For 2012, we are planning a special series with a theme: Generations at Work

• What do you need to know to prosper in your work life during your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and into your 60s and beyond?

• And how can we work well across all those age groups to build successful organizations – and to make the most of our resources?  In today’s challenging financial times, that’s more important than ever.

We’ll talk about everything from first jobs and Facebook to final chapters in the workforce.

And we’ll look at the chemistry of today’s organizations – for example, what happens when the generations of “Father Knows Best” and “The Simpsons” collaborate.

Consider this an interactive adventure: Please share your reactions and experiences.   Whatever your age, tell us how you see your generation at work – and your advice for forging strong teams of all ages – kw@wunderlin.com.

Beginning with the 20-somethings

A funny thing has happened over the past several years.

I found myself in a new kind of consulting job. My kids and their classmates, my nieces and my nephews, the children of my friends … they were all asking the same questions:  How to find a job? How to network?  How to handle the new universe of life at work?

As my son graduated from college last spring, the parents of his group of friends gathered for a brunch and gave them our best advice.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Make friends with HR.

• When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

• Keep a clean change of clothes at work.

• Read Moby Dick in yours 30s, Middlemarch in your 40s and The Confessions of St. Augustine in our 50s.

• The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow…do good anyway.

So what can we tell them?  What do they need to know in their first work adventures? And what advice can we offer to the folks who work with them?

Whether you call them Generation Y or Millennials, 20-somethings bring a new set of values and experiences to the world of work.

Let us introduce you

If you read books like “Millennials in the Workplace” by Neil Howe and Reena Nadler or a recent report on millennials from the Pew Research Center, you will hear 20-somethings described this way:

• Confident Remember they are the children of baby-boom parents who’ve told them they were great since toddlerhood.
• Team-oriented. From school team projects to scheduled sports and social lives, 20-somethings have grown up multi-tasking and working with others.
• Tech-savvy. Life before computers seems prehistoric. They have mastered new technologies at every turn and are fearless about new ones.
• Socially connected. They can’t remember life before email, Facebook and texting – and have global social communities that no previous generation could have imagined.  They are comparing notes about work around a virtual water cooler.
• Racially and ethnically diverse. More travel, study and jobs abroad, Skype, those social networks, friends and families with connections across the globe – all this has made them comfortable in diverse environments.
• OK with uncertainty.  From the terrorism of 9-11 to the economic downturn, they have grown up in unstable times. Young people their age have gone to war. They have seen friends and parents laid off.  They know they have a better chance of seeing a UFO than a pension check.

Finding a first job

At the same time, uncertainty about finding a first job —well, that is not something they are OK with.  They want jobs – preferably meaningful jobs – in the worst job market in decades.

So when 20-somethings ask for my job-hunt advice, I talk about:

Focus. Some young people know they want to be a CPA just like Mom or an architect just like Dad. But most don’t have a clear picture of how they can fit their skills and interests into the jobs out there. When young people ask me for advice, we use the Myers-Briggs type indicator and Strong Interest Inventory to get more clarity.

Networking. This is old advice — but with new weight today as job applications move online and hundreds of resumes pour into HR inboxes. How can yours stand out? Who do you know at that company? Who do you know who is friends with someone there? Whose parents have a connection? Is there someone at church or the gym?  I urge young people to join organizations and set up interviews — to ask for information.   How did you choose this line of work?  What sorts of people does the organization work for?  What kinds of work experiences do you consider most valuable?  Is there anyone else you suggest I talk to?  A young woman I know used a spreadsheet to track contacts made, jobs applied for, when to check back.  She reached out fearlessly to any older adult to whom she was referred. It worked: Having a conversation with someone in a coffee shop, she was overheard and approached about a possibility that turned into a dream job!

And keep networking: Few young people I know are in their dream jobs. So staying connected to colleagues, mentors and friends is essential.  In her book “Brazen Careerist: the New Rules for Success,” Penelope Trunk has a chapter title that says it all: “Hunting for a job is not a task – it’s a lifestyle.”

For more advice on the job hunt, check out these tips from a recent New York Times column: “Ten things job applicants should know” by an entrepreneur who owns five businesses in Chicago.

One of its best suggestions: Stay in touch even if you don’t get a job, especially if you are a finalist. “There is a good chance that the new hire won’t work out or that another position will open up.”

So you have a job…

If they have a job at all in this challenging economy, the 20-somethings I know are thrilled.

Even if it’s not their ideal job, they are intent on making the most of it.

If they are highly educated and employed in transitional jobs – nannies, bike shops, farm hands, restaurant work – they are still grateful.

If they have made a beeline to grad school, even big degrees that take a long time – like Ph.D.s – they are probably working part-time as they earn new credentials and hope for better times.

What have they learned on the job? What advice do 20-somethings in the work force have for fellow 20-somethings just getting started?

• Ask questions. As the vice president of local architecture firm likes to say to young colleagues, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Most supervisors appreciate the opportunity to keep you on track. Penelope Trunk says: “Be a sponge.”

• Just say yes. Whether it’s a new project, extra training, a volunteer initiative at your office, raise your hand for the experience and to advertise your commitment. “No job is too small or insignificant for you to complete,” one 20-something friend told me.   “If you do things well and on time, recognition will come for the tasks you complete.”

• Ignore complainers. Another young friend told me he was surprised by older coworkers’ complacency and complaints. “I asked for any responsibilities or opportunities my supervisors would afford to me…and I worked much harder than many in my department. And when new promotions came available, in less than two years, I received one of the spots.”

• Learn from less-than-perfect experiences. “I would argue holding a job — one which forces you to adapt to a management style you don’t like or work you don’t particularly care for — could help sharpen your notion of an ideal career path,” one 25-year-old told me. “I would venture to say you cannot become a well-rounded employee without the experience of working in less-than-ideal circumstances.”

• Share your outside-work accomplishments, too. A 25-year-old who started a popular series of spelling bees in bars found a connection with Louisville’s Idea Festival – and a reputation as a great project manager with a sense of humor.

What is the top advice from their bosses – and older folks in the workforce?

• Cultivate relationships you can learn from – and be inspired by.  It might be a supervisor/mentor but it could also be colleague who works well with a wide variety of people – or seems to wind up assigned to every interesting project.

• Core skills make a difference in everyday work life.  Being a good listener and a clear writer, having a positive attitude and working hard will make you a standout. A recent New York Times magazine article, “The Character Test,” described key traits correlate with success, including grit, zest and curiosity.

• Expand your horizons in terms of what you read: Facebook and Yahoo’s home page are fine. But also check out some resources with authority regularly. The New York Times front page online.  The Wall Street Journal’s front page.  Try buying a new magazine each month, from “Vanity Fair” to “Fast Company.”  And read books with buzz. “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell will help you appreciate the role of luck in life. Thomas Friedman’s “That Used to be Us,” offers his take on America’s changing role in the world. “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, looks at how we make decisions. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” offers a new take on motivation.

The great hockey player Wayne Gretsky once said, “You don’t skate to where the puck is. You skate to where the puck is going to be.”  That’s where you want your thinking to be, too – looking forward.

Working with 20-somethings

The best teams capitalize on the strengths of diverse members – so recognize that their characteristic traits add value.

• Gen Ys bring enthusiasm and special skills to cross-generational teams — and they are comfortable juggling projects. The multi-tasking that stymies some people in workplaces? It’s business-as-usual.

• Capitalize on their technology know-how, both with projects you assign them and “reverse mentoring” that lets them shine helping other less tech-savvy staff members.

• Give clear feedback.  Be specific about goals – short term and longer term.

• Understand that they want to enjoy work – but that won’t keep them from working hard.

One 20-something summed it up well.  “My experience might not be much, but my capacity to learn is great!”

I asked him how he thought his life would change in the next three to five years.

“Dramatically.  I’ll be in a new job in a different city.”  He has no idea where.

My 20s decade was so different: I’m finding the experience of working with young people a great way to pay it forward. Let me challenge you to do the same.

Next up: The Thirties

I’d like to hear from folks in this age group – and people who work with them.   If you are a 30-something, what has defined your work life so far? What have you learned? What are you headed? Do you face special challenges at work – or balancing work with the rest of your life? Email me at kw@wunderlin.com.

