I love my job.  Last week, the Hill Center’s ethical leadership development work with the Saint Paul Police Department enabled me to observe and participate in a full-scale training exercise of the East Metro SWAT Team.   That team serves multiple communities, so these exercises are especially valuable for coordinating efforts in a realistic tactical setting.   Three scenarios were played out, each involving hostages taken during a city council meeting.  There were patrol officers, negotiators, communications specialists, emergency medical teams, along with the SWAT Team’s acre of Kevlar and forest of rifles.   The SPPD bomb squad and a very handy robot were each put to excellent use.  It was impressive, and enlightening. 

My first conclusion: I have ruled out domestic terrorism as a career path.  In my role as co-bad guy, I observed first-hand the workday stresses of a hostage-taker: hours of standing around, lying, and shouting, culminating in being shot or arrested.   The food situation is likewise terrible: we never received our demanded cheeseburgers, despite holding the mayor and city council at (rubber) gunpoint. Not a good gig.

(I long ago ruled out international terrorism, for lack of second language competency.  My junior high school French teacher warned us that this deficit would one day limit our career options…but I digress.)

More important, the exercise was a graphic demonstration of the very real challenges of coordination and information sharing in critical settings.  All leaders face these challenges to varying degrees: in fast-changing situations, it is extremely difficult to acquire, evaluate and disseminate information while coordinating actions.   I was impressed by the ways in which these teams took decisive action with limited information.   

I also noted that the players seemed to develop and improve on the spot, within and between scenarios.   As an outsider, I don’t have a valid opinion on the quality of the technical police work; I will leave that to the team of experienced evaluators who moved about throughout the exercise.  As a student of leadership, I was struck by the degree to which these professionals came together to execute the exercises, quickly assimilated the learning from each scenario, and put that learning into practice on the spot. 

Those of us who work in less-urgent settings can learn from this.  Do we ever practice?  I have facilitated “war game” simulations in industry, but these were designed more to understand and predict complex commercial dynamics than to develop participant skills.   When we think about developing skills in a business setting, training is universal, but practice seems much less common.  Many relevant skills can be honed through practice, including decision-making, communication, and execution-related tasks of all kinds.  Applying practice techniques to some business skills may require a bit of imagination, but the SWAT exercise reminded me of what a powerful learning tool it can be.  There are good reasons why everyone from cops to musicians recognizes the necessity of practice, and probably no good reason why those of us in business emphasize it much less.  It seems worth revisiting.

Finally, I had a fascinating conversation with a young police officer, who was playing the role of a hostage.   He shared his experiences learning the culture of his department and the realities of police work, translating education and training into actual experience.   He also shared an observation I have heard from other excellent cops, as well: people, even close friends, began regarding him differently as soon as he came on the job.  This common perception can become an uncomfortable reality, and he is working to avoid that mental trap.  He takes care to remain engaged in non-work activities and to cultivate relationships away from the job.  These are regarded as best practices in emotional survival for police officers, but again, they are also lessons for the rest of us.  We are not our jobs.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to observe these excellent professionals in action.   There was much to learn, between exchanges of imaginary gunfire.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, here’s the old joke:
“Excuse me sir, can please you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice, practice, practice.”

CAW

Treasured Readers,

I enjoyed a vacation day on Monday, skiing at the ever-popular Afton Alps  (readers from beyond the Midwest may insert a smug chuckle here – okay – are you back now?).  It was my birthday, and in recent years this local ski outing has become something of a habit.  It feels good to be outdoors.  The Hill Center was fine without me.

For whatever reason, I was irrationally nervous as I put on my skis.  I took first to the bunny hill, using its scant inertia to propel me to the nearest full-sized chair lift.  There was no line on a Monday morning, so I took a moment to ask the lift operator whether “there’s an easy way down from this lift.”

“Is this your first time on skis?” he asked, clearly surprised by the question.

“No.”

“You basically know how to ski?”

“Sure.”

He smiled, leaning toward me.  “I don’t know if you noticed, but we don’t actually have a mountain here,” he whispered.  “You can pretty much ski anywhere you want.”

So I did, all day.  What was I worried about?  I don’t really care.  I’m just grateful that I was able to relax and enjoy the day.

