say there was a time when I did as well. Then I came to realize how poisonous and destructive workplace gossip is. Now I spend my time spreading the anti-gossip gospel.

A workplace full of whispered gossip is excruciating. It is destructive to the soul of your workplace and the souls of the people in it. They never feel safe, always wondering who is talking behind their backs.

Jack has a problem with Tom. So what does Jack do? He tells Lynne, and Jess, and Steve, and Jim, and Sandy. Everyone, that is, but Tom.

It gets even better. Jack quickly realizes he can’t trust Lynne, Jess, Steve, Jim, or Sandy. They are the kind of people who welcome gossip, you see, and people who accept gossip tend to be equal-opportunity mudslingers. Soon enough, they’ll be welcoming gossip about Jack.

Okay, now let’s suppose you’ve got the message. You’ve quit cold turkey on gossiping and backstabbing. But what do you do when someone ELSE comes to you with gossip?

You can certainly put your fingers in your ears and hum the 1812 Overture while tap dancing. But that won’t do anything to help Jack out of his own nasty gossiping habit. And since it’s your watering hole he’s muddying, you have a vested interest in helping him on the road to recovery.

Next time Jack comes to you with complaints about Tom, simply say, “Gee, this sounds serious! Let’s go talk to Tom directly so you can work this out.” When he looks panic-stricken, underline the point: “Well is this a serious problem or isn’t it? I can’t do anything to help you solve it – only Tom can do that. So please promise me you’re heading directly there. If it isn’t serious, then what are we talking about?”

This approach may or may not shock Jack into giving up gossip, but it will certainly send a message that YOU are not an available receiver. It also lets him know that you will not be gossiping behind his back – a positive message in and of itself.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Improving Morale, Joy at Work, Personal Transformation
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When the squeaky wheel deserves the grease—and when to just change the tire

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Whenever my mother said that to me, it meant “Stand up for yourself! Speak up! Don’t let the world run you over!”

And as usual, she was right.

But there’s another kind of squeak that really shouldn’t get a bit of attention. It still does, but it really shouldn’t. It’s the squeak-squeak-squeak of excuses and complaints.

When someone tells you why they didn’t meet their goals, why they missed the meeting, why their productivity is down for the third decade running, THAT’S a squeak worth ignoring. But too often we rush in with the grease, assuring the squeaker that it’s okay, that everybody has those decades, blah bah blah. In the process, we enable the next squeak, and the next. Worse than that, we’ve pretty much GUARANTEED it. Hey, why stop squeaking if it brings all that yummy attention?

Yes, it’s true—everybody whines once in a while. It’s part of being human. But when someone is a serial whiner and a compulsive excuse-maker, it’s usually an indication that the person has not aligned his or her personal plan with the company’s interests and is busily boohooing about how uncomfortable that is.

If someone is a professional and doesn’t have a quarterly plan they’ve developed with specific numbered goals and deadlines for initiatives, all tied into the organization’s objectives, it’s time to get out the jack and change that tire. Hard to hear but true. Companies don’t have time to babysit and spoon-feed during difficult times.

There’s another kind of squeak, though—one that deserves all the attention you can give it. It doesn’t come after the fact (“I didn’t meet the deadline because…”) but BEFORE things go wrong.

Let’s call it “positive squeaking.”

Positive squeaking happens when a team member has her eye on the ball so well that she notices a project going off the rails BEFORE it’s too late—and squeaks her team, herself, even her boss back onto the rails in the interest of the objective.

Positive squeaking calls it tight, insists on deadlines, rejects excuses. Positive squeaking doesn’t say, “It’s not my fault—I sent an email last week and never heard back.” It picks up the phone. It walks down the hall and knocks on office doors until it gets answers. Heck, it camps out on doorsteps. It won’t take silence for an answer.

Annoying? Sure it is. All squeaks are. That’s why they get the grease. But a squeak that’s insisting on the objective and refusing to take excuses—well, that’s a squeak well worth greasing.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Personal Transformation, Positive Attitude, Workplace Performance
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Getting the marching orders you need to succeed

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

There are a few recurring nightmares that just about everyone has at some point. You’re trying to run from a monster and you’re stuck in slow-mo. You’re walking down the hallway of your school in your underwear. The classics.

