The crowd showed up.  Some no doubt truly wanted to be there, for they knew and respected the retiree for his good work.  For others the function probably met the test of compulsory fun.  All levels of authority were in the audience, from the retiree’s peers in the company’s officer ranks down through the VPs and middle management directors, all the way through group managers and front-line supervisors to the individual contributors in the rank and file.

So what if the size of the audience was hyped a bit by the email “orders”?  The retiree had, in fact, rendered good service for many years and probably deserved a large turnout to say farewell.  The problem was not with this ceremony; it was with a failure to turn out an audience for another one a few weeks later.   From that failure came disappointment and an obvious message that, within this company, there existed a clear “We/They” conflict: WE (the officers) are more important than THEY (the middle managers).

The failure occurred when a longtime group manager was promoted to a director-level position.  This individual had started as an entry-level individual contributor and had, by consistent hard work and demonstration of good judgment, moved up through the company’s levels:  supervisor, manager, group manager.   His promotion now to director was no more and no less deserving of recognition than was the recent retirement of the senior VP.  Oh, perhaps it wasn’t expected that the company auditorium be filled, but there was a reasonable expectation that the meeting room they reserved for his promotion party have enough attendees to gobble up the snacks and empty the drinks.

The middle management peers and their subordinates turned out to honor their friend.  But not a single company officer was in the room.  Not one. No directors.  Zero vice-presidents.  No senior VPs.   They were all conspicuous by their absence.  And of course there was conversation about the no-shows.  The insult was too much of an in-your-face event for there not to be some talk.

How could it happen?  Inadvertence?  “I really meant to encourage as many folks as possible to attend, but I got busy and forgot to send any reminders.”  Perhaps.  But a busy company officer is supposed to have among his/her skills the ability to manage several tasks at the same time, and especially to remember the ones that touch on employee relations.  Hadn’t all these AWOL company officers attended at least one HR seminar that touched on the importance of employee recognition?

If the officer who should have sent the reminders failed, were there NO subordinate officers wise enough or bold enough to step up and either do it themselves, or remind the boss to do it?  Is there a culture of silence born of intimidation?  Is there a failure in the company culture to recognize that consideration for employees is a critical practice for the leaders?  Isn’t it ironic that a company could have a process to make sure flowers are sent when there’s a death in the family, but no “mental process discipline” among the leaders to make sure a veteran trusted employee is recognized by the company leadership for the most important promotion in the individual’s career?

We-They perceptions hang around organizations like the smell of skunks; they are very difficult to eradicate.  And a surprising number of them are created through inadvertence, momentary inattention, failure to practice simple consideration.  Nearly all are avoidable, if leaders will slow down from the hectic daily pace and remember that we-they avoidance is critical to the maintenance of the trust of followers.

You’d think we’d do better at remembering the idea.  Famed women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee wrote about it more than a decade ago in her book, where she relates her decision to remove from the team a star player who had violated team rules about housing.  The cascading effect of not holding the star player accountable would have been unacceptable.

Noted ethicist Rushworth Kidder wrote recently that former senator Tom Daschle’s cabinet nomination was properly withdrawn because to go forward would have put at risk the notion of “the moral commons.”  The waiver or allowance or special handling of a situation for one individual can become a calamity in the aggregate, if all individuals receive the same favored treatment.

The military services have done a good job of teaching accountability as a core value in their professional military education courses for leaders.  Military officer Mike Schmitt, a lieutenant colonel at the time, wrote effectively more than a dozen years ago about rules of accountability.  When I reviewed his work recently in connection with research for a leadership lesson for our company’s programs, I was struck by the timeless currency of what he said.  Some examples, with our comments added:

• To hold others accountable, you must accept accountability for yourself as a leader.  If an executive leader’s bonus is very large because the performance standard lacked rigor, what do others in the company think?  Isn’t the “moral commons” in play, especially in these troubled times of shrinking revenues and layoffs that reach into the homes of millions of families?
• Loyalty cannot be misplaced.  Shouldn’t a leader be loyal to core values such as accountability rather than to individuals who are “good people” and well-known to the leader, if their performance or behavior fails standards?
• Can a leader afford not to create an expectation among followers that they too must uphold accountability in the ranks they supervise?  The strength of the honor codes in the military service academies lies not so much in the “thou shalt not” prohibitions about lying, cheating and stealing as in the so-called “toleration” clauses that say “nor tolerate among us those who do.”   This one can be especially vexing, particularly when a leader’s loyalty may be more to colleagues than to core values.
• Consistency is critical.  While a thoughtful leader can and should consider factual differences between cases, a wide and inconsistent variance in defending accountability as a core value is fatal to maintenance of trust between the leader and followers.  Nor should a leader forgive for convenience.  Is anyone fooled when the star athlete guilty of a transgression is benched for the immediate next “cupcake” game on the schedule but is quickly restored to the lineup for the following tough game against the arch rival?

A veteran antitrust investigator told me once that price-fixing rarely occurs when times are bad.  Look for it, he said, when times are very good and there is “plenty around for everybody.”  The current set of bad times born in 2008 and raging in 2009 seems to be serving nicely to restore a demand for accountability in all leaders.  Let’s hope the demand for accountability will survive an economic recovery.  Leaders of character will have a say in that determination.

Some pain-adding acts may seem trivial to a leader, but the leader should remember it is always the perspective of the receiver of a communication that defines the message, not the sender.  After layoffs, there is obviously a need to have re-organization meetings with the employees who are remaining.  But the timing of those meetings can pile on to the discomfort already felt by survivors who are seeing good friends and reliable co-workers shown the door.  If the “last day worked” for those leaving is to be Friday, is it really necessary to have the needed re-org meetings on the Thursday before they go?  There is often a leader who, in his/her enthusiasm for “putting all this behind us and getting on with the tasks at hand,” schedules the Thursday meeting.  Can’t the matter wait until Monday?  The leader should think of the additional discomfort of the survivor who not only is fretting about saying goodbye to a close associate, but must now make his own survival even more visible by striding off to the Thursday meeting while the laid off employee is left to fill the cardboard moving boxes the HR staffer brought around.  We think a “decent interval” is a good idea and will improve the chances of the leader for establishing a degree of trust with the people in his/her corner of the lifeboat.  Survivors will be feeling pain they don’t show and too much zeal for the quick re-org meeting can be perceived (silently) as a new kind of insensitivity.  One leader who had been through a few rounds of layoffs told us, “I learned quickly that this ‘dance of the survivors’ is to be avoided if you want to keep the good will of your people who are left.”

There is also the problem of “orphans,” the survivors whose managers were laid off and who were thus re-assigned to a surviving manager.  One of these orphaned people wrote to us recently  and described the particular peril of the orphaned survivor.  He said, “My new manager is affable and certainly competent enough, but she isn’t taking time to find out what I know or what I can do.  The inclusion I felt before is gone.  My personal visibility is now low.  The work I did so well before has been assigned to others who simply don’t have the knowledge.   I find myself making suggestions to people who don’t know to listen.  I am now contributing little.”

The thoughtful leader, concerned for the ongoing productivity of the work group, needs to pause and make time…more than a trivial amount of time…to learn the backgrounds and skills and logical work for each inherited orphan.  If the leader doesn’t do so, the orphan will lose self-confidence quickly and the omnipresent question “Am I next?” will take on an even more burdensome importance.  Senior leaders must encourage….indeed, require…subordinate leaders to take such time.  Otherwise it won’t happen.

Lethargy and fear can run through the “lifeboat” like a deadly virus if leaders withdraw and retreat and begin to say nothing about the company’s next steps.  Even “I don’t know what’s next” is better than silence.  Senior leaders should be as forthcoming as company strategy and any encumbering legal issues allow.  Again, it’s the perspective of the receiver of a communication that defines the message, and “no communication” is itself a powerful message that endangers trust among those in the lifeboat.

Over the recent holiday the visitors included four cats and the CATtle dog quickly realized he now had his herd, and his job.  Forget all you’ve heard about herding cats; it CAN be done.  And when the herding was accomplished, the cattle dog would lie down on the periphery of the room where the visitors were kept, head on paws and eyes/ears alert, peacefully watching his herd.  Doing his job!