There’s a very personal story here, about my deep inclination toward physical cowardice, and an equally deep commitment not to let it rule my actions.  A more interesting observation, though, concerns the ease with which our fears, both conscious and unconscious, literally create mountains in our imagination.     At best, we waste energy preparing to scale mountains that do not exist.   At worst, this shadow terrain obscures and prevents us from pursuing our very real objectives.  Is it courageous to realize that our fears are unfounded?   Not especially, but it is probably a hallmark of adulthood.  It is certainly a leader’s task to sort out real and imaginary risks, beginning with our own imaginations.

There are mountains of literature about is called “change management.”  That term has always struck me as peculiar, given the more or less constant state of change in most organizations.  Isn’t “static management” really the exception and “change,” the rule?   Still, MBA students read Kotter and Schlesinger, Heifetz and Linsky, and a host of other authors, all offering guidance on how to lead others through the process of organizational change.   A common theme: overcoming the resistance to change, and addressing the conflicting interests that arise as the players imagine or predict what an upcoming change will mean for them.

Perhaps we can go a long way toward overcoming the overall burden of resistance to change, simply by reminding ourselves and one another – clearly and compassionately – that some mountains are imaginary.   We would do well to remember that others may perceive very real challenges that aren’t immediately apparent to us.    Good conversations can help everyone survey and understand the true landscape of any change.  We will be effective in delineating reality, to the extent that we have already earned the trust and respect of our teams.  Indeed, the condition of ongoing change offers ample opportunity to build credibility over time. 

Will longer ski runs yield greater insights?  Perhaps we’ll find out later in the season.

CAW

P.S.  Speaking of credibility, nobody complained about my recent ill-timed (and, it turns out, ill-informed) apologia for Toyota.  So much for citizen journalism on this blog…

Toyota is halting sales of vehicles until it can resolve a serious safety issue related to gas pedals.  The Associated Press covers this with the headline, “Toyota US sales halt deals blow to image, earnings.”  A better headline might be, “Toyota Demonstrates Courageous Leadership by Putting Safety Before Profits.”   As the article points out, this will be an extremely costly move for Toyota, at a time when no automaker can easily afford it.  That’s why we need to support the company’s clear-headed, socially responsible leadership.

Business students throughout the U.S. have long studied “The Ford Pinto Case,” which contemplates whether Ford should have recalled the car based on a propensity for gas tank fires and explosions in collisions.  The problem:  a cost-benefit analysis revealed that not doing so, even in light of predicted injuries or deaths, was cost effective.   It is heartening to know that, whatever the outcomes of their contemporary analysis, Toyota’s leaders made the decision to avoid putting unreasonably dangerous vehicles out on the road.  This is especially true in these tough times, which tends to amplify the message: Toyota’s leaders care about the safety of customers and communities.

I am sure that critics will point out that Toyota might have identified this problem more quickly or solved it before the units were in the distribution channel.  Fair enough.   However, building cars is complex business at best, and innovation of any kind carries additional risks.  We cannot expect companies to avoid all errors, engineering or otherwise.  We ought to expect them to own the errors, up front and without coercion, and to bear the costs of keeping customers and the broader communities as safe as reasonably possible. 

I’m grateful to my friend Sam Richter for bringing this to my attention (as I recall, Sam drives a Toyota, no doubt very carefully). I’ll certainly think more favorably of Toyota, rather than less, as a result of this decision.  Let us hope that the broader markets – for vehicles and for company stock - ultimately reward the company for its actions.

Let’s be careful out there!

CAW

Apparently, I’m not done blogging about physical fitness.  (Why confine myself to areas of genuine expertise?)  I think you’ll find the connection to ethical leadership obvious, however…

For most of my life I have treated my body as a life support system for ideas and words.    The relationship has been at best cool, and at times hostile.  I am committed to making a change: I want physical action to become an end unto itself, and I want to enjoy moving.  In short, I seek – I intend, I plan – to become an athlete.   

I am certain that I can’t make this journey alone (I’ve tried before).  I need support, and more specifically, I need to be led.  Therefore, I am pleased to be following my friend Michael Gayle of MGayle Studios.  I am learning a lot, and my actions are different as a result.  One unexpected lesson: I am finding it much harder to be a follower than I had expected.  Perhaps as a consequence, while I strive to follow well, I am learning much about leadership.

