2012 July Archive - RecognizeThis! Blog

Archive for July, 2012

Creating a Culture of Innovation – What to Do (and Not Do)

Recognize This! – A strong culture already exists in your organization. It’s up to you to shape that into the culture you want, not the one that “just happened.”

Yesterday I wrote about creating a culture of creativity, as Danny Boyle did to create and direct the Olympic opening ceremonies. How does that translate to the workplace or the more common phrase we often hear of creating a culture of innovation?

What to Do

In CIO, Frank Wander, founder of the IT Excellence Institute and a former Fortune 250 CIO, recently shared 3 best practices for doing just that in terms of what you should always, sometimes and never do:

“Always recognize that IT’s culture is your responsibility, and innovation is an outcome of the culture…

“Sometimes work outside the office to find a quiet setting in which to think…

“Never build a culture of blame. Innovation is often about trying and failing. If failure leads to blame, you’ll create an innovation short-circuit.”

This is at the heart of creating a culture that is open to innovative ideas (even if they may sound silly at first), sharing, helping, contributing together in an environment that’s supportive and where failure is not only tolerated but encouraged as a path to success. (Check out this great post from Dan McCarthy on famous failures.)

What Not to Do

Sometimes, avoiding the pitfalls is as difficult as following the path to success. Indeed, this is no less true when creating a culture of innovation.

Today in his Workplace Mojo blog, Matt Monge wrote about “culture killers,” namely:

Saying your people are your priority when they’re really not
Saying you want feedback when you really don’t
Empowering “leaders” who don’t really lead

Doesn’t this all really circle back to transparency? You say what you mean and do what you say. Easily said, but not always as easily done, especially when you’re trying to instill these beliefs and approaches in your own team of leaders to filter down.

The best approach is for the senior leader to model the desired behaviors, then consistently, frequently and in a timely way recognize and reward those who do so as well. Equally important, leaders must be willing to coach and, if necessary, remove leaders who demonstrate the “culture killers.”

If you want to find out how Intuit created and sustains a strong culture of innovation through strategic recognition, join me and Intuit Senior Compensation Business Partner Jennifer Lepird for a webinar on Thursday, August 2nd, 1:00pm Eastern/ 10:00am Pacific/ 5:00 pm GMT.

What are your recommendations for what to do and what not to do in creating a culture of innovation?

2 Steps to Developing & Delivering Creativity on an Olympic Scale

Recognize This! – Creativity is not enough without delivery on the promise.

I’ll hazard a guess that 100% of my readers watched the Olympics opening ceremony, at least in part, or read about it, or saw elements of it on news coverage.

What did you think of it? Most feedback seems to range from “spectacular!” to “what just happened?” Setting aside personal feelings and reactions to the opening ceremony, I think we could all agree that the effort and ingenuity required to deliver something that comprehensive, grand, and exciting – and keep it a secret for many, many months with thousands of volunteers involved – is nothing short of a miracle.

So how did director Danny Boyle do it? How did he create a culture of creativity? Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer for Boyle’s team, gives us a glimpse in this article. The secret seems to be in a two-step process – eliminate all barriers, then put them back in place.

Step 1: Eliminate the Barriers for Creativity to Flow

“Danny created a room where no one was afraid to speak, no one had to stick to their own specialism, no one was afraid of sounding stupid or talking out of turn. He restored us to the people we were before we made career choices – to when we were just wondering.”

If you really want to set people free to come up with something new, give them free rein to do so. Don’t put false boundaries on people like, “That’s not your specialty. Focus on what you’re good at.”

Instead, free everyone to explore, to share, to – yes – innovate.

Step 2: Resurrect the Barriers to Deliver on Creativity’s Promise

“And then it did get real. More people came on board – the galvanising presence of the musical director Rick Smith, the director Paulette Randall, the formidable producer Tracey Seaward, then the choreographers, and the thousands of volunteers. We all ended up back in our original disciplines – and I found myself writing everything… the brochure, even the stadium announcements. Danny was bringing it all to life and taking on the brunt of the bureaucracy. And he became Prospero – presiding over rehearsals that looked like huge raves.”

