Wow what another interesting couple of weeks. Seems like once again everybody has lots to say about what the other guy is doing and not much about what they will do differently.

I am not a huge fan of our current status quo. I recognize that if you gauge it purely by the stock market we are seeing some progress, but I continue see too many things to take a break.

A recent study by Maritz Research indicates that even though the “market” has improved slightly actual employee engagement and trust in management and leadership has gone down rather than up.

I can’t say as an American that I have found the rhetoric around the campaign trail to be particularly enlightening or inspirational either.

I am sure that President Obama’s recent statement that he supports gay marriage will cause some interesting reactions as well. I happen to agree with him. I think there is a difference between support and endorse. I don’t endorse gay marriage, but I honestly don’t see why two consenting adults who are committed to a monogamous relationship and truly care about each other need to be parsed and examined and held up to some others standard of rightness.

Similarly I respect the viewpoint of religious groups and others to refrain from recognizing it and accepting it. I do however see a difference between government and individuals and religious institutions.

I think President Obama’s stand represents a degree of leadership. He has taken a firm position to accept the rights of others as long as it does not abrogate the rights of individuals to abstain from that viewpoint.

Leadership is an elusive and yet simple concept to me. It represents presenting a viewpoint and a catalyst for positive change. It is not exclusionary on its face or below the surface. I have said before I don’t necessarily believe in servant based leadership, but I do embrace service based leadership.

Servant based leadership implies to me serving a group or individual, service based on the other hand services a purpose or ideal.

When I worked for other people I probably wasn’t a very good employee. I evolved in my career where I felt like I worked for an organization or purpose rather than individuals. My loyalty was to the values and principles of the organization rather than an individual or a Board. I tried to evaluate all my actions as to their benefit to the stakeholders.

That doesn’t mean I was deliberately insubordinate. There were occasions where my supervisor and I might disagree on a process or approach and I respected that and executed as they directed. If I continuously found myself in conflict with a values issue it is a different story. I felt that I had a responsibility to voice my concerns up to and including departing the organization.

Loyalty to me expresses itself in terms of execution and the application of my best efforts rather than tenure. When I am in your organization and accepting you compensation I owe you my best work and I need to accept that criticizing the organization or its leadership is not appropriate. If I disagree I need to act as a catalyst for change and if I am unsuccessful I need to leave and find an organization more in alignment with my values.

There is a lot of interplay with my thinking and soft things like clear expectations, communications, etc.

A couple of recent articles explored this very nicely. A recent HBR blog post talked about the relative unimportance of IQ or intellectual intelligence unless it is balanced with emotional intelligence and other factors and even cited research discussing of the four types of intelligence required for highly effective leaders intellectual intelligence might be the least important.

Another article in Forbes discussed how we may have peaked on the gains from continuous improvement as we described and implemented and are seeing diminishing returns because it is too proscriptive and leaves out the people factor. I have long held this viewpoint. I feel like CI in its various forms has led to a global obsession with certification. People display their certifications like a caricature of the South American generals in Marx’s brother’s movies we used to see. Do all those certifications make them better leaders or more effective? I haven’t seen it.

A lot of people are very uncomfortable when people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Howard Schultz and others talk about paying higher taxes and expecting corporate leaders to see a broader constituency than just their shareholders. Overcoming inertia is difficult.

I personally don’t see that truly meaningful change will ever come from one sector of the economy alone whether that be government, business, social services, etc. I think as our Founding Fathers intended there is also a significant role for individuals to play and we need to provide both the tools and the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for people to step up.

When I see the positive outcomes of organizations that have successfully harnessed the economic and intellectual capacity of true employee engagement I see enormous potential to change our definition of success and to build a better model. Unfortunately engagement seems more like Occupy movement and less like the Tea Party- the efforts are fragmented.

The Supreme Court and other institutions aren’t going to fix these issues. Their mandate is academic not execution. They are not accountable for providing meaningful solutions; only apply an academic filter to those proposed by others. Congress seems to be following a similar path. Senator Lugar’s opponent ran his campaign successfully not on a platform of creating meaningful change, but rather applies a partisan litmus test to all legislation and candidates to ensure it conforms to appropriate thinking. Doesn’t sound like leadership to me.

Over 200 years ago a group of citizen leaders got together and took some huge steps to redefine relationships and provide a new model. Even then they added ten amendments that suggested that they recognized that these principles and mandates would need to be evaluated from time to time for context and congruency. Pretty far thinking I would say.

Perhaps there are others out there who are prepared to step up to that challenge today. Are you among them?

As the authors explain, “Everyone has a brand, and anyone can be a strong brand. It doesn’t involve changing your personality – you can be an introvert or extrovert. And it’s definitely not about trying to be something you’re not. The difference between one personal brand and another is that the person with a strong brand utilizes his or her special qualities to make a difference in the lives of others.”

The book was originally written back in 2002, at a time when personal branding was not as evolved as it is today. But thanks to social media, we now have tools to shine as individuals, which is completely different than when only businesses were the embodiment of a brand.

McNally and Speak define a brand as “a relationship – not a statement. It is not a matter of contrived image, or colorful packaging, or snappy slogans, or adding an artificial veneer to disguise the true nature of what’s within. In fact, a ‘branded’ relationship is a special type of relationship – one that involves the kind of trust that only happens when two people believe that there is a direct connection between their value systems.” McNally and Speak clarify that a personal brand “is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes your outstanding qualities and influences that person’s relationship with you.”

So, does your personal brand accurately reflect what you want it to? You need brand dimensions (the combination of standards and style that defines the unique attributes of your brand) and a personal brand promise (a concise, meaningful, and inspiring statement that sums up the relationship you have with someone else). Then, your personal brand has great potential. But you’re not done yet.

McNally and Speak offer 11 guiding principles:
[1] Develop and refine your personal brand platform.
[2] Be brand proud.
[3] Audit your brand promise.
[4] Be authentic.
[5] Make sure the signals you send convey relevance to others.
[6] Be consistent.
[7] Make sure your package reflects your contents.
[8] Brands are known by the company they keep.
[9] Find alignment between your personal brand and your employer’s brand – if possible.
[10] Start counting relationships as part of your asset base.
[11] Go social or go home.