Then there’s the one where you have to do SOMETHING but you don’t know what to do or how. Maybe there’s an odd-shaped racket in your hand and thousands of people in the stands shouting angrily as ten balls of different colors come flying at you. You’re expected to perform, and you want to do well, but you don’t know the rules of the game, so you have no idea what “doing well” means.

Fortunately we wake up from our nightmares. But some people live the “no information” nightmare over and over again while the sun is up. They want nothing more than to do what is expected of them and to do it well, but they are repeatedly handed projects with unclear parameters, fuzzy deadlines, and unstated assumptions.

Worst of all is finding out that, just like in the nightmare, the expectations DID exist, and time after time the employee is lambasted for not meeting them.

This is not okay. As an employee, you have the right to know what is expected of you. Holding you to unstated standards and expectations is every bit as crazy as handing someone a bat and putting him at home plate without explaining the rules of baseball—then booing angrily when he strikes out, as he inevitably will.

The good news is that the boss who gives vague instructions is almost always doing it unintentionally. In most cases she really wants to see the project done right and simply does not realize that she hasn’t given you the information you need to make it happen. Your job is to help the boss help herself by giving you what you need to do well. It’s a win-win.

Next time your boss says, “Hey, I need this done,” don’t just dive in. Take five minutes to see if you have the information you need. What are the exact tasks that need doing? What are the specifications? When are the deadlines, both soft and hard?

Ask the boss for a five-minute meeting. Start by saying, “I want to knock this project out of the park, and to do that I want to be sure I understand what’s needed.” State in your own words what you understand the parameters of the project to be. Ask if you’ve missed anything. Ask when the hard deadline is, and whether an earlier deadline would be ideal. Thank the boss for the clear guidelines and promise to be in touch with any needed clarifications.

Then knock the cover off the ball. When complete, make sure to go back to the boss and get sign off by asking, “Does this meet your expectations?” If that step is missed, you’re not complete.

If you get praise for a job well done, reply by saying how helpful the clear guidelines and deadlines were. The odds are good that your next assignment will come complete with the details you need. If not, ask again, reminding the boss how well the previous project went with such clear guidelines.

Tags: Effective Leadership, High-Performance Culture, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
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How to Derail a Career (for Leaders)

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Tired of success? Keen on self-destruction? Looking for a way to run your career off the rails? I’ve got just the ticket. Here are ten sure-fire ways to end any hopes of advancement or future success:

1. Nurture fluffy integrity. Break your promises, gossip, lie, break confidence. Push legal and regulatory boundaries whenever possible.

2. Be passive. Always delegate upward. Refrain from showing initiative. Don’t see what needs to happen to get to the end result, and whatever you do, don’t hold yourself accountable for the results of the team. Favorite excuse: “Nobody told me.”

3. Get yourself a silo mentality. Don’t be a team player. Don’t bother to see how the team integrates with other departmental teams. Keep your cards close to your chest. Has “Every man for himself” embroidered on a pillow.

4. Generate unstable results. Get sloppy, miss numbers, and then sandbag. Make excuses.

5. Be a pain in the butt. Be an arrogant, demeaning, sarcastic know-it-all. Let disrespect be your sword and condescension your quiver!

6. Just don’t get it. No matter how many times something is explained, and no matter how clearly, keep saying, “I don’t get it.” Whatever you do, don’t go look it up on your own time.

7. Be a little Napoleon. Wax autocratic. Be a control freak. Don’t empower others. For good measure, keep one hand inside the front of your coat.

8. Spend all possible time admiring yourself in the mirror. Gawd, you’re fabulous. Put your own needs ahead of team results. You deserve it.

9. Surround yourself with mediocre team players. Keep your team full of “B” and “C”-list players. Never replace with “A”-listers, since they might outshine you.

10. Be a dirty politician. Smile in their faces, then stab them in the back. Word will get out, and you’ll be through.

Any one of the “Dirty 10″ can wipe out tremendous results in all areas. So if you’re eagerly courting disaster, cultivate these ten characteristics.

