The HR Whisperer

It kills me, just kills me, when I read about HR-related issues in BusinessWeek magazine.  I know  it is a business-related sheet and all, but they don’t always make me feel all warm and fuzzy when they start talking about the human side of things.  It’s not often that an article will catch my eye, but in this case one did and so is the inspiration for this week’s blog. 

The October 5^th article, “The No-Cost Way to Motivate,” by Patrick Lencioni who also wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, focuses on the fact that no matter who you are or what you do, everyone wants someone to be interested in them, both personally and professionally.  Lencioni says:

                “One of the greatest causes of misery for employees is the feeling that the person they work for isn’t interested in who they are and what goes on in their lives, personally or professionally. Regardless of how much money people make and whether their jobs suit them, if they feel anonymous they’ll dread going to work – and return home deflated…a manager needs to be interested in employees from a professional standpoint too, not only in job details, but also in motivation. And a big part of this is helping people figure out why their job matters to someone, somewhere in some way large or small.”

The famous Hawthorne Studies of 1924 found that if managers paid a more attention to employees and seemed to care about them, it raised morale and increased productivity.  That was followed by an additional 80+ years of research that essentially told us the same thing.  Then in 2008, Towers Perrin did an employee engagement study that found that  firms with the highest percent of engaged employees increased income 19% and earnings per share 28%. 

So it seems everybody is getting on the bus.  Even BusinessWeek.  So why don’t we see it in practice then?

As the HR Whisperer, this particular concept is one that I have been preaching about for years.  To be motivated at work, everyone needs what I call the EDA:  exercise, discipline and affection.*  You’ve got these, then you’ve got engagement.

Want to motivate employees and get them engaged?  Then use EDA:

Exercise – Give employees the opportunity to improve their skills and capabilities.  There are a ton of ways to do this, such as through education and training,  job enrichment or enlargement, coaching and feedback.  Provide opportunities for folks to have input into decision-making and to be innovative in their thinking or problem solving.  Exercising the brain keeps people interested and involved.

Discipline – Work with employees to set goals and strategies to achieve those goals.  The discipline of planning the work and working the plan creates that line of sight for achievement.  Additionally, provide challenging work assignments that not only broaden skills, but can serve as career advancement opportunities.  This will demonstrate to employees that stick-to-itness will reap rewards.

Affection – Employees continually tell us they want senior management interested in their well being and good relationships with their supervisors.  Lack of a good supervisor relationship is the number one reason people leave their jobs.  In Social Intelligence and the Biology of the Pack Leader, I talk about the importance of the supervisor-employee relationship.  To me, this is the biggie — and Lencioni agrees.

Of course there is no sure fire, quick fix.  Motivation depends on the individual’s perception of what is a valued motivator to them.  But even BusinessWeek tells us that if we pay attention to our employees and work to meet their needs, we’re going to get a pretty decent return on our investment.  And that’s a no brainer.

*I must give credit to Cesar Millan, whose catch phrase for creating a balanced canine is “exercise, discipline, and affection.”

Once again I must thank my mentor, Cesar Millan, for the inspiration for this week’s blog.  He said that “when humans bring a dog into their lives, they are most often looking for a companion; what they may not realize is that they are getting a teacher as well.”  This is true in a business sense, too.  When we bring a potential leader into our organization, we should be getting someone who can teach or positively influence others.  But teaching goes both ways…is it really possible to teach someone to be an effective leader or is it just genetics coming into play?

Many organizations decide they want to implement a leadership development program because they need better leaders or people who could be put into some kind of succession plan.  The HR department gets the charge to put “something together” and manages to get someone to run the program, get people into it and maybe even toss in a measure or two to try to link the success of the program to a business goal–all within a few months.  Is it any surprise then, that so many of these programs lose steam after one year or fall flat due to budget cuts?  Aside from the timing and operational issues, the real question centers on whether or not leadership development programs truly teach people to be good leaders.

Leadership by its definition is a very complex.  Some say that leadership is a natural thing, that we are born with the innate qualities it takes to be a leader.  Psychologists have continuously searched for the personal attributes that would describe leaders and differentiate them from the rest of the pack.  A large body of research supports the theory that the “Big Five” of personality traits underlie all others and encompass most of the significant variation in human personality. In addition to providing a cohesive framework, research has also found strong relationships between the Big Five and job performance, especially in terms of successful leadership.  It’s no surprise then that tools like the Myers-Briggs’ MBTI® or DiSC® tend to be a part of LD programs.

More recent research shows that effective leaders have emotional intelligence (EI).  Daniel Goleman found that high levels of EI predicts high performance.  I would even go so far as to say that the combination of EI and the Big Five trait of extroversion defines charisma.  A definitive study conducted in 1999 on the personalities of two executive management teams found that over a period of five years the charismatic personality of the executive manager and of the team he selected was key to understanding a company’s rise or decline in the market.  

Hmmm.

