Kim Girard discussing a paper coming from professor Tsedal Neeley on why managers send the same message via multiple media to team members:

Power, it turns out, plays a big role in how managers communicate with employees when they are under pressure.

The research showed that 21 percent of project managers with no direct power over team members used redundant communication, compared to 12 percent of managers with direct authority. And 54 percent of managers without direct power combined an instant communication (via IM or a phone call) with a delayed communication (e-mail), compared to 21 percent of managers with power.

A lack of direct power is common in companies today, Neeley says, because so many people work on teams that form and disband on a project-by-project basis. Yet team leaders are still on the hook to achieve their business imperatives despite this absence of authority.

Such is certainly the case with team members working on change projects, strategic planning projects, complex transformations, and so on. Where the discussion falls short — and where we’ll be interested in following up — is in effectiveness.

We’ll take it as table stakes that those in a position of power feel less inclined to send repeated messages to those over which they have some direct authority, than those project managers who have no direct authority over their own teams. What we don’t know is whether there is another better strategy than frequency in messaging to team members, to illustrate importance.

Surprisingly, in Girard’s closing, she shares the following:

The results also provide a concrete strategy for managers in Neeley’s Executive Education classes who are struggling with how best to communicate with workers. “This is an actual strategy—a communication persuasion strategy that they will go and try,” she says.

This piece has sparked an enthusiastic discussion in the comments, including the following, which sums up many more:

A competent manager should be able to communicate urgency without coercion. A few “how’s it going” visits will reinforce urgency, but more importantly, encourage open communication about impediments and alternatives.

Tasks then tend to solved collaboratively. Works wonders.

If a manager requires the methods outlined in the article to achieve goals through subordinates, he/she is an ineffective leader, to say nothing about communicator, and probably not suited for the position. Alternatively, the subordinates need to be replaced.

The good Dr. Jeff Cornwall picked up on a concept out of Erin Albert’s new book, Single. Women. Entrepreneurs. I haven’t read the book yet, but from the review, it sounds like it is worth picking up. The central idea of Cornwall’s post is that younger entrepreneurs, led by new views of entrepreneurship from Gen X and Y women, are choosing a different sort of model as they begin to grow their businesses. From Dr. Cornwall:

“Women, especially Generations X and Y, want to make their business and personal lives and aspirations work more in harmony,” Albert said. Because of this, they choose to limit the size of their businesses and not pursue outside funding from investors or loans to fuel more growth.

This approach to entrepreneurship is referred to as pursuing “a lifestyle business.”

However, every business should be viewed as a lifestyle business. If you choose a business deliberately based on your goals, aspirations and values, you can create a business that is an intentional reflection of the lifestyle you’d like to live.

Ours is not an entrepreneurship blog, nor is this a post focusing on start-ups. But that last line is priceless — it’s a reminder to think about what it means to live and work intentionally. Why? Because authentic people are better communicators, better trust-builders, and deliver better, more consistent results on teams.

One of the most consistent complaints we get from leadership teams in crisis is that they don’t have enough “buy-in” from team members. It’s such a nebulous word, buy-in, and as it turns out, it’s a couch for all the ills that come from individuals not bringing their full attention and honesty to the teams to which they belong.

Our first objective: find out what is in the way of team members participating to their fullest. Which typically leads to the first action of bringing authenticity to tough teams: cut those who don’t honestly want to be involved.

Teams have personalities, and they’ll model the behavior you bring to the table. If you’re living and leading authentically, honestly, you’ll attract those to your team who want to deliver the same.

Yes, we get too much email. Given the sort of work we do, we’re at the heart of creating a good bit of it with our clients, too. But this week, Alexandra Samuel lends her voice to the hue and cry for a change in perspective when it comes to the way we deal with the daily ding of our email notifications.

But with email volume rising to meet, and then exceed capacity (it’s a good rule of life: volume always rises to exceed capacity), it’s time for us to revisit the social convention that all answerable email deserves an answer.

Our take on email to date has been to find better ways to filter and process, to ensure that actions that stem from email get into the right systems. Turns out, there’s another trend afoot: people are mad at their mail.

Samuel’s method, to “put the cost of communication back on the sender,” is a compelling reminder for all of us. In her case, if the sender doesn’t receive a response to a message he or she felt was response-worthy, the sender would carry the responsibility to resend the message via a higher value channel — letter? phone? tweet? — reading Samuel, you might get the impression that anything would be a higher value communication channel than email.

We’re not so bearish on email, but this serves as a good reminder for those of us who work with teams, and generally exist to help teams make processes work better (including communications processes).

We take a more McLuhan approach (remember “the medium is the message?”) as we deal with communication. Our rule of thumb: as you think of the message you want to send, consider carefully the implications of the channel you choose to send it. Need a quick answer to a yes/no question? How about an SMS text message? Need to share a spreadsheet or PDF attachment? Perhaps email is still the workhorse for you. Need to get the recipient to think deeply about an important issue? No matter what the kids say, there is still to substitute for picking up the phone, or getting face-to-face to address important challenges.

When you model the sorts of behaviors you prefer in dealing with how you communicate with your teams, you’ll be surprised at how quickly they reciprocate, and drive the value of email back up in the process.