Recently, we searched through the archives and selected our top 10 posts. They cover a broad range of topics—from how to be a great non-profit board member to defining a vision for your company’s future.

Hope you enjoy reading them, learn from them, and forward them on to others who might find them insightful.

All the Best,

Karen’s Top Ten

1. Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings
2. Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart
3. How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach
4. Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations
5. Making a Truly Excellent Hire
6. Defining a Vision for the Future
7. Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values
8. How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips
9. “George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback
10. Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

Here’s a brief look at each of these favorites.

Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings

What if all our meetings could be decisive, productive, and no longer than necessary? Our 10 tips enable you to lead meetings that are to die for…not to die at.

Here’s how:

1. Determine if the meeting is really necessary.
2. Create and use a detailed agenda.
3. Ensure proper room arrangements are made.
4. Always have a facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe.
5. Set clear guidelines.
6. Manage participation.
7. Make periodic process checks.
8. Take and distribute action minutes.
9. Plan next steps.
10. Begin and end on time.

Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart

In this post about Emotional Intelligence we summarized Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, which now, from a quick check of Amazon, seems to have spawned a cottage industry of similar books and seminars.

Successful leaders need these emotional competencies:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Empathy, and
• Social skill.

This popular blog discusses leadership styles in light of the EQ concept, and provides a wealth of specifics on learning emotional competencies, and using them to create leadership styles that yield positive results.

How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach

Executive coaching has become a preferred approach to executive development– it focuses specifically on your individual leadership development needs, and can be directly applied to your current work.
Our  2007 newsletter “How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach” shows how to successfully employ executive coaching.

Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations

There’s nothing easy about difficult conversations. Whether the talk is about performance issues—Her work is just not where it needs to be—or behavioral issues—He was late again today—many of us avoid having to deal with conversations that we know will be unpleasant. Inside every difficult conversation are three separate conversations:

• The talk about what happened
• The conversation about feelings
• The discussion about what this information says about each person’s identity

Re-read “Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations” to get yourself started on more productive difficult conversations.

Making a Truly Excellent Hire

Whether we are expanding our businesses or just replacing employees lost through attrition, the need to “get the right people on the bus” never goes away. “Making a Truly Excellent Hire” focuses on five best practices:

• Learn from those who leave.
• Know what you want in a new hire.
• Base your hiring decisions on more than your gut.
• Hire for smarts.
• Don’t expect your new hires to sink or swim—orient them.

Defining a Vision for the Future

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” So we began our newsletter, “Defining a Vision for the Future.” Today, the need to define a clearly envisioned future is essential, and the vision processes are as important as the outcomes.

Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values

Start with this: What is your organization’s fundamental reason for being? Our newsletter on Defining Your Purpose and Values,” explores this essential element of a sustainable organization. Check out the model we recommend for defining your mission and values.

How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips

One of the most gratifying aspects of giving back to our communities is service on non-profit boards. In a 2006 blog, we provide 10 tips for making ourselves outstanding non-profit board members.

1. Get to know the organization.
2. Be an advocate for it.
3. Recognize that serving is volunteer, but not optional.
4. Make commitments you can keep.
5. Know your job and stick to it.
6. Find ways to translate what you know to benefit the non-profit.
7. Expand your skills.
8. Recognize that fundraising is a reality and a responsibility.
9. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
10. Rotate off.

Your favorite non-profit will thank you!

“George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback

Giving candid and timely feedback may be one of the most neglected of all business skills. We all know we need feedback. So why don’t we give it?

1. We don’t know how.
2. We wait too long.
3. We don’t want to be hurtful.
4. We lose focus on why feedback is important.
5. We are fearful.
6. We are not measured on it.

For more information, see the full 2008 blog. 

Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

In our newsletter on creativity, we took a look at the creative process of Twyla Tharp, one of America’s foremost choreographers. In her book on developing creativity, Tharp comments: “It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world! No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. It takes time.”

We hope you will enjoy TWC’s Top Ten and feel free to pass them along, post on Facebook or Twitter—and let us know how the Wunderlin Company can help you.

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A number of The Wunderlin Company workshops address these newsletter topics in more detail—Facilitating for Results and Advanced Models for Facilitation, Coaching as a Leadership Skill,  Effective Meetings, Myers-Briggs and Difficult Conversations.  For a full schedule or registration information, check out the workshop page on our website.

It is from this need that we developed this newsletter – our observations on what it takes to be really successful in driving change in your organization.

Change is a Process

A study of change projects concluded that 100% of successful change initiatives had good technical solutions. Not surprising. But it also found that 98% of unsuccessful change initiatives had good technical solutions!  So successful change is not about whether we have a good idea for change, but rather: Can we get the people who work here to support this good idea?

Because it is about influencing people as well as changing procedures, change is not a one-time event. When we work with clients, we focus on leading change as a four-step process:

• Initiate change by  grounding it in a solid purpose and a shared need.
• Mobilize commitment by engaging people in shaping the outcomes and understanding what the change will do for them.
• Transition to the new systems and processes in a transitioning period, and
• Make change last by monitoring results and having the change become a way of doing business.

Change Acceleration works in tandem with project management to assure that your change is delivered on time, on budget, and with support in the organization!

A savvy change leader* understands the complex interplay of these four elements, and realizes that the success of any change depends on the support of those affected.
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*Note: If you – or someone in your organization – would like to master the change leadership part of influencing people to accept change, The Wunderlin Company is offering its most popular workshop: Facilitating for Results on December 14-16. For more information or to register, click here.
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Switch!

A new book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath provides a compelling metaphor for creating effective change. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Heaths argue that implementing change is like getting a rider to control an elephant along a path. Lots of things have to go right to get the elephant where you want it to go!

Imagine you want to make a change. Every person – or team – has an emotional side, “the Elephant,” and a rational side, “the Rider.” To accomplish change, you have to reach both. And, of course, you have to clear the way for them to advance.  Using example after example, the Heaths focus on ways to “direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path.”

For example, two researchers in West Virginia wanted to try to find ways to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. Milk was identified as a pivotal part of the problem. Almost everyone drinks it, and whole milk is the single largest source of saturated fat in Americans’ diets. If people who drank whole milk switched to 1% or skim milk, they would reach the recommended levels of saturated fat in their diets.

First they appealed to the elephant – emotions – by showing grocery shoppers a tube of fat equivalent to the fat in a half gallon of milk and by explaining that one glass of whole milk contained saturated fat equal to 5 slices of bacon! Everyone’s reaction, of course, was that the fat was gross. Having monitored milk sales before the reduced-fat milk campaign began, the researchers knew that the market share of low-fat milk in the area was only 18%; during the campaign it rose to 41%, then leveled out at 35%.

The experiment covered all three bases: It clearly and simply directed the Rider to buy 1% or skim milk, it motivated the Elephant with images of tubes of fat, and it made the path easier by allowing people to make one simple change that started them along the road to better life-long health.

Direct the Rider

A few years ago The Wunderlin Company worked with a major airline, identifying 40 changes that needed to be made in the reservations division in the post 9/11 environment. As Laura Butcher, a Wunderlin Company associate, explains the challenge:

“Making 40 changes in one year – with many having impacts on the skills, compensation, and efficiency metrics – required substantial planning. We worked with a cross-functional team to put together plans to integrate the most significant initiatives first so that the airline minimized disruptions, overcame resistance, and realized efficiency and cost savings more quickly.

We helped the team complete a gap analysis for each of the initiatives to describe the current and future states, and we helped them identify the specific gaps that needed to be addressed.

We also guided the team in completing analysis of the stakeholders – what their needs, concerns and influencers were on each of the change projects. In dealing with these issues, we helped to construct adoption strategies, communication plans and action task lists to ensure that the initiatives and teams remained on message, integrated and aligned in purpose. Finally, we facilitated the group in identifying risks to successful execution and action plans to mitigate them.”

Clearly, managing change is not all about the change itself; in fact, most of our work deals with the more emotional, less rational side of the ‘change ride’: motivating the elephant!

Motivate the Elephant

A couple of years ago in a newsletter written at the depth of the recession, I discussed Ram Charan’s “Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times.” The same skills needed to weather the changes brought about by a downturn are valuable in leading a company into better times. But as a change leader, you might also want to evaluate your team’s skills in dealing with the emotional aspects of change:

• How are my team’s influencing skills?
• What about their communication skills?
• Can they address the right questions? Like…
  • Where are we meeting resistance?
  • What do our employees need to effect this change?
  • How can we influence them to support the change?
  • What is the next milestone?

