Mary Donohue2013-05-22T04:20:47-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=mary-donohueCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mary DonohueGood old fashioned elbow grease.Changing Your Brand Can Be Like Herding Catstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32364142013-05-08T17:37:00-04:002013-05-08T17:37:11-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/
One person, in my experience, who can build global brand consensus is Paul Haft, president and chief colour officer at Haft2. He does it with a simple business-change theory that I use daily in my work with global corporations: conceive, believe and achieve.
Black and Gregersen in their book Leading strategic change: Breaking through the brain barrier (2002) examined barriers to change and drew certain conclusions as to why some leaders may have a problem understanding the need to change their leadership styles and organizational culture. Leaders who experience barriers to change will have some difficulty with the movement to change. As they start the change process, many leaders will get lost and be unable to finish the move effectively, taking solace in that with which they are familiar.
This reluctance to change is similar to being "blinded by the light" and conveys the attitude that "smart people don't try new things." To counteract these problems with instituting change, the authors advocate the development of an attitude that can be summed up by the "conceive, believe, and achieve" mantra.
A leader needs to conceive of ways to initiate change that will enable followers to see the need for change. Enabling followers to define why change is needed will enable a leader to move beyond the first barrier. The second barrier is a lack of belief in change. A leader needs to get others to believe that they should adopt change. To do this, the leader in change can provide resources and rewards to get followers to act. Finally, to combat the third barrier, a leader needs to help the followers achieve the change. To do so, the leader should present champions who have succeeded, thereby demonstrating success to followers and communicating a plan to keep change moving.
You may think navigating personalities in a global committee and building consensus is only a macro issue for large global firms, but that's not the case. Every day, a leader's job is to build consensus from competition. Every unit wants to do what its members feel will be most profitable for them, while the leader wants to create a global presence that drives a strong balance sheet for every unit. This is true for corporations and for global charities.
Today is world ovarian cancer day and Mr. Haft and his team were charged in January 2013 with building the logo and global identity for this group of driven and passionate fundraisers. They needed to change their individual approach to global presence to end this killer. They had three goals for the new global brand 1) ensure that all women would be aware of the symptoms, 2) provide knowledge and support to women living with the disease, and 3) work with the medical community to end this disease.
To get the job done on time and on budget, Mr. Haft and his team followed Black and Gregersen change theory and took a close look at the organization working to understand what drove each team to raise funds and build awareness of this deadly disease.
To conceive of the change and the new brand, the Haft2 team interviewed the global team over the phone to establish a baseline. "We had no preconceived notions. We knew this team understood what needed to be designed because many of the women we interviewed were survivors of this insidious cancer," said Paul Haft.
To create belief globally in the new brand, the team culled the data and highlighted what ties the worldwide groups together versus what divides them. Finally, to achieve the change and build a new global brand, the team determined from the data the potential fundraising value of the differences between the groups.
Using the conceive, believe, achieve theory, the Haft2 team avoided the pitfalls of command-and-control change and built a brand that will raise funds and we hope lower the death rate and the desolation that comes with this dreaded diseases. Imagine if you could do that with your firm five months.
To attend Dr. Mary's workshops in May 2013 The Power of Two: 13 conversations that will help you make the sale (Toronto and Arkansas) email chantelb@dbtc.ca]]>How to Keep Employees Happy at Worktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29232602013-03-22T12:22:52-04:002013-03-22T12:36:54-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/
Arianna Huffington wrote recently about stress on workers and the resulting decline in their productivity.
Academic studies are finding that if you can increase the happiness of your employees, you can increase their productivity. If you increase your team's productivity, you sell more and, consequently, you make more money. The question is: who is leading in this and what do they understand about their employees and productivity as it relates to the human capital that is their workforce?
A friend of mine, Patrick Dion, is a true leader. He understands what I like to call the emerging business ethos of this decade: if you want to be successful, you have to help others succeed. He left a great job because his boss felt he was spending too much time volunteering on "ridiculous" things like mental health and the environment.
