Vision, Communication, and Simplicity

I am, by no means, a disciple of Jack Welch but I recently read again an old interview given while he was still CEO of GE. I am putting below some things that really stand out to me and are applicable to any organization, but particularly those organizations that are looking to work with their talent and human capital to achieve greater heights:

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, though, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don’t stick to the established channels. They’re informal. They’re straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story.

“Real communication takes…human beings coming to see and accept things through a constant interactive process aimed at consensus. And it must be absolutely relentless…

“Change…isn’t something to fear; it’s an enormous opportunity to shuffle the deck, to replay the game…

“The point is, what determines your destiny is not the hand you’re dealt; it’s how you play the hand. And the best way to play your hand is to face reality—see the world the way it is—and act accordingly…

“People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. But it’s not easy. You can’t believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simple-minded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse.”

I recently went over this with a call center's management and we discussed the implications of each paragraph. What happened in the meeting was two things: 1) a lot of head nodding as they read and discussed and 2) when they really got to talking, there was a powerful point to their comments. They realized how true, how necessary, things like availability, candor, embracing change, facing reality as it is, and self-confidence in leadership play in developing their individual phone agents into the kinds of expert performers they desire.

What also happened was a realization of vision (having a clear direction), communication (keeping on the same page constantly), and being simple (avoiding complexity) make in helping others feel capable of changing. I challenge you to take some time to think on the same subjects in relationship to your own talent development efforts.

Where Organizational Success Begins

Okay, so I truly believe that there is a great deal to learn from business and being involved in business but I do believe that it, as an institution of international relevence, that business loses so much of its power ... not because business doesn't have money and money to spare in making things go round in the world but because, ultimately, not enough is done to develop the individual.

We forget in business that it is people, the individual contributor, that makes all the difference. We think only of developing the organizational strategy or operational excellence, or whatever other jargon one can put to what we do in business on a macro scale. Didn't someone say that it is the little things that count? I believe that every person, however small they may seem, is what makes a difference. Of course, you weren't thinking anything different of what I was about to say. Yes, yes - in business, in companies as a general whole, we totally forget those important people who make the most difference. You knew I would say that and yet you don't really care. If you did, you'd do things differently. But, instead, you talk about things such as how every organization is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets. Which, I admit, is true, but part of that organizational perfection is the individuals you hire. That's where it all begins: the people.

Do you really want to make a difference? Start at the beginning, who you hire, and then develop those individuals into whom you would have. After all, another idiom says something about the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. Well, what if your parts were great to begin with. And, to be honest yet again, not everybody you hire is going to be great. If that were the case, that would be miraculous and good for you for doing it. But, seriously, this isn't really something that comes about ... at all. Ever. So, what then? Cut them? Throw them out? Some, yeah. Some are just pure "dead wood" but most of them can become what you need them to be if you properly work with them to get them there.

So, the question begs: How does one develop people to be their best?

Good question. It all begins with what your organization, as whole, wants to accomplish. Ask yourself what's the end result had in mind? Oh, wait, you've probably done that a million times, come up with some mission statements, visions, etc. Of course you have. I would if I were you. You probably have something pretty that you're saying, and that's cool. Probably had some real wordsmiths do it. Or, better yet, some consultant create it for you. Either way, you'd better be prepared to back up your pretty little statements with some real meat because that is where the whole development of the individual starts ... you have to have a direction for people to go in order to know what you are aiming for in their training. The goal of the organization starts the process toward becoming more through the individuals that make up the company. Their success will always be your success. Don't ever forget that because that's why developing the individual will always lead to your company's success.

Sir Ken Robinson

Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."



To go to his site: CLICK HERE

The Stockdale Paradox

I have nothing new to say on this subject necessarily, but I believe that this is a subject necessary for discussion in today’s economy and, more especially, for our personal lives. The bleakness of financial life can be so desperate, so depressing, and definitely heartbreaking – painful. Duh. How natural it is to feel pain when pain is inflicted? We are, ultimately, conditioned to feel injured when life doesn’t work out the way we want it to. At least, that’s been my experience every time things don’t work out my way.

Jim Collins and his team did 5 years of research on the companies with the most sustained growth and profitability and, along the way, the discovered something that works not only for organizations but for individuals as well that encompass one of those attributes found in all greatness: “The Stockdale Paradox.”

Below is an excerpt where Collins writes about The Stockdale Paradox found in Good to Great, Chapter 4, pages 83–85:

The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner's rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise system—after x minutes, you can say certain things—that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for 25 letters, c doubling for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down. After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

You can understand, then, my anticipation at the prospect of spending part of an afternoon with Stockdale. One of my students had written his paper on Stockdale, who happened to be a senior research fellow studying the Stoic philosophers at the Hoover Institution right across the street from my office, and Stockdale invited the two of us for lunch. In preparation, I read In Love and War, the book Stockdale and his wife had written in alternating chapters, chronicling their experiences during those eight years.

As I moved through the book, I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak—the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors, and so forth. And then, it dawned on me: “Here I am sitting in my warm and comfortable office, looking out over the beautiful Stanford campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I’m getting depressed reading this, and I know the end of the story! I know that he gets out, reunites with his family, becomes a national hero, and gets to spend the later years of his life studying philosophy on this same beautiful campus. If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”

“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

* * *

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”

The way this principle was synthesized by Collins and his crew was, “Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (http://www.jimcollins.com/)

In essence, this is an alternative of true realism. This is an important element when designing a talent development program. Too often, we as individuals in an organization say, "Let's do this..." because it is the ideal. Now, I'm an absolute believer in idealism (just ask my wife) but we cannot properly redesign our cultural environment without a magic combination between faith and reality - after all, faith is taking action on something you believe in. This action, however, cannot be founded purely on optimism but must take into account the necessities of the organization and the individuals within that organization. To leave out either would be detrimental to the design of your training and talent development program and, more importantly, the survival of your organization.