Adequate Performance Gets a Generous Severance Package

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“There is no policy requiring clothing, but no one comes to work naked.
Lesson: You don’t need policies for everything”

Be the market surprise instead of being surprised by the market. Increase the density of talent in your organization faster than the complexity increases around you. In the same way you can’t control the forces that affect your company, to attract the best and the brightest you may not want to try to control your top talent either. Certainly companies should support them, grow them, challenge them, and reward them. But increasingly companies are finding deeper talent and bigger results by relinquishing control over them.

This trend in giving employees autonomy puts the focus on results rather than on punching a time clock. Netflix has recognized that as a business which never sleeps, they in fact have no standard working hours for the company, and therefore should extend that analogy to respect the discretionary decision-making of their employees. So Netflix treats them like adults. As a slide presentation on their website describes, Netflix pays above-average in the industry, provides generous benefits and works to “attract and retain stunning colleagues.” How and when you get your work done is up to you, but they expect results.

“Adequate performance gets a generous severance package” reads their website. Clearly they create an environment intended to gain the best and brightest people but as they advertise, they function more like a high performance professional sports team, not like a family which forgives every fault. Managers have a test they perform when evaluating performance. They ask themselves this question, “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving, would I work hard to keep at Netflix?” If someone doesn’t satisfy that question, they are offered the generous severance package to open up that position for a star performer.

To punctuate their focus on results, not hours, their presentation goes on to say, “Sustained A-level performance with minimal effort, is rewarded with greater responsibility, and great pay.” By focusing on results rather than mere presence or compliance, employees are more likely to feel accountable and less likely to waste the company’s time or money.

Change the Aspirations, Change the Outcome

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Be the change you wish to see in the world
– Mahatma Gandhi

Let’s just agree – just for the moment – that your company cares more about your own personal and professional development and livelihood, your family’s health and well-being, your local community’s civic integrity, the broader environmental impact of the company’s footprint, building a positive value chain in which stakeholders at all points of inflection on your product’s journey from cradle to biodegradable rest are supported, and even weigh decisions with a long-view lens with the expectation that decisions today have immense brand-impact downstream – and cares more (or at least equally) than making a profit. If this were true, your company’s incentive and value system would reflect an expectation that you would contribute on these dimensions in proactive and meaningful ways. You might be expected to take time to exercise or attend conferences and workshops to develop your own physical and mental capacities. There might be some peer pressure to talk more about the difference you and your team made in developing sustained customer value, rather than high-fiving fat commission checks and bonuses. There might be some big initiatives measuring your team’s contribution to civic well-being. What we measure is what we get back in return. In other words, what we persistently ask questions of, we grow, develop and achieve toward those inquiries.

CLIF Bar CEO Gary Erickson founded CLIF in 1992 with partner Kit Crawford with a vision to make a great-tasting, healthy, organic snack bar, and while they did achieve this, meanwhile Gary’s mind kept drifting to the places that inspired him and the employees of the company: where they rode their bikes, where they spent their free time, and the communities and beautiful country they lived in. As a result, CLIF doesn’t have one bottom line, they have five. They measure their success against Five Aspirations. While constantly being adjusted and refined by the employee community, CLIF is measuring their success based on how well they are doing against their Five Aspirations they have set forth for themselves:
• Sustaining the brand
• Sustaining the business
• Sustaining the planet
• Sustaining the people
• Sustaining the community
How these metrics are valued remains up to the employee community to define, and yet are discussed, debated, and edified in writing such that each associate understands the stated metrics on how CLIF will evaluate performance against these values. To pursue these goals, employees might organize their colleagues to support their own local charities, or collaboratively measure their progress at the gym, or maybe share details of the time and energy they’ve devoted to coaching little league.

Sure, we do this now in our own lives. And then when talking to colleagues, and the reactions are often, “Good for you, how do you find the time?” because implicitly the professional expectation is that performance is measured against contribution to profit. If you have any time for time to make considered and thoughtful decisions by taking a break and trail-running with your dog, …well, that’s just because you’ve already fulfilled the profit punch-list, you’ve already fed the hungry maw of fattening investor equity. CLIF has empirically demonstrated that by sustaining (and measuring) not only the business, but also other dimensions targeted at driving human and social and community and environmental value, companies can prosper successfully on multiple dimensions.

Rick Warren reminded me years ago that the etymology of integrity is from the Latin integer, which means “wholeness” or “oneness.” When we give ourselves and our colleagues permission to bring our whole selves to work, we can begin to achieve, and define, our success against metrics far greater than shareholder value and company profitability. Consistent studies reveal that when we place progress in meaningful work as our paramount motivating factor, then cultures thrive, mood states elevate and companies profit all the more.

