Well Managed

"I love my job"

How can you tell if you have succeeded in creating a good workplace culture?

Well, sometimes it's pretty easy. Sometimes people just tell you.

I have an employee, a very successful supervisor, who periodically sticks his head in the door of my office and says something like, "I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's no other company like this out there. I could never go back to working for the kind of companies I used to work for. But some of the young people here don't know it, they don't know how special this place is because they've never worked anywhere else."

I have another employee, a really bright young guy, who also periodically shows up at my door just to stick his head in, smile, and say, "In case I haven't told you lately, I love my job."

Now, these fellows aren't happy because I baby them. Far from it. I've given both of them many tough challenges, and they've come through for me again and again. Both of them are held to very high standards for the work they do, and they have both consistently met and exceeded those standards. However, when we work together we enjoy it. We laugh a lot, we come up with a million ideas, we try new things, we brainstorm like crazy. I suppose it's hard work, but most of the time it doesn't feel like work at all.

Do you have employees who spontaneously tell you how much they love their jobs? If so, add a comment to this post sharing at least one thing you've done to build a great culture. If not, you've come to the right place. Start building your great workplace culture today, and start with selectivity.

Set out to be the best

Six years ago I was hired by my company to create a new division. Work that was then being done by a number of external vendors would all be brought in-house. It meant recruiting employees, creating forms, designing software, outlining processes, mastering regulatory compliance, setting strategy, building a training program, defining our workplace culture, and so forth. The whole ball of wax.

I only had about ten employees to start with. Early on, I started telling everyone, "We're building the best operation in the industry, and not by a little but by a lot." It just sort of popped out of my mouth and I’ve been saying it ever since. Once I started saying it, of course, we had no choice but to make it true. I had painted us into a corner.

This turned out to have several good effects. First, of course, it was inspiring and energizing. It’s always exciting to strive for the top. It provides a sense of mission and commitment. Second, it turned out to be clarifying and, in a way, relaxing. We've never had to wonder what our quality standard is: at a minimum we have to do everything better than anyone else.

I recommend making this commitment with your staff. When you say, "We're building the best team in the department," or, "We're building the best company in the industry," you immediately put your organization in an elite class. Now you’re just competing with the few other managers who have decided they will be the best. The vast majority of managers simply don’t have the guts to make that commitment, so they're out of the running from day one.

If you're willing to go out on a limb and set this goal with your staff, you may make an interesting discovery: the other managers who are "competing" with you to be the best are as likely to become your friends as your enemies. After all, you have something rare and important in common: a true commitment to excellence. I’m aware of one other organization in my industry that appears to be operating at our level of quality. (In fact, they probably still have the edge on us, but we're the new kids on the block and we’re coming on strong!) I know the guy who runs it and we’re friends. We met each other a couple years ago at a conference. When I got home from the conference my wife asked how it was and I told her, "Mostly just the same old stuff, but I met this guy there who is really a standout." Recently his wife told my wife that she asked him the same question when he got home from that conference and he gave her the same answer about me. Everyone at that conference had essentially the same job title, but we spotted each other and recognized kindred spirits. It's a nice club to belong to. Wanna join? There's always room at the top!

The Walk of Fear

I like to get input from people, including my employees. Often, when I’m in a planning meeting with my managers that involves a particular work process, I’ll call in some frontline employees who handle that process so I can get the benefit of their perspective. I do the same thing when I’m in my office trying to figure something out.

Ideally, of course, one would recognize in advance the need for input and invite the employees to the meeting ahead of time, giving them a few days to think about the topic and put their thoughts in order. I do that too. But sometimes when an issue is being discussed or I’m working on a problem, it suddenly strikes me that a frontline perspective could be quite illuminating. So then I pick up the phone and call a couple people.

If you do this sort of thing, I'd like to share a little tip with you. If you follow it, your employees will appreciate it very much. Here it is:

When you call your employees and ask them to come to your office, tell them why.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way. My first title as a manager was Chief Operating Officer. I went from having never supervised anyone in my life (as an attorney I hadn’t even supervised my own secretary!) to being a bigwig in the executive suite. Shortly after I was elevated to this lofty post I called one of my best frontline employees and asked her to come to my office. A few minutes later she rather tentatively poked her head in the door. I asked her to have a seat and started talking to her about the problem I was working on that I wanted to get her insight on. She seemed a little odd and wasn’t saying anything. Finally, several minutes into the conversation she let out a big breath and blurted out, "Oh, thank God."

Well, that got my attention. I asked what was going on. She said "When you called and told me to come to your office I thought I was in trouble. The whole time I was walking to your office I was trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I’m just so relieved that I’m not getting disciplined. Now, what were you saying?"

I tell you folks, hearing this was like a dagger in my heart. I had worked with this woman regularly in my previous position as legal counsel, we got along well, she did excellent work, and she was a person I liked and admired. Which is why I was seeking her advice. But I had unwittingly subjected her to the Long Walk of Fear to the Boss’s Office. No wonder she had seemed so tentative when she showed up at my door. I felt pretty awful about it.

Now on a rational level she had no reason to worry: her work was excellent, her behavior was exemplary, and she and I had a good working relationship. But rationality has nothing to do with the Walk of Fear. It’s like when you show up at the office one morning and your keycard doesn’t unlock the door. For a moment, you can’t help wondering, "Have I been fired?"

