Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision. Perseverance is making the decision to have courage every day, day after day.
Twelve Steps to Conquer Fear
August 9th, 2009Eight reasons you should review and revise or reaffirm your values
July 19th, 2009
If we were starting all over, what values would we choose?
An employee values forum last week at Tucson Medical Center(photo by Julia Strange)
Values Coach is currently working with three organizational clients to help them review and redefine their statements of values. It’s an exercise that every organization should periodically conduct. Times change and priorities change. The founding fathers made provision for amending the U.S. constitution for precisely that reason.
If you were to make a list of every word and phrase that could legitimately be included in a values statement, it would run for many pages.Putting core values down on paper doesn’t mean that those which aren’t listed are not important, but rather that they don’t make the cut for being defined as “core.”As one example, a hospital client has “confidentiality” in its current values statement. Confidentiality is required by the HIPAA law – when one of your values is a legal requirement, that is setting a pretty low bar!
Here’s a quick test that can be applied to any organization, be it the place where you work or your own family: if all of the members of that organization don’t know what the core values are, and the attitudinal and behavioral expectations created by those values, then it’s time to review those values, and either revise or reaffirm them.One of our longstanding clients is Auto-Owners Insurance, a Fortune 500 company recently recognized by JD Power for having the best claims service of any insurance company in America. Auto-Owners has ten core values, and every associate of the company is expected to know what they are (Click here for a preview: http://auto-owners.com/core_values.aspx).
Here are eight great reasons why your organization should go through the exercise of reviewing of reviewing and renewing its values:
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Confucius on Character
July 4th, 2009
More than two-thousand years ago, in feudal China, Confucius was speaking about character, leadership, and personal development in terms that were centuries ahead of his time. His students collected his sayings in The Analects. Many of these sayings have to do with the development of personal character. Confucius used the construct of the superior man and the small man (were he writing today, he would certainly have said “person”). I’ve adapted the following list from The Analects. I don’t think anyone has ever more eloquently defined what it means to be a person of strong character, or the essential elements of servant leadership.
Lazy Nation
June 28th, 2009
As I’ve traveled through Chicago over the past dozen years, I’ve been conducting an informal observational study at O’Hare Airport. Results so far: for every one person who takes the stairs at each end of the long tunnel between the B and C concourses, more than 10,000 wait in line to have their (often overweight) bodies hauled up on the escalator (many of them, I’m sure, complaining that they never have time to exercise). You see the same syndrome in any shopping mall parking lot, where people with perfectly good legs drive around and around trying to find the closest parking space so (heaven forbid!) they don’t have to use those legs.
In turbulent waters we need every hand on the oars
June 14th, 2009
First and foremost a salesperson, last but not least a janitor.
That is the job description of each and every employee at a small company whose CEO I met at a recent conference. It reminded me of a story told by my former business school professor Jeff Pfeffer (author of some great books on business, including The Human Equation and The Knowing-Doing Gap). In its early days, the Mazda car company hit a severe slump. Rather than laying people off, the company put line workers through a sales course, gave them a briefcase full of promotional brochures, and sent them door-to-door selling cars. It saved the company. Read the rest of this entry »
Put the Cheer back into Leading
June 5th, 2009
If you’re dead serious long enough, you end up seriously dead.
In his book Leadership A-to-Z, James O’Toole asked why so many leaders are reluctant to share their passion, but instead feel the need to be serious and buttoned-down. Corporate America, Healthcare America, Government America, Nonprofit America – managers everywhere are afflicted with what the late C.W. Metcalf (author of Lighten Up) called “terminal professionalism.”
The yin and yang of soul and ego
June 1st, 2009
For thousands of years, philosophers have written about how we humans are torn by conflicting inner drives. We want to be recognized, but we want to be left alone. We want material possessions, but we want our lives to be uncomplicated. We want to work hard at work that really matters, but we want to spend time sitting on a riverbank with a fishing pole. We are torn between temptation and virtue, almost as if there really is a little devil sitting on one shoulder and a little angel sitting on the other. How we resolve this inner conflict has everything to do with becoming Authentic (Core Action Value #1).
True Happiness
May 28th, 2009
Sally and I have a fridge magnet that says “Happiness is being married to your best friend.” We’ve been best friends for the entire 30 years that we’ve been married. And we’re at our happiest when we’re doing things with our kids (now grown and off getting higher education), when we’re doing work we love to do, and when we’re hiking together in our favorite place in the world – the Grand Canyon. This photo was taken last week by Alex Peraza, one of the many friends we’ve made in The Canyon, after we hiked together to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers (yes, the LCR really is that beautiful sapphire blue that you see behind us).
Eight essential characteristics of a culture of ownership
April 21st, 2009
Eight Essential Characteristics of a Culture of Ownership
In the rough and turbulent waters of today’s economy, organizations need every hand on the oars – they need people who are thinking and acting like partners who have bought into the values, vision and mission of the organization, and not just like hired hands who are renting a spot on the organization chart. Likewise, people who see themselves as partners are more likely to find their work fulfilling, and to achieve greater career security.
Spark Plugs, Zombies, and Vampires
April 7th, 2009The Gallup organization has extensively studied the factors that lead to employee engagement (e.g. Gallup Management Journal, June 2006). The results are disturbing, and should be of concern to leaders in every organization, because employee engagement is probably one of the most important factors that creates a source of competitive differentiation in terms of customer satisfaction, operating productivity, and employee loyalty. Gallup has distinguished between three groups – those who are fully engaged, those who are not engaged, and those who are actively disengaged. We call those people Spark Plugs, Zombies, and Vampires respectively. In every organization, there is a bell curve reflecting the distribution of positive, neutral, and negative attitudes of the people within that organization.