Since a strong, well-defined brand is an important tool if you want to be an effective leader, what would you add to this list?

GUEST POST BY DEBBIE LASKEY, MBA
Debbie Laskey has 15 years of marketing experience and an MBA Degree. She developed her marketing expertise while working in the high-tech industry, the Consumer Marketing Department at Disneyland Paris in France, the non-profit arena, and the insurance industry. Currently, Debbie is a brand marketing, social media, and employee engagement consultant to small businesses, start-ups, and non-profits. Recognized as a “Woman Making a Difference” by the Los Angeles Business Journal, Debbie has served as a judge for the Web Marketing Association’s annual web award competition since 2002. Follow Debbie on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/DebbieLaskeyMBA) and on her Blog (http://debbielaskey.blogspot.com).

“When the pace of change outside an organization becomes greater than the pace of change inside the organization, the end is near.”

John R. Walter, President, ATT

Maybe it is just my perspective, but it seems to me this might be the crossroad we are approaching.

When I read different things that are out there whether on the “news”, social media, or published I see a pattern of things that continue to leave me a bit disturbed.

I see that we are spending billions of dollars on a health care delivery system that is providing pretty adequate results at pretty high expense.

I see that presenteeism, where people show up at work, but contribute much less than their capable of because of job dissatisfaction, stress, poor management and other contributing reasons costs the U.S. economy $200 billion per year and very little innovative thinking around addressing it  concerns me.

When I see it estimated that we lose $5 trillion annually in opportunity costs related to poor hiring, management practices and organizational fit and I see minimal progress in developing better selection, development, and retention strategies it concerns me even more.

When I see C level compensation increasing at over 20% per year while average employee compensation is increasing at 2% per year and executives say “I don’t understand why my employees are unhappy” I get damn near suicidal.

I would agree that we are seeing some progress in the economy improving and in some ways that scares me the most- we might lose the inertia to make really meaningful changes without a catastrophic catalyzing event.

The part that really bothers me is that these are things we can change.

• · In the U.S we are spending 17% of our Gross Domestic Product delivering health care- 41% more than the next highest industrialized country at 11%.
• · Studies conclude that 60% of our health care expenditures are attributable to lifestyle, environment and behavior- stress, obesity and nutritional and exercise habits, but most of our focus is on delivery.
• · Our hiring and selection techniques have evolved very little. We still delegate much of this responsibility to junior people and have attempted to use technology to replace judgment. The latest brain fart is organizations that categorically refuse to consider anyone who hasn’t been consistently employed for a period of six months or longer.
• · We can build better organizations with better models and actually see improvement in every key performance indicator from profitability to sustainability and employee satisfaction, but adoption is slow.

A blog post from Bloomberg BusinessWeek earlier this week identified part of the issue perfectly described a big part of the issue earlier this week-

If you ask a CEO “What does your HR leader do?” he or she is likely to say: “You got me. I just know I need to have one.” We expect our HR execs to look after employee records, hire and train people, administer performance reviews, and see that comp and benefits practices chug along. Beyond that, the mission can get fuzzy, fast. Most CEOs I know don’t have a ready answer to the question “How does your HR leader help your organization compete?” nor do they have a handy list of must-do activities for an HR exec charged with boosting the organization’s competitive mojo.

I have worked in and around the human resources profession for over three decades and what I find to be very disturbing is the truth of that statement! What is even more disturbing is that many HR leaders aren’t any better equipped to answer it.

I participated in a survey recently of HR leaders at the C level and was mortified to see that the majority felt the most important contribution they make to their organization is compliance with various Federal and State laws, mandates, and regulations. Really?

Are you guys reading the same stuff I am?

I am not putting the blame exclusively on HR; we have a leadership shortage of crisis proportions in just about every sector of the economy.

I don’t believe we teach leadership in a meaningful way in most of our undergraduate and graduate educational programs. We teach management and functional expertise. We rarely do much better with the billions organizations spend annually in leadership training and development; the estimated transfer or application of knowledge 18 months after the training is estimated at less than 10%. The reason is because of:

• · Methodology-  we teach know what or storage memory and methods versus know how or change memory
• · Reinforcement and Foundation- we don’t look at things like trust, congruency, and the consistent application of leadership and management principles.

In the U.S especially we have long been enamored with explicit or storage memory. We build shrines to high IQ.

Great article the other day in Forbes discussing how IQ as a standalone is highly over rated; the author talks about how emotional, moral, and body intelligence in concert with intellectual intelligence are what really creates the most highly effective leaders. Sounds a lot like being and managing from the perspective of the whole person to me!

The really good news is that these intelligences are not static; you can expand your capacity.

I am concerned that when I see a lot of the rhetoric flying around I am not seeing solutions or change methodologies.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the constitutionality of the Obamacare legislation; they have no interest or obligation in exploring alternative solutions or addressing the societal issues the legislation is trying to address. I am not endorsing the model in its entirety, I think it has serious flaws, but it is recognition of some of the issues that we face.

I agree with many that governmental intervention is not the appropriate solution. I don’t believe any single sector of the economy can address the issues we face, nor should they. There is a significant role for the individual to play as well.

An article I read earlier in the week shared a series of characteristics of extraordinary leaders. I found the article and the audience response kind of bittersweet. It was a very well written article; that is why I shared it as did many others. The bittersweet part was that many of the characteristics that were described should be core competencies not extraordinary or assumed to be embedded in an individual’s DNA.

McKinsey published a great article on developing change leaders that embeds many of the same context points as those in the total intelligence model of intellectual, moral, emotional, and body and why it is this type of leadership that needs to be cultivated and disseminated. I also like the art metaphor that I have heard Seth Godin express and was the subject of an HBR blog post on defining your career as your art.

All of the articles I reference here are available from my LinkedIn profile in the activity section.

My colleagues at the KeyChange Institute believe that the primary purpose of leadership is to orchestrate effective change, I agree.

I think it becomes even more meaningful when that skill is coupled with the ability to drive execution; the ability to mesh strategy with reality, aligns people with goals, and achieves the promised results.

Taking on a role like this is not for the faint hearted. It is not easy work, but I would challenge anybody to tell me this is not a time where it is critically needed.