If for some reason you are looking to AVOID disaster, be rigorous about not allowing any of these to creep into your world. Take a hard look at yourself to find out where you need to commit to an immediate and profound change.

Tags: Culture Transformation, Effective Leadership, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
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The Shackleton mindset—a refusal to fail

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

For sheer jaw-dropping drama, it’s hard to beat the story of the three-masted sailing ship Endurance, which left England in August 1914 under the command of Ernest Shackleton with twenty-eight men determined to cross Antarctica by sled.

The Endurance ended up trapped and crushed to splinters by ice floes. The men lived on the Antarctic ice for another two years.

Total survivors out of the original twenty-eight men? Twenty-eight.

What if you approached every challenge in your life and in your work as if you simply HAD to overcome it? I’ll tell you what—you would do it. You would find a way, and you would get it done.

Whenever I hear the expression, “Failure is not an option,” I think of Ernest Shackleton and the men of Endurance. I picture them confronting these utterly impossible situations and saying, “Well, lads, let’s see what our options are.”

I then picture them reaching into a pocket and pulling out a scrap of paper. Under the title OPTIONS are two words: SUCCESS and FAILURE.

Like heck. Why would failure EVER be an option? So why not take it off the list entirely?

We’ve all heard the hundred or so reasons such and such a thing simply cannot be done, the many, many reasons failure is the only option.

Tell Shackleton about the insurmountable obstacles you face. Just let me watch.

Better STILL—why not just take FAILURE off that list of options?

I have a friend who I dearly love but who always used to explain why something couldn’t be done. Excuses came easy to her. Then one day her boss gave her a priceless saying to remember: Don’t tell me about the labor pains—show me the baby.

Before a project begins, I don’t want to hear all the reasons it can’t be done. After the project is done, I don’t care how many hours you worked. I don’t care how many obstacles you hit. Save it for your memoirs. Just show me the baby.

Decide now that whatever project or challenge you currently have before you simply cannot be allowed to fail—that you must use the fortitude of the Endurance crew to make it happen. It’s a completely different way of thinking.

But be careful—this powerful way of thinking is addicting. Once you get a taste of achieving the impossible, it’s hard to quit!

Tags: Effective Leadership, High-Performance Culture, Motivating Employees
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Culture—The Ultimate Profit Tool

Friday, May 7th, 2010

For three decades, companies across the spectrum have talked about the need to convert to a sales culture. Talk, talk, talk. Yet for all the chatter, the number that has successfully converted to a sales culture is still well below five percent! Millions have been spent in an attempt to make the change. So why have so many repeatedly failed?

Sales and service skills do little to change results UNLESS there is a strong base of people who love what they do. It’s about the culture! Without the right spirit, no amount of training or hiring will get you headed in the right direction.

A survey by the Corporate Executive Board showed that employees who are “true believers”—who value, enjoy, and believe in what they do—displayed 57 percent more discretionary effort and were 87 percent less likely to leave, while Gallup says that for every $10,000 of payroll, $3,400 of productivity is lost due to “disengaged employees.”

That’s an ugly number.

So what makes people love their jobs, fully engage, and produce greater results? Contrary to what most believe, money has very little to do with it. What does matter is the three overlooked “must haves” to rejuvenate your people’s passion for extraordinary results.

1. Kick-butt Rituals of Celebration and Appreciation
Healthy cultures have appreciation as their cultural backbone. They create an environment where everyone, not just the managers, oohs and aahs over each other’s successes and contributions. They create daily, weekly, and quarterly rituals of celebration and appreciate and coach their people to be positive coaches to each other.

Maybe you have a daily huddle before opening where each person briefly shares an accomplishment while the rest of the team cheers and claps. Maybe you have a “positive” sharing at the beginning of each weekly strategy meeting and a quarterly awards ceremony filled with many awards and recognitions. If you create a childlike energy of people high-fiving with joy, you can expect people to thrive under the recognition.

