Here are some things I’ve learned along the way about bringing out the best of who we are in the workplace:

1. Conduct a strengths-based inventory alongside your training needs analysis. Be prepared to be surprised about what emerges.
2. Ask what people are proud of and what they want to be known for. E.g. Start a meeting with each person telling a story about what they are proud of.
3. Create an inventory of key leadership practices and how they align with your organizational, team and individual values.
4. Track employee engagement as well as productivity. Give equal weight to both ‘what we do’ and ‘how we do it’. I.e. Proud of what we do and how we do it.
5. Encourage trust in leadership by having a dialogue before embarking on your next major change initiative. Give everyone an opportunity to contribute.
6. Identify ‘needs’ from four perspectives (self, team, customer/client, organization) and link to values, behaviours and competencies.
7. Take an appreciative inquiry approach by reflecting on what is working: pause, ask more – tell less.
8. Be open and fearless in the sense of attempting something different. It may or may not work out; however,you  have to try with an open mind.
9. Look back at the path you took to reach your goals; paying special attention to the ones you feel good about. Repeat!
10. Have passion and purpose in what you do. Remember, leadership of others is truly about self-leadership and believing that a proud and productive workplace is possible.

Read the full article titled The HR Edge: Performance & Productivity

Donna Howes, Humanity at Work

Why - Why Not! - Why Not Me? - Why Not Me Now!!

At the risk of repeating myself, when it comes to creating equality between the sexes, I think an important part of the equation is what needs to change for men as well as women.

In 1975, I addressed Toastmasters on the topic of International Women’s Year (before it was just a Day)…. and today, just because, I went rummaging through my special shoebox that holds scraps of my journey to now.

The first artifacts I found were the buttons… the red one circulated by the IWY committee that defiantly exclaimed WHY NOT! And then came the blue button that simply said BECAUSE. I can’t remember if anyone ever took credit for the ‘because’ button, however, it lightened the debate considerably.

The next thing I found was the speech…. yellow paper (not through age; actually on yellow letterhead) typed on a manual typewriter!  Had the years been kind to me, I wondered as I slipped the pages from their envelope and began to scan.

I said International Women’s Year was necessary because of a basic lack of communication between the sexes.  Hmmmm.  Scanning now; “there’s a huge pay gap, day care is still a problem, pensions and maternity leaves aren’t universal, and although women have been free to vote and stand for office for 50 years, very few have been candidates and not one has run for party leadership.”

Then I got to my real point in the speech….  “men may have had it good economically, but emotionally, they’ve been robbed of their right to feel.  We tell men to be strong, brave and courageous.  We send them out to fight.  We demand that they provide… and the truth is, by doing this, we deprive men of contact with their families and a natural source of joy.”

“We don’t allow men to feel, which is just as bad as not allowing women to excel in the outside world,” I said.

My premise?  International Women’s Year wasn’t only for women… it was for men too.  If we want things to really change for the better we need to go all the way.  We may think it’s all about liberating women,  but men need the freedom to make new choices as well!

Rereading these thoughts today, some 36 years later… I still believe what I said.

At the risk of repeating myself; when someone says you can’t do that (man or woman) ask WHY NOT?  And don’t take because for an answer.

Peace.

1. I heard an interview on CBC radio about a new book
2. a colleague from the Minerva Foundation sent me a You Tube link, and
3. I coached an aspiring female leader

What did they have in common? Amazingly, Cinderella (and her ugly step-sisters: self-doubt and fear of success / independence)

Random 1 – The new book - “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture”

So here, author Peggy Orenstein is saying that the saturation marketing of the Disney Princess ideal can have a negative impact on how young girls see themselves…and wish to see themselves. The author writes on her blog that “she’s touched a cultural nerve: many parents share her concerns about the significance of this seemingly-retro trend toward the ultra-feminine, and the role the ubiquitous marketing machine plays in packaging and promoting it.”

As my daughters are grown, my interest was somewhat academic, until I remembered another Cinderella-themed book that came out exactly 30 years ago that I loved, called “The Cinderella Complex”.  Way back then, writer and psychotherapist, Colette Dowling, coined the psychological term to describe how some women, often the brightest and most outwardly confident, suffer from what she called a ‘Cinderella Complex’.