It is also a time where at least from where I sit the opportunity is wide open- I am not seeing a lot of competition for those to paraphrase Gandhi are willing to step up and be the change!

So I am sitting here at a beautiful site in South Carolina about 500 yards from the ocean. It is a good place and time for reflection.

I am lucky that way; my chosen profession as a consultant allows me time for reflection on what I do and why I do it. I have also reached a time and place in my career and my life where I choose who I work with pretty carefully to be sure there is a level of alignment between me and them. That has actually been important to me for a very long time.

I remember even as an undergraduate student when I was exploring where I wanted to spend my career thinking that somehow there was a clear linkage in my mind between people and organizations; that giving people what I would later hear described as line of sight seemed logical and compelling to me. That was well over thirty years ago when I chose to focus on a field that we then called Personnel. It has gone through multiple iterations over the years. It seems like the idea of human resources may have stuck. I have to say that over the last few years I have come not to be as comfortable with that as I once was, but I much prefer it to some of the new titles like human capital, which seem to me to be cold and impersonal. My personal preference is to think of it terms of just people or talent. Sometimes I tell people I manage intellectual property and they think I am an attorney. I tell them no, the intellectual property we think of doesn’t actually become real until we entrust it to people who apply it.

This morning I was reading a blog post from someone in the not for profit sector. He was discussing why people serve those organizations out of a sense of purpose of narcissism. I have seen people from that sector react to people from other sectors with a certain smugness or martyrdom. What they do is noble and a higher calling. Really? Maybe why you do what you do is as important as the what.

I read another article that said if you do what you love the success will follow. My experience is that is generally true, but it pays to define success. If you define success economically than perhaps public service (theoretically anyway) or working in social services may not be a good first choice.

I find that I am one of the lucky ones. For the most part my career choice fulfills both my economic and self- validation needs. Sometimes we do one thing to fulfill our economic goals and another to fulfill our personal needs. Sometimes we have to do it in stages. I don’t think that is a bad thing. Sometimes it evolves. I don’t think that is a bad thing either.

Another article today discussed leadership .I always find leadership to be a fascinating topic as well; how we define it and why people seek it. I find a number of people don’t really seek or aspire to leadership; they aspire to greater earnings or influence. I am not putting a value judgment on it; I just don’t necessarily see that as leadership.

I may see it as too abstract or idealistic, but I see leadership as more a function of change management. Perceiving a better way to do something and creating a model where people are inspired to follow you to share disseminating that model. It doesn’t mean that economic success or recognition negate it, they just aren’t the driving motivators.

I don’t think we do a great job of developing leaders in most organizations. I think in many cases we do an adequate job of teaching competencies and management, but those are about assets, not people.

There is a lot of discussion right now about the validity and value of the MBA program as taught in many institutions. Back when I was an undergraduate the MBA program seemed more focused on preparing a fairly small group of individuals for executive/senior management of organizations. You didn’t get into the program without applicable previous experience and it was most valuable to expand the context of individuals possessing technical skills or broad educational skills with the conceptual framework of managing an enterprise and the connectivity of things like marketing, finance, operations, etc. More and more MBA’s today seem to be to be more functional, they teach you how to manage assets, not relationships or talent.

We still refer to relationship management as soft skills. I find that somewhat ironic. When I read about the amount of opportunity costs of lack of effective engagement, social literacy and entitlement issues impacting the management of health and health care and related things it doesn’t seem all that soft.

Social media has certainly caused many employers some consternation. I think the idea of requesting/requiring access to employees and candidates personal social media sites to prevent and monitor what they are saying about us is both ludicrous and sad. That is another case of managing effect not cause. Doesn’t it make more sense if your employees aren’t describing you in a positive light to attempt to determine why and address it?

• · Are you hiring people whose values aren’t in alignment with the organization?
• · Are expectations and linkages to rewards not clear?
• · Are there incongruences between what you say and what you do?

I could go on, but somehow policing communications doesn’t seem likely to address those issues.

A few years ago I had the privilege of being exposed to three concepts that really impacted my thinking: Situational Leadership™, the Human Resources Pyramid™, and Congruency™.

Situational Leadership from Paul Hersey and others said that people behave differently based on their readiness and trust. The Human Resources Pyramid from Roger Deprey says that people need context, and the concept of Congruency as articulated by Ron Willingham says that if what I am asking you to do is incongruent on one of more of five different levels you will be unlikely to perform at optimal levels for a sustained period. You might notice all three of those ideas are focused on relationships between individuals and between individuals and organizations not competencies.

Some years ago I began experimenting with and sharing my own model of Moving from Compliance to Commitment™. The fundamental premise is that when people willingly and cognitively make a choice to join you their performance will be superior. I believe it is fundamental to what we now call Engagement.

I like the emerging concept of Social Gravity. Social gravity says that if you clearly articulate and consistently demonstrate both your values and your value proposition your stakeholder base will seek you out because they are naturally drawn to you.

Think about that in the context of social media, where your message and what people say about you resonates and is heard consistently not from your advertising and messaging, but from your stakeholders. The tough part is there is no singular template and you have to do the work.

For the last 120 years our models seem to be about compliance and doing things to people rather than with people. When I look at how we are doing I think we have room for significant improvement.

For me what I do now is try to help organizations address that issue of defining their values and their value proposition and building congruency with those into the fabric of their organization. I find it personally fulfilling and so far impacting those organizations that have truly embraced it in a positive way across every dimension of success from sustainability and profitability to employee retention and market share growth.

Each of us has to take our own personal journey; my advice is the closer the alignment to what you do the more likely it is you will find your own definition of success and fulfillment. Perhaps I am just too controlling to let someone else define success for me…

Pam Fox Rollin shares 42 leadership tips in her book entitled, “42 Rules For Your New Leadership Role: The Manual They Didn’t Hand You When You Made VP, Director, or Manager.”

In the words of Judy Gilbert, the Director of People Operations at YouTube: “When making the transition to a new role, even a top performer needs to exercise a different group of muscles. Pam has distilled extensive leadership lessons into simple and actionable guidelines. With the insights from this book, you can make your next start your best ever.”