Volunteering enabled Patrick to meet new people, to understand the community he was working in and to extend the brand of the business, yet his old boss felt this was a waste of time. This outdated thinking is one of the reasons today's leadership is puzzling over how to motivate their workforce. They don't understand what makes their staff happy. It isn't sitting in long meetings or hearing leadership drone on about mission and values, or how people are their greatest assets. If people were their greatest assets, they would treat them with respect and endeavor to make their dull jobs more bearable.
Leadership is defined by different organizations in various ways. One is the technical definition given by Webster's dictionary: "The office or capacity of a leader." An effective definition goes much deeper.
Leadership is not power over people who need to work. Leadership is the ability to engage followers to share your vision and act on it because they believe in it, not because they need it to pay the rent. Anyone can lead people who need to work to live, very few can lead people who are talented and can work anywhere. Which workforce do you have?
Patrick has gone on to create with his partners a workplace that challenges and respects talented people. Besides working with their clients, they have become involved in a benevolent project to improve the community in which they live and work, called Waterfire Rideau. Corporate partners have joined with them to build this art project on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, designed to increase tourism and, in turn, tourism-related jobs. As Patrick says, Waterfire is also "a lot of fun." He believes that "when you are laughing and having fun, you will make money."
Patrick is not alone in this belief, and he is not alone in leaving a job to start his own business in the hope of living to work rather than working to live. Imagine the change in your workforce if everyone on your team was able to indulge in his or her passion even for just a brief period a month. Your return on investment, as Google, Microsoft, Safeway, and other blue-chip companies will tell you, is substantial.
To do this, however, you need to provide leadership training in how to communicate and how to listen to your followers. Listening is not a skill leaders use today. Most of us have forgotten how to listen and how to observe. But, as I have demonstrated in my research, if you can train your leaders to use these two skills, as well as understanding the basic principles of servant leadership, you will increase the productivity or your workforce by at least 10%.
If Patrick's former boss had indulged in a little more training and a little less focus on billing clients, he would now be enjoying the benefits of working with the government, building a project that benefits our nation's capital, and reaping the benefits of some very positive press.
Dr. Mary Donohue is a workplace therapist specializing in leadership building. She is the author of three books, including her most recent book on mentoring and structure. This year she was awarded the Queen's Jubilee medal for her business acumen, as well as her work on culture and millennials in the workplace. To attend Dr. Mary's workshops in May - The Power of Two: 13 Conversations That Will Help You Make the Sale, email info@drmarydonohue.com.
]]>How to Get Millennials Excited About Coming to Worktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28125012013-03-05T17:43:09-05:002013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/working from home or working at work has brought a few issues to the forefront. Primarily, that dealing with a young, mobile and educated workforce is hard. When millennials work for you, life is going to be very different: they are not their father's workforce.
Think about the workforce today. We are no longer teams working toward a goal, but rather pods of people working in isolation to get through the day, be it at home or at work. It seems we are depressed workers who toil in isolation, or work with friends that are equally as miserable. This sad state of affairs is particularly true for millennials, and this is reducing their contentment factor and will lower your company's productivity. The contentment factor is a measurement that reviews trust, value and engagement in the workplace for millennials.
Recently, I had lunch with a talented millennial who worked for me a few years ago. Let's call him John. As soon as you met John, you knew he could write, speak, and think; key ingredients in my line of work. Shortly after I hired him, I made sure he had a raise in salary and increased responsibility, but, unfortunately, I became ill and had to leave the business to my partners. Others, of course, have seen John's promise and he has moved to a much larger global firm, he can now sell million-dollar clients, and is a respected blogger, and yet he is unhappy.
He has found his success has doomed him. His current boss needs his skills and is, therefore, not promoting him. Because of that, he will be leaving that firm soon, and it will cost the company about $140,000 to replace him.
After his experience with his boss, nothing will keep him at the firm. This is the crux of the situation: millennials don't judge a workplace on the value of the brand: they judge it on the boss of the time. This is what makes dealing with millennials so difficult, Gen X and Boomers judge their work on their ability to get a corner window or to reach partnership level, they know they will have bad bosses and they know it will be difficult.
