By now you've undoubtedly heard about Steven Slater's bad day at work. The Jet Blue flight attendant was working a capacity-filled flight on the Pittsburgh to New York route recently. A passenger, while attempting to squeeze a suitcase into an overhead compartment, supposedly banged Slater in the head with it. Then she added insult to injury, literally: in lieu of an apology, she told him off.


Once the plane landed in New York, a fed-up Slater responded to the woman with his own disparaging remarks – via the craft's public address system. He then deployed the plane's emergency evacuation chute and, with his luggage in hand, slid into unemployment and the public spotlight. He was later arrested for his theatrics.


While conflicting accounts of the events continue to surface, one thing is certain: Slater picked a dramatic way to quit his job. Since then, Slater has been heralded as a hero by frustrated working stiffs who envy his gumption. He recently hired a well-known publicist to help him capitalize on his newfound fame, and there is talk of a reality television show.


But is Slater really a hero? Not when you consider how he endangered his co-workers on the tarmac by unexpectedly deploying the inflatable slide. Nor when you factor in the tens of thousands of dollars Jet Blue had to pay to replace the chute. And certainly not when you think about the copycats in companies everywhere who are dreaming up new flamboyant – and costly – ways to resign.


No, Slater is not a hero for "pulling the chute" on his career. He's just a disgruntled employee who caved under pressure and blamed the world for his frustration.


As it turns out, you can find heroes at an airport near you. They are the men and women of the U.S. armed forces who are returning home this month after completing combat missions in Iraq. But, unlike Slater, these heroes are not holding news conferences or securing press agents. They're coming home without fanfare to a public that seems more fascinated by the exploits of a spoiled flight attendant than with the sacrifices of these brave soldiers. And shame on us for that.

Labels: leadership, values

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Armando Galarraga had retired twenty-six straight batters and was a single out away from pitching a perfect game. You undoubtedly know what happened next. Umpire Jim Joyce called a clearly out runner safe at first base, denying Galarraga his rightful place in baseball history. Tyler Kepner of The New York Times called it "easily the most egregious blown call in baseball over the last 25 years." After watching a replay later, Joyce admitted his mistake and apologized to Galarraga.

On the following day, after morning news programs reported the incident, a growing number of disconcerted Americans, feeling deprived of something special in their own sense, waited to see if a leader would step forward to make things right. That person, as it turns out, would have been Bud Selig. As Major League Baseball commissioner, Selig alone possesses the power to overturn rulings on the field.

Selig said no.

In the greater scheme of things, of course, this was just a baseball game. And while perfect games are historically rare (only twenty in MLB's entire history), Galarraga's would have been the third this year. But to a nation increasingly weary from stories about corporate corruption, government bailouts, and oil spills, Selig's refusal to overrule Joyce's call was another leadership disappointment in a long list of recent ones.

After all, if baseball's top boss won't correct a blatant injustice in America's favorite pastime, what chance do we have of finding someone who will restore our faith in business leaders anytime soon?

While we should all be inspired by the graciousness both Galarraga and Joyce displayed following the episode, there is still a lingering letdown: another leader struck out in the moment of truth.

Labels: business, leadership, values

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Last week, two former top-ranking Citigroup officials apologized on Capitol Hill for taking the banking giant to the brink of extinction. Former CEO Charles Prince and ex-board member Robert Rubin offered repentance to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Prince ran the company from 2003 through 2007. During much of his watch, Citigroup ran up billions of dollars in losses, eventually causing the U.S. government to spend $45 billion to prevent its collapse. "I'm sorry," said Prince, "that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us."

For his part, Rubin offered regrets but refused to accept responsibility for the day-to-day operations that created the Citigroup debacle. Like Prince, he indicated that the entire banking industry shared the blame, saying that nearly everyone "missed the powerful combination of forces at work and the serious possibility of a massive crisis."

But committee chair Phil Angelides wasn't willing to let the two off the hook so easily. As Angelides put it, "You were either pulling the levers or asleep at the switch."

Thanks for the apology, guys. I hope you're not offended if your former employees, customers, and stockholders don't forgive you immediately. 