Here are some of my favorite tips from Pam’s book:
• Draft your own strategic one-pager, a coherent summary of the state and trends of your industry, company, division, function, and team.
• Create your own onboarding plan – this is so much more than just setting up a phone, smartphone, laptop, and reading the Employee Procedures manual.
• Set realistic milestones – include the big rocks as well as the small pebbles.
• Surround yourself with all types of people, not just those who think like you do – your weaknesses may be their strengths, and the result will be a better functioning team.
• Make it easy for people to work with you – tell them how often you want to be updated, how you want to be contacted, any triggers that may cause you angst, etc.
• Determine how you will measure your own metrics – and help your team to measure their performance.
• Make the most of screw-ups and take ownership of mistakes.
• Organize your priorities – and deflect early requests to go off-mission.
• Grow more leaders: champion your people and be their advocate.

While there are countless leadership books that you can read on your tablet, TV, desktop computer, or in traditional print format, “42 Rules” is a must-read. But be warned. You will read the book again and again because revisiting the rules will make you a sharper and better leader.

GUEST POST BY DEBBIE LASKEY, MBA
Debbie Laskey has 15 years of marketing experience and an MBA Degree. She developed her marketing expertise while working in the high-tech industry, the Consumer Marketing Department at Disneyland Paris in France, the non-profit arena, and the insurance industry. Currently, Debbie is a brand marketing, social media, and employee engagement consultant to small businesses, start-ups, and non-profits. Recognized as a “Woman Making a Difference” by the Los Angeles Business Journal, Debbie has served as a judge for the Web Marketing Association’s annual web award competition since 2002. Follow Debbie on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/DebbieLaskeyMBA) and on her Blog (http://debbielaskey.blogspot.com).

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the immensity of the sea. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A colleague shared that quote with me earlier this week and I thought it brilliantly and succinctly summarized the essence of engagement and true employment branding.

As those of you who are familiar with me and my work know I am deeply committed to a few key concepts. Among them I include building your organization on a foundation of commitment rather than compliance and the concept of personal competency.

There are a lot of other things that inherently embedded in those ideas, but they really represent the foundational pieces.

In the first is the idea that when people come together with a shared set of values and clarity about our purpose proactively and willingly the amount of energy they will bring to that effort increases exponentially.

The second is the idea that people are whole. They perform best when we give them both an opportunity and an expectation of being present. My colleague Reut Hebron Schwartz describes it in part as kindexcellence. She would tell you there is not true kindness in letting someone meander through their life or career working at 70 or 80 percent of their capacity. Neither can you achieve excellence by simply providing someone with a template and punishing them if they do it wrong.

Social gravity is the emerging concept of describing your value proposition in such a clear way and operating with such consistency that your stakeholders including customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, and communities are drawn to you. There is a community of interests that is clear and compelling.

We have seen examples of organizations do this brilliantly although I would argue they are few and far between.

Organizations like Apple, Starbucks, Zappo’s and others use social gravity. Their stakeholders self-select. They don’t spend zillions of dollars on recruiting, retention or even marketing. People know what they represent and seek them out.

I read some interesting excerpts from the Steve Jobs biography. When he was questioned about being a control freak and abusive he responded by saying “if I was as bad as they say do you think people would have stayed?” Individuals who chose to remain with Apple saw something greater than just Jobs and his vision. They made a cognitive choice to give up other opportunities.

Social gravity doesn’t look the same in every organization. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we have really developed an infatuation with best practices to the point we want to use them almost like recipes. The whole consulting sector to a certain extent is all about promulgating templates.

I think that there are in fact fundamental principles that exist in just about every organization that achieves and sustains success, but they are principles or elements that are applied uniquely for a particular setting. That is the art of leadership. I do see leadership as more of an art where as I see management as more of a skill.

That is not to diminish management in any way. It is a critical skill. Leadership crafts vision, but management facilitates execution and to paraphrase Seth Godin long term success in any entity is about shipping .If no one buys your product or service or is moved by your value proposition you better have a plan B.

It is interesting to me that we still struggle to accept this idea of social gravity. Most of our systems are based on push, not pull. We look at processes like six sigma, lean, TQM, etc. and we lament why they don’t guarantee long term success.

When I see surveys that conclude that most leadership failures occur because of organizational fit, interpersonal dynamics and relayed human factors I have to say I find the perplexity of failure of technology to guarantee sustained success ironically amusing. The answer is right there. It isn’t about processes it is about relationships. Processes can facilitate communications and tasks, but they can’t create relationships. That is a uniquely human dimension.

There has yet to be developed a technology that creates trust.

When I see employers now requesting Facebook and other social media passwords so they can monitor employee behavior and communications my reaction is “wow, you failed the dumbass test in college didn’t you?”

To me it is this generation’s equivalent of coming up with tricky ways to gain access to information that the Civil Rights Act and other legislation specifically excluded us from using in making employment decisions. I remember executives being very chagrined when I said “okay you have obtained information that is likely non-relevant and illegal, what are you going to do with it?” How about building trust instead?

Social media provides an incredible platform to increase your social gravity or to blow it sky high. It is however a tool. If you are a shitty employer having a cool blog or web site isn’t going to overcome that.

If you are controlling, manipulative and exploitative monitoring the social media pages of your employees so they don’t share that or rat you out seems kind of dumb to me as well. Investing in supervisory training or some therapy seems to be a better use of your time and money.

On the other hand if you are an employee and your employer says that engaging in certain behaviors unless they are specifically protected by law will result in your losing your job and doing it anyway represents in my mind your failure to pass the stupid test.

I read the story today about the Marine who is being discharged because he was repeatedly told that criticizing the Commander in Chief was a dischargeable offense and did it anyway. Advocates are saying his civil rights are being abridged. Being stupid is not a protected class. The orders given him to refrain from criticism were not either unlawful or contradictory to the interests of the country or his unit.

I feel similarly about people who go to foreign countries and violate their laws and customs.

For better than 100 years our approach to the employment relationship has been to ask people to drum up wood and perform tasks; the data pretty clearly and convincingly shows that sharing a longing for the immensity of the sea is better- way better.

I know which approach I will continue to cultivate….

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were building ships…

Charles Simic

I was having a conversation with a client of mine recently where he shared with me his experience in having a conversation with the human resources department of his organization. I want to be clear that this organization has 18,000 employees in three states; it is not a small company.

