Which is why I can’t stop beating myself up this week.  About a month ago, my dog Jave began showing signs of impaired vision. I made the assumption that he was simply getting old, and that nothing could be done about it (I rescued Jave about four years ago, so I don’t know exactly how old he is).

I should mention that Jave is like my child to me; I take him everywhere, unless I’m getting on a plane, and I structure my days around taking him hiking and spending quality time with him.  I won’t plan a vacation that doesn’t include him.  This just makes it all the more inexcusable that I handled the situation the way I did.

Last week, after he banged into a couple of coffee tables, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should take him to the vet.  I had to catch a plane that day, so I called and got a last-minute appointment shortly before I needed to leave for the airport.  The doctor measured Jave’s eye pressure and immediately diagnosed him with glaucoma.  In case you don’t know what glaucoma actually is (I didn’t), it’s the build-up of pressure in the eyes from fluid.  In dogs it is very painful, but treatable if caught early.  We did not catch Jave’s early, and the vet told me he was now blind in one eye.  She said I needed to rush him to an emergency clinic if I wanted a chance to save his other eye.

Thank goodness my mother was available to go with me.  I knew I couldn’t cancel a job for a veterinary emergency, no matter how important my dog is to me; my contractors and clients would not understand.  We rushed Jave to the clinic, and then I had to make the incredibly painful decision to leave him there and make a mad dash to the airport.  I will never forget the look of disbelief in his eyes as I walked out the door.  The clinic kept Jave overnight and put him on a drug regimen to get the pressure down, and my mother picked him up in the morning.  So far it looks likely that his one good eye will be saved, although we don’t yet know for sure.

What I do know is that as human beings, no matter how hard we try to avoid acting on unquestioned assumptions, we all end up making mistakes sometimes.   I will learn from this one, and I just hope it doesn’t cost Jave his sight.

• Connection to a Larger Vision:  The ability to contribute to something bigger than yourself
• Perceived Progress:  The perception that you’re further along today than yesterday
• Perceived Control:  The perception that you have a direct effect on the outcomes in your life
• Relatedness:  Living life in the context of meaningful relationships

If you work for a government agency, you might be thinking, “That’s all very well, but I have to live in the real world.”   Are there too many rules and regulations in the federal environment to make use of Zappos’ philosophy?  I don’t think so.  Here are some ideas to consider:

• Connection to a larger vision is about that most elementary and primary activity of any organization: the creation of a mission and vision, and the exploration of how each team member contributes to them.  When was the last time you revisited the mission and vision statements of your agency or company with your employees?  Do smaller team units have their own mission and vision statements also?  Does every member of a team understand how they fit into the big picture?  If not, it’s time to help them make that connection.
• As a leader, you can create perceived progress by making sure the team has a strong structure for communication, both in terms of goals, and in terms of feedback from customers and leadership.  Weekly or even daily meetings to review progress toward goals or the completion of projects will help.  You can also make sure you’re measuring employee satisfaction along the way, by using some type of employee survey and communicating the results to employees when you make progress.
• Perceived control comes from constantly asking the question, “Am I micro-managing?  Can give my people more autonomy, more sense of choice about how they reach their goals?”  In other words, lead through a focus on results, rather than activities.  Adults don’t like to be told how to do everything; they like to make choices for themselves.
• Relatedness is first about creating cohesion and a sense of community.   Team members must be able to cultivate respect, trust, and effective communication on the team.  As a leader, give team members forums in which to get to know each other better.  Reinforce how important it is to understand each other’s communication preferences and pet peeves, and to give each other the benefit of the doubt when mistakes are made or disagreements rise.  You cannot force team members to like and respect each other; but you can create an environment in which it’s possible for them to arrive at that conclusion on their own.

Shawn Achor, in a 2011 Harvard Business Publishing blog article says that happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage an organization can have, because it broadens the neural pathways that tell us what is possible in the world and thus leads to greater creativity.  When we question “the real world” of a federal agency or any other organization which must deal with so many constraints, isn’t creativity what we’re really seeking?  We want to find new and better ways of getting the job done, without being stuck in the paradigm of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”  Pursue employee happiness and you’ll be on your way.

I’m proud to say that by the end of May, we will have licensed somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 crane operators this season.  Why be proud of that?  Because it’s something tangible, something we can see the results of.  We’re helping to make the construction world a safer place for people to work.  You need only be an occasional consumer of mainstream news to know that a crane accident can be a pretty serious thing.  By helping operators meet the 2014 OSHA requirement to be nationally licensed, we’re doing our part to bring those accident statistics down.  We’re also doing our part to help operators keep their jobs during a time of high unemployment.