Failure to bring the organization along with you can ensure individual and collective resistance, along with reactions to the change ranging from apathy to downright sabotage, so inspiring a buy-in is absolutely essential.  So how do you handle the inevitable resistance?

In recent months, we have been working with a global company whose senior team wants to achieve some dramatic culture change  AND give leadership development opportunities to a number of “next generation” leaders. The executive team elected to launched a number of change initiatives, simultaneously! Senior team leaders had spent a good amount of time hand-picking the team members for each initiative, and providing resources for their work, but issues and resistance still arose.

For example, teams  feared disagreeing with senior management.  The first time such an issue came up,  the team took the risk, presented their case, and let management decide whether to accept what ended up being a very modest change (and they did!). Another team made a recommendation that actually wasvery significant – involving a change in the company’s logo and tagline – and after robust conversations, senior management supported them. All these issues were more about the elephant than the rider.  As senior leaders proved they were serious about letting the teams do their work, commitment has increased.

The early experiences with change management helped senior management and the change acceleration teams understand how to really “bake in” a culture difference across the globe. TWC’s “Equation for Success” had turned into the company’s mantra for change: the Quality of a solution times its Acceptance in the organization determines the Success of your result.

Sometimes, getting that all-important buy-in from your employees is as simple as maintaining your sense of humor–

A Fortune 500 company was changing its time sheets from paper to electronic. This was a major change, involving staff reduction, job assignment changes, and major alterations in methodology. The head of payroll  knew the change was going to have an emotional impact on over 15,000 employees.  So those most involved were invited to a funeral for the paper time sheet! Eulogies extolling the virtues of the old system acknowledged the pain of its passing. When the new system came online, birth announcements were sent out. The transition was much smoother because the stress brought about by change was anticipated and addressed with respect and humor.

Shape the Path

Once changes are formulated, and individuals and departments have bought into the changes, leaders have to shape the path to make the changes last.

The Switch authors suggest that you tweak the environment to make right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. Think about Amazon’s 1-click ordering. With one-tenth the effort of dialing a phone number, you can buy a new book or DVD. Talk about instant gratification. Amazon’s site designers have simply made a desired behavior – you spending money on their site – a little bit easier.

Here’s how Wunderlin Company associate Carol Schifman explains our approach to helping leaders shape the path for change: “Change is never easy, but the process and likelihood of success improves measurably when leaders understand how to initiate change, mobilize commitment for it, make the transition, and make the change last. We help get them to this level of understanding.”

Final words of advice from Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath: “For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture the person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed.”

Direct the Rider • Motivate the Elephant • Shape the Path

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Some Great Reads on Change

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. Chip and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Penguin Books, 2008, 2009.

Harvard Business Review on Change. A Harvard Business Review Paperback. 1998.

Change the Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies That Really Work. David M. Herold and Donald B. Fedor. Stanford Business Books, 2008.

Radical Change, the Quiet Way.Debra E. Meyerson. Harvard Business Review. October 2001.

Leading Change: An Action Plan from the World’s Foremost Expert on Business Leadership, John P. Kotter. Harvard Business School Press.

When I went to college in 1974, most women I knew still expected to marry shortly after graduation.  Many of my friends majored in nursing and teaching, the most common and “available” careers for women.  When I graduated from business school, instead of luggage and a brief case, I got a sewing machine and a vacuum cleaner! But while in school, our world began to change.  Friends switched their majors to business, or began planning to go to law school or med school.  And, most of us didn’t get married right out of school!

Then in the late seventies, we began our careers… and have ended up as CEO’s, CIO’s, GM’s, senior partners, business owners, public sector leaders, elected officials, and presidents… and that’s just my friends! We have worked in a time when social mores and expectations were shifting at an accelerating pace.

A couple of months ago, some of us were reminiscing about those days… and the idea for a newsletter emerged.  I hope you enjoy reading about and gain some in learning from our stories.

Lessons Learned:  Beyond the Glass Ceiling
Women who entered the work force in the 1960s and ‘70s – and even managed to break through the glass ceiling – may not know whether to laugh or cry at AMC’s Mad Men, set in an ad agency around 1960. If they laugh, it might be because of the truth they see in the depiction of women in the workplace. If they cry, it might be because of the truth they see …well, you get the picture.

You don’t have to turn to television for stories of behavior in the workplace of the past that would be unimaginable by today’s standards. You just need to ask the women who were there! That’s just what we did for this edition of Changing Times. Compiled here are the stories of women’s early days of their careers.  They relate, with a humorous twist, some of the challenges they faced. Then, we share gems of advice for finding success as a woman in the world of work today. And, it’s not too hard to see that many of these lessons apply to both women and men.

Looking Back
In the mid-80s I was on a team at GE that spent significant time in Japan and Korea.  My first trip there, I asked one of our Asian hosts to point me in the direction of a rest room.  Following his directions, I unknowingly walked in on all my male teammates!

As the project progressed, we developed strong bonds with our Asian counterparts. On my final visit to Japan as part of the team, we held a dinner, followed by a visit to our Japanese host’s club.  After several rounds of scotch, this fellow with whom I had spent so much time finally opened up about the question that had clearly been on his mind all along—“ Why does your husband allow you to do this?!”

I was not alone: A former manager of a firm specializing in corporate design and relocation tells the story of a phone call she thought was a mere formality to closing a deal to design a series of child-care centers. Working from home the day of the call, she failed to notice the family parrot mimicking voices in the background, but the would-be client abruptly ended the call, telling her he would not consider doing business with a woman who left a child crying in the background during the whole call.  Her explanation that the sounds were a parrot, and that her youngest “child” was a college student, did nothing to counter his position that in the South, families were revered, and he would not trust the design of his facilities to such an unfeeling “professional” woman.

One of the ways most women have succeeded is by looking for the humor in situations.  A former auditor mused that one controller asked her directly why a “gal like you is in a job like this and not home having babies.” The same man had the documents needed for the audit stored in boxes in the men’s room.  Of course, she ventured in anyway, reviewing the documents and stepping out any time someone came in to use the facility.  (That controller, by the way, ended up being convicted of embezzlement, giving her one more reason to trust her instincts.)

Other stories aren’t really tinged with humor, but rather make you cringe. A long-time IT and HR executive recalled that she was promoted to management when she was 8 ½ months pregnant, but was told that her boss’s boss at the New York headquarters of the company wanted to hold off on her raise until she returned from maternity leave – they didn’t really believe she would come back! Fortunately, her boss stood firm, saying she had earned the promotion and the pay that accompanied it.

When Everything Changed
Gail Collins’ 2009 book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, tells the story of our move from a society in 1960 where most young women grew up never seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, or engineer, and where most had to have their husband’s permission to get a credit card, through the 2008 Presidential campaign of Hilary Clinton.  The book is full of astonishing facts and stories of the early years:

• A young woman was thrown out of court in 1960 by a judge because she was wearing pants.
• A medical school dean in 1961 candidly said of women, “We don’t want them here.”
• A NASA spokesman announced that “talk of an American space woman makes me sick to my stomach.”
• The Boston Marathon was men only, because it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.”

A report on women in management by Harvard Business Review in the 1960s noted that there were so few women in higher echelons that “there is scarcely anything to study.”

Yenise Alonso and Vickie Brint, in their essay “Women in the Workplace,” note that social and economic changes enabled more women to attend college in the 60s, thereby increasing their job opportunities. According to Nancy Gibbs, Time magazine’s editor-at-large and author of Time’s 2009 special report, “The State of the American Woman,” the birth control pill, the civil rights movement, and a changing economy enabled women to start their families later and made us less tolerant of discrimination in any form, opening doors for women to go to work.

By 1998, the number of women entering the workforce had risen to 3 out of every 5 women, compared to 1 in 3 in 1950. By 2006, women represented 46% of those working, and in 2010, for the first time, women were generally reported to be at least 50% of the workforce.

How Far We’ve Come
Today, women have come so far that it seems acceptable to take a light-hearted look at gender issues. NBC News legal analyst Dan Abrams has written a compelling little book entitled Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.