Labels: business, credibility, ethics, integrity, leadership, trust, values

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According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the nation's largest banks are still employing the same dangerous business practices that caused the recent financial crisis. Only now, they're trying harder to cover their tracks.  

Attempting to protect their stock prices and credit ratings, big banks have been temporarily lowering the debt levels they use to fund securities trades. For the past five quarters, institutions including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, lowered their debt levels an average of 42 percent just before releasing financial results to the public. Then, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, those banks promptly restored their risky debt levels in successive quarters.

While technically legal, the practice misleads investors about the amount of risk the banks are actually incurring.

It's important to note that this deception has been going on for fifteen months, roughly the same amount of time our tax dollars have propped up these companies' battered balance sheets. Obviously, the people who run these institutions have not learned from their mistakes or made any efforts to change their misguided ways.

Clearly the banking crisis is, in fact, a leadership crisis.

Labels: business, ethics, integrity, leadership

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When it comes to leadership styles, many experts agree that leaders tend to exhibit two distinct types of behaviors: task behaviors and relationship behaviors. Task behaviors focus on processes and end results, whereas relationship behaviors concentrate on the people doing the work. Taskmasters demonstrate a heavy emphasis on authority and compliance; for them, people are simply the ends to a mean. But while tasks and results are important, it's the ability to form and nourish relationships that sets highly effective leaders apart from the rest.

360-degree evaluations help distinguish leaders who display relationship behaviors from those who are predominately task focused. 

As the name implies, "360-degree" evaluations allow leaders to solicit feedback from people all around them, including their superiors, peers, and subordinates. Participants get anonymous feedback on a wide-ranging list of leadership and management abilities. High scores in certain competencies normally correlate to low grades in others, substantiating the theory that leaders are either task or relationship oriented.

Most 360-degree evaluation tools include some type of graph on which participant scores are plotted, indicating whether raters perceive them to be task or relationship focused. The remainders of the reports contain the scoring data that support the graph and any written comments that raters provide.

While administering 360-degree evaluations for clients, I've noticed a common tendency that prevents leaders from gaining the task-relationship insight that the instruments are meant to provide. When they first receive their feedback reports, most participants rush past the overview of their leadership profiles and turn immediately to the comment section. It seems that leaders are more interested in what their co-workers said about them than they are in learning about their task-relationship styles.

But the graph is where leaders should center their attention. There, participants will see a snapshot of how their raters currently perceive them as leaders. While the data includes outlier ratings, comments of disgruntled employees or jealous peers, and other survey "noise," the graph reflects their raters' overall perception. And since the most effective use of 360-degree evaluations is leadership development, the graph provides a benchmark for improvement.

The ability to receive comprehensive and anonymous performance feedback can help leaders at all levels determine their task-relationship tendencies. If you have the opportunity to get 360-degree feedback, resist the urge to focus on your lowest raw scores or negative comments. Instead, use the graph as a milestone in your leadership development journey and adjust your behaviors accordingly.

Labels: 360-degree evaluations, communication, leadership

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On October 11, 2007, former North Carolina senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards spoke to reporters about rumors that he had an extramarital affair with campaign staffer Rielle Hunter. "The story is false," ABC News timeline "It's completely untrue, ridiculous." In the meantime, his wife Elizabeth was battling breast cancer.

Labels: communication, credibility, employees, integrity, leadership, trust

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In the spirit of the countless year-in-review lists that appear every January, I'm happy to present the Vital Integrities Blog's annual ranking of the ten dumbest leadership actions of the past twelve months. From corporate scandals to political missteps to coaching shenanigans, 2009 was jam-packed with stories of stupid leadership behavior. Here, then, are just ten examples of dim-witted leadership moves appearing in the news last year.

1. As the year began, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis basked in the glory of his company's acquisition of Merrill Lynch. At a time when financial institutions were collapsing all around him, Lewis had brilliantly snagged a coveted prize -- or so it seemed. As it turned out, Merrill Lynch had its own problems: $15 billion in losses that Lewis knew about but neglected to disclose to BofA shareholders. Lewis also forgot to mention that, as part of the deal, BofA had approved the payments of $5.8 billion in bonuses to the very Merrill executives who created the losses. Before long, Lewis was asking Congress for an additional $20 billion in taxpayer aid, bringing the government's total BofA bailout to $45 billion. Bamboozled stockholders wisely booted him as board chair, and the SEC has filed charges. The beleaguered Lewis gallantly resigned as CEO.

