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Making Collaboration Work

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I’ve got a problem. Once or twice a week, someone approaches me and says:

I really like what you do. I do something very similar. We should talk and figure out ways to do things together.

The problem: this almost never works.  Let’s figure out why.

Intent is Necessary but Not Sufficient

I’m glad people want to collaborate with me. I increasingly have little patience for those who won’t.  And when I’m the one who won’t, I know I should hit the reset button and start the day over. After all, collaboration is the new competition.

But intent alone doesn’t cut it. I can feel it in my schedule. I hate to be rude, but I just can’t take any more meetings based on goodwill and karmic synchronicity. Millions are in sync with me; I’m in danger of feeling boring, not lonely.

A Clear Vision is Necessary but Not Sufficient

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. From a false assumption, any conclusion logically follows. So clearly you’ve got to be clear.

But clarity alone is worth not much. 20 years in strategy consulting taught me that a brilliant strategy and four quarters is worth a dollar. Despite what the Hegelians and the authors of The Secret will tell you, thought alone will not move matter.

Action Steps are Necessary but Not Sufficient

Before nearly every keynote address I give, someone says, “What our people really want are tangible action steps they can begin using the very next day.”

Okay, here you go. Tell the truth. Tell your spouse you love them. Make lists with five bullets. Fix your attitude. Meditate. Exercise. Be kind to dogs. Read your client’s industry newsletter. Listen better. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Yes, that’s what people want. But try just giving action steps, and see if you get paid.

The Three Pathologies of Collaboration

If you’ve only got one of these three factors working, you’ve got bupkus.

More frequently, you’ve got two factors working.  But if you’ve only got two, you’ve got a pathology.  There are three pathologies:

  • Spinning Wheels. You’ve got Intent and Vision, but no Action Steps. You get no traction. You keep on talking, but it’s always to the same people, and you’ve already convinced each other. You need some action steps.
  • Grinding It Out. You’ve got Intent and Next Steps, but no Vision. You’re all processes and metrics and execution and best practices, but you never get anywhere, because you never figured out how to aim, align, coalesce, define a purpose, set a goal, do the vision thing. You’re only running a ground game, and it’s wearing down your offense.
  • Passive Aggression. You’ve got Vision and Next Steps, but no Intent. Your team is talking the talk, but blame-throwing behind the scenes. You’re all brains and no heart. You’re stuck in a 70s military strategy game, all Machiavelli and no truth-telling. You need some positive Intent.

Those people who call me up and offer to work together?  Wheel spinning. The solution, I’m finding, is to say, “Fabulous; you come up with one great Action Step, and I’ll buy lunch. Until then, let’s not “do lunch.”

Do you work in a grind-it-out organization? Swallow your subject-matter-expert pride and hire a motivational speaker. It’ll do you good.

Do you work in a passive aggressive organization? You’re far, far from alone. Go sit in on a 12-Step program and realize that you do not have to be co-dependent.

 

What do you think? What does it take to make collaboration work?

Note: if Anne Evans or Howard Schwartz are reading this, big props to you for an earlier version of the pathologies. And if you’re not reading it, write me and explain why.

Creating a Culture of Trust: Virtues and Values

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This post comes from our upcoming book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading With Trust, from the chapter on Implementing a Culture of Trust. Tools for trust initiatives include principles, or values, at the organizational level, and personal attributes, or virtues, at the individual level. The chapter explores five tools for implementing trust change initiatives: leading by example, stories, vocabulary, and managing with wisdom. This post explores two diagnostic tools: the Trust Temperament™ and the Trust Roadmap™.

We will be sharing selected portions of the book with our readers leading up to the publication date. The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook will be available from Wiley Books on October 31, 2011, or you can pre-order The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook today.

What Is a High-trust Organization?

Our definition: an organization of people who are trustworthy, and appropriately trusting, working together in an environment that actively encourages those behaviors in employees as well as stakeholders.