The creative process itself cannot go on forever. At some point, we all must return to our specialties to make the dreams reality. Someone needs to take the reins, and everyone else needs to focus on what they know best to deliver results.

If you’re looking to create a culture of creativity in your organization, ask yourself these questions:

1) Are you giving people to step outside their job roles to safely and comfortably express creative ideas?

2) Are you empowering the right people at the right time to take control and bring about delivery on the creative process?

3) Are you recognizing and rewarding people for both being creative and taking the reins to guide the team or project to success?

* Image credit: Creative Commons

Cooperation? Competition? Coopertition? What’s the Best Approach for Success?

Recognize This! – The Olympics offer us lessons to apply in the workplace on how to achieve both individual and organization success.

How competitive is your workplace? Is it a good type of competition or one that breeds dissension, disharmony and, ultimately, disengagement?

A recent survey reported by NBC shows 96% of senior managers think employees are more competitive with one another than they were a decade ago. As the article points out, this isn’t all that surprising with recent history of massive layoffs and people grappling to hold onto their jobs.

And, really, isn’t a little healthy competition good for business? It can generate innovation and excitement and I’ve yet to see a sales team that doesn’t compete to some extent with each other.

But there is a line where the competitive spirit devolves into the destructive, which means:

“People will try harder to stand out individually, in some cases even if it comes at the expense of succeeding as a group.”

The Olympics are arguably one of the most competitive endeavours out there. How can they not be? But let’s look at the sport of gymnastics for a moment. Each team competes as both a team and as individuals. Each individual’s performance contributes to the team’s ultimate success. So, while members of a team are ostensibly competing against each other in any given event, they are simultaneously co-operating with each other, encouraging and helping team members to achieve their very best individual performance to ensure ultimate team success as well.

With the Olympics beginning today, think about how this spirit of individual competitive success driving co-operative team success could play out in your team or organization as a whole. Are you creating a healthy culture of co-operative competition?

Whither Leaders?

Recognize This! – Leaders do more than lead. Managers do more than manage. They must also demonstrate your desired culture and values daily in everything they do.

I’ve been thinking about leaders and managers lately, with my thoughts running the gamut from “Where have all the good ones gone?” to “Are we expecting too much of them?” to “What exactly are we expecting of leaders/managers in the workplace today?”

These topics are top-of-mind for me because with companies and clients I work with, we’re trying to do something different. We want to help them create a new culture of recognition, not just another employee recognition program. And to do that – true, fundamental, culture change – requires managers being 100% behind the effort and change management principles.

Chris Edmonds, an author and strategic thinker I respect greatly, said this on the topic in his Cool Culture blog:

“Wouldn’t it be great to have an authentically ‘friendly’ work place? Does your organizational culture provide a courteous, safe, inspiring environment where people thrive, where work gets done, customers are wow’ed daily, and stakeholders are equally thrilled?

“Creation of a truly friendly work environment for ALL staff, from senior leaders to front line employees, does not happen casually. It happens only when senior leaders are intentional about their corporate culture, when they place equal emphasis on performance AND values demonstration.”

Creating that kind of workplace environment – one in which employees will naturally want to engage, I argue – is reliant on managers taking on the true leadership role inherent in their position. And research backs this up. An article in Fast Company that’s making the rounds lately, reported on this:

“Emotions are contagious. The more people we see expressing a particular feeling, the more likely we are to adopt it ourselves, amplifying it in the process. …

“In a series of experiments published in Motivation and Emotion, we found that simply placing participants in the same room as a highly motivated individual improved their motivation and enhanced their performance. But when we paired participants with a less motivated individual, their motivation dwindled and their performance dropped.

“Surprisingly, when we asked participants if their performance had been influenced by the person working in their room, they said absolutely not. The effect had, in other words, occurred unconsciously.

“We call this motivational synchronicity and argue that it’s a byproduct of the way our brains have evolved. By unconsciously mimicking the motivation of those around us, we better relate to one another—a useful habit in the evolutionary past, when belonging to a group could mean the difference between life and death.”

