People leaders are bridge builders

During the past 20 years of professional experience leading people I've been working on consolidating my leadership principles. As I mentioned in a previous article One rule and 6 steps to drive employee engagement I feel I got to something valuable. Today I have one of the most engaged team of employees working with me. No easy feat during these turbulent times.

What if I told you that this was achieved through building bridges? What if I told you your job as a leader is to build bridges? Some of them long and solid, some high. You may ask bridges to where, for whom and why? What for?

Well, I define the role of real people leaders as bridge builders. Our role when it comes to the people we lead is not for selfish growth and fame. It’s a selfless responsibility of serving others through valuable and rare skills. The skill of providing clarity to people looking for answers about their future and how to get there.

The majority of people unconsciously know in their hearts what they want in life. Few will ever realize that and turn into action. They lack the understanding or the courage to make it happen. However, when you help by removing the fog around and allowing them to find out where they want to go you will see their inner lights shine while they fulfill their potential. Then you build a bridge.

When you are helping building the bridge to your people you will have to resolve 3 simple yet critical puzzles. I’ll share them here and break them down in future articles:

1. The process of building a bridge starts with a fundamental question one must answer: where do they want to go? If one doesn't know where to go she shouldn't spend energy moving because she may be just going to the wrong direction anyway. As a leader facilitating that process it takes time and patience.
2. The second puzzle is for the individual to clearly understand where they are.Another critical step of self discovery and self awareness that great people leaders must facilitate. If one can’t accept where she really is and believes she’s somewhere else, you can’t start building the bridge for the individual won’t be able to find it.
3. And finally the final step. Once the present location and destination are fully realized by the individual, the leader will be able to start the construction. In some cases the distance between the points is great and will require a few hops. Sometimes the depth of the valley between the points is great and will require time for building solid foundations. Those analogies translate into people development approaches the leader will apply.

When people comprehend a leader’s main motivation is helping constructing bridges to their desired future, they will reciprocate, work hard and be loyal. It’s also a fact you may lose some people along the way. Some for good reasons if they found their desired destination is in a different path. Even in that case, they will respect you for life for you helped them finding their true path. The reward for all this incredibly demanding leadership task is a highly engaged and performing workforce along with the gratifying realization of seeing people fulfill their dreams; a people leader’s ultimate accomplishment.

Stay tuned for next articles with insights about how to execute the 3 steps above.

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One rule and 6 steps to drive employee engagement

You may ask what qualifies me to speak about employee engagement and it’s a fair question when you are about to spend your valuable time reading something on such critical leadership competency. I understand leaders are busy so I’ll go straight to the answer:

• 21 years of proven leadership and people development at PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and Lowe’s
• Highest employee score in recent employee opinion survey
• The highest score (90% strongly agree) to the question “my team members come together and help each other to get the job done
• Full profile here if you want additional details

So let’s get to it shall we. The trigger for this article was a question from my management about what did I do to get such results, comparatively so much better. There was speculation about bribe, power play, torture and other common leadership methods. But I didn’t use any of that. Honestly, I could not exactly describe it other than say that my team’s development is my single most important priority.

That was not enough to put the interrogators at ease. So I really had to put some time and think about it, and in a way create some sense, some logic, some method regarding something that for me was day-to-day practice.

This is what I came up with. Don’t expect rocket science. This is something you can apply any time but it must be sincere:

RULE #1 and only: give before you ask; give more than you ask.

GIVE (4)

1. Make your employees’ career your #1 priority (I stuck to my initial gut feel here) – Indeed the most important step is to remember that as leaders of people our first priority is to take care of people. Forget about your boss, forget about your deliverables and forget your other stakeholders. Their needs will be met naturally while you attend the needs of your employees. Engaged employees will deliver better results. Your engagement with your employees will provide the information you need to properly communicate with your boss and stakeholders.
2. Trust before compliance (this is a tricky area) -. There is no question about the need for employees to comply with company rules and policies. However, if you treat everything under the compliance lens you are removing the one thing that differentiates us from the rest the animal kingdom: intelligence. Give them trust and they will positively surprise you.
3. Flexibility and space (but stay connected) – one important way to demonstrate you trust your team is giving them space to work and allow flexibility in how they work. Set a clear objective and get out of their way. It doesn’t matter if they got there in a different way than you thought. Actually, often they will find better ways to get there. Note it’s very important that you understand people’s limitations and support them when needed. No matter how much flexibility and space you give a trainee he won’t be able to devise the company strategy. I’m assuming this is common sense though.
4. Appreciate – this is likely the one step that requires the most sincerity. You don’t need to say “great job” to everything that is not really a great job. However, expressing your gratitude with a simple thank you goes a long way. Make appreciation public and again sincere. Remember that some things that may look like business as usual and simple at your career stage; can represent a major accomplishment to a more junior professional.