The discussion was around some issues he was having transitioning out some underperforming employees and creating appropriate, approved classifications for some critical new positions he needs to complete his infrastructure for a transition for his organization from a staff role to a revenue generating department.

The HR executive commented that the discussion seemed somewhat familiar- my client responded “that is because we have talked about this issue three times in the last three months with no resolution”. The HR executive involved had the grace to be embarrassed.

I just read about a recent survey from CareerBuilder of 3000 HR executives that indicated their biggest concerns are the retention of key talent, maintaining a competitive position, and the acquisition of new talent needed to staff their client organizations.

I see literature published daily citing that less than 30% of employees in the U.S. find themselves fully engaged at work.

• Employee trust in leadership is at all-time lows
• C level compensation the last two years advanced an average of 22% while average employees saw their compensation increase 2% per annum.
• The Department of Labor estimates that we lose $5 trillion annually to the direct and indirect costs of employee turnover.
• We lose another $200 billion annually to the costs of presenteeism, people who show up every day, but contribute much less than they are capable of because of stress, misalignment, dissatisfaction or just general apathy.
• The number one reason people voluntarily quit their jobs is a poor relationship with their immediate supervisor.

The biggest irony is that when I saw the results of a survey of human resources executives about where they spend their time and create the most value for their organizations the majority responded it was in compliance .I recognize that I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I need someone to explain to me how compliance is the most direct route to addressing the issues I cited above.

Although I have moved out of the traditional venue of human resources into first C level operating roles and then into management consulting I am disappointed when I see surveys and writing from colleagues in the profession that continue to assert that the most important role of HR is compliance with the myriad of regulations and restrictions that guide our relationship with employees.

Similarly I see tomes written on the application of technology to hire, manage, deploy and optimize performance. I am not technology phobic by any means; I do adhere firmly to the belief that technology is a tactic, not a strategy. In fact I make a significant part of my living showing organizations how to bridge the appropriate application of technology, change management initiates, and various and sundry programs to create meaningful alignment between employees and organizations.

When I look at the opportunity costs represented by more effective recruitment and retention, re-designing health care to include health management and address issues like social literacy and individual responsibility and the creating of meaningful employee engagement strategies on our society I have to admit I am puzzled about why more organizations don’t “get it”.

I understand that it is hard work. I understand that in some cases the ability and necessity to do things like create trust based relationships, establish clear performance expectations, provide meaningful feedback, and take appropriate corrective actions necessary to align performance with organizational goals is still in many organizations considered a soft skill, but the data is becoming more and more available and compelling.

I don’t believe that becoming certified as a HR professional, or gaining your black belt, or Six Sigma will necessarily make you a better leader or manager.

I don’t blame all of this on human resources or the human resources profession. For over 100 years we have embraced the concept of people as assets to be deployed and categorized on the balance sheet like capital or equipment. They aren’t.

In a more recent blog post I made the assertion that our compliance based models cost is billions in opportunity cost. We discourage people from thinking outside of the box. Our management literature is replete with best practices and templates. My concern in many cases is that those templates are applied like recipes handed down by high priests- to be followed absolutely with no deviation. The problem is that model doesn’t take into account culture.

Culture is real, every organization has one; intentionally or unintentionally. Applying Apple’s culture to IBM would be disastrous and vice versa. It doesn’t work.

I don’t believe that most of our graduate schools teach leadership, they teach management. More specifically they teach the management of assets not relationships or people.

I believe the emerging role of leadership, especially human resources leadership fits into three key buckets:

•             Technical skills. The proliferation of rules and regulations has indeed made the profession more complex as has the application of technology, phenomenon like social media, outsourcing and global workforces, and related challenges. We need to be technically proficient, not only in our craft, but to understand the businesses and organizations we serve.

•             Project Management. Similar to the Total Quality Management movement I believe human resource competency in core areas needs to be deployed broadly and deeply rather than be seen as a departmental competency. It is fundamental to the management/leadership role.

•             Facilitation. We need to help our client organizations recognize that by building relationships with individuals as people first and resources second we can create enormous gains in sustainability, productivity, and profitability through alignment of organizational and individual goals.

In simplistic fashion leadership is about initiating and facilitating effective, meaningful, sustained change. The current models aren’t working.

The Supreme Court is taking up the merits of the Affordable Care Act and whether or not the law should be modified or scuttled. The concern I have is that they have the luxury of addressing the law purely from an academic viewpoint. They don’t have to propose an alternative solution to some of the issues the law attempted to address.

Similarly I see legislatures whose answer to the issue of entitlement oriented employee welfare programs in the public sector relating to health and retirement benefits that are bankrupting local and State governments is to make collective bargaining illegal. Once again I ask the question- “how does this fix the root cause?”

I don’t believe more governmental intervention is the answer. I don’t think they have any better answers than anybody else by themselves.

Smart organizations are embedding a new concept called social gravity into their organizational strategy. Social gravity is a pull strategy rather than a push. It says I define my value proposition as an organization; value proposition including my product our service, our core values as an organization, and what we feel differentiates us, and we pull people to us.

People who share those values including; shareholders, employees, customers, and communities are drawn to us. We are clear and consistent about those things. People commit rather than comply. We also hear this referred to in the literature as creating an employment brand.

I very much like Brett Minchington of Employment Brand International’s perspective that employment brands represent collaboration between human resources, marketing, and communications professionals with top down support and systemic alignment with all messaging and business systems.

With the ability to communicate that social media affords us now there is no better time to explore this type of systemic thinking.

When I see employers forbid the use of social media at work, make it a violation of policy to identify your employer in your social media presence, or worse yet request employee’s passwords to their personal social media I think- “wow, you guys didn’t get the trust email”.

A colleague recently posted a couple of things that I thought were right on- the first about the entitlement mentality that we complain the emerging generations share was created and nurtured by us, and the second about seeing today through yesterday’s worldview.

We are at a potential turning point. Those of us who occupy or aspire to leadership have a huge opportunity to change how we do things and reap the rewards which the literature and practical application show are compelling and affect the entire economy.

So I guess I would ask you- “What are we waiting for?”

Obamacare- the Great Debate

Like a lot of other people I am watching the proceedings at the Supreme Court with a lot of interest. Unlike many others I am concerned that if the Court simply elects to throw out the law I am concerned about plan B.

