My mother read me lots of books and taught me how to read before I went to Grade One. I loved reading so much that I read anything I could find. I recall the Bobbsey Twins as a favorite book series.

The story I remember most from my childhood is Dr. Goat by Georgina. Later, I loved to read The Hardy Boys series. I had about a dozen or more of their books and borrowed many others.

Throughout elementary school, I looked forward to getting the monthly book club catalogue and choosing a book that fit my modest budget. I loved the smell of a new book and the anticipation of a fresh new story. On Saturday mornings, my mother took me to our local library. I loved going through the stacks and picking out a few books to borrow.

We read to our kids to nurture their love of reading. It’s great to see our kids now reading to their kids and filling their homes with books. I love reading to our grandkids. They’re captivated by stories and will likely become lifelong readers and book lovers.

As I now look after my 88-year-old mother, we occasionally talk about Robert Munch’s picture book, Love You Forever. It’s a powerful story of parental love and the circle of life. It still chokes me up.

A Fascinating History of Books and Their Impact on History

I’ve been a voracious book reader all my life. I typically have three or four books — a spiritual, novel, personal/leadership/organization development, and historical/biographical book on the go in my notebook computer or phone Kindle reader. I use the Kindle app because it allows me to read anywhere at any time in any light, highlight key passages, and then add them to my searchable database with all the citation notes, page numbers, etc., for each quotation.

So… Irene Vallejo’s book, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, about the history of books — and their impact on history — was an obvious pick for me. I loved it. Irene masterfully shows how the written word — from clay tablets to papyrus scrolls to bound paper pages — has transformed history across multiple cultures and millennia. She’s an engaging storyteller, drawing us in with fascinating stories about the history of the written word in all its physical forms.

Papyrus opens with this action scene; “mysterious bands of men on horseback travel the roads of Greece. The country folk watch them with suspicion from their plots of land, or the doors to their huts. They know from experience that only those who represent danger travel: soldiers, mercenaries, and slave traders. They frown and grumble until the men disappear over the horizon. Country folk do not look kindly upon armed strangers.”

She explains that these hunters are “in search of a special kind of prey.” They’re searching for books. The Egyptian ruler was trying “to obtain all the books in the world for his Great Library in Alexandria. He was chasing the dream of an absolute, perfect library, a collection that would gather together every single work by every single author since the beginning of time.”

You can view a two-minute video clip of Irene giving an overview of Papyrus.

Quotes to Note from Papyrus

My Kindle version of Papyrus is full of yellow highlighted passages. Here are a few on the power of books:

• If the ideas, scientific achievements, imagination, laws, and rebellions of the Greeks and Romans survived, we owe it to the simple perfection books had achieved after centuries of searching and experimentation.
• The invention of books was perhaps the greatest triumph in our tenacious struggle against destruction. With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary acceleration of history, development, and progress.
• Somehow, mysteriously, spontaneously, the love of books forged an invisible chain of people –men and women — who, without knowing one another, have rescued the treasure of the greatest stories, thoughts, and dreams throughout time.
• Books help us survive major historical catastrophes and the small tragedies of our lives.
• Neither wisdom nor literature fit completely into a single mind, but thanks to books, each of us finds the door open to all the knowledge and stories in existence.
• The book collector’s passion is similar to that of the traveler. Every library is a journey, every book a passport that never expires.
• Books have a voice, and when they speak, they save eras and lives.

Not All Readers Are Leaders, But Many Outstanding Leaders Are Readers

John Coleman’s Harvard Business Review article on Managing Yourself is entitled “For Those Who Want to Lead, Read.” He writes, “Deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness. Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers… reading increases verbal intelligence, making a leader a more adept and articulate communicator. Reading novels can improve empathy and understanding of social cues, allowing a leader to better work with and understand others.”

In a survey of 208 Fortune 1000 CEOs, 84% described themselves as voracious readers when growing up. Perhaps many were beneficiaries of reading highlighted by American writer and editor Cliff Fadiman, “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Good books fire our imagination and expand our horizons. The best books provide stairways to personal growth and development. As Socrates advised, “Employ your time in improving yourself by other’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”

Of course, not all books are equal. With 86,000 books published every month (reported by Irene in Papyrus), there are some great books, many mediocre books, and lots of garbage. When I am asked to review a book and provide a “cover blurb,” occasionally I agree with American satirist, Ambrose Bierce (most known for writing The Devil’s Dictionary), “the covers of this book are too far apart.”

And like many of the crazier conspiracy theories, skimming through some poorly written books recalls the Groucho Marx quip, “from the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.”

You’ve Been Warned…

Beware the warning Irene provides in Papyrus; “the threatening words inscribed at the library of the San Pedro de las Puellas monastery in Barcelona, quoted in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading:

“For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”

Read, lead, succeed…and return any books you borrow!

The post Reading, Leading, Succeeding: The Transformative Power of Books appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

It’s bacckkkkk. Despite numerous studies showing return-to-office mandates don’t work — and often backfire — the federal government is the latest of way too many organizational bosses to spew management double talk. The Ottawa Citizen reports that Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council Christiane Fox argues “in-person work is necessary for team building.” She claims having people together in the office “strengthens collaboration within, and across teams and, increases opportunities for learning and sharing.”

How is that for leadership? If you don’t work as a team, we’ll unilaterally force you into our offices to collaborate and work as a team. And you’d better like it or else….

