Earlier this week I was sitting in a town hall meeting held by the head of human resources for an organization going through a major overhaul of its HR function.  The audience was a collection of HR professionals from throughout the world gathered in person and via the web to hear about state of affairs with the massive change that had begun a few months earlier.

The audience waited anxiously expecting an announcement of inevitable job loss, but also hoping their leader would share a vision of a modern, effective department whose contributions were prized by the organization. 

Instead, the SVP droned for thirty unfulfilling minutes spouting meaningless clichés about tackling the “low hanging fruit” (eight times) on their way to having a “seat at the table” (five times) where they could be a “strategic partner with the business” (six times).  He stumbled through his too-detailed slides in a lifeless monotone with a stiff back and an empty facial expression.  Detached.  Distant.  Not revealing anything of substance.

The feedback from the audience after the meeting suggested he failed not only to provide any meaningful information, but more importantly to make the connection required to get anything more than dutiful compliance to the task ahead.  The comments after the presentation ranged from the politically correct (“I think his plan is still developing”) to the skeptical (“I’m not sure he fully understands what’s required”) to the confused (“I’m not really sure what the heck he said”) to the hostile (“He doesn’t have a clue”).

He will need much more than that to get the focus, energy and commitment required to complete the effort.

Now, imagine the difference if he stood at the front of the room, took off his jacket, sat on the edge of a table and said:

“Our business has changed a great deal over the past decade, and it’s clear that the HR function that brought us to this point needs to change to support our company in the coming years.  To help us identify the right steps to take, we hired some experienced advisors to share their insights and present us with recommendations.  I would like to say that I understand all that we need to do, but I’m still learning about these new tools, processes and structural changes and what they will mean for us.  What I do know is that with your help, we will be able to make the right decisions—even the tough decisions—that will take us in the best direction.  Now, let me share with you some of what I understand and where I am still learning.”

Our instinct during times of uncertainty is to domesticate reality.  We try to put life in a box where we can control it and we hide behind platitudes hoping that the appearance of certainty will bring comfort to those around us.  The result?  We appear inauthentic and we put distance between ourselves and those we are trying to lead.

Instead, we must learn to live with a robust and confident uncertainty.  Only by allowing ourselves to be seen, showing our own vulnerability, will we draw others close enough to engage in the creative, collaborative process of facing the unknown.

I’m sentimental

So I walk in the rain

I’ve got some habits

Even I can’t explain

I go to the corner

I end up in Spain

Why try to change me now

Whether voiced with the fragile anguish of Fiona Apple or the charming cockiness of Frank Sinatra, these Cy Coleman lyrics express the unapologetic resistance we often face when managing change.  Overcoming resistance is an essential capability required of change leaders. Here are a few techniques for gaining support as well as the pros and cons of using them.  An adaptive change leader may deploy multiple strategies throughout a project:

1. Education and communication are used when there is a lack of information or inaccurate information and analysis.  Advantage:  Once persuaded, people will help with the implementation of the change.  Disadvantage:  Education and communication can be very time-consuming if lots of people are involved.
2. Participation and involvement are used when the change leaders do not have all the information they need to design the change and when others have considerable power to resist.  Advantage:  People who participate will be committed to implementing change, and any relevant information they have will be integrated into the plan.  Disadvantage:  Involving others in the change process can be very time-consuming, especially if participants design an inappropriate approach to change.
3. Facilitation and support are best when people are resisting because of adjustment problems.  Advantage:  No other approach works as well with adjustment problems.  Disadvantage:  Facilitation and support can be time-consuming, expensive and still fail.
4. Negotiation and agreement are used when someone or some group will clearly lose out in a change, and when that group has considerable power to resist.  Advantage:  Negotiation has proven to be a relatively easy way to avoid major resistance.  Disadvantage:  It can be too expensive in many cases if it alerts others to negotiate.
5. Manipulation and co-optation are used when other tactics will not work or are too expensive.  Advantage:  It can be a quick and inexpensive solution to resistance problems.  Disadvantage:  It can lead to future problems if people feel manipulated.
6. Explicit and implicit coercion are best when speed is essential, and the change initiators possess considerable power.  Advantage:  Coercion is speedy and can overcome any kind of resistance.  Disadvantage:  It can be risky if it leaves people angry with those who initiate the change.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a project manager who wanted an assessment of his team’s capability.  The project had been moving along without significant problems, but was approaching an intense period with several critical milestones.  The project manager felt unsettled because his team was not providing the analysis and insight he expected.