2. Pilots captaining a Northwest Airlines flight from San Diego to Minneapolis led their passengers off course -- by 150 miles! Tim Cheney and Richard Cole claimed they were so engrossed in deciphering the airline's new crew-scheduling system on their laptop computers that they lost track of time and forgot to land the plane (Delta Airlines acquired Northwest earlier in the year). Air traffic controllers, unable to establish radio contract with the plane for 77 minutes, feared it had been hijacked and notified military officials. As a result, air defense commanders readied fighter jets for a possible midair interception. The FAA promptly revoked the pilots' licenses and, hopefully, confiscated their laptops.

3. When Carlotta Freeman reported that a male co-worker was badgering her with "sexually explicit and racially charged statements," her supervisor at the Whirlpool plant in La Vergne, Tennessee told her to ignore him. When the harassment continued, that same supervisor offered another brilliant solution: he suggested that Freeman give in and have sex with the man. The verbal abuse persisted before turning physical: angry that she reported him yet again, Freeman's white harasser punched her in the face and knocked her onto an assembly line. In court, Whirlpool tried to deny its responsibility in the incident; however, federal Judge John T. Nixon found that every level of management mishandled Freeman's complaints and ordered the company to pay her $1 million.

4. Managers at a Wal-Mart store in Easton, Pennsylvania were concerned that employees were stealing merchandise. So, hoping to catch dishonest workers in the act of shoplifting, the supervisors secretly installed a video camera: in a public unisex bathroom! Employees, who also used the bathroom as a changing room, discovered the surveillance camera and complained. According to a lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart, management fired three of the workers for reporting the unlawful invasion of privacy.

5. The dumbest-comment-by-a-leader award goes to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. After a passenger aboard a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit attempted to set off an explosive device, Napolitano announced on CNN that "the system worked." Critics swiftly pointed out that the "system" she was referring to allowed a would-be bomber, whose name had been added to a database of possible terrorists, to board an international flight without any luggage and with a one-way ticket that he paid for with cash. Napolitano claimed her remark had been taken out of context, but later conceded, "Our system did not work in this instance."

6. After U.S. taxpayers coughed up $173 billion to rescue financial behemoth American International Group from certain extinction, the company paid its top executives $165 million in bonuses. It was that kind of audacity that prompted government pay czar Kenneth Feinberg to implement a $500,000 salary cap for executives of bailed-out companies. For some leaders at AIG, that meant sizeable pay cuts. So Anastasia Kelly, AIG's general counsel, led a handful of executives who threatened to resign if the cap was enforced. While the other executives changed their minds, Kelly made good on her warning and quit. Now that's a system that works. As if to prove that AIG executives are clueless, CEO Robert Benmosche issued a press release saying, "On behalf of the management team, employees, and the Board of Directors, I would like to thank Stasia for her tireless service to the company."

7. Texas Tech University officials fired head football coach Mike Leach for mistreating an injured player. After receiver Adam James was diagnosed with a concussion, Leach allegedly ordered trainers to put him in "the darkest place you can find." And they obeyed, forcing James to stand in an unlit equipment room while the rest of the team practiced. According to James, the former Big 12 coach of the year isolated him again two days later in a noisy electrical closet; when the buzzing became unbearable, trainers moved him to an empty pressroom and again told him not to sit. TTU booted Leach days before the Red Raiders were to play in the Alamo Bowl, and mere moments before Leach was to collect an $800,000 bonus.

8. Speaking of dumb coaches: The Covenant School in Texas fired girls basketball coach Micah Grimes for inflicting a 100-0 pounding over opponent Dallas Academy. Officials at Covenant, a private Christian high school, promptly apologized for the blowout and moved to forfeit the game. Dallas Academy teaches students struggling with diagnosed learning differences. For his part, Grimes refused to apologize for the smack down, saying his team "played with honor and integrity."

9. For several days in June, residents of South Carolina did not know where their Governor Mark Sanford was. Not to worry, said his staff eventually; the governor is off "hiking the Appalachian Trail." That phrase soon became a naughty euphemism when Sanford later admitted that he had in fact been secretly visiting his mistress in Argentina. Efforts to impeach Sanford were unsuccessful, but his wife told him to take a hike.