The human members of this extended family quickly drew the contrast with an experience they had suffered only a few nights before at the local outlet of a major national restaurant chain.  The details need not be related.  It was one of those classic restaurant experiences we have all had and was caused, as they nearly always are, by an almost overwhelming dose of “not my job” on the part of the host, servers, busboys…everyone.

Poor leadership is almost always the root cause of the “not my job” syndrome.  Several scenarios may be at work:

• There may have been some bad hires.  But a bad hire is merely the evidence that a leader lost focus, became hurried, or was never trained well in hiring/interviewing techniques.
• A poorly-trained supervisor.  Usually the training is not lacking in company procedures, but instead in giving the supervisor the understanding needed to lead a mix of employees with individual differences.
• A supervisor may have fallen into the trap of trying to please everyone.  “How do you like me NOW?” is a management technique that never works and especially not when there is a near-peer relationship where the age and experience of leader and follower are similar.
• The leader may be inadvertently doing things that create a “we/they” relationship in which the leaders establish what seems to be a special position for themselves, and the followers are resentful.
• Front-line people have become discouraged because leaders fail to listen when the front-liners come up with good ideas.  The flow of good ideas will stop and “not my job” will take its place.
• Leaders may never have learned effective ways to manage meetings of their teams.  A lousy team meeting is like locking everybody up in a small room when one person has a terrible cold. Soon everyone has it.  “Not my job” is the sneeze we see.
• Maybe there is one weak supervisor in the group of leaders and employees resent the comparatively poor performance of the weak person’s people.   Failing to deal with a weak supervisor will create a “not my job” outlook in the larger work force.
• Employees could be rebelling against a manager who is a bully, jerk, and bad actor.  The employees may not be able to quit, but they easily adopt “not my job” as a work habit.

These are not the only reasons that cause “not my job” to prevail in a workplace; we teach about several others as well in our leadership programs.  But, whatever the governing reasons, they all work through the channel of the employee’s attitude.  For our cattle dog there’s a solution in his genes and it’s much harder for his leader to mess him up.  Not so with the humans.

Commentary

As a current Reservist and a person who has many friends who have served or are currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — including some who have lost their lives serving our country — this story strikes me as particularly outrageous.  Why? Because it illustrates all too clearly that the individuals who have pledged their lives in service to our country — who, in this case, have made the ultimate sacrifice – are really no more than an entry in a large Army database.  I’d have said they’re only a name in that database, but the Army didn’t even give them that justice.  They’re just John Does.

You see, whether it’s the contractor’s fault, or a database technician’s fault, or someone else’s fault — that doesn’t matter.  Every person in the chain of command, every person working this project, every person who was involved at all — they all have a fiduciary duty, not to mention a moral obligation, to do it right.  Apparently, those involved in this matter don’t subscribe to the notion that “Everything worth doing is worth doing well.”

When I was a cadet at our nation’s premier military academy — West Point — which also happens to be the Army’s premier officer training school, you couldn’t escape one concept that permeated all aspects of cadet life:  attention to detail. Why was it important for the cuff on your bed to be exactly the right width? Why did your shoes and boots have to be spit-shined and in perfect alignment?  Not because the world would have ended if they weren’t, but because professional Army officers had to have keen attention to detail! Because it’s attention to detail that can be the difference between life or death…

…Or between treating the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice with dignity, respect, and gratitude and treating them with so much disrespect that we can’t even notice that 7,000 letters are to “John Doe”!

Reflect on how you’d feel if you were “John Doe,” having lost a son, daughter, brother, sister, or other loved one.  It’s been said that it only takes a minute to do things right.  Take that minute. Show the dignity and respect to others that they are due. Your employees — or, if you’re military, your soldiers, sailors, and airmen — will thank you.

One of our main themes at The LeaderMaker Group is that effective leaders constantly respect their followers as fellow human beings and treat them with dignity, earning and hopefully maintaining their trust over time.  Having such a focus in our — and your — daily practices helps guard against lapses in leadership like in this “Dear John Doe” case.