The Public Service Alliance of Canada is fighting these mandates in court. They’re very rightly asking for proof that forcing people back to the office increases anyone’s effectiveness.  The Treasury Board argues that it has the “management right to choose employees’ location of work and to require them to report to their designated workplaces.” Very true. They do have the right to command, control, and boss.

Return to Office Mandates are Dead Right

Employees also have the right to quit and leave, quit and stay, or retire on the job. Managers asserting their right to be the boss are like the driver who insists on staying on their side of the road as a huge truck barrels toward them in their lane. They’re within their legal right to refuse to yield. They’ll be dead right.

In another one of way too many other hypocritical examples, PWC is using location data to police it’s new back-to-office rule. That’s because “our business thrives on relationships.” This is part of creating “the positive learning and coaching environment that is key to our success.” Huh?

From just the last few months, here’s a tiny sample of blowback on this heavy-handed, autocratic, and misguided management:

Some return-to-office mandates purposely tried to make workers quit. Now those companies are facing a bigger loss than expected

• Nearly half (42 percent) of companies with enforced RTO mandates experienced higher employee attrition than expected — especially with women and under-represented employees
• Losses include productivity drops, operational disruptions, recruitment challenges, less workplace diversity, and retention of the highest performers.

How Return to Office Policies Are Impacting Employees in 2024

• 8 in 10 employers lost talent to return-to-office mandates
• Reduced office dynamics and employee satisfaction
• Raised concerns about employee trust and culture
• Over 40% of employees put in face time to trick their bosses
• Workers feel micromanaged
• In-office workers tend to spend an hour more socializing than their remote counterparts

The Data Is In: Return-to-Office Mandates Aren’t Worth the Talent Risks

• A major source of leadership conflict
• Lack of work-life balance and a top reason many employees quit
• High performers especially resent mandates and are most likely to leave
• Women and millennials are most negatively impacted
• Nearly 2/3 of employees work best in a remote environment and report higher feelings of inclusion

This is a Leadership Test: Command or Collaborate?

I’ve written articles and blogs about RTO mandates and remote/hybrid work. Here are links to, and excerpts from, a few:

X or Y: Are You Patronizing or Partnering?

Theory Y leaders believe people are self-motivated and self-controlled, want to take pride in their work, be on a winning team, and are trusted adults. Theory X leaders believe employees will take advantage, need to be “snoopervised,” and managed like kindergarten kids with rules, policies, and punishments.

Theory X bosses don’t see a disconnect between spouting warmed over platitudes about collaboration and teamwork while mandating return to office facetime. Rather than partnering with employees to find the right hybrid solutions for individual needs, they assert their management right to dictate RTO policies and track compliance. You will work together as a team, dammit!

Countless organizational studies show that autonomy, participation, “having some say,” and a modicum of control in the workplace is vital to employee engagement and boosting discretionary effort. Highly effective leaders see people as partners. Partnerships flourish with trust, mutual respect, two-way communication (talking with, not at each other), and adult-to-adult collaboration. These leaders do it with their partners, rather than doing it to or for them.

Return to Office Mandates: Destroy Trust, Engagement, and Performance

Hybrid, Work-From Home, and Return to Work mandates are new variations of a very old issue — bossing versus leading. Bosses push, manipulate, and mandate. Leaders pull, serve, and partner.

Decisions about remote, in-office, or hybrid policies expose underlying values about trust, partnering, and treating team members as adults or children. Effective leaders believe people should be given a choice to do what works best for them.

We’re-in-charge managers feel it’s about “the golden rule” — whoever’s paying the gold makes the rules. The boss decides what the home/office/hybrid policies should be. These managers often blab, blab, blab…about the value of people. “Our people are our most important assets,” “We’re a people-first organization,” “Our core values are teamwork/trust/collaboration/respect/____” …yadda, yadda, yadda…

Numerous analyses, such as the study by Microsoft, find that people working in hybrid or remote arrangements are more productive than people working in the office full-time. And countless studies show the links between employee engagement, trust, being treated as partners, and team or organization performance.

Bosses puppeteer, leaders partner.

Virtually Engaged Shows Leaders How to Lead Remote Teams

Tyler Hayden’s book Virtually Engaged is a rich resource for project managers, team leaders, and training and development professionals helping teams thrive in today’s online world. It’s a practical and timely how-to book chock full of useful advice, activities, and links.

Tyler provides over 101 remote team-building activities sandwiched between pragmatic team leadership tips and techniques.

Why Teams Often Don’t Work and How to Build Them

What a tone-deaf boss calls “teamwork” is often about exhorting everyone to pull together to meet the management’s goals and follow their direction. These autocratic bosses see lack of compliance as not being a team player.

The same bosses who mandate Return-to-Office policies try pulling the right strings to manipulate project teams, departmental groups, task forces, or direct reports into teamwork. Good luck with that.

Teamwork is voluntary. It can’t be pushed, bullied, or cajoled. It can only be fostered, coached, and supported. That takes leadership skill.

Avoid Being Swamped by the Quitting Tsunami

Many leaders keep searching for programs and systems to increase productivity and reduce turnover. Some of them are helpful. But leaders can find the biggest factor by looking in the mirror.

How the leadership team functions — or dysfunctions — ripples out to shape organizational culture. Leadership team dynamics are central to the organization’s positive or negative magnetic field.

Return-to-Office Mandates and hybrid/remote policies and practices cut through all the teamwork and collaboration values and mission statements to show how leaders truly feel about people and the type of command-and-control culture they really want to enforce.