10. It was a bad year for South Carolina Republicans. As President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress on health care reform, Representative Joe Wilson angrily shouted, "You lie!" The emotional outburst stunned politicos on both sides of the aisle. "No president has ever been treated like that. Ever," said White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Wilson later apologized for his "lack of civility."

Labels: credibility, integrity, leadership, management

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A company I know recently replaced its time clocks with an "automated" timekeeping solution. The goal was to streamline payroll processing by eliminating some manual procedures. Employees now log in and out at a computer and the information is electronically fed directly to the payroll system. There are no timecards for managers to tally or reports to complete; everything is automatic.

Except, of course, that it isn't.

Sometimes the computer is down and employees can't log in. Or they forget to log out prior to going home. Or they log out seven minutes later than their scheduled quitting time, pushing them into overtime. Or…well, you get the point.

Organizational development experts call these issues second-order consequences. When attempting to solve one problem, companies often create indirect or deferred glitches along the way.

And second-order consequences can cause more trouble than the original problem. While the new timekeeping system has saved time for the company's payroll department, it has placed a new burden on its unit managers. All those exceptions must be tracked and entered into the system. So, to address these unforeseen consequences, the company has implemented another change. Now, when employees neglect to log in or out, for example, they simply fill out a form detailing the exceptions. Their managers must then manually make the adjustments on the automated system.

One manager, who has dozens of employees, comes in on weekends just to sort through the stack of exception forms and update the system. She would do it on work time, but she can't fit the extra four hours into her schedule. In this case, the solution to the second-order consequences has created third-order consequences.

At the pace with which change happens in the workplace today, second-order consequences are inevitable. Leaders can try to predict all the possible ramifications of change, but every new initiative carries the risk of unanticipated side effects. The way in which leaders adjust to those consequences -- and keep them from spiraling out of control -- defines how well they manage change.

Labels: business, employees, leadership, management

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Boxing champion Daniel Mendoza could really throw a punch. Despite his relatively small size for a heavyweight -- barely five feet seven and 160 pounds -- he dominated the British prize-fighting scene in the late 1700s. But it wasn't simply the power behind Mendoza's slugging that allowed him to dispatch his larger opponents. In fact, the timing of his punches gave him a unique advantage.

As a pioneer of the scientific approach to boxing, Mendoza figured out a seemingly obvious way to defeat his challengers: throwing the first punch. While his bigger and stronger competitors expected the diminutive fighter to play defense, Mendoza caught them off guard with his audacity to land the first blow. Mendoza's hit-first technique is credited as the inspiration for the idiom, beating them to the punch.

As it turns out, Mendoza's boxing strategy can help you win the verbal skirmishes waged against your creativity on a daily basis.

Perhaps you've noticed when offering a suggestion that someone is always eager to shoot down your idea. A well-meaning boss, for example, might dismiss your recommendation with the helpful recollection, "We tried that once, and it didn't work." Or a coworker might admonish, "Management will never go along with that idea." If you're like most people, you get weary of the constant jabs at your innovation and stop making suggestions.

Why not employ Mendoza"s fighting style when selling your ideas? The champ knew his opponents were going to punch him, so he punched them first. No, I'm not saying you should physically hit people who assail your ideas. But if you expect their arguments, you can beat them to the persuasive punch.

Here's an example: In his speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Hubert Humphrey called for civil rights reform. The way it would normally work is that Humphrey would make his remarks and, the following day, the opposing opinions of his political rivals would appear in the media. Humphrey would have to answer his opponents the next day, but by then his argument would have lost steam.

But rather than waiting for the other side to voice its contrary view, Humphrey stated it for them, and in the same sentence he provided his follow-up response. "To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late." In other words, Humphrey anticipated his opponents' attack, and he beat them to the punch.

Know that there will always be people with good reasons why your ideas are bad ones. When preparing your case, stop and consider their most likely arguments. Then, like Humphrey, build your counterattack into your sales pitch. "To those who say we've tried this before without success, I say our previous experience has shown us the obstacles we can overcome."

