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Who Else Wants Two Weeks Paid Vacation Before the Start Date?

May 9, 2013 by 5 Comments
Turpin-Chaplin-his-new-job_02

Chaplin should have taken 2 weeks off before starting his new job

I heard a crazy idea the other day: Offer people two weeks of paid vacation before they start work. Literally before they start work. After you finish your previous job, your salary and benefits begin two weeks before you come into the office. It is called a Pre’cation, the brainchild of Jason Freedman, who wrote about it on his blog 42Floors.com.

Freedman has an aversion to vacations. He is a serial entrepreneur, going from startup to startup. He gets into each company so much that he never wants to take a vacation. He ascribes this behavior in part to the very nature of a startup. He writes, “Startups are a mission; a belief that something impossible is actually possible.” But he also noted “that doesn’t mean startup people don’t need vacations – we clearly do.  If for no other reason than our best ideas come when we’ve been able to disengage from the problem in front of us.”

Freedman started offering new employees two weeks of vacation before they start, as a way to make sure that everyone has some time off and arrive rested. In some ways, a Pre’cation is no different than a signing bonus: a company expense that comes prior to an employee doing work. While the Pre’cation isn’t mandatory at 42Floors, there has been 100% adoption of the practice so far.

Who wouldn’t take this offer? (In fact, I’d worry about someone who didn’t). The real question is, what type of company would offer Pre’cation? A company that wants to attract the best talent, and a company that wants employees to bring their best to work.

I think the Pre’cation is exactly the kind of radical new idea that we need to make the corporate world both more efficient, and more humane. It is easy to dismiss this idea as something that could never happen in your industry. However, imagine that your biggest competitor adopted this policy. Which of these three best describes your reaction?

  1. Good! Let them waste their money.
  2. Crap, this will help them attract better talent.
  3. Hmm, I wonder if there is a job there for me.

I don’t know about you, but I was tempted to look at the 42Floors jobs page, and I don’t even know what that company does.

What do you think?

Image Credit: Turpin-Chaplin-his-new-job_02 By alyletteri via Flickr CC

Filed Under: Business Case For Good, Featured, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lessons From Jason Collins: Coming Out As a Parent in the Office

April 30, 2013 by 3 Comments
Mother With Child by Mzacha via rgbphoto Face hidden to protect her career?

Mother With Child by Mzacha via rgbphoto
Face hidden to protect her career?

Jason Collins article is the first active professional male athlete to come out. Collins wrote a first person account of his life before coming out, and how he feels now. He stayed in the closet for fear of consequences to his professional life, and as a result “endured years of misery.” Now, Collins is looking forward to living an authentic life. The feared backlash is no where near what it might have been, and the majority of the feedback, at least in public, has been positive.

As I read Collin’s article, I was reminded of how hard it can be to tell the truth in the corporate world. And I don’t mean telling the truth to your boss or to customers about a work issue. I mean telling the truth about yourself.

Where I live, in Silicon Valley, it is common to have openly gay coworkers. But there are many people who are living in the closet, hiding their authentic selves at work for fear that it will impact there career. What closet are they in? The parenting closet.

For example, for many years, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg secretly left at 5:30 to pick up her kids because she was concerned about the impact of being perceived as a “working mom” on her career. In the words of Collins, “It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret.” Granted, Sandberg’s secret was not as big as Collins, but it must have been a drain on her.

Corporate executive Karin Hurt wrote on her blog, Let’s Grow Leaders, about the difficulty of keeping her divorce secret. She had just been promoted to a major leadership position in a fluid post merger environment. Plus, her new position required frequent travel to another city.

Hurt wrote “I had been very deliberate about keeping that hidden. Even my new boss did not know what I was going through. I had heard enough discussion about the concept of “single moms” needing extra care and support so they could come to work on time and not call in sick when their kids were sick. I thought, I’m not like that. I’m a different kind of single mom… I’m an executive. I’d better just keep all this to myself.”

Collins wrote:
“By its nature, my double life has kept me from getting close to any of my teammates. Early in my career I worked hard at acting straight, but as I got more comfortable in my straight mask it required less effort.”

Hurt wrote that when she was discovered as a single mom, there was a backlash.

“You lead all these meetings where we work on programs to make it easier for single moms… and NOT ONE TIME… do you mention that you are one. What else aren’t you sharing?” Another teammate of Karin’s told her “we are starting to wonder about you. You know all about us, but we know nothing about you.”

Collins wrote “A good teammate supports you no matter what. In professional sports, it really is all about teamwork.”

We talk about teamwork in the corporate world. In a thriving workplace, people have a shared sense of mission, and e support each other. There is one little drawback – in my experience, you will be supported as long as you act a certain way. A corporation can breed a sameness, an unwritten code of conduct about how to act and even how to dress. Try showing up at Google wearing a suit and tie. You wouldn’t feel comfortable, and you wouldn’t fit in.

So it was a logical act for self-preservation for Collins, Sandberg and Hurt to keep part of their lives hidden. Attitudes have changed dramatically over the last few years about being gay, and it is wonderful that Collins has enough support to feel he can be successful as a gay athlete.

And with leaders like Sandberg and Hurt, now is the time for women not only to Lean In, but to come out as their authentic selves.

