Learning From Stories of Happiness

Learning From Stories of Happiness

by Fred Harburg

My perspective on leadership communication was influenced by studying the Native American tribes near my childhood home on the plains of New Mexico. In many tribes, the chief shared power with others, one of whom was called the storyteller. The storyteller - often a woman - used her craft to engage and encourage others to heed the tribe's collective wisdom regarding logistics, planning, preparation, character, ethics, culture and purpose. The knowledge and inspiration coming from the stories became the basis for a more powerful and constructive tribal mindset - one that propelled the tribe to effective action in difficult times.

What was true for Native Americans remains true for modern corporate tribes like yours and mine. In spite of our seeming sophistication in using the latest technologies and the most advanced global systems, we have not outgrown our need for stories that provide understanding, emotional energy and human connection. We need stories that guide us to fulfillment, and we respond to leaders who effectively tell such stories. Further, we learn from our own stories of achievement and happiness.

I experienced the power of effective storytelling as a young organizational development professional starting up The Saturn Corp. In the late 1980s, there was great internal and external opposition to the existence of the company. Our fledging company had been an on-again, off-again investment item for GM for months, and our survival was a real question mark.

In that environment, we called together the key stakeholders and our most senior leaders who were involved in the launch of Saturn. We captured, both verbally and pictorially, in a wall-sized mural, the story of how we arrived at our current situation, the rationale for our existence and the purpose for the company. Despite heated differences, the sense of passion and purpose in the story worked to unify and energize our efforts. It placed all of us on common ground and propelled us to create a shared path to a productive future.

Our senior leaders used that story and the stories that unfolded thereafter to ignite possibility and to translate possibility into reality. Ever since that experience, I have used storytelling as a prime strategy in leadership, learning and organizational development work.

Great 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued: "The best society is that where the people are happiest, and the best policy is the one that produces the greatest happiness." Views such as Bentham's led to the impressive social reforms of the 1800s that resulted in improved education, better working conditions, enhanced health care, better standards of sanitation and reduced crime in Europe and the United States.

In her recently published book of scientific research on the phenomenon of happiness, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a respected scientist and researcher at the University of California, defines happiness as "the experience of frequent positive emotions and the sense that your life is good - that you are progressing toward your life goals and are satisfied with how your life is going." Her rigorous research confirms our intuition that happiness embedded in story is one of the most salient and significant dimensions of human experience and emotional life.

As it turns out, stories of happiness are causal of, not merely correlated with, a variety of benefits, including:

a) Higher income and superior work outcomes.

b) Larger social rewards.

c) Better physical health.

d) Greater personal effectiveness.

There are three simple ways leaders can employ the story mechanism, each of which is based on one of the scientific findings regarding human happiness.

a) Rather than ruminating on or covering up mistakes and setbacks, leaders should describe events in an authentic and realistic way; take appropriate responsibility for mistakes; identify the lessons learned; and talk about specific forward actions they will take to make course corrections.

b) Establish regular times to express gratitude by telling stories that celebrate the successes, contributions and achievements of teams and team members.

c) Energetically and colorfully express meaningful goals and objectives for the future in story fashion that include the names of people and organizations that will play an important role in the achievement of success.

Today, we need storyteller chiefs who can inspire us with words that reach deep into our hearts and help us see what has happened, what is happening and what is possible for our future. We need those who will lead us well in our pursuit of happiness.

[About the Author: Fred Harburg is a private consultant, writer and speaker in the disciplines of leadership, strategy and performance coaching. He has held numerous international leadership roles at IBM, GM, Motorola and Fidelity Investments.]

Do You Think Like a Leader or a Manager?

Do You Think Like a Leader or a Manager?

by William P. Fisher, Ph.D.

As you may know, there is considerable discussion in the literature and at various forums about factors that distinguish a "Leader" from a "Manager". Many people make no distinction, assuming that a person in a management position must be a leader as that is inherent in the position. Such people confuse "positionship" with "leadership", for the mere occupancy of a position does not guarantee real leadership. Perhaps you have known a person who had a lofty position (and title and trappings to go with it) who was not a leader and every subordinate knew it. In reverse, some people consider a leader to be a good manager, believing that, by definition, a leader must have superior management skills. Such people confuse "vision" with "process" which are entirely different concepts. Perhaps you have known someone who was a visionary, but did not have particularly good management skills. Certainly it is ideal if one person embodies all the qualities of leadership and management, but such individuals are rare. Most of us "lean" toward one function or the other (right brain/left brain theory) but we can and do "crossover" and back from time to time. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note a few of the characteristics that distinguish "leadership thinking" from "management thinking".

1. Managers tend to focus on the immediate situation as they function in the present and are usually measured in this way.

While they are peripherally aware of the future, they really don't spend a lot of time contemplating it. Leaders, on the other hand, do look to the long term, realizing that the present is a fulcrum future direction and results. If they were chess players they would be thinking several moves ahead. Leaders mostly think strategically, managers mostly think tactically.

2. Managers focus on the process of management and immediate efficiency more than leaders do.

Leaders think about how they invest their time creatively and surround themselves with, and develop, the strongest talent so that those talented people can grow and do more and more over time. Leaders believe that if they do so, their people will do a better job of watching and improving the processes than the leader could do himself or herself.

3. Leaders understand that compensation is a satisfier, not a true motivator.

Once this satisfier is in place at an acceptable level, people are motivated by the nature of the work, the challenges, opportunities to learn and grow, and whether or not their bosses support and care about them. Managers, on the other hand, often think of their subordinates as responding best to financial rewards and incentives. Did you ever know people who hated their jobs even though they were highly compensated? Many managers also project, perhaps subconsciously, that "I am officer material" and subordinates are "enlisted material".

4. Someone once said that "Managers get work done through other people," but leaders "develop people through work".

Since leaders need to know what "makes people tick", they want to know a subordinate's long term goals and aspirations so they can fashion ways to combine personal goals with the work at hand, as well as the organization's goals. The current buzzword for this is "alignment". For any given project it may be less important to know people's long term goals, but for organizational growth and success it is necessary over a period of time. Leaders tend to be contemplative and social, managers are often impatient and mentally preoccupied.

5. Leaders recognize that individuals are motivated differently and so consistency is not an absolute virtue in their recognition of people.

Some people may like public praise, others may appreciate the opportunity for more flexible time, for example. Managers emphasize systems more than they do people or personalities. Many managers do not recognize that a policy is not a regulation and "hide" behind policy when a vexing situation arises, wherein the right thing to do is to deviate from established policy.

6. Managers tend to think more about what has been done before and try to make incremental improvements, while leaders like to challenge themselves and their people to bring out their best in ways they never thought possible, so quantum leaps can occur.

They establish new paradigms.

7. A manager's priority, from which he or she usually derives the most satisfaction, is based on process and efficiency.

"Getting it done" is their byword. Leaders enjoy success too, of course, but tend to revel in it more when it leads to growth of individuals and the organization. Their greatest satisfaction comes from having others who succeed them rise to greater heights than they did.

8. Leaders use time as a reward and seek to invest their attention where it can have the most upside impact.

People usually have the most opportunity to grow and become truly great where they already demonstrate strong performance, and so leaders tend to avoid remedial projects or the constant oversight of weaker performers. Instead, they spend more of their time with the people most likely to bring the greatest advances in the future. Managers tend to focus more on problems to solve than they do in boosting people to previously unachieved excellence. Leaders are "fire lighters" (passion), managers are "fire fighters."

9. Leaders try to get to know people and understand them in a personal way without being invasive or inappropriate.

They evidence compassion as well as objectivity in their decision making. Many managers tend to be more "cut and dried" in their working relationships, which can be perceived as insensitivity. Leaders "think with a cool head and a warm heart, not a hot head and a cold heart."

10. Some of the best managers are very good at studying "best practices" and ways to "build a better mousetrap".

Leaders tend to look for more of the "Einsteins" and star performers who are likely to find a better alternative to eliminating mice than the snap trap. Leaders possess and look for creativity. Managers are more conformity minded.

11. Leaders are all about finding and cultivating talent and are not threatened by it.

Managers usually want to feel more in control of their surroundings, not the least of all because highly talented people can be very independent and often "difficult to manage". Leaders often have stronger social skills than managers do and are better prepared to deal with strong egos. Many managers lean toward inflexibility.

12. As headstrong as many leaders can be, they know from experience that being headstrong can be a liability, and they have learned to listen and be accepting of other's points of view.

Managers may be more focused on what they believe to be the "right way" to do something and may be less open to hearing divergent views. Leaders may not always enjoy hearing opposite views, but they evidence the concept of "let the best idea win."

The foregoing is not "cast in stone", of course. There are few people who are "complete leaders" and few who are "complete managers". Regard these characteristics as being on a scale list as it is important to know which is which. Think like a leader when leadership is called for, think like a manager when management is required.

[About the Author: William P. Fisher, Ph.D., a member of Cayuga Hospitality Advisors, is the Darden Chair in the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.]

Can You Handle the Truth?

Can You Handle the Truth?

by Mike Prokopeak

Managers have gotten into some bad habits. In the name of getting along, they've coated information in whitewash and obscured the hard facts. Instead of being open, honest and transparent, they encourage anonymous feedback and hide behind 360 assessments.

Susan Scott, author of Fierce Leadership, argues that many of today's management best practices are actually holding us back. Many leaders fail to recognize that their practices face substantial internal barriers to success.