So, we need leaders to lead. We need them to demonstrate through their own behaviors what is acceptable and desirable in this new culture we’re trying to create.

But managers/leaders are human, a reality Trish McFarlane pointed our brilliantly in a recent post on her HR Ringleader blog:

“The misconception is that all leaders are strong. The truth is that leaders have moments of weakness and doubt like everyone else, they just dig deep and find a way to step up to the risk or challenge and set the tone to keep everyone else calm and on target.

“So today, if you reflect on leaders you have admired in your career, I think you’ll see that they were not always strong. They had moments of doubt and times where there was not a clear path to follow. They were able to overcome those fears though and be someone other people could look to for guidance and stability.”

And that’s the key point. When you’re looking for the person to promote into that leadership or managerial position, don’t look purely at skills or past performance as individual contributor. Look especially for those who can rise above in times of stress and fear and doubt to live your culture so that those who follow them can do the same.

4 Tips to Ensure Your Company Survives the Transition to a New Senior Leader

Recognize This! – Build a strong culture based on core values that mean something to individual employees.

We’ve all read the stories of the new CEO stepping into a strong company culture. The good CEOs express various concerns around wanting to preserve what is strong in the culture and company, etc. Now think how much higher the pressure would be if you were the daughter of the company founder, coming in as CEO into an organization in which both of your parents as well as your uncle would be among your employees?

That’s the situation Cathy Choi found herself in when she stepped into the role of president of Bulbrite, as reported in The New York Times “Corner Office” column.

1) Build a culture based on allegiance to the company, not the person.

As the company grew and transitioned leadership from her father to herself, Ms. Choi needed to ensure employees were also able to transition their loyalty from her father. Wisely, she realized the potential to recreate the same problem by transferring loyalty to herself. Instead, she wanted employees to be loyal to the organization, the team as a whole, and the brand promise. Some would argue this is a problem for small businesses. I disagree. We only have to look to hero CEOs like Richard Branson, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs for examples.

No one can continue as CEO forever. The question becomes, how do strong leaders make this transition and not create a situation that can cut down a strong culture. Ms. Choi offers strong suggestions.

2) Create core values for the organization based on the core personal values of the employees.

As part of her effort to create a company culture employees would want to be loyal to and engage in, Ms. Choi worked with them to create core values. Her approach differed from most, however, in that she first asked what people enjoyed doing when not at work and why. That last – the “why” – is most critical as it got to the heart of employees’ personal value system. These could then be translated into corporate values that made sense for Bulbrite.

3) Define behaviors that support the value system.

Like many companies, one of the values for Bulbrite became “Integrity.” This is a strong value and certainly one that is important. But unless behaviors that define what “integrity” looks like in the daily work, any organization with that value runs the risk of becoming the next Enron. Ms. Choi avoided this by also clearly defining what behaviors employees should demonstrate in their daily work.

4) Hire, manage and recognize according to those values.

Once you’ve gone to all that work, you must be willing to hire, fire, manage and recognize according to those values. If you’re diligent, someone whose personal value system doesn’t align simply won’t enjoy working in your culture and will self-select out. Recognizing people for living the values reinforces for everyone the importance of the values and associated behaviors to the organization. Incorporating those values into your performance management system so success is defined around them does the same.

What would your tips to a new president or CEO be?

Learn Intuit's Secret to Recognition Success: Webinar August 2, 1:00pm (EDT)

Recognize This! – Learning from others’ success makes our own path to success that much straighter.

Intuit has been a trusted partner of ours for, oh, many years now. I’ve had the opportunity to share Intuit’s incredibly strong results thanks to strategic recognition over the years, including double digit increases in employee engagement sustained over many years.

Even more importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to share the stage in various HR industry forums with Jennifer Lepird, senior compensation business partner at Intuit. Now, we’re bringing that insight to you in my webinar with Intuit next week, August 2, 1:00 (Eastern).

