Everyday Ethics

Here’s what the business world doesn’t need: Another high-sounding “code of ethics.”

Some of these read like a cross between the The Night Before Christmas, a smarmy pre-school set of rules about “being nice” , and the Ten Commandments with all of the reality stripped out.  People are urged in a lofty way to “be good for goodness’ sake.”  Whether captured in an actual “code” or in a vision/values statement, the words have the interesting dual capacity of being both too high-brow to relate to actual life on the ground and too nitty-gritty to relate to all of the ways in which things can go south.

Often these are captured or expanded upon in policy and procedure manuals, an ever-growing volume (or set of volumes) that attempt to cover all of the ways in which people can do wrong (or careless, or stupid, or whatever).  When the government does it, it becomes 250,000 people engaged full time in writing rules and a thousand or more pages added to the Federal Register every year.  Whoever does it, the more the volume the less the meaning, expecially since a lot of the effort involves making and justifying exceptions to the code/policy/procedure/rule.

This is why we at Luma talk abou everyday ethics.  What are everyday ethics?  They’re ethics that address things that can happen every day, violate people’s sense of right every day, waste resources every day, destroy the possibilities of the organization every day, produce mediocrity every day.  Things like focusing on the wrong (or even bad) priorities, drowning people in distractions, allowing internal warfare and destructive competition, burying truth (top-down, bottom-up, side-to-side), letting greed prevail over serving people successfully.  I addressed these and more in my book High-Performance Ethics, where the main guideline was to talk about ethics that are critical to having team integrity that leads to better results. 

There is a place for lofty prose, but too often the prose is all we get.  Talk is cheap.  Action is the proof of the pudding.  Is this ethic something that relates to real human beings with real strengths and weaknesses, living in organizations with real opportunities and challenges?  If so, it’s worth talking about.  If not, we should save it for the next conversation we have with a cleric or philosopher.

Even they would do better talking about everyday ethics.

High “Satisfaction” Scores, Low Results

We’ve been saying for a long time that “employee satisfaction” isn’t a bad thing, it just isn’t the right thing.  It measures things that are largely irrelevant to the main reason why we even have an organization – to achieve results, preferably at a high level.

We’ve seen this over and over again with our clients.  We’ve even had them start meetings about “how to have a passionate organization” by saying something like, “You know, we’ve had great employee satisfaction scores for years.  We score in the 90+% ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied.’  We thought that would make a difference for our organization, but it obviously has not.  Our results haven’t improved, and in some areas have actually declined.  What gives?”

The latest proof coming from a major organization that is not a Luman client is from United Healthcare.  In a recent survey of many organizations from a variety of industries, they reported both the highest employee satisfaction scores and the poorest results.  To us, that shows no correlation between satisfaction scores and results – or worse, that there might even be a negative correlation. 

How can that be?  We’ve worked with some clients who had become “entitlement,” even “welfare” states.  Employees were “satisfied” – they had great working conditions, great pay and benefits, extras like fitness centers and onsite restaurants and daycare, the whole magilla.  What we often found as we dug in was that people were not only not grateful and working hard because of this, they were complaining that there wasn’t even more, or that a few trinkets had been removed or cut back a bit.  And they were not infrequently facing very low or no expectations, and were because of all of this lazy and apathetic.

Our conclusion?  If you want a Passionate, Pure-Performance Organization, one of the things you can’t be is “satisfied.”  You need plenty of people who are positively discontented and constructively disengaged.  If passionate people are working on something meaningful, it isn’t very important to them what their work conditions are – you could put them in a cardboard box as long as you don’t kill their passion.  We teach and assess on the 10 key elements you have to have if you want a passionate organization.  If you want a “satisfied” organization, you’ll have to go somewhere else.

Phony and Genuine Accountability

There’s a lot of talk about accountability in organizations, but precious little of actual accountability.

What we normally see is a statement like, “You’re accountable,” and then actions by leaders that diminish that comment. These actions include micromanaging, randomly inserting ourselves into the middle of decision-making processes, creating overlapping or parallel accountabilities for the same things, and requiring multiple reviews along with approvals from above. The result is a sense of disempowerment, which leads to making excuses and pointing the finger at others.