Incentivize Innovation that Escalates Me to We

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We do this constantly in our work: we figure out macros and hacks that streamline and accelerate our work. A routine we might perform numerous times a day, becomes a habit we learn how to tweak and accelerate and perform faster to increase our own performance.

But what if our organizational cultures incentivized people to conjure hacks and macros that accelerated the work of the team, of the entire groups we collaborate with?

I had an interview with the VP of HR for a leading consultancy in India. He described a practice there to incentivize bigger thinking innovation we can all emulate. If an associate there figures out a faster, cleaner why of performing a routinized task, they are acknowledged and rewarded. Their work gets better, and the entire team benefits from their elevated capacity.

However, if they develop an innovative new process which lifts the productivity of their entire collaborative team, the recognition and reward is significantly larger. Because now the defining mindset and orientation shifts on what innovation really means. Innovation is now cast in terms of lifting the larger whole, the greater goal and purpose. Instead of being defined as personal and incremental, innovation is recast as the opportunity and expectation that everyone will both think of themselves constantly as part of a larger we.

Here’s an example of that idea in practice borrowed from a fortune 500 financial services company that does just that in spades. I had a cool conversation with their IT leader who encourages professionals on the team to post internally their custom hacks and scripts to a social platform for others to copy and build on. The practice has spurred a friendly cooperative competition among the programmers to post and defend their own cool custom hacks. Then, other pros in the IT group are encouraged to borrow that brilliance and build on these signature scripts, which again elevates the productivity of the greater whole. It encourages personal, creative expression, and it builds a shared network of signature solutions within the group.

Figure out how to not only recognize and incentivize individual creativity and productivity, but also create shared solutions that support everyone around them.

Finding the Guru Within

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“While we teach, we learn”
– Seneca

One of the greatest gifts you can offer another is unconditional, open sharing of ideas and wisdom to grow their ideas and talents. Everyone benefits, not only obviously the person receiving advice and direction from a trusted mentor, but also the coach himself benefits greatly from the experience.

When you take the time to seek out a talented coach, ask for advice, and aspire to a particular habit, behavior, or way of life, you can better:

  • Figure out what matters to you and your growth to make an impact
  • Amplify your focus by removing lesser priorities
  • Connect with people and ideas more closely aligned
  • Identify and remove blind spots

Yet even more powerfully, when you take the time to show up and offer your own thoughtful advice, energy and direction, the impact can be surprisingly valuable for you, the advisor. Consider, if you can teach something you first have to learn it deeply enough to share it in a meaningful and clearly articulate way. In order to teach something as an effective and credible advisor, you also need to deepen your knowledge and understanding such that you can handle penetrating questions, and know where to find answers. If someone you are working with develops a greater curiosity, you should know where to direct their next inquiry.

The best coaches develop a deep emotional fluency such that they have strong understanding of their player’s strengths. John Wooden, one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, coached so personally and directly that he spoke, on average, for only four seconds at a time, and most often only to individual players.  In the movie “The Blind Side,” Sandra Bullock’s character draws out the best football player in Big Mike by reinforcing the fact that he scored 98% on “protective instincts.”

The etymology of guru is “teacher” or “master.”  Guru has also come to mean “one who dispels the darkness of ignorance.”  I had a wonderful interview Monday with Dr. Sujaya Banerjee, Chief Learning Officer for Essar Group, one of the fastest growing companies in India.

Essar has developed a remarkably successful coaching and mentoring program by appealing to cultural influences. Indians believe in rebirth and the cyclical nature of life.  Which means aspiring toward being immortal, becoming “amar” in Hindi.  The philosophy of mentoring at Essar teaches that a way to become immortal is to coach and mentor.  Senior executives and managers are encouraged to develop their immortal self through developing the wise guru within another, younger associate. By tapping into this intrinsic motivation to build an eternal legacy of wisdom, executives see clearly they have a path to create a legacy, and preserve their own immortal wisdom through others.

Share your gifts without pause or regret.  I once wrote a rap to introduce Keith Ferrazzi, based on his book Never Eat Alone.  You can read the bit in the rap about mentoring below or see the video here.

But before you focus on improving your standard of living
Remember you earn trust and proximity first by giving
With a big head you’ll think you turn everything to gold
Be careful in your success, don’t let hubris take hold
Your final task should you choose to accept
Is share this wonderful gift, without pause or regret
For if its true legacy you want to approach
Teach and share, become a mentor, a coach
People in the house
Open up your hearts and minds, there is nothing to fear
To deliver this message Keith Ferrazzi is here

Building Cathedrals

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This story has been retold many times, in different ways, but the point is the same.

Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was a famous English architect and builder. As legend has it, he was walking past three stonecutters working on the rebuilding of St. Paul’s cathedral. He asked them each what they were doing.