My cognitive dissonance is deafening.  The health and fitness stuff is one thing – a huge thing – but it turns out that I’m just as conflicted about being led.   I may teach the idea that great leaders must also be willing and able to follow, but when it is my turn…I resist doing so.   I want to trust “my intuitions,” even though they are ultimately unreliable in this arena (read MalcolmGladwell’s Blink for a good account of why).  I want to be self-sufficient, which somehow becomes self-directing.  However, I’m also committed to doing things right, which means, in this case, doing them differently.  So, I take a deep breath, and accept the guidance and support that is being offered to me.

Gayle makes it easier to be a follower, because he is a talented leader.  In fact, I am heartened to observe that he exhibits the very qualities that we at the Hill Center talk about, to anyone who will listen.  He has clear vision, and an equally clear commitment to reality and to making sound, fact-based decisions.   He knows his stuff, for sure, as an accomplished and educated trainer, athlete, coach, and physical educator.    He’s creative (in, among other ways, overcoming my objections).  He also tells the truth, even when it is hard.    

Many people are talented technicians.  I think the deciding factor in my decision to follow Michael is not knowledge, but commitment and caring.   This guy really cares about his work, and more particularly, about my success.  The work becomes, in a very real sense, our task, and our accomplishments.  

Above all, this experience is reinforcing for me the degree to which leadership is an agreement.  As a follower, I am responsible and accountable for effort, and for providing Michael with the candid input he needs to exercise leadership judgment.  I cede that judgment to him, in turn, because I trust his abilities as well as his motives.  That’s the core of it – the sustained actions flow from there.

So it turns out that leadership, like fitness, begins with a strong core.

Back at it,

CAW

Treasured Readers,

I was grinding away on the treadmill in pursuit of one New Year's Resolution, when I was struck by a Southwest Airlines ad, glowing about employee volunteerism.   It was just the hook I needed to kick-start another New Year's Resolution:  consistent blogging.  Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

The ad showed bright, happy people educating the young, feeding the elderly, and cleaning up parks (ostensibly around an airport, complete with low-flying but curiously silent Southwest 737s overhead).   By focusing on its employee volunteer activities, Southwest made an interesting choice with its advertising dollars: they are betting that customers will prefer a company that is so engaged.  That's consistent with Southwest's overall strategy, as exemplified in its mission statement:  "...the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit." They go on to state that the company will treat employees as they expect employees to treat every customer.   It has worked for them.

Increasingly, company communications - from television ads to corporate reports - reflect the belief that customers, investors, or others will choose to do business with companies committed to ethics and social responsibility.   This isn't altruism, but enlightened self-interest in action.  As such, the choices to engage in and highlight community engagement are both prudent and honorable.

Instructive examples can be found close to home, as well.  Since 1999, the Minnesota Business Ethics Award (MBEA) has recognized companies of all sizes for excellence in ethical conduct.  This year, the Hill Center is pleased to be an Endorsing Organization for the MBEA, helping to spread the word about this excellent program. (Our official endorsement: "GO, MBEA!!  RAH!").   

Nominate a business that you think is excellent.  Apply yourself!  Nominations are due on January 29, which is MUCH sooner than it seems, and can be completed online at http://mnethicsaward.org.

These awards do more than recognize a few winners and a few more nominees each year.  They provide instructive examples for all of us, along with the recognition that a sustained commitment and a little thoughtful effort can go a long way toward building a stronger company in every respect.   The MBEA application process provides additional guidance.  We at the Hill Center are also proud or our resources, both human and digital, for helping ethical business leaders achieve greatness.  Rah!

Let's have a great 2010, and do what we can to share it with those around us.

CAW

I’m teaching the ethics course at the Carlson School of Management again this fall, and I can always count on those students to come up with interesting perspectives, new challenges, and concerns that I otherwise would not have paused to consider.  Pesky, but in a good way.   Last week, we considered whether and how to talk to employees about job security, especially when their jobs are less than secure.  I went into the discussion with a firmly-held point of view, grounded in the idea that trust is both a primary ethical consideration and a powerful business driver.  Nothing builds trust like reliable candor and transparency.   As we talked it through, the students stressed other considerations, like the very real need to protect some key assets from some employees, and the likelihood that even a modest level of expressed risk would be taken with alarm.  They noted the weaknesses of prediction. The discussion complicated my perspective, by broadening it.   Other conversations have had similar effects.