ASK (2)

1. Accountability – make sure people understand that with greater power comes greater responsibility. It doesn’t need to be through punishment. Explain that along with trust you give you expect the individual or team to take accountability and escalate whenever things are not going as planned.
2. Results – under the same principle, all that you gave to enable team success will be measured by the employee engagement and also by results. If everything else is in place and results are not being delivered there is something wrong. It can be your team’s readiness to transition to a more open model, your understanding of their capacity to deliver or lack of support. With time these will be discussed openly and any problem will be minimized.

The method is fairly simple. Make your people your first priority. Give them more than you ask. Observe your team thrive. If this is too different than what you do today and you are willing to try, make sure to explain the game plan and pace the transition accordingly. If team members are afraid to speak up or to think rather preferring to take orders, it will take same time before it works, however, the prize is worthwhile. The power of 10 engaged brains is always bigger than 100 disengaged ones.

Privacy is Down; Get Over It, Will You!

If I had one social networking advice to give for 2012, this is it: privacy is down; get over it, will you!

The most common complaint or reason people mention to me about their hesitation in joining the social network world is lack of privacy.  In these people’s minds there is a clear privacy hole in this technology.  Some don’t want to share information about their lives or pictures.  Some are concerned about what people can do by stalking their profile.

What I can tell this people is: act according to your beliefs, but as interesting as your life may seem to you I can guarantee that 99.999999% of the world’s population is completely uninterested in it.  Your life is very likely less interesting to other people than you give it credit for.  And there will be hundreds of thousands of others who will make all they can to show everything, and I mean everything, to the social world audience, which makes it even less plausible people would be interested in our “boring” lives.

Even if someone end up looking at your profile, the behavior in the web shows they will move to the next one in a matter of seconds and will never remember you anyway.  And if you are concerned about serious stalkers or identity theft, it’s known that the vast majority of the offenders are people physically close to us, so you should be concerned about the real world not the virtual one.

The exception is children.  They really need to be protected because they can fall prey because they don’t have the maturity to deal with some sick people out there.  Even though, once again, the majority of the problems will unfortunately happen with people close to them and who they trust (also read The Strange Faces of Crime).

There are some reasons why the concept of privacy is changing so dramatically.  The people who created Facebook were teenagers when they did it.  They didn’t want privacy!  They wanted to be found!  Surprisingly the very nature of Facebook and social networks in general is to connect with people, to show off, to engage.  Not to hide!

The other reason is that there are few countries in the world where individual rights are really enforced.  So most of the world’s population was never used to have privacy anyway in the first place.

If you put these groups together you are going to get to the conclusion very few people really care about privacy after all.  Take a look at the half billion+ people putting information in Facebook.

So, trust me: if you are not a celebrity or politician, unless you post your social security number, salary, bank account and password in the social world, you will be safe.  And if you don’t believe me, try to became famous in the social world and let me know what did you have to do to make it happen.  I can guarantee posting about your life will not make it.

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Is Social Business creating Corporate Socialism?

so·cial·ism     noun \ˈsō-shə-ˌli-zəm\

1 : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property

2 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

A scaring thought in the corporate world so used to hierarchical, top down, do-what-I-told-you model.  Can the S-word (I know what you thought but I meant Social), belong in the same phrase with the C-word (I meant Corporate just in case you had any other creative idea)?

The thought of allowing people at all levels to speak freely in a corporate environment feels like a dictatorship enforcing free speech for its people, a nice conversation between Government and Unions, allowing woman to vote a century ago or people from different ethnicities to share the same seat in a bus not that long ago.

Is social business the beginning of corporate socialism?  Is Marx becoming real at the heart of the capitalist world?  I know a lot of people are cringing now.  Some of these words put together bring back memories of the most fearful time of a generation.  Socialism, Marxism, Communism, Capitalism, Cold War, Nuclear War, End of the World.  I know, sounds scary for some of us.  But it’s good that most in the social revolution didn’t live through that and don’t have the same reaction.

There will always be a certain level of command and structure required for an organization to run.  Ever since I joined the corporate world back in 1990 I hear about reduction in hierarchical levels, elimination of higher and middle management, improving our listening skills, etc.  It seemed my promotions were always timed with corporate culture change.  Every time I was promoted matched the time the level I now belonged to no longer had the right for an office.  Worse than that, it was always perfectly synchronized with workforce reduction and empowerment down the ladder.  What meant in reality fewer direct reports, and luckily the same but most often more work.  So, while my boss had 10 people and a nice office, by the time I was promoted to take his job I had 2 direct reports and the same windowless cubicle.