“I don’t think I have a team that has the right skill set,” the project manager confessed.  “We’re coming up on some very important milestones and they’re not sharing the usual level of detail.  I’m concerned they don’t know what they are doing and that I’ll have to make some decisions without their input.”

When I spoke with the project team, they expressed a similar frustration.  “I don’t feel like he trusts us,” the validation lead shared.  “Meetings feel more like an inquisition.  We’ve all worked on similar projects before, but he hasn’t recognized any of our experience.  We know he’s a good project manager, but he doesn’t seem to know we’re good, too.”

There have been a number of studies that examined the relationship between trust in management and the actual performance at the group or organizational level.  One study, for example, found that when basketball team members trust their coach, their performance is better.  Another study found that when restaurant employees trust their manager the restaurant’s sales and net profits increase.  The results of these studies demonstrate that when employees trust management, organizations have greater success.

More importantly, a study by Sabrina Deutsch Salamon (York University) and Sandra Robinson (University of British Columbia) found that when employees feel that they are trusted by management, organizational performance is improved.  This is significant because it shows that a sense of “felt trust” affects performance beyond the effect of employee trust in management.  It shows that when employees feel trusted by management it can have a direct impact on the top and bottom lines.

This is a very different picture than the leader standing on a pedestal waiting for employees to prove themselves and earn his or her trust.  These results suggest that successful leaders start the relationship by actively showing employees they trust them through words and deeds.

For many organizational leaders and human resources professionals, this study validates what they have known intuitively for years: the more you engage and involve your employees, the more you give them autonomy to perform their jobs, the better you tap their intrinsic motivation and drive employee performance skyward.

Unfortunately, many of the well-developed techniques of organizational management and control work directly against these findings.  This is especially true of rigorous project management methodologies.  They enable companies to organize people in different places with different skills to perform tasks with structure consistency, but at the risk of marginalizing the relationship building skills that build trust.

It’s a delicate, but important, balance.  To be a successful leader, especially under the demands of time-intensive projects, requires that you apply the formal structures and process needed for systematic execution AND that you show a willingness to be “emotionally vulnerable and human with one another.” (Patrick Lencioni)

It turns out that Douglas McGregor was on the right track about how to manage in the future with his concept of Theory Y managers:  People are more self-directed, committed and creative when managers develop a climate of trust by communicating openly, minimizing the relationship distance between themselves and their subordinates, and creating a comfortable environment where employees can develop and use their abilities.

Nobody likes to fail.  We think failure is the opposite of success.  In organization life, failure is unacceptable.  It demands action.  It requires a response.  It gets you fired.  It is better to maintain the status quo and achieve mediocre results than to take a risk and fail.

Unless you are an effective change leader.

If you are an effective change leader, failure is a part of the process of achieving success.  Failure is data.  It’s information that helps you understand more about what it will take, or not take, to create a successful outcome.  It’s a sign that it’s time to make a change.

Get low scores on stakeholder satisfaction surveys?  Maybe it’s time to do a needs analysis or review design specifications.

Continuing to miss project deadlines?  Maybe it’s time to rework the project plan or assess whether you have the right resources.

Project teams not performing?  Maybe it’s time to learn what makes each individual tick or adjust your management style to be more effective.

Failing again and again?  Maybe it’s time to understand the root causes and systemic challenges (rather than continuing to treat problems with band-aids).

Change agents, innovators, entrepreneurs, R&D professionals, athletes and high achievers of every kind see failure as part of the continuous process of improving.  Failure is the feedback we need to adapt our efforts in the direction of our objective.

If you are a change leader who cares about success, then you may want to rethink your response to failure.  Instead of irritation, try curiosity.  Instead of hiding it, highlight it.  Instead of scolding those who fail, embrace them and have them share what they learned.

Failure is achievement because it shows we are reaching for something far beyond our immediate capability.  Even when we falter, we learn, grow and are strengthened for the challenge ahead.

Dave Berzack loves his career.  Check out his website, www.daveberzack.com, and you will see more evidence of the passion, and talent, he has for his chosen profession.  (Shout out to Dan Schawbel for pointing me to this video.)

Droppin science (here’s the secret) for live (for a great) 9 to 5 (career):  It’s about finding your passion.