The first worker said, “I am earning six pence a day.”
The second worker said, “I am cutting this stone true and square.”
The third worker said, “I am helping Sir Christopher Wren build St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

Peter Drucker interprets this story illuminating the three perspectives of:
“I am making a living for me”
“I am doing my best work for a reason I do not connect to” to finally
“I am willingly contributing to a greater purpose and meaning, for which it will take many hands and a guiding leader to accomplish.”

Connect higher. What’s your point of view?

Balancing Global Vision with Local Relevance

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At the moment, Andrew Deonarine is a third year medical resident at University of British Columbia (UBC)  He has developed a passion for improving literacy in developing economies.  A few years ago after a trip to India he was inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative to improve literacy around the world.  And he wondered if there wasn’t an even easier and more ubiquitous platform for delivering literacy learning.

He is also a programmer and technology tinkerer.  With a curious mind, he developed a big idea to use simple cellphones to be a platform for distributing literacy learning through PhoneCasting – a push technology in which anyone can author a brief engaging learning script and push-cast it out to deliver simple reading and math literacy to potentially millions of people.  He calls it EduCell.

Inventive yes.  But how does anyone know about it?  They didn’t.  Until, he learns about an InnoCentive challenge.  He applies and his EduCell proposal wins.  He is in talks with Nokia to develop and deliver EduCell universally.  Through the innovation crowd-sourcing visibility of Innocentive, Andrew is changing the world.  From Ontario.

This is a wonderful story, and indicative of how fast innovation can move in this frictionless economy.  How important is speed to market?  Last year Jim Barksdale, formerly of Netscape, spent 300 million to dig a gopher hole from the Chicago Mercantile exchange 825 miles to the New York Stock Exchange to lay direct-line fiber optic cable.  Why?  To gain 3 milliseconds in speed of trading information.

Competition is emerging from everyone, everywhere, and for everything – and one thing is clear:  Our most powerful competitive advantage is in the hearts and minds of all the people throughout our global organizations, and we must unlock these capacities.  Gone are the days when we could just buy diligence and expertise, and ask people to execute on the strategic bets of a very few in the corner offices.  Now, only by tapping into those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity and passion – that cannot be bought at any price – can we build the competitive value of the future.

Bruce Churchill, president for DirectTV Latin America, said the key to the 300% market growth was to remove the corporate directives from NYC and Miami that decided how and when and where their services were deployed in Latin America, and instead give autonomy and discretionary decision-making authority to the local operators.  Who knows better than the people who live in Bogotá, Rio, and Caracas, the culturally relevant TV programming to provide, how to price it, the marketing that would make it stick in each locality.

Michael Byrne, president of Linfox, the biggest shipping and logistics operator in Australia said the key to their remarkable growth in India, Thailand, Vietnam, China and throughout southeast asia over the past ten years has been specifically because tap into the talents and give localized control over operations.  With over 2400 employees in India, and as of my conversation with him last year, Linfox had exactly one Aussie ex-pat working there – and he’s not the boss either.  By first providing a clear and singular vision of commitment to safety, excellence, product integrity and quality, Linfox provides the shared vision and values that provide the bedrock of the company, and then gives trust and operating control to the local markets for culturally nuanced execution.

Those organizations that learn to balance global unified vision with local relevance are those that will thrive in the new creative age.

The Meeting After the Meeting

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Don’t do this. Don’t hijack an hour of time from people, ask their thoughtful opinion, and then excuse everyone and hold back your cronies and have that “meeting after the meeting.” Sometimes you hear it on the conference call when a team leader says, “Hey Margaret can you call me right after this to follow up?” What is that all about?

We can easily sabotage our efforts to build the valued trust, rapport and engagement we know are important to drive excellence. Here’s a little way in which we can sometimes show to the team that their opinions aren’t really part of the solution: Having the meeting after the meeting.

The meeting after the meeting in which the “real” decision-makers call the shots, says to everyone that they don’t really have a voice. Or at best, they are fighting for their opinion to be heard. Or at worst, it’s a polite move so the shot-callers can attest publicly that opinions were heard, that they took in people’s concerns.

Do this instead. Listen more than talk. Ask credible, relevant and probing questions, and then collaboratively work toward decisions in front of everyone that recognizes and includes the voice of everyone. If you don’t intend to value an opinion, you’re not leading, you’re lobbying.

Money is a by product of contributing value and meaning

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As the legend goes, Peter Drucker was once asked by a business owner to review his financial statements and see if he could find better, more innovative, ways to make money from studying, and tweaking, his financials. To which Drucker replied, “You don’t make money, you make shoes. Work on making shoes. The money is just a by-product.”

