Who Do You Trust?
Do you trust your employees, customers, vendors, and management? If there is little or no trust between these groups, your business is in trouble. Trust is the social oil that makes things happen with much less effort. When you trust your boss, you have less stress and feel empowered. When you trust your staff, you have more time to mentor, facilitate and innovate. Trusting your customers gives them warm fuzzies and results in better experiences for companies and customers. Trusting vendors helps with scale and transforms them into partners.
This kind of trust does not just happen. It’s primarily a byproduct of culture. Your company’s culture has to bring about trust. Companies like Zappos, Netflix, Semco, Google, and Best Buy have cultures that result in trust. What do all of these companies have in common? They embrace transparency; they help their employees get good at their jobs and find their passion. They treat their employees like adults. They build relationships with vendors and treat them as partners. They have cultures that don’t lend themselves to bullies or assholes.
It turns out that trust is a chemical, oxytocin, not to be confused with oxycontin. Paul Zac, known as Dr. Love, discovered its ability to induce trust during his research in 2004. When we trust someone and demonstrate that trust, we secrete a bit of this chemical, and it feels good. Compare that with the feeling you get from doing a fraud investigation or feeling that you have to keep someone under your thumb. We are wired to trust people. Think of how young children are.
Recently I went to TEDxConstitutionDrive, TWTRCON and the Creativity World Forum. It was at TEDx that I met Paul Zac and heard him speak on trust, which was the theme of the event. At the time, I didn’t really get the theme. This morning while going through my blog roll, I came across a talk by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path: The Economist, Ideas Economy: Human Potential. It tied together the idea of trust that had been building from my research for the last several months. Thanks, Peter! Now I can see the importance of trust in every aspect of our lives. As I look back at the reading I’ve done in the last year and the conferences I’ve attended from a trust perspective, I see it everywhere.
In my last job, trust was a scarce commodity. After my hiring manager jumped ship, my trust went with him. There were only 3 or 4 people higher than me in the food chain, and they no longer inspired trust. Most of the staff didn’t seem to trust their supervisors and the feeling went both ways. With a lack of transparency, lack of trust, and a down economy, things were not going well.
During my second year, the director team, which I was a part of, was left to solve our budget shortfall. The execs were hands-off, and we solved the problem. In the next budget cycle, the execs decided to fix the budget problem behind closed doors, with minimal input from the directors. The first budget cycle was stressful and manageable as we could keep our staff up to date on developments. In the second budget cycle, we didn’t know what would happen. Talk about stress! It was compounded by a series of events that lowered trust, and people jumped ship when they saw the writing on the wall.
Don’t let this happen to your organization! Develop a culture that inspires and encourages trust. Care about the people you work with, work for and serve. Remember, caring for someone is demonstrated by action, not words, though the words are nice too. Be careful about who you hire and about their acculturation process. Create a culture that discourages bullies and assholes and encourages trust and engagement.
Can ROWE and 20% Time Help your Company Through the Recession?
This is not the time to freak out. It’s a time of reflection and introspection for companies and individuals. It’s a great time to ask, “why are we here?” Are we in the right market? Are our customers delighted with our products and services? It’s a great time to do research and design, and it’s a great time to start something new.
If your company spends most of its efforts reducing costs, it might not survive. Granted, reducing costs and keeping them in line with income is a sound business practice. As long as you’re not creating a stressful workplace for what’s left of your employees. Cutting costs is a short-term fix. It will help that quarter’s earnings, but it will not make or break the company in the long run.
So what things can a company do now to get through the recession? How about hiring some fantastic folks? With so many people unemployed, talented folks are looking for work. Hire them and find something interesting for them to do. It seems counterintuitive to hire in a down market, and it certainly won’t lower expenses in the short term, though it’s a hirer’s market, now is a great time to find new talent. Getting the right folks on the bus is just as crucial as getting the wrong ones off the bus. One great way to do this is to institute a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). Doing this will increase productivity and employee engagement while dramatically reducing turnover. Yes, this works for sales organizations as well. One of the hallmarks of a ROWE is that it becomes readily apparent who the performers/nonperformers are. Results measure everyone.
Invest in R&D. Right now. You should be positioning yourself for what happens when the market goes back up. INNOVATE! What better way to motivate those new hires than to roll out 20% time? Let your employees work on whatever they want 20% of the time as long as it’s unrelated to their normal jobs. At least consider 5% or 10% time. This is where the Post-It Note and Gmail came from.
The importance of transparency cannot be overstated. Uncertainty about one’s fate is stressful. Let your employees know what’s happening with the company and encourage them to participate in challenges. Semco, a Brazilian company, let’s the workers they plan to lay off participate in the process. This increases employee loyalty and decreases stress around layoffs. According to Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, the most harmful thing to concentration camp victims’ hope was not knowing when their captivity would end. It’s more stressful to show up to work every day wondering if this is the day I get the ax than to know I have six weeks until my job ends. I went through the layoff saga 18 months ago, and it was hell.
So stop spinning, take stock and make changes that help your company and customers. Prepare for the next upcycle, and don’t lose sight of your employees' importance. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have a captive audience, so you don’t have to make an effort. If you do, you might find your retention bottoms out when the economy recovers.
The Myth of Pursuing Happiness
Are you trying to find happiness and success? According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, you can’t pursue them directly. You can only find them as a byproduct of other things. Dr. Frankl, a survivor of four Nazi Germany concentration camps, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist, developed a new field of psychiatry, Logotherapy, just prior to being sent to the camps. He had travel papers that would have let him leave Germany for the US, but since his parents didn’t have a way to leave Germany, he chose to stay.
In the first part of his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, he talks about his experiences in the death camps, and in the second part, he discusses his theories on Logotherapy or healing through meaning. Dr. Frankl says that our search for meaning is our primary motivation. In study after study, we find that meaning is five times more important to most people than cold hard cash. Studies done in the US, Vienna, and France across different demographics all say the same thing.
So, what kinds of things result in happiness and success? According to Frankl, it is taking selfless actions. Work without purpose or fulfillment does not qualify. Dr. Frankl quotes Edith Weisskopf-Joelson from her article on logotherapy, “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.” The word unsuccessful could be substituted for unhappy in the previous quote.
How we deal with challenges defines who we are as people. If your life appears boring to you, chances are you don’t have a meaning or purpose behind your actions. What can you do to find meaning and help relieve boredom? You could start by finding work that would provide a purpose. If, for some reason, that’s not possible, find someplace to volunteer where people are worse off than you are if victims in concentration camps could find meaning in their lives while prisoners, there’s hope for the rest of us.
Viktor Frankl on Finding Meaning
Viktor Frankl, talks about finding meaning, optomism and aiming high to achieve. Dr. Frankl was a neurologist, psychiatrist and a holocaust survivor.
If You Want To Hit The Target, Aim High!
I saw a Viktor Frankl video this morning on the meaning of life. Dr. Frankl was a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. It’s a short video and to the point. Aim high to achieve results, and the drive to find meaning in work and life is one of our highest drives.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that to experience Flow, we must have tasks that make us reach just beyond our grasp. Tasks that are too easy don’t increase our skill levels, and we find them boring. They don’t help us grow. Ones that are too hard discourage us from trying because we’ll have more failures than successes. Tasks beyond our reach stretch us and make us better than we are. Dan Pink calls them Goldilocks tasks. Being better than we are is good, right? And it makes us feel good as well.
As we become better at what we do, we’ll become happier and more productive, and our value will increase. Self-worth and our value to the world around us will go up. As more managers and businesses adopt these ideas and prioritize Goldilocks tasks, our workplaces will become sources of meaning, not just a way to pay the bills.