Millennials have never been challenged. These are kids whose parents disagreed with competitive sports -- everyone wins, remember? Frankly, the workplace is no longer a training ground: it's a war zone. Think of the cartoon "Dilbert" everyone likes it so much because it reminds them of their workplace.
Gone is the middle manager who used to train new hires, teach them the culture and help them understand how to get promoted. In are emails from the CEO and Chief People Officer that dictate or strongly suggest how to behave. And then there are the hated forced corporate functions.
To increase the content factor for millennials, think like they do, in terms of family and friends.
Don't send your young team members to outside courses or degree programs; connect them with experts within the company. Build your culture. I grew up near Detroit and clearly remember hearing about the days of the car companies' training campus. These schools were legendary not only because they had the best training in town, but because the people who went to these training session became CEOs and CFOs that lasted more than two years: they cared about the company and its people, not just shareholder value.
The workplace is a surrogate family. We like to feel good at work; we like to be around people with a common goal. For the most part, we enjoy the rules that govern the workplace: these are what allow us to execute and achieve success, but when you change the rules, just as when you change the dynamics of a family, failure will follow.
Bonds that tie. When millennials work with people they care about and respect the full power of their brilliant minds will increase productivity in your workplace by 10 per cent. Millennials understand team dynamics and working within teams. When the workplace has a boss who is a dictator rather than a team player she will lose brilliant young people like John because she doesn't know how to play.
Whether your millennials work from home, in a store or at an office, we have found that following these rules decreases millennials' churn by 50 per cent. These rules may not cause your employees to yell "YAHOO" every time they have to come to the workplace, but they will create a more productive workforce.
]]>What Execs Don't Know About Listeningtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24979242013-01-17T14:57:38-05:002013-03-19T05:12:01-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/
As I went on shopping, I could hear her telling her children that she needed them to do this and needed them to do that. Eventually, it was evident that the mom just gave up, left her cart, took a few things to the counter and got out of the store. As parents, many of us have shared this experience, but few have experienced the "aha" moment I had after witnessing this family drama play out.
The mother's interaction with her kids is like the workforce culture of today. Executives are talking, but no one is really listening.
Our research, conducted in Canada and the United States with select Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, indicates that of more than 150 mid- to senior-level staff surveyed and interviewed, less than 11 per cent of employees agree that they learn from company executives. It's interesting to note that these same employees overwhelmingly feel they are leaders of the company and not followers. An example from one company reveals that 88 per cent of mid-level executives consider themselves leaders, while only 2 per cent consider themselves followers.
The employees think they know what should go into the shopping cart, and they aren't listening to the executives' opinion. We found that these numbers were similar no matter what organization we studied. A new culture of "I'm not listening" is pervading our workplace.
When we questioned our participants on listening, 78 per cent said they believed they were good listeners. Yet when asked about their leadership style, 50 per cent indicated that their leadership style was based on their own personalities. How can you be listening to your team, but leading based only on your own opinions? People aren't listening at work, and because of this, mid-level and senior leaders aren't happy at work. And if people aren't happy at work, they aren't productive.
Rasheed Bustamam, in his blog "Unrest in the Workplace", indicates that this is the result of employees' inability to engage at work. Both senior and mid-level leaders lack ownership in what they are doing. Bustamam is right: employees don't want to go to meetings all day and then have to work extra hours to complete tasks and never get positive feedback or accolades for a project.
When they take part in a project at work, employees are always led by a senior director. Most have to attend meetings daily, even hourly at some workplaces, but few have real ownership of the project and very few understand their role in it and how their work is improving the company or the community.
We've been told that in the workplace no one wants to make a decision, and when someone finally does make one it is usually the safest decision that can be made. That's like getting rid of your range because your child touched it and was burned. Cooking is difficult without a range. Every day in business, people avoid taking any risks because they are afraid of the consequences, so they depend on themselves and their self-perceived leadership abilities to take care of themselves and their jobs.