Apparently he did, because he and his firm were never named in any of the indictments this jury subsequently handed down.  The man’s credibility may have been established by one of the stories he said the told the jurors about a recent time when an economic downturn caused highway construction work to grind to a near-halt, with only a limited numbers of jobs available.  The man said he won a few small jobs with bids that earned him either no profit or even produced losses he could accept, while hoping for a better day later.

The essence of his position was:  It was hard, but I kept my crews together for a better day.  And I kept their families together.  I didn’t lose my good people because I didn’t force them to leave home, scrambling to find work wherever they could.  He said he told the jurors that he thought laying off his crews would be a “last resort.”

Therein lies the leadership lesson to be learned from this quiet, private, small business leader who made a practical pro-people decision almost three decades ago.  It is apparent in the frequent news of frequent layoffs that too many executive leaders view those layoffs as a “first resort” to contain costs and to keep the polish on a short term stock price, as if the duty to “maximize shareholder value” can refer only to the next short term earnings report and never to the long term viability of a company.  Keeping the good crews together for a better day seems to be absent too often from the list of options crossing executive minds.  The people from the finance department, charged with calculating the number of “heads” needed for the layoff to hit its near-term goal, are doing work that turns the word “headcount” into an obscenity.

We are not naive; we know firms may eventually have no choice but to lay people off in a last resort.  It’s the “first resort mentality” that we believe leaders of character must avoid.  There’s a hidden price to be paid if they don’t.  We believe employees are understanding of what happens in hard times and forgiving of a layoff that is carefully considered and explained.  But when there’s a second layoff, and a third, and still more, then trust is betrayed forever and even if many of those people laid off later return, things will never be the same.  Trust, once betrayed, is rarely restored.  Trust operates in the long term and “first resort layoffs” can miss the point.  Even those who survive the layoffs now live and work in fear, with trust gone.

She wrote, “Mullen went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief–no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books.  Mullen showed up with just a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.”  She added that “it was a 45-minute conversation that ranged from the personal to the philosophical.”

We urge leaders in all organizations to adopt this approach.  Too often the urge to prepare elaborate “onboarding” materials for a new leader overwhelms the common sense that would ask, “Why don’t you, first, just ‘get to know’ him or her?”  Staffs are too often tasked with multi-day projects to prepare onboarding material, which is often edited and re-edited and edited still again and then, in too many cases, also subjected to that fear-based notion that “we must dumb it down for the executive.”

The “blame” for the too-common practice may not lie with the preparers, for they have often been “taught” by the prior experiences they’ve had with leaders who somehow communicated a desire to hear this onslaught of material from people BEFORE the leader had bothered to learn much about the people themselves.  If it was the President-elect who told the Admiral, “Let’s just talk,” then praise for Obama, whose transition seems to be so well-managed in many such respects.  If it was the admiral who asked, “Can we just talk?” then bully for him too.

We strongly urge all leaders about to be on the receiving end of “onboarding” knowledge to WAIT a bit for the knowledge and make its acquisition secondary to the much more important need to meet, assess, and perhaps win the confidence of key followers.  The onboarding knowledge is, by definition, perishable.  The developing (or not) of interpersonal trust is, as the credit card advertisement says, “priceless.”

Sometimes a leader who wants to be sensitive to this issue will make a subtle error.  The leader will not ask immediately for the formal onboarding presentations, but WILL send each key follower a memo or email with a list of more general topics “to be prepared to discuss when we meet.”   The effect of that memo can be almost as negative as just proceeding with the onboading and can add a rigidity and “pro forma” nature to what should be instead something like the Obama-Mullen conversation.  You can bet the followers who get the “be prepared” memo will ask each other, “Have you run YOUR list yet?”

It’s certainly OK, indeed wise, for the leader to have such a topical list.  But we say keep the list in your head, vary the order in which the topics are covered, work hard to make the topics “not a list.”  And absolutely be prepared to spend time on subjects you the leader did not anticipate, as you learn from your meeting companion of THEIR personal interests.  These meetings are for mutual value, for leaders and followers are always joined in a mutually dependent relationship.  Otherwise, what happens is not really leadership.

