We want growth in our personal lives, as parents, and in our friendships. We want to grow in our professional lives, as business leaders, entrepreneurs, and front-line employees.
The desire for growth lies deep down in each of us. It just makes sense that it is a key goal for most businesses. But growth, in and of itself, is not without its challenges. Chris Zook, partner at Bain & Co. and co-author of The Founder’s Mentality put it this way:
“Growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth.”
Zook and co-author James Allen’s basic argument is this: The more your business grows, the more employees you hire. You create departments focused on specific areas. Market share becomes a priority. Executive leadership teams make all the calls even as they lose connection with customers, the product, and front-line employees.
Then suddenly the organization stops growing. Leaders are confused. “Nothing’s changed,” they think. In fact, as the company found success, everything changed.
Successful companies grow when people believe in something.
That belief usually comes from connection. Connection with customers or passionate leaders or coworkers. Solving problems with these small, committed groups of people is where the best ideas come from. It’s the source of the passion and hard work that brings these ideas to life. As companies grow, the connections weaken. So does engagement, innovation, and grit.
94% of growth barriers for companies are internal;
“only 13% of people in the world say they have any emotional commitment to the company that they spend half their waking lives with;” and
two-thirds of Bain and Co.’s strategy studies show that “companies failed to see the full potential in their core and often needed to shrink to grow.“
I love that last finding – companies often must shrink to grow. Why?
Because connection is the most important part of business.
Connection with the team and the customers. The product, the mission, and the strategy. When leaders lose that connection companies become lost. People stop talking. They stop caring. The life that built the organization begins to die.
How can leaders keep that connection? By being approachable. This builds connection to front-line employees, who are directly connected to customers. This is the only place where perfect knowledge of the organization exists. And if you don’t know what your customers and employees experience day-to-day, how can you lead?
This is what The Founders Mentality is all about. It takes you back to the beginnings of the business, when there is only one leader, the founder, who is as engaged as everyone else.
Zook tells the story of Vikram Oberoi, CEO of Oberoi Hotels, voted “the best luxury hotels in the world” for many years. Zook says:
“Even at the age of 94, he [Oberoi] would be holding customer comment cards in front of his eyes when he could barely see, scratching notes about the temperature of the tea for customer complaints. To me, that gets lost often in big companies.”
He’s right.
Can you think of any examples where growth actually lead to the downfall of a company? Any examples from places you’ve worked? Have you seen problems caused by leaders moving further and further away from the day-to-day customer and employee experience? Have you ever experienced this loss of connection?
“Managers account for up to 70% of variance in engagement.”
And there’s the rub.
As leaders, we constantly struggle to keep employees engaged. It’s the most important, and most challenging, part of our job. You can have a perfect market, a high quality product, solid economics and wide distribution all nailed down. But if our employees don’t care, none of it matters.
Everyone knows this. That’s why “employee engagement” is such a hot topic in business today. And we as leaders know we are mostly responsible for that engagement. But we still struggle. In fact, Gallup estimates that only 29% of the American workforce is actually engaged.
This can mean only one thing: as leaders we are failing our people.
Research on leader approachability is still in the early stages. We are one of the pioneers (check out our white paper here). That’s why it’s so exciting when we see others finding the same results we’ve found. Again, from Gallup:
Among employees who strongly agree that they can approach their manager with any type of question, 54% are engaged. When employees strongly disagree, only 2% are engaged, while 65% are actively disengaged.
That’s an amazing finding. Check out this chart from the research:
Make the first move. You can’t wait for employees to come to you. As I explain in The Approachability Playbook: 3 Essential Habits for Thriving Leaders and Teams, people in low power positions often fear approaching someone in a high power position. You have to initiate. Why? Because of power-distance (check out our article here on how power-distance killed Nokia) Where do you start? A great place to start is with our three questions (see number 6 below). In addition to work-related topics, ask your coworkers about their families, hobbies and what is exciting them outside of work.