The essential theme is that, instead of believing that they can “make it on their own”, these smart, together women harbour a secret desire to be rescued by a ‘prince’; to be whisked away from the frightening realities of living as an authentic adult.

Right, well. That was the first peek at Cinderella in my day.

Random 2 – The You Tube Link

Next came the link to a TED Talk by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Her theme?

Why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions.  One of the main reasons she says is that women “systematically underestimate themselves” and “attribute their successes to others”.

What’s interesting (and where Cinderella fits in) is that the ugly step-sisters–self doubt and fear of success / independence– appear to still be part of the female psyche today!  It turns out, the research shows women would rather be liked than be successful, because successful women are not admired; they are labeled ‘aggressive’ or ‘pushy’ or worse (at least by those participating in the research!)

Ms Sandberg offers three strategies to women aiming for leadership roles and senior positions.  She’s done her research, quotes authoritative, balanced studies, and is well worth your time listening to.

Random 3 – Coaching Conversation with an Aspiring Leader

And then there was the coaching conversation with a young woman who wants to ‘play bigger’ than she has been at work. She feels stuck in the day-to-day, constantly trying to prove herself; never feeling her successes.  Hoping she’s good enough but never quite feeling successful enough.   Thinking to herself, “I can’t believe it was me…Am I really good at this?  Am I fooling people?”

Ugly step-sisters, right? Taunting voices loaded with ridicule… “Who do you think you are? “You’re not as good as you think you are.” “No one’s going to like you if you’re too good anyway!”

So, real-time now…..  as we worked together through the 30 minute coaching call, she went from fear of success to declaring she was ready to own her success.  By the end of the call, she heard herself say–out loud–that she doesn’t have to keep proving herself.  “I don’t need approval to feel successful,” she said, “because I already am enough, and I already do enough!”

A big leap and a spontaneous one.

All I have to say is “night, night Cinderella.  Sleep well.”

Why?  Partly it’s because they’ve got talent, ambition, energy and ideas that aren’t being utilized within traditional workplaces and they’ve leaving for something better.  If you thought the ‘glass ceiling’ had been shattered long ago, ask yourself why it is that women leaders didn’t make it onto the Top 100 list of most senior or highly paid executives in 2010.

Is it Brain Sex?

More than 21 years ago, Anne Moir and David Jessell wrote ‘Brain Sex: the Real Difference between Men & Women’.  They looked at the scientific research of the day and came up with the premise that we’re different because our brains are different.  What did this mean in terms of leadership styles?

Here’s a passage from page 167 around the importance that women place on ‘relationship’ in the workplace.

“Women would flourish better, then, in a work environment where the emphasis on the personal is seen as an advantage, rather than a handicap.  In a man-made world of work such an environment does not, on the whole, exist.

Women have had to create it: they may not be properly represented at important levels of big corporations, but they are now doing remarkably well in the firms they have set up themselves.  Here, they don’t have to play the male game according to male rules.”

With management literature increasingly promoting that both creativity and innovation are sources of business value, the best companies today are learning that ‘how’ they do things is just as important as ‘what’ they do to reach their business goals.

And that of course falls squarely into the realm of relationship building–a hard-wired leadership strength in women, according to the brain scientists.

Leadership Redefined

No one can seriously doubt that women make a unique contribution to leadership at every level of organizations today.  While leadership is still about getting things done, the challenge and real opportunity is to redefine what ‘successful leadership’ looks like.

Today, successful leadership is about everyone being on the same page and in tight alignment with the organization’s goals to meet shared objectives.  This is where the leadership values of women make a vital contribution.

In a more recent book, titled: Leadership and the Sexes, Barbara Annis and Michael Gurian point out that women tend toward more participative teams, are collaborative and look for possible connections rather than introduce competitiveness into the process.  Both women and men are collaborative but in different ways: men leaders lace competitiveness into the process, while women leaders tend to see possible connections.  And while women leaders enjoy solving problems with others; men challenge themselves to “solve the problem himself”.