The lesson reminded me of an interview I had with Yvon Chounaird, founder of Patagonia, who said in the interview, “Over the past forty years I have yet to encounter a business problem that cannot be solved by focusing on product excellence and product integrity.” Despite, and because of, the magnificent growth Patagonia has enjoyed over the years, Yvon and Patagonia found sustainability by consistently refocusing their attention on quality and excellence. The journey was not without various hurtles and faltering moments while those around him were distracted by financial growth alone. For the full story see this interview.

But my point is this: Everyone I talk to is talking about building meaning in their work – building meaning into their everyday life and endeavors, As Teresa Amabile reminds us, progress in meaningful work is what motivates and engages us. We’re preparing for an upcoming event with Benjamin Zander, renowned conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and I listened to him talk recently about the importance and value of contribution, as opposed to competition. They aren’t the same thing – competition is when you mentally compare, evaluate and attempt to trump. Contribution has no such relative marker. Contribution is when you try, when you show up and muster what you got – hopefully from a source of practice and competence – but nevertheless a real try.

Dispel your worries of competitive evaluation, and focus on your best, and give toward your best efforts with honest intention.

You’re more likely to be fired by your team than your boss

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“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Ken Hicks, CEO of Foot Locker had just said, “You are more likely to be fired up than fired down.” I was interviewing him yesterday and had asked how new managers and leaders could best make a difference in their first 60-90 days. He provided some intuitive advice about how if you go in with a grand plan to make a difference and expect people to execute on your great idea, you’ve lost the buy-in of the people around you. That is, you’ve lost the opportunity to listen deeply, understand and solicit the input of everyone on the team and gather the best ideas while simultaneously co-opting the engagement of the people ready to execute.

He went on to say – while defining the expression “You are more likely to be fired up than fired down” – that too often new (or existing) managers – get caught up in pandering to the imagined interests of superiors, and as a result lose the support of those around them. Building that support has to be more about listening to their ideas and contributions, than getting people to say what you want hear.

The result of lost support, while catering to the top, is that your team feels their voice isn’t heard, their ideas aren’t recognized, and so they disengage. When that happens, a manager cannot possibly execute on any grand vision and get anything done. Your team isn’t following any more. You’ve just been fired up. Sure, your leadership has the capacity to get rid of you top-down fashion, but long before that happens, long before the complete paralysis or catastrophe, or missed milestones, you’ve been fired up from the people you are supposed to be leading to a clear deliverable. Maybe you have that that grand vision in mind, but if you neglect the team, you’ve lost your ability to be effective.

Exploring New Terrain – Giving Greatness

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There’s a sublimely beautiful spot in the north woods of Maine off the beaten path called Southbranch campground on the north end of Baxter State Park. It takes thoughtful planning to get there. To begin with, you have to mail in – yes, USPS mail in – your registration to Baxter State Authority. Although recently they do have an online calendar showing availability, you still have to fill out a piece of paper and select your top choices for camping spots, label an envelope, and mail it in. Baxter State Park Authority will mail you back a paper confirmation which you have to have in hand when you arrive at the checkpoint gate – more than ten miles out from the campground. Nothing motorized invited, on the lakes or trails, other than the car or van that got you there. We’ve visited the last three years and spend off-the-grid days paddling, telling stories by campfires, hiking, and sharing good company.

A highlight of this annual pilgrimage are gloriously high granite cliffs, about a morning-paddle away on an adjacent lake. After we awake, pack lunches, and paddle the length of Southbranch north lake, then portage to south lake along a stream, and tie up the canoes, we scramble up the faces of this granite rock to witness the beauty and quiet solitude of a wonderfully isolated deep lake in the north woods.

Then we jump! From various points that meet our own idea of courage, we jump. Here’s the thing – as the visit grows, as well as subsequent visits over a couple days, we find our collective rhythm in the adventure. We both encourage eachother, and ourselves, in more audacious jumps – or more interesting and unique jumps. Understand, at this site the sky is almost the limit – you could etch ever higher upon that rock and jump from a higher and higher point – there is almost no feasible summit since the true top is over 100 feet – a jump I have yet to see anyone take…yet.

Here’s the interesting part – after our group arrives and we spend time there, we first lead eachother to what is obvious, what is most accessible. As time passes, the sun rises and people start to find their own routes up the rock to higher jumping points, the group teaches what is possible, what can be achieved.

In the context of leadership, once everyone feels supported and in a safe environment, we begin to not only explore the possible but also teach those around us what is possible. Leading the way up the rock, demonstrating unique leaps of faith – older kids taking the hands of the younger to safely navigate the rock face. We have to examine both the novel and mundane with fresh eyes, and excitedly share those experiences – it’s only then we can both lead and encourage new climbs and new leaps from high above. Believe me, our work is no different. No group ever got dumber by hiding trails, or hoarding glory. Teach everyone on the path. That’s giving greatness.