When demonstrating your creativity, never go down without a fight.

Labels: communication, leadership, management, vision

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For many leaders, empowering employees can be a personal challenge. For one thing, the thought of sharing our power might mean confronting some of our personal insecurities. What's more, empowerment requires that we trust workers to fulfill their commitments -- and that can seem risky. We must work hard at being empowering, lest we become micromanagers.

Not surprisingly, our bosses face this same challenge. And that increases the odds that you work for a micromanager.

If you work for a micromanager, you know the drawbacks. Micromanagers continually interrupt you, rearrange your priorities and deadlines, hand off their crises to you, and take credit for your good ideas? If that's not enough, they consume your time with countless, endless meetings and overburden you by commissioning a stream of pointless reports.

Some leaders micromanage because they can -- their positions give them the authority to boss people around and they intend to use it. Other micromanagers fear falling short in terms of their own performances. She won’t get this done, we’ll miss the deadline, and that will make me look bad. That fear prevents micromanagers from trusting their employees; consequently, they attempt to establish complete control.

As long as you work for a micromanaging boss, you will struggle in your leadership role. Through their actions, micromanagers broadcast their lack of trust. Your employees will sense your micromanaging boss's doubts and wonder whether you are worthy of their trust. Therefore, if you work for a micromanager, you need to confront the problem directly.

I suggest that you start by asking your boss the following:

"Am I fulfilling your expectations as a leader? If not, please tell me how to improve. Otherwise, when you meddle in my actions, countermand my decisions, or outright do my job for me, I have to conclude that you distrust my judgment."

If your performance does need improving, this kind of candid conversation with your supervisor can help you grow as a leader. On the other hand, drawing attention to micromanagement behavior could actually help your boss recognize a personal leadership weakness. You might point out the obvious:

"You're probably unaware of how your behavior causes my employees to wonder if I have any real authority. That's why they often go around me to you."

But some people micromanage consciously and deliberately; many micromanagers try hard to intimidate. To them, you need to be blunt:

"You hold me accountable for getting things done. But by constantly overriding my authority, you’re making it impossible for me to succeed."

By challenging micromanagement behavior you're telling your boss that you welcome constructive feedback and are eager to work hard toward improving, but that you are unwilling to endure unwarranted bullying and second-guessing.

Enough is Enough

If your micromanaging boss is unreceptive, or proves unable or unwilling to change, you should consider changing bosses. Unchecked, micromanagement limits your opportunities to grow. Your micromanager will continue to ignore you, abstain from teaching you new skills, withhold company news from you, exclude you from decision making, and selfishly hold back the most demanding assignments. Your employees might see you as weak or untrustworthy. You will expect less from yourself. Your performance will reflect your boss’s low expectations. And, lo and behold, another self-fulfilling prophecy will come true.

If your core personal values include principles like trust, respect, and helping individuals grow then living by the values you profess requires standing up to micromanagement.

Labels: employees, leadership, management, trust, values

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According to research by Gallup, employees tend to receive very little praise from their supervisors. In fact, less than a third of U.S. workers would strongly agree that a boss has praised their work in the past week. Why are leaders so stingy with the compliments? One excuse I frequently hear from managers is that recognizing employees for doing a good job is an ongoing burden.

In other words, once you start praising people, they expect you to praise them again and again.

Labels: employees, leadership, management, praise, recognition

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"Our system was failing to meet its most basic responsibility: the development of productive and well-disciplined individuals." Dick Grote, Discipline Without Punishment

In the early 1970s, a troublesome mystery befuddled the executives of Frito-Lay. Abruptly one day, complaint letters from outraged customers began arriving at the company's headquarters. Angry writers reported the same upsetting experience: each had been shocked to discover, on a Frito-Lay potato chip, an obscene message written in felt-tip pen.

Having traced the source of the offensive chips to a particular plant, management dispatched training and development manager Dick Grote to the facility with instructions to track down the culprit responsible for the vulgar messages. What Grote found instead was a workplace culture that bred disobedience.

Grote learned that plant managers had fired fifty-eight of the factory's 210 employees for disciplinary reasons in the prior nine months. Supervisors were misusing progressive discipline -- verbal and written warnings, unpaid suspensions, and terminations -- as a way to rid the plant of unwanted workers. The excessive firings resulted in dismal morale and led disgruntled employees to sabotage the company's products.