Using empirical evidence and a good dose of humor, Abrams makes the serious case that polls and scientific studies have demonstrated that women have better memories, vote in higher percentages, are better at using social media, are less corrupt in politics, are better at navigating a tough economy, and are even better beer tasters!

One of Abrams’ most interesting and well-documented chapters concerns the effectiveness of women police officers, who, he notes, “didn’t even have a Police Officer Barbie to look up to until 1993.” When crime and police corruption were rocking Lima, Peru, and Volgograd, Russia, in the early 2000s, the countries came up with the same solution: hire women officers instead. A study in Los Angeles backed up their good results: Women were more trusted, played by the rules, and had less tolerance for bad behavior on the streets and among their peers.

Abrams reports that a New York Times study determined that women make more money in the stock market than men. The same newspaper reported that some Ivy League schools have been accused of stacking the deck in favor of boys to try to “balance out” higher achievement by women students.  As Abrams notes: “Wow. Accusations of affirmative action policies—for men. That kind of says it all.”

Fifty years after a wholesale move of women into the work force, many people believe that all issues of gender equity are behind us. In truth, women are still chiseling away at the glass ceiling.  As one friend put it, the cracks are bigger, but the ceiling is still there.

Issues that Remain
Progress to the very top has remained slow.  While women now earn 60% of all master’s degrees and 50% of all doctoral degrees, in 2006 only 10 Fortune 500 companies were run by women.

Pay equity also remains an issue. In 2005, women earned only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2009, according to the US Department of Labor statistics, that figure ranged from 80 cents through 93 cents, depending on the ages of the women. (Young women ages 16 to 24 achieved the higher level.) Pay inequality in part stems from the occupations most prevalent among women.  The number one job category for women in 2009 was secretaries and administrative assistants, and the numbers two and three – registered nurses and teachers.  So there hasn’t been as much change as one would like to believe.

Competing priorities at work and home remain an issue for women, but a consensus is developing that what women want and need in the workforce can be beneficial to men and to employers, as well.

With women’s participation in the world of work largely a foregone conclusion, some old issues have died out, but new ones have arisen. A recent New York Times article focused on a new set of issues facing academic women.  Those in scientific fields, still a minority, spend an inordinate amount of time, for example, sitting on committees, where they feel like the “token woman.”  In addition, author Kate Zernike notes that women feel they—and not the men on the faculty—are too frequently invited to participate in work-life balance panels, where they are expected to discuss family issues, like how much sleep they get, or what they feed their children for breakfast.

Keys to Success
Distilled down, here are some of our lessons learned—

• Focus on what you do well.  Your individuality is your best asset.
• Listen for hints and take advice.
• Trust your instincts. They are a major part of who you are.
• Act confident until you are.
• Always make friends with the HR people.
• Be able to understand and articulate how your initiatives align with the vision of the organization.
• Document and share your accomplishments and those of the people you lead.

Lessons Learned
So where do we go from here? How can we be sure the path from here continues to improve openness and opportunity?

One thing is certain: everyone benefits when the talents of women and men alike are fully utilized, and when employees are able to work with their employers on finding a balance that is beneficial to everyone. Policies that are women-friendly are also men-friendly and business-friendly.

The Last Laugh
Of all of the advice my friends had to offer to young women and to those who mentor them, perhaps the best was to be yourself – your individuality is your strongest asset. We’ll close with one last true story from a colleague:

“It was the early 1980s, and we were all wearing the ‘dress for success’ uniform – suit with oxford shirt and floppy bow tie. I had a friend at work who wore the uniform every day, and I mean EVERY DAY. She was very attractive, but also very shy. She said she couldn’t just start wearing something different, because everyone would notice. This continued until she got a job at another company. When she got her acceptance letter, I bought her a celebration present – a red knit dress with matching jacket that looked GREAT. She wore the new dress the first day on the job, and phased out the uniform. She’s now a senior executive at a Fortune 200 Company. While the killer red dress wasn’t the reason for her success, it sure helped her self-confidence!”

You, go, girl.

Asking for a raise. Reassigning responsibilities. Giving critical feedback to an underperforming employee. Saying “no” to a request. All difficult conversations. What are the hard conversations you need to have,  but don’t,  or don’t do well enough?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a book that rarely is more than an arm’s reach away. My copy is tattered, highlighted and post-it tabbed with years of use. The tools and techniques this book offers are ones I have found invaluable.

(In fact, we wrote a newsletter on the subject several years ago.)

In response to client interest, we have developed a one-day workshop that will aid you in having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success. The course deconstructs difficult conversations into manageable portions and provides practical and actionable tools to take back into the workplace or the homeplace.

We’ll start the day with examining the three conversations that are part of a difficult conversation: the “What Happened” conversation, the “Feelings” conversation, and the “What does this say about my identity” conversation. Then we’ll move forward to mapping the contribution system (wherever we are, we all contributed both good and bad), separating intention from results (“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.”), and how to shift the conversation from being about who is right, to a learning conversation about how to go forward from here.

An inaugural public workshop is being offered on Friday, November 12. Cost is $850 and includes all materials, course instruction, and lunch. Enrollment is limited.

Dedicated on-site workshops are also available and can be customized in length and topics to address the specific needs of your organization. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

And there’s another new workshop on the horizon…

Myers-Briggs Step II® Workshop Now Being Offered

Working in almost any organization today, chances are you have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. You know that you are a INFP (Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception) or an ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment) or one of the 14 other combinations of psychological type. The Wunderlin Company uses the MBTI® to help individuals, teams and entire organizations improve the way they communicate, learn and work. The basic MBTI® is designed help identify your natural patterns for accessing information, making decisions and relating to people.

But did you know that there is a second part (MBTI – Step 2) that helps people better understanding their unique expression of a particular personality type? The MBTI Step 2 takes each of the 8 scales from Step 1 and breaks them down into 5 sub-scales known as facets. This gives us not 4 ways in which we differ but 40!

The Wunderlin Company is pleased to announce a half-day workshop that focuses on providing a much more thorough analysis of the Step 2 data and its applications in terms of personal development, teams, organizations, conflict, coaching, emotional intelligence and communication.

This new workshop is being offered for the first time on Monday, August 23 from 8:00 – noon and again on Monday, October 18 and Monday, December 13. The cost of the workshop is $249 and includes the Step II diagnostic test, and course instruction.

For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

Fall Lineup Announced for Wunderlin Company Workshops
In addition to the two new workshops, we offer a whole series of workshops that mirror the services offered by The Wunderlin Company. Click on the one that will most help you polish your skills and get all the details.

Facilitating for Results
This introductory workshop provides leaders and managers with three days of experiential practice in both the skills of facilitators—asking effective questions, observing groups and making interventions—and the tools of facilitators—brainstorming, multivoting, gap analysis and others. The final day simulates a WorkOut style problem solving process.

Advanced Models for Facilitation
For the facilitator with some level of experience, our Advanced Models workshop enhances capability by working through Roger Schwartz’ Skilled Facilitator models, and introduces more sophisticated group processes such as Appreciative inquiry and Open Spaces and working on more complex team interventions. Advanced Models also customizes to the specific needs and requests of workshop participants with plenty of time for problem solving, Q&A and practice sharing with our very experienced and skilled faculty.

Coaching as a Leadership Skill

Often at the end of a coaching process, our clients will see the value in cascading the approaches of the one-on-one coaching process to a broader population of leaders. Coaching as Leadership Skill provides over two days the practice required to significantly improve manager’s effectiveness in communicating with and developing their associates.

Customized Leadership Development
We have also customized this workshop for several clients to specifically support their leadership development needs.

Effective Meetings
We all spend so much time in meetings… and almost universally find the majority of meetings to be a poor use of time. This half day workshop provides nine practical and immediately applicable practices for improving meeting effectiveness.

Discover Your Strengths and Put Them to Work
Building on Marcus Buckingham’s book Now Discover Your Strengths, this team building workshop enables teams to look at their collective and individual strengths and reorient both their work allocation and leadership development.

We offer these workshops both in-house and by subscription. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

Here’s the catch: in order to improve, we need to receive candid and timely feedback about our performance.  And, to the point of this enews, we need to give candid and timely feedback to the people who work for us.