One of our colleagues has a Friday morning ritual that he keeps as many Fridays as he can, meeting a group of friends at a Starbucks location for an hour of conversation that usually has a point.  The friends all work in product development for a large company that now faces intense competition in its long-established product lines.

On a recent Friday all these friends were discouraged.  The previous day their company had sponsored an appearance by Dr. Geoffrey Nicholson, the recently-retired 3M vice-president famous for his innovative work on the Post-it note.   Dr. Nicholson has traveled widely, telling audiences of the many things 3M does to foster the company culture needed to sustain innovation.  These friends had all attended and had been delighted by the speaker’s message.  Their discouragement came from the fact that only about thirty people showed up and were badly outnumbered by the empty chairs.

One of the friends mused to our colleague, “I am afraid our people have become dulled to the idea that our management really wants us to innovate anything, no matter what they say.”

Our colleague reminded his friends of the need for a CEO and senior leaders to push innovation, by their personal commitment and actions, down through several layers of management below the CEO—the idea that senior leaders merely giving speeches about innovation won’t get the job done.  He asked how many executive-level people were among the thirty attendees.

“Only one,” replied the friend, “Just one of the directors.  But he left halfway through and told me that he had another important meeting and he was afraid he would be late.”

Then the friend asked, “What can we do to wake them up?”

I waited to take in all that the woman might mean by that word “fluffy.”  Was she referring to the VP’s physical appearance?  I thought not.  The new VP was not unattractive and certainly not fluffy in terms of size.  My employee must mean something else.  So I took the bait and had to ask, “What do you mean, fluffy?”

She told me that, to her, fluffy meant an executive who knew enough to talk her way through new products and services in order to look intelligent to the people above her in the organization chart.   But did the new VP really know her stuff…

• Did she know the details of the products that so glibly rolled off her tongue?
• Did she understand the requirements the product would put on production and engineering?
• Did she realize all the changes that would be required for the company’s sales channels?  Or its advertising departments?
• Did she have any notion of the hurdles ahead for the people who do I-T work?

My inquisitive employee thought not.  She sat down and further unburdened herself.
“I am pretty sure the new VP does not know, nor does she care to know.  Too many execs in this company don’t move up by getting their hands dirty.  They move up by ‘pretending to know,’ which is what I mean by fluffy.  They just fluff the details and are good at saying the right keywords that higher execs will appreciate.”

Does this sound familiar?  Have you had a similar question from one of your employees?  It’s likely you have.  Makes you wonder what it really takes to move up in some of today’s large companies.  The answer used to be hard work, making employees happy and productive, and meeting the targets for financial goals.  But, in a “fluffy” world, it seems you can say the right things at the right time for just the right audience and, magically, good things happen for you–budgets expanded, key initiatives approved, excellent employees re-assigned to work in your department.

Fluffy leaders (executives AND managers) exist and they do harm.  In particular, they undermine the hopes and dreams of real performers to the point that these good employees move on to other companies.  Fluffy leaders make us question our own career plans and how we thought we’d move up the ladder on merit.  On reflection I’m sure my employee who came with her fluffy question was troubled.

I asked her, “Are guys fluffy too?”  “Sure,” she said, “Anybody can be fluffy.”

Are we willing to forsake real knowledge for learning a few key buzzwords?  I think not.  Strong senior leaders should out those spouting fluff.

“Before we commit to a lot of expensive technical testing, I’d like to have the research people do some surveys and a couple of focus groups to see if our customers will really buy in to the ‘less equals more’ idea for this product,” he said.

“Let’s do a technical feasibility trial first,” said the VP.  “We have to make sure the thing will work.”

“That could be really expensive,” replied the product manager, “And it could take more time than we think.  I’d rather see the research results first.”

“No!” was the VP’s emphatic answer.  “Why would I want to spend even a nickel with those researchers before I knew if the damned thing will work?”

The product manager had a business degree.  The VP had come up through the ranks of the engineers.  Common ground was not in sight.