Archives January 2024

I’ve said it

You may have said it

You probably had it said to you.

It goes like this:

The boss proudly says: “I have an open-door policy!” And then they state, “Feel free to bring your problems to me, but bring a solution with it.”

Sounds good?

We believe we are creating high employee engagement.

We think we are encouraging creative thinking.

We hope we are developing future leaders.

What is wrong with that?

What if our high-minded, forward-looking leadership ideas are shutting people down?

Read more about words that shut you down

Let’s pull his apart:

First, you announced an ‘open-door policy, BUT’ … ‘but’ tells the listener that you do not mean what you just said. It implies there are conditions.

Then you say you want people to bring you their problems with the qualifications they need to get solutions.

If they had solutions, they wouldn’t need you to help figure it out.

You may very well have shut down all the people who are too afraid to bring problems to you because they don’t have a solution to recommend.

Having people come to your office is a demonstration of the power you have over them.

A better approach is to not hide behind your desk; narrow the power differential by going to them, to their workplace, so you can see what is going on.

Ask open-ended questions, like what is going on? Do you understand where your work fits into the company? Is there anything getting in the way of you meeting your objectives?

Read more about asking the right questions

What Does This Look Like?

I had an employee who made a series of small and seemingly insignificant requests whenever I stopped by his work site.

With each request, I listened and took it under advisement.

And I either addressed his suggestion or responded as to why I couldn’t.

Read more about building trust

Over time, we established a high level of confidence.

Eventually, he mentioned that a piece of equipment was being misused and offered a solution that saved over $50,000 in the first year.

He was a good employee and worked in another location than I did.

He’d seen bosses come and go and had no reason to trust that I would ever have fixed anything.

So, the odds of him walking into my office to share his ideas were slim to nil.

So, tell me something: how would my ‘bring me solutions, not problems’ speech work out?

Recently, someone asked me how I know whether a client will succeed in achieving organizational health.

Read what organizational health is

It is a great question.

While several factors are involved in making such a prediction, I’m convinced that one indicator demonstrates that a client really “gets it” and is likely to experience the transformation that only organizational health can bring about. Though that indicator isn’t directly related to teamwork, Clarity, communication or systems, it connects all these disciplines in a way that nothing else can.

What I’m talking about are meetings.

Yes, meetings.

Not the kind of meetings that non-healthy organizations have, where every issue under the sun gets thrown onto an agenda, nothing seems to get decided, and unimportant topics and PowerPoint presentations take up valuable time. Executives check their watches, waiting for the painful ritual to end.

I’m talking about meetings with Clarity, focus and intense interaction.

Most of our clients immediately understand the importance of the model of the meeting I propose, and they excitedly adopt it. Adoption is rarely a challenge, as my approach is simple and practical. The more significant obstacle they face – and this is a litmus test – is whether they will have the discipline and courage to stay with those meetings over the long haul and keep passionately focused on the most critical issues.

Solving a problem is one thing; continuing to exploit that solution after its novelty has worn off is another. Too many leaders struggle with discipline, getting bored with consistency and continuity and searching for something new and exciting. And many of them, even if they do stick to the structure of their meetings, lack courage when entering the danger around difficult topics, choosing a more harmonious path instead.

How Healthy is our team? Take the survey

The myth is that meetings are inherently flawed.

 For some reason, we have accepted that meetings are a necessary evil of organizational life. Worse, we think all meetings are painful and unproductive time wasters.

But the fact is, bad meetings are a reflection of bad leaders. Worse yet, they take a more devastating toll on a company’s success than we realize.

Fortunately, for those willing to challenge the notion that meetings are unfixable, it is possible to transform what is now tedious and debilitating into something productive, focused, and energizing.

However, the key to improving meetings has nothing to do with better preparation, agendas or minutes. To address the problem, leaders must understand why they are so bad, take a contrarian view of meetings and apply a few basic guidelines.

Meetings are bad due to two basic problems.

