PLEASE AND THANK YOU IS ONLY A START

The following is a guest blog by Jay Remer

I could not help but notice the recent headline in this paper stating that New Brunswick is Canada’s most polite province. Diving right into the article, I quickly realized that this grand pronouncement was based on the percentage of businesses that say please and thank you in email communication. As wonderful as the headline sounds, 15 percent of the 250,000 examined emails that include please and thank you is hardly a ringing endorsement for politeness.

Saying please and thank you is what we are supposed to be taught as soon as we learn to speak. The fact that so few of us use these phrases in business communication explains at least in part why the general culture in the North American workplace is not polite but is fear-based.

A work environment must go far beyond simple platitudes to qualify as truly polite. An organization that provides a safe work space for all of its employees, one in which encouragement and appropriate support are a part of the culture, qualifies. An organization where high employee retention is reflective of a high morale qualifies. An organization where employees speak highly of their job and of their boss qualifies. An organization where civil debate and respectful communication occurs qualifies. An organization where an employee has someone to turn to if unnecessary stress, harassment, or abuse rears its ugly head qualifies. And, an organization where every point of human interaction is a positive one qualifies.

If you look at these qualifiers within your own organization or place of work, what answers do you discover? Dismally low ratings are revealed on an almost daily basis, with survey after survey uncovering the ugly truth. Mental Health America and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence have both conducted such surveys in partnership with Canada’s Faas Foundation that indicate that less than 25 percent of employees are fully engaged in their work or speak highly of their boss or the organization for which they work. And the remaining 75 percent are actively looking for other work.

These are facts that cannot be refuted. They are however clear indicators for where we need to look to begin to fix this colossal problem. It’s not much of a stretch to see what a long road we have to travel to have businesses that qualify as being truly polite. Although please and thank you are a start, companies need to understand the interconnectedness between our life at work and our life outside of work. Given that most of us spend more of our waking hours at work than we do at home with our families and friends, I suggest that significantly more attention needs to be focused on our workplace culture.

Most human resource trainings, though regularly offered, seldom have any lasting impact. The reason for this is a lack of desire at the top to welcome any real change. If this desire to maintain the status quo is the experience you are coping with, you have little choice but to change jobs. Given that 75 percent of the workforce is in this situation, it’s a scary jungle out there.

As scary as the landscape may be, it is up to you/us to make choices for ourselves that help steer us to a more fulfilled life. Employers need to refocus their thinking from simply being a place that is offering work to anyone qualified, to a place of excellence, where there is little turnover and a line-up of potential employees seeking work because of the way everyone is treated. That would qualify as polite.

There is an effort afoot within the province to become the innovative province. I have my doubts that leadership found within the government has the ability to accomplish this without a tremendous amount of input from the public at large that they will listen to and implement when appropriate. My doubt comes from the number of fundamental challenges facing the province that have gone unresolved for generations.

If one looks at poverty, education, and access to quality healthcare, the steep hill to climb ahead of us is daunting. These challenges will not go away without significant effort. This requires realigning priorities from community to community. Without changing the water on the beans, you can expect the status quo to continue. The weakest links in our society will continue to be marginalized and not given the assistance needed to achieve a real change. Not until this real change occurs do we deserve to be dubbed as polite.

Please and thank you is a start. What will you do to carry the conversation further?

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OPEN LETTER TO FACEBOOK’S SHERYL SANDBERG - IT’S TIME TO “LEAN IN”, SHERYL

This story in the New York Times suggests that both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were at odds with those who pressed for full disclosure on Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation. The story also indicates how obsessed Zuckerberg and Sandberg are about their public image; and Sandberg has become an impressive role model for women.

Unless they come clean with what they knew, when they found out, and what they did about it, their reputations and that of Facebook will be in tatters. For Sandberg, it is even more significant because a failure to “Lean In” on this will make a mockery of what she has espoused. 

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SAME OLD, SAME OLD NOT LIKELY TO WORK FOR NEW RCMP COMMISSIONER

Brenda Lucki, a member of the national police force for 31 years, will take over as RCMP Commissioner in April as appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Having used the RCMP as an example of a Dictatorial Culture in my books, written a number of blogs on them, and interviewed a number of former and current employees, both prior to and subsequently after this appointment. Lucki’s predecessor, Bob Paulson, had made similar promises to overhaul the department, especially in terms of how harassment and mental health issues are handled, at the time of his appointment in 2011.