"Our practices include not only what we do, but what we believe, because it's our belief that drives our behavior that produces results," Scott said. "It's very difficult for them to behave differently and to sustain that behavior if what they believe underneath doesn't support it."

To overcome these barriers, Scott said managers need to develop "squid eye" - the ability to spot signals that foretell potential problems. She co-opted the term from divers who scour the sea floor in search of squid. Beginning divers have difficulty spotting squid because of their camouflage, but after they learn to see them - develop "squid eye" - the signs are all around.

"I want people ... to be able to spot the 'tells' that indicate we're headed in a good direction or a bad direction," Scott said.

The ability to spot these corporate "tells" will allow companies to adjust their practices in order to operate more effectively individually and in teams and drive performance. Scott identified six "worst" best practices that are key tells that a company is headed in the wrong direction, including hiring for smarts, legislated optimism and anonymous 360-degree feedback.

Scott said the way 360s are used anonymously in most organizations fails to provide meaningful feedback that improves individual and organizational results. Anonymous feedback indicates a belief that it's risky to disclose what you are thinking or feeling or that people can't handle delivering or receiving the truth face to face. It may be an indicator of a deeper cultural problem.

"When an organization gives the message quite overtly that we are unable to give one another feedback candidly face to face ... then you have to ask where else in the company does anonymity live," Scott said. "Where else in the organization are people withholding what they think and feel, and what price are we paying for that?"

On an individual level, anonymous feedback lacks context and meaning. The person receiving the feedback often struggles to understand what to do with the results because he or she has no idea where the feedback is coming from. More importantly, Scott said people lose the opportunity to build meaningful relationships.

"The language of anonymous feedback is colorless and soul-killing, and I just don't see any life or intimacy or humanity [in it] that could truly enrich a relationship," Scott said.

That failure to establish and enrich relationships is what costs organizations in the long run. The inability to have a candid conversation about performance leads to a tendency for relationships to flatline and fail, Scott said.

"A key premise of fierce conversations is that our careers and our companies and our relationships succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time, and secondly, the conversation is the relationship," she said.

Rather than anonymous 360-degree feedback, Scott suggested that companies practice face-to-face feedback, 365 days a year.

"Unfortunately, we don't care enough to do the hard things that also happen to be the right things because we are not connected with people at a deep level," Scott said. "If you want to become a great leader - or a great human being, a great parent - you must gain the capacity to connect with your colleagues, with your customers, with your community at a deep level, or lower your aim."

Scott said that those relationships - our emotional capital - are our most valuable currency. Executive suites are littered with the corpses of brilliant people who flamed out because they failed to recognize the importance of human connectivity.

"We might be technically proficient and very smart and very well-intentioned and bomb if we don't know how to connect with our colleagues and our customers at a deep level, if we don't know how to have the conversations that need to take place," Scott said.

Those authentic conversations tackle reality, provoke learning, resolve tough challenges and enrich, rather than devalue, relationships, but Scott said pulling the plug immediately on anonymous feedback could be disastrous. While it's not hard to do, having a conversation that tackles these challenges requires preparation.

"You just need to be shown how to do it and then practice doing it on real issues," Scott said.

The ultimate goal is to create a transparent, authentic performance-driven culture.

"Leaders need to examine their practices and look at the results their practices are producing," Scott said. "Where they love the results, then obviously their practices are working. Where they're not getting the results they want, perhaps ... it's time to clear the windshield."

[About the Author: Mike Prokopeak is the editorial director for Chief Learning Officer magazine.]

Communication as Influence

Communication as Influence

by Merrie Spaeth

Proper communication techniques -- including an understanding of what listeners remember and the importance of coordinating internal and external messages -- will add value to the HR role and to overall organizational effectiveness.

In Human Resource Executive's Forecast issue (published in November 2007 looking forward to 2008,) Edward E. Lawler III, distinguished professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, wrote, "Instead of focusing on what HR needs to do to be a business partner, I would argue that the key to the future success of HR is not in becoming a business partner, but in focusing on organizational effectiveness.

"I firmly believe if HR does not adopt organizational effectiveness as its major focus, it will be the worst of times. But, if HR can become a significant contributor to organizational effectiveness, it will be the best of times, because it will position HR to add value in ways that are truly significant."

One of the ways that HR can add "organizational effectiveness" is by adopting and owning a model and approach to communication that creates a consistent set of definitions, strategies and expectations across the enterprise.

Read any HR publication, and the word "communication" comes up at least a dozen times. Communication is important during mergers or downsizings, when starting open enrollment for benefits, and for any initiative from wellness to expat repatriation.

I have examined communication strategies and training for hundreds of companies and found familiar shortcomings: Too frequently, companies equate effectiveness with "more" - more brochures, more information. Today, HR has discovered social media so "more" means YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

If you're looking for organization effectiveness or "adding value," what could be better than saving the company from lawsuits and huge legal judgments, destroyed reputation and even going out of business?

Tall claims. And yet, that's what our methodology would have provided for UBS and Bear Stearns. Because these techniques can be used for internal communication, and because they do not fall into the purview of other traditional ways of slicing up a company, HR has the opportunity to embrace them and drive a common culture of communication throughout the company.

A common culture requires shared definitions. Most companies and executives start with the mind-set of what they want to say or what they think the target audience needs to know. But when you ask how much your listener remembers from what you say - a lot or a little - everyone knows it's just a little.

Time permits only an initial examination of what drives the memory of the listener, but it's the right topic for HR to start with. The first step is to agree that effective communication is not what you want to say, it's what the listener hears, believes and remembers. Frequently, it's also what you want the listener to pass on to someone else.

Step Two is to embrace the concept of alignment. That is, there are clearly definable routes or networks to your target listener or audience.

There's what we call the "formal network," what the listener knows that you control. This includes most of what HR does, ranging from forms and brochures to interactive Web sites. Then, there's what's loosely called the media, although the definition of what's media is also changing dramatically and at breakneck speed.

Finally, there's how we encounter the listener-audience. Internally, this means various meetings or person-to-person conversations, etc.

Alignment requires that what is conveyed along the formal network should always be consistent with- or aligned with - what the listener receives along the other two networks. HR professionals have experience with what happens when information from one source in a company is contradicted by, or misaligned, with what another source says or what a company does.

A number of years ago, we took a company, the largest in its industry, through bankruptcy and reorganization. In these situations, management always stresses the importance of teamwork, of being exceptionally cost conscious and that every individual can make a difference.

The 50 top executives at this company parked their leased Mercedes underground, next to the elevator banks. Everyone else parked out in the large parking lot. So every employee had to trot past those Mercedes at least twice a day. They were the source of one of the biggest gripes I heard from employees. The CEO was confounded, saying "they're leased, and we'll lose money if we break the leases." He failed to understand the intangible cost and the contradiction of the visual of the expensive cars with the daily message of cost savings.

The first, and we believe one of the most powerful, drivers of memory are the words a company chooses to use. They represent the articulation of the soul, values and blueprint for the company.

In a company with a shared communication culture, you will hear the top executives articulating these words with passion and looking for opportunities to use them. For example, at FedEx, the words speed, reliability, satisfied customers, exceeding expectations and so on, aren't just words. They're the promise every FedEx employee makes.

It's personal. We call these "good words." That is, they're the anchors of what the company wants the listener to hear, believe, remember and pass on.

And these words don't just appear in a pitch situation.

When we're benchmarking a company, we try to sit in on as many meetings and internal presentations as we can. Frequently, you'll hear a lot of these "good words." Then, the question and answer or back and forth discussion begins. Guess what happens to these "good words?" They disappear. This clearly signifies to the listener that they were just pitch words.

Of course, if there are "good words," there must be "bad words," the words that represent what the company doesn't want passed on. Words can be bad, but also true. For example, layoffs is a bad word to most audiences. The issue is whether a company also can articulate truthfully a set of good words, such as respect, assistance, fair treatment and so on to counter the negative words.

E-mail has become a ubiquitous, frequently overused channel of communication. It's a combination of person-to-person communication electronically enabled. Most large companies issue guidelines about the proper use or overuse of e-mail. We've seen 20-page memos on the topic. They never get read.

We have two very simple rules. The first and most important is that if an e-mail has a "bad word" in it, count on it reaching other people.

Sound simple? By introducing this model and the accompanying methodology, the Swiss giant banking house, UBS, might not be facing a court order to post a $35 million bond as part of litigation initiated by a large customer.

UBS represented that it sold "investment grade securities" to a Connecticut hedge fund, Pursuit Partners. It said so on all the brochures and in PowerPoint presentations. But internally, UBS traders were referring to the same products as "vomit" and "crap." Pretty easy to identify which are the good words and which are the bad words.

A Google search of the judge's decision in September brings up an amazing list of headlines, including: "Silo Breaker: For UBS, Some Securities Were 'Crap' or 'Vomit.'" Or my favorite: "Lords of the Underworld: UBS Employee called CDO 'Vomit' in 2007."

The case also has a significant ethics component, but it's enough to note here that if HR had aggressively preached the concept that the words used to an external audience along the formal network of communication be the same used by the company along the informal networks; if they had a clear message about the simplistically named but robust concept of good and bad words; we believe that someone could have flagged the egregious situation. In other words, getting people to adopt a common model and set of definitions enables employees to point out inconsistencies without having to step into the problematic role of whistleblower.

And while $35 million is small potatoes for UBS, the ramifications of the incident are global. Who will trust them when they say they have investment-grade securities?

Now, let's turn to Bear Stearns, where we can see how bad words can affect actual behavior. Think of the letter that Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., leaked calling into question whether IndyMac bank was about to "fail" - and it immediately did.