The post The Hypocrisy of Return-to-Office Mandates appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

Last week The Original Five had dinner – in our family home where the kids grew up – to celebrate Jen’s birthday. Our conversation turned to the role of money, career, and status in fostering happiness. As each discussed their mortgage renewals, financial planning, inflation, and the fiscal stresses of home ownership and raising families, we reaffirmed that love and family were among the truest sources of lasting happiness and life satisfaction. As the Beatles sang, “money can’t buy me love.”

 On that note, I am republishing a blog from last year….

How much land does a man need? Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story with this title about Pahom, a peasant farmer who was given a chance for free land. Carrying a spade, he had to pace out the land in a large circuit starting from any spot. He was to dig holes to indicate corners or boundaries. But “before the sun sets you must return to the place you started from.”

Pahom eagerly started out at the crack of dawn. Most of the land was very fertile. It was filled with hills, dales, streams, and marshes. He traced a circuitous route around the very best land. Late in the day, he realized that his greed had taken him very far from his starting point. So, he began a desperate race with the setting sun to get back to where he started.

With his distant finish line in sight and the sun fast disappearing, Pahom ran the last mile at top speed. He collapsed at his starting point just as the sun set. He made it! His servant came to help him up. He found blood flowing from Pahom’s mouth. “Pahom was dead…his servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”

How Much is Enough?

Research shows the truth of the cliché “money doesn’t buy happiness.” The explosion in happiness studies over the last two decades (I’ve written over 100 blogs, articles, and book reviews on happiness) shows that despite dramatically rising standards of living in Western countries, levels of happiness have not increased. In some cases, they’ve decreased as stress levels from jogging ever faster on the hedonic treadmill increases.

This month, yet another study on money and happiness in The Globe & Mail asked, “Americans are richer than Canadians and Europeans — so why aren’t they happier?” John Rapley, political economist at the University of Cambridge, notes, “Mainstream economic theory presumes humans to be utility maximizers — or, as a colleague of mine once put it rather crudely, people want more stuff, and the more stuff they have, the happier they are. But while the assumption that more money equals more utility is treated as canonical in mainstream economic theory, there’s surprisingly little evidence for the belief.”

In her article, “Don’t worry, be happy…or not,” reporter Lynda Hurst wrote about a study surveying people on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and the Masai people of East Africa. Researchers found almost equal satisfaction reported by both groups. The Masai have no electricity or running water and live in dung huts. The researchers concluded, “…economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness they are so often linked to.”

The pursuit of owning ever more stuff too often leads to our stuff owning us.

That’s Rich. How Do You Define Wealth?

Happiness research is causing a reassessment of whether economic growth should be the ultimate goal of society. Economist, John Rapley concludes, “Some of the most reliable predictors of contentment, such as happy family life, bear at most only a partial relationship to income. And you just have to scan the self-help section of any bookstore to realize that the secret of human well-being remains very much a live topic.”

Poverty — especially if others around us are doing much better — causes unhappiness. But once our physical and financial needs are adequately met, loving relationships, good health, helping others, spiritual beliefs, community involvement, a clean environment, connections to nature, living our values and strengths, fulfilling work, and a sense of positive contribution to our world are much stronger happiness factors.

Three Core Questions: What Really Matters?

Pursuing a rich life that might include, but goes beyond, material wealth means clarifying our core values and setting life priorities. Our values are what we value. This is our sense of what’s most, through to what’s least, important to us.

We’ve long used these three core questions to provide focus and clarity for our family, businesses, and coaching others:

• Where are we going (our picture of our preferred future or outcome)?
• What do we believe in (our guiding values or principles)?
• Why do we exist (our reason for being, mission, or purpose)?

These aren’t in any order. You can start and finish anywhere. Like a triple yin yang symbol, they blend and blur into each other.

A PERMA Foundation for a Life of Riches

The founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, has spent decades studying why “in spite of the tripling of real purchasing power in the last fifty years, life satisfaction has not budged and depression is ten times more common now.” He concludes, “I believe we have squandered our wealth on the wrong sort of stuff, that we have engaged as a nation in ‘bad consumerism.’ We have used our wealth to buy more positive emotion. Positive emotion is like French Vanilla ice cream. The very first bite is great but by the sixth bite it tastes like cardboard (and we keep eating anyway).”

Seligman and his research colleagues developed a much more meaningful and broader framework for non-financial wealth management. The PERMA model emerged from their research, showing the key factors contributing to living the richest, most fulfilling life:

Positive Emotion — happiness and life satisfaction are moved from being the end goals to factors of well-being.

Engagement — when we’re in this state of “flow,” time flies by as thoughts and feelings are often absent. We then look back later at just how fun or rewarding the activity was.

Relationships — acts of kindness, connecting with others, and sharing laughter, joy, pride, or purpose provide deep and lasting feelings of well-being.

Meaning — feeling we’re part of something much bigger or serving a greater purpose than ourselves.

Accomplishment — goals such as money, fame, winning, or mastery that we pursue for their own sake, whether or not they bring positive emotion, stronger relationships, or meaning.

How we define and pursue our personal definition of wealth determines our satisfaction and just how rich we are.

The post Best Riches: A Heart Core Source of Deep and Lasting Happiness appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

A few years ago, I ran into an old acquaintance I hadn’t seen for a while. Our short conversation confirmed just why I hadn’t seen him — and wouldn’t again soon if I could help it! I started off with, “Hey Phil. How’s it going?” His response was, “Oh, you know; same crap, different day.” His expletive-laced language was much spicier than that. He then proceeded to proudly pile up the most recent crap in his life as if inviting me to wallow in it with him. He likely has a closet full of those “inspiring” T-shirts like, “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die,” or “Gravity is a Myth, The World Just Sucks.”