I am not at all optimistic Lucki will have any more success than her other many predecessors. For her to be successful, two things have to happen.  First of all, a new model of governance must be instituted; and secondly, a culling of ‘the old boy’s’ club is long overdue.  

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CONVEYING TOUGH MESSAGES

The ‘Emotion Revolution in the Workplace’ is an initiative in which the Faas Foundation has partnered with the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence. Our research has revealed that one of the biggest reasons emotional intelligence has generally not been embraced as a leadership capability is that is viewed as soft, with the purpose of “being nice”. The perspective in this Washington Post article nicely challenges that view.

We assert, based on evidence, that emotionally intelligent managers are better able to give tough messages to their subordinates. Developing emotional intelligence skills in people allows them to have open, honest and direct conversations; something we have found is not the norm in most organizations. We are also finding employees want this feedback.

Photo credit: ei.yale.edu

‘P’ is for Purposeful

This article is part of a series currently being published on MoneyInc. Previous submissions can be viewed on the MoneyInc site by clicking here.

“We all need something to believe in, something for which we can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. We need to feel that our life has meaning, that we are needed in this world.” Hennel Senesh

Just over a decade ago, I was given a death sentence after being diagnosed with leukemia. Thanks to the miracle drug Gleevec, which had just come off of clinical trial, what was considered to be a fatal condition became a chronic one. 

I have difficulty responding when referred to as a cancer survivor because I did not go through the suffering that most cancer patients do. I did not have a single day of down time, and zero side effects usually associated with cancer treatments. Each day I take a single pill, which directly targets the cancer cells without harming the healthy ones.

Emotionally however, I did go through what most do, fearing the unknown and anticipating the terrible ordeals others have fought. Another dynamic was facing the reality that as there is a beginning, there is also an end, which caused me to reflect on my reason for being.

While I have lived a charmed and successful life, there was a realization that if my life were to prematurely end, my mark on the world would be insignificant. The day I came to that important, yet horrible realization, I cut a deal with the Almighty that, if I were made better, I would become a better person. I was made better and continue to try to be that better person.

This determination required me to reflect on purpose; and as Winston Churchill admonished, “we should be determined to live for something”. For me that something became helping to create a more civil society, where it is possible for every point of human interaction to be positive and constructive.

Much of the work I do today is helping organizations create psychologically healthy, safe, fair and productive cultures and climates. What continues to amaze me is the number of employees at all levels who don’t have a sense of purpose. In a study by Mental Health America (MHA), sponsored by the Faas Foundation, called ‘Mind the Workplace’, 74 percent of the 20,000 respondents, indicated that their work environment is overly focused on trivial activities and having overly bureaucratic company policies.

This staggering statistic provides a tremendous opportunity to address the productivity crisis. The World Economic Forum indicates that innovation is the key, which I support with this caveat. Unless people understand the purpose or ultimate aspiration of an organization, and how the work they do contributes to this, they are not likely to contribute to innovation and creativity. 

When I am called in to help organizations improve performance, assessing the current state is the first step I take to understand if the conditions exist that are necessary for an organization to be successful in transforming into becoming psychologically healthy. The conditions are based on the research conducted on emotionally intelligent cultures. They are:

. Trust amongst members.
. A sense of group identity. (this means a sense of purpose)
. A sense of group efficacy.

I have found that these three conditions are related and interdependent, insomuch that without trust, purpose is not evident; and without purpose, there is no efficacy.

In conducting current state conditions, I ask sample individuals and groups what they are working on, and why. Again, it is amazing to me how many struggle with responding to this. Most people work in command and control environments, and just do what they are told to do, without understanding the why. For those few who understand the why, few of them are able to articulate how what they do relates to the overarching purpose of the organization. I have also found that of the few who do understand the why, even fewer of them feel empowered to challenge why they do what they do the way they do it. My research on this indicates that most people are afraid to ask these fundamental questions about what they spend the bulk of their time on. The reason for this fear is usually a lack of trust in leadership.
I enjoy relating the story of when President Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral in 1962, and asked people working there what they did. Most of them, being rocket scientists, gave him technical answers. When he asked a janitor what he did, the janitor answered, “Well Mr. President, I am helping to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely to earth.” Just imagine if everyone who reports to you could give this type of answer.

