Management Craft

More on the Kindle and the Power of Sharing Your Goals

If you read the comments from my last post, you know that I had a surprise waiting for me when I woke up this morning. Herman, a friend and fellow blogger and business book author, decided to send me a Kindle. What a huge gift - I am blown away with surprise and delight and gratitude. The reason I am sharing this with you is not to brag or gloat - I am humbled by Herman's gift. I want to share this because Herman's story reinforces the gargantuan power of small actions - my favorite butterfly effect. Here's a portion of the email Herman sent me this morning (Herman said it was OK to share it):

Meeting you was a great event for me this past year.  I am sure I would have made progress in my efforts to start a blog and get attention for my books…but a special person arrived in the form of Lisa Haneberg and made my progress leap ahead.  Starting on November 26th there will be a Daily Hermanism given with a brief comment by yours truly everyday on over 500 radio stations across America.  The wing flapping you started on your trip to Baltimore has now had super results in achieving our goals.

In the January edition of Spirit Magazine, the Southwest Airlines publication, there will be a feature on HERMAN and more people will be made aware of my work.

Last week I visited the University of Wisconsin and Salisbury University where wonderful college kids embraced Hermanisms.  Today I visit another college.  My wings are flapping all the time.

And so, Lisa Haneberg…to honor your help in all of this…I have ordered Kindle for you and it will be delivered to your doorstep in 3 to 5 days.  If you already have it, or don’t want it….give it to a deserving person of your choice.  Please accept this gift as my thank you for the inspiration you bring others everyday.

It feels kind of strange sharing this because I know it might seem like I am tooting my horn. Look beyond this, please, and consider the examples of focused action (which I put in bold type). A conversation that I had with Herman (perhaps a total of two or three conversations) in which he shared his goals and what he wanted to do with his career and book was in some small way catalytic. Herman saw the spark of possible forward momentum and ran with it. What I did for Herman was nothing that we all can't do for each other on any day of the week.

I don't say it like this to diminish the importance or value. I love being a catalyst and think it is the best work in the world. But we all can and do play the role of catalyst and when we do, we help change the world one situation at a time.

I know I sound like a broken record, but sharing your goals with others can be the best and most powerful thing you do to put your progress on the fast track. It won't happen every time, but some number of those conversations will be catalytic and if you see this happening, grab on and go for the ride.

When I wrote about the Kindle I certainly had no idea or expectation that something like this would happen. It's amazing and I am very thankful to Herman. If you want to learn more about what Herman is doing, you can find his site here and blog here.

Oh, and I can't wait until I get to give the Kindle a try! Yippee!

Kindle - Great for the Traveling Reader

Yes, I want one. Don't you?

 

Kindle is Amazon.com's new digital book reader. Yes it is a bit pricey at $399, but have you ever tried packing a lot of books and magazines and newspapers in a carry on? To me, I would just love to take the kindle and relax in my comfy chair with my morning soy latte and catch up on the daily news. So civilized in a high-tech way.

I love that you do not need to be connected to a computer to get new stuff and updates on your newspapers and blogs and magazines. Love that.

Very cool, very, very, cool. Have you been naughty or nice? How nice have you been?

I worry that I might not have been quite nice enough this year to score the Kindle. So, like any good "land of the American Dream" American, I am thinking of ways I can cram a lot of good Karma into the next few weeks. Any ideas?

Notes from a Road Trip

I have a ton to get done this week and thought I would start by getting organized - taming the stacks on my desk. I have this habit of partially using spiral bound notebooks. So I have 5 or 6 on my desk right now, all with notes to myself and all with a few blank pages. It's not a good thing because I might be missing something. So today I am going through them and getting rid of what I can.

In one notebook were these notes and I thought you might find them interesting on this rainy Monday (it's rainy here in Seattle).

The world is affected one connection as a time.

One conversation at a time.

One act of generosity at a time.

Micro connections lead to macro change.

Small - especially when it is real and connecting - becomes big.

"Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly." Proverb

What if you don't expect something, but embrace it when offered?

Are you ready for the holiday blahs?

We have reached the time of year when it is tough to keep people focused and engaged. Should you even try? Interestingly, the less you try, the more people will get done. Chill out on the regular meetings and let people use this slower time - relatively speaking, so some workplaces will still move like a hummingbird on crack - to get caught up on planning, projects, organization, and finishing off those nasty little to-dos that have been piling up in your in-box.