Said in geeky consultant language:  The key to high levels of performance and achievement is aligning your work with your sources of intrinsic motivation . . . It’s about finding your passion!

When you can get out of bed every morning with the same spirit and sense of fun that Dave shows, you have found your bliss.  And bliss leads to the biggest career reward of all:  satisfaction.  If your goal is to make millions of dollars, well, success will depend upon your career choice, your effort and a bit of luck.  But if your definition of success is to have a sense of purpose and meaning,  to thrive and to have a consistent source of satisfaction, then build your work around what you love.

A young student from my alma mater called me a few months ago to learn more about the consulting profession.  He did a nice job of providing a verbal resume outlining his well-chosen major, his proper corporate summer internship and the reasons why that prepared him for an entry level job in consulting.  Based upon the facts alone, he was a good candidate for a job in the field.  Based upon the level of excitement in his voice, however, I was compelled to ask another question.

“What do you do for fun?”

He responded by saying, “Since I was a little kid I’ve played hockey.”  And for the next ten minutes told me about playing in hockey leagues four seasons every year, reffing for younger leagues when he was in high school and during the summer, coaching hockey at summer camps and meeting his favorite players at various events.  His tone was entirely different.  You could hear the smile in his voice.

“What are you doing with that?”  I asked.  Silence.

Not everyone can be a professional hockey player.  Not everyone can get a job in the hockey industry on a team, a league office, or an equipment manufacturer.  Although the more we talked, the more he discovered his options were much greater than the “conventional” jobs found in the college placement office.  He realized there were countless careers in the hockey world that were not just about playing.

More importantly, the more we talked, the more he realized there were aspects about hockey that could be translated to other potential career choices.  He enjoyed the camaraderie.  He enjoyed the competition, but he really valued the learning and growing and hard work, whether winning or not.  He also really enjoyed the teaching and development of others when reffing and coaching.

We didn’t have to talk any more about consulting.  He was fired up to listen to his heart and think about options that were more closely aligned with his innate talents, interests and joy.  He may yet end up in consulting, but if he does, it will be when he discovers it is the best place to live his purpose.

Oh, yeah, and by the way . . . If you are on the other end of this and looking for the job candidates who are going to knock your socks off, remember that no matter how killa the resume, you have to listen to the heart of the candidate.  It’s the employees who work from a sense of purpose and passion that will always, always kick it.

Orchestra conductors must exercise a unique style of leadership.  They must listen intently, and without saying a word, draw out strong performances from their orchestras.  This requires that they learn to be the ultimate collaborators,  understand the unique capabilities of each musician and decide how best to blend them into a coherent whole.

In this video, Itay Talgam shows that contrary to their popular image, the best conductors are not dictators.  Instead, they are successful by being great teachers and by mastering the art of helping others give voice to expressive contributions.  The most successful conductors believe in the inherent capacity of the people they lead to accomplish whatever is required.  The players may need to be coaxed, nudged and enticed, but masterful performances reside within them.

Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic and author of The Art of Possibility, suggests that one way to determine whether you are on track is to look into the eyes of those you lead.  “The eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren’t shining, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing that’s keeping my musicians’ eyes from shining?’”

Conductors, or leaders, who recognize that they do not need to make a sound or dominate or control, can focus on enabling others to be more effective.  They can help others feel energetic, lively, engaged and focused not only on the task at hand, but more importantly, connected and listening to the other musicians, their orchestral collaborators, required to make beautiful music.

Are we really surprised?

Companies have been obsessed with pay for performance for almost two decades.  And like any obsession, it has clouded the judgment of executives and others, such as human resources professionals and consultants, who should know better.

The problem is that pay for performance is founded on a two faulty beliefs:

1. If you reward something you get more of the behavior you want.
2. If you punish something you get less of the behavior you don’t want.

Unfortunately for our misguided execs, study after study has demonstrated results that massively contradict this way of thinking.  It’s hard to fault them entirely.  Logically, one would think that incentives work.  The science, however, has proven otherwise and has found:

1. As long as the job involves only mechanical skills or rules-based tasks, incentives work as expected.  The higher the incentive, the better the performance.
2. But once the job calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill—some conceptual and/or creative thinking—a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

These results have been replicated over and over again by psychologists, sociologists, and economists . . . including those funded by that left-wing, socialist institution, the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Even a recent study from McKinsey found that three noncash motivators—praise from immediate supervisors, attention from leaders, and a chance to direct projects—are at least as effective as the three most highly rated monetary ones.