One of the most common mistakes is to repeat and deny a negative word. The listener is likely to ignore the denial and actually hear the opposite of what the speaker is trying to say. We've been using humor for 20 years to get people to understand the implications, by highlighting what we call "bimbo" comments - named for the young woman, who, when caught in a tryst with a high profile, married man, announced to the world, "I am not a bimbo." Thus, she caused everyone to think she was.

While our monthly bimbo winners can be amusing, they are no laughing matter. Bear Stearns' CEO was the 2008 winner. On a Wednesday, the company issued a press release and he went on CNBC to announce, "Bear Stearns does not have liquidity problems." By that weekend, they were part of JPMorgan Chase.

While HR professionals may think they pay a great deal of attention to communication," it's not sufficient unless it has an overarching, robust, enterprisewide application. When we look at what HR departments are providing - if they are providing any communication training - it's frequently basic courses in the most elementary presentation skills.

Eye contact and body language are important, but if you don't know how to influence what the listener remembers, and worse, you don't have a teachable methodology to accomplish it, your hand gestures don't matter much.

Of course, for those who remember comedian Bill Cosby's immortal monologues from when he was a stand-up comedian in Philadelphia, his admonition to pro athletes is still true: "Do not touch certain areas of your body."

Adopting and disseminating a shared analysis and approach and a common set of definitions and techniques allow HR to "touch" the entire enterprise, and to go far beyond the elementary expectation of what's effective. This supports the goals of having HR contribute to high level strategy and, as Lawler advises, to "organizational effectiveness."

[About the Author: Merrie Spaeth is the founder and president of Dallas-based Spaeth Communications, Inc., a strategic communication consulting and training firm. Merrie is a pioneer in communication theory and executive training, and is acknowledged as one of the most influential communication counselors in the world. She served as a White House Fellow and was assigned to FBI Director William Webster.]

Apology Is the First Resort

Apology Is the First Resort

by John Kador

Why is it so hard for HR professionals to be accountable for mistakes and faulty judgments? All professionals are reluctant to admit they are less than perfect. And everyone is apprehensive about the consequences of making mistakes. But there is evidence that HR professionals may be a little more adverse to admitting mistakes than other professionals.

Human resource professionals make no more mistakes than their peers in information services, accounting, finance or any other department. But when HR makes a mistake, the consequences are usually obvious and messy for the organization. So what are HR executives to do when they realize they have made a mistake or given faulty advice?

Plan A is to admit the mistakes as soon as possible, sometimes before they have become obvious, accept full responsibility, apologize and accept the consequences. Plan B is to wait to see if things really are as bad as feared, shift the blame, minimize, cover-up, spin and deny. There's little middle ground.

Let's look at some actual examples of HR mistakes. No one likes to admit mistakes. So I have agreed to change names and identifying details as a condition of reporting these stories of actual HR foul-ups. As you read these stories, put yourself in place of the HR executive and try to decide how you would handle it.

1. HR Gives Faulty Information

The first example takes place at a global technology company. A well-respected computer analyst - let's call him Jim - with 10 years at the company announces his resignation because he has an opportunity to join a start-up. Everyone is sad to see him go and wishes him well. A month later, Jim asks for his job back. The start-up did not work out. Jim's manager is glad to have him back. The company's policy allows rehiring of former employees. Jim left on good terms and returns on good terms.

So far so good. But here's where the problem starts. When Jim reapplied for his job, he asked HR whether his seniority would be reset. In other words, would he be treated as a brand-new employee or would his seniority be preserved? The HR manager assured Jim, "It's like you never left. Your seniority continues, minus the one month you were away."

A year passes and Jim receives his year-end bonus. He's unhappy because the bonus is much lower than he expected; in fact it's calculated not on 11 year's credit, but on just one year. So Jim appeals and it's revealed that the HR manager who assured Jim that he would not lose seniority was, in fact, wrong.

And then, the HR manager denies saying anything of the sort, so Jim feels doubly betrayed. Betrayed, first, by the HR manager, whom he thought should have been more of an advocate, and betrayed also by the company's bonus program. Instead of being motivated by the bonus, Jim was left feeling frustrated and demotivated.

The situation ended especially badly. Jim produced an e-mail that demonstrated that the HR manager did indeed give faulty advice. The HR manager was asked to resign and Jim left the company shortly thereafter.

It's not hard to understand what probably happened. The HR manager panicked. Caught in a significant mistake, her first instinct was to deny and to protect herself. Worse, she engaged in a cover-up. Such lack of integrity ended her career.

It didn't have to be that way.

Had the HR manager accepted accountability for her mistake and apologized to Jim and the CFO, the situation would have been manageable. Assuming that such mistakes weren't a pattern, the HR manager could have saved her job. A compromise could have been worked out with Jim, a valued employee, and the company would have an opportunity to reaffirm its seniority policy or change it. The lack of accountability and apology subverted all that.

2. Termination Letter Mailed to Wrong Employee

Not all HR mistakes end as badly. Here's an example of a mistake that's probably the basis for the nightmares of many HR executives. I'm indebted to Washington-based HR consultant Katharine Giacalone for this example.

A large company with thousands of employees scheduled a mass layoff. The HR department mailed termination letters to the homes of about 100 employees. Unfortunately, a valued employee not on the layoff list received the letter by mistake.

When the HR executive discovered the error, she had a decision to make.

She could attempt to handle the situation herself and perhaps avoid criticism of her department, but she understood that this was a significant mistake with significant downsides for the company.

She immediately went to the president of the company and explained the situation. She accepted responsibility and apologized for the error. The HR executive further recommended that the president phone the employee, apologizing for the mistake, rescind the letter and ask the employee to return to the job that was waiting for her.

The president followed the HR executive's recommendation. Initially, the employee was justifiably angry. She had started making plans for a new job and didn't know if she wanted to come back. The president was very apologetic and assured the employee that she was valued and there was no intent to terminate her.

This situation worked out well. The employee accepted the president's apology and returned to her job. The relationship between the president and HR executive actually improved. The incident renewed the president's trust in HR, recognizing that, even when things go wrong, HR has the best interests of the company in mind and will not blindside the president.

And because the HR department was willing to be accountable, the energy that might have gone into covering up the incident was instead channeled into ensuring that wrongful termination letters would not be sent out in the future.

The moral here, according to Giacolone, is that the HR executive balanced her advocacy for employees with her commitment to the business.

"She was willing to be accountable for the actions of her department without blaming anyone else," Giacolone says. "The HR executive understood that the best outcome required the president's involvement and it was much better that the president hear of the problem from her instead of someone else."

Apology Outcomes

Why is it so hard for HR professionals to be accountable for mistakes and faulty judgments? All professionals are reluctant to admit they are less than perfect. And everyone is apprehensive about the consequences of making mistakes. But there is evidence that HR professionals may be a little more averse to admitting mistakes than other professionals.

Two reasons may account for the relative difficulty of HR professionals to hold themselves accountable.

First, there is a certain defensiveness that still prevails among some HR departments. Many organizations have residues of the stereotype that HR managers are less professional than other managers.

"To the extent that HR internalizes that stereotype, it is not surprising that there might be temptation to cover up mistakes, lest they give credence to the stereotype," says Ethan Becker, president of Boston-based Speech Improvement Co., who frequent consults on communications issues with HR executives.

Lawrence Polsky, managing partner of People Energy, a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., agrees.

"At the end of the day, disclosing their own mistakes is tricky for all executives, but HR executives may have an especially hard time because of their training," he says. "As part of their professional duties, HR executives are put in the middle and frequently expected to withhold the facts and delay the disclosure of information."

In fact, HR managers have to train themselves to resist disclosing truthful information. Given that the culture of HR is sometimes antagonistic to transparency; it may be difficult for HR managers to satisfy the organization's needs for transparency when it's about the limitations of HR itself that transparency is called for.

Acts of Omission

HR managers can also err by failing to do the right thing. Lauren Bloom, a lawyer practicing in the Washington area, and the author of The Art of Apology, recalls a recent incident in which a company president wanted to classify his overworked secretary as exempt - when, by the company's own definitions, she wasn't.

Nevertheless, the president ordered the HR manager to arrange the reclassification. The president said he would be responsible for the action, and the HR manager capitulated. The situation went on for a number of years. Then, as these things do, the situation unraveled. The secretary, fed up with the endless, uncompensated overwork, resigned and demanded all the back wages - at time-and-a-half - that she has accumulated over the years. She claimed tens of thousands of dollars for unpaid overtime.

In the investigation, the HR manager accepted full responsibility for her failure. She pointedly did not excuse her judgment on the rationalization that she was just following orders. She apologized for not standing up, for failing to document her professional judgment and for allowing herself to be pressured.

Because the HR manager accepted full responsibility, she kept her job.

Evidence shows that executives who apologize just have better outcomes. Everyone in HR knows that that the cover-up is always worse than the underlying offense; yet when HR executives make a mistake, many are tempted to see how the situation plays out, see who else can be blamed or attempt to minimize their responsibility. Such instincts are normal, but they must be resisted. Instead, HR leaders must instill a culture of strict accountability, starting with themselves.

[About the Author: John Kador is a frequent contributor to Human Resource Executive. He is the author of Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust (Berrett-Koehler, 2009).]

Doing More With Less - Really!

Doing More With Less - Really!

by Bob Mosher

Ours is not an industry of parts and inventory. Trimming the bottom line is never an issue of simply reducing head count or closing classrooms. It also impacts the level of service we can provide.