• First, meetings are boring.
• Second, most meetings lack context and purpose. They are a confusing mix of administrivia, tactics, strategy and review, all creating unfocused, meandering and seemingly endless conferences with little resolution or Clarity.

The Meeting Agenda That Creates Drama and Clarity

            Lightning Round (Report) – (What and where does each individual need help on work that is deemed the “Most Important Right Now”)

            Organizational Clarity – (Confirm Clarity – every time to ensure the meeting is focused on the right work)

1. 1. 1. Why Do We Exist?
      2. How Do We Behave
      3. What Do We Do?
      4. How Will We Succeed?

What Is Most Important Right Now? (Thematic Goal)

How to decide what is the most important thing to be working on

Today’s Topics (should be directly connected with achieving the Thematic Goal)

1. 1. 1. Topics for discussion
      2. Topics for strategic meetings – are there subjects so strategic and essential that they require their own meeting
      3. Decisions
      4. Cascading Communications Messages

How to be the Chief Reminder Officer

Closing Thoughts

The fact is, running a healthy organization is neither sexy nor comfortable.

Leaders who want to be stimulated and entertained more than they want their companies to succeed will often find it too taxing.

They’ll be easily tempted by the latest fad or flavour of the month, which almost always means their meetings will become scattered, unfocused and inconsistent.

What is particularly ironic about all of this is that eventually and inevitably, those meetings become boring.

And so, here is my advice to any leader considering the journey toward making his or her organization healthy: know that one of your primary responsibilities, perhaps the most important, is ensuring that your meetings are outstanding.

Make them a constant, living example of teamwork, Clarity and communication.

As unsexy as that may seem, there is no greater predictor of organizational health than well-run meetings. 

99% of being a leader has everything to do with interpersonal relationships and social interactions.

And not every interaction is with someone you like.

Read more about working with that SOB in Accounting

The book Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute is easy to read and written in the form of a fable.

The gist of the book is that conflict between people is based on our self-deception that we view others as either a help or hindrance and begin to feel we are more critical than others.

Whether it is a family member or that ‘idiot’ at work, this perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We inflate our self-worth while deflating the other person until we rationalize our behaviour by blaming the other person.

How does the book suggest how we can get past this self-deception?

1. Have empathy. Treat people like people. When you are in the box and are being self-deceptive, you treat others as objects, not as human beings.  

This doesn’t mean you don’t fire someone who isn’t right for a job; firing can be done by seeing the other person as an object or as a person among people.

2. Don’t let your expectations affect your view of someone’s actions. One way of being in the box is having a view of a person or the world and then fitting all the evidence to reinforce your view.  

Suppose you expect someone to be a particular way. In that case, you view their actions differently. “we subconsciously begin to ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our worldviews, since we surround ourselves with people and information that confirm what we already think.”

3. When you betray your sense of what you should do for another, you begin to see the world in a way that justifies your betrayal. And that leads to blaming others and viewing yourself as a victim.

For example, if you are sure that SOB is a jerk, everything that person does will begin to reinforce that perception, Even if he is doing the right thing.

4. Self-betrayal leads to self-deception. When you engage in self-deception, you are in the box. You exaggerate your virtues, inflate the faults of others, and emphasize factors that support your self-deception.  

 When you betray your core values, you explain the betrayal by deceiving yourself.  

5. Being in the box leads others to be in the box. By justifying your view of the world and acting and communicating accordingly, others will develop a view of you that causes them to be in the box. 

The leadership self-betrayal results when we don’t do what is right and justify that action or inaction to protect our egos. This leads to us shifting the blame onto others. We start to view others as activating or stumbling blocks – they help or hinder us.

This book’s message is that the problem often lies within ourselves, and only through self-awareness can we move forward.

I wish I had read this book in my twenties when I was starting my leadership journey … except I suspect I had deceived myself and was so self-absorbed that it would have been lost on me.

As is most good life advice.