Now, don’t misunderstand me.  Money is a motivator.  If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated to do the job.

Once you pay people enough, however, it is no longer a factor in motivating performance, especially in jobs that require basic cognitive, conceptual and creative skill . . . the majority of jobs in the U.S. economy.

Organizations must stop drinking the pay for performance Kool-Aid.  Pay for performance, carrot and stick management, performance appraisal, time clocks, verbal and written warnings, and many other management and HR practices are outdated and just don’t work.

Instead, it’s time to equip managers with the tools to manage in the modern workplace and support them with HR programs and practices that encourage the right behavior.  That’s about redefining what it is to manage and it’s about completely overhauling HR.  More importantly, it’s founded on the notion that we stop treating people like cogs in a machine and start treating them like smart, creative, self-motivated people who want to at all times do their best.

That’s not just some feel good manifesto.  It’s the fact-based, scientific reality required to be a high performing organization.

Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, has been researching great bosses for many years.   His last book was the New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.  His work suggests a number of techniques and behaviors that research has shown good bosses demonstrate.

More importantly, he has concluded that all the technique and behavior coaching in the world won’t make a boss great if that boss doesn’t also have a certain mindset.  Interestingly, these beliefs are held by the best bosses and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses.  Here are the key beliefs:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

“I hope that at least in your eyes I have earned what all of you have done for me.”

Imagine the quality of our lives, our leadership and our service to each other if we asked this question everyday.

It’s simple, really.  Most “modern” corporations kill human capability the way we strip-mine and deplete the earth of natural resources.

Think about it.  We hire bright, ambitious, enthusiastic young people fresh out of the hope and idealism of school.  We stick them in cubicles under fluorescent lights away from windows so they can’t tell whether it’s day or night, sunny or rainy.  We tell them to dress a certain way, show up at a certain time, eat at a certain time, and stay late enough to make a good impression.  We encourage them to not express emotion, talk with the right jargon and tone, write with a particular style and embrace certain values and principles and mission statements.  And we force them to comply with standardized procedures, criticize their shortcomings when they fail to do so, and threaten their security if they get too far out of line.

It sounds a bit like the way cults program people, doesn’t it?  In fact, it’s not too far from the truth.  Cults program people to be silent, loyal, endure pain (to be “strong”), to do the jobs they’ve been assigned and to subscribe to the spiritual values of the group.

I’m not saying that corporations are cults . . . not really . . . I’m saying that the traditional structures of managerial control are designed for compliance and to produce performance within a steady, predictable, average range.

And that’s not good enough anymore.

While it’s cliché, the world is changing too fast, too dynamically, too organically, too symbiotically.  The old linear, command and control, carrot and stick model may work when you want compliance to routine tasks.  If, on the other hand, you want innovation, creativity and high performance, this doesn’t work.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson argues that we don’t get the best out of people because we educate them to become good workers, rather than to be creative thinkers.  Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says.

We can apply the same thinking to the way we manage people in organization life.  Take performance appraisal, for example.  The primary HR methodology pushed on organizations over the last 40 years is a standardized, “fast food” model.  It’s built around standard ratings as well as standard competencies or goals or some other check list for evaluation.  It’s meant to be batch processed once or twice per year and rolled up to higher executive, finance or HR authorities for approval.  The expectation is that our staff will fit a normalized distribution curve and that we won’t have too many people that exceed expectations.  This way the compensation distribution will fit the budget.

What’s the point of that approach?  Certainly not developing people.

To create an environment where people can reach their highest potential, you need the “Zagat or Michelin” approach where development, motivation, and engagement are “customized to local circumstances.”  In other words, talent is incredibly diverse even within the same department or function.  People have different aptitudes, passions and motivation.  To help them apply their unique gifts to their jobs, we have to tailor our approach and create the conditions where they will begin to thrive.

Instead of separating people from their natural talents so they can fit a standardized mode, we have to help them identify and connect those talents to the ways they can contribute.  Developing human potential is not a mechanical process.  It’s an organic process that requires customizing to your circumstances and personalizing our approach to managing to people we are managing.

We can’t do that simply by installing a new technology, rating methodology or competency model.  We do this by developing the ability of organization leaders to listen and identify the talents of employees, and to help them apply their gifts in unique and remarkable ways.