Priscilla Claman, in the HBR blog post Choose Your Boss Wisely, talks about how important it is to evaluate a potential boss’s leadership style when interviewing for a new position.  She tells the story of a time early in her career when she interviewed with a manager reputed to have a dictatorial style, and she asked him if he had any superstars working for him.  He responded by telling her about an employee whom he considered to be a star because she did exactly what he told her to do even when she didn’t want to, and he told a story about one particular time when she had done that.  It made me think, why can’t you use the same behavioral interviewing techniques on the boss that they’re supposed to be using on you?  Which is Claman’s point, although she doesn’t actually use the term “behavioral interviewing.”

Behavioral interviewing, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a technique used to bypass a candidate’s natural tendency to tell you what you want to hear by getting him to tell stories about past behavior.  Stories about past behavior are pretty good predictors of future behavior, much more so than a candidate’s espoused beliefs about behavior.  So for example, instead of asking a candidate how he would normally handle a difficult customer, you ask him to tell a story about a specific time in the past when he had a difficult customer and then describe how he handled him.

I see no reason to suppose the same technique wouldn’t work just as well on a potential boss.  Instead of asking her what her philosophy on employee motivation is, you’d ask her to tell about a time when she was having trouble increasing the motivational level of a team and what she did about it.  Or instead of asking her about her approach to delegation, you might ask her to describe a time when she had to restructure specific task assignments for a new project.

As we consultants are fond of saying, when people quit a job it’s usually the people they’re leaving, not the job.  And who has the most potential to make you miserable out of all the “people” you might choose to leave?  Your boss, of course.  So as Claman says, find out early on whether you’re about to work for “Mr. Mafia Management Style.”  It could save you a lot of time and trouble some day.

I ask participants to make their own ground rules when I facilitate a meeting or training session.  But I always ask their permission to add one ground rule to the list: Everyone must say what they really think, as long as it’s relevant to the discussion and respectful of the folks in the room.

There are so many reasons why people often don’t speak up when they have a different perspective.  They’re afraid of looking foolish, or of being wrong.  They want to avoid confrontation or the appearance of quarrelsomeness, or they think they might hurt someone’s feelings.  They don’t believe it will do any good to speak up when they have a different perspective on the issue because they’ve been dismissed or ridiculed before.  Or perhaps, worst of all, they just don’t care enough about the team, the issue or the project to put forth the effort of expressing themselves.

The consequences can be severe, however.  A team that doesn’t say what they really think lacks creativity and cuts its own potential short.  They engage in “group think,” which rarely gets us anywhere in terms of innovative solutions to problems and new ways of approaching things.  And they often lack commitment to an agreed upon course of action; everyone nods and says, “yes, that’s a great idea, that’s what we’ll do” and then they walk out of the room and complain to each other that it’s actually a stupid idea.  Nothing gets done as a result.  Action plans collect dust and the organization keeps on doing what it’s always done.  This is the kiss of death for teams and organizations.

When I work with a team in which everyone appears to agree on everything all the time, I tell them up front that I’m concerned about that.  Often this manufactured sense of agreement is something they’ve carefully cultivated, believing that it makes them a stronger team, so my message is not a welcome one.  I tell them the story about the helicopter crash: Years ago, in an organization I work with frequently, a helicopter was landing in a clearing in order to drop off some employees at a research camp.  Later on during the depositions, some of the folks who were on the ground said, “I saw that the rotors were too close to the trees, but I didn’t say anything.”  Why not?  Because they didn’t think they had the right to say anything, not being helicopter operations experts.  They were afraid of looking foolish.  And the result was that everyone died.

Marcie Schorr Hirsch, in a Harvard Business Publishing blog article called What Separates the Extremely Successful from the Pack, describes the results of a fascinating research project.  She studied 12 sets of matched pairs of executives; in each pair, one was a moderately successful mid-level executive and the other was a high level “extremely successful” executive of the same age, gender, race, educational level and organizational background.  She asked them questions to determine what they considered to be success factors and found that they attributed their success to the same sources; for example, 22 out of 24 of them said that being married played into their career success.  What differed was the way in which they described how the success factors contributed.

“The members of the extreme talent group — from their optimizing of other relationships without adhering to the limits of job descriptions (why couldn’t a comptroller offer creative ideas?) to their continual reinvention of their career path as unexpected opportunities came along — showed a propensity for creating value in non-obvious ways. They seemed to have a different lens through which they viewed what was going on around them,” Hirsch says.  For example, the moderately successful folks said that their marriages helped them because the always had a clean shirt in the closet and never had to pick up the kids from school (all the study participants were men, by the way), but the extremely successful folks said things like, “I learned everything I know about interpersonal skills from my wife.”  In other words, the extremely successful folks dug deeper to find the value of their relationships, opportunities and circumstances.