And now this Social Business thing.  After all things we had to put up during our careers, we have to allow anyone in the company to say what they think and smile!  We have to share with everyone the knowledge that gave us competitive advantage to grow our career?  Share that knowledge with those who are competing for a promotion with us, when unemployment rates are high and the world is in economic crisis?

Yes.  Companies are becoming social.  Under the following definition corporate socialism is happening.  I define Corporate Socialism as:

 1 : a system of management or team working in which there is no private knowledge but protects intellectual property.

Whether this will happen through generational change in the corporate world or paradigm change in the current management model is the only question to be asked.  People will learn that socializing knowledge while protecting intellectual property will make drive results.  Those retaining it will get stuck in the past and will be eventually forgotten there.  And no; retaining your knowledge will no longer help your career.

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Move like Jagger, Think like Jobs

The one on my right is Steve Jobs!

Would the Rolling Stones exist without Mick Jagger? No, it wouldn't. It would be either a cheap copy of the wiggly legendary lead vocal or something that wouldn't resemble anything of the former band, which means it would literally cease to exist. Soon we will find out whether Apple was a one man show.

In a world built on volatility, it's hard to say Apple's leadership has been established. Mostly for 2 reasons: (1) no company is ever assured of keeping a leading position without continuous improvement; (2) there is no longer such a thing as established leadership.

What was Steve Jobs' legacy to Apple? Was it a roadmap or pipeline of ideas and products? Was it his creative and visionary brain? Or was it a way of thinking? No company can depend on a single individual for its success. No company will achieve competitive longevity based on a single leader, no matter how good he/she is.

We know great leaders not only when they have the job but perhaps more importantly after they leave, their legacy. We often see companies striving under a leader just to lose its momentum after a leadership transition. If the way of working has been ingrained into people’s beliefs and behavior, the company no longer depends on a single visionary individual to achieve greatness.

It’s a fact we can’t only blame Jobs in case Apple loses its luster. But preparing someone who can take your job is a key role of a leader. Hopefully the new person will bring even better and greater ideas. Inheriting a winning company is probably more difficult than taking a company that needs change, if we can really say a job is easier than the other. The rationale before this statement is that in relative market position a leading company can only keep it or go down.

I don’t know how much value there is learning how to move like Jagger, but I can say that if you can do it along with perpetuating a winning corporate culture you’ll be a hilariously entertaining leader on top of being a great one.

Jobs didn’t have Jagger’s moves that’s for sure. It now remains to be seen whether he succeeded making Apple think like him.

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How Google+ Will Shake the Social World

By now you probably heard all kinds of predictions:

• Google+ will take over the social space and gain Facebookers’ hearts with the new features, specially the ability to consolidate networks and manage privacy;
• Google+ is coming too late;
• Or, “what is Google+?”; among others.

Working with technology for many years, I learned we can never say it’s too late. Look at Apple’s success in changing completely the landscape of the technology world. Or even Facebook itself taking over My Space leadership. There are countless examples. The fact Facebook is in the social world today what Microsoft was in the personal computing space during the 1990’s , doesn’t guarantee its position at the top. The company has been facing on-going criticism on how it manages its users’ privacy, and that’s where Google+ is betting its chips.

But before you consider migrating your networks to a new solution, let’s consider some important facts:

• Social network doesn’t work without a network: Google’s controlled release approach may backfire. It’ll be difficult to reach critical mass if the majority can’t actually join it. This will likely give time to its competition to catch up with some of the innovative capabilities offered by Google+.

• Privacy has been less of a concern than previously estimated: most of the younger generations are less concerned about their privacy. This may come back to haunt them when applying for a job or looking for a stable relationship. However, since this may be the new norm, people are likely to be more forgiven to things they know happened in the past. And who has never done anything wrong and could judge other people anyway. The fact they were able to hide doesn’t make than better, just sneakier. This openness will actually be very helpful raising serious red flags.

• There is some benefit keeping your professional network in a completely separate solution than your personal network: Google+ assumes there is a lot of value aggregating all your networks into a single place. But professional and personal networks have different demands. When someone tries to deliver everything, usually doesn’t do any of them with the highest quality. I always tell my wife “do not trust a pizzeria that also has steak, sushi or even pasta”. The best pizzerias I ever ate at made pizza exclusively (by now you guessed I love pizza). So there is benefit having LinkeIn specializing on your professional networking requirements and Facebook on your personal ones.

Moving one’s networks is a hard labor. Specially if you took it very seriously when creating it. I’m yet to see a compelling reason why one should and I bet Facebook is already working to catch up. Now, playing catch up is not a position a leader wants to be. So it better take innovation and user requirements seriously. Because if by the end of the day my networks move somewhere else, I can guarantee I’ll move as well. As I said before, there is no network of 1.

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Enterprise Collaboration in the Cloud at Kraft Foods

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