Education

Cornell University professor Dr. Tony Simons’ powerful article, “The High Cost of Lost Trust,” appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 2002. In that piece, he described his team’s efforts to examine a specific hypothesis (“Employee commitment drives customer service”) in the US operations of a major hotel chain. They interviewed over 7,000 employees at nearly 80 properties and found that employee commitment drives customer service, but, most critically, a leader’s behavioral integrity drives that and more.

Over 30 years ago I had a conversation with a teenager that caught me completely off guard - and reminds me of a valuable principle to this day. While I have a very well-honed skill for catching people doing things wrong - if I want to be an effective leader, I need to catch people doing things right. I work on this every day, with clients, peers, and bosses - greatly because of the jumpstart this conversation gave me.

Choose to make the decisions that will take you to the end that you have in mind. That means being proactive, not reactive about life and what it might present to you. The wisdom of Winnie the Pooh in the 2018 movie Christopher Robin is useful on this point. Winnie The Pooh: I always get to where I'm going by walking away from where I've been.

The position of the kicker on a football team has always intrigued me. Here is a player that for most of the time is practically anonymous. Many of the rival fans and neutrals watching won’t even know his name. He runs on, unannounced and unnoticed, a few times in the game just to kick the ball between the posts, and then disappears again, whilst everybody is generally consumed with the much higher profile players and the more dramatic plays.

As the New Year begins and our work life starts to move into first gear, we can be tempted to think back to yesteryear and ponder the ‘if only...?’ question. Not that reflection is a bad thing mind you, indeed, done purposefully it can be positive. That said, there is a lot of wisdom in what Walt Disney had to say. Curiosity is what impels us to move forward.

As a leader, your credibility is maintained, day by day, when you do what you say you will do. For example, if you announce that, from this point forward, every team member will be expected to demonstrate our team’s valued behaviors, you have set a standard. Educating team members about desired valued behaviors is important, but, without accountability, those valued behaviors are just one more set of expectations that your employees can ignore.

If you’re like most managers we work with you just don’t have enough time. Your open door has become a revolving door of employees bringing you problems that need solving. So how do you turn these problem-bringers into problem solvers?

People don’t hate meetings. They hate bad meetings. And there’s a long list of reasons why so many meetings are bad: there’s no decision to be made (it should have been an email; there’s no agenda and the meeting goes in circles; no one clarifies the action items and nothing gets done; you invited the wrong people and everyone’s multi-tasking; the list goes on an on.

Every December brings with it a certain amount of joy, exuberance, and happiness. Every New Year brings with it a renewed sense of optimism, hopefulness and most likely a heightened sense of prosperity for the year ahead.

Every business needs a captain, a person that sets the stage for all actions and all relationships that take place within the work environment. If you, as a leader, do not set the stage by defining and aligning practices to clear performance standards and values expectations, people will be left to “figure it out on their own.” This leads to widely varying practices – not aligned, proven practices. That lack of clarity and alignment erodes consistent performance, service, and results.