My first reaction: Wow.  The possibilities of this idea are endless.  Hirsch’s take is that you can teach people to dig deeper in a coaching relationship, with the goal of developing executives toward higher levels of career success.  My question is, can you teach managers this perspective in the context of a training situation, with the goal of improving their leadership skills?  What if you took a manager with a mediocre track record in mentoring and developing his employees, and tried to teach him to dig deeper for an employee’s potential?  A study such as Hirsch’s might provide just the incentive such a manager needs to adopt a new perspective, assuming he was ambitious; in other words, rather than selling this idea as a way to develop employees, sell it as a career development tool for the manager himself.  Trickery, you say?  Perhaps.  But I know I’ll be thinking about this next time I do a leadership course.

We all control our emotions to differing degrees.  Or I should say, we control the way our behavior is driven by our emotions to different degrees.  But I’ve always maintained that being a frequent traveler provides the best test you could possibly devise for how well a person maintains that control.  And I have to believe that even the most emotionally intelligent of us still loses it sometimes while traveling.

Let’s take some personal examples.  I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle of the scale.  I can be a great person to sit next to on the plane, but on a really bad day I can also be a desk agent’s worst nightmare.  A couple weeks ago I had one of those rotten days where I got lost on the way to the rental car return, ran through the airport thinking I was late, and then discovered my flight was massively delayed by weather.  The gate agents and flight attendants were surly and the flight was packed full.  It wasn’t my regular airline so I had a middle seat.  When I finally boarded I couldn’t find space in the overhead bins, but there were two bags in the bin over my seat that were bigger than regulations allow.  As the flight attendant announced that anyone with oversize bags would need to check them with her, I looked around to see who was trying not to make eye contact with me and I identified the culprits.  Then I let one of them have it.  “I think it’s a shame that I can’t find space for my bag because you’re taking up enough space for two,” I snapped at her.   She protested that her bag used to fit but now suddenly, mysteriously, it didn’t any more.  The other travelers seated around her busied themselves with their magazines and I gave up.  If the flight attendants weren’t going to enforce the rules, how could I?  As I sat down I heard another traveler making fun of me for being so cranky and my face flamed.  He was right, of course.  I was just being cranky.  The problem is that it doesn’t feel like that at the time; it feels like I have a legitimate complaint that should be aired.

This week I had a day where everything went right.  The plane was on time, I found a great restaurant in the terminal, I had a good seat, and there were two friendly women in my row.  When the flight attendant took drink orders I asked for a glass of wine and handed over my debit card.  The woman next to me said, “Oh, I have so many drink coupons and I never use them.  Take this,” and she handed it to the flight attendant for my drink.

Later when the flight got turbulent, the other woman in my row was clearly very nervous.  She didn’t have anything to read so she stared out the window, gripping her arm rests.  I ripped an article about the royal wedding out of my Newsweek magazine and handed it to her, and then I chatted with her for a while to take her mind off her fear.  It made me feel so much more human than the time I yelled at a passenger about the size of her bag.  And I thought, why don’t I remember how it feels to be the good guy every time, and let that feeling drive my behavior?

I don’t have the answer to that question.  I just know that sometimes I’m the good guy and sometimes I’m the bad guy.  The trick is to keep working on it.

Recently I led a team building session for a federal agency group in which the team’s manager had a bad sarcasm habit.  He used sarcasm for everything—to make points about the work load, to highlight his people’s weaknesses, even to talk about challenges the team was dealing with in getting the job done.  He didn’t see it as sarcasm; he called it humor and he and the team often talked about how important it was to have a sense of humor on their team.

When I left, one of my parting comments was that sarcasm should never be used to say something important, because no one would take it seriously and feelings might be hurt in the process.  Sarcasm, I told them, was often used as a protective mechanism to give what might otherwise be constructive criticism.  If they recipient gets it, great; if he doesn’t get it or is offended by it, you can say, “hey, I was only kidding, can’t you take a joke?”

Then last week I read a great column in the Vital Smarts newsletter by Kerry Patterson, called “Confronting Workplace Sarcasm.” I wish I’d seen this before my team building session because Patterson captures the point perfectly:  sarcasm is “humor at its worst—humor used as a tool for taking shots at people, but done in a way that maintains plausible deniability,” he says, adding, “it’s actually quite difficult to defend your right to take cheap shots, dole out insults, and cut people down—all in the name of humor. Trust me. You never want to be the defense attorney when sarcasm goes to court.”