Filed Under: Featured, Values, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Change Management and the Golden Calf

April 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Dans_om_het_gouden_kalf_Fri_Heil_Koningsplein_Arnhem

By Brbbl (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Golden Calf is a story about the peril of a leader pushing change too quickly.  As you may recall from the book of Exodus (or from the movie The Ten Commandments), Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt in dramatic fashion.  God has brought Ten Plagues on Egypt, and parted the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape from the pursuing army of Egypt. Yet, the people quickly lost faith when Moses was away for too long.

When Moses was absent from the Israelites for 40 days and 40 nights, the people grew afraid and asked his brother Aaron to construct a Golden Calf to give them an object of worship.  This is one of the most infamous cases of fair weather friendship in the history of the world.  After all, the power of God was just demonstrated through dramatic miracles that delivered a people from 400 years of slavery.  But these miracles, which everyone must of seen with their own eyes, were insufficient to overcome the strong cultural bias towards idol worship.

If we set aside the questions of divinity, this story says something powerful about culture: an entrenched culture cannot change overnight, even if an overwhelming set of evidence is presented that is should. During their time in Egypt, the Israelites had fallen into idol worship. And after hundreds of years statue worship, it was too big a jump to start worshipping an abstract God that no one could see.

The solution in the Bible is to create a Tabernacle  an intermediary structure that was kind of like the Egyptian temples, yet worshipped God. This same principle applies today.

If you are trying to change the culture of a company, or to change yourself, a dramatic change is exceedingly difficult to pull off. It is better to create an intermediary goal, something similar to what you are doing today, but a significant distance towards what you are trying to achieve.

And if you are hoping the culture of your company will change, even a great leader like Moses may not be able to pull it off.

Filed Under: Featured, Values Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stress Keeping You Up At Night? Eleven Tips To Help You Sleep

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Young Couple Sleeping by epSos.de via Flickr CC

Young Couple Sleeping by epSos.de via Flickr CC

I have been a terrible sleeper since I was a baby. (And my dad never lets me forget it.) I should say I was a terrible sleeper, until a few years ago when I learned to sleep well.

The standard sleep hygene tips?  They all help, but I resisted trying them for many years. It was a combination of pride and my work-first priorities that held me back. In fact, ever since college if I had a deadline to make, I couldn’t sleep. I was so alert that I could use the time to study. It was my secret weapon.

Unfortunately, as I got older, the sleeplessness remained but I was no longer awake enough to function.

As with many of the changes in my life, I got serious about sleeping after I realigned my values to make people and not work the most important thing in my life. The most important people first value is my own health. But how could health be the top priority if I was working till 11 at night, and getting up at 5 to work some more?

Eleven things I have learned to help me sleep.

  1. Ambien helps, but wasn’t effective if I was working right up until the second I took it. Sleep was fitful, and I was prone to waking up after a few hours because my body never had time to unwind. Therefore I instituted some firm rules and boundaries. 
  2. Lights out at 11, every night including weekends.
  3. Work stops at 9, to give me time to unwind.
  4. The computer, tablet, and phone are shut off at 9. These are stimulating, and too work-like. I can’t help but think about work if the computer is open. The temptation to look at email is too great, and I can easily get sucked into things.
  5. Lights for the kids go out at 9. My wife and I need time to be together without the kids.
  6. I look for ways to enjoy the time between 9 and 11. Ok, in my life some of the time is spent cleaning the kitchen and scooping cat litter, but usually by 9:30 we’re ready to move on to another activity. It is important that this time isn’t all chores – the object is to find some enjoyment to help you relax before bed. Reading, tv, movies, sex, exercise, and music are all good options.
  7. No work until 6 AM. Stress can make me wake up, and if I work it re-enforces the habit of waking up. If I know I can’t work no matter what, it is easier for me to get back to sleep. If necessary, I’ll jot down a few notes to clear my head, knowing I won’t forget the supposedly important thing rambling around in my head.
  8. The bedroom a sacred space: No working, no devices. Sleep, sex, relaxing only! Yes, this means you should stop reading email on your Droid before getting out of bed. Seriously. If this is a habit, put a shoe box outside your bedroom, and drop the phone in before you enter. If you really need to check something, walk out into the hall.
  9. If I wake up at 3 AM and am hungry, I have a cup of ginger tea. It settles my stomach without giving me a sugar fix. The sugar fix rewards waking up. I try to keep it boring.
  10. I have a comfort ritual to help me get back to sleep. If it is 3 or 4, I go downstairs and sleep in the lazy boy in the living room. I put on my favorite original Star Trek episode (The Doomsday Machine), cover myself with my favorite throw, turn out the lights, put on an old pair of sunglasses (to cut down on glare from the tv), close my eyes, and just listen. I am comforted by the familiarity, and am usually asleep within ten minutes. And I know the episode so well I can always tell if I have fallen asleep, because suddenly the chronicle will jump to something 30 minutes later. This totally cuts off the frustration of feeling like you haven’t slept, because I know that I was asleep. This helps me get right back to sleep.
  11. The thing that put me over the top was a guided meditation CD called “Just Relax.” It changed my life. Just Relax describes itself as “dull, boring, and effective.” It delivers big time. I tried it in desperation one night at 5 AM after a week of sleepless nights. . It was a weekend and I slept on the couch till 9:30. The kids were up, around, and I’m told very noisy. I slept through it all, and felt more refreshed than I ever had. I used Just Relax pretty regularly for a while, and now I can play the sounds in my head to help me go to sleep.