Creating a culture of trust requires a different emphasis than do most change initiatives. What works to reduce accident rates, increase customer-centricity, or become ISO-9000 compliant isn’t the same as what’s needed to create a high-trust organization.

Trust is about interpersonal relations. For people to trust and be trusted by others, they must take personal risks and face personal fears in ways that cannot, by their nature, be fully planned and structured in ways that typical change initiatives can rely on.

That suggests a different emphasis: an initiative built around personal change.

Two Keys to Trust Culture Change: Virtues and Values

Creating a high-trust culture boils down to two main thrusts: virtues and values. “Virtues” are the personal qualities that high-trust people embody, and “values” are what guide the organizations they work in. In trust-based organizations, virtues and values are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

We use these words very intentionally, because they’re commonly understood–and common language matters. Each deserves its own word and understanding, and both are required for trust culture change. In our experience, some companies rightly focus on organizational values, but few focus enough on personal virtues.

 

The virtues of trust are personal, and involve your level of trustworthiness and your ability to trust. The virtues of trust are contained in the trust equation: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

It is virtuous for someone to tell the truth, to behave dependably, to keep confidences, and to be mindful of the needs of others. Unless people take personal responsibility for their own behavior around trust, the organization will never be a trust-based organization.

 

The values of trust are institutional, and drive the organization’s external relationships, leadership, structure, rewards, and key processes. The values of a trust-based organization are reflected in the four trust principles: other-focus, collaboration, medium- to long-term perspective, and transparency. An organization that espouses these values treats others with respect, has an inclination to partner, has a bias toward a longer timeframe, and shares information.

Trust-based organizations take values very seriously. If your organization has never fired someone for a values violation, then either you’ve been astoundingly successful in your hiring and development efforts, or you’re not a strongly values-driven organization.

Diagnosing Trust

To improve virtues and values, it’s helpful to know where you’re starting from—to have some kind of diagnostic. For virtues, there is the trust quotient: for values, there is the Trust Roadmap™.

Virtues.

The trust quotient is a self-diagnostic taken at the individual level, based on the four values of the trust equation.   With individual data aggregated anonymously at the group level, you can profile the organization in terms of Trust Temperaments (the pair of highest-scoring values in the trust equation for an individual), as follows:

Trust Temperament™ Highest Ranked Attributes Motto
The Expert C, R “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”– Anonymous
The Doer R, I “As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”– Eleanor Roosevelt
The Catalyst C, I “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”– Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Professor C, S “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”– Albert Einstein
The Steward R, S “My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.” – Steve Wozniak
The Connector I, S “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”– Anonymous

 

Values.

The Trust Roadmap is a diagnostic tool that surveys the Trust Values across components of organizations, as below:

Collaboration Medium- to Long-Term Perspective Transparency Other Focus
External Relationships
Leadership
Structure
Rewards
Processes

 

Generic and organization-specific questions are developed for each of the 20 cells, and the survey administered to groups of stakeholders: customers, employees, managers, for example.   For example, the question for Leadership and Medium-to-Long Term Perspective might be “Your leaders are willing to sacrifice short-term gains for the long-term benefit of the organization.”

The survey results allow a management team to assess, in a structured manner, where the organizational values that drive trust are being implemented, and where they’re not; how those patterns vary across constituencies; and what they feel the priority should be in addressing the issues.  In short, a Trust Roadmap.

The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading With Trust will be published by Wiley Books on October 31, 2011.  Pre-order your copy of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook today.

The Death of Employee Trust: Myth? Or Fable?

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Trust is a many-meaning thing. One of its multiple mysteries is the assumed object. As in, “I trust my 16-year old.” Well, to do what? Trusting him to set the table correctly is one thing; to make curfew may be quite another. The identity of the implied object makes all the difference.