The sheer volume of disciplinary actions at the plant allowed Grote to spot what is less obvious in most organizations; that is, that traditional progressive-discipline methods are highly ineffective.

In his book, Discipline Without Punishment, Grote writes, "The problem wasn't the way we were administering the system. The problem was the system itself." Like discipline systems at most companies, Frito-Lay's offered employees no way to redeem themselves. Says Grote, "Virtually every employee who received a verbal warning received a written warning; almost everyone who reached the point of a disciplinary suspension was fired not long after." So he decided to change the system.

While keeping the progressive characteristic of the system, Grote eliminated punishment and replaced it with personal responsibility and decision-making. Warnings and reprimands became reminders -- coaching sessions in which employees are asked to take responsibility for their actions and commit to changing their undesirable behaviors. Unpaid suspensions became paid leaves during which employees can reflect on the seriousness of the problem -- without the resentment and financial hardships caused by withholding pay.

Over the next two years, the number of terminations resulting from disciplinary actions at the plant fell from 58 to two. Thousands of organizations have since followed Frito-Lay's approach with staggering results. In addition to firing fewer employees, these companies are also experiencing lower voluntary turnover, reductions in sick-leave usage, and drops in worker grievances.

"The basic premise of the traditional discipline system is that crime must be followed by punishment," writes Grote. With that in mind, too many organizations treat all of their employees like criminals.

So, is it time to overhaul your disciplinary system?

Labels: discipline, employees, leadership, management

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"Perhaps one of the most prevalent errors is based on the idea that discipline is punishment." Robert Bacal, "Five Sins of Discipline"

Many years ago, I had to confront an employee about her recurring tardiness problem. It wasn't my first disciplinary conversation; over time, I'd dealt with everything from below-standard work performance to blatant theft, and I had developed a thick skin for the task. Nevertheless, in this case I was reluctant to have the necessary conversation.

Labels: discipline, employees, leadership, management

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"Many of those who remain after downsizing are stricken with survivor's guilt. Others are filled with an enormous amount of anxiety, assuming that it is only a matter of time before the other shoe drops." John Challenger

There are few leadership tasks more gut wrenching than laying workers off during business downturns. What could be harder than putting people on the street when jobs are in short supply? If you have any kindness in you, you'll feel badly for those you've had to displace. As it turns out, those employees who are spared from layoffs need your compassion, too.

"Companies use the word affected with people who lose their jobs -- the implication being that the people who remain aren't," says Joel Brockner, a professor of management at Columbia Business School. "They're very much affected."

And when workers are affected, their employers are, too. According to a survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, companies undergoing downsizing efforts face tough challenges in keeping surviving employees engaged and focused. Fifty-four percent of HR executives cited maintaining employee engagement as their biggest challenge after conducting layoffs. Another large concern, according to 23 percent of respondents, is easing anxiety among surviving workers that additional layoffs might be imminent.

And then there’s the guilt.

Psychologists note that workers who avoid the downsizing ax experience mixed emotions, ranging from the initial relief of keeping their jobs to the feeling of guilt over their good fortune. What's more, anxiety that more job cuts are coming and the burden of taking on additional workloads can lead some workers to actually envy their former coworkers.

As a leader, be aware that your role in layoffs doesn't end once you've pass out the pink slips. Columbia's Brockner recalls a conversation with a bank executive who boasted about the company's generous severance package. "I said, 'That's great. What have you done for the people who have remained?'"

"It is an unfortunate situation to be in, but the way companies handle it -- particularly the way they deal with surviving employees -- can make it significantly better or worse," says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "You cannot simply tell employees to 'do more with less.' There must be a back-and-forth dialogue to address employees' concerns and fears."

According to Challenger, surviving employees want leaders to be straight with them. "Honesty is the best policy; employees deserve up-front communication when it comes to the state of the company and their jobs," he says.

When economics dictate that you let people go, do it as compassionately as possible. And don't forget to take care of your survivors.