Our world is full of crap. There’s lots of injustice, inequality, and unfairness. Life isn’t fair; the crap that hits the fan in life is often not evenly distributed. But we get to decide whether to stand in it or not. We decide if we want today to be crappy or happy. If we walk around with our “crap glasses” on, we’ll see lots of it. The more crap we look for, the more crap we see. The more crap we see, the more we look for. My fellow performance improvement author/speaker, psychologist Peter Jensen, calls this “optical rectumitis,” which he loosely translates as “having a shitty outlook on life.”

Our world is also full of beauty, joy, and happiness. We do need to squarely face our issues — the crap — in our lives. Putting on rose-colored glasses and not addressing problems — our moose-on-the-table — means we’re deferring and compounding the day of reckoning when we’ll do a face plant in the crap.

My last few posts are part of a series on “reality.” Overwhelming evidence shows there’s no such thing as objective, definitive, never changing “reality.” As William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente put it in their book, What the Bleep Do We Know!?, “The bottom line, at least as far as science has gone up till now, is this: We create the world we perceive. When I open my eyes and look around, it is not ‘the world’ that I see, but the world my human sensory equipment is able to see, the world my belief system allows me to see, and the world that my emotions care about seeing or not seeing.”

C.R.A.P.: Can’t Readily Absorb Positivity?

It’s all in how we frame life’s problems and possibilities. The vibrational energy we put out to the universe, and the energy frequency we’re tuned into, create our reality. There is no objective reality. We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

Charles Dickens opens his book, A Tale of Two Cities, opens with these now famous lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

Dickens contrasts the two ends of what I call the Range of Reality. These are the glasses we put on to look at every aspect of our lives. These are the focal points for the perspective we bring to our every thought and action hundreds of times throughout any given day.

American Heritage Dictionary provides these sharp distinctions for the opposing ends of the Range of Reality:

Pessimism

1. A tendency to stress the negative or unfavorable or to take the gloomiest possible view.
2. The doctrine or belief that this is the worst of all possible worlds and that all things ultimately tend toward evil.
3. The doctrine or belief that the evil in the world outweighs the good.

Optimism

1. A tendency to expect the best possible outcome or dwell on the most hopeful aspects of a situation.
2. The doctrine that this world is the best of all possible worlds.
3. The belief that the universe is improving and that good will ultimately triumph over evil.

Martin Seligman is the Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center and Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology. He is also Director of the Penn Master of Applied Positive Psychology program (MAPP). He’s written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books. Seligman’s been studying optimism and pessimism since his foundational experiments and theories of “learned helplessness” at Cornell University in 1967. Here’s how he explains and contrasts his more than forty years of studying pessimism and optimism:

“Pessimists, I have found… are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad events occur; they do worse at school, sports, and most jobs than their talents augur; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier interpersonal relations, and they lose American Presidential elections to their more optimistic opponents.

“Optimism and hope are quite well-understood, they have been the objects of thousands of empirical studies, and best of all, they can be built. Optimism and hope cause better resistance to depression when bad events strike, better performance in work, particularly in challenging jobs, and better physical health.”

Like Marvel’s Hulk character, we can harbor an inner beast that erupts in negative emotions destructive to ourselves and/or others. The frequency and intensity of our inner demons partially depends on our awareness (cognition and mindfulness) and choices about where we live on the Range of Reality.

Which reality glasses do you wear? Where’s your home on the range?

The post Are You Wearing C.R.A.P Glasses? appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

We’ve got a big leadership “opportunity.” Cynicism and trust are falling. According to the General Social Survey, the belief that “most people can be trusted” has dropped from 45% to 30% in the last five decades. It’s a global issue. This year, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer found that nearly 60% of people in 27 countries said their default is to distrust others.

Wikipedia defines cynicism as “an attitude characterized by a general distrust of the motives of ‘others’. A cynic may have a general lack of faith or hope in people motivated by ambition, desire, greed, gratification, materialism, goals, and opinions that a cynic perceives as vain, unobtainable, or ultimately meaningless and therefore deserving of ridicule or admonishment.”

Like sailors on the high seas, organizational leaders can’t control the storm, but they can navigate through it. In last month’s Harvard Business Review, Stanford University associate professor, Jamil Zaki, article “Don’t Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace,” outlines the magnitude of the challenge by citing those trust studies. He writes, “countless organizations have been overrun by cynicism — a belief that other people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.” He cites research showing cynicism “predicts a slew of negative outcomes at work including poor performance, burnout, turnover, and cheating.” He warns that cynicism spreads rapidly, and once this destructive contagion takes hold, it breeds gossip and backstabbing. This leads to “behavior that brings out the worst in their colleagues, causing the cynics’ suspicion and mistrust to become self-fulfilling prophecies.”

At the other end of the cynicism and trust spectrum…over twenty years of research by Great Places to Work found that “employees who trust their managers give their best work freely, and that extra effort goes directly to the company’s bottom line. Managers who trust their employees allow innovative ideas to bubble up from all levels of the company…together people working in high trust environments deliver far more value.” Russell Investment Group tracked the annualized stock returns of those high-trust cultures claiming: “Those companies performed more than three times better than the general market.”