So, why don’t we do it? What’s YOUR excuse? Why don’t YOU give your people the constructive (and sometimes difficult) feedback they need to get better at their jobs? I don’t mean to single YOU out; I run into this issue with almost all my clients!  Without singling anyone out, this is an issue I encounter consistently.  I’m even guilty. A number of years ago, a TWC team member I hired to help me with a long and complicated project confronted me with this feedback: “Karen, I’m worried that if you ever had negative feedback to give me, I would just never hear from you again.” And he was correct! When members of my team didn’t perform to expectations, my tendency was just not to use them on the next project – or maybe ever again. Doug’s feedback was a turning point for me as a leader. I learned that the folks who work with me want to know what they can do to improve their results. As a result, I’m constantly working to provide constructive feedback to them.

I have my own theories about what keeps people from giving robust feedback, but was curious to see what other professionals had to say. I posted the following question to the online business community of LinkedIn:

Why do you think it is so hard for managers and leaders
to give their people the constructive (and sometimes difficult) feedback they need to get better at their jobs?

I heard an earful! My thanks to all who responded so eloquently. The majority of comments fell into one of the following six excuses (oops, I meant categories):

• We don’t know how.
• We wait too long.
• We don’t want to be hurtful.
• We lose focus on why feedback is important.
• We are fearful.
• We are not measured on it.

Here’s a slightly edited sample of the responses, categorized by excuse, along with ideas for overcoming them.

EXCUSE 1: We don’t know how.
“Managers do not have the skills and conversation structure for giving feedback.” – Tony Latimer, master executive coach, co-founder Horseplay Asia, training director at Asia Coach Institute, president ICF Singapore

Advice
Keep your feedback fact-based. “In order to be truly constructive, especially when it’s tough, the feedback must be as fact-based and as non-judgmental as possible. Numbers work best, and if you haven’t set measurable goals and tracked them effectively, you’re going to have a hard time giving fact-based numerical feedback.” – Tom O’Dea, owner, WSI Internet Marketing

Feedback is not about forms. A Fast Company article puts it this way: “Anyone who equates delivering feedback with filling out forms has lost the battle for smart appraisal before it’s begun.” Consultant Kelly Allen is quoted in the article saying: “If you use forms as the basis for meetings about performance you change only one thing – what might have been a natural, helpful conversation into an awkward, anxious inspection.”

Develop your skills as a coach. Today’s leaders need strong coaching skills if they are to achieve the necessary business results and support their employees’ growth into tomorrow’s leaders. Consider taking a coaching workshop so that you will know how to give really good feedback to your employees.

EXCUSE 2: We wait too long.
“Some of the hesitation to give timely feedback can be attributed to the very nature of an “annual performance evaluation” exercise which encourages you to save up these constructive tidbits to make good use of the time set aside at the end of the year. Having been a part of very well-led and very poorly-led teams, an environment that fosters timely and constructive feedback is certainly a common trait among the good ones.” – T.J. Graven, VP, Director of Business Solutions and Technology at Brown-Forman Corporation

Advice
Don’t delay. Practice being intentional about providing feedback immediately or nearly immediately.  Start with one direct report, one instance, and try to formulate and deliver the feedback within 24 hours.  A coaching client I am working with now has found that, so far, the feedback she agonized over delivering is, in fact well-received.  She has learned that folks do want to know how they can get better results.

“A working relationship is like any kind of personal relationship. Open, timely and honest communication makes all the difference in the world.” – Jeff Unger, owner, Jeff Unger and Associates, Inc. and management consulting consultant

Okay, delay sometimes.  If you are providing feedback around an emotionally charged event, wait a day or two. “Sometimes you’re so emotional that it makes sense to wait,” advises Rick Maurer, author of Feedback Toolkit. “Let your gut be your guide.” And find an appropriate time and place. Don’t give important feedback,” advises Maurer, in the hallway.”

Create just-in-time feedback. The Fast Company article mentioned above challenges managers to build feedback into routine meetings and memos. The article encourages managers to learn to deliver feedback through email, voice mail, and short notes. “If we really want a just-in-time workforce,” argues business author Bruce Tulgan, “we have to create just-in-time feedback.”

EXCUSE 3: We don’t want to be hurtful. Or, put another way: it is nice to be nice.
“I believe it [reluctance to give feedback] primarily may be due to our society’s current emphasis on being “positive” and not doing anything to harm others’ self esteem.” – Philip Eschels, member at Greenebaum Doll & MacDonald

This is an excuse that resonates with me personally.  What if the feedback provided is injurious?  What if the receiver is angry?  Anecdotally, this is the most frequently voiced concern in coaching sessions with clients.

Advice
Being direct isn’t being mean. In fact, it is one of the kindest things you can do for your employees. State the positive outcome you want to see, being as descriptive as possible. Don’t forget to communicate that you are “on their side.”  And then, tell that person the news—your feedback in a direct AND caring fashion.

Make feedback more acceptable. A recent Harvard Business Review article, entitled “A Better Way to Deliver Bad News” notes that people tend to be more willing to accept feedback when they have the feeling that:

• The person offering the feedback is reliable and has good intentions toward them.
• The feedback development process is fair – that is, the person giving the feedback collects all relevant information; allows the subordinate to clarify and explain matters; considers the subordinate’s opinions; and applies consistent standards when delivering criticism.
• The feedback communication process is fair – that is, the person offering feedback pays careful attention to the subordinate’s ideas; shows respect for the subordinate; and supports the subordinate despite their disagreements.

Partner for improvement. “Genuinely work with your employees to see how you might help them improve, either through your own actions, or training, or other resources in the organization.” – Heather Stagl, Owner and Leadership Coach at Enclaria Leadership

EXCUSE 4: We lose focus on why feedback is important.
“I believe that the person delivering the feedback has to ground themselves on why the feedback needs to be given: 1) to help the individual grow and 2) to be a good steward of the organization. When I have to deliver tough feedback, it helps me tremendously to remind myself that I am not doing the individual a favor if I withhold important, though difficult, feedback. I would also not be serving my employer properly if I don’t seek to improve the performance of the organization’s resources.” – Raul Pino, technology and strategy executive at CARE

Advice
It is your job to give feedback. Giving feedback to your employees is essential to grow and develop and to build successful organizations. With coaching clients, we frequently create a “coaching grid” that lists each direct report and one or two specific development needs for each person.  Keeping the grid foremost in their daily work then greatly increases leaders’ likelihood of taking advantage of their daily interactions with employees to focus on their improvement and deliver needed performance feedback.

EXCUSE 5:  We are fearful.
“For some, it may be fear of potential conflict, for others maybe fear of not being liked or fear of damaging a relationship that they value.” – Bo Carrington, senior consultant at The Hayes Group International

One reason I believe managers are reluctant to give hard, but constructive feedback, is fear – fear of how the feedback will be received by the employee (i.e., they might be mad, cry, etc.) and fear of how they, the manager, will be perceived. This fear often stems from a lack of practice in effective coaching.” – Lynette Green, interactive project manager at Brown-Forman Corporation

“Even managers and leaders want to be liked – at least most do. And difficult feedback doesn’t appear to go hand-in-hand with being liked. Ironically, well prepared and delivered feedback could be the most valuable contribution a manager can make to an employee’s development.” – Tom O’Dea

Advice
Make feedback an expected and routine part of your supervisory style. The more often you give feedback, the easier it becomes to do – and the easier it is for an employee to respond to. Remember employees are starving for feedback and recognition. They want to be challenged and they want to know how they are doing. If you regularly compliment accomplishments and identify problem areas with the intent to teach, rather than punish, feedback will become an expected and welcomed part of your style.

EXCUSE 6: We are not measured on it.
“I have worked within organizations where leaders were hesitant to give critical feedback because their performance was graded partially (but significantly) on how well their employees ‘liked’ them.” – Bo Carrington

“I believe the discussions fail to take place when a manager is not being appropriately measured and held accountable by his/her own manager. – David Metzger, sourcing at GE Consumer & Industrial

Advice
Measure your managers for how well they develop their employees. Along with metrics around hard business deliverables, managers should also be measured on soft deliverables: team morale, team member development and promotion, succession planning, conflict resolution. We focus on what we’re being measured on.” – David Metzger

So, think about it. What is your excuse? What is your feedback phobia? And what are you going to do about it? Please share your thoughts/action plans with us.

Many thanks to my connections on LinkedIn who provided important and helpful comments for this newsletter!

• What’s the best advice you ever got?

