Tag Archive for: Articles by David Irvine

Accountability: How One Person Can Transform A Culture

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Ron Bynum was the leader of a training organization that used a former summer camp as one of its facilities. One night his phone rang with horrific news. One of the buildings at his training center had caught fire and burned down quickly. Someone had left a towel near a heater in a dormitory where some of the staff lived. The old wooden building had gone up in flames like a pile of dry sticks.

When he got to the center the staff of nearly one hundred was in an uproar of finger pointing, criticism, trying to find who was to blame for the fire. As the furor began to subside, an accountable employee stood up and said, “I’m responsible.” Dead silence filled the room. “Wait a minute,” someone said. “You weren’t even here this week. How could you possibly be responsible?”

“I’m responsible because I’m claiming responsibility. That’s all that really matters. If you’re looking for details, I’ve been in that dormitory a dozen times this summer, and I could have noticed that the towel rack was too close to the heater. But I didn’t. So for that one reason I’m responsible. The details are irrelevant. How about if we all took responsibility rather than blaming ourselves or somebody else? Then let’s find out what needs to be done.”

The atmosphere in the room shifted in that one brief moment. Blame and recrimination transformed into searching for constructive solutions. Stepping into accountability got everyone heading in a productive direction. Now that’s leadership, and he didn’t need a title, only a decision to be accountable.

Thanks, Gay Hendricks (The Corporate Mystic), for this story.

What are you doing to inspire others around you with the courage to be accountable?

What is Culture? Are You Wasting Your Time With Fancy Value Statements?

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Value statements don’t make a culture. Ask Enron, whose values were communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. How many companies have you known who have the value of “safety” written fancily on their web site and the walls of their offices, but in reality, have a deplorable safety rating? There’s a big difference between value statements and values. Value statements are what we claim to be. Values are what we actually do. Your culture is not your statements. Your culture is your actions.

So…What is culture? Culture is the “the way things are done around here.” You get an indication of your culture by listening to what people talk about when the boss isn’t in theroom, or how you describe your workplace with your closest friends. If you want to know what you culture is, don’t read the web site or look at the fancy value statements on the wall. Look at who you hire. Look at who you promote and what actions get recognized and rewarded in your organization. Culture is no different than life: How you act will speak so loudly that people won’t hear what you say. Culture isn’t a noun. Culture, like love, is a verb.

Does this mean that developing clear statements of values is a waste of time? No. It’s important to clarify the values and principles that you expect should guide the actions of every employee in your organization. The mistake that most executive teams make is that they think that writing down the values is all it takes. Executives make a huge mistake when they take their senior management team to the mountains and return to “roll out” the “10 Commandments” in a communication strategy from the front of the room.

In reality, clarifying the values is just the beginning of building an aligned, engaged, accountable culture.

Once you get the value statements on the web site and the walls, you have to create the conversation. You have to make noise about the document. Ask questions. Challenge respectfully. Tell the stories. If you haven’t found contradictions in the values and the guiding principles you espouse, you haven’t had deep enough conversations. You haven’t invested enough. You have to turn the statements into actions, and actions into promises. You have to hold people accountable – at every level – for living the values.

It’s okay to be misaligned. That’s human. Don’t be afraid to see the misalignment. While you will want to focus on the positive, and shine a light on actions that demonstrate a support of the values, don’t be afraid to embrace the negative. Invite people, especially your direct reports, to challenge you when they see the misalignment. Having a standard gives you something to aim at.

Are you wasting your time with fancy value statements on the wall? Not if you are committed to getting these off the wall and into the hearts and hands of every employee.

It doesn’t really matter that you understand what culture is. What matters is that your design and deliver one that matters.

How Honest Can You Be With Your Boss?

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My colleague and friend, Murray Hiebert, world renowned in the field of helping professionals become more powerful and useful in their organization (www.Powerful2Lead.com), recently shared some intriguing trivia: Most airline crashes in the last few decades have taken place while the senior pilot, the Captain, not the less experienced and lower-ranked First Officer, was flying the aircraft. Most crashes are a series of errors culminating with poor Captain-First Officer communication. Most of these crashes occurred in airlines where the “Power Distance Index”— the degree people of lesser status may challenge those of higher status— is greatest. Did you know Captains generally use commands, while First Officers predominantly use hints?

Murray cited Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, as to how many airline crashes have been caused by power differentials and cultural norms (from Outliers). “It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors thatcause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. Airlines have worked hard at lowering the ‘Power Distance Index’ to encourage open, straightforward communication between air safety employees of unlike status. Typically, First Officers need to step up the strength of their requests, while Captains need to lower their barriers.”