2. Ironclad Values
Your defined values are your “true north” and a powerhouse of results IF you do them correctly. If your values could be listed as the values of any other company in the country, you haven’t done a good enough job of creating values that will guide you powerfully. When you say “honesty” or “integrity” or “hard work,” you haven’t really said a thing. And if people don’t have their quarterly project plans built around the values, guess what? They aren’t really your values.

3. “We mean it” Behaviors
When an organization defines its behaviors well, then supports and coaches to those behaviors as if they really are to be followed consistently, miraculous transformations begin.

Besides sales and service behaviors, behaviors regarding how to treat and respect coworkers must also be defined, like “no excuses” or “no talking behind peoples’ backs” or “state things in the positive.” When you are clear in expecting the best in others, people bring their higher selves to work—that part in all of us that knows the right thing to do and the willingness to do it.

Most of all, remember that EVERYTHING is a leadership issue. If you want people to thrive at work and bring their passion for extraordinary results, you must, as a leader, create the environment in which people can thrive.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Culture Transformation, Employee Motivation Ideas, High-Performance Culture
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Planning for Certain Uncertainty

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

You’ve probably heard of the Butterfly Effect, where the beating of a butterfly’s wings sets off a chain of countless small reactions until you’ve got a hurricane on your hands. That’s the economy for you – an incredibly complex web of tiny causes and huge effects. It’s difficult to predict what the world will look like three, six, or twelve months out.

Given all that uncertainty, any minute-to-minute plan you carve in stone is doomed to fail. The move from Step 5 to Step 6 that seemed so logical and inevitable in January may be suicide in July, once the economy has shaken the ground beneath your feet a few times. What you need is a constant reassessment and reorientation to the end results you want, coupled with the skills to adapt and adjust your strategies as the world turns. And churns.

So when you meet later this year to plan your company’s strategic direction, put away that chisel. Instead, define the targets you intend to keep in your sights and build the shared commitment to reach them.

Be strategic. Speaking of your strategic plan, you might just want to put some…you know…strategies in it. You think I’m kidding? The fact is, if you were severely allergic to strategies, I could fill a swimming pool with the strategic plans of typical banks and throw you in, and you wouldn’t get so much as a SNIFFLE. Why? Because most strategic plans are scoured clean of strategies.

They might have goals—yes, lots of them seem to have goals. There may be some initiatives, too, or tactics. And fonts, and margins. But without strategies, world-class results will be something you read about in headlines about the other guy.

Be specific. Vague wandering in the general direction of results will get you vague and general results. Instead, create a plan that zeroes in on the results you expect with glistening, crackling clarity, and build in follow-through templates, making sure that everyone is aligned through weekly check-ins.

Be systematic. Good intentions are swell. A good start on your plan of action is peachy. But you will never connect the dots between Point A and Point Z unless you put a system in place. Not a system that is written up and forgotten, but one that you return to every week for realignment and one that is integrated into every employee’s quarterly plan.

These elements of a successful plan—strategies, precision, and a drum-tight system—are all optional. So is success. But if you choose to follow these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to the kind of success that will have your old-school competitors running for their silver bullets. Let ‘em run—you’ve got things to do—and an uncertain world in which to do them. Best to have a flexible, dynamic plan to meet that challenge.

Tags: High-Performance Culture, Organizational Culture Change, Strategic Planning
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Telling the no-kidding truth for no-kidding results

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

What’s WRONG with you?

When I ask it that way, your defenses probably go up in a heartbeat. Nothing’s wrong with me, you’ll insist, thank you very much. And you’ll have lost a shot at self-improvement.

When it comes to their own problems, people don’t often tell the truth. That’s why people with weight problems keep struggling with their weight and alcoholics keep drinking. They’re rarely telling themselves the truth.

In business, most of the problems we encounter result from not telling the truth about our own problems, preferring to insist that everything’s groovy even in the face of the evidence. We put our energy into deflecting blame instead of finding and asking the questions that can lead to a genuine breakthrough.

If you ask a VERY important question, such as, “Why aren’t we twice the size we are?” there are many potential answers. “We don’t have enough salespeople.” “Our salespeople aren’t skilled.” “Our sales manager isn’t following a solid process.” “There are no consequences for inaction.” “Our marketing is ineffective.” And the list goes on…and on….and on.