A more relevant example is the Edelman Tweet Level test; it rates your twitter handle on several dimensions, including trust. On the Top Twitter Users by Trust ranking, the New York Times is #14. CNN is #4. Tops on the list is–of course–Justin Bieber. (Numbers 2 and 3 are a couple of Kardashians).

Trust to do what? Report the news?  Or–well, I’m not sure what Bieber/Kardashian are trusted for, but I doubt it’s for the same thing as the Times.  Again, the implied object makes all the difference. (Full disclosure: I confess, I’m hooked on TweetLevel myself).

Which brings us to an interesting blogpost, Employee Trust in Its Death Throes, by Derek Irvine in the Human Capital League.  

Employee trust in and loyalty for the employer has been dying a slow, agonizing death for the last several decades. It began with massive layoffs in the 1970s-80s when employees who thought they had a job for life, like their parents before them, found themselves pounding the pavement looking for work…

…The result? No one expects their employer to look out for the employee’s best interests.

…Octavius Black, chief executive of the Mind Gym, a performance consultancy, warns that while staff retention has held up during the downturn, that could soon change. “Over 60 per cent of employees currently say they plan to switch companies, with 25 per cent actively looking for a new job,” he says. “The risk is even more acute with top performers, whose feeling of engagement with their employer has dropped three times faster than the average employee’s in the past 12 months.”

Well, yes. And no. Employees should trust their employers—to do what? Employers should trust their employers—to do what?   It depends on the implied object of trust. 

Unless we update the implied objects, we’re about half a century out of date in our assumptions.  And you can’t get good answers out of questions that no longer make sense.

What Trust Means Between Employers and Employees

The old, 1950s belief-set of employer-employee trust had to do with a pact around employment. If the workers worked hard and well, the company would/should take care of them. As usually interpreted, “take care” meant, if not lifetime employment, then something approaching it. As the article notes, that myth was taken out and shot several times in the past few decades.

But, like a zombie myth, it lives on. It lives on in articles that still conflate low turnover with a trust-based employment relationship. It’s time to get clear:

The length of the W-2 form relationship no longer has anything to do with employment trust!  

There, I said it. Let’s see why that’s true.

It’s true because no company in the world these days has enough direct control over its markets, customers, suppliers, etc. to guarantee employment. No one—not employees, customers, suppliers, nor stockholders—should assume in a globally-scaled world that any one institution can maintain its current form over the decades required to guarantee any one’s employment. 

It would be arrogant of an employer to claim otherwise, and foolish of an employee to believe it if they did. Yet somehow we look at arrogance and stupidity and see—a decline in trust!?  The fault lies in the perceiver, not in the relationship.    

Let me suggest a different meaning of employment trust, one that is also cited in Irvine’s article: trust as looking out for the other’s best interests.

Trust as Looking Out for the Others’ Best Interests

What would happen if a company really, truly took this approach? In a rapidly evolving world, a company dedicated to its employees’ best interests would be attuned to the times when employees’ interests could be better served by working elsewhere. 

Think about that. What if a company hired an executive search firm not to add more people, but to find offers to entice away the existing employees. Because if they then stayed, they would have re-upped and re-motivated; and if they left, it would be for the sake of their personal improvement. Which a good employer would be dedicated to serving, yes?

This is not nearly as crazy as it sounds. For decades now we have recited “attract and retain” as a mantra. It’s half wrong, and the wrong part is the retention part. We have come to think of talent using the roach motel model: you can check them in, but don’t let them check out.

Yes, there are economies of knowledge, which argue for employee retention. But there is also burnout, bureaucratization, golden handcuffs, Peter Principles, going native, drinking the Kool Aid, and diminishing returns. Companies truly focused on their employees’ best interests would not automatically try to retain everybody—they would aggressively seek personal development opportunities for all, regardless of what that meant.  It would sure make attraction a slam dunk!

The molecular unit of business in this approaching world is no longer the company. It is the person. Companies who truly care about their people are willing to morph to serve those people. Companies who insist on bending people to maintain the continued existence of a corporate entity are zombies who have lived out their natural lives–and we all know you can’t trust zombies.