Freedom from meetings and fewer coworkers around to badger each other means that those remaining can eat, drink, be merry and get things done.

Here are a couple interesting posts to kick off a week of reflection:

Do you use huddles, or stand-ups? David from Agile Management discusses this ad-hoc fast meeting style.

Slow Leadership offers this post called, How Sales Contests Kill Sales. Here, here. this is a double edged sword, though because although I agree with the science and have seen incentives kills a work culture, I also know that it is hard to compete for top sales talent without a decent sales incentive plan. Sales professionals demand it and they seem convinced that it helps them perform better (which it does, but mostly because of the social construction of reality, not because sales incentives are a great idea). Sales contests also kill the culture, but that's another matter.

Richard Florida offers this groovy graphic that shows what makes creative people creative. chicken and egg question here: If you take on these "ways of being" will it make us more creative or does creativity produce these ways of being? I would guess the answer is "both," so go be these ways and make something new happen!

Want to use this season to relax and recharge? Zen Habits offer 20 ways to quiet the mind.

And here's a great quote from Ralph Stayer, CEO of Johnsonville Foods:

If it is to be, it is up to me. If it is up to me, it shall be.

Will You Please Vote for Two Weeks to a Breakthrough - it costs nothing and would mean a lot!

Confession:

I am feeling a bit needy and greedy this week with your time. When I look at this week's posts, the first asked for a vote, the second was normal and now this one is asking for another vote. Geez.

Next week it will be all about YOU - good content o'plenty, I promise :-)

The pitch: 800CEOREAD is doing a "Best of" award with books in a lot of categories. Authors were asked to submit their books (had to be published in 2007). I submitted my book, Two Weeks to a Breakthrough for the "Personal Development" category. 800CEOREAD will determine the BEST OF a few ways and one way is through reader votes.

I would appreciate your vote. It is quick and easy and you don't have to lick any stamps. Just go here

VOTE HERE

And select my book cover (tip: they are listed alphabetical by title, so mine is in the right hand section, 2/3 of the way down the page). It takes a minute to load. Please keep in mind that although they have several categories for this BEST OF awards program, they have listed ALL the books together on this voting page (there are a lot). Here is what the book cover looks like:

I realize that there are many wonderful books on this list by many wonderful authors. But please pick Two Weeks. Why?

1. Purely selfish, "Lisa wants to win" reasons.
2. More compelling - I love this book and I know it has made a difference for some people and has the potential to make a difference for others. I get wonderful emails and calls from folks who have told me this.

Help me catalyze more flapping and more breakthroughs! Thanks!

Here is a brief post from the Breakthrough blog about the power of flapping.

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The Butterfly Effect

As a trainer and executive coach, I have seen thousands of tiny acts make big differences. It’s very cool to observe. The question that turns the meeting on its end. The sudden inspiration to visit a museum that leads to a career change. The phone calls you make day after day and that finally pay off big. The new method that becomes your signature. Sometimes the impact is immediate, like when a blogger posts about his favorite new gadget and sales go through the roof in under and hour. Sometimes the big affects are delayed, like when you rediscover your youthful ambitions by strolling though an old photo album.

Often, our small actions start a chain reaction of other actions that build and develop until – POW – something happens.

1. A job opening is posted at your company. It’s not exactly a match to your past experience, but you find this job highly appealing.
2. You decide not to apply.
3. You mention the job to your wife at dinner. She picks up in the tone of your voice that you want to apply and encourages you.
4. You don’t apply.
5. The next day, you go for a walk during lunch and see street performers. You decide to apply for the promotion.
6. You don’t get the job. The news is tough to take because you had already mentally moved out of your current job. It’s no longer interesting or challenging.
7. Over the next few months, you go to more association functions and talk to people in a different way than you used to.
8. Prior to the job posting, you went to these functions and acted like a smug jerk (you weren’t looking for a job). But now you want to learn about what’s going on and whether the grass might actually be greener somewhere else.
9. You click with a couple people. You exchange cards and a few emails. You have coffee with a like-minded colleague who works right around the corner from your office.
10. She just heard ABC is launching a new division. She can tell that your interest is piqued and suggests you call ABC and ask for information.
11. You put off making the call.
12. You mention the ABC project to your wife and she can see in your eyes you want to call. She encourages you to call.
13. You don’t call.
14. You read an article about Richard Branson’s new Spaceport venture in New Mexico.
15. Your boss does something stupid at work.
16. You make a call and talk to the expansion leader at ABC. As it turns out, you met him at an association function a couple months ago and sat at the same table for dinner. Luckily for you, this occurred after you stopped being a smug jerk at these meetings.
17. You have coffee with him the next day and – POW – your career takes a new and exciting direction.