I have been involved with health care in at least a peripheral sense for better than 30 years, but only anecdotally as a consumer. As a practicing human resources manager and executive I was involved as a provider. We didn’t of course directly provide health care and health care management services to our employees, but we had a very important role as we paid for those services for our employees and their dependents.

I recognize I am dating myself, but I remember when health care benefits were part of what we referred to as fringe benefits- an ancillary cost to providing competitive wages to our employees. In those days with inflation and wages going up at 13 and 14% per year we barely kept our eye on the ball in this area. Then a funny thing happened- wage inflation slowed down, but medical inflation did not. It suddenly hit our radar screen that this fringe benefit wasn’t so fringy anymore. That trend has continued with the cost of providing health and retirement benefits now consuming a huge part of most organizations talent acquisition and retention costs, especially in the public sector.

There are a number of factors that cause the U.S. to have one of the highest cost/lowest efficiency health management and health care delivery systems in industrial societies. We spend well over 17% of our GDP annually delivering health care and that number continues to move up- not down.

By contrast Switzerland spends 11% and Taiwan 7%.

Some of the factors causing that include technology, distribution, inefficiency, and a lot of other contributors. Bluntly over 60% of our health care expenditures are directly related to patient/consumer behavior. We do a poor job of managing heath and involving consumers in a meaningful way in the management and responsibility for their own health.

Our outcomes aren’t particularly spectacular either; while it is true that if you can afford it some of the best care in the world is available in the U.S., but our national health measured by mortality and morbidity as an average is pretty mediocre.

We are consistent, a recent study by the International Federation of Health Plans examined the costs of 23 different medical procedures ranging from routine checkups to MRIs to Lipitor and found that the costs for the services was higher in the U.S. than any other participating country for 22 out of 23 services. No other participating country currently spends more than 12% of GDP in providing care. That means we are spending 41% more than the least efficient of those other countries.

When I was new to the game, my employers used the standard solutions to address many of these issues:

• Beat up the providers and carriers
• Begin a long and arduous process of “cost sharing” with our employees ranging from methods like higher deductibles and co-pays to eliminating coverage and scaling back coverage for retirees, dependents and other groups.
• Cutting out the “middle man” and moving to self- insurance to gain administrative savings.

Some enlightened employers embraced managed care pretty aggressively. By managing health care delivery more efficiently we could affect costs.

I was in that group. Not being that smart and having recently been exposed to new concepts like total quality management and process improvement I didn’t understand why we couldn’t apply many of those techniques to the management of health and the delivery of health care. I even promoted more radical thinking- actually engaging and involving employees and their dependents in the management of their own health and health care. The interesting thing is that we saw significant positive outcomes not only directly to our bottom line, but indirectly as morale improved and employees felt more engaged and valued- go figure.

I recognize that may not sound particularly enlightened today, but this was 30 years ago.

One of the things I began to understand back then is a concept that we now refer to as social literacy. The truth is the process of delivering, pricing, and administering health care in the U.S. is incredibly opaque, obscure, and arcane. It scares and confuses the average person enormously. It has a language all of its own spoken of in hushed tones using acronyms and language that shuts people out.

There are other factors at play as well that the Average American has little or no appreciation or understanding of as it relates to health care.

One of those concepts is what we call adverse selection. Adverse selection is what the principle of insurance tries to mitigate or correct for across a group. At its most simplistic it means that we only want to pay for a service when we need it rather than preventatively. Given a choice only sick people or people who anticipate a need for a service want to pay for it. A great illustration is for any of us who have had the opportunity to pay for closer to the true costs of providing health insurance either by virtue of self -employment or losing our employer based coverage and looking at paying for coverage under COBRA.

The interesting thing about COBRA is that even though there is sticker shock you are still looking at coverage that is advantageous both in its breadth and depth and in its cost as you are seeing a group rate.

Most individual policies offer much more limited coverage and much higher rates. To illustrate the effects of adverse selection even more graphically the sickest 5% of our population account for 50% of the total health care expenditures.

We have actually added to that issue through the contraction of the economy. As more Americans lose employer based coverage the solution in many cases is to do without. What the result is that much of our health care delivery has shifted to emergency rooms to treat situations that have hit critical mass. To compound that issue even further much of that care is delivered by not for profit organizations or public institutions so the provider is not reimbursed. The effect is those costs get shifted to those with insurance or paying patients just like the costs of shop lifting gets passed along.

We have also done very little over the last three decades about managing demand. Obesity, direct and indirect costs related to work related stress and economic insecurity and other factors costs us billions annually.

Studies show that literally 60% of health care related costs in the U.S. are directly related to and can be affected by changes in individual behavior; to put it simply taking proactive rather than reactive action.

So you might ask yourself why we aren’t addressing this. I would posture several reasons:

• We created very deliberately a kind of codependency with our employees originating with the Industrial Revolution. In return for compliance and loyalty we agreed to provide employees with a safety net. Management thinks, you do. You don’t need to be educated or participate in decision making.
• Role definition. I have heard and continue to hear from employers for over 30 years that “we aren’t in the health care business”.  While I don’t disagree entirely I could make the same argument about working with a key supplier about components in your manufacturing or production process. What the total quality movement, or TQM taught us is that by partnering with key suppliers we could improve our own efficiency and sustainability.
• Systemic versus silo thinking. In truth very few people think systemically and have a full appreciation for how things work together. We “get” our part.
• Inertia. Changing behavior and patterns is hard. Few of us will make meaningful changes without a crisis as a catalyst. If my employer has always “taken care of” this issue I am not inclined to find it broken. Previous solutions included off shoring, outsourcing, etc.
• Partial solutions. I do not see the current plan as a panacea. One of my biggest concerns is that it addresses almost exclusively the supply side of the house- the delivery of care. It does little to address the management of health or encourage individuals to participate in the management of their health other than paying for care.
• Flawed models. Our current financial model is deeply rooted in health care delivery. You get paid for delivering care not preventative medicine.

