Connecting through Social Contracts

The thought of a thing is often more fulfilling than it’s reality. I wonder if that’s true of social contracts for organizations.

We talk about connecting, but what are we doing to create, deepen, and protect connections.

Talk is self-affirming gibberish without action.

Words or Actions:

Ask leaders if they believe in connecting and they’ll raise their eyes like you’re stupid.

But ask, “What are you doing to help people connect?” and they look stupid.

Stop babbling and create social contracts that define, deepen, and protect relationship within your organization.

How:

Invite everyone to participate in crafting a social contract. Don’t create it for people.

Engage people if you expect them to be engaged.

Develop an agreed upon social contract by addressing topics like:

1. How do you want to be treated by co-workers?
2. How do you want to treat co-workers?
3. Describe unacceptable relationship violations. (How do you not want to be treated?)
4. What is the goal of connecting with co-workers?
5. How can we help people connect?

Define your aspirations for relationship.

Rewards:

Describe rewards, recognition, and honor for outstanding success in upholding social contracts. Dinner out or leave work at noon on Friday, for example.

Violations:

Create agreed upon consequences for violations of your social contract. Focus on fun consequences like paying fines for minor offenses. Don’t wait for big stuff.

Practice:

Start meetings by asking, “Who have you seen upholding our social contract? What did they do?”

Review:

Review your social contract every six months to keep it fresh and top of mind.

Individual:

Build social contracts on an individual level if not organizationally, try addressing topics like:

1. What does support, respect, or encouragement look like to you?
2. I feel connected when…?
3. Our work relationship is strengthened when… (weakened when)
4. I commit to…

I’ve never seen or developed a social contract for an organization. Have you?

What are the pros and cons of developing social contracts? How would you develop and implement a social contract?

Addressing the Rotten-Apple-People Problem

Rotten apples – negative, destructive, self-absorbed, unethical employees – pollute organizations.

Furthermore, foul leaders inevitably build stagnant, foul organizations. Worse yet, passive leaders – those who tolerate rotten apples – create rotten environments by default.

Leaders who tolerate rotten apples are rotten themselves.

Facebook contributors discuss: “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch, true or false?” (5/3/13)

Spotting:

You don’t need a study to determine if your culture sucks.

1. People use blind copies in email.
2. Gossips win.
3. Territorial managers stake out and protect turf.
4. Leaders live in ivory towers.
5. Competition is about winners and losers not performance.
6. Getting by is the goal.
7. Smiles and laughs are rare.

Your culture sucks if people don’t love working in it.

Solving:

Organizational culture is simply the way you do things – how people treat each other. Yesterday, a Leadership Freak contributor suggested social contracts. KaPow!

Social contracts say you’re serious
about the way you do things.

Social contract:

We will:

1. Address issues in the smallest context possible. Dirty laundry is kept in the laundry room.
2. Expect you to connect with colleagues and teammates.
3. Take responsibility to improve things we don’t like.
4. Pursue the best interests of all parties, always.
5. Call you out if you let others down.
6. Speak candidly with compassion.
7. Forgive offenses that are acknowledged and addressed.

We won’t:

1. Say one thing to your face and another behind your back.
2. Tolerate posturing and puffing behaviors.
3. Lie, ever.
4. Blow up.
5. Hold grudges.
6. Have secret agendas.
7. Complain without bringing solutions.

Consequences:

Violating our social contract is grounds for warnings, corrective action, and dismissal, if necessary. You might be sent to our, “Be Nice,” class for social delinquents.

Enforcement:

Everyone is authorized to point out violations of social contracts, regardless of position or tenure.

More: Connecting Through Social Contracts.

What would you include in an organizational social contract?

All’s Well that Begins Well

This note arrived from a young leader:

I’m spearheading some interdepartmental activities with the goal of more open communication and increased relationships between departments. Could you suggest some good resources? Would you consider posting  a question on your Facebook page?

Reply:

You’re asking the wrong questions. Leaders often rush to fix painful symptoms before defining root problems.

First:

The first question is, “What is the problem?” Craft an agreed upon definition of the problem. (Agreed upon by all stakeholders, not just upper management.)

Powerful solutions begin with powerful problems.
You can’t solve problems you can’t define.

Every solution to poorly defined problems is unsatisfactory.

Ask:

1. Why does interdepartmental communication (IC) matter? Think about mission, vision, and values.
2. What’s frustrating about IC?
3. What behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs interfere with IC?