I love the work I do in team building and leadership training and facilitation.  But let’s face it, the results of that work will never be as visible and measurable as what we do for crane operators.   At the end of a leadership development workshop, you don’t get to give the participants a test, proclaim them competent, and congratulate them for making the grade.  Nor would we want to try!  But there’s just something satisfying about the kind of program in which you can test for competency, and then watch the look of accomplishment (or relief, sometimes) on a participant’s face.  It’s also satisfying to be able to track statistics on how many people you’ve helped to get a job or keep a job, and to be safer in the performance of that job.  It’s something to be proud of, and we look forward to an even busier season next winter.

Of course part of customer service training is always to examine appropriate and inappropriate uses of certain words and phrasing.  We teach customer service reps to say things like, “let me help you with that” and not to say things like, “I’m sorry, but that’s policy.”  And yet it never occurred to me to actually create, in writing, an organization-specific lexicon.  A language manual of sorts, that would lay out conscious phrasing choices such as “my pleasure” for an upscale hotel company, instead of “OK” or “Yes sir.”

It made me start thinking about other uses for such a language manual.  What about creating a teamwork lexicon?  Such a manual would specify word and phrase choices such as:

• “We” instead of “I”
• “We made a mistake” instead of “you made a mistake”
• “What do you think?”
• “What other ways could we look at this?”
• “How do you see it?”
• “Let’s consider some different options”
• “I’m frustrated about ___.  Do you have time to talk about it?”

So on and so forth.  The possibilities are endless.   And the lexicon could be laid out in a team charter or other such guiding document, and could be part of new employe orientation.  The act of creating it would be a team building activity in and of itself.

What language would you put in a teamwork lexicon?

Pentland says the study uncovered some surprising results: that individual talent and skill matter far less than communication when it comes to building high performance teams.  “The best way to build a great team,” he says “is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.”

The research was conducted by placing little sensor badges on the members of high performance teams and recording their communication patterns for a period of months.  After analyzing the data points, the researchers identified three themes of communication for great teams:

1.  Energy, which is defined as the number and measure of exchanges between team members.  The most valuable medium of communication in terms of energy is face-to-face, followed by phone and video conferencing.  Email and text are the least valuable media.

2. Engagement, which reflects the distribution of energy between team members.  “If all members of a team have relatively equal and reasonably high energy with all other members, engagement is extremely strong. Teams that have clusters of members who engage in high-energy communication while other members do not participate don’t perform as well. ”

3.  Exploration, or the willingness of team members to communicate outside of the team and bring fresh perspectives back to the team.

In short, the members of great teams communicate often, informally/socially, and in equal measure.  Some of the interventions the study considered included changing break times so that everyone had the same break, changing the office seating arrangement, and putting long tables in the lunch room so that employees sat together.  These types of interventions were linked to measurable increases in performance.

Some of my standard team building activities were reinforced by this fascinating study:

1.  I ask teammates to practice “skillful discussion,” focusing on a volatile and controversial topic, with the goal to balance the levels of inquiry and advocacy within the group.  I ask members to get out of their comfort zone during this activity; if they usually spend more time listening and observing, they are challenged to do more advocating for their own perspective; if they usually spend more time expressing their opinions, I ask them to practice asking good questions and actively listening to others.  Ultimately what I’m asking them to do is practice having a learning conversation.

2.  Small table groups do an activity in which they list the pros and cons of different communication media, leading to a discussion of the importance of getting as much face time as possible.  For virtual teams, we talk about using technology more effectively to increase face time and decrease email communication.

3. I ask teammates to consider how they might improve team cohesion and creativity by widening the circle of their communication–asking someone different to lunch, for example, or seeking advice from someone other than their usual “go to” person.

What I think the article also reinforces, and a group of techniques I need to use more often, consists in activities like Open Space, World Cafe or Leadership Cafe–activities that maximize the use of open, informal, social communication during the break times of a formal meeting or training session.

Pentland says the science of the sensors used for the study is evolving, and they will eventually be able to capture more and finer data points.  It will be interesting to follow the work of this group as it continues to study team dynamics.

Sounds dismal, right?  But it wasn’t.  In fact, it was one of the most invigorating experiences I’ve had in a long time.