Pretty standard sleep hygene on the list. I thought these things were so hokey that I wouldn’t even look at them until a few years ago.  The hokey feeling? A rationalization to prevent me from trying something to help myself. Maybe I was too proud. Whatever the case, I’m glad I got over it.

What is your experience with sleep? Are you a natural sleeper? If not, what has worked for you?

Filed Under: Featured, Values, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How To Have Sustainable Success

January 25, 2013 by 2 Comments

Self Portrait By Jillian Corinne Via Flickr CC

A guest post by Health Coach Catherine Chen, Ph.D.

Do you sometimes fall into this trap?

If I finish this project, then I can relax.

If I get approval from my boss, then I will feel more competent.

If I work on what I want, then I’ll feel like I’m making a difference.

“If-then” thinking is problematic because we don’t actually focus on the present moment. By being concerned with the outcome, we don’t fully mentally engage with what we’re doing or the lessons presented to us. By the time we do achieve the result, we may not feel like we’ve accomplished anything meaningful because the entire journey felt like a blur (life crisis, anyone?).

If we continue to stay in this thought-trap and achieve our desired result, we never feel like we’ve gotten “there” because there is always more to follow. If you finish the project, there’s follow-up work to do, or if you get that promotion or the dream project, unforeseen responsibilities follow, making you wish that you took the time to enjoy what you were doing before. It’s like climbing a mountain quickly to reach the top, only realizing when you get there that there’s more to climb and that you didn’t get a chance to enjoy the views earlier (and now won’t have the energy to do so!). The key is to not bank on a result to make you feel a certain way. Feelings that arise from external accomplishments are fleeting, but attitudes independent of results will sustain you.

How can you relax/feel more confident/make a difference with the role you have right now? You can be as relaxed, confident, or impactful as you want to be, right now. Find friends or family (or a Health Coach!) to support you towards taking actions that give you a sense of mastery and pro-actively support you towards feeling what you desire. For example, engage with people you care about to relax. Offer to help a colleague with your expertise to be valuable.

Release self-induced pressure by taking action towards feeling what you desire right now, rather than making your feelings dependent on an outcome over which you have no control.

Catherine Chen, Ph.D., is a Health Coach who supports high-octane professionals to achieve with ease, have time for what they love, and live a balanced life. Prior to launching her wellness practice, she worked in the management consulting industry and at one of the leading cancer research biotechnology companies. She’d love to hear from you at info@catherinechenwellness.com. Or, sign-up to get work-life balance tips at www.catherinechenwellness.com

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Post, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How Forgiveness Can Set You Free

January 4, 2013 by 2 Comments

Steve by Steve Snodgrass via Flickr CC

Today a guest post from Anda Tudor from Freelancecoach.com.  Anda shares a wonderful parable about forgiveness.

Even to the kindest, forgiveness does not come easy. The feeling of bitterness, of having been wronged, and the desire to take revenge is almost tangible.  Although it seems hard, forgiveness sets you free. As Coach Bob Proctor puts it ‘It doesn’t matter where you are; you are nowhere compared to where you can go.’

A teacher once asked her students to bring a sack to class. Intrigued, everyone brought a sack and found a mountain of potatoes on the teacher’s desk. There was laughter and sniggering and much speculation about what the assignment would be.

The teacher then asked each one of them to make a list of people they couldn’t forgive, and then to take one potato for each name.  Soon, the mountain disappeared and the teacher had to call for additional potatoes. Then, the students wrote one name on each potato.  When the students were done, she asked them to put all the potatoes in the sack and carry it around with them at all times for three days. Whether they were heading to the store or going on a date, the sack had to be with them.

After the third day, the teacher asked about their experiences.  In a word, it was horrible.  It was such a fuss to carry the sack at all times;  people stared and laughed. The students couldn’t enjoy their time properly, feeling self conscious and judged.

The teacher smiled and said that the sack of potatoes is the mental and spiritual burden you carry when you don’t forgive others. You are never truly free or  at peace in your life  unless you shed these past inhibitions and move on.

It is difficult to forgive others, and some do not deserve our forgiveness but by not forgiving them, you are the one carrying the burden around, not them. ‘Issue a blanket pardon. Forgive everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. Forgiveness is a perfectly selfish act. It sets you free from the past’- Brian Tracy

What has been your experience with forgiveness?  Did you ever feel that it lifted a burden from your back?

Guest poster Anda Tudor Anda Tudor is the Public Relations Manager of FreelanceCoach.com, the first open network for coaches, consultants and advisors.  You can learn more about Freelance.com and it’s services for individual and career growth here.  

 

Filed Under: Guest Post, Values Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Do You Have What It Takes To Be the Best?

January 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ultra limited edition Michael Phelps Frosted Flakes by Timothy Moenk via Flickr CC

I always want to be the best.

I also want to have a happy and balanced life.

I’m not sure I can have both.

In fact I know I can’t have both.

Being the best means an inherently unbalanced life.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I caught one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes.  Jack Klugman plays Jesse Cardiff,  a man who lives for pool, and laments that he is not considered as good as the late “Fats Brown.”  This being the Twilight Zone, in walks Brown, who offers to play one game if Jesse will bet his life on the outcome.