Listen carefully. Engage in active listening. This means listening with a purpose to summarize back what you’ve heard. If you do this you are more likely to ask clarifying questions and to behave in a way that shows you are really listening (because you are!) Don’t try to figure out what you’re going to say next – try to keep them talking as long as you can.
Share. To truly be approachable, you have to be vulnerable. You can only grow a relationship and build trust by sharing with others. That’s what makes people comfortable with you. It makes them see you as a full person and not just someone who’s higher up the ladder. Your success won’t impress people. Being down-to-earth in spite of your success will.
Make it professionally personal. The point here isn’t to become a gossip or an amateur psychiatrist. You want to know what is going on in the lives of your people without being nosy or too personal. Keep things professional.
Note your non-verbals. Robin really nailed it here. Non-verbal communication is critical! Trying to have a personal conversation with someone while checking email on your phone or standing with your arms crossed defeats the purpose of the conversation to begin with. It’s belittling and making them feel unimportant. Hot tip: stuff like this sends people flying over to the “actively disengaged” side of the scale.
Keep a running list of questions to ask. Have a few gems in your back pocket for feeding conversation once it starts. Camarote suggest general questions that can be used in any array of conversations. “How does that make you feel?” or “How do you see that working?” Or use a variation of our three questions: Do you have what you need? What would make work better? Where are you going?
This is all great advice. I think it boils down to two things.
Leaders HAVE to care about their people. You wouldn’t be reading this post if you didn’t. But how are you showing it? Remember what FDR said: nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Think about how you can show how much you care in the way you carry yourself, the way you communicate and follow up with your team, and in how available you are to your teammates.
Don’t make things difficult. This is where Approachable Leadership all started for me. There is so much advice out there about what leaders can do to increase engagement. Most of it is complex and hard to remember in the moment. To me, it’s simple. Focus on being more approachable. Everything else will follow.
It is great to see organizations like Gallup backing up what we’ve been preaching about the critical importance of approachable leaders to employee engagement. If you are looking for tips on improving your approachability and haven’t picked up The Playbook yet, that’s a great place to start.
Are employees of your more approachable leaders more engaged? Have you worked for a leader you considered approachable? How engaged were you working for them? Have you ever worked for a leader who hurt your engagement? How approachable would you say they were? Let us know in the comments!
Disruption keeps company leaders up at night. Dollar Shave Club taught Proctor & Gamble a $1 billion lesson in disruption this week.
5 years ago nobody had ever heard of Dollar Shave Club. Most people who first heard the idea mocked it. But this week Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion, teaching us all a huge lesson in disruption and change.
Unilever is the third-largest consumer goods company in the world, employing over 172,000 people. They own big name brands like Dove, TRESemme, Vaseline, Lipton, Ben & Jerry’s and many more. Unilever battles for store shelf space against Proctor & Gamble and Colgate Palmolive every day.
Until this week Unilever was a little player in the highly competitive (and profitable) men’s razor market. That all changed with the purchase of Dollar Shave Club. Now Unilever becomes a solid competitor in men’s razors. They also gain a major foothold for direct-selling their other products to 3.2 million Dollar Shave Club Members.
The big losers in this deal are the folks at Gillette (owned by Proctor & Gamble). They are scratching their heads about how their business could be so completely disrupted – in a market they completely dominated just 5 short years ago. Dollar Shave Club “was probably on the radar, but we weren’t necessarily having the right conversation around what might disrupt us,” a P&G Executive told the WSJ.
Dollar Shave Club began operations in 2011, but they didn’t really start gaining steam until they released this video in 2012.
The video is marketing genius. Within 48 hours of its launch, Dollar Shave Club had 12,000 new orders. In the four years since, the company has become one of the fastest growing e-commerce startups ever, reaching $150 million-plus in sales in 2015. They currently have about 5% market share in the men’s razor market.
This will be a business case study for years. In business school people will focus on the innovative marketing and unusual delivery model – made possible by the Internet – and how it disrupted the well-established market leader. What they will probably gloss over is the real reason why disruptive changes like this catch big companies by surprise: leaders who won’t or don’t listen.