Tiny snowflakes that together create an avalanche of change. If any one action did not occur, the outcome would have been very different.

This idea that small changes can make a big difference is nothing new to those of you who follow chaos theory. The butterfly effect is a widely popularized interpretation of one of the key elements of chaos theory. Simply put, the butterfly effect says that something as seemingly insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings in the rainforests of Brazil has the potential to trigger a tornado in Texas.  The flapping wings stir the air and the effect grows into a meteorological event of epic proportions. If the butterfly hadn’t flapped its wings, the tornado wouldn’t have occurred. If the butterfly had flown in a different direction or been in Tahiti instead of Brazil, maybe the result would have been a typhoon in the South Pacific or a hailstorm in Russia instead of a tornado in Texas.

The butterfly effect has its roots in something that mathematicians refer to as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. That means that even small and seemingly insignificant changes at the start of a process described by certain kinds of equations can produce wildly different and practically unpredictable results. During the early 1960s, American meteorologist Edward Lorenz was developing some of the first computer simulations of weather and wanted to repeat the last steps of a previous simulation. Because computers of the time were slow and difficult to use, one day Lorenz tried to save some time by using the intermediate output from a previous simulation as input for a new simulation. Doing so would save him the trouble of repeating calculations that weren’t of interest and give him the results he needed.  Or so Lorenz thought. To his surprise, the results of his second simulation were much different than the results of his first simulation even though they should have been virtually identical. Lorenz eventually discovered the source of the difference: the first simulation used results calculated to six decimal places but he used value rounded to three decimal places as input for the second simulation. That small difference in starting values produced two completely different sets of results. Mathematicians had long known about sensitivity to initial conditions, but Lorenz’s work emphasized how important they can be in real-world applications such as weather forecasting.

Although Lorenz originally quoted a colleague who had made reference to the flapping of seagull wings, he eventually switched to butterflies and used the title “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” for a presentation at the 1972 meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.  The practical implication is not literally that a butterfly can cause a tornado half a world away, but rather that sensitivity to initial conditions makes long-term weather forecasting a practical impossibility.

Lorenz eventually simplified his model and reduced the number of equations from twelve to three. He discovered that in addition to having sensitivity to initial conditions, for certain input values the system would change over time but repeatedly return to certain states or combinations of variables known as attractors. Scientists and mathematicians working on chaos theory have since discovered many other kinds of attractors, but the particular set discovered by Lorenz continue to bear his name and are often used as a classic example of deterministic chaos.

Chaos theory is cool. We can see a sensitivity to initial conditions in many aspects of our lives. Small changes in new employee orientation reduces turnover. Getting good running shoes reduces injuries and could impact the overall health of someone 15 years later. A new job is posted. Little things can make a big difference.

There are three beliefs that will help you put the big power of small actions to work in creating breakthroughs and generating a life you love. The first belief is that you are not in control. You need to let go of any need to know which action, or combination of actions, is going to make things happen. In chaotic systems, and your life is a chaotic system, you are not in control. Some actions will impact the system and others won’t seem to make any difference at all. They may become important at a later time or never.

Instead of trying to control what you cannot, focus on putting lots of directionally aligned actions out into the world. This is where the power of small actions repeatedly applied comes into play. You don’t want to waste time with actions that do not line up with your goals. Focus is always important. If you can take a few small and aligned actions every day, you will experience breakthroughs and produce great results.

The second belief I recommend you adopt is that you will be more successful if you take act from a position of sincerity, passion, service orientation, and gratitude. The magical and mystical powers of small actions will flourish more when people sense that you are working on something larger than yourself. If you believe that you are somehow entitled or due for a breakthrough, this will come through in your actions and dull their affect. This belief gets to the question of why you do what you do. What’s driving you to succeed? If you need to see a tangible result from every action you take, you are measuring success in a way that will hinder your success.