All of the answers should be entertained. And once they are, the hard part kicks in. Now, figure out the number one reason and decide to have a breakthrough in that area—no matter what.

Much of the $110 billion spent each year on training is spent chasing solutions to the wrong problems—the result of a dishonest self-assessment.

As with all things, the question is not how much you invest, but whether you are aligning your training with dashboards and other business measurement tools to gauge the results. And the best way to invest that money in the right kind of training is to ask the hard questions up front AND to invite someone outside the management loop—and preferably outside the company—to ask the hard questions as well.

Tags: Company Culture Change, Culture Transformation, High-Performance Culture, Personal Transformation, Workplace Performance
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Create Better Results by Revisiting Your Company Values – Video

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

The core that everything else is based upon is your company values. Revisit the values that you stand for as an organization because as you grow and become better and different, your values change. Do you suppose Bill Gates has the same values today as he did when he was 19 years old starting his first business? No – he’s become much more philanthropic and had to grow as a human being. His values had to change to create better results. There’s always a need to go back and revisit your values.

You don’t have to have the standard values that every company has. Here’s a list of company values my team came up with a few years ago:

Extreme commitment to customer success. Customer satisfaction doesn’t matter. Customer Success is what it’s about. Everything anybody does should be defined by “Does this help the customer succeed more?”
Blue Vase. Watch the video to hear the whole story about the blue vase. Do you ever have people who are really busy telling you why something can’t be done when they could be spending just a little bit more energy to just figure out how to get it done? Blue Vase in our office is code for “I know this is impossible, but figure it out anyway because it needs to get done.”
No excuses. Excuses don’t replace results. Instead of making excuses say, “I blew it. Here is my massive corrective action so that this doesn’t happen again.” Making excuses to cover up mistakes really creates chaos in organizations. As soon as you start allowing excuses, you will see a decrease in your results.
Having and Spreading Fun!
Commitment to personal growth and commitment to professional growth. In order to have an organization that grows, you better have people who are committed to reading and learning. You should read at least one book a month in your profession so you can make yourself better at what you do.
Sense of urgency. One of the most limited resources that we all share is time. People’s time needs to be used effectively.
Positive reinforcement to fellow associates. People always think they don’t get enough appreciation from their manager, but the research show that it’s really from their fellow employees where it matters. So you better have people who are givers and always showing their appreciation for others.

What are some of your company values?

Tags: Culture In the Workplace, High-Performance Culture, Inspired Workplace, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
Posted in Culture Transformation, Customer Service, Workplace Performance | No Comments »

Screw up? Chin up! ‘Fess up—then clean up

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

You’re human, so you’ll make mistakes. It’s part of the bargain. You’ll miss deadlines. You’ll drop the ball in a hundred different ways. No matter how hard you try, you WILL disappoint people by not meeting their expectations and living up to your commitments.

That’s why it’s crucial to have the ability to (1) admit your mistakes, and (2) clean up after yourself.

A clean-up has two parts—acknowledging the result wasn’t okay and committing to take corrective action. When you miss a deadline, you owe it to your team to say, “I’m so sorry I missed that deadline. There’s no excuse. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m putting a tickler system in place to remind myself earlier in the process so it won’t happen again.”

In a world of wall-to-wall denial and deflection of blame, just IMAGINE the reaction that kind of honesty will get.

When a document slips through with errors—and you know it will sometimes—your boss expects to witness a duck-and-cover drill. Imagine instead if she hears, “I can see that I made mistakes in this document and I know that’s not acceptable. I will put a reminder at my desk to checklist each document before I submit it to make sure they are double-checked and accurate. I want you to be able to trust me.” It’ll stand out like a stallion in a herd of mules.

If someone DOES react badly to your honesty—and again, sometimes they will—just grin and bear it, knowing you are not responsible for the reactions of others. Make an honest willingness to clean up your messes a way of life, and 99 times out of 100, the world will beat a path to your door.

Tags: Culture In the Workplace, Managing Employees, Workplace Performance
Posted in Culture Transformation, Managing Employees, Personal Transformation | No Comments »

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