As you might suspect I am a pretty big advocate of wellness and managing health not delivering health care as a singular solution. The best health management strategies incorporate several dimensions:

• Education about health and lifestyle management (Social literacy)
• Behavioral/lifestyle changes
• Exercise and movement
• Ongoing communication and consumer engagement
• Reinforcement and incentivization

If you look at those elements neither the health care industry or government is well positioned to address all of those elements. If on the other hand we look at the issue systemically and government, health care, the educational system, and employers combine to create a collaborative integrated model we can see results and see them pretty quickly.

Integrated models in several thought leading organizations are yielding per capita reductions ranging from 5 to 12% per annum in as short a time frame as 12 to 18 months! That represents literally billions of dollars annually.

My point here is that when the Court decides which way to land on this issue we need to ask ourselves – “What is Plan B?”

We are facing a time in our history and society where many of the old models don’t work.

• We know that over 70% of our workforce is not actively engaged and it is costing us trillions in lost productivity, health care related expenditures and just general poor quality of life.
• C level compensation the last couple years has increased an average of 20% per annum while the average American has seen a 2% increase in their wages, but we have people who don’t understand the anger and the frustration of the “99%”.
• The market is up, but unemployment and underemployment remain very high.

I am passionately committed to concepts like personal responsibility, personal competency and a free market society.

I don’t want to see more government, especially in areas I feel they are not well positioned, well informed, or accountable for outcomes as well as process.

When the Court makes its decision it has the luxury of being held harmless from providing any alternative solutions or asking themselves the impact on our economy or quality of life. They can address this issue entirely in the abstract- an academic exercise. Unfortunately if you are an employer or consumer the same can’t be said.

I in candor find much of the political rhetoric we are being subjected to on both sides of the aisle as being tiresome and bad theater. I guess I just wish I was seeing a bit more focus on solutions and a little less investment in pyrrhic victories.

I would like to see a little more execution and execution as defined by Larry Bossidy-

The ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised result.

I often find myself thinking that there is a real benefit in not being a genius. As I alluded to in my last blog post I thought the research that was shared about the cost of compliance, it is interesting how much pressure being seen as being a genius or expert can put on you.

In that post I explored the fact that when we evaluate entrepreneurial ability like leadership, there was an assumption that the bulk of that capacity is innate rather than learned or developed. Turns out the assumptions were wrong, that while intellectual capacity a measured by IQ is largely influenced genetically, but creativity is not necessarily the same.

I benefit from never believing that I was a “born” leader. That I would need to continuously develop my leadership capacity and whatever meager ability I possess by working at it through education, development, practice, trial and error, and most importantly the enduring patience of mentors and subordinates who have coached me and taught me over the years. I like to think it has served me well.

Maybe I benefit from having a short attention span and not having cable television available in my house as well, but I also love to read and study and explore other perspectives and viewpoints. I envy members of the newest generation’s access to information in a convenient way that I didn’t have as a “new” manager.

There is of course a downside associated with that cacophony of information as well- what do you read, process, and integrate?

Just this morning I read several articles that I found incredibly insightful.

The first was an article on the two lists that every leader should review daily- your focus list and your ignore list. It pointed out that really effective leaders/executives have mastered this. They think systemically not serially. They process information and are able to sort those lists quicker than the rest of us. I have included the link here: http://bit.ly/H5MyzC

The second article carried on some thinking that Stephen M.R. Covey explored in his bestselling book The Speed of Trust. Covey talked about how individuals and organizations benefit from either a trust dividend or pay a trust tax and the foundations of trust are rooted in competency and character. This particular article is really good at describing competency and what it means in the context of effective leadership. http://bit.ly/GMXoxm

I also read a third article that talked about how focusing on team performance rather than individual performance you can actually use poor performers to strengthen the overall contribution of a group or team to the benefit of the organization. http://bit.ly/GR7GII

In the context of Collins, Welch and others who talk about culling your organization and getting the right people on the bus I found this especially interesting. The author wasn’t suggesting you keep habitual non- performers on the team, but that you focus on team performance rather than individual performance. How do we align resources so that they are complementary and synergistic rather than competitive?

To be honest I try to go through an exercise like this almost daily. Because I don’t see myself as either a genius or having completed my personal development journey I try to scan what is out there from people way smarter than me. A population I can assure you is quite large.

I find the study and evolution of leadership and relationships fascinating. I have always believed that the relationship between individuals and between individuals and groups to be the most powerful catalytic tool we have available to create meaningful, systemic change. Everything else is merely a tactic. I recognize that this is probably heresy, but I include technology, social media, etc. in that tactical category. They allow us to deploy talent or convey information, but they don’t create it and guarantee its application.

I think this is what terrifies us. We want to develop technology that bypasses all those messy processes involved in earning and building trust, giving clear expectations, providing meaningful feedback, aligning performance and goals, etc. The bad news is that it doesn’t and will never exist. We can bypass it temporarily, but it will always re-manifest itself.

I am both bemused and chagrined by the slow recognition of the importance of creating highly engaged relationships and long term productivity and sustainability in areas including everything from industrial capacity to the management of health and delivery of health care.

I responded to a post on another site this morning wanting to know why we Baby Boomers don’t invest in relationships like the emerging, enlightened generations do. My first reaction candidly was “what a silly, sweeping assertion”.

Most of our leadership models still have their roots in the old scientific management philosophy and compliance mentality- leaders lead and employees do. To a large extent that is still how we train and educate leaders. We still refer to skills involving relationship as soft skills.

We still to a large extent embrace the leader/hero and born leader mystique much like the not so validated relationship between intellectual capacity, leadership, creativity, and success.

The MBA is probably one of the most prolifically granted educational degrees conferred at the graduate level today. Many organizations require them now as a ticket to management and leadership roles. Many graduates come out assuming they ready to take command of a department or even an organization. The amusing part to me is that most of the curriculums don’t teach you shit about the two critical factors of being an effective leader- building and sustaining trust and parsing your two lists; they focus instead on tactical competencies.

Equally amusing is our infatuation with certification. It seems like we have created some accreditation or certification body for damn near everything these days. Again I haven’t been able to find a direct correlation to certification and those two pesky leadership foundational issues of character and competence.

I guess that for me I am going to have to accept Dr. Di Fiore’s assertion that like the majority out there I am not a genius, and that my continuing education and journey as a leader is going to require study, hard work, mentoring, and benefitting from the wisdom of others.