Mayor of New York City, founder of Bloomberg LP

“I can’t remember who told me this, but I certainly didn’t grow up knowing it, so I must have gotten this advice at Salomon Brothers in the 1970s. The advice was, first, always ask for the order, and second, when the customer says yes, stop talking…” Fortune Magazine, May 12, 2008

On a long flight recently, I was catching up on some reading. An article in Fortune’s May 12 issue got my attention: The Best Advice I Ever Got, featuring responses from 19 very successful people including Larry Page, the founder of Google, Tina Fey, Gen. David Petraeus, and Robert Iger, CEO of Disney. (Click on the article name to read all 19 pieces of advice.)

And it got me thinking about the best advice I had ever gotten…

From Rollie Tillman at University of North Carolina’s Business School
“Separate the decision of what to do from how to pay for it.”

So frequently in strategic planning sessions with clients or when making personal decisions, the tendency is to go immediately to the shortage of current resources. This sage advice from my professor has frequently helped facilitate first the conversation about “What is the right action to take here?; What do we really want?; What is our vision for our best future?” Then, armed with a compelling view of what we want, we can begin to think about how to achieve it, and how to pay for it.

From another business school professor
Professor Rader at the Darden School taught Rader’s Rules and they had a profound impact on my husband, David. He has often shared them with me and the one I have found most useful is: “Get the facts or the facts will get you.” Harold Geneen, CEO of ITT called this “shaking the facts”. He told the story of buying a tract of land in Canada because of the plentiful and high quality lumber. After purchasing the land, someone finally went to see the land… and learned that the trees were all very small and thin because of the short growing season, and were many many years from being harvested. A graphic example of the need to verify the facts!

So often a conversation or problem-solving session roams from opinion to opinion. Those who know me know I am not always right, and I am rarely in doubt! Life has taught me to look for the facts in a situation and to base my decisions on them. If ignored, the facts have this incredible way of showing up when my actions contradict them.

From my Aunt Alean
“Don’t expect anyone to take care of your financial needs except you.”

My aunt had a difficult life as a single parent in the 1960’s. She and my three cousins even had to come live in our three bedroom house for a time – and it already had seven people in it! Her determination to provide for her girls when life threw her some serious curve balls helped me see the value of being able to take care of oneself.

It was the same important lesson that Maria Shriver shares in her book: Ten Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Went Out in the World.This short book is based on a commencement speech she gave at the College of the Holy Cross. It is full of wisdom and insight for young folks beginning their careers. Now, how do we transmit that value to our children? It is a question that has real meaning as our children, Julie and Ed, become young adults.

So, what is the best advice you ever got? Please share it here by hitting the comment button… we’ll compile all the responses and share them later this summer!

What I have come to know is that storytelling, done appropriately, is the key to catalyzing change. It doesn’t replace analytical thinking; it supplements it by enabling one to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. The right story can communicate complicated change ideas while generating momentum toward rapid implementation. The right story can help an organization reinvent itself by getting into the minds of individuals and affecting how they think, wonder, agonize, and dream about themselves and their organization. It can help them see things in a different light and change behavior. Simply put, a powerful story can transform individuals and organizations. It can drive commitment and action.

This issue is devoted to the art and craft of storytelling in the business environment. Settle in and journey along with us as we explore this powerful tool for managing change.

Craft the Right Kind of Story to Accomplish Your Business Goal

Different kinds of stories achieve different results. Crafted and told properly, a story can spark action, communicate who you are, transmit values, foster collaboration, tame the grapevine, share knowledge, or lead people into the future.

Choosing the right narrative form allows you to accomplish your business goal. Business author Stephen Denning explains how to pick your story carefully to match it to your business situation. Denning advocates that the ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill.

To determine which kind of story to tell, ask yourself:

• What do I want my listeners to FEEL after they hear my story?
• What do I want them to REMEMBER from my story?
• What do I want them to BELIEVE as a result of hearing my story?

Are You a Good Listener to Other People’s Stories?

Being a good listener to other people’s stories has a big payoff.

First of all, people who are good storytellers learned how to tell stories by listening to others and picking up storytelling skills from them. It may have been a parent telling you a bedtime story, or it may have been a teacher who made the subject come alive through storytelling, or perhaps it was a manager who achieved remarkable results through the stories she told. But from each you can learn what storytelling techniques really work and then you can weave them into your storytelling efforts.

Secondly, by being a good story listener, you can learn a great deal about the people and environment around you. Business guru Tom Peters has long advocated “management by wandering around” as an effective leadership tool. It works because you hear stories as you wander. By listening to the stories of your employees and customers you can uncover problems and solutions that you may never have otherwise known existed. And only by knowing about them, can you respond.

In her book Corporate Legends & Lore, Peg Neuhauser reminds us that “storytelling is a two-way street that requires telling and listening to forge strong relationships with lasting results.”

Questions to Consider for Getting Stories Started in Your Organization

Whether you are the supervisor of a work team or the CEO of a large company, storytelling can be one of your most effective management tools. Even if you are not an experienced storyteller, your job is to continually talk about and emphasize the key values and goals of your organization. If you are relentless in this effort, you will find that members of your organization will take this “material” and fashion their own stories to exemplify these key values. In her book, Corporate Legends & Lore, Peg C. Neuhauser poses six questions to consider for getting stories started within your organization:

• What are the two or three key ideas or themes about this business that the people who work in this organization associate with me?
• When and where can you repeatedly bring up these themes so that everyone knows they are on your mind all the time?
• What stories are they already telling that have these themes?
• How much time do you spend listening to other people in your organization, at all levels, tell their stories?
• When and where could you repeat stories you have heard that represent the themes you want to encourage? Or, how could you get other people to repeat these stories?

Using Storytelling to Determine: What does Your Organization’s Future Look Like?

Here’s a way that we use storytelling techniques when working with organizations to envision their future.

Working with a group, we tell them: “It is January 2010 and you have just learned that your organization will be featured in Fortune magazine’s June edition. In addition to a cover photo, the magazine will include a full feature on your organization. The reason your organization was selected is its outstanding success over the last five years.” We then ask them:

• What/who is on the cover of the magazine? Draw it on a flip chart.
• What is the title of the article?
• Please write an outline of the article. Be sure to include quotes from your customers, professional staff and employees, industry experts, and competitors. Describe the factors that have contributed to your outstanding success. Note the barriers that had to be overcome.

When each individual is done with this exercise, we have them exchange stories with other members of the group and then identify what the stories had in common and what was unique among them. Later they share their collective story with the whole group and then work to develop a common vision from the stories.

A Gatherer of Stories

by Judy Futch, associate of The Wunderlin Company
I’m a gardener. I have a variety of baskets and crates and two wheelbarrows to carry produce, weeds, tools, rocks, and plants. If I go into my garden and find too many ripe tomatoes that I can’t hand carry, I improvise and use the tail from my workshirt as a carrying sling.

Stories are like my carrying devices – they hold the richness of people’s experiences, their beliefs, values, hopes, and dreams and also dark-side fears and blocks. Stories operate on two levels – the level of the story text and the level of the subconscious – where the images conjured up in the telling simmer and mix. Our thinking mind is engaged answering the questions who did it or how did that happen? and our imagination and intuitive intelligence is awakened and engaged making connections, enlarging our ideas, stretching our boundaries, and stepping outside our current realms of possibilities.

Everyone is a storyteller – a weaver of their experience. If we operate from the assumptions that people in organizations are rich with insights and understandings to share about their positive perspective of the organization, and that by asking questions the organization begins to shift in the direction of the inquiry, then it makes sense to ask our organizational “partners”:

• What are the best times that you have had at our organization – a time that you felt most alive, involved, or excited about your contribution?
• What do you value deeply about yourself, your work, and our organization?
• What do you think is at the core of this organization – what would make this organization more vital than it currently is?
• What in our organization gives you confidence for the future?
• If a genie emerged from a bottle and gave you three wishes for this organization, what would they be?

The stories that emerge from the simple asking of these questions can be “mined” by listening appreciatively for the words, phrases, ideas, and emotions and truly hearing the responses. This approach begins the appreciative inquiry process which seeks to understand the forces within an organization that encourage vitality. EPA, Roadway Express, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, University of Kentucky Hospital, and ANZ Bank (Australia’s largest bank) all have embarked on appreciative inquiry processes to align their organizations and to accelerate whole system changes.