Organizations that become big and successful often get complacent and overconfident. They are so focused on competing the way they always have that they ignore disruptive change. This focus isn’t always bad – after all, Proctor & Gamble’s Gillette brand owned nearly 3/4 of the men’s razor market in 2010. But they quit thinking like a start-up and that’s when they became vulnerable. Voices who suggest innovations or warn about disruptions often get drowned out, ignored or in the worst cases, ridiculed.
It is way too early to know exactly what voices inside Gillette were saying about Dollar Shave Club. I’m sure we will hear more as this deal gets dissected. And Unilever may have overpaid, paying around 5 times annual revenue (deals like this are normally at around 2 times annual revenue, so it’s a BIG bet). Unilever also didn’t take advantage of the market opportunity when it first occurred. They’ve had to pay a huge premium to catch up. But Unilever does buy itself a nice slice of the billion-plus dollar annual shaving market. In addition it gets deep customer data on over 3.2 million Dollar Shave Club members (who it can sell tons of other stuff).
The problem with most successful companies is that once they find success, they quit thinking like start-ups. Strategy decisions start happening only at the top of the hierarchy. And the people at the top of Proctor & Gamble or Unilever weren’t going to invest in a cheap, direct mail version of their flagship product (or produce an edgy video like guys at Dollar Shave Club did).
In the end it comes down to leaders being approachable and listening to ALL the voices in the organization – especially the ones who disagree or challenge the current thinking. Then leaders must have the courage to place bets on disruptive changes and encouraging innovation and experimentation down the line. That’s how you put yourself in the best position to be ready for (you cannot avoid) disruptive change.
How do you encourage innovation with your team? Do you think your employees feel comfortable speaking up when they have new ideas? Are they comfortable challenging the current way of doing things, even if it is successful?
High fives. Atta girls. Good job milkshakes. 4 o’clock happy hours.
It can be anything. What matters is that you celebrate. Celebrate the great work your folks do every day. Tell them often. It’s so simple but we don’t do it. Instead we take our terrific employees for granted. Not always, of course. When we do take time to think about it, we find ourselves being grateful for the incredible work everyone does. The problem is we’re busy. It’s hard to find that moment to sit back and just be grateful. And even when we do, we forget to mention it to the employees we’re feeling grateful for. Then we’re singing a Joni Mitchell ballad…
“….You Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)…”
But forget about turnover. Just think about production.
Here are four reasons you should be celebrating more with your team.
People enjoy work more when they feel good about what they do. This includes the value that’s placed on them and the quality of their work. I’m not saying you can’t overdo this, but rarely do leaders over-compliment their team. Try doing it more often.
Your employees are just people. They get down. They have personal stuff going on. Being told that they did a good job on something could change their whole day and give them the bit of encouragement they need to push through some of the more doll-drum tasks they deal with every day.
When you do the same thing every day – sit in the same office, under the same fluorescent lights, breathing the same not-so-fresh air – sometimes motivation is hard to come by. As a leader, you’re likely someone your team respects – which means you have immense opportunities to be the pick-me-up on a teammate’s bad day.
The Progress Principal. This research by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer focuses on the idea that in order to feel good, to feel motivated, people must feel that they’re making progress, not only at work but also in their personal lives. The pair’s best advice for managers is to celebrate small successes with your team. Kramer writes:
“By supporting people and their daily progress in meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term performance, which enhances inner work life even more. Of course, there is a dark side—the possibility of negative feedback loops. If managers fail to support progress and the people trying to make it, inner work life suffers and so does performance; and degraded performance further undermines inner work life.”
I started thinking about why we should celebrate more at work when I stumbled upon this article from Eric Barker about how we don’t celebrate enough in general. Eric discovered that if we start celebrating the small things in addition to the big ones, we see major improvements in every area of our lives. Specifically, in our relationships, at work, and in our levels of happiness and motivation.