The third belief that will serve you is that life is about the journey not the goal. Ten years from now, you will recall and tell stories about your experiences along the way, not the end result. Goals and aspirations provide some focus for how to live today and you need focus to feel great about where you are heading. Where you end up is not nearly as important as how you got there. Pour your energy and focus into today’s journey. If you do this, your tomorrow will be much better. When you adopt this belief, you will increase the power and appeal of your little actions. Small deeds can be done today. They exist in the present.

Flap your butterfly wings. Flap, flap, flap. Each small action is another flap. You never know the impact each tiny flap might have. Today’s flap might catalyze tomorrow’s blizzard of changes. Who knows what possible!

Can we expect employees to be great team members?

I was having dinner last night with a group of clients and the topic of team strength and expectations came up. The question we bantered is whether we can expect strong team cohesion and cooperation?

The short answer is YES. As managers and leaders, we can expect employees to work as a team. We can expect this and we can hire and fire based on this expectation.

But if that's all we consider, we might be hiring and firing a lot.

The key question in my mind is how the job and work is set up and whether it is designed to enhance and encourage a team orientation.

If you have a proponderance of individual rewards - incentives, bonuses - you should expect that people will act and decide based on what optimizes their individual earnings.

In other words, if you have a system that is set up to stress individual performance (even more so if competition is also an element), you can expect team, but you will not likely get it.

Sure, you can try to compensate by doing team building and talking about the importance of collaboration and cooperation, but realize your efforts will be a bit hollow. If team is important, why not design jobs and motivational elements to communicate this?

And if you choose not to do this, why waste your time on efforts that won't work? Perhaps your time will be better spent to optimize individual systems.

What do you think?

Which Book Cover Should I Use?

You can't judge a book by its cover but people buy books based on the cover every day. Covers are important! I asked people to submit options for the cover of the soft cover version of High Impact Middle Management because I am putting out a revised edition and do not like the old one.

And you came through! Here are nine cover designs - all of which I think are better than the original. I would like to thank the folks who took the time to work on and submit these covers. If you are writing a book and need a cover and want to contact any of these talented folks, let me know and I will hook you up.

Which cover do you think I should use? Tell me in the comments which number cover you like best and why. Here they are listed in no particular order:

Cover #1 (Below)

Cover #2 (Below)

Cover #3 (Below)

Cover #4 (Below)

Cover #5 (Below)

Cover #6 (Below)

Cover #7 (Below)

Cover #8 (Below)

Cover #9 (Below)

I can't wait to see your feedback!!!!

Do We Create Problems to Solve Them?

Here is an interesting article from the Harvard Business Review (free to view online for this month only) called Munchausen at Work. Here's the opening few sentences of this article by Nathan Bennett.

One particularly disturbing psychological disorder is Munchausen by proxy, in which a caregiver exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness in another person in order to get praise for then helping the victim. A similar pathology occurs in workplaces when employees create fictitious organizational problems, only to solve them.

What can you offer employees?

Unless you are a highly respected and sought after large company with deep financial pockets, you need to compete for talent. 95% of companies are not in a position to demand more than they can give. As HR professionals and leaders, many of us like to run a tight ship and have consistent conservative policies.

That make people feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.

And if this is the situation, the only thing you can do to get them to temporarily work harder is to throw a bunch of money at them. Alas, that will not work forever and they will go work for someone else.

I like this article from Management Issues about flexibility called, Attraction of Flexible Working Ignored by HR. I think this is sad but true.

Here's the bottom line for most companies - You have limited funds and there are some irritations that you cannot reduce (like restrictive laws or the regulatory environment at hospitals, government, shipping, finance). Your stance ought to be to be flexible wherever you can be flexible.

This is particularly true for small companies. You don't have fancy training programs or a lot of upward mobility to offer. your salaries are likely lower than what people could get working for a bigger company. You won't have a long list of benefits and likely have just the the basic health care package. Small companies, in particular, ought to be as flexible as possible.

With today's competition for top talent we need to give people reasons to want to work for us - and many companies (influenced by many HR professionals) are just not getting it.