The Hawthorne project and current workplace research tell us that employees crave trust, faith and patience in the workplace. Employees want to trust that executives have their back; they want leadership to have faith in their ability to get the job done and done well. Employees want leadership to have patience to see employees grow in the company, not just exist in a job. When organizations do this, we have seen an increase in trust, faith and patience in their workforce, enabling productivity rates to increase 11 per cent. Conclusion: happy employees are more productive employees.
In a knowledge economy, happy employees are the difference between profit and loss, or as the example of the mother in the grocery store demonstrates: it's like getting a little bit of food or getting enough to last a week.
Dr. Mary Donohue is the founder of the Donohue Mentoring System™ and an Adjunct professor at Dalhousie School of Management Graduate Studies. She is the author of three books, including her most recent book on mentoring and structure. This year she is honored to be receiving the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her mentoring acumen, as well as her work on culture and millennials in the workplace. To book Dr. Mary for speaking engagements, please e-mail info@drmarydonohue.com]]>Don't Blame Karl Rove and the Internet: You are Responsible for Society's Illstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24250592013-01-08T17:12:51-05:002013-03-10T05:12:01-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/
No matter what news channel you turn on, you hear about the horrific behaviour of your fellow-citizens or the misuse of democracy for personal or professional gain. Sadly, in the last 30 days, there are more examples to cite than I have room for in this blog, and frankly I am fed up about talking about them so why not talk about the cause -- our own behaviour or lack thereof.
There I said it: we are responsible for this mess, and by we, I mean all adults. Society today seems more like the Clint Eastwood film when he plays the crazy old man. Think about it: we complain, we harass, we hate.
Why and when did this happen? Over the holidays, I asked many people this question, and received answers that included Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan, Pierre Trudeau, the media, our parents, the Internet, and, finally, millennials, which is interesting, since they were born in the 1980s, and in no way are responsible for today's culture -- yet.
It is fascinating that no one took responsibility for this crappy society we have created. No one said, "Well, I didn't vote so, X was elected." No one said, "Well, I didn't speak up, so X was bullied." No one said, "Well, I didn't teach my kids personal responsibility, so they are not doing really well at work." Everyone blamed someone or something else.
Naturally, none of us did anything wrong. Everyone else did. All this hit home just after Christmas in my neighborhood.
I told my 12-year-old and her friend to go out and shovel the driveway of our neighbor who is blind. I was angry because my daughter hadn't thought of this herself. As I was storming out of the house and grabbing a shovel to help them, a man walking his dog asked me what was the rush and I explained. His response was as cold as the weather: "Why bother -- they can hire someone if they need the snow shoveled." I had to stop myself from going "Dirty Harry" on him. Doesn't he understand the perils of living on a fixed income; the need for living independently or at least believing you live independently? Or maybe he doesn't know who these neighbors are, or maybe he's just an ass. I decided on the last, and took the shoveling team down the street, my anger now directed at him rather than my daughter. But it gave me cause for thought. When the next snow came, not one other neighbor shoveled that driveway, not even the lawyer next door with the snow blower.
Now you may be thinking that I live in a horrible neighborhood -- I don't. I live on a picture-perfect, old-fashioned street with people that worry about themselves and their families. Are you any different? Is your neighborhood any different? I don't think so.
Our neighborhoods and our workplaces are the microcosms of our society. My research indicates that today's leaders and their followers are more focused on completing their tasks than they are on developing the people they work with. This means they aren't focusing on the people in their division. They focus only on the task their engaged in. In other words your employees are the man with the dog telling others to take care of themselves.
Research also proves that your employees are just like my daughter: pretending to be happy when I direct her to shovel. Employees are lying to you on their engagement surveys and their 360s because they know it's what you want to hear. Ask yourself do you believe that your employees really care about the firm or the quality of their work, or are they just staying at work to pay the mortgage because "it's a job"? Do you just believe those reports because it is easier than finding out the truth about your culture?
Does this matter to you? Does any of this matter? I don't know, but I do know that we will be doing a lot of shoveling this year.