And if that’s not reason enough for you to start celebrating more at work and at home, consider this:
“Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves how the experience felt.”
Our brains are unbelievably sophisticated, but they aren’t perfect computers. We don’t actually remember the full experience of something. We’re more likely to remember how we felt at the end of it. This means we have opportunities all the time to take control of our feelings about a certain event. When we get to the end of happy times, or, more importantly, tough times, we should celebrate. If we do that, according to Kahneman, “it would be hard not to feel like you have an amazing life.”
And isn’t that what we want for our team? Isn’t that how we want them to feel about their life’s work?
As leaders, we have control of that because we set the standard. We create the vibe in our office. Take the time to celebrate. To have fun. As far as work goes, the effect is kind of ironic.
Spend more time not working and more work will get done.
What do you think about celebrations at work? Do you have any tips or suggestions for other leaders? Have you noticed a positive impact in your teams mood or relationships with each other after celebrations? How often are you saying “good job”?
On June 23rd, Great Britain voted to leave the European Union. The full effect of this decision, known as Brexit, remains to be seen. But one thing is certain – international relations and the global economy are in for an interesting ride.
As I’ve watched Brexit play out, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s a leadership lesson in all of this. And it is not just for global leaders, but for corporate leaders, small business owners, front-line managers and parents!
I hope you give it a watch.
Here’s the link to Verne Harnish’s article referenced in the video.
Creating a culture of trust decreases chronic stress and improves productivity, creative problem solving, and job satisfaction.
This, according to Paul J. Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and chief science officer at Ofactor. Zak began his research in the 1990s. Initially, his goal was to find the common thread shared by high-performance cultures. His answer? Trust. But how could he prove it?
The idea that trust relates to high performance isn’t new. They are highly correlated. What sets this research apart from most is its focus on the causal chain. For more than a decade, Zak measured trust and trustworthiness by looking at the amount of oxytocin (the trust neurochemical) a person’s body produced when faced with a situation where trust played a role. This could be interacting with a stranger or placing finances in the hands of another person. Through years of experimentation, Zak and his group ultimately discovered what promoted and inhibited the release of oxytocin.
“Oxytocin facilitates the release of another neurochemical called dopamine, which increases motivation and makes it feel good to work as a team.”
However,
“High levels of stress as measured by the hormone epinephrine, inhibit the brain’s synthesis of oxytocin.”
This means when your employees are stressed out, they’re less trusting. They’re also less cooperative. According to Zak, “When the brain makes more oxytocin, cooperative behaviors surge.”
What that means for us as leaders is that we should do our best to help employees manage their stress. Because when employees are stressed, their brains aren’t making use of the oxytocin being released in their bodies. Which means decreased cooperation, and reduced productivity. All of which just leads to more stress.
In fact, Zak’s formula for measuring trust (as detailed in his article “Trust and Growth” in the Economic Journal) shows that:
“Trust reduces the frictions—what economists call transaction costs—when people interact. As the frictions to social interactions fall, the opportunity to create economic value increases.”
Does that mean we need to turn our workplaces into relaxation spas? Nope. The idea that we want to reduce feelings of stress among coworkers does not mean that we shouldn’t want them to be challenged.
“The science shows that employees want to be trusted and to be held accountable to one another because it makes work challenging and enjoyable, and has a salubrious effect on the bottom line.”
Furthermore, Zak’s study found that employees in “high-trust organizations” have:
70 percent less chronic stress and
28 percent more energy;
experience 26 percent more joy during the work day; and
are 19 percent more productive,
22 percent more creative,
one-third less likely to miss work due to sickness,
69 percent more likely to stay with their current employer, and
17 percent more satisfied with their lives outside of work.
Okay great. But HOW do you increase organizational trust?
This is the hard part, and it is one of the big challenges with trying to increase trust in an organization. Zak’s team suggests eight classes of management policies that can impact (increase or decrease) trust. They even come with a handy mnemonic: OXYTOCIN.