Register for the webinar and learn how Intuit used strategic recognition to increase employee engagement and unify its workforce around the world. Jennifer will also share:

How Intuit unified its global workforce through recognition
The significant business impact of strategic recognition
How recognition serves as an ongoing performance management tool

For background on the power and role of strategic recognition at Intuit, you may be interested in these earlier posts:

2 Perspectives: What It Takes to Engage Employees

Recognize This! – Defining employee engagement isn’t nearly as important as creating an environment in which employees want to engage.

I, among many others, write fairly often about employee engagement. Indeed, the importance of strategic, social employee recognition to creating a company culture in which employees would want to engage has been a primary topic for Globoforce for more than 10 years now.

During that time, more and more people – HR pros and consultants alike – have jumped on the engagement bandwagon, and with good reason. Employee engagement is far different from employee satisfaction and measures much more of real value to an organization, such as how well the employee understands the goals of the organization and how committed he or she is to giving discretionary effort to achieve those goals. Now, isn’t that much more valuable than knowing how satisfied the employee is with the coffee in the café or with the general working conditions?

If employee engagement has become almost de rigueur, why do I and so many others keep researching it and writing about it? Because it’s critical and must be kept at top of mind for those who can fundamentally impact the factors of engagement.

To that point, HR consultancy ETS recently issued a new report on engagement and what it is that makes employees want to give the discretionary effort that’s the hallmark of employee engagement – to “go the extra mile.”

“Titled Getting employees to go the extra mile, the report highlights the following as the three most significant motivators that lead to employees being more prepared to go above and beyond their job description:

Employee’s role – understanding what is expected in a given role and how this supports business goals

Leadership – employees believing in leaders

Communication – employees feeling free to communicate upwards within the company”

In a similar vein, SCInc, a learning and development consulting company, wrote about the importance of alignment in employee engagement, a topic I’ve discussed before. SCInc’s point is that true engagement is only achieved when employees can answer “yes” to both of these questions:

“I like my work and I do it well.” (maximum satisfaction)

“I help achieve the goals of my company.” (maximum contribute)

“Engagement happens when the job tasks assigned to an employee are aligned to the department, team or organizational goals, and at the same time tap into an employee’s natural talent, proficiency and passion.”

What both studies point to is the simplicity and the complexity of true employee engagement – employees know what you need them to do, why you need them to do, and they want to get it done.

What’s your preferred definition of employee engagement?

3 Ideas to Retain Top Young Talent When Career Paths Are Scarce

Recognize This! – Boomers are about to surpass Gen Y in the workplace.

Steve Boese (another go-to blogger of mine for anything relevant and important in the moment in HR) recently pointed out this alarming statistic: For the first time since these things started being tracked (1950), we are on the cusp of the number of employees aged 55 and older (Baby Boomers) surpassing those aged 25-34 (Gen Y). (Click through for Steve’s post to see a chart that makes this very clear.)

Let that sink in for a moment. Very soon, the average organization will have more employees nearing retirement than mid-career employees ready and able to take their place. This is especially surprising to me as it’s the generation in the middle – Gen X – that’s far smaller than Boomers or Gen Y, but that’s not mentioned in this chart. Gen Y is larger than the Boomers, and yet they’re about to be surpassed by Boomers in the workforce.

Of course, there are obvious reasons why this may be, including those employees who would typically retire at 65 remaining in the workplace much longer due to the recent recession and loss of planned retirement funds. Regardless, the reality remains the potential lack of career path for those who typically at this stage rapidly advance in their careers.

If you can’t offer a clear career path, what do you do to keep these young, highly motivated, talented employees on board and engaged with your organization? This article offers a few ideas, but I don’t think they go far enough. Here are a 3 more ideas to create career paths for young, talented individuals.

Ensure all employees understand very clearly the value they and their efforts bring to the organization with frequent, timely recognition and detailed feedback.
Continue to train and develop employees in the roles they are in. Skills can always be improved.
Allow employees to invest some increment of “work time” in creative ideas and outlets that could bring benefits to your organization, e.g., Google’s “20 percent time.”