Women Leading the Way – A new and exciting program from the Minerva Foundation

So where do women get the opportunity for leadership development….and to become the best they can possibly be?  Here’s where!

The Minerva Foundation for BC Women is seeking applicants for Women Leading the Way – an exciting and innovative three-year pilot program that will take women who want to lead through a part-time, year-long, advanced leadership development training program.  The program begins January 2011 and the application deadline is September 15, 2010.

Find out how you can advance your career and make a real difference in the world.  Visit the Minerva Foundation for more information and an application.

There is something uplifting and tangible for each of us in bearing witness to John Furlong’s inspirational leadership throughout the entire 2010 Winter Olympics Games.  His successes are well documented, including the recent Globe and Mail story, “Honoured for ‘extraordinary leadership’ where Furlong was recognized for “unlocking our pride and our patriotism, and well, just for making us better.”

His unrelenting belief in the value of ‘doing good’ and ‘inspiring others’, carried him well beyond his job description, almost into the realms of being super-human (not so much in his ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound), but in his heroic determination to lead from the heart through a set of personally-held values he shared each time he spoke.

Witnessing Excellence in Action

For more than 20 years, social scientists have been observing and reporting on the phenomenon of ‘witnessing’ simple acts of everyday kindness between strangers.  One person giving up a seat for another on the bus, ensuring that an elder crosses safely in traffic, or holding the door for a parent with a pram, generates a positive feeling in us the observer and promotes altruism.

According to research, this phenomenon of being uplifted or swept up in ‘doing good’ is called elevation.  The term was coined by University of Virginia professor Johnathan Haidt.  For more visit: “Witnessing excellence in action: ‘The ‘other-praising’ emotions of elevation, gratitude and admiration.” Algoe, S.B. and J. Haidt (2009) journal of Positive Psychology, 4, 105-127)

It’s connected to the study of positive psychology and is being described as a moral emotion that involves a desire to act morally and do ‘good’.  So, if even observing good deeds connects us to our inner sense of well-being, lifts our emotions and motivates us to to ‘do good’ for others–what is possible when we collectively tap into this poerful energy at work?

A Whole New Mind

Daniel Pink is among the thought leaders on the topic of awakening organizations to game changing new ways of working and relating to each other.  I heard him speak at the BC Human Resources Management Association conference in Vancouver, BC recently about his book “A Whole New Mind”.  In it, he talks about going beyond enduring and surviving in business.  In today’s world, he says, we have to know how to flourish, to inspire and to nurture.  He believes this can only happen when we engage our ‘right brain’ qualities of inventiveness, empathy and meaning-making.  If you want to achieve professional success and personal fulfillment, or as he energetically challenges, “put a dent in the universe and make the world a better place”, you’d better master the new literacy skills of nurturing others within organizations.

Now that would be Humanity at work.

What If We Don’t Inspire, Nurture and Elevate?

It can be difficult to make the case to champion the highest human values in some workplaces.  Harder still to have meaningful conversations about what to do when we see something we know is wrong, against the greater good and not in keeping with our values.  Just as we are uplifted in a positive sense by seeing and doing good…there are extraordinary consequences from witnessing and being in the presence of wrong-doing.

When we as individuals feel forced to choose between our values and our livelihoods there can be sweeping consequences.

The Opposite of Extraordinary Leadership

I have been deeply saddened by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Much is yet to become clear about what occurred and the series of decisions that created the disaster.  It is a grim reminder to us that leadership bereft of regard for life sustaining values can results in loss from with it takes generations to recover.

This is Mike Williams’ story of errors and misplaced values that let to the oil spill, as told to 60 Minutes.  Mike was Deepwater Horizon’s chief technician.

What’s the Connection to Coaching?

When you have a crisis in your work life; when it was meaningful yesterday, and not the next… When an event triggers the question, “Why am I doing this? What am I doing here?”; there is a very real sense of being in two minds.  The logical, left brain is often in high gear, challenging why there is a crisis at all–often seeking rational proof to support the status quo.

The more ‘feeling’ right brain–wired for empathy, deeper reflection and embracing the big picture–won’t rest until the solution makes sense to us.  In effect, we begin to argue with ourselves, our values, our experiences and our beliefs.