We have included a number of resources you may want to explore on our website. Visit www.wunderlin.com to check our favorites on this subject. Or step out into your hallway and ask a colleague for a story about a time when they felt “most excited about their involvement at your workplace.” Be that gatherer of stories! “Stories are like my carrying devices – they hold the richness of people’s experiences, their beliefs, values, hopes, and dreams and also dark-side fears and blocks.”

“Let’s Count Motion Instead of Doors”

In one of the first Workouts at GE Appliances we had a team of employees working on a number of refrigeration factory productivity issues. One of those issues was the factory’s inability to consistently manufacture the same number of refrigerator cases as doors. Numerous analyses and continuous improvement projects had been initiated in this highly automated plant to address the issue; none successfully. At the report out on the last day, a manufacturing engineer stood up to begin presenting an idea. Soon, a member of the team, a union member who actually worked on the line, stood up and said, “Here, let me tell them what’s really going on.” He went on to recount how he worked downstream from the paint booth. Because of his quality circle training, he knew that a door with a drip, crack, or imperfection should not go to the customer. So he would pull those doors to be reworked. Trouble was, right past him was an electronic eye that counted motion, not doors—so the system didn’t know that hook was empty! This fellow’s idea was, “Let’s start counting doors instead of motion.”

This story so graphically demonstrated many of the issues we were struggling with to transform the organization—it got told and retold.

Managing by Storying Around

The story above comes from Karen’s experience at GE. In his book, Managing by Storying Around: An New Method of Leadership , author David Armstrong offers a collection of 75 stories from his experience running a family business. Each of Armstrong’s stories has a moral. They work for him because he “invests a bit of his soul in each of these small sagas.” It makes for good reading-and makes a good case for the power of storytelling within your organization!

Emotional intelligence refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions in ourselves and in our relationships. Simply put, emotional intelligence is the intelligent use of emotions. It encompasses maturity, emotional health, and “grownupness.” You intentionally make your emotions work for you by using them to help guide your behavior and thinking in ways that enhance your results.

For leaders, emotional intelligence accounts for almost 90 percent of what sets “stars” apart from the mediocre. And organizations that build emotional intelligence in groups are the ones that are vital and dynamic today – and will remain so in the future.

Unlike IQ, EI can be developed and dramatically increased at any age. But boosting your EI takes extensive practice, feedback, and personal enthusiasm for making the change. Are you up to the challenge?

[audio:http://www.wunderlin.com/audio/changingtimes8.mp3]

Using a Mix of Leadership Styles Yields Positive Results

Emotionally smart leaders know that being flexible with their leadership styles pays big dividends. They know that instead of choosing the style that best suits their temperament, they adopt the style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation.

The most successful leaders have strengths in the following emotional intelligence competencies:

• self-awareness
• self-management
• empathy
• and social skill.

Researchers have identified six basic styles of leadership; each makes use of these EI competencies in different combinations. The leadership style that is chosen in any given situation dramatically affects the way that managers motivate direct reports, gather and use information, make decisions, manage change initiatives and handle crises.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled: Leadership That Gets Results, author Daniel Goleman presents the six leadership styles and suggests situations in which they are effective and those in which they are likely to backfire. Here’s a brief overview of how Goleman describes the styles:

1. The coercive style. This “Do what I say” approach can be very effective in a turn-around situations, a natural disaster, or when working with problem employees. But in most situations, coercive leadership inhibits the organization’s flexibility and dampens employees’ motivation. This style demands immediate compliance.

2. The authoritative style. An authoritative leader takes a “come with me” approach: she states the overall goal but gives people the freedom to choose their own means of achieving it. This style works especially well when a business is adrift. It is less effective when the leader is working with a team of experts who are more experienced than he is. This style mobilizes people toward a vision.

3. The affiliative style. The hallmark of the affiliative leader is a “people come first” attitude. This style is particularly useful for building team harmony or increasing morale. But its exclusive focus on praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected. Also affiliative leaders rarely offer advice, which often leaves employees in a quandary. This style tends to heal rifts in a team or motivate people during stressful circumstances.

4. The democratic style. By giving workers a voice in decisions, democratic leaders build organizational flexibility and responsibility and help generate fresh ideas. But sometimes the price is endless meetings and confused employees who feel leaderless. It is best used to build buy-in or consensus, or to get input from valuable employees.

5. The pacesetting style. A leader who sets high performance standards and exemplifies them himself has a very positive impact on employees who are self-motivated and highly competent. But other employees tend to feel overwhelmed by such a leader’s demands for excellence — and to resent his tendency to take over a situation.

6. The coaching style. This style focuses more on personal development than on immediate work-related tasks. It works to develop people for the future. It works well when employees are already aware of their weaknesses and want to improve, but not when they are resistant to changing their ways.

Goleman tells us, “The more styles a leader masters, the better.” Being able to switch among the styles as conditions dictate, “creates the best organizational climate and optimizes performance.” While most leaders have a predominate style, they need to work to expand their style repertories. They can do so by first understanding which emotional intelligence competencies underlie the leadership styles they are lacking, and then by working to increase develop those competencies through measurement, practice and feedback.

EI Leadership Dimensions Build Upon Each Other

Work Without Emotion is Like an Opera Without Music

In his book, Primal Leadership Daniel Goleman outlines the four leadership dimensions of emotional intelligence. He contends that the dimensions build upon one another. For example, self-awareness is crucial for self-management; self-management, in turn, is crucial for success in terms of social awareness and relationship management. As Goleman points out: “None of us is perfect on this scale; we inevitably have a profile of strengths and limits….the ingredients for outstanding performance require only that we have strengths in a given number of these competencies….and that our strengths be spread across all four of the areas of emotional intelligence.” While he tells us there are many paths to excellence, in general, leaders who exhibit sensitivity to the range of needs and individual differences in their organizations get the best performance results.

Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that are based on these competencies. Our emotional competence measures how much of that potential we have translated into on-the-job capabilities. As Goleman explains it: “Being good at serving customers is an emotional competence based on empathy. Likewise, trustworthiness is a competence based on self-regulation, or handing impulses and emotions well. Both customer service and trustworthiness are competencies that can make people outstanding in their work.” He goes on to explain that “Simply being high in emotional intelligence does not guarantee a person will have learned the emotional competencies that matter for work; it means only that they have excellent potential to learn them.”

The foundation of Goleman’s model is self-awareness. Self-aware people recognize their emotions and their effects on others. The second tier, self-management, demands knowing one’s inner resources, abilities, and limits. The third and fourth tier deal with “People Skills.” Each tier builds on the one below it.

Emotional Intelligence in Action

From Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman: “The aptitudes you need to succeed start with intellectual horsepower – but people need emotional competence, too, to get the full potential of their talents. The reason we don’t get people’s full potential is emotional incompetence.”

“If you are part of a management team, you need to consider whether your organization fosters these [EI] competencies or discourages them. To the degree your organizational climate nourishes these competencies, your organization will be more effective and productive. You will maximize your group’s intelligence, the synergistic interaction of every person’s best talents.”

From a Harvard Business Review article entitled: Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance, by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee:

“Emotional intelligence travels through an organization like electricity over telephone wires. Depressed, ruthless bosses create toxic organizations filled with negative underachievers. But if you’re an upbeat, inspirational leader, you cultivate positive employees who embrace and surmount even the toughest challenges . Managing for financial results, then, begins with the leader managing his inner life so that the right emotional and behavior chain reaction occurs.”

From The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace by Cary Cherniss and Daniel Goleman:

“The higher one’s position in an organization, the more important EI is; EI accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the success of organizational leaders.”

And, finally, from the Harvard Business Review article entitled Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff:

“Group emotional intelligence is about the small acts that make a big difference. It is not about a team member working all night to meet a deadline; it is about saying thank you for doing so. It is not about in-depth discussion of ideas; it is about asking a quiet member for his thoughts. It is not about harmony, lack of tension, and all members liking each other; it is about acknowledging when harmony is false, tension is unexpressed, and treating others with respect.”

Emotional Competencies: Guidelines for Learning

The good news is that emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, can be improved throughout life. Our emotional intelligence tends to increase as we learn to be more aware of our moods and the moods of others, to handle distressing emotions better, to listen and empathize – in short, as we become more mature.