What I love about the episode is the way it highlights what it takes to become the champion.  At one point Jesse says “I am the best.  Do you know how much of my life I’ve spent playing pool?  Do you know how many nights I slept on this table?  I made a deal with the owner so I could practice after the place closed.  I haven’t been to the movies in years.  I haven’t dated a girl, or read a book because it would take time away from the game.”

Later in the show, Fats offers a different view of being a champion.  ”It pains me to see you spend your whole life in this dark, dingy room.  I may not look it, but I’ve made love, swam in the ocean, and had a life where no one had heard of a pool hall. And I’m still the best.”

As a teen, I resonated with the drive to be the best.  I saw being the best as an escape, a way to write my own ticket.  And I did – to Cornell, to MIT, to Stanford, and then to jobs at the hot biotech companies of the day.  What I noticed yesterday was another comparison -Jesse was driven by the need to “show everybody that he could be the best at something.”  All those people who made him feel badly that he wasn’t good at this or wasn’t good at that.  Jesse is adamant that now he is the best at something.  I recognized the insecure overachiever.  As talented as I was, I never felt like it was good enough.  It’s not a happy place to be.  Some of that comes with youth; well at least that has faded to some degree for me.

The price for Jesse was high – yes, he gets the fame while alive.  But in the Twilight Zone world, he takes the place of Fats, cursed to travel to cheap pool joints defending his title.

In the real world, the price of being the best is just as high.  For example, Michael Phelps is the best swimmer in history, and according to many the greatest Olympic athelete of all time.  And what did it take for him to win 8 gold medals in Beijing?  He went “five years without taking a day off” he told Baltimore Magazine.  “That included birthdays, Christmases, Sundays.”  And he needed to eat 12,000 calaries a day to fuel his workouts.

Phelps has incredible gifts – a freakish body with long arms, double jointed knees and feet that straighten 15 degrees more than normal. And he has d what his coach calls an obsessive compulsive streak that kept him in the pool at least 5 hours a day, every day.

That level of work is what it takes to be the best.  Phelps was so good in Beijing that he won a gold medal with broken goggles.

For the London Games, Phelps cut down on his training significantly.  Prior to the games, his coach Bob Bowman explained. “If we look at his preparation the past three or four years in terms of, did he do everything he possibly could do to be a better swimmer? The answer’s no, [but] he’s certainly done enough work to be competitive. Phelps “only” won 4 Gold and 2 Silver medals.  The difference came down to minutia – a little worse on the turns, a little less kick at the finish.  Had he worked those extra days, he may have won an extra gold medal.  Does anyone really care?

Phelps doesn’t seem to care.  He went into London with the attitude that he would enjoy this Olympics, something he was unable to do because of the enormity of trying for 8 Golds.  This time he achieved the elusive balance – superior performance amid a sea of calm.

There is a myth that if you don’t work all the time, you get mediocrity.  It IS a myth.

 Busting Your Corporate Idol will return Monday January 7th

Filed Under: Featured, Identity, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

When Not To Wait For Your Job To Improve

December 11, 2012 by 2 Comments

Over the last month, a spate of companies have announced special or early dividends this year.  For me, dividend stories are usually a yawner, but in this case there is a lesson about values and priorities

As background, on January 1st the tax rate for dividend income will go from 15% to as high as 43%.  For some companies, like Walmart, it is a no brainer to pay its dividend December 27th instead of January 2.  The move saves investors significant money, and it doesn’t impact the overall business. (And if the Walton family, who owns 43% of the company saves $180 million on their tax bill, so much the better for them.)  Check out these articles in the WSJ and Daily Beast for more.

But what about Costco, that is borrowing 3.5 billion dollars to finance a $3 billion dollar dividend payout that wasn’t scheduled to take place? Or Oracle, spending $867.4 million on a dividend that will bring Larry Ellison, the CEO a payment of close to $200 million dollars?  This is about bringing shareholders a short term return, which is ok with me.  Corporations are founded to make money for investors.

From a business standpoint however, I think anything that prioritizes the short term over the long term is poor strategy.  It sends a signal that percolates throughout the organization.  Here is an example of that from my experience a number of years ago at a rapidly growing biotech company.

Late in Q1, the VP of marketing rather sheepishly told everyone to drop what we were doing, and find out what we could do to help make the quarter. And then, development resources were diverted from the new product to slam in a feature to help close a sale. We put together some last minute promotions.  So the company sold the product in Q1 at a discount, instead of later in the year at full price when the customer swould have been ready to use it.   The result: Less total revenue for the year, and long term customer relationships were reduced to transactional interactions.

My product manager buddies and I ragged on management, hoping someday they would get it. But we were the ones who didn’t get it.  The company was telling us what was most important to them, and it wasn’t long term value creation.

Which brings us back to the dividend issue.  Any way you slice it, a company that is pulling dividends forward by multiple quarters to save its investors money is focused on short-term returns and not long term-value creation.  Next quarter, those investors will be looking for something instead of the dividends.  What will management do?

Something to think about if you work for one of those companies.  If the company doesn’t make the long-term value creation a priority, or sacrifices long term customer relationships for short term sales, it is hard to believe that long term employee retention is a priority.

If you have a job you like, with a good manager and a supportive environment, enjoy.