I guess I will just have to apply a metaphor I learned from a mentor many years ago-

Life is a journey not a destination. When you “arrive” at the end point you are dead. Enjoy the trip and what it has to offer…

I think I will continue to journey. How about you?

Almost anybody that knows me or has had to sit through one of my presentations or read any of my books, blogs, or other ramblings knows that I am not a big fan of compliance for the sake of compliance.

I much prefer the atmosphere and environment created by engagement, the alignment created when people and organizations share a set of ideas and values and work towards common goals that are clearly articulated and shared. After thirty plus years of talking about it, it is great to see objective, factual evidence that validates what I believed intuitively- people embracing something they believe in voluntarily yields significantly superior results for the organization- period.

When I see fellow Human resource leaders and practitioners describe compliance with various governmental regulations as the key contribution that human resources organizations can provide to their sponsoring organization it almost causes me to scream.

I am a huge proponent of the concept of personal competency, the idea that each of us has both the right and responsibility to optimize ourselves. I am also a believer in respect and personal boundary management; that optimization needs to occur in a way that doesn’t intrude on the rights of others.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and introduction of the concepts of scientific management, we began moving away from the basic tenets of personal competency and responsibility. We didn’t do it to empower people; we did it to control them and to reduce costs. The central tenet of scientific management is that management manages and workers do. The theory of white versus blue collar management was born. It also gave birth to the idea of the disposable workforce.

That model has been firmly embedded in our American system for close to 100 years. I think very few people realize that the right to collectively bargain or unionize was not recognized until the late 1930’s and even then the system was crafted in such a way as to reinforce the belief of conflicting values and goals and an adversarial relationship between employer and employed.

Even today, collective bargaining; also known as unionization is demonized. While I agree that there are dimensions of the process that have been abused the reality is that for generations the working person was exploited. Many of the laws around health, safety, working conditions, etc. would not exist in the absence of collective bargaining. I believe firmly that in most cases companies that find themselves as the target of a unionization campaign will find their treatment of their employees, real or perceived to be a root cause.

When you optimize the interests of one stakeholder group shareholder/owners to the detriment of others like employees, community, or customers you create friction. Duh, this shouldn’t be rocket science.

Compliance was introduced with the idea of dumbing down the skills and the expense associated with performing tasks. If you could take a complex process and break it down into simplified sub tasks the rent on the skills required is much lower. That is how we got the concept of white collar management- we will think, workers just do.

In return for being compliant we offered things like lifetime employment, pensions, etc. We also created the public school system with the goal of providing a supply of workers who were trained that compliance is the natural order.

Sorry to be a buzz kill if you were under the illusion that schools were created to upgrade the quality of life of average people.

In the sixties when the Japanese and Germans adopted more advanced management concepts that empowered workers and began making superior products available at lower prices our initial response was three fold:

•  Scream for trade restrictions and production quotas
•  Begin outsourcing to other economies where we didn’t have to comply with those pesky regulations
•  Begin reducing or eliminating the things we had traditionally exchanged for compliance like pensions, health care, etc.

Interesting how we never really examined root causes isn’t it?

Today I had the opportunity to read a blog post by Alessandro Di Fiore from the Harvard Business Review Blog Network that speaks to one of the other detriments to our compliance approach.

In his post he talks about the idea that creativity and entrepreneurialism, much like leadership, are believed to be inherited or genetic attributes. He goes on to indicate why that is wrong. A study showed that in identical twins although 80% of intellectual capacity (IQ) could be attributed to genetic predisposition only 30% of creativity is genetically disposed.

To put it simply, the tendency towards genius is likely genetically predisposed, but 70% of creativity is a function of environment, aptitude, and hard work! He further points out that much of our education and business models (which are compliance based) retrain people from utilizing this capacity. We teach them managers/executives/geniuses think, the rest of us should just do!

If you extrapolate that idea you could draw the conclusion that our current models are yielding an opportunity cost of 70% of our creative capacity.

Maybe I am taking the point too far, but when I look at a few things that I am aware of, including:

•  Highly engaged organizations outperform their competitors by as much as 100% on key performance metrics
•  Individual employees who self- identify as highly engaged contribute per capita productivity at 30 to 40% higher levels than their moderately engaged or unengaged colleagues
•  The Department of Labor indicates employee turnover costs the U.S. economy $5 trillion per year in direct and indirect costs
•  Presenteeism, the phenomenon where employees show up , but contribute at less than optimal levels costs another $200 billion per annum

I say, hmmm, maybe there is some truth to this concept.

•  Engagement on the part of U.S. workers, along with trust in leadership in every sector is at all- time lows.
•   Health care spending is out of control and a huge contributing factor is personal behavior/lifestyle management is barely being acknowledged.
•  Employers are whining that they can’t find suitable talent even given the high unemployment rate.
•  Most organizations still look at employees/talent as a transactional or disposable resource rather than a strategic investment.

There are those who believe that removing restrictions are the right solution. I wonder. The stock market is back at all-time highs. C level compensation increased at a rate of over 20% per annum the last two years, whereas average employee compensation increased less than 2%. It would appear the shareholders and the elite seem to be doing fine. It is the rest of the economy that is struggling.

My experience is that societal issues tend to be systemic rather than isolated. If you have people who are concerned about economic security it affects their ability to focus on higher order issues.

If we have a large segment of the population who are unemployed, underemployed, and don’t have access to basic social infrastructure it bleeds into other dimensions of the economy.

I want to be clear that I am not advocating for more governmental regulation or intervention. I don’t think government is well equipped to solve these issues. I do believe that we need to look at these issues systemically rather than serially or in a vacuum.

It appears to me that our current compliance models coupled with our disposable employee thinking is costing our economy trillions of dollars annually that could be redeployed to do some pretty amazing things.

Compliance isn’t a good foundation for problem solving. It is apparent that the old models don’t work. We have numerous examples demonstrating a clear linkage between engagement, productivity, profitability, and even employee health. It isn’t soft science anymore; the data is widely available and pretty conclusive.

Perhaps to paraphrase Di Fiore we need to stop waiting for geniuses to surface with a brand new model and get to work doing the work.

We don’t need new people; we need leaders who are willing to do things differently and begin to capitalize on that 70% of the creative capacity we are squandering……Are you one of those leaders?