Here are seven ways that friends can keep people healthier:
]]>How Mentoring Can Save Your Companytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22137332012-12-03T16:15:06-05:002013-02-02T05:12:01-05:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/New York Times op-ed piece he wrote that suggested taxing the rich would not hurt anything. He said the world would not come to an end, nor would the rich stop investing if their tax rate were raised.
He gave a vivid example in the form of a question. He asked interviewer Matt Lauer whether he would prefer to keep his money in a 1 per cent savings account because of his high tax rate, or, if Mr. Buffett called him in the middle of the night and gave him a hot stock tip, would he say, "Great, where do I invest?"
Mr. Buffet is correct, and history has proven him right with trickle-down economics.
Trickle-down economics refers, of course, to the idea that tax breaks and other economic benefits provided by government to businesses and the wealthy will benefit the middle and lower classes by improving the economy as a whole. John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, said "trickle down" would fail in the same way "the horse-and-sparrow" theory did in the 1890s: feed lots of grain to a horse and enough will pass through it and fall to the ground to satisfy a few sparrows.
Trickle down may not work in economics, but it sure does for employee productivity. Think of mentoring as your stock tip in the middle of the night from Mr. Buffet: it will give you a strong return on your HR investment -- if the mentoring involves structured measurement.
Over the course of the past six months, I have been investigating the "trickle-down" effect of mentoring in the workplace. My idea is based on the work of Elton Mayo, begun 1931 and 1932. After experiments, later defined as the Hawthorne Effect, Mayo believed that workers performed better if they felt better in the situation, because of the sympathy and interest of observers. He said this experiment is about testing overall effect, not testing factors separately. He also discussed it not really as an experimenter effect but as a management effect: how management can make workers perform differently because they feel differently.
The data I have collected over the course of the past five years demonstrate that mentoring makes employees feel differently. The trickle-down effect of mentoring is that it enables employees to be more productive and innovative. This is because behaviour is a function of the relationship between people and the environment.
Productivity and sales have been the theme this year in many publications, including Harvard Business Review (HBR) and the New York Times. June's HBR offers numerous ideas on motivating and compensating a sales forces. The New York Times wrote about a company whose employees are not compensated especially well, but who are loyal: those of Apple Inc.
Why is it that some companies can offer fair compensation packages and still have productivity issues, while others can offer $25,000 or less a year and have very high productivity? Culture.
It's all about culture. And our culture is shifting. The rich will eventually pay tax. Actually, our culture is not shifting it is repeating itself. Culture, like history, does tend to repeat itself. However, there are so few students of history left I don't think anyone has noticed.
During the last century, there were four historic eras of leadership. The Classical Era (1910-1935), The Transitional Era (1935-1955), The Systems Era (1955-1975), and The Middle Range Leadership (1975 to now).
The Classical Era, sometimes call the Bureaucratic Era, was the age of systematizing workers, it taught people how to focus on task. This didn't work out too well and ended with large fights between owners and employees who wanted to unions because the gap between the rich presidents and poor workers was enormous. Tax was a big issue then too.
The Transitional Era was also known as the Human Resource Era. Leaders focused on people, subsequently innovation and productivity went up; so much so that if you look at the economy of the time you will notice that it is also the most economically prosperous era of our time. This was also the era of the Hawthorne study.
Well, nothing good last forever, so we moved to the Systems Era, often called the Scientific Era, where the focus was on task and people and, as we know, it is really hard to focus on one thing, let alone two; consequently this era didn't work out too well for business.
Finally we moved to where we are now: the Middle Range Era, or the Laissez Faire, era. This era is best understood through the movie Wall Street: anything goes, just make those quarterly returns. As we saw by the crash of 2008, this era didn't work out too well either.
To be effective, the data suggest we should return to what Mr. Buffet has always believed: focus on your people, learn from the Transitional Era. No matter how big your advertising budget, if your employees don't feel good, they are not going to make customers happy and move product. The substantial data we have collected suggest that structured mentoring programs enable employees to feel good, and to understand how they can be innovative and more productive at work, and this makes companies money.