I was recently speaking with a CLO friend of mine who said he was being asked to cut his budget by more than 50 percent while maintaining the same level of service. It doesn't seem possible that we could remove many of the standard learning services we've offered for years and still be able to provide a quality product.

But many learning professionals are being presented with similar challenges and are either coming up with creative new solutions or revisiting old models and trying to look at them in a new way. In fact, some may even save money while providing a whole new - potentially better - level of service. Let's examine a few of these ideas.

The uptake in online synchronous instruction is staggering of late. I don't think I have been to a conference, spoken to a fellow learning director or read a related article recently without some mention of moving brick-and-mortar classrooms online. After all, online virtual classroom instruction can do more than simply cut down on travel expenses. It can also increase learning in ways that the classroom may never have seen before.

The most powerful advantage here seems to be time. When designed correctly, online instruction builds independent and applied learning back into the "classroom" model in ways the standup classroom couldn't. In fact, many of the learning executives I've talked to who are using these new approaches say that, when done well, the actual online synchronous portion is no longer the most important or highest-impact part of the experience. It's there to stabilize and guide, but the real learning and return on the investment are realized when the learners take time between sessions to participate in group work or individual assignments in the context of their day-to-day jobs. This moves learning to a whole new level and maximizes an already cost-effective model.

Two natural offshoots of the virtual classroom are the use of social networking and performance support. The virtual classroom is at its best when learners are asked to take their learning beyond a one- to three-hour online session. Learners should be given the time to collaborate with their peers, share what they've learned and document best practices. These online communities, or communities of practice (CoP), are often very vibrant and sustainable because they were born out of a specific outcome and are bringing together learners of a like mind and experience.

However, CoPs can't be forced. The ones that have been formed for the sake of simply gathering tend to die on the vine. Conversely, those started in the classroom or online, since they have been driven out of common experiences and business outcomes, often grow into very powerful knowledge-sharing tools that far outlive and go beyond the original experience.

Performance support is the tie that binds. It's a cost-effective approach that allows learning departments to shorten class time while extending reach and effectiveness. Learners are taught to self-support, discover new findings and extend the classroom into their workplace in an applied way often not seen through traditional instruction. When blended appropriately, I have seen performance support reduce class time by up to 75 percent. For example, I once worked with an organization that took a traditional 20-hour class and reduced it to a five-hour session, much of which could be done synchronously online when enhanced by a performance support strategy on the back end.

Smaller budgets and greater demands on learning departments will clearly affect the services we are allowed to offer. But in many cases, we can still offer a robust - and potentially more effective - product if we share best practices and take a new and creative look at existing methodologies.

[About the Author: Bob Mosher is global chief learning and strategy evangelist for LearningGuide Solutions and has been an influential leader in the IT training space for more than 15 years.]

The Five Rs of Effective Apology

The Five Rs of Effective Apology

by John Kador

Effective apologies are as unique as the offenses that inspire them, but they all have, in varying degrees, five dimensions. You will easily remember them if you think of the five Rs of effective apology: Recognition, Responsibility, Remorse, Restitution and Repetition.

Recognition

Acknowledging the offense - establishes that an offense requiring apology has been committed. To the offender this step may seem as obvious as the offense itself, and therefore it may be tempting to just get through the apology or "get on with it." But more often than not, skipping the recognition step results in a statement that just compounds the offense because it leaves the victim uncertain whether the apologizer understands why the victim is so upset.

Responsibility

The key to effective apology is taking responsibility for your role in the consequences of your behavior.

What distinguishes effective from half-hearted apologies is the integrity that offenders demonstrate when they look deep into their hearts and reckon uncompromisingly with what they find there. In fearlessly pushing away all excuses, the apologizer retains undiluted responsibility.

Underlying it all is the intention that the offender values the relationship and desires to rebuild it on terms agreeable to the victim.

Remorse

Signals the offender's contrition. Remorse is the feeling that we get when we realize that something we did hurt someone, that it was wrong and that we wish we could undo what we did.

Because there is no way to know whether someone else is experiencing remorse, we rely on a variety of verbal and nonverbal cues. By far, the most important verbal cue, without which a statement falls short of being an actual apology, is the phrase, "I'm sorry" or "I apologize." Using the words, "I'm sorry" or "I apologize," is pretty much nonnegotiable. It is, in fact, the entire reason for the apology and without such an expression you may as well not bother with the apology at all.

Restitution

Is the practical attempt to restore the relationship to what it was before you broke it.

Effective apology is more than just words. You can't talk your way out of a situation you acted your way into. For serious breaches, the offender must demonstrate a concrete expression of contrition. In other words, it must have some element of action.

Without restitution, it becomes more difficult for offended parties to accept an apology, however well crafted.

Repetition

Is a promise to the victim that the offender will not repeat the offense. A particularly effective phrase is a variant of, "I promise it will never happen again." It is often effective to end the apology with such a commitment; communication theory suggests that people remember best what they hear last.

[About the Author: John Kador is a frequent contributor to Human Resource Executive. He is the author of Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust (Berrett-Koehler, 2009).]

Four Practices for Great Performance

Four Practices for Great Performance

by Lauren Keller Johnson

Expecting the best from employees doesn't always deliver results. Instead, managers must involve workers in setting goals that are achievable, measurable, and tap into motivation.

It all sounds so sensible: Expect the best from your employees, and they'll give you their best—a phenomenon that J. Sterling Livingston, founder of the Sterling Institute, discussed in his seminal 1969 Harvard Business Review article "Pygmalion in Management." On the other hand, expect little from employees, and they'll give you meager performance in return—what INSEAD professors Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux have named the set-up-to-fail syndrome.

But the interplay between managerial expectations and employee performance is more complex than these commonsense maxims suggest. To be sure, expectations exert a powerful impact on an individual's performance. Yet managers who believe that they've done their job merely by defining and declaring high expectations—without involving employees in the process—will likely get the same poor results that bosses with low expectations receive.

"The idea that setting high expectations gets you more out of employees makes sense at 35,000 feet," says Janelle Barlow, president of the Las Vegas-based consulting firm TMI US. "But you have to execute this principle on the ground." Experts and executives agree that successful fulfillment of individuals' performance expectations hinges on managers' ability to apply four practices:

1. Involve employees
Too many managers leave out a crucial first step while setting expectations: finding out if their direct reports agree with and buy into the proposed expectations, says Linda Finkle, a consultant with the Potomac, Maryland-based Incedo Group. Just because a manager wants a certain level of performance doesn't mean an employee can provide it. Managers need to find out what employees think of the proposed expectations, she says. People are more committed to objectives that they've helped to define. They also feel more confident that they can reach the agreed-upon goals. The result? Better performance.

Bob Senatore, executive vice president of the Woodbury, New York-based staffing firm Comforce, invites employee participation in setting expectations by saying, "This is what I think we can achieve together. What do you think?" He and his reporting managers negotiate defined expectations, as do these managers and their reports. Then each manager-employee pair sets benchmarks for measuring progress, particularly when the employee is new in the role. Each pair also adapts expectations when changes in the business environment demand.

In Comforce's approach, employees find "the agreed-upon goals more meaningful, and people know more immediately when they're not meeting expectations," Senatore says. Still, he adds, "each employee may successfully fulfill his or her expectations, but the company may still miss the mark in terms of overall goals, such as desired revenue. To ensure the company's success, we sometimes need to push for adjustments to employees' expected performance."

Ed Gubman, founding partner of Northfield, Illinois-based Strategic Talent Solutions, urges managers to "think group, but see individuals. Big goals inspire people at the collective level, but you then need to work with each person based on their roles, strengths, and passions. You can't—and shouldn't—expect the same performance from everyone. Some people can and will work sixty or seventy hours a week; others can't or won't but can still contribute valuable results. You need to put people in situations where they can be successful."

2. Focus on achievability
No matter how actively employees participate in the expectation-definition process, they won't rise to the occasion unless they understand in concrete terms what's expected of them. Senatore says that Comforce managers express agreed-upon expectations with as much specificity as possible, including a target time frame for fulfilling each objective. They may frame expectations as, "We will sign a contract with this large account to provide them with five full-time and ten part-time technical staff members through the first quarter of next year" or, "We will make 200 phone calls and 100 on-site visits to potential new clients over the next six months."

Other executives believe that too much detail can set the stage for a limited response and maintain that clarity is still possible with less specificity. For instance, Ray Bedingfield, president of the Monument, Colorado-based executive search firm Woodmoor Group, tells recruiters who join his staff: "We expect you to be able to make six figures this year." He then leaves it up to them to decide what level of six figures to strive for.

Still, clarity of expectations isn't enough. Employees must see defined objectives as realistic and achievable. As Cary L. Cooper, professor of organizational psychology and health at England's Lancaster University Management School, says, "Expectations and performance are linked in a bell-shaped curve: High expectations can lead to improvement—until the expectations become unrealistically high. That causes overload, stress, and diminished performance. Yet many senior managers intuitively feel that they should constantly push their subordinates, setting ever-higher objectives and performance targets."