Second:

The second question is, “What is the win?” Define success in behavioral and emotional terms.

1. What does winning look and feel like?
2. What improved results are we seeking?
3. How will we act differently?
4. How will success be measured?
5. What does implementation look like?
6. Who are the champions?
7. How will we celebrate wins and correct failures?

Bonus: How will we stick with it?

You can’t implement solutions you can’t describe.

Tips:

Engage as many as possible in the process of defining problems and describing wins.

Engage people if you expect people to feel engaged.

Design training activities that solve real problems and create tangible wins. Don’t waste your time throwing communication building activities against the wall to see what sticks.

Facebook:

I posted this question on Facebook: Leaders who cultivate interdepartmental communication _______.”

What suggestions would you make to this young leader?

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Attend the complimentary pre-summit activities for WBOLS. I’m offering a short seminar describing things I did that led to Leadership Freak becoming the most socially shared leadership blog of 2012. Click the banner below:

How to Solve the #1 Problem with Meetings

Bosses need to run meetings because they need to exercise authority and control. That attitude hinders free, honest involvement by participants. Worse yet, controlling-bosses obstruct ownership. Others won’t own what you own.

The problem with meetings is bosses run them.

No one can effectively manage a meeting and participate at the same time. Transform meetings by training new employees to – facilitate – manage meeting. Facilitators don’t participate with content they manage the process.

Meeting facilitators:

Martin Murphy, author of, “No More Pointless Meetings said, “The boss or highest ranking person in the room should not run workflow management sessions.” Martin prefers calling meetings “workflow management sessions.”

Assign junior team members to run – facilitate – meetings. They don’t give input they manage the meeting, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.

Power and control:

Murphy’s suggestion freaks out leaders who need to sit at the head of the table exercising control. The whole dynamic stinks of inappropriate command and control leadership.

Sit at the foot of the table not the head.

Manipulating:

Stop pretending you’re collaborating when you’re manipulating.

If you know the outcome of the meeting before the meeting, DON’T call a meeting. Meetings with pre-determined outcomes are manipulations. Have the integrity and courage to say, “This is what I want.” Say it and save everyone time.

Keep control if you must. If you need to set the agenda, do it. If not, work with the team to set agendas, for example.

Real collaboration:

If you’re genuinely interested in collaborative processes that produce collaborative results, stop running meetings. Train junior team members to facilitate meetings, instead. They manage processes while everyone else, including you, participates.

How would meetings change if bosses stopped running them?

What skills should meeting facilitators possess or develop?

Note: We had technical difficulties with yesterday’s call with Dr. Henry Cloud. My apologies for any inconvenience this caused you. We’re working to reschedule using another platform. Stay tuned and thank you for your patience.

Death to Bobble Head Leaders

Bobble head leaders don’t say what they really think. They go with the flow to get ahead. Bobble heads don’t speak their mind they defend the company line.

Leaders become bobble heads to protect position and get promoted. It’s dishonest and disingenuous. Look around. How many bobbing heads sit at the table? Is anyone disruptive?

Bobble-head organizations:

1. Lose creative contributions.
2. Make lousy, status quo decisions and complain about status quo results.
3. Reflect fear based cultures.

The reason you don’t speak your mind:

1. Untrustworthy team mates who use your ideas against you.
2. Organizational culture that celebrates going along to get along – “Yes cultures.”
3. Fear of being ridiculed for being wrong.

Good girls and boys go along and get stars on their report cards. Bad girls and boys – disruptors, dissenters, and the unorthodox – go to detention.

Fault:

Top leadership is fully to blame for bobble-heading. Rather than punish bobble heads they’re rewarded. Organization grow weak and leaders bask in fake approval.

Dying organizations thrive on stability, agreement, and orderly meetings.

Constructive dissent:

Peter Drucker commented, “Dissent, even conflict, is necessary, indeed desirable. Without dissent and conflict there is no understanding. And without understanding, there are only wrong decisions. 

Dissent is more than good, it’s noble.

People who change the world disrupt and critique. The path to exceptional is paved with the bones of the mediocre.

Creating dissent:

1. Assign dissent in the next meeting. Put a devil suit on half the team and challenge them to challenge ideas.
2. Ask everyone to make a list of reasons the initiative on the table won’t work.
3. Establish three options and have everyone advocate for all three.

The path to oblivion is smooth. Great decisions are born in conflict. Create structures for constructive dissent.