Labels: business, employees, leadership, management

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Leonard Abess likes to read annual reports. As the head of City National Bank in Miami, he especially likes to study the annual reports of other banks. He always pays particular attention to the opening letter written by the corporation's CEO. It struck Abess as backward that CEOs begin the final paragraphs of their letters with the phrase, "And last but not least, we wish to thank our loyal employees…" Why, he wondered, are the employees the last to be mentioned? In his letters, he always likes to acknowledge his employees first.

Last fall, Abess sold his majority stake in City National. In a business environment in which many corporate leaders have demonstrated mindboggling personal greed, he did something remarkable. He gave $60 million of his proceeds to 471 current and former employees. It was, he said, something he'd been planning to do for more than 20 years.

When deciding how to allocate the money, Abess created an undisclosed formula based on longevity. Recognizing that the highest ranking -- and thus, highest paid -- employees had the shortest tenure, Abess gave the largest amounts to those who had been with City National the longest. As a result, some long-term employees received bonuses equal to nine times their annual salaries.

At a time when the country has lost faith in the leaders of its major financial institutions, what Abess did is highly unusual. He wishes it wasn't. "I prefer to live in a world where this is ordinary," he has said.

Me too.

Labels: business, employees, integrity, leadership, management, values

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Looking for a great place to work? Consider applying at the Mountain View, California headquarters of Google. Among the perks enjoyed by Google employees are onsite haircuts, free laundry facilities, workout and massage rooms, in-house childcare, and car washes. And then there's the free food. The campus has eleven cafeterias serving everything from gourmet meals to M&Ms. Legend has it that Google workers are never more than 150 feet away from free food. No wonder the company topped Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2007 and 2008.

But there's a new number one company on the Fortune list this year: storage and data management company NetApp. Unlike Google, which got to the top largely by providing employees with lots of goodies, NetApp earned the number one spot because of its culture of trust. NetApp's leaders promote an atmosphere of openness and honesty, and they go out of their way to proactively share information with workers.

Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, whose Great Place to Work Institute has been compiling information on great workplaces since 1980, have been quoted as saying, "The most important factor in selecting companies for this list is what employees themselves have to say about their workplace." For their part, NetApp employees say they appreciate how easy it is to share ideas, get answers to questions, meet with senior leaders, and find opportunities to take responsibility. Funny, no one mentions wanting free M&Ms.

At number four on the 2009 list, Google is still clearly a great place to work. And Google's culture of fun, high energy, and innovation undoubtedly attracts as many people as the free chow does. But NetApp's elevation reveals how important trustworthy leadership is to workers in today's business environment. "Perks are nice, but employees are looking for something more basic," Levering and Moskowitz have noted. "They want to be told the truth, especially if the news is bad."

If you want employees to consider your company a great place to work, focus less on promoting financially oriented rewards and more on demonstrating the values that attracted them in the first place.

Labels: business, employees, integrity, leadership, management, trust, values

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Wherever I go, leaders and followers within organizations report a common and growing challenge. Employees describe the maddening experience of offering up ideas at work, only to have their suggestions shot down by a boss. For their part, managers insist they are not rejecting the ideas because they lack merit. It's just that many times the initiatives are not new -- the company has tried them unsuccessfully in the past. Therefore, dissuadable managers are simply hoping to spare employees from wasting their time on proven failures.

Chalk those managers' propensity for rejecting already-tried suggestions up to human nature. In their new book, The Three Laws of Performance, Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan assert that every idea has a future that we have already written for it. The default future, as the authors call it, is often based on our past experiences, assumptions, and fears. Consequently, managers who dismiss ideas because of a been-there-done-that-and-failed bias are doing so because they expect history to repeat itself.

While we can't rewrite the past, Zaffron and Logan point out that we can rewrite the future. Rather than assuming we'll get the same disappointing results today as we got in the past, we can create a new future -- one with a desirable outcome. What's more, instead of discouraging employees from offering ideas, this approach encourages managers to engage workers in designing the new future. As a result, managers will stop frustrating creative employees and start inspiring them instead.

