Nothing Funny about a culture of trust, responsibility; personal accountability and teamwork (and peace, love and understanding).

I just finished reading Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers. It’s an intriguing book if you are focusing on the way you communicate (including how you listen) at work and home. The following is an excerpt that I wish all of us were brave enought to live by.”Think about what it’s like to be in an organization in which commitments are made publicly and clearly, [where] the vast majority of people take their commitments seriously, and are personally responsible for owning and actively managing their commitments.

In such an organization, they never are part of any unexpected, last-minute drops of the ball because they’re always on top of things, always communicating with people and re-negotiating, modifying commitments in real-time. Here, everyone expects promises to be kept and to be actively managed in all cases. Here, anyone failing to manage a commitment will be “called” on it, even by peers and subordinates (this is all agreed to ahead of time). Not in a super-negative, accusing way but in a way that is consistent with a culture of trust, responsibility; personal accountability and teamwork.

Now think about what it’s like to be in a company in which promises are allowed to slip and slide often, with many unspoken assumptions and misunderstandings, and with people not taking responsibility for managing their commitments. Think about the productivity impact as well as the “mood” impact.

In this setting, people often blame others, or always have a ready reason or excuse as to why X or Y didn’t get done. Real accountability is non-existent here, as gradually people at all levels slide into a kind of mild cynicism about virtually everything. People who’ve been on the receiving end of one too many broken commitment may begin to harbor a bit of resentment. It becomes much easier — and much more prevalent — to gossip and complain about others’ broken promises behind their backs. It slowly becomes the standard, the norm. Yet no real action to improve is taken. No conversation for the sake of making this better is ever held. Promises simply keep getting broken, commitments continue to be unkept and not cleaned up, agreements are allowed to slip by unfulfilled. Often, it’s as if this topic — which is at the heart of things — is considered to be undiscussable — undiscussable, at least, in conversations which could actually move things toward real change.”

Can we talk?

What do we need? Leaders or Managers

Old, Bold? BNET’s Don Blohowiak — Attempting to distinguish between being a leader from a manager or administrator, the instructor at the professional development seminar at a major eastern university described the differences in this way: An administrator focuses on getting the work done. A manager spends time and energy on processes and incremental changes to make improvements. A leader, on the other hand, well, a leader is bold and transformational! more . . .

Which 90% is Crap?

I love reading BNET’s Don Blohowiak’s Leadership. Now. blog. The following is another one of his posts entitled Suitable for Flushing.
Suitable for Flushing by BNET’s Don Blohowiak — Robert Sutton, the best selling author and management professor at the Stanford Engineering School, thinks the vast majority of the business advice you receive is His new, not-at-all-subtly titled essay, Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? is a free downloadable PDF from ChangeThis.com in which he argues that managers waste a heck of lot of their time and energy chasing after bad and recycled ideas.

He posits Sutton’s Law: “If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong, Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.”

With brusque deliciousness, Sutton slams a manure-covered boot up into the backside of purported “best practices.”

Just a few weeks ago, a manager at a Stanford executive program—from a big health insurance company—told me that he had been forced to institute a General Electric-style “A,B,C” ranking system on his team of eight people. He complained to his boss that he had spent years melding together a cooperative and effective team and couldn’t understand why it made sense to fire one of his people and give 80% of the bonus money to his top two people. His boss answered, “This system is being used throughout the Fortune 500.” This logic reminds me of the blunt old saying, “Eat shit. 100 billion flies can’t be wrong.”

You can download the entire, unvarnished 11-page manifesto yourself. No charge. Courtesy of the sponsors of ChangeThis.com, the nice people at 800CEORead.com — whose business it is to sell you business advice.

Death By Meeting

Death by Meeting by BNET’s Don BlohowiakTwo U.S. industrial psychologists recently conducted a study of business people and released a conclusion that will shock no one doing knowledge work. They found, “a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload.”