Remember being a teenager?  Sarcasm equaled wittiness and sophistication for many of us when we were fifteen or sixteen.  Our parents were stupid, stodgy and boring, and sarcasm was the best way to make fun of them.  What it comes down to is that some of us grew out of it and recognized sarcasm for what it is, and some didn’t, perhaps because they were good at it and continued to get laughs out of others.  It’s not that the folks who continued to use sarcasm as a tool have bad intentions.  It’s that no one ever told them that it isn’t really funny.  It’s time for all of us to step up and do that now.

A blog post on Harvard Business Publishing,  Are Happy People Dumb? by Shawn Achor, got me thinking about this old but interesting question.  The theory often touted is that anyone with the intelligence to keep up with what’s going on in the world couldn’t possibly be happy about it.  This is part logic and part stereotype; the stereotype part comes from our arsenal of historical figures who were alcoholic writers or manic-depressive artists or musical geniuses who committed suicide.  We’ve come to associate above-average intelligence with emotional disturbance, so we think there must be a causal factor.

Achor quotes research that shows that when you take a smart, successful person who’s unhappy and raise his level of positive emotion, he performs even better.  “Doctors primed to be positive come to the correct diagnosis 19% faster when primed to be positive as opposed to negative,” he says.  “Salespeople have 37% higher levels of sales when optimistic. In fact, a meta-analysis of employees at companies reveals that nearly every single business outcome improves when a brain is positive. Happiness is a significant advantage.”

That puts a whole different spin on mood, doesn’t it?  Achor goes so far as to say 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.  It isn’t the guy brooding on the problems of the world who is “deep,” but rather the guy who can see past those problems to the solution.

Once you start thinking about what we all know about employee engagement, it becomes more intuitive.   Take Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s “theory of employee happiness,” for example.  Hsieh talks about happiness instead of engagement, not just because it’s different and catchier, but because it’s what truly matters.  Employees will be engaged in their work if they’re happy being there.  And they’ll perform better as a result.  It’s that simple.

So what about that tense, angry high-level executive who makes everyone miserable, but whom we tolerate because she’s smart and she gets things done?  Now we have to think about her on two levels.  How much smarter and more personally effective would she be if she stopped being unhappy?  And how much more effective would the organization be if she stopped playing Genghis Khan and bringing down the general happiness level of the staff?  A smart, unhappy person at the top of the organization has a ripple effect that just shouldn’t be tolerated.

Imagine that suddenly, a new federal regulation was released that said you must take a test in order to prove you know what you’re doing in your job.  If you fail the test, you’ll no longer be able to do that job.  And imagine that you’ve been doing your job for 30 years and are considered an expert.  But perhaps you’ve been out of school for a very long time, and your reading comprehension and test-taking skills are not what they used to be.  Or perhaps they were never that great to start with.  Maybe you never finished high school.  Maybe you can’t even read very well.  Suddenly, after many years of being competent and respected in your work, all your experience means nothing.  You have to take the same test that someone brand new to the job might have to take.  And you’re afraid that you might not be able to pass it.

I imagine you’d feel all kinds of emotions, none of them positive.  Fear, anxiety, anger, embarrassment and indignation, just to name a few.  You’d look at other industries and professions and wonder why they weren’t subject to the same injustice.  You might even consider looking for a new career.

That’s the situation many crane operators are now in, due to new OSHA regulations that require them to be licensed by 2014.  Don’t get me wrong—there have been a rash of fatal crane accidents over the past few years and I believe OSHA is doing what needs to be done to make the industry safer.  And yet, as a training and development professional I see the challenges that lie ahead.  For some companies, their best and most experienced crane operator might be the very guy least likely to pass the written test.  And that’s going to be a problem.

So why is a leadership and team building consultant writing about crane operators?  Because my brother is a crane operator, and we’ve teamed up to offer solutions for the industry.  We’ve recently become approved by the Crane Institute Certification (CIC) organization to offer training and nationally accredited testing, and we plan to specialize in helping the very folks I’ve been talking about—experienced operators who will need some extra help preparing for a written exam.  You can read about our programs here: www.newenglandcraneschool.com.

And if you’re a training, HR or OD professional like me, be thankful for what we have.  In our industry, experience is still what counts most.

An interesting column in Newsweek, High on Anxiety by Casey Schwartz, details research on emotion regulation that says some people seek a feeling of anxiety because that’s what they’re used to.  It isn’t that it feels good, exactly, but rather that it feels familiar; and that boosts performance.