Maybe this goes back to childhood experiences of being called to the principal’s office. For many of us, that was our first experience with the Walk of Fear. Again, it does not have to be based on any rational concern. When I was a kid I was a great student: I got good grades, did not cause trouble, and generally enjoyed being in school. But whenever I got called to the principal’s office I couldn’t help but worry as I took that long walk down the hallway, even though it always turned out to be something innocuous.

If you're trying to build a positive workplace culture, you do not want to unwittingly inflict this unpleasant experience on your good employees. I was lucky that, early in my career, I had this experience with an employee who was so open and honest about being worried when I called her. The vast majority of employees, of course, will never mention that they had been worried when you called them to your office. They will just play it very cool. So it tends to be an invisible problem.

I recommend doing the same thing I have done, which is to develop the habit of telling employees what you want to talk to them about when you call them. I might say something like, "Are you free for a few minutes? We are discussing when to do an AME and when to skip right to a panel exam and we would like to get your input." That’s the best way to do it, because then they can actually warm up their thoughts on the topic as they walk over. However, sometimes the topic is too complicated to easily summarize, and then I’ll just say something like, "Could you help me out? I’m working on a project and I’d like to get your advice on it." That, at least, makes it clear that they are not in trouble.

Company, company on the wall...

What do you see when you look at the organization you manage? If you're the president or CEO,  think about your company as a whole. If you're not in charge of the whole company, think specifically about the part of the company that you manage, whether it's a team of ten employees or a division of 1,000 employees.

What is the character of your organization? Do you see suspicion, laziness, and resentment? Do you see trust, enthusiasm, and appreciation?

Do you have an image of your organization in your mind now? Do you have a feel for what it’s "personality" is like?

Now, here is the big news: you are looking in the mirror.

Any organization, whether it has ten employees or 10,000 employees, eventually takes on the true character of its leader. Over time, whoever you really are, whatever is truly within you, will come to be reflected in the organization you lead.

This is an amazingly accurate process. I have seen it in a number of companies, with the workplace culture revealing in surprising detail the leader’s strengths, quirks, and hidden weaknesses. As far as I can tell, you can’t "fool the system" by pretending to be different than who you really are. Your real self shines through in the end.

Whether this is good news or bad news depends on what you see when you look at your organization.

What it means is that if you don’t like what you see in your organization and you want to rebuild your workplace culture, you need to start with yourself, not with your staff. Identify the character traits in your organization that you are not happy with and then look at yourself to figure out where those traits are coming from. The good news is that this gives you enormous leverage: you can achieve dramatic culture changes in your organization in a surprisingly short time simply by making changes in your own beliefs, assumptions, or attitudes.

This also gives you a great opportunity to develop yourself as an individual. Since building a strong culture in your organization is an important part of your job, and since the best way for you to do so is to strengthen your own character, you are literally being paid to improve yourself.

Tennis lesson

I was playing tennis with a friend recently. There was a family of four playing doubles on the court next to us: father, mother, and two sons. It quickly became apparent that it was not a fun time for any of them. The father was a grim and silent presence, saying little other than occasional short, harsh criticisms of his sons' errors. The expression on his face was stuck somewhere between a scowl and sneer. The sons were tense. They bitterly criticized themselves and each other for mis-hit shots and quarreled over line calls. The mother gamely tried to salvage the outing, at one point noting that she was the only one paying anyone any compliments. The other three pointedly ignored her suggestion that a few positive comments might be in order.

This foursome generated an almost palpable zone of tension that took a lot of the fun out of the game for my friend and me. And that takes some doing. We take a very light-hearted approach to the game. We do our best to play well and on our good days play some pretty fine tennis. However, we have at least as much fun when we play poorly. One day we were tied 6-6 in a set that had featured a tragically impressive parade of creative unforced errors. Neither of us had won a single service game. As we prepared to begin the tie-breaker, my buddy intoned, with the dramatic seriousness of a sports announcer, "Now it all comes down to one question: Who wants it less?" I laughed so hard I could barely stand up.

But on this day, we were just hitting the ball back and forth and suffering from the grim tableau being enacted on the next court, serving as unwilling witnesses to a little slice of a family dynamic in which the father was systematically grinding his sons into grim anxiety, the sons were turning into younger versions of their wretched father, and the mother was being dragged along for the ride, her protests going for naught. When they left we experienced a great sense of relief and were able to enjoy the rest of our game.

In that family, the father was playing the role of manager. His intentions, I suspect, were good: he was attempting to make his sons into better tennis players. Unfortunately, he was doing so by adopting a harsh demeanor and attacking them for every error they made. This did motivate them to try to avoid errors but it also made them tense and miserable, and it is hard to play any sport well when you are tense and miserable. Plus, it sucks all the joy out of what should be a pleasurable experience.

Too many managers take this same approach. They create an atmosphere of anxiety and oppression that permeates their organization, seeking to gain efficiency by keeping everyone on edge. What an awful way to manage. Even when this approach to management is performed skillfully it can only generate moderately good results in terms of productivity and quality. People can perform competently when they are tense and fearful, but they cannot perform brilliantly. Brilliant work is generated only by enthusiasm and joy.

You can get decent results being a jerk boss but you can get even better results being a good boss. So why not shoot for generating brilliant success and creating a little corner of happiness and fulfillment in the world at the same time? Sounds like a good idea to me, and sharing ideas on how to do it is one of the goals of this blog.