How can organizations create constructive dissent?

How can leaders avoid being mired in dissent? 

It’s today!

Last chance to register for FREE – LIVE conference call with Dr. Henry Cloud. “Set boundaries – Extend Results – Be Ridiculously in Charge.” INFO

Why HR Sucks and How to Fix It

Image source

My worst experience with HR is a broken confidence. She smiled and listened and within an hour violated my trust.

Human Resource personnel are among the most criticized people in business.

HR is criticized for:

1. Treating humans as resources.
2. Not understanding positions they’re filling.
3. Managing paper better than people.
4. Subservience to policy and procedure.
5. Defensive, CYA postures.
6. Lack of operational experience.
7. Working for the C-Suit, not the people.

See the entire list on Facebook (3/5/13).

New potential:

HR matters because people matter.

“I don’t know about you, but I love HR.” Dr. Vik (Doc) in “The Culture Secret.”

They are underrated, over-criticized, and underutilized. Jack Welch believes the head of HR should enjoy equal standing with Chief Financial Officers.

New focus:

Doc says, change the name from Human Resources to Human Empowerment (HE). The job of HE is, “Maximizing human potential.” Doc goes on to say, “HE could be the single biggest champion of your companies Culture.

New ideas for HE:

1. Focus more on development.
2. Become more human. Since when does serious work prohibit smiling?
3. Sit in the seats of workers and do their jobs.

More on Facebook (3/5/13).

Doc adds:

HE includes personal life. Enrich employee’s lives and they’ll be better employees. Hire a coach. Doc was the Coach at Zappos for five years. He helped employees sort out issues before they erupted. HR loved him.

HE delivers fun. Change the image of HR by taking charge of organizational celebrations.

HE attends team and department meetings to connect, not to police.

Read more in Doc’s book, “The Culture Secret.”

Connect with Doc on Linkedin.

What small steps could transform HR to Human Empowerment?

How to Become a Culture Building Leader

Lazy leaders blame. Arrogant leaders push down. Fearful leaders push away.

Facebook contributors said, “The worst leaders ______:”

1. Talk too much and think too little.
2. Believe collaboration shows weakness.
3. Fear risk.
4. Need power.
5. Never acknowledge weakness.
6. More (posted on 3/4/13)…

All leaders build organizational culture, worst included.

Negative impact:

Lousy leaders build lousy organizational culture. Anyone suggesting leadership is overrated hasn’t worked with lousy leaders. However…

Power to destroy suggests power to create.

Those who tear down have power to build up.

Culture building leaders:

Dr. Vik (Doc) explains the type of leaders who build empowering organizational cultures in, “The Culture Secret.” Leaders who empower:

1. Connect rather than withdraw. “Leaders can’t lead anything from the office.”
2. Build “chains of empowerment” not “chains of command.”
3. Concentrate on the success of others.
4. Exercise “power with,” not “power over.”
5. Tell people what needs to be done not what to do.
6. Focus on employee strengths.
7. Express gratitude.
8. Make people feel they matter.
9. Emphasize positives even when dealing with negatives.
10. Use “we,” “ours,” and, “us.”
11. Show interest.
12. Know names.

Becoming a culture builder:

1. Believe you matter in the face of obstacles, opposition, and negativity.
2. Choose creation over destruction.
3. Courageously dream and consistently talk about what could be.
4. Find and exploit points of alignment. Don’t push against, pull with.
5. Keep smiling.

I’m recommending, “The Culture Secret,” for any leaders looking to ramp up their culture building skills and activities.

Connect with Doc:

Linkedin

What behaviors do culture building leaders exhibit?

What activities build empowering cultures?

Great Leaders are Great Because They …

Great leadership is more about others and less about you. Stop focusing on yourself.

Great leaders are great because they:

1. Have emotional intelligence.
2. Reveal greatness in others.
3. Know where they’re going and why.
4. Engage.
5. Don’t really think they are great.

Read the whole “great leaders” list on Facebook.

Two great leaders:

Warren Buffet (4^th richest person in the world) and Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) are great leaders because they hire great people and get out of the way.

Buffet said:

1. Hire people and don’t tell them what to do.
2. Let good people set their own standards and direction.
3. Delegate almost to the point of abdication.

Dr. David Vik (Doc) invested early in Zappos and worked there for five years. I asked Doc what made Tony Hsieh a great leader. “Zappos’ vision to Deliver Happiness is so clear and powerful that management doesn’t have to tell employees what to do.”