"Goals should be difficult," says James Smither, who teaches human resources at La Salle University in Philadelphia, "but not so difficult that employees will see them as impossible and hence reject them." Employees must believe they can achieve their goals if they try—a personal attribute that Smither calls self-efficacy. When self-efficacy is high, he says, people set more challenging goals. They also persevere when they encounter setbacks, and they respond to negative feedback with more effort rather than with defensiveness. Smither says managers can boost employee self-efficacy by:

• Breaking up a large task and giving employees one piece of the task at a time, encouraging "small wins."
• Setting up work so that employees accomplish successively more complex and challenging tasks.
• Drawing employees' attention to colleagues who have surmounted similar challenges.
• Having an employee watch another skilled person model a desired behavior, whether it's performing a quantifiable task or exercising a harder-to-define interpersonal skill, such as conflict resolution.
• Expressing confidence in employees rather than focusing on criticism—or assuming that a person already feels confident about meeting defined expectations.

3. Build measures that help meet goals
With the right expectations in place, managers should focus next on the measures that will help people to meet them, including feedback, training, and encouragement.

Sean McLaughlin, director of brand management at Philadelphia-based Aramark Harrison Lodging, had this point in mind when he launched a new feedback program throughout the company in 2003. McLaughlin set up a system of e-mailed surveys to gather steady, specific feedback on service quality and other criteria from hotel guests and meeting planners, the firm's two main customer groups. The surveys, he says, provide "an enormous amount of actionable feedback that we can present to employees." If Aramark receives a response in which a guest or meeting planner has rated any performance criterion with a "1" or "2" (the lowest values on the five-point scale), the system sends an instant alert to the manager responsible for the property in question. That manager must then communicate the situation to employees and devise a plan to address it. McLaughlin says this approach "enables us to send two crucial messages: that we need to address alienated customers immediately and that we want to raise expectations as well as set them."

Feedback and training exert even more of an impact when managers add encouragement to the mix. As business coach Juliet Funt points out, "There's a huge chasm between a manager who says, 'I want you to…' and one who says, 'I know you can….' Managers must constantly notice, affirm, and express thanks for high performance."

Nevertheless, "you need to adapt the form of praise you use," says consultant Ben Leichtling. "People want their praise in different forms—whether it's delivered orally in a public forum or personally in a handwritten letter or some other form. Through observation and trial and error, managers can find out which form each person prefers."

Likewise, people respond differently to criticism. "As employees work toward fulfilling expectations," Leichtling says, "keep letting them know that you expect the best they can give. If they have trouble fulfilling expectations, adjust your approach to each person depending on how they work best. Some people respond better to shock, disappointment, and criticism; others to help with building step-by-step successes."

Managers who have earned the highest respect and loyalty, Leichtling adds, sometimes need only give a disapproving look or a quiet "You can do better than that" to steer performance in a more successful direction.

4. Tap into employees' deepest motivations
This last element in both expectation setting and fulfillment is often the most challenging for managers: tapping into an employee's motivation. But it could be the most critical part of the equation.

"People are motivated to fulfill expectations based on their personal interests—not based on what others are telling them to do," says University of Houston business professor Curt Tueffert. "Managers must work with employees to discover what each person is most motivated by—whether it's competition, a chance to form close working relationships, or some other reward. When both participate in this process, each has a higher stake in the drive for top performance."

Judy Rogers, senior vice president of human resources at Houston's Central Bank, uses a motivation-assessment tool both for hiring and coaching, and for development. "The results of the assessment help managers work with employees to realize their career fulfillment and potential. For underperformers, the assessment results help identify ways to coach the person up to expectations."

Management consultant Robert Cannon examines motivation from a different angle: "Most managers view the world from a problem perspective and use negative language. But no one is uplifted by the statement 'We've got a problem.'" Cannon helps his clients to use the appreciative inquiry method to frame expectations in positive terms. "Through appreciative inquiry, managers and employees can define together what's going well and which assets they've got to draw from. They envision possible desired future realities, then develop and implement doable solutions for realizing those visions. Instead of telling people how to do something, managers use appreciative inquiry to explain why it's important to do it. Leave the 'how' up to employees, and you get more ownership of those expectations and more buy-in."

The Power of Posture

The Power of Posture

by Nick Morgan

How you stand can be as important as what you say. Here are the ten categories of behavior you should monitor to improve your "presence" and effectiveness.

The way you stand could change your life. Immediately. For businesspeople, stance is an important indicator of how deeply you are engaged with your job, how much you believe in the products you are selling, how confident you are that your company will survive.

And that's just for starters. Did you know that you are likely to make or break a sale by what you do in the first fifteen seconds after entering the customer's office—before you say anything? Or that you can increase your attractiveness to others—and your success in your career—by how you move your head? Or that the seat you take at a table will determine, in part, the direction a negotiation will take?

These insights and many more are at the heart of modern communications research, and Teach Yourself Body Language, by Gordon Wainright (McGraw-Hill, 2003), summarizes much of it in very practical terms that readers can put to work immediately to change their lives.

Take stance. Wainwright suggests an experiment in which you stand straight, tuck your tummy in, hold your head high, and smile at those you meet. Do this for a week, concentrating especially on those who normally don't seem to be very friendly in your workplace. Wainwright predicts, based on many such experiments, that you'll find people treat you differently immediately. You'll garner more respect, you'll be taken more seriously, and you'll find that even the grumpy ones warm up to you.

Your stance, broadly speaking, signals to the world how energetic, confident, and powerful you are. Slumped shoulders, a downcast gaze, a slow pace, and a sagging belly are taken by the world to mean that you lack confidence, that you don't have much energy, and that you are probably less important, successful, and powerful as a result. These impressions may be neither accurate nor fair, but they are the inevitable results of the fleeting impressions we tend to get of one another during the course of a busy day.

Those are just the fleeting impressions. Stance, and what used to be called your bearing, can play much more important roles when you're negotiating an important contract or trying to close a sale. We like to deal with winners, and we are more inclined to yield negotiating points to people who appear to be operating from a position of strength.

And what about those first fifteen seconds after entering a room? Wainwright reports research that measured the status of people who enter an office. Low-status people tend to linger at the door. Medium-status people go in halfway. And high-status people go in all the way to the desk and sit down next to the occupant.

To increase your attractiveness, Wainwright suggests ten categories of behavior to monitor and improve. Studies show that attractive people tend to be more successful, everything else being equal, so more than mere likability is at stake here. The ten categories are:

Eye contact: The more the better, up to visual intrusiveness.

Facial expression: Be lively, smile a lot, look interested.

Head movements: Nod to show interest, keep your chin up.

Gestures: Be expressive and open, without overdoing it.

Posture: Stand erect, lean forward to show interest, lean back to be informal.

Proximity and orientation: Get as close as you can to people without crowding.

Bodily contact: Touch as often as you can without causing offense.

Appearance and physique: Go for color in dress, fitness in physique.

Timing and synchronization: Speed up your activities to just before the point of inefficiency.

Nonverbal aspects of speech: Try to balance your need to talk with the need to listen.

If taking on all of these desiderata sounds like a tall order, take heart in the knowledge that doing even a few of them will begin to increase your attractiveness to others. You don't have to manage them all at once. In fact, you don't have to manage them at all, if you can find enthusiasm for your job, your colleagues, and your activities in general. If you are enthusiastic, you'll discover that you'll naturally increase your attractiveness by unconsciously doing many of the behaviors on the list.

Nick Morgan is the editor of Harvard Management Communication Letter.

Taking Feedback to Heart (and Action)

Taking Feedback to Heart (and Action)

by Jay M. Jackman and Myra H. Strober

Encouraging feedback is one thing—putting it to good use is quite another. Step number one is to free yourself from knee-jerk reaction to criticism.

Adapting to feedback—which inevitably asks people to change, sometimes significantly—is critical for managers who find themselves in jobs, companies, and industries undergoing frequent transitions. Of course, adaptation is easier said than done, for resistance to change is endemic in human beings. But while most people feel they can't control the negative emotions that are aroused by change, this is not the case. It is possible—and necessary—to think positively about change. Using the following adaptive techniques, you can alter how you respond to feedback and to the changes it demands.

Recognize your emotions and responses. Understanding that you are experiencing fear ("I'm afraid my boss will fire me") and that you are exhibiting a maladaptive response to that fear ("I'll just stay out of his way and keep my mouth shut") are the critical initial steps toward adaptive change. They require ruthless self-honesty and a little detective work, both of which will go a long way toward helping you undo years of disguising your feelings. It's important to understand, too, that a particular maladaptive behavior does not necessarily tell you what emotion underlies it: You may be procrastinating out of anger, frustration, sadness, or other feelings. But persevering in the detective work is important, for the payoff is high. Having named the emotion and response, you can then act—just as someone who fears flying chooses to board a plane anyway. With practice, it gradually becomes easier to respond differently, even though the fear, anger, or sadness may remain.

Maria, a mid-level manager with whom we worked, is a good example of someone who learned to name her emotions and act despite them. Maria was several months overdue on performance reviews for the three people who reported to her. When we suggested that she was procrastinating, we asked her how she felt when she thought about doing the reviews. After some reflection, she said she was extremely resentful that her boss had not yet completed her own performance evaluation; she recognized that her procrastination was an expression of her anger toward him. We helped her realize that she could act despite her anger. Accordingly, Maria completed the performance evaluations for her subordinates and, in so doing, felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Once she had completed the reviews, she noticed that her relationships with her three subordinates quickly improved, and her boss responded by finishing Maria's performance review.

We should note that Maria's procrastination was not an entrenched habit, so it was relatively easy to fix. Employees who start procrastinating in response to negative emotions early in their work lives won't change that habit quickly, but they can eventually.