Cynical People Often Follow their Leaders

During a retreat with the leadership team of a large healthcare organization, we were running behind schedule so, I said we’d move fairly quickly through the section on responsibility our choices.  Fortunately, an astute participant piped up with, “Jim, I think we need to talk about our ‘blaming and disclaiming’ culture. We routinely blame everyone else for our problems and give up trying to solve them. We blame the unions, the physicians, our board, payers, the patients and their families, other agencies, the government, and so on. We’re disempowering ourselves and failing to provide leadership to our organization.”

He was right. We then had a very productive discussion about how leaders need to shift from wallowing and following to leading. The team agreed to stop groaning and start growing their leadership.

Shifting organizational behaviors and culture is an inside-out job. Leaders need to start by looking at their own behavior. Are leaders on the pessimistic end of the range wearing their C.R.A.P. glasses? Is what they’re saying aligned with what they’re doing on the commitment continuum? Declaring “assume good intent,” “look on the bright side,” or beseeching others to “trust me” is like trying to blow the storm away. Empty words intensify cynicism.

Joe Folkman’s new book, The Trifecta of Trust: The Proven Formula for Building and Restoring Trust, cuts to the heart of this foundational leadership issue. Joe went deep into Zenger Folkman’s 360 database of over 1.5 million ratings of over one hundred thousand leaders to define the key elements of trust. He found, “while there could be hundreds of behaviors that impact trust, just three can account for the vast difference in the impact of individuals with high levels of trust and those who are not trusted at all. These are the core behaviors that create and reinforce trust from others:

• displaying expertise and the good judgment that comes with it,
• demonstrating consistency, and
• building relationships.

These three pillars support the foundation of trust, regardless of culture, industry, race, or gender.” See my review of this book and key points here and quotes to note here.

In a Globe & Mail column Bridging the Credibility Gap, I described how leaders widen that gap and how to bridge it:

How Managers Widen the Credibility Gap

• Looking outside, instead of within — for ideas, expertise, and advice
• Not serving the servers
• “Blame storming”
• Confusing information and communication
• Open doors and closed minds
• Avoiding feedback about themselves

How to Bridge the Credibility Gap

• Listen up
• Reach across the great divide
• Get their input
• Run two-way meetings
• Stop trying to “motivate”
• Be approachable
• Be radical

Are you widening or bridging your creditability gap? How do you know?

In his article on not letting cynicism undermine your workplace, Jamil Zaki concludes, “Trust is only one component of anticynical leadership. Leaders should also examine structural factors in their workplace: Are your corporate values mere window dressing, or do you deliver on them in concrete ways? Are wages, bonuses, and benefits fairly and transparently determined? If those conditions are not met, no amount of kind conversation will defeat cynicism.”

The adage “we judge ourselves by our intentions while everyone else judges us by our actions” is especially central to building credibility and trust. Leaders looking to increase trust levels often confuse their inward view of their own character or intentions with the behaviors others are seeing. Nobody can see into our heart to read our true intentions…instead, they judge our honesty, integrity, trustworthiness — and our intentions — on our actions. Trust me.

Further Reading

• Mind the Gap: Are Your Values Rhetoric or Reality?
• Reality Check: Are Your Values Hot Air and Gas?
• 7 Leadership Team Failure Factors
• 6 Dysfunctional Leadership Team Behaviors

The post Yeah, right. Overcoming Organizational Cynicism and Mistrust appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

Years ago, we helped an international mining company transform its safety culture from good to outstanding. Their 65% reduction in injuries over a three-year period vaulted them to become a benchmark company in their industry. A delegation of senior leaders and safety professionals from another mining company visited a few of their mine sites to understand how they achieved such dramatic safety improvement. One of the delegates asked the first person they saw on-site, “who’s in charge of safety?” “I am,” was the reply. “Oh, you’re the safety supervisor here?” “No,” he replied. “I am a miner on the night shift. We’re all in charge of safety.”

When we’re hired to start a culture development process with an organization, we’ll often assess the current culture through a series of small group and one-on-one interviews. We’ll ask questions like what are your organization’s core values? What behaviors are expected and rewarded? What behaviors are punished or corrected? What gets people hired, fired, or promoted here?

The combined answers are then clustered into key themes. In high-performing cultures, the themes are consistent and aligned with the organization’s stated values. But…that’s rare. Sometimes we’ll encounter discussions and disagreement about what the organization’s vision, mission, and values are. Many respondents must look them up. They’re clearly not top of mind. Sometimes there’s even disagreement about which are the most current ones.

Many people see a huge disconnect between the “aspired values” and the “lived values” that get people hired, fired, and promoted. For example, a bully boss who kisses up and kicks down is promoted because he or she delivers results. Results at any cost are the organization’s real values — despite lofty mission, vision, and values statements.

