Archive for September, 2010

…then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.  That’s what I tell folks who complain to me about their labor market and their impossible, imposed-from-above recruiting goals.

It’s usually a diversity goal that gives rise to the complaints.  “We’re in the mid-west,” groups of diversity class participants will tell me.  “There’s no racial diversity here.  It’s impossible for us to increase our representation.”

This week it was a somewhat different scenario; the participants were from the hospitality industry and their goal was simply to start hiring responsible adults rather than young surf bums with drug problems.  But my response was the same.  In smaller organizations we often get stuck in ruts with our sourcing and recruiting efforts and it becomes easy to believe that what we’re looking for simply isn’t out there.  If you run recruitment ads in your local paper and then sit back to see what walks through your door, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.

I challenged the group to think differently.  “It’s not about who applies,” I told them.  “It’s about who you go out and get.”

“But we don’t pay enough to go out and get who we want,” they said.  “We don’t pay enough to get the experienced people.”

I talked to them about Zappos, a company well known for getting quality call center hires not by paying them any more than the competition but by creating an environment where intrinsically motivated, customer-oriented people will want to stay and do their best.

But more importantly, I talked to them about the corners of their community they might not be considering.  What about stay-at-home moms who might want to work part-time a couple nights a week?  What about recently retired folks who’ve decided they don’t want to be completely retired?  What about empty nesters looking for something to get them out of the house?  What organizations, clubs and networking groups could we tap into for referrals in these demographics?

It always takes a while to break through the mindset that says, “We already know what’s out there in our local community and it’s not what we’re looking for.”  But eventually I think we got there.  I look forward to seeing what creative things this group will do next in their pursuit of a great guest experience.

Recently I was facilitating a team building session for a young, enthusiastic group of government employees, and  a new colleague who would serve as my back-up for this particular session sat in the back of the room to observe.  I thought the session was going particularly well; I had put an unusually high number of creative activities into the training design to keep the participants moving, and they seemed to be actively engaged, learning, and having fun.  But during a break, my colleague said to me, “Why are you holding back?”

I was baffled.  He doesn’t even know me, I thought, indignantly.  How could he possibly tell that I was holding anything back, even if I was?

The next day I asked him what he meant.  After struggling to put it into words for a moment, he said, “It just seems like you get your energy for the session from the participants, rather than them getting it from you.”

This was food for thought for several days.  Over the years, I had gradually made a change to the extent to which I injected “myself” into a meeting or training session; always fearful of making it look like “the me show,” I had been focusing less and less on the amount of time I spent introducing myself or telling personal stories, whether relevant and illustrative or not.  I’ve so often seen trainers that go overboard with this, and had once, years ago, received feedback that I needed to be careful with it myself.

But after really thinking about it, I began to see my colleague’s perspective.  It’s a simple concept, but it was truly an “ah ha” moment for me.  Sometimes the personal stories and other things trainers do to bring the material to light isn’t just about injecting yourself into the session; it’s about the energy in the room and where it comes from.  The participants will get energy from each other if you structure things appropriately.  But there will be times that they’re just sitting and listening to you, and perhaps checking out and going to sleep.  So I see now that it’s appropriate to ask; are you putting energy into the room?  Or are you letting someone else do it, and maybe even feeding on that energy yourself?

In a recent team building session, a group I was working with posed an interesting question.  If members are not fully engaged in their team meetings, is that because the topics are inappropriate, e.g. applicable only to certain members?  Or is it because, as we were exploring in the session, they are acting as a “federation” rather than a “tribe,” using the terminology of Gervase Bushe?

Bushe says that a federation is  a group of managers that isn’t really a team in the sense of being fully interdependent, and in which each member oversees separate functional areas that compete for resources and attention.  They have the same organizational goals overall, but tend to lose sight of them because performance is measured and rewarded  by department.  What many organizations want, Bushe says, is to turn their federations into “tribes,” in which individuals identify so strongly with the group that they will put the good of the  community ahead of their own departmental goals when necessary.

So the question we began to ask was, if people are starting to type away on their laptops during team meetings while other people’s programs and projects are being discussed, is that acceptable?  Does it mean we need to restructure the way the agenda is created, or the level of detail at which the facilitator moves the group on?  Or does it mean that something much more fundamental must be addressed, such as that members don’t really identify strongly enough with the group and don’t have any interest in their colleague’s areas of responsibility?