How hard is your organization working at lowering your own “Power Distance Index?” How hard are you, as an employee, working to strengthen your requests, and how hard are you, as a positional leader, working at lowering your barriers? Do you have a culture where, when you see ethics violated, you can speak up against it, even if it is your boss or a person with higher positional power than you?

Here are three ways to lower the “Power Distance Index” in your organization:

  1. Practice speaking up in a respectful way.
    Challenge the status quo. Ask good questions that push for positive change. As long as your motive is to build, to move the organization forward, then challenges are both necessary and useful.
  2. Get used to being challenged.
    I’m not talking about criticism. There’s no place for blind criticism without a supporting solution. What I’m talking about is being open to learning. The best leaders are humble. They are confident because they learn not to take a challenge personally. It’s about working for the greater good, not protecting people’s egos.
  3. Encourage a “speak out culture.”
    Former GE CEO Jack Welch lauded a “speak out culture”—an organizational atmosphere where all are encouraged to speak what is on their minds. Jim Collins recommended much the same in Good to Great where his research showed great organizations “Confront the brutal facts.” I wonder how much of the tragedy in the Penn State football program would have been prevented had they established a “speak out culture.” Jerry Sandusky’s sickness would not have been allowed to spread if people would have spoken up. Penn State showed us that the “brutal facts” will come out eventually.

How honest can you be with your boss or with people who depend on you in  your organization and in your life? If you are a boss, how honest are people with you? Do you find your employees coming with the “brutal facts?” Speaking out respectfully is a muscle that is under-used in many organizational cultures. It needs strengthening. And strengthening requires patient, persistent practice.

What are you doing to encourage a “speak out culture” in your organization? It’s also something to encourage in your family or any place where you spend your time.

Should we be expecting our leaders to “Walk The Talk?”

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I wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard the phrase, “The leaders in this place don’t ‘walk the talk.’” I’d be wealthier than a lottery winner. I’ve heard this said about leaders in every walk of life – business, politics, and government.

I understand the frustration when people see a lack of congruence from their leaders between what is espoused and what is lived. It’s called an authenticity gap. While the frustration is legitimate, the problem is the way we see the problem and the way we approach it. A lack of congruence will prevail as long as we continue to see this as a leadership problem. In fact, I contend that we are actually contributing to the problem by the way we view the situation.

There will always be an authenticity gap in our positional leaders because of the nature of our expectations.

No one will ever meet our expectations completely for “walking the talk” because we are human. Think about it. Where in your life have you maintained all the habits that you know are important? Do you exercise as much as you say you should? Do you always eat what you say is a healthy diet? Do you spend as much time with the people you love as you say you should? Do you ever watch more TV than you know is healthy? Where do you have perfect alignment between your espoused values and your actions? Where in your life have you completely closed this “authenticity gap?”

I contend that it’s not the gap that’s the problem. The real problem is that we aren’t talking about the gap – directly, honestly, and respectfully. What authentic, accountable leaders do, rather than pretend that there is no gap, is create a space for people to honestly and respectfully discuss the gap and work toward closing it. What authentic, accountable employees do, rather than complain about the gap with a sense of entitlement, is have the courage to face the incongruence directly when they see it.

If you are working in an environment and feel that your positional leaders are not “walking the talk,” here are some suggestions:

  • Strategy #1
    Start by giving what you expect from your leaders. Take a careful inventory of yourself. Where are you not “walking the talk” in your professional or personal life?  Where is there an authenticity gap in your life? Try taking the focus off your leaders and bring it back to yourself. Deciding that you have co-created the world around you – and therefore you are the one to step into healing it – is the ultimate act of accountability.
  • Strategy #2
    Once you have earned self-respect and credibility by working at closing your own authenticity gaps, initiate courageous, open, and respectful conversations with your leaders about that gap in yourself and in your culture. Be sure to bring your solutions, not your complaints to these conversations. Bring a copy of your corporate values to the discussion and ask for feedback about how you can better live these values as an employee.  If you don’t have clear corporate values then make up your own and bring these to the conversation for open, respectful dialogue.
  • Strategy #3
    If you are a positional leader, be aware that you are always being watched and there will always be people in your organization who perceive you as not “walking the talk.” Talk openly about this. Invite feedback continually. Turn your value statements into concrete behaviors and commit publically to living these values, while simultaneously fessing up that you are human, that you won’t ever be perceived as getting it perfect, that you are open for constructive feedback when you get off track, and that you expect the same commitment from your those who report to you.