Enable people to act without you
by establishing shared vision.

Stop telling good people what to do.

Two factors of great leadership:

Great leadership isn’t about you. It’s about the people around you. “Get the right people on the bus.” Jim Collins.

Surround yourself with the most talented, passionate people available. Jack Welch said, “The team with the best players wins.”

Second, great leaders become less central, not more. Work yourself out-of, not into jobs.

If you are essential you are the bottleneck.

Third essential ingredient:

Doc believes organizational culture creates environments that empower people to function at their best. In other words, you can’t simply hire people and leave them alone. Success requires high performance cultures.

Great leaders build empowering organizational culture.

Doc explains the five factors essential to culture building in his book, “The Culture Secret.”

1. Vision.
2. Purpose.
3. Business Model.
4. Unique/Wow factors.
5. Values.

Doc, in his own words on what makes Tony Hsieh a great leader:

Connect with Doc on Linkedin.

What factors make leaders great?

5 Structures that Shaped Zappos’ Culture

Lack of focus wastes energy, squanders resources, and defeats hope. Focus, on the other hand, eliminates the superfluous in order to grasp the essential.

Success requires focus.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, describes his focus in two words, “Company culture.”

Dr. David Vik (Doc), author of, “The Culture Secret,” helped build the world renowned culture of Zappos. During our conversation he said leaders tried to replicate Zappos’ culture in their own businesses, but often failed.

Trying to replicate another organization’s culture is like putting decorations on a Christmas tree. It’s pretty at first and garbage in the end.

Doc says, “There are two parts to any Culture. The first is structure.” Culture development fails when it’s all decorations but no structure.

5 Structures that shape Zappos’ Culture:

1. Vision: What the organization is doing and wants to do.
2. Purpose: Why the organization is doing what it does.
3. Business Model: How vision is accomplished.
4. Wow Factors: What makes the organization stand out?
5. Values: What the company and employees care about.

Doc says, “The second part of Culture is people.”

5 behavioral expressions of culture:

Sustained culture development and transformation requires behavioral alignment with the culture building structures listed above. Behavioral alignment includes:

1. Habits.
2. Routines.
3. Shared language.
4. Common beliefs
5. Mutual decisions.

Roots of failure:

Doc explained failure to develop the five structures dooms culture development. It’s hanging pretty decorations on shabby trees.

Building organizational culture begins with structures not decorations.

Why focus on culture:

Tony Hsieh says, “If you get the culture right, then a lot of really amazing things happen on their own.”

Check out, “The Culture Secret,” written by a guy who helped develop the best culture on the planet.

What factors develop or transform organizational culture?

The Three Pillars of High Performance Teams

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“The more decisions a leader makes, the further he or she is from leading a high-performance team. … Make too many command decisions, and you’ll doom yourself and your team to mediocrity,” Mark Miller in, “The Secret of Teams.”

Everyone serious about success is serious about teams. Great teams lift organizations. Lousy teams drain everyone.

Mark Miller explains three pillars of successful teams.

First, success begins with selection. Every member must possess, “Attitude and aptitude for the job.”

Always begin with attitude, not skills. I’ve made the mistake of becoming enamored with skills and abilities.

Bad attitudes ruin teams.

People with bad attitudes:

1. Expect perfection from the beginning. They respond to imperfection by complaining or quitting. They can’t grow and improve.
2. Hate it when others do well.
3. Complain about others while excusing themselves. They blame.
4. Explain why things can’t be done. They’re “can’t do” rather than “can do” people. Favorite words include, “We can’t do that because …”
5. Gossip. Rather than supporting, they tear down.

Additionally, attitude without aptitude results in frustration and failure. If they can’t perform, can they learn?

Second, success requires constant training. “Become a training machine,” Mark Miller.

Training topics include:

1. Teamwork. Teach people how to work together if you expect them to work together.
2. Decision making.
3. Problem solving.
4. Leadership.
5. Management.

Third, successful teams develop and enjoy esprit de corps. Mark says it’s the “secret sauce” of high performance teams; the essential ingredient. “This is the heart stuff.”

“Your team will never perform at the highest possible level if the members of the team don’t exhibit genuine care and concern for one another.” Mark Miller

Surprising benefit:

Great teams mean you’re not alone.

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What are the essential ingredients for high performance teams?

What prevents teams from performing?

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I found, The Secret of Teams, well written and insightful. It’s must reading.