The students generally stick with the discussion and embrace the complexity, but I can see that it’s uncomfortable for some of them.  That’s no surprise: we business people are trained to revere simplicity, to reduce paragraphs to bullet points and conversations to elevator speeches.   This can be a matter of discipline, as Mark Twain and others have observed that a good, short letter takes longer to write.   We are taught to clarify, which often leads us to simplify.  Clarity is good.

Misplaced simplicity can lead us past clarity and into emptiness.   Some situations are complex, and to simplify their descriptions robs them of accuracy or meaning.   Of course we sometimes need the discipline to focus and simplify.  Other times, we need the willingness to embrace complexity, and the skill to communicate about complicated things clearly, if not always briefly. 

Yes, it’s hard.

This week, one in-class discussion concerned the ethical status of social engagement.   Starbucks touts its investment in environmental remediation.  Do they do so because they care about the environment, or because they want to sell more coffee?  Does a company’s desire to benefit commercially from good works taint those works?   Do results count, or do motives matter more when we are making moral judgments that guide our commercial behavior (even at the Latte level)? 

Here, it helps to tolerate complexity: We can say that our actions are driven by social AND commercial motives, and mean it.  Why can’t we act from both motives, truly and honestly, at the same time?   To insist that we pick one is as absurd as that timeless beverage debate: “Less Filling, Tastes Great.”   Those ads were funny precisely because we want so badly to come up with a single answer, even when considering the merits of a reduced-calorie beer.

For weightier subjects, perhaps we could do well to accept that the questions that matter often have more than one right answer, and that best answers may be inherently complicated.

CAW

Treasured readers,

There’s a lot we can learn from the Greek myth of Sisyphus.  You might recall (or rush to Wikipedia to discover) that he committed some very impressive acts of hubris, culminating in freeing humanity from death (if only briefly) and revealing Zeus for the sexual scoundrel that he was.   Then Zeus exacted his revenge: Sisyphus was condemned to repeatedly push a boulder up a hill, reaching the top only to see it roll back down again.  Zeus conceived a terrible sentence for an extremely clever and creative human: eternal, pointless labor.

Greek myths are not the only ancient source for this observation.  The book of Exodus tells of an angry Pharaoh punishing Israelite slaves with an act of caprice: ordering them to make the same quota of bricks with less straw to bind them.  Much more work, for the same amount of product.  The point:  pointless labor is drudgery, demoralizing and dehumanizing.   And, the emblem of meaningless work is toil that is unnecessarily arduous, and ultimately unproductive.

It is sometimes easy to feel that way about our work: a quota achieved leads to a quota expanded, the carrot recedes as we pursue it.  If we followed ancient gender roles, Sisyphus would have nothing on Mrs. Sisyphus: clean the kitchen, cook the meal, repeat.  Feed the baby, change the diaper…you get the picture.  It is all too easy to let the rhythms of life become a dirge, the music by which we trudge through our days.  

What’s a mortal to do?

First, we can often choose to find meaning in our work and our tasks.   We may have more control over the tasks themselves than we grant ourselves.  Even if we don’t , we can look to their underlying goals – or to the achievement of our teams and organizations - for inspiration.  We can also take justifiable pride in work well done, and pleasure in the benefits that we are creating for ourselves or others.  We can seek to understand the benefits our customers seek, and strive to improve on them.  Striving is itself more satisfying than trudging.  Preparing meals and cleaning the kitchen can be an acts of love, repeated often (some weeks more often than others), but far from meaningless. 

Caring about what we do, and taking justified pride in a job well done, can be transformative. This isn’t mere misdirection, but a very real sort of magic: we change the nature of our work, by our insight and repeated acts of will.   Meaningful work is fulfilling, satisfying, even ennobling.  If you’ve never thought of it that way, I’d bet you’ve experienced it.  I see it in myself, just as I see it in others.  One waiter really seems to enjoy serving people, exhibiting hospitality and participating in a satisfying meal.  Another simply can’t wait for his shift to end, and it shows.  The irony: whose shift seems longer?   We can’t always feel like creative geniuses, but we can strive to do great work, and take pride in the effort as well as the achievement.