But if you are working like crazy and sacrificing your personal life in the hope that things will be better in the future, you may be waiting a long time.  To quote Guy Kawasaki quoting an ancient chinese proverb “Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very very long time.”*

* APE: How To Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki PDF edition p. 56

Tomorrow: Back to Busting Your Corporate Idol.  If you like this post, you may want to read Chapter 3: The Corporation, The Real American Idol Here

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How To Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle

November 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Today a break from Busting Your Corporate Idol. This post is a way to help bring that feeling of gratitude to the rest of your life. I never thought I’d say this, but I am grateful to Oprah for sharing this great video.

It is easy for me to be grateful on Thanksgiving.  There was good food, a nap, football, and time with family and dear friends.
But as a viral Facebook post shows, “Some of us have problems during the holidays and sometimes are overcome with great sadness when we remember the loved ones who are not with us. And, many people have no one to spend these times with and are besieged by loneliness.”

Is there a place for gratitude in those situations where clearly the glass is nowhere near half full?

Someone close to me once said – “How can I be grateful after all the tough things that have happened to me?”  My answer: if those things had not happened, you would not be married to the person you are today.  I was met by stunned silence.  This is a new thing for me, this practice of gratitude.  And it is a practice – every day I try to remind myself of something that I am grateful for.

And how about those times when the glass is 3/4 full – does that guarantee happiness, or even gratitude?

In his book “Everyday Holiness, Alan Morinis points out that the world is full of an infinite number of things we’ll never have.  The question is, where do we focus our attention, and what we have, or what we don’t have?  I doubt all those rich celeberty’s in drug rehab are feeling like money and fame have solved their life’s problems.  A friend of mine, a VP in Silicon Valley told me how stressful it is to live in a big house in a wealthy neighborhood   It takes a lot of work to keep up on the clothing fashions, to be seen at the right places, and to keep the car ultra clean.  He has recently downsized to a smaller home in a quiet neighborhood  and is loving life.  It’s not the small house per se, it is the attitude of appreciating what he has.  Once he started thinking about what was important to him, it became obvious that he had more house than he needed.

Being grateful for what you have is a guarantee to make you feel at least a little better.  This does not mean that you have to be satisfied with a bad situation, but looking to what makes you grateful is a clue to where to spend your energy to make things better.  One popular approach is a gratitude journal, to write down things you are grateful for every day to help turn your consciousness to the good that is already in your life.

Gratitude is a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it will become.  If things are going well for you, practice gratitude to make it strong to get you through the tough times.  And if you’re in the tough times now, a dose of gratitude can be that ray of hope.

My model for gratitude is my late grandfather.  He graduated high school in 1932 – the height of the Great Depression, and he was not able to go to college.  Grandpa was a brilliant man, who knew as much history as some college professors I’ve met.  But never once did he complain to me about not being able to go to college.  He worked for the toll system of Connecticut, and I was always waiting form him to lament the missed opportunities in his life.  It never happened.

“As long as I get to be here with your grandmother, I’ll be happy Greg.”

Grandpa died two weeks after my first child was born.  “Lots of people live to be grandparents, but very few get to be great-grandparents.”  Not a peep about his failing health at the time.

I miss my grandfather, but I am so very grateful he was and is such a big part of my life.

 

Filed Under: Values Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A New Model For Cooperation, Values, and Employee Motivation

October 26, 2012 by 2 Comments

Today we’ll take a break from Busting Your Corporate Idol for this timely guest post from Omer Soker, Founder of The Ethics Of Success. 

In 1943 Abraham Maslow clearly explained our hierarchy of needs includes being respected, accepted or valued by others. In 1968 Frederick Herzberg reminded us of this in his now-classic Harvard Business Review article entitled “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” Chip Conley’s recent best-selling book Peak re-affirms recognition and meaning as success and transformation drivers for employees.

And yet, too many distressed managers believe employees are out for themselves and motivated primarily by money. They overlook the power of collaboration with their employees.

A model for collaboration and shared values

People need purpose, especially at work. When an individual’s personal values are aligned with the core values of the company, that’s when passion is ignited – and that creates the collaboration that drives innovation, productivity, growth and competitive advantage. One example is Tony Hsieh who founded Zappos.com and sold it to Amazon for over US$1 billion. Zappos aligned its entire organisation around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible. It supported it with 10 values that resonate with everyone who works there including delivering WOW through service, embracing change, creating fun, pursuing learning, open communication, building a family spirit, doing more with less, being passionate and being humble. The flow-on benefits are high morale, lower turnover rates, and an environment and culture that attracts the best talent and an authentic connection with customers that drives sales to growth rates any company would envy.

This mutual goal achievement is represented in the red collaborative overlap of the twin circles: here representing the company and the individual (although they can also represent any two parties coming together).

At the extreme end of the company circle (in blue) are the managers who indulge in what I call “harmful self-interest” when they focus exclusively on short-term sales, at the expense of their people and their values. When values are compromised and when people are disrespected, both the health and the performance of companies suffer. These managers purport to self-interest, but they are harming everyone including the company itself by operating outside of shared values. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the employee engaging in a different form of harmful self-interest; be it avoidance of responsibility, politicking or sabotage of colleagues.