To be meaningful, accountability has to be tightly defined. We need to provide the authority and resources to pull it off. Then, as much as possible, we need to get out of the way and stay out of the way until we reach a key milestone, deadline, or commitment date. People have to know, “This is my baby and there’s no place to hide if things go wrong. I’d better focus, work hard, be tenacious, ask for what I need to accomplish the work, get help with problems as necessary, and deliver the goods.”

Accountability is a great concept, but it’s just words unless we make it real in the conversations, actions, and decisions of those who are…really accountable.

Case Studies – The Backward Way to Learn Leadership

For a century, case studies have played a major role in the development of leaders.

The thinking goes like this: Let’s study what happened to a particular organization and see how they responded – what they did right, what they did wrong, what they learned. Or let’s see what aggressive moves a new CEO made to shake up a company. Then let’s try to squeeze some useful ideas and practices out of their experience and apply it to…everything else.

The problems with this are many. One is ignorance. Do we really even know all of the relevant facts? Do we truly understand their context – economy, market, competition, regulation, etc.? What is their culture really like? Is this the whole picture or just a snapshot? Nothing is more difficult than understanding something fully enough to make pronouncements based on that understanding.

Another problem is applicability. Even in the same line of work, what does the experience of a $50 billion/year company have to do with a $50 million/year company (or the other way around)? If it happened even a short while ago, have times changed enough to render their experience much less than meaningful? What is the effect of a different workforce makeup – more or less technical people, or blend of personalities, or spread of ages?

A third problem is confusion and contradiction. In many situations, there are case studies that prove a point and others that disprove the same point. Faced with a similar challenge, one organization wins by “sticking with their knitting” and another one wins by “breaking out of the box.” So what’s “right?”

The overall problem with this approach is that it approaches leadership from the wrong end. Instead of finding leadership principles that work over time because they are connected to the real world and to what it means to be human in a team environment, they survey a variety of shapshots and then hope to draw something that makes sense out of the pictures.

At Luman, we believe that great leadership consists of having an array of powerful principles that work in all times and places, along with a toolbox of practices that can be applied and modified as necessary to allow leaders to win in specific situations. We’ve learned that examples can illustrate a principle, but can never create one or prove that it works.

Telling a story about how a leader or organization applied a principle and saw it work can be very encouraging. Telling that story to teach leadership is an exercise in wishful – and backward – thinking.

Leadership Models and the Diamond of Excellence

It doesn’t take long to figure out that there are dozens if not hundreds of leadership models out there.  Some are focused on individual areas (like teams and teambuilding) while others are intended to be comprehensive.  Frankly, most of them are useless, and some are actually counterproductive.  But you’ve got to have one.

Why does anyone need a great leadership model?  For a number of very good reasons:

• There’s so much to think about that it’s extremely helpful to have a grid into which you can place new learning, ideas, material, and tools.
• It’s important to have a framework by which you can see if your approach is balanced or out of whack (like spending all of your time on one or two areas instead of the whole realm of leadership requirements)
• It keeps you focused as a leader on what’s really important and helps you avoid a thousand meaningless distractions
• It allows us to evaluate books, articles, seminars and other arenas where leadership teaching is offered
• It helps us – especially with decent assessments – to determine with great accuracy where our challenges and opportunities lie

Should an effective model be simple or comprehensive?  Absolutely.  It has to be simple enough that a leader can keep it easily in his or her head.  Complicated 7 to 10 models with lots of sidebars are just too much to be handy or useful.  But it also has to be comprehensive enough to allow everything that’s important to a leader to be incorporated.  Too many models are focused on just 1 or 2 aspects of leadership, or worse – or built around a gimmick (you can probably think of a few there).

You want a model that has elegant simplicity.  We spent 25 years distilling our experience with hundreds of organizations and tens of thousans of leaders down into a model that is both straightforward and robust.  We call it the Diamond of Excellence™.  It has 4 facets that are easily grasped but rich enough to cover everything a leader needs to know and do to be top-tier effective.  We’ve been challenging leaders for the past 5 years to name one important leadership situation or challenge that isn’t covered by the Diamond, and to date no one has been able to come up with anything.

The spirit of the Diamond is captured in our tag line, Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations™ – all based on a foundation of facing and defining reality.  Please take a few minutes and check out the Diamond on our website.  Whatever you do, find a model that works – for you personally as well as for your team or organization.

Models come in all shapes and sizes.  Make sure you use one that you can build on forever.