Invest in your people in the same way Mr. Buffet is investing in America. Get them talking to each other through mentoring. The trickle-down effect of mentoring is demonstrated by the fact that, on average, each company we have worked with has seen an increase in their employees' productivity of about 11 per cent and their reported on-the-job satisfaction increase 12 per cent.
Mentoring, when measured and run in a systematic format, closes the knowledge gap between senior leaders, Gen X's and millennials. Mentoring helps people understand the depth and breadth of the corporation. Mentoring helps people see the sum of all parts of the company and how they fit together and what their role is.
Most important, mentoring enables knowledge transfer and prepares the corporation for the exit of senior leaders with critical roles whose departure could cause a disruption for the company. The trickle-down effect of mentoring is that your productivity gap is closed through applied knowledge transfer, and your investment is solid because your employees are happy.
Dr. Mary Donohue is the founder of the Donohue Mentoring System™ and an Adjunct professor at Dalhousie School of Management Graduate Studies. She is the author of three books, including her most recent book on mentoring and structure. This year she was nominated for the Premier's Award for her business acumen, as well as her work on culture and millennials in the workplace. To book Dr. Mary for speaking engagements, please e-mail graceb@dbtc.ca.
]]>A Business Tip From a Country Boy: Invest in Peopletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18756472012-09-12T12:05:24-04:002012-11-12T05:12:01-05:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/
"We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us."
Plant Corn, and You Get Corn
Finally, someone said what white- and blue-collar workers have known for 30 years: you need to invest in people to have an innovative and productive economy. Billy Pratt, my riding coach, used to say "you get corn, if you plant corn." In other words, if you plant the seeds of winning by practicing every day, you win, if you don't, you lose. Neither in government nor in business have we been planting corn. We quit planting it almost 30 years ago when we got rid of middle management in government and the private sector, and as the economy reveals, we are losing.
"If I Give You 10 People, You Need to Return 12 to Me"
That's one of my client's favorite directives to his team. When he was asked about this, his answer was simple: To be competitive, you need to have talented staff. You can have the best consumer product, but if your people aren't developed in your culture, they won't sell it to your advantage. You can't just develop the people that currently work for you, you also need to mine for the people you will need.
Mentoring as Risk Insurance
How do you do that? How do you train people in your culture while training them to do their jobs? You invest in them and educate them. My clients use mentoring as one of the tools in their chest to help replace the cultural transference that was the role of middle management in bygone years. When you are mentoring, you are turning information into knowledge that helps employees develop. You are also mitigating your hiring and retention risks. Mentoring acts as risk insurance, because through cultural transference that takes place during conversations, mentoring works to prevent employees from being disconnected and discontent.
Mentoring is also risk-management for promotion and hiring because it weeds out employees who aren't right for their positions. During our tenure with companies, we have seen people exit who were not right for the company -- one gentleman even left to become a Catholic priest.
Mining -- an Example of a Culture that Needs Transference
Mining is an industry that needs to rethink how it develops and sources its biggest resource: its people. Thirty years ago, the Canadian government used to fund the Geological Surveys in northern Canada. Today, they don't. Thirty years ago, students were plucked from university, moved up north and given work that innovated today's mining industry. Thirty years later, our mining companies are facing the fact that engineers in their 50s and 60s are getting ready to leave, and there are very few people who are training to replace them. How do you transfer the culture and knowledge of these engineers to young people? How do you increase productivity and the ability to innovate while you are transferring culture -- mentor.
Mentoring Is Planting Corn
Mentoring increases an employee's ability to innovate and be more productive because the mentor helps the mentee understand how to move from better to best, which is what middle management and training programs used to do.
Our research demonstrates that if you can move a mentee from better to best, he or she will trust the organization more, stay with the organization longer, and believe in and understand the value of the organization.
When President Clinton was talking about investing, rather than divesting, he was really talking not just to Republicans, he was inspiring business leaders who want to build a sustainable and profitable culture. Imagine that: a boy from Arkansas, telling people to plant corn.]]>The Problem Isn't Dead Money, It's Dead Stafftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18397462012-08-30T07:00:13-04:002012-10-30T05:12:01-04:00Mary Donohuehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-donohue/dead money" that they should put to work, increasing innovation, productivity and competitiveness for corporations, thereby creating a stronger economy.