Ovation – recognizing those who meet or exceed goals. Example: peer recognition program.
eXpectation – designing difficult but achievable challenges and holding colleagues accountable to reach them. Example: teams set clear and observable weekly and quarterly goals and supervisors make daily check-ins to assess progress and offer help if need be.
Yield – enabling employees to complete their work as they see fit. Example: initiating a telecommuting program.
Transfer – enabling self-management in which colleagues choose the work they want to do. Example: replace backward-looking quarterly reviews to forward-looking work development plans in which colleagues help choose their projects.
Openness – sharing information broadly. Example: senior staff holds quarterly town hall meetings to discuss current challenges and ask for input before major changes are made.
Caring – intentionally building relationships with colleagues. Example: create a more warm and welcoming office environment.
Invest – enabling personal and professional growth. Example: continuing education, leadership training.
Natural – enabling one’s vulnerabilities to show. Example: leaders working on projects with colleagues, creating opportunities for interaction and developing relationships.
Honestly I think this prescription is overly complex (probably to get the mnemonic to work). But I’m sure you noticed all 8 of these policies involve relationships, communicating, and essentially just caring about the people you work with. The other thing I hope you noticed is how closely they align with the 3 Questions and 3 Habits of Approachable Leaders we outline in the Approachability Playbook.
One of my favorite points from Zak’s research has to do with his critique of positive psychology. While Zak doesn’t disagree with positive psychology, he does argue that most of the time its application is superficial. Most people think it just means leaders should try to make employees happy.
I totally agree with Zak here. Approachable Leadership really began when I started seeing study after study showing that happy employees DO NOT significantly increase organizational performance. Sometimes the unhappy employees are the most productive. Instead of wasting time and energy on trying to make everyone happy focus on making sure your employees feel that they are doing important work and making progress in their lives. That’s what gets the good brain chemicals flowing, and according to twenty years of research from Zak, builds an organization of trust.
To create a culture of trust you need leaders who can be trusted. This begins with being self-aware (are people avoiding you or afraid to tell you what’s going on?) It also requires you to seek honest feedback and be willing to grow and improve your own leadership skills. Finally it requires you to be fully committed to providing opportunities for your team to do work that excites and challenges them, and gives them opportunities to grow and develop. It requires you to seek personal connections and to be a great listener. You can only pull this off by being approachable. The good news is these behaviors also prove through action that you can be trusted.
Which of the 8 OXYTOCIN suggestions are your strong areas? Are there any you could embrace more? What do you think about the distinction between satisfaction and job performance? We’d love to hear what you think.
Here is what others have to say about recent Approachable Leadership Keynotes and Workshops.
Great Interactive Session, New Techniques
"I recently attended the Approachable Leadership Session with Phil Wilson at the CUE Conference in Denver. It was a great session. I loved the interactive sessions, they really help you learn some new techniques. Phil does a great job involving the participants and keeping everything moving at a great pace. I am so enthralled with this training that I brought Phil to our location to put my troops thru the paces for approachable leadership!" Laurie Galmeyer, Director of Human Resources, ETFN
Masterful Approach Captured Audience
“Phil is masterful in his approach and paints a compelling vision. He has the ability to capture an audience’s attention and take them on a journey through images and anecdotes. Whether you have 1 or 100 supervisors in your organization, I would recommend Phil Wilson’s “Approachable Leadership” session. And learning how to live longer and make more money wasn’t so bad either.” W. Alex Koch, Manager of Positive Associate Relations, TJX
Demystifies Leadership, Use Lessons Every Day
“Your workshop demystified what connecting with another human being – whether an employee, client, or spouse – can be like. I’ve used his 3-question strategy every day, both in my personal and professional relationships, to become a better coach, sister, and friend.”
Lori Broyles, Business and Entrepreneurial Services Coordinator, Francis Tuttle Technology Center
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Resistance to change? High turnover? Low engagement? Discover the surprising research on how your leaders can solve (or create more of) these challenges.
