Learning is life

Our E&C team is meeting in sunny Florida this week for our annual offsite.

For the first time, we will be using an idea board. We already defined our challenges and populated our first column with ideas. Our work this week will be to move ideas to the “plan” and “perform” columns.

The most exciting part will come in a few weeks when we reflect on our performance and identify our learnings. “What have we learned this week?” is a question that is rarely asked by a team that has more challenges that it can handle. We usually solve a problem and move to the next. In the process, we miss out on the most rewarding part of work, the part that adds meaning to our lives.

Learning is growth. Growth is life.

On patience and kindness

I have little patience for complaining.

Generally, I find that people complain too much and too loudly about things they should simply accept or quietly work to change.

This character trait makes me ill-suited for a part of my job as an ethics & compliance officer, the part where I receive allegations of wrongdoing.

When I feel my blood starting to boil (i.e. when I feel the urge to complain), I bring to mind the following quotes:

Patience is not how long you can wait but how well you behave while you wait.

– Timber Hawkeye

Wherever there is a human being there is an opportunity for kindness.

– Seneca

This allows me to set my pain aside and seek to understand and alleviate another’s pain.

WTF

These three letters got my attention in a Forbes article about culture.

They don’t stand for what I thought. Rather, they are a reminder that a good company culture creates employees who are Willing To Fail.

I usually have 10 bad ideas before I have a good one. What I’ve discovered over the years is that each bad idea reveals how the world really is. Once you’ve had enough of them, your correct understanding of the world leads to ideas that actually work.

Every company has goals. To achieve them, employees need to take action. These actions are based on ideas and understandings that might be wrong. These wrong ideas need to be tested quickly before a competitor figures it out and drives you out of business. So you need a culture that encourages failing.

Otherwise, you might find yourself sidelined and thinking “WTF?”

On divestitures

When a company with a strong compliance program is set to acquire another company, a lot of effort goes into the integration of the new company. Those responsible for policies, training, controls, audits and investigations are all busy planning for Day 1. They understand the risks associated with any acquisition.

Perhaps far greater are the risks associated with a divestiture. The employees of the soon-to-be-divested business unit turn their attention to all the uncertainties of the future. Suddenly, complying with policies, completing the training, maintaining the controls and conducting the audits don’t seems like worthy activities. If the time to divest is short, the risks might be low. But if negotiations with the buyer stall, or worse fall apart, great damage has been dealt.

E&C professionals should carefully plan acquisitions. When it comes to divestitures, they should double those efforts.

I will help you

Employees who are victims of wrongdoing are sometimes in a messy state.

Some of them are so focussed on what has happened to them that they cannot see the big picture. They are so emotional that they cannot tell their story without providing every detail. The day before they came to you for help, they were in someone else’s office asking for their support; tomorrow, they’ll be writing to the Board of Directors.

The easiest way to defuse the situation is to pronounce a magic formula before you say anything else.

The magic formula is: “I will help you.”

Learnings from Slack’s Frontiers 2018

I spent the last two days in New York City attending a conference held by Slack, a company whose mission is to make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

I attended because Lindsay McGregor was one of the keynote speakers. Lindsay is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of Primed to Perform. She delivered Vega’s “101”, a summary of the science of total motivation (tomo) – a speech I’ve heard at least 4 times. It never gets old. I won’t elaborate here because frequent readers of this blog know all about tomo. If you are new here, search the archive for Primed to Perform.

To keep this post short (as usual), I will list here some of my learnings from the conference. Each bullet point may one day become it’s own post.

  • A speak-up culture starts with a listen-up culture. Good listening breaks down silos.
  • The more innovative an idea, the more likely it is to be rejected. To improve your chance of adoption, make the unfamiliar familiar.
  • Create psychological safety to promote trust and spur innovation. Put out a problem box (not a suggestion box) for employees to raise problems and then assign executives to champion solutions.
  • Ask employees to “kill the company”, or to “kill the department”, or to “kill the idea”. This borrows on the concept of pre-mortem, where you dream up in advance why a venture failed in order to prevent fatal mistakes.
  • Encourage help-seeking, with tools like Givitas.
  • Offices are not natural for human beings. We’ve only worked in offices for about 100 years. Meaningful workspaces are at the intersection of tools, space and culture.

“We shape our buildings. Thereafter they shape up”

– Winston Churchill.

Have a peaceful day

Today is the International Day of Non-Violence.

It was born out of the anti-war/peace movement but it is relevant to our homes and workplaces.

If we could all commit to end physical and verbal violence in our daily lives, there would be no fuel for war. As Mahatma Gandhi, who was born on this day, said: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”

Should corporate culture be regulated?

Some argues it should, others that it should not.

What is certain is that it can be. Once you accept that culture is an outcome of your processes, that is. For many, that is too big of a responsibility to accept.

Regulators understand that we cannot have rules for everything, so it is only a matter of time before they decide to regulate culture. So now is a good time for corporations to look at their key processes – how they hire, compensate, reward, promote, etc. – and take action.

Before the government does.