The white spaces in between are every day realities of compromise and accommodation that exist because we don’t live in a perfect world. Whether it’s the employee accommodating a request from the company to work late on a critical project, the company compromising to cater to a unique individual need or vice-versa, these everyday interactions and negotiations can be healthy, so long as they are not repetitive and within limits. It’s only when compromise or accommodation become chronic that values are jeopardized.

The next step is plotting where you are on the chart, where your company is on the chart – and taking some steps towards the middle. The chart can serve as an aid to self-awareness, and an understanding of the behaviors of others.

Collaboration is a way of aligning everyone’s interest so more of the workforce’s energies go into the company’s interest than into playing games. It’s more complex because there are many stakeholders with differing needs, but once a commitment is made to bringing these interests together and not seeing them as mutually exclusives, it’s amazing what companies can achieve.

Omer Soker has worked in senior corporate general management roles including Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier, as well as two company turnaround transformations in Australia. In August 2012 he established The Ethics of Success Corporation to help companies and individuals create and sustain positive change. He is a corporate speaker, workshop facilitator and business consultant.  Follow Omer on Twitter: @ethicsofsuccess or LinkedIn

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Post, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Ten Tips To Reduce Your Work-Related Stress

October 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Ten Tips For Stress Reduction Featured Image

Cold Friendship by Hamed Saber via Flickr CC

 

Today I’m taking a break from Busting Your Corporate Idol to share some stress reduction tips that were inspired by stories I heard while researching the book.

 

Three ways to relieve stress at work by putting yourself first

  1. Put your health first.  Take time during the business day to exercise.  If you are suffering from chronic stress, you are probably working too many hours.  If you take time away from work to exercise, your stress will go down and you will become more productive, which will more than make up for the 90 minutes at the gym.
  2. Put your time first.  There are always people asking you for favors, and to do extra things.  If you are good at what you do, there are an infinite number of things you could be doing.  Make sure that you put your time first by learning to say no.  Having fewer commitments will reduce stress
  3. Become a winner at politics.  Are you the type of person who says “I don’t care about the politics, I just want to get it done.”  This is a recipe for being taken advantage of.  Politics is a fact of life, and no one is above it.  If you aren’t playing at least to defend yourself, you risk being played.

Three ways to relieve stress at home by putting people first

  1. Put your health first by stopping all work by 9 PM to give you an hour or two to decompress before bed time.  Sleep deprivation is a guaranteed way to increase stress.
  2. Put your health and family first by having a Sabbath, least one day a week with no work or email at all.  You will be amazed at how refreshed and more creative you feel.
  3. More sex at home.  The research is pretty consistent – people who have sex more often are happier.  And stress leads people to have sex less often.  Use those goal setting skills to have sex at least once during the workweek and once on the weekend.  This will lead you to stop working earlier, and will directly combat feelings of stress.

A key to preventing stress at work is to reduce your workload.  If your boss asks you to do more, here are four things to help you say no.

  1. Don’t feel guilty. There is only so much time in the day, and your health and family are more important than whatever the boss is asking you to do.
  2. Make the boss decide the business priorities.  Your time is a finite company resource.  Explain the trade off decision, and why you think another use of your time is more important.  If the boss insists, ask for his or her support in explaining the changed deadline to the stakeholder whose deliverable is being pushed back.
  3. Offer an alternative solution.  Sometimes the boss is asking for more than he or she needs.  Offer a quick and easy solution instead.
  4. Suggest someone else to do the job.  Your boss needs a solution, but it doesn’t necessarily need to come from you.

If you find at least one of these suggestions helpful, please share using the buttons below.

You might also like Discover How I Avoided Burnout 

Filed Under: Featured, Values, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Why You Shouldn’t Let the Company Provide Your Moral Compass

August 22, 2012 by 4 Comments

Chapter 3: The Corporation, The Real American Idol Part 14

Let me be clear: I think corporations are fantastic at creating goods and services – they enlist cooperation on a level not possible with any other system.  However, even Adam Smith, who coined the term “The Invisible Hand Of the Market” understood that free markets were good for maximizing economic value, and not moral value. A corporation is created to make money, i.e. increase revenue and minimize costs.  Just as a real person will strive to survive and thrive in the fiercely competitive natural world, the artificial person seeks to survive and thrive in the highly competitive economy.  But there is one key difference: a person’s struggle for survival is tempered by our capacity for moral reasoning, while a company is incapable of any moral agency.

Let me give you an example that seems obvious today: child labor.  I don’t know when the first moral issues about child labor were raised, but in the United States, the first state to make child labor illegal was Massachusetts in 1832.  At the Federal level, child labor was not illegal until 1938.  So what happened in between?  According to The Child Public Education Labor Project  “Growing opposition to child labor in the North caused many factories to move to the South.  By 1900, states varied considerably in whether they had child labor standards and in their content and degree of enforcement.”

Lets unpack this: there were a heterogeneous set of laws, and presumably child labor was less expensive or more productive than adult labor.  So a factory in a state where child labor was illegal was at a disadvantage when compared to a state without regulations.  Based on the numbers, the business case was strong to move the factory.  The only thing to keep it behind would be a moral argument.  But in my experience, it is hard for a morality-based argument to beat a numbers-based business case, especially if inaction could threaten the future viability of the business.