I realize I’ve tried to put 40 pounds of content into a 20-pound blog here, so let me tighten it up in closing:

The idea that employment trust is defined by a continuing employer-employee relationship is not only out of date, it is keeping us from recognizing the true object of trust in an evolving world. 

You can’t talk about trust without defining the object. And when it comes to employment, that object is changing.   

Employee Engagement, Fog Sculpting, and Measuring Love

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Do you believe the following statement?

High levels of employee engagement keenly correlate to individual, group and corporate performance in areas such as retention, turnover, productivity, customer service and loyalty.

It’s from Employee Engagement:What Exactly is It? by Patricia Soldati.

How about this following statement?

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of an engaged workforce on a company’s bottom line.

That one is Julie Gebauer (whom I know) of Towers Perrin at The Workforce Disengagement Problem.  

I believe both statements. I believe them a lot, in fact. (And not just because Julie Gebauer says so—though that helps!).

Trouble is—what do you do with it?

“Employee engagement” is one of those concepts that straddle a thin line: how to be complex enough to be true—and yet simple enough to be practical?

• Over-stress explanation, and you risk fog-sculpting—creating beautiful conceptual landscapes that are unactionable;
• Over-stress actionability, and you risk measuring love—mechanizing the things that make humanity human.

Similar issues arise with concepts like loyalty, employee satisfaction, organizational commitment, or identifying customer needs.

There are four risks here.

The first two risks are definitions, and identifying drivers. Soldati says:

In 2006, The Conference Board published "Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications"…twelve major studies on employee engagement had been published over the prior four years by top research firms such as Gallup, Towers Perrin, Blessing White, the Corporate Leadership Council and others.  Each of the studies used different definitions and, collectively, came up with 26 key drivers of engagement.

Four of the studies agreed on eight of the 26 drivers.  All studies agreed that the strongest driver is the relationship with one’s manager.

Believe it?  I do.  No problem believing that one at all.  But it’s dangerously close to the fog-sculpting end of things, up there with good parenting, moral values and integrity.

The third risk is causality. For example: it is statistically proven that shorter people have lower IQ scores.

Don’t believe it? Compare 7-year olds’ test scores with 20-somethings’ performance on the same test.  See? Height is clearly correlated with IQ.

Correlation is not causality. David Hume (who outranks even Julie Gebauer), famously showed it’s impossible to prove causality.

The search for causality, in service to managerial actions and simplicity, forces us down the path of measuring love—which, like an emotional Heisenberg Principle, can destroy the thing being measured if overdone.

Which leads to the fourth risk—in today’s business environment, the biggest of all: measurement-driven behavioralism.

“Employee engagement” is the latest star in the umpteenth remake of a movie we’ve seen too often: define drivers, measure them, benchmark the measures, attach rewards, and link pay to performance against the metrics.

This leads managers to ask HR to causally link “engagement” to shareholder value, define indicators for the links, and provide incentive plans to drive the whole Rube Goldberg scheme.  By Tuesday, please.

I suspect the HR community is even more at fault for encouraging this kind of thinking.

Of the two sins, I’d rather be subjected to fog-sculpting. At least it fires the imagination.

By contrast, measuring love is inherently dehumanizing.

Turning “engagement” into an engineering exercise is—I believe—a great recipe for disengagement.

Scott Flander takes a good look at all this in “Terms of Engagement” in Human Resource Executive Online.  He quotes Ian Ziskin, chief HR officer at Northrup Grumman:

I’ve found over time that the single biggest thing to focus on is not the actual scores or the response rates — that’s a means to an end. The end is, do you really understand what the issues are in your business, and what are the actions you’re taking to improve them?

I don’t know Ziskin, but he sounds a thoughtful exec; he knows how to sculpt fog, and how to measure love.  And he artfully chooses a Middle Way.