I made this for you

At the ECI Fellows meeting this week, several attendees told me they could never think of something to write about every day on a blog.

We spoke and they soon realized that they could if they focused on documenting their journey rather than trying to create compelling and dazzling content.

The point of writing a blog post is not to show others how smart you are. It’s to force you to pay attention, notice things, think about them and then drive you to action.

If I were to document my day today, it would look like this:

10 AM – Work on the Code launch communications campaign with a vendor (by phone)
11 AM – Meet with a new employee in person
12 PM – Share my experience of conducting the Global Business Ethics Survey with a colleague from another industry (by phone)
2 PM – Phone call with a vendor who created a training module for my organization and figure out how we can chop it into shorter pieces and distribute them as vignettes to our employees.
3 PM – Meet with a new employee in person
3:15 PM – Meet in person with colleagues from the Communications department to discuss our new internal blog features.

Most E&C professionals deal with similar issues and, as you can imagine, it would be easy for anyone to share how they are approaching these activities, the challenges they face, their insights, etc.

Seth Godin would give the following advice:

Write under a pseudonym if you need to. The point of putting your writing out there is to force you to think, to take a risk, and to get feedback. It’s to be an artist and be generous and say “Here, I made this for you.”

So here, I made this for you.

ECI Fellows Meeting – Day 1

Whenever I attend a large meeting of E&C professionals, I learn about leading or best practices from other organizations. Of course, no organization is flawless but here are some of the practices that were shared yesterday during Day 1 of the ECI Fellows meeting:

In one banking organization, the E&C group must sign off on compensation plans. Their job is to look for elements that might drive unethical behavior.
In one aerospace organization, 40% of the employee performance evaluation is based on the corporate values.
In one healthcare organization, executives go through a regular 360 assessment, with a particular emphasis on feedback from subordinates.

And here are some concepts from Day 1 that got my attention:

However you design your compensation system, make sure you send a clear message that “compliance affects your pay.”
To influence ethical behavior through compensation, focus on variable pay over fixed pay and benefits.
Goals focus your attention (good) but can also create blinders to important and risky behaviors happening in your peripheral vision (bad).
Goals cause people to take on more risk (this can be good or bad). An independent party should evaluate those risks.

Finally, some thoughts from the session with Neel Doshi:

Data, in its most natural form, creates play. Unfortunately, many organizations weaponize data to create emotional and economic pressure.
Dashboards and scorecards don’t tell the whole story. Where there is red on a dashboard, it is certainly not proof that people are the problem. Go see for yourself. The further removed you are from the event, the stronger the blame bias.
If no one in your organization owns culture, then it’s a great opportunity for E&C to take the lead. It’s much harder to do so when another function claims ownership.

Culture bugs

I often say that culture is an outcome of our processes. I first read about this concept in a 2016 HBR article and it made a deep impact on me.

Today I read about this concept in a Fast Company article featuring Asana, a workplace-productivity management company. Asana received a perfect rating on Glassdoor and is among Glassdoor’s Top 10 Best Places to Work in 2017. The company was also named one of Entrepreneur magazine’s best workplace cultures of 2017.

How did Asana get there? Here’s an extract from the article:

“We decided to treat culture as a product,” Rosenstein says.

He explained that instead of looking at culture as something that “just happens,” he and his cofounder realized that culture was actually something that needed to be carefully designed, tested, debugged, and iterated on, like any other product they released.

This means that representatives from all areas of the company meet regularly to reassess Asana’s values and design new ways to incorporate those values into every process at the company. Once a new process is “shipped,” an intense period of user feedback begins.

“We actively survey people anonymously, and during one-on-ones, we ask what’s working well and what isn’t working well. Based on that information, we go back to the company and say, here’s what we heard, and here’s what we’re doing to do about it,” says Rosenstein.

In fact, every quarter, the entire company takes a full week off from business to road map corporate goals for the future. Many of these goals are business-related, but culture-related reflection is heavily encouraged.

When problems are brought to the table, Rosenstein says that management is quick to address the issues. Asana even has a name for these issues–“culture bugs”–and it seeks to squash them as quickly as bugs in the codebase of any other product.

Many organizations see it as their obligation to offer employee benefits like vacation, health care, retirement, and disability.

But what about offering a great culture?

Redefining speak-up culture

Today’s post was originally published on LinkedIn. It is reproduced below.

In many organizations, the “speak up” message has been hijacked by the compliance function.

When employees hear “If you see something, say something,” they think about reporting someone else’s wrongdoing. But a true speak-up culture can and should be much more than that.

A true speak-up culture is one where employees feel safe to share any idea that they believe will help the organization or its stakeholders. It can be an idea about a new product, a more efficient process, a new market, a savings opportunity, or even how to improve your bathrooms.