What other creative ideas are there for retaining young, top talent when career paths aren’t evident?

3 Requirements for Good Performance Management

Recognize This! – Forced ranking is a proven failure. So are traditional approaches to employee incentives.

Yesterday, I jumped on the bandwagon of everyone commenting on the evisceration of Microsoft’s forced ranking performance management system. So, if that’s not the solution for better performance management, what is?

Perhaps we need to start with understanding exactly why employees don’t do what we need them to do. Earlier this month, Blanchard Leader Chat pointed out research based on survey results from 25,000 managers on precisely this question. Just a few of the top 16 reasons were the obvious ones of employees don’t know what to do, how to do it, or why the should.

The next step in the breakdown, Helen Giles in HR Magazine points out is managers simply don’t know how to or can’t describe objectively for employees what good performance is. As she writes:

“Intellectually, they accept that there’s at least a degree of plausibility in the proposition that if you are investing in the expensive piece of kit that is an employee who might be costing you, let’s say, £25,000 a year, it’s wise to ensure your return on investment by setting a crystal clear specification of what you want them to deliver in terms of speed and quality of outputs and outcomes. But they simply find it devilishly difficult to do in practice.”

Helen then goes on to argue that less emphasis needs to be placed on employee engagement and more on “good old fashioned performance management.” This is all well and good, but as Personnel Today reports, managers aren’t equipped to deal with underperformance. Yes, difficult conversations are, well, difficult to have. But they can be made easier with more data.

And that’s my point with this post. Good performance management of employees requires 3 things:

Good direction – Strategic, social recognition solutions make it clear for employees exactly what is expected from them, both in terms of what needs to be accomplished as well as how it should be done.
Good data – Opening up a strategic recognition program to all employees to both give and receive means you’ll have vastly more data points around who is living your core values in their daily work as they contribute to achieving your key objectives.
Good discussions – With this expanded data now available in real time, managers have at their fingertips the data to share with employees at a glance where they’re doing well and how they can improve. Critically, because managers have also built stronger relationships with employees by giving good direction through positive feedback more frequently and in a more timely way than just at an annual review, it’s easier for managers to discuss areas for improvement and how employees can do so.

What do you see as key requirements for good performance management?

What Traditional Incentives & Forced Ranking Performance Management Have in Common

Recognize This! – Creating a big winners’ circle is as important in performance management as in incentives, or unintended consequences will likely result.

In the last couple of weeks, countless news sources and bloggers have taken a swipe at Microsoft for their forced ranking system and a Vanity Fair article calling it “the most destructive process inside Microsoft.”

Now, readers of my blog know I’m no fan of forced ranking systems, having heard too many first-hand stories of the internal problems it can cause.

In this latest imbroglio, most of what I’ve read one way or another talks about the last sentence in this quote from the Vanity Fair article:

“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

I’m more interested in the first part of that sentence. That description of how forced ranking performance management systems work is also one of the best I’ve seen on how incentives work. From day one, you know just how many “winners” you can have. And no matter how good any of the rest of the people are, once those “winners” are identified, you’ll never enter the winner’s circle.

Fundamentally, that’s not any different than a traditional incentives program set up in a call center, for example, in which employees are told, “The two people who close the most calls in X number of hours will win the prize.” Yes, but what about the next three people who didn’t close as many calls but did create strong, lasting, positive customer relationships in the calls they did close but spent a little more time on.

Once again, it’s the law of unintended consequences at work. It’s no less true in the outcomes of forced ranking in performance management. Once again, quoting from the Vanity Fair article:

“This caused people to resist helping one another. It wasn’t just that helping a colleague took time away from someone’s own work. The forced curve meant that ‘Helping your fellow worker become more productive can actually hurt your chances of getting a higher bonus.’”

Think carefully about how you’re directing the focus of your employees. Far better to broaden the winners circle so all have the opportunity to participate and focus them instead on what really matters most – every employee living out your core company values as they work to achieve your strategic objectives.

My CEO, Eric Mosley, put it better in this short video:

What unintended consequences have you seen from forced ranking performance management systems?

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