Get support. Identifying your emotions is sometimes difficult, and feedback that requires change can leave you feeling inhibited and ashamed. For these reasons, it's critical to ask for help from trusted friends who will listen, encourage, and offer suggestions. Asking for support is often hard, because most corporate cultures expect managers to be self-reliant. Nevertheless, it's nearly impossible to make significant change without such encouragement. Support can come in many forms, but it should begin with at least two people—including, say, a spouse, a minister or spiritual counselor, a former mentor, an old high school classmate—with whom you feel emotionally safe. Ideally, one of these people should have some business experience. It may also help to enlist the assistance of an outside consultant or executive coach.

Reframe the feedback. Another adaptive technique, reframing, allows you to reconstruct the feedback process to your advantage. Specifically, this involves putting the prospect of asking for or reacting to feedback in a positive light so that negative emotions and responses lose their grip.

Take the example of Gary, a junior sales manager for a large manufacturing company. Gary's boss told him that he wasn't sociable enough with customers and prospects. The criticism stung, and Gary could have responded with denial or brooding. Indeed, his first response was to interpret the feedback as shallow. Eventually, though, Gary was able to reframe what he'd heard, first by grudgingly acknowledging it. ("He's right, I'm not very sociable. I tested as an introvert on the Myers-Briggs, and I've always been uncomfortable with small talk"). Then Gary reframed the feedback. Instead of seeing it as painful, he recognized that he could use it to help his career. Avoiding possible maladaptive responses, he was able to ask himself several important questions: "How critical is sociability to my position? How much do I want to keep this job? How much am I willing to change to become more sociable?" In responding, Gary realized two things: that sociability was indeed critical to success in sales and that he wasn't willing to learn to be more sociable. He requested a transfer and moved to a new position where he became much more successful.

Break up the task. Yet another adaptive technique is to divide up the large task of dealing with feedback into manageable, measurable chunks, and set realistic time frames for each one. Although more than two areas of behavior may need to be modified, it's our experience that most people can't change more than one or two at a time. Taking small steps and meeting discrete goals reduces your chances of being overwhelmed and makes change much more likely.

Jane, for example, received feedback indicating that the quality of her work was excellent but that her public presentations were boring. A quiet and reserved person, Jane could have felt overwhelmed by what she perceived as the subtext of this criticism: that she was a lousy public speaker and that she'd better transform herself from a wallflower into a writer and actress. Instead, she adapted by breaking down the challenge of "interesting presentations" into its constituent parts (solid and well constructed content; a commanding delivery; an understanding of the audience; and so on). Then she undertook to teach herself to present more effectively by observing several effective speakers and taking an introductory course in public speaking.

It was important for Jane to start with the easiest task—in this case, observing good speakers. She noted their gestures, the organization of their speeches, their intonation, timing, use of humor, and so forth. Once she felt she understood what good speaking entailed, she was ready to take the introductory speaking course. These endeavors allowed her to improve her presentations. Though she didn't transform herself into a mesmerizing orator, she did learn to command the attention and respect of an audience.

Use incentives. Pat yourself on the back as you make adaptive changes. That may seem like unusual advice, given that feedback situations can rouse us to self-punishment and few of us are in the habit of congratulating ourselves. Nevertheless, nowhere is it written that the feedback process must be a wholly negative experience. Just as a salary raise or a bonus provides incentive to improve performance, rewarding yourself whenever you take an important step in the process will help you to persevere in your efforts. The incentive should be commensurate with the achievement. For example, an appropriate reward for completing a self-assessment might be an uninterrupted afternoon watching ESPN or, for a meeting with the boss, a fine dinner out.

Jay M. Jackman is a psychiatrist and human resources consultant in Stanford, California.

Myra H. Strober is a labor economist and professor at Stanford University's School of Education.

Creating a Positive Professional Image

Creating a Positive Professional Image

by Mallory Stark

In today's diverse workplace, your actions and motives are constantly under scrutiny. Time to manage your own professional image before others do it for you. An interview with professor Laura Morgan Roberts.

As HBS professor Laura Morgan Roberts sees it, if you aren't managing your own professional image, others are.

"People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated throughout your workplace," she says. "It is only wise to add your voice in framing others' theories about who you are and what you can accomplish."

There are plenty of books telling you how to "dress for success" and control your body language. But keeping on top of your personal traits is only part of the story of managing your professional image, says Roberts. You also belong to a social identity group—African American male, working mother—that brings its own stereotyping from the people you work with, especially in today's diverse workplaces. You can put on a suit and cut your hair to improve your appearance, but how do you manage something like skin color?

She discusses her research in this interview.

Mallory Stark: What is a professional image?

Laura Morgan Roberts: Your professional image is the set of qualities and characteristics that represent perceptions of your competence and character as judged by your key constituents (i.e., clients, superiors, subordinates, colleagues).

Q: What is the difference between "desired professional image" and "perceived professional image?"

A: It is important to distinguish between the image you want others to have of you and the image that you think people currently have of you.

Most people want to be described as technically competent, socially skilled, of strong character and integrity, and committed to your work, your team, and your company. Research shows that the most favorably regarded traits are trustworthiness, caring, humility, and capability.

Ask yourself the question: What do I want my key constituents to say about me when I'm not in the room? This description is your desired professional image. Likewise, you might ask yourself the question: What am I concerned that my key constituents might say about me when I'm not in the room? The answer to this question represents your undesired professional image.

You can never know exactly what all of your key constituents think about you, or how they would describe you when you aren't in the room. You can, however, draw inferences about your current professional image based on your interactions with key constituents. People often give you direct feedback about your persona that tells you what they think about your level of competence, character, and commitment. Other times, you may receive indirect signals about your image, through job assignments or referrals and recommendations. Taken together, these direct and indirect signals shape your perceived professional image, your best guess of how you think your key constituents perceive you.

Q: How do stereotypes affect perceived professional image?

A: In the increasingly diverse, twenty-first century workplace, people face a number of complex challenges to creating a positive professional image. They often experience a significant incongruence between their desired professional image and their perceived professional image. In short, they are not perceived in the manner they desire; instead, their undesired professional image may be more closely aligned with how their key constituents actually perceive them.

What lies at the source of this incongruence? Three types of identity threats—predicaments, devaluation, and illegitimacy—compromise key constituents' perceptions of technical competence, social competence, character, and commitment. All professionals will experience a "predicament" or event that reflects poorly on their competence, character, or commitment at some point in time, due to mistakes they have made in the past that have become public knowledge, or competency gaps ( e.g., shortcomings or limitations in skill set or style).

Members of negatively stereotyped identity groups may experience an additional form of identity threat known as "devaluation." Identity devaluation occurs when negative attributions about your social identity group(s) undermine key constituents' perceptions of your competence, character, or commitment. For example, African American men are stereotyped as being less intelligent and more likely to engage in criminal behavior than Caucasian men. Asian Americans are stereotyped as technically competent, but lacking in the social skills required to lead effectively. Working mothers are stereotyped as being less committed to their profession and less loyal to their employing organizations. All of these stereotypes pose obstacles for creating a positive professional image.

Even positive stereotypes can pose a challenge for creating a positive professional image if someone is perceived as being unable to live up to favorable expectations of their social identity group(s). For example, clients may question the qualifications of a freshly minted MBA who is representing a prominent strategic consulting firm. Similarly, female medical students and residents are often mistaken for nurses or orderlies and challenged by patients who do not believe they are legitimate physicians.

Q: What is impression management and what are its potential benefits?

A: Despite the added complexity of managing stereotypes while also demonstrating competence, character, and commitment, there is promising news for creating your professional image! Impression management strategies enable you to explain predicaments, counter devaluation, and demonstrate legitimacy. People manage impressions through their non-verbal behavior (appearance, demeanor), verbal cues (vocal pitch, tone, and rate of speech, grammar and diction, disclosures), and demonstrative acts (citizenship, job performance).

My research suggests that, in addition to using these traditional impression management strategies, people also use social identity-based impression management (SIM) to create a positive professional image. SIM refers to the process of strategically presenting yourself in a manner that communicates the meaning and significance you associate with your social identities. There are two overarching SIM strategies: positive distinctiveness and social recategorization.

Positive distinctiveness means using verbal and non-verbal cues to claim aspects of your identity that are personally and/or socially valued, in an attempt to create a new, more positive meaning for that identity. Positive distinctiveness usually involves attempts to educate others about the positive qualities of your identity group, advocate on behalf of members of your identity group, and incorporate your background and identity-related experiences into your workplace interactions and innovation.

Social recategorization means using verbal and non-verbal cues to suppress other aspects of your identity that are personally and/or socially devalued, in an attempt to distance yourself from negative stereotypes associated with that group. Social recategorization involves minimization and avoidance strategies, such as physically and mentally conforming to the dominant workplace culture while being careful not to draw attention to identity group differences and one's unique cultural background.

Rather than adopting one strategy wholesale, most people use a variety of strategies for managing impressions of their social identities. In some situations, they choose to draw attention to a social identity, if they think it will benefit them personally or professionally. Even members of devalued social identity groups, such as African American professionals, will draw attention to their race if it creates mutual understanding with colleagues, generates high-quality connections with clients, or enhances their experience of authenticity and fulfillment in their work. In other situations, these same individuals may choose to minimize their race in order to draw attention to an alternate identity, such as gender, profession, or religion, if they feel their race inhibits their ability to connect with colleagues or clients.

Successful impression management can generate a number of important personal and organizational benefits, including career advancement, client satisfaction, better work relationships (trust, intimacy, avoiding offense), group cohesiveness, a more pleasant organizational climate, and a more fulfilling work experience. However, when unsuccessfully employed, impression management attempts can lead to feelings of deception, delusion, preoccupation, distraction, futility, and manipulation.