Developing emotional intelligence differs from intellectual learning in fundamental ways. It requires developing new behaviors – and this takes practice over time. Intellectual learning can take place in a classroom; emotional intelligence learning takes place best in life and over an extended period of time. Nevertheless, teaching emotional competencies can be accomplished using the following guidelines, which are offered by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, a coalition of researchers and practitioners from business school, the federal government, consulting firms, and corporations.

• Assess the job. Training should focus on the competencies needed most for excellence in a given job or role.
• Assess the individual. The individual’s profile of strengths and limitations should be assessed to identify what needs improving.
• Deliver assessments with care. Feedback on a person’s strengths and weaknesses carries an emotional charge.
• Gauge readiness. People are at different levels of readiness.
• Motivate. People learn to the degree they are motivated – for example, by realizing that a competence is important to doing their job well – and making the competence a personal goal for change.
• Make change self-directed. When people direct their learning program, tailoring it to their needs, circumstances, and motivation, learning is more effective.
• Focus on clear, manageable goals. People need to understand the competence and the steps needed to improve it.
• Prevent relapse. Habits change slowly. Relapses and slips need not signal defeat.
• Give performance feedback. Ongoing feedback encourages and helps direct change.
• Encourage practice. Lasting change requires sustained practice both on and off the job.
• Arrange support. Like-minded people who are also trying to make similar changes can offer crucial ongoing support.
• Provide models. High status, highly effective people who embody the competence can be models who inspire change.
• Encourage. Change will be greater if the organization’s environment supports the change, values the competence, and offers a safe atmosphere for experimentation.
• Reinforce change. People need recognition – to feel their change efforts matter.
• Evaluate. Establish ways to evaluate the development effort to see if it has lasting effects.

These guidelines appear in Daniel Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence book and on The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations web site: www.eiconsortium.org.

Build the Emotional Intelligence of Teams and Boost Their Overall Performance

Just like individuals, the most effective teams are emotionally intelligent ones. And like individuals, emotional intelligence can be built within teams. A team’s EI isn’t simply the sum of its members’ EI; rather, it comes from norms that support awareness and regulation of emotions both within and outside the team. Teams with a high EI build the foundation for true collaboration and cooperation – enabling the members to feel that they work better together than individually and enabling them to boost their overall performance.

To build EI within a group, the members must be aware of and constructively regulate the emotions of the individual team members, the whole group, and other key groups with whom it interacts. They can do so by establishing EI norms – rules for behavior. For example, a group’s norm for regulating the emotions of individual team members might be: “to encourage all group members to share their perspectives before making key decisions.” A norm for the whole group might be: “Regularly assess the group’s strengths, weaknesses, and modes of interaction.” And one for other key groups might be: “Designate team members as liaisons to key outside constituencies.”

These norms serve to build emotional capacity and influence emotions in constructive ways. The norms outline the attitudes and behaviors that eventually become habits.

They serve to support behaviors for building trust, group identity, and a belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart. At the heart of these behaviors are emotions.

A group’s emotional intelligence is not about learning to suppress emotions; rather, it’s about bringing emotions deliberately to the surface and understanding how they affect the team’s work. It is also about building relationships that strengthen the team’s ability to face challenges.

Intrigued by EI? Want to Learn More?

The Wunderlin Company has been using this body of work on emotional intelligence for a number of years with our clients. It provides a springboard for helping our clients understand how their emotions impact their own success and those with whom they work – staff, suppliers, and clients.

We have a number of resources that we use extensively with our work on this subject. Take a look at the books on our “bookshelf” for further learning about this essential subject:

Boyatzis, Richard, Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee. 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Cherniss, Cary and Daniel Goleman. 2001. The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Goleman, Daniel. 1998. Working with Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books.

Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books.

Pearman, Roger R. 2002. Introduction to Type and Emotional Intelligence, Palo Alto: CPPI, Inc.

Weisinger, Hendrie, Ph.D. 1998. Emotional Intelligence at Work, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

We also recommend the following articles from The Harvard Business Review:

Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance (Product #8269).

Leadership That Gets Results (Product #4487).

Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups.

And check out this website:

The web site for The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (www.eiconsortium.org) is packed with research findings including model programs, business cases for EI, practice guidelines, and downloadable reports.

And finally, The Wunderlin Company is so committed to integrating knowledge of EI into our work that we cover it extensively in all our workshops. For more information visit: www.wunderlin.com/workshops.

Listen to the Voices

“I say we fight like hell to do it our way.”

“I’m finally getting it. We have been sitting here thinking it really was business as usual, and a huge wave is about to hit us.”

“It’s total chaos. No one knows what to do; people aren’t coming to work. It varies by group AND by leadership styles within the groups.”

“I really want out of this. It is becoming a whirlpool sucking out all of my energy.”

These are real “employee voices” during a recent and quite dramatic change in an organization.

When leaders are asked: “What do you want your people to do differently to implement this change effort?” or “How do you want your employees to think differently?” they most often respond: “They will figure that out for themselves. These are smart people.”

The problem is people don’t figure it out. People will do the old things with more effort and intensity early in any major change because they are convinced that if they can simply make the old ways work better, they will be able to avoid, or at least delay, the need for making any changes. Does this ring true for your organization?

Listen to what your employees’ are saying. Use them as a gauge to determine if, indeed, they will figure it out for themselves. Then do not shy away — lead the change.

Laying the Groundwork for Change

To succeed through change, leaders are responsible for laying the groundwork. Here are five questions to help you begin thinking about what you have to do to make any change succeed in your organization:

1. Does everyone clearly understand the outcomes this change is trying to accomplish?
2. Does each department, functional group and team collectively understand what they have to do for this change to succeed in their specific area?
3. Do I know where the resistance is, why, and have a plan to address it? (This takes time!)
4. Do all appropriate individuals have the right channels of communication for information to come in and go out, to ensure or check for progress?
5. Does the formal and informal reward system clearly reinforce and support these new behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, etc.?

If you can answer yes to these five questions, people in your organization are likely to begin to make the changes work. Change is a process. This is just the beginning.

Change: It’s a Process that Takes Time and Effort

Implementing change is a process that takes concerted time and effort – time and effort that seems preciously limited. Research shows that most leaders underestimate the magnitude of the change they plan, the level of resistance they will encounter, and the amount of time required to implement their planned change, and overestimate their level of clarity regarding the kind of (organizational as well as individual) change required.

So what can you do to move your people towards making the change? Here are a number of ways to help individuals through the process.

• Legitimize the expression of feelings
• Listen
• Target a few quick wins
• Recognize new performance
• Preserve employee influence wherever possible
• Strategize and plan for the future
• Clarify roles and responsibilities
• Involve individuals in the decision-making process where possible
• Give as much clear direction as possible — daily
• Communicate frequently
• Focus people on the future
• Continue to recognize anxieties that exist

Leading a Change Effort

The Wunderlin Company is committed to helping organizations manage and implement change. We help organizations implement new structures, leadership development processes, succession planning and organization-wide initiatives.

We also recognize that leading a change effort requires a cadre of managers who can inspire, motivate and lead employees so that they perform to the best of their abilities. In other words, it requires managers who are masterful coaches and facilitators. The Wunderlin Company offers both a Coaching Workshop and Facilitation one. To find out more, click on http://www.wunderlin.com/workshops.htm#coaching for the Coaching Workshop and on http://www.wunderlin.com/workshops.htm#facilitator for the Facilitation Workshop.

And From Our Bookshelf

Here are some of our favorite books to help you better understand the process of implementing change within your organization:

Leading Change by John P. Kotter.

The Heart of Change by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen.

The Change Monster by Jeanie Daniel Duck.

Best Practices in Oganizational Development and Change edited by Louis Carter, David Giber and Marshall Goldsmith.

Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination by Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr.

Leading Change, Overcoming Chaos: A Seven Stage Process for Making Change Succeed in Your Organization by Michael L. Heifetz

Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations by Richard H. Axelrod

The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block

Managing at the Speed of Change by Daryl R. Conner

Conquering Organizational Change: How to Succeed Where Most Companies Fail by Pierre Mourier and Martin Smith

Managing Transitions by William Bridges

Cracking the Code of Change by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria

The Real Reason People Won’t Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John Kotter

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