To start with, people flew in from all over the country for this reunion, many of them traveling on their own dime.  How many companies have you worked for that would inspire people to do that long after the company was no longer in existence?  There is really only one such company on my resume, and it’s this one.

We watched hours of video footage from our old conferences and meetings.  No one got bored.  All of us wallowed in the good memories we shared.  The truth is, we had more fun working at that company than I’ve ever had since, or are ever likely to have again.  As the former CEO said when he stood up to make a speech, “We can’t recreate the experience and we won’t try.  But we can relive the memories.”

In the couple weeks since, I’ve thought about what made it so engaging to work there.  Much of it came from the charisma, talent and personality of our chief operating officer, but I believe we can identify some organization-wide elements:

• Clarity about the mission: We all knew we were there to make those hotels cash flow, and that we needed to do it through smart management practices and delivering great guest service
• Clarity about the values and the culture: Our culture was about the autonomy and decision-making capability of our managers.  We didn’t believe in letting our managers be puppets on a string for the corporate or franchise staff to maneuver.  We defined ourselves in opposition to some of the leading branded hotel companies, where we joked that you had to have an SOP that spelled out how to get a hall pass to go to the bathroom.
• Work hard play hard: It helped that we all liked each other a lot.  We did everything together, both work and play.
• Celebrate every individual for what s/he brings to the table: Our COO was a man who knew how to celebrate people’s differences in a special way.  He always remembered little things about each of us, and he would celebrate those things through mass communication emails and practical jokes around the office.   He had nicknames for each of us, and when someone got promoted or transferred he loved to put out an email to the whole company that praised that person’s strengths and joked (in a positive way) about their hobbies or personal interests.  Mine, for instance, was my love of heavy metal music.  He called me “Anna rocks” and played heavy metal music around the office sometimes.  At our annual awards conferences every year, he would get photos of each award winner and find out what their favorite song was, and when they came up on stage to receive their award the music would blare and their photo would fill the screen, as if they were walking onstage at an Academy Awards ceremony.
• A organization-wide sense of humor: This came from our COO too.  He was a lover of practical jokes.  His favorite one was to get on someone’s laptop while they were away from their desk and send funny emails to someone else.  He’d get on the finance director’s laptop and send a note to the operations team telling them that they were spending too much money on Mickey Mouse key chains.  Then he’d get on a director of human resources computer and send an email to the finance director saying that the Mickey Mouse key chain reprimands would have to stop immediately.  There was no end to how mischievous he could be.
• An environment that says it’s OK to be who you are: By celebrating the little things about each person, with a sense of humor and play, our COO told us it was OK for us to be who we were.  And we took that very, very seriously.

We may not be able to go back, but we can certainly learn from great experiences in the past.  And we can continue to celebrate them too—rumor has it we’ll be having another reunion in the California wine country in a couple years!

The problem, Bregman says, is that by segregating people into categories and focusing on their difference, we promote bias rather than eradicating it. “Categories are dehumanizing,” he says.  “They simplify the complexity of a human being. So focusing people on the categories increases their prejudice. ”

I agree with everything except his conclusion that diversity training doesn’t work.  Diversity training can work–it just has to be good diversity training.

Good diversity training consists in training employees to value each others’ differences.  It’s a team building session, really.  Good diversity training explores tools and techniques for getting to know teammates better, and emphasizes the importance of finding ways to let people’s differences contribute to the mission.  Here are some examples of great ideas I’ve heard from folks during diversity seminars:

• We’re using Generation Y workers to mentor older workers in the use of social media
• We’re using gay and lesbian employees to help our marketing people understand ways to tap into the GLBT market for our products
• We’re using our people of color to help design products that appeal to niche markets within their diverse communities (or for public sector organizations, to help us understand better how to serve the diverse needs of our public)

The other thing that good diversity training does is focus on ways to build relationships and improve the quality of leadership.  There’s plenty of research out there that says people don’t sue people who make mistakes–they sue people whom they feel mistreated or disrespected by.  Patients, for example, often tell their lawyers that they don’t want to sue the specialist who actually made the mistake because they like that particular doctor; instead, they want to sue their primary physician who has a lousy bedside manner and doesn’t appear to care.  Likewise, employees don’t sue because a well-meaning supervisor accidentally missed a step in an EEO-related policy or procedure; they sue because the supervisor is a jerk who doesn’t appear to value the employee’s contributions.

Maybe it’s really a matter of semantics.  Maybe good diversity training is not called diversity training, but rather, leadership or team building training.  But good leadership and team building training will always have a diversity component.  The answer is most certainly not to throw diversity training out the door.