Schwartz quotes psychiatrist Harris Stratyner of Mount Sinai School of Medicine: “Some people get addicted to feeling anxious because that’s the state that they’ve always known.  If they feel a sense of calm, they get bored; they feel empty inside.  They want to feel anxious.”

Is that what makes some people say, “I perform best under pressure”?  My brother, whose nickname is “last-minute Larry,” has always said that.   And I’ve always thought that it was just an excuse for procrastination.  Perhaps it’s actually an addition to certain brain chemicals.

The other question that comes to mind has to do with pressure to perform as a trainer or public speaker.  Recently a colleague told me I was a “little too comfortable” with what I do, and perhaps if I upped my level of nervous tension I would generate more energy in the classroom.  But I hate that feeling of being nervous before an event and I’ll do anything to avoid it.  What does that mean?  Am I boring because I’m not anxious enough?  Have I conditioned myself to be addicted to the wrong brain chemicals?

Perhaps the lesson is not so much what state of emotion you need to cultivate before an important job or event, but rather, that we need to be cognizant of how we’re conditioning our neurotransmitters in general.  Are we allowing ourselves to get habituated to something uncomfortable, and becoming addicted to it in the process?  That seems like something you could consciously reverse if you were aware of it.  I’d rather be addicted to feeling at ease.

Watching the Academy Awards the other night I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if every industry had a recognition event like that?  I believe in the power of recognition to deepen employee engagement, or “employee happiness” as my hero Tony Hsieh (of Zappos) would say.

Years ago I worked as a corporate HR director for a big hotel company that used to put on annual conferences and award dinners for its general managers and directors of sales.  The GM conference in particular was a big deal; getting an invitation to attend, if you were not a GM, was like getting a ticket to the Oscars.  Our chief operating officer, a man who truly understood how to create a unique and motivating organizational culture, would spend months planning for the conference.  His team would assemble photos of the award winners to beam on the big screen and would find out their favorite songs, so that when they came up on stage they felt like rock stars.  He shot video in advance, and created hilarious little skits and jokes that played on the personal strengths, quirks and foibles of the general managers, or on some of the company’s significant achievements or bloopers that year.  Everything was put together by talented and creative audio-visual experts to make a full night of entertainment; one year when the conference was in LA, he even hired an A/V company that had done some work for the Academy Awards ceremony before.

The banquet room was usually set as though it was Oscar night too, with glitter and glitz and mood lighting and beautifully decorated tables.  I remember feeling a sense of enchantment when the doors opened each year and we all streamed into the ballroom to find our name cards and see who we were sitting next to.

It cost the company a lot of money to do this every year, not only because of the expense of the evening but because the GMs had to fly in from all over the country.  Sometimes I would hear some of the other executives criticizing our COO for spending so much money on one event.  But every time I saw the look in a GM’s eyes as she climbed the stairs to the stage, every time I visited a hotel and heard a GM say, “I want to be on that stage next year,” I knew it was money well spent.

What do you do to make your people feel like rock stars?

I haven’t even finished this book yet but I had to write about it already.  Parts of it are the usual “here’s what makes our company great” type stuff about Zappos.  In fact, it reminds me of all the books that used to get written about Southwest Airline’s culture ten or twenty years ago.  But what makes it a great read, in my opinion, is the autobiographical stuff leading up to the founding of Zappos.

Hsieh didn’t use a ghost writer and that was a good move.  His own voice is down-to-earth, quirky and humorous, and I laughed out loud as I read about him starting his first business at the age of 9, skating through college with “as little effort as possible,” and learning about the science of human happiness from attending rave parties.  The first part of the book doesn’t pretend to be a complete autobiography, but it describes all of Tony’s learning experiences that led him to first fund and then become part of Zappos.  He makes a few million dollars at the age of 24 and learns that money can’t buy happiness, or even engagement in one’s work.  He buys a party loft to throw parties for his friends and learns that a sense of interconnectedness is part of what makes people happy in their work.  He focuses on defining organizational culture and learns that culture is the gateway to equating your brand with superior customer service.

The book is full of zaniness, like the sidebar rhapsodizing about Tony’s relationship with Red Bull, or the story about him naming his venture capital firm Venture Frogs just because a friend dared him to do it.  Or his buying up all the space in a new multi-use development because it was always his dream to live in a place with a movie theater downstairs (he adds office space, a restaurant and a party loft, gets all his friends to move in, and says, “there, now we never have to leave the building.”)

It’s a life to admire and learn from, and he’s only in his mid-thirties.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the book when I finish it.  In the meantime, go get a copy!  As the book jacket points out, it makes excellent kindling for your fireplace after you finish reading it.