Q: How do authenticity and credibility influence the positive outcomes of impression management attempts?

A: In order to create a positive professional image, impression management must effectively accomplish two tasks: build credibility and maintain authenticity. When you present yourself in a manner that is both true to self and valued and believed by others, impression management can yield a host of favorable outcomes for you, your team, and your organization. On the other hand, when you present yourself in an inauthentic and non-credible manner, you are likely to undermine your health, relationships, and performance.

Most often, people attempt to build credibility and maintain authenticity simultaneously, but they must negotiate the tension that can arise between the two. Your "true self," or authentic self-portrayal, will not always be consistent with your key constituents' expectations for professional competence and character. Building credibility can involve being who others want you to be, gaining social approval and professional benefits, and leveraging your strengths. If you suppress or contradict your personal values or identity characteristics for the sake of meeting societal expectations for professionalism, you might receive certain professional benefits, but you might compromise other psychological, relational, and organizational outcomes.

Q: What are the steps individuals should take to manage their professional image?

A: First, you must realize that if you aren't managing your own professional image, someone else is. People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated throughout your workplace. It is only wise to add your voice in framing others' theories about who you are and what you can accomplish.

Be the author of your own identity. Take a strategic, proactive approach to managing your image:

• Identify your ideal state.
  • What are the core competencies and character traits you want people to associate with you?
  • Which of your social identities do you want to emphasize and incorporate into your workplace interactions, and which would you rather minimize?
• Assess your current image, culture, and audience.
  • What are the expectations for professionalism?
  • How do others currently perceive you?
• Conduct a cost-benefit analysis for image change.
  • Do you care about others' perceptions of you?
  • Are you capable of changing your image?
  • Are the benefits worth the costs? (Cognitive, psychological, emotional, physical effort)
• Use strategic self-presentation to manage impressions and change your image.
  • Employ appropriate traditional and social identity-based impression management strategies.
  • Pay attention to the balancing act—build credibility while maintaining authenticity.
• Manage the effort you invest in the process.
  • Monitoring others' perceptions of you
  • Monitoring your own behavior
  • Strategic self-disclosure
  • Preoccupation with proving worth and legitimacy

Unwanted Attention

Unwanted attention

WINNING WAYS by DATIN T.D. AMPIKAIPAKAN

SEXUAL harassment is a topic that stirs up emotions in the corporate world due to its infinite variations and varying degrees of seriousness, thereby making it a subject that is difficult to discuss.

Organisations should take great pains to define it. The open-ended nature of the law demands that we understand what real sexual harassment is before we cry wolf. There are some guidelines and these are a start:


a.. Unwanted remarks about your sexuality or gender.

a.. Offensive behaviour which is intentional and/or repeated.

a.. Behaviour that is unwanted and not reciprocated.

a.. It interferes with your work or the office environment becomes uncomfortable.
To give you an example of what this means, let me relate an incident that happened to an employee recently.

At a corporate annual dinner, one of the bosses decided to engage in a little flirtation with a junior employee which eventually led to serious sexual assault.

This was clearly a case where power and position allowed a man to take unfair advantage of an unsuspecting junior executive. The victim reported the incident.

The corporate network is often unsure of what action to take with regard to sexual misconduct, and junior executives with no social, economic or political clout often slink away in shame while the culprit gets away.

It is appalling that in this day and age, cases of sexual harassment are still not taken seriously.

From a woman's point of view, sexual harassment can be cruel, disgusting and very frightening, often leaving her traumatised.

No woman should be put in a position where she is forced to enter into a relationship just because she needs to protect her livelihood.

A woman should not be offended when her male colleague is easy-going and misinterprets his wicked sense of humour as sexual harassment.

Avoid jokes about sexual harassment.

People have been falsely accused of sexual harassment because of such jokes.

What then can you do to stop sexual harassment?


a.. If you are a victim of real harassment, take action. Do not accept it. Do not be frightened or intimidated because you need the job. You have rights. Look around and see the kind of people who get harassed. Confident people never get bullied or harassed.

a.. If you see someone in the office who is being harassed, take action. Be indignant. If women do not help each other, who will help them? Accompany the victim to report the harassment.

a.. If the boss is harassing the employees, get out of that office. You can always find another job.

a.. If you think you can handle someone who is harassing you, then you could try attacking his ego. Smile and tell the person that his attempts are comical and that you are not interested.

a.. If the person continues, then give him fair warning. Give the person a second chance but if the harassment continues say: "Look, I have already told you how I feel. You chose to ignore it. This is my last warning and if you try this once more, I am going to report it to HR."
Take action if your warnings are ignored. Go appeal to the good sense of the most senior person in management and do it quickly.

If you are a victim of sexual harassment, there is a professional way of handling it. Consider the following:


a.. Control your emotions. You can never make a strong case when your are emotional or hysterical. If you work for a large company, then look up the employee manuals. They must have guidelines on how they deal with this behaviour.

a.. Make a detailed list of the things that happened. Include the time, place and type of action made by the perpetrator. Be clear and precise, and say what you did during the harassment.

a.. If you work for a large organisation and the person harassing you is the boss, it will take great courage for you to go to the Board of Directors. If you think you can handle it, do so. If you work for a small company, just resign and go.
Sexual harassment is not confined to women only. In recent years more and more men have experienced sexual harassment from their female bosses.

Similar action need to be taken but it should be done with due consideration so that your chances of getting another job is not jeopardised.

There was a case of a man who resigned after suffering three weeks of harassment by a woman boss. Wanting to be careful about what he wrote in his letter of resignation, he did not directly accuse his boss but just added one sentence in his letter to the HR manager.

He wrote: "Like my four male predecessors during the past two years, I am resigning to seek a position with better prospect for advancement in the management of an organisation."

Without making a direct accusation, he implied what the real trouble was.

The HR manager was very perceptive and looked into the previous files of the men who walked away. He took the matter up with the senior management and the woman boss was gone in no time.

That's professionalism laced with responsibility and accountability, with regard to protecting the company's employees.

Using KPIs to Keep Performance Improving

Using KPIs to Keep Performance Improving
By Mike Toten

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used by organisations both to measure individual employee performance and to measure overall organisation performance.

This article covers their use for individual employees.

The Importance of Being SMART
The acronym of SMART frequently appears when commentators discuss KPIs. It means that KPIs need to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Agreed to
• Realistic
• Timely

More recently, there has been a trend to turn SMART into SMARTA, by adding the requirement that KPIs be 'Aligned'.

This is an important addition, particularly where KPIs are also used as an organisation-wide measure. Each component of SMARTA is explained in greater detail below.

Specific
KPIs need to be specific to the individual job and if possible expressed as statements of actual on-the-job behaviours.

You need to go beyond terms such as 'work quality', 'job knowledge', 'standard of customer service', 'accuracy' and so on, which are too vague to be of much use.

Other 'specifics' an indicator needs to achieve include:

• explaining clearly to the employee what he/she has to do in terms of performance to be 'successful';
• having an impact on successful job performance, that is distinguishing between effective performance and ineffective performance; and
• focusing on the behaviour itself, rather than personality attributes such as 'attitude to customers'.

Measurable
KPIs must be quantifiable to a large extent, that is based on behaviour that can be observed and documented, and which is job-related. They should also provide employees with ongoing feedback on their standard of performance.

Some degree of compromise may be necessary, however, to ensure you 'cover the field' regarding job performance.

Some aspects of performance are easy to measure, such as financial and work quantity measures, and it may be tempting to prepare a list of KPIs that focuses mainly on these aspects.

If the more subjective but still important aspects are overlooked, such as people management skills or customer service levels, employees will be unlikely to pay as much attention to them.

Agreed to
Always remember that performance management needs to be an open, two-way communication process. KPIs that are imposed on employees without genuine prior consultation are risking failure, the best you can usually hope for is some level of 'compliance'.

If you can't involve employees directly in developing the KPIs, at least try to obtain their agreement before imposing them.

It is essential that employees clearly understand the KPIs, and that they have the same meaning to both parties. Also, consultation is more likely to result in standards that are relevant and valid.

Realistic
Several points are relevant here:

• The employee must have a significant degree of control over achievement of the KPI.This is not the case when there are issues such as insufficient resources to do the job, 'lemon' products, bad organisation reputation, IT problems, etc. Make at least some allowance for such problems where they occur.
• The KPI must be realistically achievable. If it is set too high for the prevailing circumstances (such as an ambitious sales or production target or deadline), not only will it be irrelevant but if action is taken against the employee for failure to achieve it, legal issues may arise, such as an unfair dismissal claim.
• Also make allowance for the realities of the work environment. Most jobs are clogged, to varying extents, by routine administrative tasks that take time. Nor is every aspect of most jobs predictable or assessable. The prevailing circumstances described above also have an impact.
• KPIs should emphasise the nature of the job as well. If the outcome of the job is its most important aspect, emphasise actual results. If the process is most important, focus on actual behaviour and performance methods. If what the employee 'is' on the job matters most, focus on personal aspects, such as management style, interpersonal skills, 'team player' attributes, risk-taking, etc.

Timely
KPIs should have an appropriate time frame.

It should be possible to collect the relevant information either 'as it happens' or within a short time afterwards, otherwise it will lose its relevance. This is also another argument in favour of keeping the process simple.

Aligned
Individual KPIs need to be directly linked to organisation goals and objectives, or overall organisation KPIs where they are used.