He's right. Corporations do have dead money, but they also have dead staff, and this is also what is really killing productivity in North America. I call this Death of a Workforce.
Death of a workforce
The term Death of a Workforce reflects our review of data from our clients. In the same way that Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman charts the waning days of a failing salesman, my research has revealed the waning days of an engaged and innovative workforce. Although many corporations will claim their workforces are engaged, or that their engagement numbers are off the charts, neither their productivity nor their innovation measurements reflect these high engagement numbers.
According to business-management analyst Peter Drucker, we shouldn't be surprised. As Carney suggests, current leadership isn't creating the climate for innovative employees. Drucker found that innovation and productivity depend on human perception (cultural transfer), employees' mood (inspiration) and their understanding of the meaning of the organization and their role within the organization (learning from executives vs. leading by gut).
Our clients employ as few as 7,700 employees and as many as a small country. They are located in Canada and the United States. All have asked us to increase their managers' ability to lead through mentoring. In the data below, mentors are senior leaders at the firm while mentees are employee candidates streaming for senior leadership positions within the firm.
Leading by the gut: When asked whether they believed they were a one-person show, at one client we found 90 per cent of mentees and 81 per cent of mentors said no, yet when asked about their own leadership style, 50 per cent of mentees and 56 per cent of mentors said that they adapted a leadership style based on their own personality.
This indicates that people aren't learning from their superiors, and are using their own personalities as barometers for change. Personalities don't develop corporate innovation. Understanding your role in the organization and how it relates to the improvement of the organization is the key to innovation.
Inspiration
With the same client, 96 per cent of mentors and 98 per cent of mentees said they believed they have a good sense of humour, but when asked only about their ability to inspire, 92 per cent of mentors said they believe they inspire people, but only 60 per cent of mentees said they believe they have the ability to inspire, while 30 per cent said they lacked the ability this will hurt innovation, as well. How can you lead when you can't inspire?
Cultural transfer
Just as Miller's character Willy Loman felt that his son had not reached his potential, employees don't know how to reach theirs. Like Willy, many, managers are questioning their value to the firm or their ability. With the same client we found that 63 per cent of mentors and 56 per cent of mentees had had very poor learning/mentoring experiences with their superiors, which drives the fact that only 7 per cent of mentors and 8 per cent of mentees want to emulate the leadership style of their superiors. These statistics indicated that cultural transfer, i.e. the ability to get buy-in for goals and objectives for the organization is limited to about 30 per cent.
Engagement
When asked how engaged they felt as employees, 87 per cent of mentees reported they felt very engaged or engaged. When asked whether they were effective at helping their team leaders achieve their goals, only 42 per cent of participants said they were 80 per cent of the time. How can you be an engaged employee if you aren't helping to achieve corporate goals? Are your employees Willy Lomans who just exercise a routine at work?
Corporate similarities
Interestingly, no matter which client we asked, the answers were relatively the same, representing a deep malaise among workforces. Although this is only the first review of the data for 2012, my team and I were stunned by the similarity of the qualitative answers and the statistics.
What our research has determined is that the underlying problem in business today is that employees are leading by their gut, they are not happy, because they can't inspire their team and they can't transfer culture between older workers and younger workers. Managers feel like an island unto themselves in a corporate sea. They may self-report being engaged, but their walk doesn't match their talk.
Trickle down or trickle in?
Carney was correct: corporations do have dead money, but even worse they have dead staff. Until leaders deal with the death of their workforce they will continue to lose the fight to innovate and be productive, and people like Carney will still be encouraging corporations to invest externally rather than internally to get the economy started again. Trickle-down economics works only when internal economics are sound.
Dr. Mary Donohue is the Founder of the Donohue Mentoring System™. Her third book The Donohue Mentoring System™ is available at Amazon.com. www.drmarydonohue.com]]>