Values-based leadership and cultures have huge payoffs. Here are a few ways leaders can embed values in their own behaviors and build high-performance cultures:

• Revisit and revise your values every few years to keep them alive and relevant. They can too easily become stale and ignored.
• Use a series of “values fit screens” once new job candidates have made it through the technical qualifications and work experience screens. If your values say anything about empowerment, teamwork, participation, or involvement, get those people who will be the teammates of the new candidate actively involved in the hiring and selection process.
• If you’re not using your values as key criteria in performance appraisal/management and especially promotions, they’re just hot air and gas.
• What gets measured gets managed. If you’re not measuring and providing feedback to everyone on your core values, they’re dead.
• Look at key organization systems, processes, and structure. Whom do they serve? Do they help or hinder people in living your values?
• Ask a random group of customers, external partners, and internal people to jot down the three things that your organization or team seems to care most about.
• Have team members give regular, anonymous ratings on how well the leaders are living the values.
• Ask people what gets somebody fired or promoted.
• Look at a recent (or current) crisis. What values were really tested? Did leaders use those values to guide decisions and actions?
• What’s on your team meeting agendas? How is planning, directing, and controlling balanced with caring for the cultural context and values?
• What are people rewarded and recognized for?
• Deeply imbed values in all training and organization improvement efforts.
• If you’re trying to bring about a values shift, look for dramatic, visible ways to demonstrate the new values.
• Begin meetings (especially strategic, budgeting, or planning sessions) with participants reflecting on how he or she has lived the values personally. Or you might give recognition to team members for a strong example of signaling the values. End the meeting with a team assessment of whether your values were alive and actively used in the meeting.
• Weave references to your values in presentations, emails, and discussions.
• Ensure your leadership team is getting unfiltered, regular feedback on how well their team dynamics and personal behaviors model your stated values and desired culture.

Who’s in charge of safety or service or quality or whatever you’re stated vision, mission, or values are? Do frontline servers and team members embody and own your values? If a delegation visited your organization to see how alive your values are, what would they find? Would they hear and see consistent alignment and ownership at every level?

The post Bluster Buster: How to Bring Your Values to Life and Strengthen Your Culture appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

Raise your hand if your organization has a mission statement. When I do that survey during leadership/culture presentations, almost every hand goes up. Mission statements are as common as a logo, website, or budget. Everybody has one.

BUT…does it…

• Define the soul of your organization?
• Energize and engage?
• Align with leaders’ and employees’ personal purpose?
• Unite your past and future?
• Anchor hiring, promotion, and firing decisions?
• Drive your strategy and priorities?

Many mission statements sound like they were written by bureaucrats and lawyers. Others are catchy branding slogans written by marketing. In either case, they’re superficial and meaningless. Cue the eye rolls and snickers.

This month’s issue of Harvard Business Review features a Spotlight section on “Making Purpose Real.” The first article poses a vital question in its title; “What the Purpose of your Purpose?” Great question. Purpose is one of three yin/yang questions at the heart of Focus and Context; Why Do We Exist (our reason for being, mission, or purpose)?

Another article in the series is written by Ranjay Gulati, a business professor at Harvard Business School. Gulati spent two years extensively researching and writing his new book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies. He writes, “these companies weren’t simply aiming to ‘win’ in conventional terms. They were on a sacred mission and had a sizzling energy about them, one that transcended mundane description and was grounded in both a sense of their interconnection with the wider world and a vision of a better future they sought to realize. Deep purpose leaders reached for religious or spiritual language to describe this energy, associating the purpose with words like ‘soul,’ ‘soulfulness,’ and ‘spirit.'”

Spirit and meaning are missing in too many teams and organizations. At the same time, lots of us are joining the growing ranks of meaning-seekers. This disconnect is a major factor behind The Great Resignation coming out of the COVID pandemic. We want to know that our work and our lives count for something. We want to make a difference. Our work and our lives become ever more meaningful the more they are in harmony with who we are and touch the very core of why we exist.

In Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit, organization consultants and professors, Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (co-author of the classic Corporate Cultures — the 1982 book that popularized the idea of organization culture) conclude, “The signs point toward spirit and soul as the essence of leadership.”

In going about their busyness — especially during times of crisis — organizations too easily lose their heart and soul. Without realizing it or ever intending to, organizations can lose their deeper sense of meaning. Goals, plans, reports, and numbers take over. In the harsh glare of hard-headed analysis, soft “touchy, feely” emotions like spirit and meaning evaporate as dew in the morning sun.

If you had to do without your heart or without your lungs, which would you choose? Dumb question. We need both to live. Likewise, is your company pursuing profits or purpose?

I’ve written quite a bit about the Purpose-Profit Paradox; purposeful companies without profits can’t live to do their good work. Profitable companies without purpose live, but they seldom thrive — especially in today’s world. A February 25, 2022, Globe & Mail article, “Balancing Profit with Purpose,” reports on a seismic shift, “a global Zeno Group ‘Strength of Purpose’ study from 2020 says consumers are four to six times more likely to buy from, trust, champion and defend companies with a strong purpose.”

BlackRock is the largest money-management firm in the world with more than US$10 trillion in assets under management. In his 2021 letter to CEOs, Chairman and CEO, Larry Fink, wrote, “The more your company can show its purpose in delivering value to its customers, its employees, and its communities, the better able you will be to compete and deliver long-term, durable profits for shareholders. As the evidence increasingly shows, a purpose encompassing multiple stakeholders yields stronger financial performance.”

In the March 10, 2022, Globe and Mail article, entitled, “Companies’ swift action on Ukraine suggests the days of corporate indifference are over,” Andre Pratte, chair of the Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation, said, “Companies that have invested considerable amounts of time, energy and money in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives wonder how becoming ‘purposeful’ is different. It is very different. Companies often do CSR and ESG on the side as an afterthought to their operations. ‘Purpose’ is embedded in operations. It implies tough decisions, balancing the interests of the business’s stakeholders.”

So how about that mission statement? Is it a yawner? Or is it snappy — with empty words? Or is purpose at the core of your being? Are you leading on purpose?

The post On Purpose: What Condition Is Your Mission In? appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

As a gardener, I love this time of year. My office looks over our back gardens. After looking at a brown, dead landscape for the past months, the garden is alive with spring flowers and vigorous green growth.