Feeling safe and trusted is critical to a speak-up culture. In their book Primed to Perform, authors Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor explain how “play” is the most powerful driver of performance. Organizations who allow their employees to be curious, to experiment, and to fail often outperform their peers. And my friends at LRN use the neat acronym “TRIP”: when Trust is high and employees feel safe, they take on more Risk, which leads to Innovation and Performance.

Smart leaders understand the true value of a speak-up culture. They invite feedback and treat it with respect. Each instance is a seed that will grow into trust.

Where there is no trust, more than wrongdoing goes unreported.

Book report: Primed to Perform – The Fire Starters

Book by Neel Doshi & Lindsay McGregor

Reading notes by Yan Tougas

Fire Starters are leaders who ignite total motivation in their teams and across entire organization. The necessary leadership skills can be taught and learned. Systems can be put in place to build leaders at every level.

There are 4 leadership styles:

Quid pro quo. Leaders use indirect motivators only. Good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished. This creates high levels of emotional and economic pressure.

Hands-off. Leaders do not use any motivators. They get involved only when there is a problem, not realizing that teams perform best when leaders build play, purpose, and potential in the work.

Enthusiasts. Leaders use all motivators, including indirect motivators, which decrease performance. These leaders score at about the same level as the hands-off leaders.

Fire starters. Leaders encourage direct motives and discourage indirect motives. They balance tactical and adaptive performance. They maximize total motivation, primarily through 14 behaviors:

Play. Inspires curiosity and encourages experimentation:

1. Provides you with time, space, and encouragement to experiment and learn.

2. Makes it clear what it means to be performing well.

3. Challenges you to solve problems yourself.

Purpose. Removes the blame bias by focussing on the purpose of the work:

4. Helps you see that your work is important and meaningful.

5. Role models and and expects you to live by positive, consistent values and a common sense of purpose.

6. Puts the customer’s interests first.

Potential. Shows you that investment in your work is an investment in yourself:

7. Actively links the work with your personal goals

8. Helps you to develop and focus your time on your strengths rather than your weaknesses.

9. Provides you with more responsibility as your skills grow.

Emotional pressure. Removes fear, shame, guilt, or peer pressure:

10. Ensures targets and goals are fair and reasonable.

11. Is fair, honest, and transparent.

12. Enables friendships at work.

Economic pressure. Avoids rewards or punishments:

13. Ensures you are evaluated holistically.

Inertia. Removes obstacles and makes sure the work has an impact:

14. Makes it easy to get things done and ensures you don’t waste effort.

To become a fire starter, one should embed these behaviors and ToMo into every aspect of the rhythm of performance management. Avoid “effort goals” and “tactical goals”, and replace them with adaptive goals Tactical performance goals focus people on just the appearance of competence. Adaptive goals focus people on becoming competent.

Once a week, (1) review tactical goals and think about how they can be translated into adaptive goals; (2) have a team huddle to discuss what was learned during the week, how we progressed against our goals, and what we need to learn next week. For the team huddles, have a leader and a scribe, and rotate the roles every week. The topics covered in team huddles allows you to cover all 14 behaviors.

Great organizations are deliberate about building leaders. They have systems with two primary components:

Training. Provide ToMo and leadership training to your employees.

Feedback. Very few people are good leaders, in part because they don’t get feedback about how bad they are. Conducting 360 reviews is critical.

Building a world-class culture starts with you. Practice. Then find a friend to join you. Huddle with your team. Develop training and feedback. Get more people to join you on your journey.

Book report: Primed to Perform – The Blame Bias

Book by Neel Doshi & Lindsay McGregor

Reading notes by Yan Tougas

Studies have shown that people tend to blame individuals, and not the situation, when something goes wrong. Teachers who teach in terrible conditions blame the students for not learning. Managers blame employees who get hurt in dangerous conditions. Salespeople miss their targets because they are lazy. Coworkers cheat because they are unethical. Because of this bias, few of us focus on improving the context, the culture.

We invest in hiring the right people and then underestimate the influence of our culture once they arrive.

In many studies, leaders were tricked into believing that their followers were exceptional individuals. Because leaders believed that their followers could do no wrong, they assumed that the context was at fault when something didn’t go as planned. The leaders then worked on the context (because, they assumed, there was nothing wrong with the followers). Witnessing this work, the followers felt motivated and valued, and ended up excelling. The Pygmalion effect is the antidote to the blame bias. Once blame is eliminated, expectations increase all around.

Everyone is subject to this bias. Before anyone can remove the bias from an organization, they must remove it from themselves. The easiest way is to learn how to give feedback to others (“REAP”):

Remember to assume a positive intent. Assume the other person means well.

Explain – Come up with 5 scenarios that could explain the behavior, scenarios that do not place the blame on the individual. Consider that culture could have contributed to the outcome.

Ask the other person why they behaved that way (ask assuming positive intent).

Plan – Identify the root cause and create a plan of action

One of Toyota’s values is genchi genbutsu – the actual place, the actual part – reminding managers to go to the worksite to assess a situation in context and ensure a good solution based on objectivity and open mind.