Although we didn’t get any further in the session than identifying the questions and setting some action steps for further exploration, my sense is that this group will come to the conclusion that it’s a little of both.  We all have a different tolerance for detail, but most of us will tune-out at some point if the level of detail is too much for a discussion about something we are not even directly involved in.  On the other hand, if the members of the group work in silos to such an extent that they aren’t even curious to hear what their colleagues are working on, that’s a problem for everyone.  Some basic work around looking at organizational structure and how the parts add up to the whole is probably called for at this point.

Take a family unit as an analogy.  No one expects brother Jake to have the same day-to-day goals as sister Susan, nor to have the patience to listen to a greatly detailed description of her science project every night.  But if Jake wants to leave the dinner table anytime Susan even begins to answer the question, “how was your day?” that’s a family that will have issues beyond not being able to eat dinner together.

Dahlia Lithwick, in her recent Newsweek column “The Female Factor,” asks the question whether having three women on the Supreme Court will make any difference.  The answer, according to the studies and social scientists she quotes, is an emphatic “yes.”

It’s not that women have a unified perspective on things that is different from men’s.  It’s that as they gain critical mass, women begin to speak up more confidently and add a perspective that is missing from the conversation between men.   “Women speak openly when they don’t feel their own voice is meant to reflect all women,” she says, and this can be very important in situations where a woman’s perspective would be different.  Lithwick uses the example of the 2009 Supreme Court case in which a 13-year-old girl was strip searched by school officials looking for Ibuprofen; the males on the court likened this to the locker room pranks of young boys, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in an interview at the time, “My colleagues have never been a 13-year-old girl.”

Lithwick concludes, “…as the justices continue to decide cases that affect the ways that women are educated, hired, compensated, and afforded control over their bodies, maybe it’s high time there were three voices at the table with actual experience in the field.”

In how many corporate boardrooms and executive teams do we applaud the rise of a single woman, as if that means we’ve made progress?  Too often we’re still lacking the critical mass that would allow those women to speak confidently, that would allow them to add their experience of the world to the business conversation.

I’ve served on a couple of non-profit boards over the past five years and in both cases I was the only female.  I found myself often seeing a personnel issue as being influenced by gender stereotypes, and in the process, alienating my male colleagues by referring to it as such.  To have more female colleagues around that table would have helped; it would have leant credibility to my perspective and confidence to my delivery.

This has been said before, by people much smarter than me, but often the rise of a single woman to the corporate boardroom simply means she acted like a man in order to get there.  Will she act any differently once she’s at the table?  Probably not, if she’s faced with providing the only female perspective.  No one likes to be seen as being the representative voice of an entire group, never mind a group that is half the human race.

I’ll be watching the Supreme Court in the coming years, looking for evidence that our numbers matter and that the corporate world can look forward to a similar transition some day.  In the meantime, I’ll still be arguing alone on my non-profit boards.

One of my favorite topics to teach, in any teambuilding, leadership or communication skill-related class, is Peter Senge’s concept of balancing advocacy and inquiry in conversation.  Advocacy means explaining one’s own thinking and reasoning while advocating for a position, rather than keeping hidden agendas and withholding relevant information.  And even more importantly, inquiry means spending at least as much time, if not more, asking good questions and actively listening in order to understand another person’s position or perspective on the issue.

Personally, I have a long way to go in skillfully achieving this balance in my own conversations.  I do well with sharing relevant information but I need to work on my inquiry skills.  But where I really get frustrated is in dealing with personality types who are uncomfortable with any type of conflict or disagreement and prefer to avoid it altogether. What do you do when someone just doesn’t want to discuss the issue?  They don’t want to listen to you explaining your own position, and they don’t respond to your attempts to get them to explain their own.

I think I understand why they do this.  It’s not about being cowardly or self-serving.  For some people, to discuss a conflict is to dignify and perhaps magnify something they feel is unproductive, damaging, or maybe just trivial.  They believe it is better to hold their tongues and let the problem work itself out or just go away.

But problems and issues don’t usually just go away, especially interpersonal problems.  When someone ignores them, especially someone in a leadership position, problems simply seek alternative outlets.  Or they fester and grow.

I struggle with how to use the idea of inquiry and advocacy to take on the very concept of conflict resolution with folks who prefer to avoid rather than tackle.  How do you show respect for their preferences and still advocate for the view that many (most?) conflicts must be dealt with?  More importantly, how do you stop them from simply shutting down and walking away from the very conversation?  I’d like to hear your thoughts.