The 19th-century British theologian and essayist, John Henry Newman once said, “Growth is the only evidence of life.” Again, this spring I’ll be in the garden pruning winter kill and nurturing growth. I am always struck by the parallels to my personal growth and my work helping others grow their leadership, teams, and organizations. Highly effective leaders continuously prune old habits and cultivate new growth.

Stanford University professor of psychology, Carol Dweck, is known for her work on the power of a Growth Mindset. This is the belief that intelligence and abilities can be expanded. She contrasts that with a Fixed Mindset that sees intelligence and abilities as static. Growth is the central focus of my book, Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success. You can read the Introduction on letting yourself grow here.

The founder of MacDonald’s hamburger chain, Ray Kroc, was known for his motto, “when you’re green you’re growing, when you’re ripe you rot.” Here are a few danger signs that rot may be setting in:

• “We’ve always done it that way”— we don’t challenge our assumptions or reflect on how we should do things now.
• “I am too old to change”— in The Dog Ate My Homework, philosophy professor, Vincent Barry, calls this fixed mindset “some senior’s socially sanctioned refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for attitudes, actions, and circumstances well within his or her power to influence.” He goes on to write, “It’s also about dying before one’s time by living half heartedly the time one has left. In this respect, ‘I’m too old to change’ is about all of us who refuse to live by refusing to change; for ‘to change is to mature, (and) to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly’.”
• Losing our child-like curiosity— our sense of wonder and discovery is replaced with cynicism and apathy — “been there, done that, what else is new?” One of the most prolific artists in history (he created more than 20,000 works) the Spanish painter and sculptor, Pablo Picasso, has been called the greatest artist of the 20th century. He once observed, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
• Learning strictly through our own experience— we can strengthen our growth by learning from other people’s experience. Not only can that be less painful, but it’s also very effective. Books, podcasts, seminars, mentoring, networking, group problem solving, and the like are some of the ways we can learn from others.
• Creatures of bad habits— it’s so easy to slip into routines that close us off from new approaches and learning. We can fall victim to repeating worn out cliches, platitudes, and dogma. Habits formation is a vital growth/fixed mindset choice. We can be the victim or master of this powerful force.
• Having all the answers— in his personal journal, the French artist Eugene Delacroix wrote, “Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them…a capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.”
• Satisfied and complacent— only a mediocre person is always at his or her best. If I am getting very comfortable with my expertise and skill levels, my learning has levelled out. I am not stretching and challenging myself enough. My comfort zone fossilizes into a complacency zone and rot sets in.
• Fearing to attempt— we know that the turtle only makes progress by sticking his head out. It’s easy to stay in our old habit shell and dream about what we’re going to do someday. If we don’t take steady steps toward our dreams, the walls around our complacency zone get ever higher and thicker.
• Fuzzy focus— our growth and development should be taking us someplace. If we don’t know where we want to go, what we stand for, or why we’re here, any experience and learning path will do. We just wander around and hope for the best.

As, Brooks Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times and drama critic, wrote, “The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”

Personal growth, continuous improvement, lifelong learning…are cliches for many people.

But good intentions often don’t become action. Recognizing when our growth is stagnating isn’t easy. Like putting on weight, it happens so gradually until one day we notice how out of shape we’ve become.

Are you green and growing? Or is your development decaying and starting to smell a little off?

The post Are You Green and Growing or Ripe and Rotting? appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

At a leadership conference years ago, I shared the stage with the CEO of a top-performing company known for its powerful combination of management discipline and people-focused leadership culture. He illustrated the defining role of vision, values, and purpose with a great personal example. He told us he called a friend and got this message; “Hi. Sorry I missed your call. This is not an answering machine; it’s a questioning machine. There are two important questions in life; Who are you? and What do you want? Please leave your answer at the tone.”

Talk of answering machines shows this example is a “few” years old! But those existential questions are timeless. Going way…back to my days co-founding the Achieve Group, we’ve used three key questions that have stood the test of time:

• Where are we going (our picture of our preferred future or outcome)?
• What do we believe in (our guiding values or principles)?
• Why do we exist (our reason for being, mission, or purpose)?

These aren’t in any order. You can start and finish anywhere. Like a triple yin yang symbol, they blend and blur into each other. We’ve put them at the center of two core personal, team, and leadership effectiveness models anchoring many of my books and our development programs and services.

We call these three questions, Focus and Context. This is at the very core of our organizations and our lives. Focus and Context provide the ultimate focal point and meaning for us. What are our core values and beliefs? Where are you trying to go? What does success look like? What kind of team or organization are we trying to build? What kind of person are we becoming? How does our work align with our life’s mission or purpose?

The three Focus and Context questions are the counterbalance to Strategy and Direction at the heart of our culture development pathways model. They define the heart, soul, and spirit of our teams and organizations. This is the heart that drives the head of rational systems and processes to direct the hands of technology. These three questions are also the core of our “leadership wheel,” framing the timeless leadership principles we use for books and workshops on leading self and others.

Less effective managers often “do leadership” as if it were just another set of tools to be deployed (“I’ve done my vision thing”). But a team or organization’s Focus and Context aren’t techniques, statements, or approaches. They’re deeper than that. Focus and Context are about feelings, causes, and convictions. They go to the very DNA of our being. You can’t be dispassionate about passionate issues. Otherwise, while you do your “leadership thing,” people on your team and in your organization will do their “commitment thing.” So, nothing is energized.