Now, I grant that some companies have cultures that do try to adhere to standards other than the numbers.  (I reject the notion that there are “good” companies on the same grounds that I reject the concept of “evil” companies.) But whatever company you are in, I would not trust them to set my moral compass.  They simply cannot detect moral issues.  Asking a company to do the right thing is like asking a blind person to pick out the blue shirt.  They can pick a shirt based on size or texture, or maybe even a label that says “blue” in brail.  But they do not have the sensory apparatus to know the difference between blue and red.

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Filed Under: Busting Your Corporate Idol, Chapter 3: The Real American Idol, Values Tagged With: , , ,

What No One Is Saying About Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s New CEO

July 19, 2012 by 5 Comments

Family by Nina Matthews Photography via Flickr CC

As is the custom on Friday, a break from Busting Your Corporate Idol.

Marissa Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo.  She has an impressive track record at Google, and is eminently qualified to take over.  But there is a big brouhaha and a lot of hand-wringing over her pregnancy.  What really got people going was her comment to Fortune Magazine.

My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it.

The debate has been blistering Melissa Hincha-Ownby at the Mother Nature Network summarized it this way.

This sent the mommyverse into a tailspin. Some mothers praised her determination and work ethic, others denounced her decision as selfish and mourned for the son who won’t spend much quality time with his mother while others think she’s going to be in for a rude awakening once her son is here and she won’t have time to work at all.

I am a big advocate of people-first values, and The Idolbuster has a number of posts about the personal cost of a 90 hour work week, which Mayer apparently worked at Google.

So what people should come first here?

Is it the new baby, and if so does that mean that women should never work with a newborn in the house?  The woman who cleans my house was pregnant one week, and back at work the next.  I was so shocked.  I assumed she would take the week off, but was back right away.  I expect she couldn’t afford to forgo a week of pay.

Is it the employees, investors, or customers of Yahoo who need Mayer’s expertise to turn the company around?  I read Yahoo news multiple times every day, and I want the company to succeed.  In my opinion Yahoo would be just fine if she truly unplugged, but I can understand why she would want to work through.

Is Marissa Mayer herself the person we should put first?  And if we want to, how would we go about it?  Should we save her from herself, and push her into taking a longer or shorter leave?  If I read another “she doesn’t know what she’s getting into” handwringing post, I’ll shoot myself.

Here is the simple truth: none of us know what is best for Mayer or her family.  But our course of action here is simple.  Mayer deserves the basic respect to make her own choices and tradeoffs without our punditry.  She is an adult, and gets to choose what is the most fulfilling path for her life.  The Golden Rule says “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” or “don’t treat others in ways you don’t like to be treated.” And I can’t imagine anyone would want a Facebook poll to be taken about their maternity leave.  It is no one else’s business what Marissa Mayer does in her family life.

And one more thing:  Am I the only one on the world who thinks maybe her husband will stay home with the newborn?  Her husband, Zachary Bogue, is a lawyer and Co-Managing Partner at Data Collective.  The very idea that he would take care of the newborn seems out of the question.

For my marketing friends: we need a phrase to describe the societal barriers that make it hard for men to take care of the family.  We need something that is analogous to The Glass Ceiling.  Somehow The Glass Remote doesn’t seem to cover it.

 

Filed Under: Values, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Upset about Penn State? Then Prevent It From Happening Again!

July 13, 2012 by 8 Comments

Today’s guest post is from me.  We’ll get back to Busting Your Corporate Idol on Monday.

“The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” – The Freeh Report p 14

If you are interested in my thoughts on how the culture of Penn State enabled this tragedy, and is the embodiment of institutional idolatry, come back on Monday.  I realized that if that is all I had to say, I too, would be ignoring the victims of child abuse.  People come first, so let me share what I have learned about child predators.  Kudos to those news reports that have included experts on child abuse, who have taught me that this is no longer an issue of laws, it is an issue of awareness.

“The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse victims are abused by someone they know and trust, someone most parents would never suspect.”

For those who prefer statistics, according to the American Psychological association, 60% of perpetrators are known the the parents, 30% are relatives of the child, and just 10% are strangers.  This particularly hits home for me.  I met a family friend’s husband at a wedding and later learned that he was sexually abusing their children.  His own children.  I met him and never in a million years would have guessed.  And she didn’t figure it out for years.

So wearing my business, problem solving hat, if 60% of the problem comes from known, trusted people, how to we as a society solve the problem?

I think a model system is the Safe Haven program, designed by the The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO).  The Safe Haven program was designed to “prevent opportunities for abuse to occur while minimizing opportunities for volunteers to be misunderstood or falsely accused. The guidelines hold coaches responsible for all players, for maintaining supervision protocols, and maintaining appropriate adult/child boundaries.”

Here are the three rules I learned in Safe Haven training as a coach for my daughters’ soccer teams.

  1. A coach is never alone with a child, ever.
  2. A coach never touches a child, ever.
  3. For girls teams, at least one adult woman must be present at every practice.  And if no woman is available, the practice is canceled.  In San Carlos, where I live,  my town, this is taken very seriously.  Once  when I was an assistant coach, the head coach spent the first 15 minutes of practice calling moms until he found one to come to the field.
What is great about The Safe Haven is that everyone involved with the soccer league, the parents, coaches, referees, and kids are all trained on these rules.  The program works exactly as designed – the kids are safe, and the coaches are never in a position where they could be questioned or falsely accused.

What to do if you come across the unthinkable?