What’s your experience with leaders not “walking the talk?” I’d love to hear from you.

Laissez faire Leadership or Lazy Fare Abdication: It Takes Courage To Let Go

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Not long ago I was hired by a CEO to help assess and develop the leadership capacity of one of his managers. I started by interviewing the manager and each member of his leadership team. There was a consistent theme in the interviews. “He’s practicing laissez faire leadership,” I was told, with frustration, by his team. In actuality, it wasn’t “laissez faire” leadership at all. It was “lazy fare abdication.” Rather than leading at all, he was abandoning his leadership responsibilities. Ignoring people and leaving them without direction, clarity, or accountability left him with a team of frustrated, disgruntled subordinates.

When I asked this manager about his approach, he explained that he was a laissez faire leader, that he believed that people work much better when they are “left alone,” and that he was developing a “self-directed,” leaderless team.

This manager had the wrong understanding of what it means to a laissez faire leader. Laissez faire doesn’t mean “lazy fare.” It’s not about passive abandonment of your responsibilities, which is what his approach ended up being. It’s not about abdication. Laissez faire leadership is actually very strategic, focused, and deliberate. It takes maturity, clarity, and precision to lead with a laissez faire approach.

Laissez faire comes from the French, “leave it be”, or “let go.” Laissez faire from a leader’s perspective is a non-authoritarian style of leadership that achieves control through more subtle means. It is an approach to leadership that assumes that people excel when they are left alone to respond to their responsibilities and obligations in their own ways.

Below are three essential qualities needed to be an effective laissez faire leader:

  1. Connection
    You have to be connected to your team and your employees so you know how much they need the presence and availability of their leader. You have to know if a group is mature enough to function without the boss being around. If you back off too soon, as this manager did, you will breed resentment and frustration on your team. If you try to make a team “self-directed” when they don’t have the maturity and good will required, you end up with an assassinated leader who attempts to step into the role without the organizational support.
  2. Maturity
    Related to strategy #1, you can’t operate with a laissez faire leadership approach when you are parenting two-year olds. While extending trust to others by backing away and letting go can be an important tool for developing the maturity to function more independently, you have to know your staff enough to know when to back off and when to be more directive.
  3. Courage and Clarity
    “Letting go” in not passive. Letting go means being actively engaged with your staff and stepping away intentionally, knowing that backing off and extending trust will help them grow. To have the courage to do this, you need to have a solid accountability process in place, so everyone understands their roles and responsibilities, both from themselves and from every member of the team. You can’t be lazy if you want to be a laissez faire leader. It takes active involvement, awareness, and intentional, clear action.

What is your experience with laissez faire leadership? What works? What doesn’t work? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Organizational Culture: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest

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To be engaged today, people need to feel a sense of passion, personal vision, and to express their unique talents. But this is only half of what full authentic expression – the heart of a culture – is about. This week, in a committee meeting of a local non-profit group, I was reminded that a commitment to contribution – choosing service over self-interest – is the other component to authentic expression. It’s like the wings of a bird. Without both passion and service, your organizational culture simply isn’t going to fly. It’s the law of giving.

The universe operates through dynamic exchange. Culture is ultimately about energy, and authentic expression inspires us while giving keeps the flow of energy moving. In our willingness to give, we keep the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives, and the energy of a culture alive.

You don’t have to go to Africa to be of service. There are plenty of opportunities to practice giving right in our own communities. Here are three ways:

  1. Wherever you go, bring a gift.
    The gift may be a compliment, a smile, a word of encouragement, appreciation, caring, kindness, gratitude, a generous spirit, or even some patience and grace. As you circulate what you have been given, you keep the energy of your culture alive, because cultural energy is simply universal energy.
  2. Practice receiving all the gifts that life has to offer.
    Recognize, and look for all the ways that people you work and live with are conspiring to help you. Take time to experience the beauty of a sunset, a spring flower, the sound of birds singing, a child in love with life, the wisdom of an elder, or the attempt of a colleague to bring excellence to a project. There are gifts all around us every day, if we just s-l-o-w d-o-w-n long enough to notice. And what you notice, you focus on, and what you focus on grows. Try it.
  3. Be a giver, not a taker.
    There appears to be two kinds of people in the world: those who help, and those who hinder; those who give and those who take; those who lift, and those who lean; those who contribute, and those who consume. Which kind of person will you decide to be? Make a commitment to look, each day, for opportunities to support others, to contribute in some way to making the world around you a better place by your presence, to choose service over self-interest.