Working with your Coach is a way to help you move through difficult choices.  This happens through honest, thought-provoking conversations that revewal deeply held beliefs.  It is a way of gaining clarity, examining issues through multiple lenses, identifying what is missing, what’s possible and what you want more of.  It helps you tap in into the internal flow of your communication and decision-making to help you make the distinctions that are necessary to break through barriers, and gain the peace of mind you need to move forward.

Increasingly, coaching is a partner of the extraordinary leader.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether a situation is personal or professional though, great coaching conversations help people make better choices…and the results are often inspiring.

The other day a coachee told me she was proud of the way she had handled a very difficult conversation with an employee who had been sabotaging progress of a change initiative within the work team.   Despite several attempts to overcome his resistance, he wasn’t buying what she was selling.  She credited the ‘win’ to our coaching work a couple of weeks before.

Here’s a snapshot of a typical coaching conversation:

Q.  You’ve tried working at that level, what else have you tried?
R.  Coachee summarizes her thought process for coming up with different approaches / strategies.

Q.  What would it look like if your strategies worked perfectly?
R. Coachee comes up with a list of ideal outcomes.

Q.  What needs to change in order to achieve these outcomes?
R.  Coachee identifies one aspect of her skill set.

Q.  How would you like to address that issue in the time we have today?
R.  Coachee says she wants to focus on her communication style.

Q.  As a stretch question…how could you go into the conversation  so that it doesn’t feel confrontational for either of you?
R.  Coachee said, “Listen first….. and see what he and I are saying in common….”

Q.  What are you taking away from our coaching conversation today?
R.  Coachee says, “The realization that the conversation would be successful if she showed confidence in (and valued) the employee’s contribution.”

Coaching Works. It isn’t magic but it is magical… which is a great introduction to this 4 minute video produced by Wellcoaches.  Enjoy!

Guest writer Mitch Joel, president of the digital marketing agency Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation, began his piece by asking some provocative questions, “Is it that hard to be kind to one another?” “Is the simple act of having a culture of kindness going to affect the bottom line in a negative way?” “Can a business be both kind and profitable?”

It’s a big idea that has the potential to change the conversations we have with each other in the workplace…and fundamentally change our way of measuring success and of gaining a strategic advantage. With a name like Humanity at Work, it isn’t a leap to anticipate my thoughts about including human values in our professional relationships.

Approaching the Tipping Point

Hasn’t it been amazing to notice the changes in leadership book titles over the past 10 years? We are now describing leadership using words such as: emotional intelligence, courageous, authentic, fierce, from the inside out, soul, quiet, presence and passion. Along with this new language, has come a significant shift in how we measure the effectiveness of our leaders. Not only do they have to deliver bottom line results, they have to do it with passion!

Having come from a corporate background, including government and volunteer sector involvement over the past 25 years, I have a hunch that kindness, along with some other very positive human values, are what true leadership has always been about…. we just weren’t ready to have the conversation on such a personal level.

We are now though, and one reason is that we do have a new business language that allows us to engage in meaningful conversations about our emotional experiences within the workplace, rather than pretending that we are exclusively hard-wired to left brain ways of doing things.

The big question is… “If kindness and other human values are the real leadership measures of success, how can we support leaders to take the leap from ‘what we’re doing’ to ‘how we are doing it’?”

Transparency and Communication

When you combine transparency and communication you get trust…. and in the workplace, trust builds followership, commitment, passion and kindness.

My challenge to you as a leader, wanting to incorporate human values into the strategic framework of your organization, is to be transparent about how you measure your own success and the success of those around you, and to communicate through conversations that encourage others to speak from their values.

Here are some thought provoking questions from Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations that are guaranteed to open courageous, authentic, passionate dialogue in the workplace. A fierce conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves, into the conversation and make it real.

▪ What values do you stand for and are there gaps between those values and how you actually behave?
▪ What conversations are you avoiding right now?
▪ What are you pretending not to know?
▪ What is at stake for you to lose or gain?

“Mark these words, kindness will soon become the killer app and the winning business model.” Mitch Joel