What would you do if you found out a close friend, coworker, or aquantance was molesting kids?  One mother involved with the Penn State tragedy confronted Jerry Sandusky when she though he had molested her son.  Don’t do it.  Monsters like him are master manipulators.  You would have a better chance of winning a chess match against world champion Viswanathan Anand of India than you would of learning the truth yourself.  None of us are prepared for such things.  Call for professional help immediately.
Your company may have a policy to inform HR,  your boss, or local security.  Some good people at Penn State followed that procedure, and Sandusky continued to hurt kids for years.  In my opinion, if you see something obvious, just call the police on the spot, and call the chain of command later.  After all the national scrutiny on the failings at Penn State, this is one time to ask for forgiveness later for not following procedure.
You do not need to have proof to call in the professionals like the police or a doctor.  It is not your call whether someone should be prosecuted or investigated.  Present what you know and let the professionals work it out.
Another option is to call the Childhelp.org hotline .  1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453).  After reviewing a number of websites, this one seems to be the best.  From Childhelp.org:
 ”A qualified crisis counselor will answer and assist you, if you:
  • Have questions about the signs of child abuse.
  • Need to find out how to report known or suspected abuse.
  • Have questions about the reporting process and what you might expect through the process.
  • Want a referral to an agency, counseling or other services near where you live.
  • Need help and want to talk to a counselor.
  • Are in physical or emotional crisis and need support and encouragement
  • Connect you to the best possible resources in your area.
In summary, 90% of child abuse is by people known to the child.  We can do our part to dramatically cut down on child buse by doing the following two things.
1. Set rules for your kids that prevent them from being alone with adults.  Pedaphiles often groom kids by offering special favors or attention. For more information on the danger signs, see http://www.childhelp.org/pages/blow-the-whistle-on-child-abuse
2. Make sure that you, and everyone you know, knows what to do if they see something. Call 1-800-4-A-Child.  We don’t need a witch hunt, but we do need to make sure to bring in a professional if we have reason to believe children are being hurt.  Pedophiles can remain undetected for years, and  hurt multiple children.  And abused kids are much more likely to become abusers themselves.
As uncomfortable as the topic may be, please pass this information on.  It is a concrete step we all can take to make sure that something like this can never happen again.
Filed Under: Community, Featured, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Search For Universal Values I: The Ten Commandments

July 5, 2012 by 6 Comments

Chapter 2: Idolatry Then & Now

20% of the Ten Commandments Concern Idolatry

In the last post, I argued that a culture of idolatry is built on relative values, which is in contrast to the idea of a single creator who taught a single set of universal, absolute values that do not change with circumstance.  This is the first in a series of posts to define a set of universal values.

According to Thomas Cahil, in his books The Gift of the Jews, the Ten Commandments are a great place to start when looking for a universal set of values.  The last eight “commandments “reflect a tendency that is already there,” a set of ideas that at a high level are fairly uncontroversial.   But what about the first two commandments?  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that twenty percent of the Ten Commandments concern idolatry. (In fact as a marketer, 20% of anything will get my attention.)

The first commandment affirms the supremacy and unity of God, and the second forbids the worship of other gods.  But one need not be a believer to benefit from a universal set of values.  From a humanist standpoint, the first commandment (I am the Lord your God) can be interpreted as “Follow this set of universal values”.  The second commandment (You shall worship no other God but me) can be interpreted as “Accept no substitutes.”

Value systems matter – they impact how we make decisions, and what we do in life.  And the first two commandments together argue that there is a single set of values that does not change with circumstance. This stands in stark contrast to the sensibilities of the Ancient world, with many gods each with its own set of values.  But what is that set of unchanging values?

I discovered as I studied further, that The Ten Commandments don’t hold any special place in Judaism.  They are but 10 of 613 commandments in the Torah. (The Torah is the Hebrew word for the five books of Moses in the first half of the Old Testament, which is the foundation of Jewish law and tradition.)  This was going in the wrong direction – as much as I like the idea of a set of universal values, it would be impractical and career-limiting to walk around with a Torah Scroll under my arm.  I needed a way to summarize the entire Torah in three bullets.  Moreover, if the values are truly universal, they should exist in other religions and philosophies from around the world.

The answer for me came once again from the Talmud, a collection of stories and Rabbinic commentary that was compiled ~ 200 C.E.

It happened that a heathen came before [Rabbi] Shammai and said to him “Take me as a proselyte, but on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Shammai instantly drove him away with a builder’s measuring rod he happened to have in his hand.  When the heathen came before [Rabbi] Hillel, Hillel said to him “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man.  This is the entire Torah, all of it; the rest is commentary.  Go and study it.”[i] 

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man” is the Jewish version of The Golden Rule.  The heathen in the story is by definition an idol worshiper (the only monotheistic religion at the time was Judaism.) So therefore the only thing needed to escape idolatry was the Golden Rule.  And as we shall see in the next post, the Golden Rule is found in more than a dozen religions and philosophies worldwide.

[i]  Book of Legends, Sefer Ha-Aggadah Legends from the Talmud and Midrash. Edited by Hayim Bialik and Yehoshua Ravinitzky.  Translated by William Braude.  Schoken books 1992. p 207

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Filed Under: Busting Your Corporate Idol, Chapter 2: Idolatry Then & Now, Featured, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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