Now on the other hand, behavioral theories focus on identifying the specific behaviors that differentiate leaders from nonleaders, which implies that these behaviors can be taught, i.e., leadership is a competency that can be broken down into concrete sets of trainable skills.  The most comprehensive of the behavioral theories resulted from research conducted at Ohio State University in the late 40s where the researchers narrowed a thousand different leadership dimensions into two categories: (1) task/structure and (2) relationship/consideration.  The managerial grid developed by Blake and Mouton and the contingency leadership theory developed by Hersey and Blanchard in the 1960s serve as the landmarks for situational leadership theory today.  The Hersey-Blanchard theory in particular focuses on the leader being able to select the right behavioral style based on followers’ willingness and ability.   

So, in my mind good leadership really is a combination of personality and environment. Which brings us back to our original question:  can people be trained in leadership?  The answer to me is an unequivocal yes.  Strong, results-driven leadership development programs worth their salt screen for the necessary Big Five personality traits and then provide adult-centered interventions to develop the skills necessary to:

• Run the task/structure of a business, such as strategic planning and financial management.
• Develop the relationship/consideration in teams, such as communication and conflict management.
• Understand the self and corresponding behavior by opening the Johari Window through extensive feedback, coaching and 360° profiling.

Another question:  if “nature” and “nurture” are important elements of leader effectiveness then, how does experience play a part?  Many believe that the value of on-the-job experience is a strong predictor of leadership effectiveness. Research, however shows that experience alone is usually a very poor predictor of leadership.  There have been numerous studies of military officers, shop supervisors, and school principals that demonstrate that experienced leaders tend to be no more effective than leaders who have little experience.  The problem seems to be in the variability of the situations a leader finds himself in that influence whether or not the experience will transfer to that situation.  Another problem is the assumption that the amount of time a leader spends in a particular position is really a true measure of experience.  So, LD programs need to provide education, training and experience through action learning.

Remember the heroes of September 11?  They may not have had the particular experience of being attacked by terrorists, but may have had the necessary personality traits and training in leading others and influencing them to action.

And that’s what we really need in any LD program.

You know, as the HR Whisperer, I’m really enamored with the whole idea of creating top performing organizations through positive behavior change. One of my favorite mentors, Cesar Millan, says, “A dog that doesn’t trust its human to be a good pack leader becomes unbalanced and often exhibits unwanted or antisocial behaviors.” It struck me that the same is true for people in organizations. We need to have strong leadership because in many cases our very business survival depends on a stable, organized and motivated team. Business survival instinct is perhaps one of our greatest natural motivators in the workplace and if a person is not guided well, it can not only result in unwanted behavior but total chaos in the long run.

So, I’m digging this concept and working it through in my brain as to how this relates to human capital and wouldn’t you know, I web-stumbled across an article recently published by Harvard Business Review (September 2008). Written by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership” discusses new studies of the brain that show that business leaders can improve team performance by understanding not the psychology, but the biology of social intelligence. How cool. It struck me that scientists have discovered a biological underpinning to what makes a good leader great, which could toss more fuel on the fire in the “leaders are born, not made” camp. (Which I don’t subscribe to, by the way. I believe that anyone, given time and effort can change their behavior – even interpersonally. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in. Oh, I feel another blog topic coming on! <huge grin>)

More on the biology of leadership from Harvard Business Review:

“The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do—specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’ moods—literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more) independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to each other. Rather, the individual minds become, in a sense, fused into a single system. We believe that great leaders are those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain interconnectedness…If we are correct, it follows that a potent way of becoming a better leader is to find authentic contexts in which to learn the kinds of social behavior that reinforce the brain’s social circuitry. Leading effectively is, in other words, less about mastering situations—or even mastering social skill sets—than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.”

Wow. The idea that leaders need good interpersonal as well as functional skills has certainly been around for quite some time. As a matter of fact, Goleman coined the phrase, “social intelligence” to discuss this very thing. But what he and Boyatzis are talking about here is different – they’re saying that we have these things in our brains called mirror neurons that mimic what another person does. As social beings, when we “consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our brain’s mirror neurons reproduce those emotions and allow us to instantly share that experience.” Ever notice when two people are deep in discussion they tend to hold their arms the same way or cross their legs at the same time? That’s the mirror neurons in action.

 So, how can leaders take advantage of this brain interconnectedness? If it stands to reason that followers will create a social connection with their leader, it also stands to reason that they will emotionally feel whatever it is the leader is feeling and behave accordingly. If leaders are emotionless, don’t smile or otherwise engage their followers, they will not activate the mirror neutrons in a positive way, leading to distressed and nonperforming followers, and thus the potential for business chaos. Body language plays a great part also. If a leader’s body language doesn’t jibe with what is being said, the follower will go with the body language. Bodies don’t tell lies, mouths do.

 The bottom line is that when people feel good about what they are doing, when they have a social connection with their leaders, when they feel part of something that is bigger than them, those mirror neurons come in handy. Reinforce the brain’s social circuitry — if you want to motivate those around you, create a positive atmosphere. If you want higher performance or enhanced creativity, be in a good mood and show you care.

If you truly want the best from your followers, kick those mirror neutrons into high gear and create an environment where sincere respect, fun, laughter and performance are a serious part of your business operations.