Go where the attention is

If we want our message to be effective, we need to place it where the attention is.

It seems obvious. Yet, companies continue to advertise on billboards, on the radio, and on television, despite the fact that we now use our phones to search for information, to listen to podcasts, to watch Netflix.

Organization must know where their employees’ attention is if they want to have an effective ethics and compliance communication program. Depending on the size and footprint of the organization, the same ethics message might have to take different forms:

  • In a small factory in Asia, where meals are provided to all workers for free in the canteen, table tent cards can be a good way to reach everyone and spur conversation.
  • For a sales force deployed in the field 300 days/year, using a mobile phone application to deliver messages and administer a short quiz can prove effective.
  • For office-based employees, asking supervisors to give voice to the company’s values during staff meetings allows them to be visible and vocal on the importance of ethics.

In large organizations, there is no size-fits-all. Good communication requires effort and planning. We must look at our employee “buckets” and figure out where the attention is for each.

Short on time? Document, don’t create.

An ethical leader inspires others to become ethical leaders.

To be inspiring, they must communicate what they do and how they do it. In this context, it is much more effective for an ethical leader to document what she already does than to separately create inspiring content.

For example, the ethical leader can spend a few minutes at an all-hands meeting explaining how he decided to walk away from business when the potential customer insisted that the organization hire the customer’s nephew in return for an order.

People are inspired when they see us walk the talk.

Let’s show them how we walk.

Hat tip to Gary Vaynerchuk

Playful agenda

In their book Primed to Perform, authors Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor demonstrate that “why people work determines how well they work.” Somewhat surprisingly, we learn that play is the strongest driver of performance.

In the workplace, play refers to an employee’s ability to be curious, to experiment, and – more importantly – to survive failures. When employees are given the opportunity to try new ways to get the work done, they perform better. This concept works even in highly-tactical environments like assembly lines. Just add an andon cord and see what happens.

Several years ago, before I understood this idea, I started to use play by allowing employees to set the agenda for meetings and presentations. I had noticed greater employee participation with this approach. You can call it a micro-application of the play concept. Here are two specific examples:

  • When I’m invited to present to a group, I reserve at least two-thirds of my allotted time for Q&As, which means that two-thirds of my presentation is driven by their curiosity.
  • This month, I will be in Europe to meet with 100 of my team members over 2 days. Using Tricider.com, I invited them to identify many of the topics to be covered during the meeting.

I believe it was Stephen Covey who said (or repeated) that “the key to commitment is involvement”. Play is something we willingly get involved with. We do it out of pure enjoyment.

Lucky for us, it also increases performance.

Hero culture

Most of us get overwhelmed at work once in a while (more often for some).

If we operate in a “hero culture”, we don’t say anything. We work harder and smarter, convinced that we can pull it off on our own. “One day soon,” we say to ourselves, “I’ll be a hero for getting this done.”

In large organizations with a hero culture, the reality is that someone is always dropping a ball somewhere. And sometimes, it’s an important ball – one that should never have touched the ground.

To avoid a hero culture, a leader must know what her team is working on and determine if the resources are adequate. If they are not, a choice needs to be made: do we add resources or do we drop a ball. When we decide to drop a ball, at least we can choose which one.

Remember: heroes are supposed to be the exception.

Skip-level meetings

Hierarchies serve a purpose. No one should have 150 direct reports. When an organization reaches a certain size, layers of management become useful.

These layers can also become barriers. The more layers, the thinner your personal relationship with colleagues, and the less likely you are to hear about the challenges they face, way down on the front lines. If you believe in servant leadership, that’s a problem.

A way to mitigate this problem is to hold skip-level meetings. As many as possible, as far down the ladder as possible. These meetings need not be lengthy. If scheduled in advance, your colleagues will arrive prepared to share their concerns. But only if they trust you, that is.

A good topic for another day.

A culture score for every organization

As I watch my son go through the college application process, I can’t help imagining what his job search will look like in a few years.

What organization will he decide to join? One that fosters his personal growth? One that guarantees lifetime employment? One with a noble purpose? One that will pay him lots of money?

How about one with the right culture? What if there was a website out there ranking all organizations according to their culture?

I hear some of you say “Wait! You can’t measure culture!” Actually, you can. Scientifically. Small, private organizations have done it. Large, publicly-traded multinationals have done it as well. You can see their results in the book Primed to Perform. The formula behind the culture score was developed by the principals at Vega Factor. It measures how much play*, purpose, and potential the organizations offer their employees, and how little emotional and financial pressures they use to get things done.

Imagine a world where organizations measure their culture with the intent to continuously improve it. A world where employees can choose to work for an organization based on their culture score.

In such a world, this father would have one less worry.

* In this context, “play” does not refer to ping-pong tables.

Promises

We should keep our promises because doing so builds trust. Trust is the currency of business. Trust is the glue in building relationships.

This doesn’t mean that we should expect others to keep their promises. Everyone has to break a promise at some point. Some do it more often than others. Others are downright malicious about it.

If we are honest with ourselves, we understand where these people come from. Bad weather kept their plane on the ground. A relative got sick. They lost a big contract the week before. They grew up on the bad side of town. They were abused as kids. They’ve always hit glass ceilings because of their race, gender, nationality, etc.

When someone breaks a promise they’ve made to us, we should allow ourselves to be frustrated only for a brief moment. Then we need to deploy some empathy and move on.

When we don’t expect others to keep their promises, we walk through life with greater awareness, a lighter heart, and greater speed.

Keep calm

Every now and then – and more often for some people – we get frustrated at work.

Frustration is inevitable for anyone who cares deeply about the work they do. That frustration often manifests itself in negative ways. We can be disrespectful to others, we can become disengaged, or, in the worst cases, we can sabotage our own organization.

We often react this way despite the fact that we are healthy and that our basic needs for food/shelter/clothing are met aplenty. We lose perspective on what really matters. We lose perspective because we are told that our work makes the world a better place, that we must do more less, that we must do it flawlessly – because if we don’t, something terrible will happen (i.e. the world will not be a better place and our stock price will go down).

We don’t get this type of pressure at home or with friends.

It’s OK to get frustrated. And we should care about our work. But our response to frustration should be to pause, count our blessings, and decide to do the right thing.

Because employees who perform with trust, respect, and integrity have a much better shot at making the world a better place.