Recommended reading on this story is a paper written by Andrew M. Carton at the Wharton School of Management called ‘How NASA Leaders Enhanced the Meaningfulness of Work by Changing the Meaning of Work’. In this he analyses how employees can see a stronger connection between their work and an organization’s ultimate aspirations. 

Patrick Lencioni in his book ‘The Advantage - Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business’ is a must read for leaders. This book is a very pragmatic guide on how to build cultures where purpose and trust are at the core of the equation. David Ramsey, a New York Times best selling author, nailed it in his review of the book, “Lencioni cuts through the corporate ‘Bull’ that creates a culture of stonewalling and feet -dragging, and shows leaders at every level how to build up a culture of productivity and communication.”

A psychologically healthy, safe, fair and productive culture is one where people constantly challenge - Why am I doing this? And if this can be satisfied - Why am I doing it this way? 

Andrew Faas is the author of ‘From Bully to Bull’s Eye - Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire’, and is a Public Voices Fellow at Yale University.

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SMALL WONDER PEOPLE DISTRUST

This New York Times article by Yonette Joseph highlights yet another example of bullying and abuse being common knowledge, without intervention by the board! ONE charity had a high profile international board of directors who including Bono were either complicit or grossly negligent. 

U2’s front man, Bono, said he was “furious” after the ONE charity was rocked by accusations that it had long fostered an atmosphere of bullying and abuse. Just because unscrupulous executives secrete these types of abuse from boards of directors, it does not excuse boards from ensuring that this cannot happen.

In my book, ‘From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire’, I discuss the responsibilities boards of directors have and what to do when executive directors overstep their bounds. Without openness and transparency in an organization, trust erodes quickly.

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WHY ARE PEOPLE SO ANGRY?

This heart-wrenching story from the Washington Post articulates the moral decay we are currently witnessing and experiencing in society today. People are angry; and there is much to be angry about.  A fundamental reason for this anger is the feeling there is no one or no place to turn for support. This assertion is substantiated by ‘Mind the Workplace’, a survey of 20,000 North American Workers conducted by Mental Health America and sponsored by the Faas Foundation, where we found that only 34 percent of respondents felt they could rely on their co-workers for support when things go south for them at work. Add to this the scandals being exposed in every segment in our society, situations that in most cases have been open secrets for years and in some cases decades. Add to this the erosion of democracy. Add to this the polarization of positions and politics. Add to this the almost impossible access to justice for the average person. Add to this people being gouged. So when we add it all up it is totally understandable that people are angry. This kind of feels and sounds like the early thirties to me. 

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#FORCETHEDIALOGUE

Chitra Anand articulates a tremendous opportunity for organizations to help counter abuse of power in the workplace. The benefit of forcing dialogue will go much beyond countering abuse; it will also improve performance, innovation and creativity.

Forcing dialogue is very much in line with the work that the Faas Foundation is doing with the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence and Mental Health America on helping organizations create psychologically healthy, safe, fair and productive climates and cultures, where every point of human interaction is positive and constructive.

We are finding, in most environments the dialogue between managers and subordinates is limited to the annual or semi annual much dreaded performance review and when things go south. We are also finding that people generally are just not comfortable in being able to Discuss, Disagree, Debate and yes, even Disobey - what we are labeling the 4 D’s of emotional intelligence. 

What we are advocating is first creating the conditions for dialogue to become a comfortable norm. The three conditions are:

. Trust
. A sense of Purpose
. A sense of efficacy

Both Google and Twitter, recognize how hostile and abusive online communications have become and are exploring initiatives to have healthier online conversations. While this should be embraced, unless the conditions for dialogue and the 4 D’s of Emotional Intelligence are the norm in organizations, whatever Google and Twitter develop, will not change the unhealthy discourse.

#FORCETHEDIALOGUE has the potential of being a huge movement.

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A Boomer's Guide to Millennials: The ABC's of Leadership:‘O’ is for OBSERVANT

(This article is part of a series I am writing for MoneyInc.)

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said”.  Peter Drucker

Leadership is all about communication; yet most leaders, in fact most humans, have become horrible (ineffective) communicators, which is perhaps why there is such a state of dysfunction in almost every aspect of society. 