The team building sessions I facilitated this week were full of similarly anxious people.  They were re-organizing for the second time in a little over a year, and because there was a long period of time in which they knew they were moving to new teams but didn’t know exactly where, they remained focused on the negative.  They made up stories about how they would surely be working with people they didn’t like, and reporting to supervisors they wouldn’t get along with.  I think maybe their leadership should have kept the suitcase hidden until they were ready to reveal all the details.

It didn’t come out as anxiety, however.  As fear so often does, it came out as anger.  The group made up story after story about how this reorg was going to go badly and result in unfair treatment.  They would be asked to do things outside of their ability; they would have to report to two supervisors and be pulled between them; they would be appraised on work that they didn’t know how to do.  The stories went on and on, and even a tour through the concepts of the ladder of inference and our very human tendency to make up stories that are worse than reality didn’t seem to help.

I got back to my hotel room after the second day and found a blog entry on my email from Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Blog that I wished I’d seen that morning.  It was a guest post from an author named Chip Conley, who has a new book out called Emotional Equations.   In describing ways to become a CEO (Chief Emotional Officer), Conley lays out a number of mathematical equations to increase our self-awareness of our own emotional responses.  There were too many interesting concepts in the post to mention all of them, but one that really struck me was the equation “Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness.”  How true!  And Conley suggested a simple activity that I wished I’d had the opportunity to facilitate with my group earlier that day:

“If we know that the combustible product of uncertainty and powerlessness creates anxiety, we can create what I call an Anxiety Balance Sheet to turn this around. Take out a piece of paper and create four columns. Then, think of something that is currently making you anxious. Regarding that subject, the first column is “What Do I Know” about this issue. The second column is “What Don’t I Know.” The third column is “What Can I Influence.” The fourth column is “What Can’t I Influence.” Spend enough time doing this so that you have at least one item per column but you may find that you have a half-dozen items in some columns.”

The result, Conley says, is that we will discover more items in columns one and three than in two and four.  And with a little thought and consultation with our resources, we might move some things from the “bad” columns to the “good” columns.  I believe if I’d facilitated an activity like this with my anxious team building group, we might have come out with an action plan for asking questions of leadership and taking a more active role in shaping the reorg in a positive direction.

I’ve ordered Conley’s book, so stay tuned for more interesting emotional equations!

It isn’t just the intrusion of constant calls that gets annoying though; more and more every year, it’s the finger-pointing and lack of accountability that pervades the dialogue of every campaign ad and debate.  Jeffrey Saltzman had an interesting blog post recently in which he laments what appears to be a very pervasive case of the fundamental attribution error in politics (my characterization, not his, but I think he would agree with my use of the term).   There is a human tendency to see our own actions as motivated by external circumstances, but the actions of others as motivated by bad intentions.  Saltzman lists examples both domestic and international, including Anthony Weiner claiming that someone else hacked his Twitter account and circulated pornographic pictures of him; Herman Cain blaming a conspiracy for the claims of a woman who said she had an affair with him; and a entire host of Arab leaders who blamed terrorists rather than the terrible conditions they themselves had created for the people’s attempts to overthrow their regimes.  I would add my own example of Ron Paul claiming to be completely unaware and therefore not responsible for racist remarks in newsletters put out in his name.  And of course, there are countless other examples across the spectrum of politicians, on both sides of the partisan divide.

We see it in the corporate world too.  A organizational leader gets caught out for bad behavior and immediately looks to external factors to explain it.  It was government regulation or incompetence; it was a corrupt employee that no one was aware of; it was the lies and entrapment of a competitor.  Think of the Wall Street bank industry’s executive compensation after bailouts, the News Corp phone hacking scandal, and the endless accounting scandals that get reported every year. Rarely does anyone just step up and say, “I screwed up.  I’m sorry.”

Saltzman says, “While of course not new, the number of times that the excuse of external forces being  at play as the rationale for dismissing accusations, crimes, violence, murder, the taking away of rights, and in general bad behavior seems to me to be more plentiful now than it has ever been. I have to think that some of the leaders dismissing these activities are simply looking for a convenient excuse for their actions and are knowingly lying, but that others may be truly incapable of seeing the world accurately, always seeing sinister forces of some sort working against them or external forces controlling them. I am not sure which is worse.”

I’m not sure either, but I wish Ron Paul would call in person so I could give him a piece of my mind.