I’ve been involved in too many “vernacular engineering” debates as management teams discuss whether the statement they’ve been crafting is a vision, mission, values, goals, and the like. Often these philosophical labeling debates are like trying to pick the fly specks out of the pepper. Unless you’re a lexicographer and your company is in the dictionary business, don’t worry about the precise definition of a vision, mission, values, or whatever you may be calling the words you’re using to define who you are and where you’re trying to go.

What matters is that you and your team have discussed, debated, and decided on the answers to these three questions. They are existential questions. They’re fundamental to leading yourself and others. This is the core of effective leadership. If you’re attempting to improve your team or organization culture, your answers to these basic questions are the first step toward your desired culture.

These questions are at the center of our lives. They are central to our choices, authenticity, passion and commitment, spirit and meaning, growth and development, and ability to energize and mobilize others.

In The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff writes:

How can you get very far,

If you don’t know Who You Are?

How can you do what you ought,

If you don’t know What You’ve Got?

And if you don’t know Which to Do

Of all the things in front of you,

Then what you’ll have when you are through

Is just a mess without a clue

All the best can come true

If you know What and Which and Who.

The post Who Are You and What Do You Want? appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

P.S. – What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? That’s right; rrrrr…

In his book, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, reflecting on decades of research leading him to found the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman writes, “I spend an enormous amount of my time imagining futures, daydreaming what-ifs, turning possible scenarios over and over, upside down, and backward, and the older I get the more time I spend in the future…I believe that the unrivaled human ability of imagining futures–‘prospection’–uniquely describes our species…We prospect the future uniquely well, and this ability might ultimately make the aspiration of wisdom a reality. Hence, we are better named Homo prospectus.”

I’ve been studying and applying the power of positive pictures for most of my life. As I wrote in How Visioning Changed My Life, it’s where my personal and leadership effectiveness quest began way back when. Early in my career, visioning was pivotal to stop smoking, becoming a professional speaker, writing books, and keeping my marriage together. These skills, habits, and techniques are often called visioning, imagery, and visualization. They have a power for change, improvement, and energy creation that we’re only beginning to understand.

Since fear and pessimism are so easy to give in to, we seem to visualize most easily what we don’t want, and then bring that into being. That magnetizes worry and stress. Turning around years of negative conditioning and pessimistic thoughts, so we can learn to vividly see what we do want, takes hard work and forming new thought patterns. We need to change our automatic explanatory style and cognitive framework. A powerful and proven approach is reversing the downward spiral of negative, self-defeating thoughts with positively charged images visualizing what circumstances, people, or events we want to attract to our lives. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been proven in countless clinical trials to be a highly effective approach to reframing negative images.

We’re all uniquely wired. There’s no universal, one-approach-fits-all way to enhance our positive visualization. We need to learn how to use the imagery techniques that work best for each of us. There’s a rich abundance of books, video/audio recordings, articles, blogs, and web sites on how to tap into this very powerful life force. Google “visualization techniques,” “guided imagery,” and similar phrases for lots of how-to tips and techniques.

My wife, Heather, and I began yearly visioning and progress reviews when our kids were toddlers — we were drifting apart and seemed to be heading down separate paths. We’re convinced it saved our marriage. Using a five-year time horizon, these notes describe our ideal life in seven key areas: our family, careers, health, financial, community, spiritual, and social lives. Visualizing Your Ideal Future a version of the exercise we used.

Visualization Tips and Techniques

• At least once a year, describe what your ideal life would look like if things were going extremely well three to five years from now. Outline your perfect job. Envision your ideal family life. See yourself helping to build whatever communities you’re now part of. Visualize a strong and secure financial situation. Imagine your preferred social circle. Feel an even stronger connection to your philosophical or spiritual beliefs. See your optimum health or physical condition. Include your spouse/life partner as a joint exercise.
• Use photos, drawings, or symbols to paint the pictures of your preferred future. Assemble a collage of these from magazines, websites, sketches, stock photos, etc. that represent what you want to attain, the kind of person you want to be, your ideal role or position, your preferred family or social life, the kind of community you want to help build, your physical well-being, and so on. Keep your collage in a prominent place to keep you focused on where you’re going.
• If you have an illness or physical condition, research and apply the ongoing advances in the emerging fields of Mind-Body Medicine and Psychoneuroimmunology.
• Begin with the end in mind. As you start a big task, bring about a major personal change, or embark on a long project, continually visualize your success. Surround yourself with images, symbols, pictures, positive reinforcement, encouraging people, and uplifting messages.
• Counteract the stress and anxiety feeding your mind a steady stream of negative, fear-filled images with a continual stream of positive images of your preferred outcomes. Use visualization or imagery to picture yourself brilliantly giving a presentation, confronting an issue, reaching an agreement, or mastering whatever you might be anxious about doing.
• Develop a “dream list” to help find the core of your deepest and truest inner desires and visions. Brainstorm every dream, desire, or goal that pops into your mind. Sift through your list to look for patterns or clusters. This doesn’t have to happen overnight; you might want to keep a running list for a while.
• Only share your vision with people who truly want to see you succeed and will encourage or help you get there. However, share, broadcast, take bets toward, or otherwise publicly declare your improvement goals. That paints you into a corner. It will push you to keep going toward that goal when you’ve got to pull yourself out of bed early, pass on the dessert, change bad habits, or practice those new skills.

If you can’t see it, you can’t be it; viewing it is the first step to doing it.

The post If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Be It appeared first on The Clemmer Group.