More important, we shouldn’t have to work that magic alone.  As friends, teammates, and leaders, we can come together to build meaning into our work, and to take pride in our accomplishments.  If we want to work for an organization that we can feel proud of, we need to lead the way in building that sort of an organization.  We can seek to know and understand how our work impacts others, and we can share that understanding with the people with whom we share our work.  

Do the team members whom you lead know how their tasks fit into the broader projects, processes, or products that they produce?  Do they know how their work benefits customers, or contributes to the firm’s success?  Or, do you just insist that the rocks keep rolling?  These are messages that need to be repeated: not quarterly or weekly, but constantly.  You cannot over-communicate where making meaning is concerned. 

By building a sense of meaning and purpose into the work that you share, you demonstrate respect for your team members as human beings.   You also empower them to join you in the pursuit of greatness.

Seen any greatness lately?  I’d love to hear about it.

CAW

Treasured readers,

This past summer (how sad it is to write those words!), I taught an ethics course at the Carlson School of Management for the first time, which I am preparing to teach again in the fall.   Toward that end, I  read the summer students’ survey results, and I realized that (1) It was a pretty succssful course, (2) there is some room to improve the course, with respect to a few details in particular, and (3) I am one deeply neurotic individual.   It led to some more general thoughts about criticsm, as well.  Leaders get criticized.

Objectively speaking, I have to be pleased.  More than three fourths of the students would recommend the course as well as the instructor to others, and more than 80% found that instuctor to be well-prepared, knowledgeable, etc.  If I am to believe the data, I am slightly more "approachable" than a cocker spaniel puppy.  There were many, very positive comments about the material and my presentation of it.   There were also some extremely helpful suggestions and well-reasoned criticism, all proving very useful as I work on the next iteration of the course.  Hooray, right? 

Not so fast.

There were also a handful of students who thought I was awful.  “The most horrendous class and hands-down the worst instructor I have ever had,” for example.  Based on those descriptions, I seem to rate somewhere between Borat and Idi Amin (except more approachable).    The lunacy: I can’t get these harshest of critics out of my head.  They are drowning out all but the more legitimate criticism.   And, this is not an isolated incident.  I recently got surveys back from a Hill Center day-long training.   The mean overall satisfaction was 4.95 out of 5.  I wondered – at length - which individual at the table wasn’t ideally satisfied. 

Lunacy descends.

What can we learn from this?  First, I must confront my unconscious goal of agreeing with everybody.   A good friend and Hill Center consulting partner, Todd Wadsworth, pointed this out most starkly.  If everyone agreed with me, what did I contribute?  (Okay, my wife Cathy, a professional educator herself, also nailed that one.  Todd always reads the blog, so I’ll mention him first.)   There were certainly a small minority of students in the class who do not embrace, nor can they tolerate discussion of, even basic ethical frameworks.   Their disapproval should, in that sense, be reassuring.  Their grammatical errors amid the venom, a bonus.

More important, while I understand – hell, I teach – the importance of accepting criticism as a gift, I also have to acknowledge just how difficult it is to do so consistently.   Ego, fear, or unexamined assumptions all keep us from benefitting from criticism as much as we otherwise might.  Plus, it stinks.

We talk about constructive criticism as if “constructiveness” is purely a feature of the criticism itself.  To some degree it is, hinging on the intent of the critic, and depending on her skill at communicating that intent along with a candid, relevant message.    Perhaps the most important factor, though, is the disposition of the recipient.  Without care, I can fail to benefit from even the best-intentioned criticism.  With the proper frame of mind, on the other hand, I can find value in even the evil stuff.  That value may be a kernel of truth in the words of the critic, or in the absence of truth, a vindication of my original viewpoint or methods.   Unkind criticism might simply offer a great opportunity to grow more comfortable with the awareness that people disagree with me, sometimes vehemently.  I can stand to have a few students think I’m a yahoo, or worse.  They’re probably not losing sleep over what I think of them.  Lesson learned.

As Earl Warren is said to have put it, “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.”   

And now, back to our regular scheduled program…

CAW