With our ever-increasing obsession with self-absorption, as opposed to self-awareness, we have lost both the art and the science of observation, and how all of our seven senses can improve our communications and our ability to lead.

Technology, while being a huge enabler, has also diluted our observational skills. Texts and emails have become substitutes for critical discussions and debate. We are no longer able to gauge the reaction to what we communicate because we cannot observe the non-verbal messages such as body language and facial expressions.

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched  - they must be felt with the heart.” These words come from one of 20th century’s most articulate educators, authors, political activists, lecturers, and leading humanitarians. Helen Keller was stricken with an illness at 19 months old, which left her blind and deaf. She overcame her disabilities, through the power of observation, to become that great communicator and leader.

Brad Snyder, a brave veteran, who lost his sight as the result of stepping on a landmine while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, shares his remarkable journey to recovery to mentally and emotionally overcome his blindness in this New York Times opinion piece. Although he has adjusted to ‘seeing’ and ‘observing’ the outside world through his other senses, he still faces the challenge of understanding how sighted people perceive him.

My two beautiful Weimaraners, Casey Girl and Rollie Junior, aka Jr. or RJ, continually teach me the wonder of observation by applying their amazing senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, movement and balance. Obviously they cannot talk, but they, though their behaviours, eloquently communicate.

Nothing eludes them. When awake they are constantly aware of both their biological and emotional needs. Because of this, they are generally in a state of bliss.

Over the last year or so, Casey Girl, who is nine years old, has been suffering from arthritis. Junior, who is four, unmercifully torments her, except when she is in pain. He then becomes her healer, licking her hip and leg, whimpering periodic crying sounds to express his sadness. Similarly when I am feeling poorly, they both comfort me by curling up next to me, or resting their heads or paws on my lap.

When Junior gets into trouble, which is more often than not, Casey Girl tries to set him straight. They happily share their food with one another, yet are jealous for my affections. They also have a remarkable ability to let me know what they want - food, walks, attention.

Both of them have an uncanny ability to read human emotions. When I am happy, they are elated. When I am worried or disturbed, they look like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and attempt to distract me. They can distinguish between people who likes dogs and those who fear them. 

As an expert in organizational dynamics, I have found that most organizations do not view emotional intelligence as a quantifiable skill. Nor do they make the connection or see the relationship between emotions and communications, and by extension - leadership. To properly make this connection, one needs to understand the art and science of observation.

Randy Nelson put this into perspective when he wrote, “The skills we develop are skills we need everywhere in the organization. Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn’t just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be observant. There is no company on earth who wouldn’t benefit from having people become more observant.” I would add that there is no group on earth who would not benefit from this.

A sad reality in most organizations is that leaders do not hear what they need to hear. Instead, they hear what their subordinates believe they want to hear. Observant leaders are better able to assess this input by comparative analysis against other inputs and judge the consistency of the messages.

Being observant leads to better decisions. I further believe that observation extends well beyond the present moment. In decision-making, recollection of previous observations allows for people to also factor in what may appear to be seemingly unrelated such as comments, events and situations. More often than not they are very related. True intuition, for example, is the ability to be observant.

Being observant mitigates risk. I can’t tell you the number of instances I have been called in to handle a critical situation such as a work related suicide. What I have found in every instance is that the event could have been avoided had people been more observant. There are always ‘red flags’ which are almost always nonverbal but loud.

I have found observant people are wise. Borrowing from Marilyn vos Savant, “To acquire knowledge one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” In every aspect of society we are lacking wise leaders. When things go well, they readily credit their leadership for the successes; yet as readily absolve themselves when confronted with a disaster, claiming they were not aware. If they were genuinely not aware, they were not observant, and therefore not wise, and therefore a poor communicator, and therefore a poor leader.

Andrew Faas is the author of ‘From Bully to Bull’s Eye - Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire’, and is a Public Voices Fellow at Yale University.

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CUSTOMERS SHOULD DUMP WELLS FARGO

According to this New York Times report, a lawsuit by a former employee claims that when customers complained of fraudulent activity in their accounts, the bank closed the accounts instead of investigating them.

To compound matters, the bank is also being accused of gouging customers by focusing more on charging higher commissions rather than on recommending what investment strategy is the best fit for their customer.

If these allegations are true, Wells Fargo and their stagecoach should get run out of town!!! This also begs the question of whether this is an industry practice. 

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