Labels: business, employees, leadership, management

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Do you have a tattletale on your staff? I'm not referring to those courageous whistleblowers who turn in embezzlers or expose harassment. I am talking about the sticklers who can't wait to rat out a coworker for arriving ten minutes late, or for extending a lunch hour by a few moments. Tattletales want you to know about every shortcut a teammate took, each personal phone call a colleague made, and how many days an associate's lunch was left stinking up the department refrigerator. If you're like most managers, you find the snitcher's behavior unhelpful at best -- and annoying at worst.

In The Art of Ethics, Elizabeth McGrath describes the stages we go through on our way to ethical maturity. Our first ethical lessons involve obedience, she says. Good boys and girls obey their parents; bad kids disobey. While in this stage we learn to view the world in we're-right-and-they're-wrong terms. But as we mature ethically, we experience the consequences of our independent decisions, and we eventually stop looking at actions as right or wrong and begin seeing outcomes as good or bad. Therefore, becoming ethically mature requires leaving the obedience stage behind us.

Unfortunately, some people never advance beyond the point of deferring to someone else's view of right and wrong. Those workers who childishly tattle on colleagues who bend some rules are most likely stalled in the obedience stage. The reasons are probably deep-seated and best left to a trained therapist to resolve. But understanding your tattlers could help you lead them more effectively.

As a manager, I always sensed that my tattlers were seeking personal affirmation rather than trying to get other people in trouble. In other words, I felt snitchers were seeking assurance that they were indeed good boys and girls. Whenever an employee finked about something trivial, I tried to respond with, "I'm glad I can count on you to always follow the rules." It seemed to be the response they needed, and it afforded them a respite from the urge to turn in their friends.

Next time a tattler informs you of an inconsequential breach of the rules, try thanking them for being a "good" corporate citizen.

Labels: employees, leadership

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"I'm here on television saying I screwed up." Barak Obama

When news broke that Tom Daschle had failed to pay nearly $140,000 in back taxes, President Obama initially stood by his choice for Health and Human Services secretary. But Daschle was the President's second Cabinet nominee to be identified as a tax dodger, and political pundits everywhere began criticizing the appointment. After Daschle withdrew his name from consideration, the President admitted to reporters that he "screwed up" by defending Daschle when his tax problems were first discovered.

There's a lesson here for leaders who, like the President, are new to their current roles. Workshop participants often ask me for tips on earning the respect of a new staff. As it turns out, exhibiting humility is a good first step. Too many new managers believe that it's better to appear right than to be right. So rather than acknowledge their mistakes, they arrogantly discount them. But as the President demonstrated, the willingness to acknowledge an error can turn a leadership misstep into a credibility boost.

Leadership requires the courage to admit your blunders. By owning up to a mistake, you'll show workers that you're willing to risk your pride in order to do the right thing.

Labels: credibility, integrity, leadership

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There's recent news of yet another campaign marred by the misconduct of a greedy scoundrel using an influential position for personal financial gain. You might think I'm describing the latest shenanigans in Illinois politics. However, I'm actually referring to the most recent scandal at a United Way chapter.

In October, the United Way of Central Carolinas fired CEO Gloria Pace King amid donor outrage over her compensation package. King received pay and benefits totaling $1.2 million in 2007, reportedly making her the highest paid CEO of a United Way affiliate. While that amount is appalling in the nonprofit world, it's not by itself unethical. But an independent investigation revealed that King brazenly slipped past unsuspecting board members a revision to her pension plan that tripled its amount to $2.1 million. Public indignation has impacted the agency's annual fundraising campaign, with pledges falling by nearly 50 percent.

This is just another of a long list of scandals to hit United Way chapters in recent years. For example, in 2003 the controller of the Capital Area United Way in Lansing, Michigan pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.9 million to buy herself expensive show horses. A former CEO of New York City's United Way, a 33-year veteran of the organization, stole $227,000 during 2002 and 2003 to pay for personal expenses including dry cleaning, parking, and hotel stays. Then there was United Way of America president William Aramony, who was convicted of fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy in 1995. Unfortunately, these are but a few cases of dishonesty at United Way.

After federal agents arrested Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich for attempting to auction off a Senate seat, many observers referred to his behavior as "business as usual" in that state's political establishment. It's as if we've come to expect political corruption in Illinois and that crooked politicians are merely living out a self-fulfilling prophecy. Could this same phenomenon be happening among leadership at United Way?

Labels: integrity, leadership

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