Robert Scoble has an absolutely fascinating post on the nature of information sharing in the workplace. The upshot is this: at most companies, the systems we use condition us to become what Robert calls information hoarders — private email systems, private document folders, etc. But in a recent interview with Yammer CEO David Sacks, Robert asked the executive “when companies would be compensating people based on the value they are pouring into the system.”

What a great way to phrase that question!

It helps a bit to know that Yammer is a company that provides what amounts to an internal Twitter — a place for employees to share their status, resources, links, and more, in real time with the rest of the organization. Salesforce has rolled out a similar tool with their Chatter service. Taking a service inside with something like Yammer or Chatter suddenly makes the potential benefit of a more public, status driven workforce make much more sense. From Robert, the upshot is right here:

So, when I go and ask whether we should compensate people based on the information they SHARE with a company, that’s a topic these new CEOs aren’t quite willing to talk openly about.

Why? It freaks the information hoarders out and makes them less likely to change to information sharers. In such a world old systems like Microsoft Sharepoint stay relevant and new systems like Yammer don’t get adopted. I’m quite convinced though that in the future at least some of big-company compensation will come from whether you have good knowledge sharing skills.

Think about the time and energy you spend transitioning when you lose long-term team members. Does your succession plan deal with all the nooks and crannies of intellectual capital your critical employees have collected in their tenure? Do you have a system that capitalizes on that knowledge for the institution at large?

Conditioning employees to practice more diligence in their approach to documenting their work on these company-public systems is one way to ensure fewer information silos, and soften the blow when key team members move on. Robert’s post is absolutely worth reading in full.

Amy Gallo contributed a fine piece to the HBR Best Practices blog today. Fine really is the word for it — while she outlines the textbook premise on employee engagement well, I can’t help but be left with a longing for at least a bit of discussion around how infrequently the textbook approaches really apply in employee development these days.

Commenter Rick Ross and I are kindred spirits. From his response:

Creating a plan – The formulaic “goal\ objective \ milestone \evaluate risk” method works in the increasingly rare environments where tasks are simple and easily measurable. More sophisticated methodologies are required in environments with higher complexity and where results that are harder to measure. Nothing will deflate motivation faster than being measured in an invalid way.

That last line says it all, and it’s the overriding concept I think we are well-served to remember. We deal with great complexity at work, which requires a degree of intellectual dexterity as we try to define the measures of our success. So, what could serve to make a measurement invalid? A) When it doesn’t make intuitive sense to the one being measured and, B) When the one being measured had no part in the definition of the metric.

Integrating new processes ends up being a more organic process than we ever expect, and certainly more organic than the textbooks predict. Working with staff to build a planning process that provides clear direction — and maintains flexibility and adaptability over time — is key to making change stick in the long run.

In a terrific piece this morning at HBR.org, Deborah Gruenfeld and Lauren Zander lay out the case for authenticity in leadership, and where “hiding behind the authenticity excuse” can go awry. From the post:

In practice, we’ve observed that placing value on being authentic has become an excuse for bad behavior among executives. It’s important to realize that what makes you you is not just the good stuff — your values, aspirations and dreams; the qualities others love most. For most people, what comes naturally can also get pretty nasty. When you are overly critical, non-communicative, crass, judgmental, or rigid, you are probably at your most real — but you are not at your best. In fact, it is often these most authentic parts of a leader that need the most management.

Why is this so important to our work? Because any change initiative, any Lean or shared services integration project, anything that challenges the way people work brings out our most authentic selves. It’s this authentic self that is backed into a corner, wary of change, and protective of what we know and understand. When we’re backed into a corner responding by emotion, we’re unable to process the most difficult tasks which, ultimately, might be the best for us and our organizations.

As leaders, being able to reflect critically on our own behavior when we feel challenged, and being able to listen to others as they describe who they perceive us to be without defense or justification, can be the foundation for far greater change to come. But it takes hard work and an open mind to get there.

Jackie Gilbert is a professor of management at Middle Tennessee State University. This weekend she posted her thoughts on the importance of saving face for others in negotiations with some good tips that serve to remind us all how we’re perceived in negotiation. It’s a good post and worth a quick read.

From Gilbert’s post:

Although in theory we appear to espouse the values of mutual respect and democratic management, how often are these values forgotten when we are faced with an annoying situation? Our desire then to embellish our ego, to trounce an opponent, or to vindicate ourselves at another’s expense may take precedent over conducting ourselves with a sense of decorum. In these moments of self-righteousness indignation, we seem to forget the Golden Rule, or as Tony Alessandra so eloquently coined the term, the Platinum Rule® – treating others as they wish to be treated.

The good Jeff Cornwall picked up her lead in a terrifically interesting direction: entrepreneurial bullying.

Sometimes entrepreneurs just can’t help themselves. They get so wrapped up things like making the business model work and growing their ventures that they can lose perspective on their actions. They may talk about the importance of acting ethically and building a positive culture, but the pressures of the entrepreneurial journey can lead to behaviors that do not match their words and their intentions.

When we focus on our individual needs first and only, we loose sight of potential horizons still clouded to us. This becomes critically important in process, system, or departmental integration projects; as soon as you open the door to bringing service centers together you’re begging for critical examination of what’s good, what’s bad — what to keep, what to trash. This involves judgement, and people hate to be judged.

That’s where Cornwall’s insights ring so true. When you’re asking people passionate about processes they’ve created to give up those processes for something different, the success of implementation becomes deeply rooted in how you collectively arrive at that decision.

Listen now…

Listen now…