They need to reflect organisation culture and values, by indicating the types of behaviour and performance the organisation will recognise as 'successful' and reward employees for.

As outputs of the performance management system, KPIs also need to be in alignment with other HR-related functions, including training and development, recruitment and selection, rewards and recognition, and career planning.

Scope of KPIs
Even with the SMARTA parameters described above, the scope of potential KPIs is very wide. The following list is by no means exhaustive, but provides an indication of the range of issues that can be adapted to KPIs:

Work quantity, productivity, work quality, time (eg deadlines, response, delivery, turnaround), revenue, return on investment, consistency/reliability, safety, environmental impact, use of resources, cost-effectiveness, management style, turnover/retention, promotion of diversity, workplace relations, training and development, communication.

Training required
Training of participants – both those who appraise and those who are to be appraised – has been shown to be influential to the success of performance management activities.

The training process should cover the steps involved in researching, identifying, developing and communicating KPIs, using the SMARTA principles.

There is a range of commercial providers, products, seminars/workshops, etc available for those who require assistance.

Managerial Leadership at Twelve O'clock

Managerial Leadership at Twelve O'clock
By Charles Kerns

Managerial leadership - everyone knows an organization needs it to thrive and grow. But what does managerial leadership mean for you and your organization? The Linkage Research Model (LRM) is one way to think about this. LRM encourages managers to focus on those managerial leadership practices that drive employee results, which in turn influence customer results, which are what actually produce business results.

This model can be depicted as a clock. At the twelve o'clock position is a set of Managerial Leadership Practices. At three, six, and nine, respectively, are employee, customer, and business results.

The Linkage Research Model and Managerial Leadership
This article suggests one way for managers to explore and identify those managerial leadership practices that should be in their twelve o'clock box in the LRM model. In so doing, this approach encourages them to survey current popular management writings in order to stay up to date with current management practices.

More on the Linkage Research Model (LRM)
The primary purpose of linkage research is to identify elements operating in the work environment, especially managerial leadership practices, which influence employee actions as well as customer relationships. To do this, LRM correlates managerial leadership practices with employee and customer survey data and with other important organizational metrics. The stronger the link between particular managerial leadership practices and employee survey results, customer survey results, and other measures of organizational effectiveness, the more important these specific leadership practices are considered to be in influencing overall organizational success. As more research is conducted using this model, practitioners will learn more about how the various relationships examined in the framework interact across different cultural, industry and organizational settings.

While the LRM model does not address all the factors that may impact organizational performance, numerous foundational studies exist that lend support to the linkage methodology. One landmark study, done at Sears in the mid-1990s, demonstrated how the various components in the model can be quantitatively analyzed and used to manage business operations. Management focused on 12 skills, grouped into three categories: passion for customers, people add value, and performance leadership. Following implementation of these practices, they found that a five-unit increase in employee attitude was correlated with a 1.3 unit increase in customer satisfaction (both measured by surveys) and a 0.5% increase in revenue growth. These results were statistically significant.

Jack Wiley is internationally recognized for his work in linking employee survey results to measures of customer satisfaction and business performance. From his experience and applications of LRM across a variety of organizational settings, including retail branch banking, he concludes that:

1. Employee and customer satisfaction are clearly linked.
2. Managerial leadership value systems and practices are critical ingredients in this linkage between employee and customer satisfaction.
3. Employee retention and customer satisfaction are positively correlated.
4. Over the long haul, quality and customer satisfaction are positively linked to customer retention, market share, and profitability.
5. Short-term practices intended to maximize sales and profits may adversely affect employee and customer satisfaction.
6. Commitment to managerial leadership practices that support quality, as well as employee and customer satisfaction, is a longer-term business strategy, not a quick fix.
7. Managerial leadership practices within the LRM framework become self-reinforcing.

Given the growing track record of research on the LRM, I would strongly encourage any managerial leader to discern which managerial leadership practices actually drive employee, customer and business results for his or her group or organization. What follows is an approach to help you do just that!

Selecting Key Managerial Leadership Effectiveness Practices
Focusing on key managerial leadership practices that ultimately drive organizational results is a challenge. This challenge includes identifying the universe from which to choose, establishing a set of criteria by which to critically analyze each potential practice, and deciding upon the final practices to be included in your 12 o'clock box. To assist in meeting this challenge, I offer practitioners the following four-step approach to selecting managerial leadership practices that will be effective in their organizations.

Step 1: Survey Practices: First, identify the universe of managerial leadership practices. One way is to regularly review business periodicals that are written for practitioners, as well as websites that provide business tools and information or that aggregate business literature. Book review sections of papers, journals and websites can also be useful. However, if your time does not permit this amount of research, I recommend that you read The Manager's Bookshelf: A Mosaic of Contemporary Views by Pierce and Newstrom, now in its sixth edition. The current volume concisely reviews 45 best-selling business books and offers summaries of a multitude of managerial leadership practices. This source provides a convenient and relatively painless way to pore through volumes of practices to glean what is useful to your circumstance.

Step 2: Identifying Relevant Practices: Then from the numerous practices you have identified, narrow the list to include only those that would be relevant to and potentially useful in your leadership role. This is essentially an informal brainstorming session.

Step 3: Establishing Selection Criteria: Now that your list is more refined, select those that would be most effective for you by formulating a list of a few meaningful criteria to use to narrow your field of finalists. Some potential criteria are presented as questions to ponder: Is the practice valid on its face? - Does it generally seem to make sense? Is the practice practical and does it have application in the real world? - Can this practice be made to work in my organization given my current situation? Is the author espousing the practice credible? - Does the author's training, experience and/or other credentials support and give credibility to what he or she is espousing?

Step 4: Using the Criteria to Select Your Final Practices: Next, look at each of the managerial leadership practices you brainstormed in Step 2 in light of each of your criteria. Typically, anywhere from five to twenty managerial leadership practices will make the cut. You may find it useful to engage co-workers in this critical review process, carefully considering each practice and its relevance and usefulness in your situation. . All your final selections should be double checked against the selection criteria you established in Step 3. Further refine your list until it represents the "best" of managerial leadership practices that you believe drive employee, customer and overall business results in your own sphere of influence.

The Application
To demonstrate the process, I would like to apply the Four-Step Model, showing how it can be used by management practitioners

Step 1: Survey Practices: Using the Manager's Bookshelf, read each of the 45 summaries of these business best-selling books. You will find a myriad of managerial leadership practices, some of which may be relevant to your own situation, others not.

Step 2: Identifying Relevant Practices: As you read, list in bullet point fashion the managerial leadership practices that seem to be most able to drive results in your work setting. Note the page, source book, and "take-away" points for future reference.

Step 3: Establishing Selection Criteria: When you have generated an extensive list of potential managerial leadership practices, determine a handful of useful criteria to use to pare down your list. Potential criteria to use may include: Practicality Face Validity External Validity Research Support Author Credibility Uniqueness Objectivity Reliability Reasonable Approach Emotional Appeal Application Value Track Record of Success

Step 4: Using the Criteria to Select Your Final Practices: Your chosen criteria may be applied in a variety of ways to each of the managerial leadership practices designated thus far. I recommend that you create a spreadsheet and list each practice that you have selected. Then evaluate each of these practices against your established criteria using a ten point scale (ten being the highest). The practices receiving the highest ratings would be considered a "preliminary final list." Discuss these practices with three or four of your key reports. Check these final candidate practices against your stated criteria once again. On a scale of one to ten, to what extent does each practice really seem like a key action that managerial leaders in your current situation can take to drive results? If you can answer this key question with an "8" or higher, and you have also given the specific practice a high rating against your criteria, then that particular practice becomes a practice you place in the twelve o'clock box. You are endorsing it as a managerial leadership practice that should help you drive employee, customer, and overall business results.

Some Sample Selections
Having worked externally in many companies across a variety of industries as a business advisor/organizational psychologist, I have gleaned five managerial leadership practices that I would recommend across the board for your final list:

1. The Stockdale Paradox: (Based on Admiral Stockdale's experience as a prisoner of war in the "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam War.) Face the hard cold facts of the current situation but, even with a grim reality, maintain total faith that you will prevail in the end.

2. Affirming Shared Values and Honesty: Ensure there is an agreement in your organization about values, and be honest in your dealings with others. In one global survey involving over 15,000 managers, honesty was determined to be essential to leadership.

3. Courage and Risk Taking: Create a working environment that fosters courage and encourages taking calculated risks.

4. The New Management Virtues: Lead and manage in ways that reveal the virtues of trustworthiness, unity, respect, justice and service. Do the right things for the right reasons and long-term results will tend to be positive.

5. The Star of Success: Utilize a five-pointed star, where each point represents a key question that helps members of an organization determine if they have the right pattern of success. Do we have the right strategic direction? Do we have the right functions (processes and systems)? Do we have the right form? Do we have the right resources? Do we have the right information?

In practice, I have my clients take this further by translating their selected managerial leadership practices (Step 4) into specific actions and behaviors. They are encouraged to determine how they plan to convert a practice into action, where it will be applied and when it will be applied.

A Closing Note
As a practicing manager or a student of management, knowing what is at your 12 o'clock position in the Linkage Research Model can mean the difference between floundering and knowing just what to do to help drive business results. I encourage you to use this four-step process to help you enhance your practice tool kit to achieve results. Managerial leadership practices at 12 o'clock can make the difference between organizational and career success and failure. Do you know what should go into your 12 o'clock box?