Things to consider:

• Telecommuting. We fear that we will not get everyone's full attention if we let them work from home. This assumption only holds water if we believe that we DO have their full attention at the office. Of course we don't. People zone out and they will - in the office and at their home office.
• Flexible hours. Do you have exempt (salary, don't earn overtime pay) employees? If so, you have the opportunity to embrace the nature of what it means to be exempt. when someone is exempt, I don't count hours worked, I pay for a particular result. I know a lot of companies who treat their exempt employees like they are on the clock with rigid expectations about when they should get to work and on which days they work. sure we all have to be present for a few pesky meetings, but otherwise you should not overmanage schedules. The same goes for hourly folks except that you do need to accurately count the hours - but try to be flexible with the schedule where possible.
• Benefits. I think we need to offer more choices. Companies spend a lot of money on benefits and I would rather do a bit more work and offer a menu of benefits from which and employee can pick versus offering only one or two options. Health care is a great example - there are lots of innovative products like high deductible plans with health savings accounts that might be a win/win for certain types of employees. Instead of paying $500 per month for each employee's health care, the high deductible plan might only cost $250 per month. For employees that choose this plan, put a deposit into their health saving account of $2,000 (money that will earn interest and can be used for any health related cost and is theirs to use for life).
• Work/Life Balance. Each company has different barrier to promoting a good balance between work and life. Sometimes it is the culture, sometimes the company is too cheap to hire the number of employees needed to get the work done. Often it is both. The saying, "I run a lean company," or "We believe in running lean," are euphemisms for, "we are too cheap to hire the right number of people," and "you will be doing the work of two people." Periodic work peaks is fine, but people deserve balance and they do better work when they have a life.
• Position changes. Small organizations may not have a lot of promotion opportunities. If you have a rock star employee, be creative in letting him or her stretch his or her wings. I would rather roll the dice on a rock star than hire the mediocre person with the precise background that you seek. And if you need to modify a job to fit the person, so be it.
• Time off. Allow people to be creative with how they bundle their time off. Encourage people take their vacations (not by refusing to roll it over, that's a parental response, not an adult-adult response).

How flexible is your company?

Lessons on Coachability

I was facilitating a training session recently and was reminded of the power of coachability. Here are a couple coachability stories (both true) I recall from time to time.

Story #1: Extreme coachability in action. This is the situation that allowed me to distinguish coachability and began my research and writing about it.

I attended a two-day personal productivity session several years ago. At the beginning of the session, the lead trainer (lead) introduced us to another trainer who would be doing some parts of the class as part of his training to facilitate this class in other cities. The lead said that he would be coaching the trainee trainer (trainee) on line (in other word, as things happened).

The trainee began his first part and all was going well. Suddenly, the lead stopped the trainee and told him what he was doing wrong and why. He did this while both were standing up on the stage and so that we all could hear. The trainee acknowledged the coaching and resumed, doing the parts he had messed up over.

This stop - coaching - resume pattern continued throughout the day. I remember thinking how much I admired the trainee's strength in being able to show this level of coachability. I think most people would have found the public nature of the corrections humiliating and embarrassing.

At a break, I asked the trainee if it was hard to be coached in this way. He said that it was a gift and that he and the lead had contracted for this type of direct feedback.

Story #2: A couple years ago, I attended the Taos Writer's Conference. I took a two-day poetry class taught by Levi Romero, a wonderful New Mexican poet. At the beginning of the class, Levi asked us the following question:

"Can I hang you from the vigas?"

He was asking about the type of feedback that we were willing to hear about our poetry. Vigas are the exposed wood beams that hold up the ceiling in traditional adobe construction. Levi was asking if we could take direct and maybe harsh feedback if it was warranted. We all gave him permission to hang us from the vigas and in doing so, shifted our coachability to a deeper level. The question and the agreement reduced our resistances and opened us up for more meaningful feedback.

Being highly coachable - to the point of setting aside our egos and defense mechanisms can open us up for a higher level of learning and can teach us a few things about the self-talk that gets in the way of our success.

Two key lessons/suggestions:

1. Contract for coachability. Have the conversation about the level of feedback you want to give or receive.

2. Try  extreme coachability for one week and see what happens.