Today I’m going to defer to a terrific paper I found on organizational trust from the DDI group.
“How do you promote open communication with employees to gain trust? Here are five easily adaptable behaviors:
Each of these behaviors helps to build bonds of trust between leaders and employees.”
Click to see the full monograph.
See you on the other side in 2010 – Happy New Year!
Categories: Leadership · Personal
Tagged: Communication, Trust
I have some very fond memories of “fun” at work. When it comes to a good environment, it truly is a matter of the little things rather than the grand gestures. Having fun is something that you do on a daily basis, not just once in a while to celebrate a big achievement – though that is important too. I have learned that the folks who work the hardest, also love to play the most.
As a leader you have to at least turn a blind eye toward play, and in most instances it is wise to encourage it. You just cannot expect everyone to sit at their desks for 8+ hours a day without a break, though the worst managers seem to demand this. I definitely remember being growled at by a senior manager a very long time ago when the entire aisle that I worked on was embroiled in a rubber band fight. This was before nerf weapons really became sophisticated. Full scale nerf wars are hilarious and 5 minutes of insanity can help people blow off some steam.
Games are also a good way for folks to have some fun – and they promote a natural gathering place during breaks, lunches, and after work. I’m partial to ping pong tables, but I’ve also seen pool tables, foosball, and video games foster a sense a community in a team.
Keep things fun and people will want to come to work.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Attitude, Balance, Creativity
Balance defines the amount of time spent working vs the amount of time devoted to personal pursuits. At some points in your life, you have the time, energy, and desire to spend more of time working. At other times in your life you need to spend more effort on your personal life. This could mean raising kids, taking care of parents, or just spending time enjoying hobbies and past times that are in no way related to work.
Balance is different for everyone. With it, you’re pretty comfortable and happy. Without it, you feel like your life is out of control.
Now I am going to go spend some time with a good book!
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Balance, Relationships
There are times when my profession really frustrates me. I don’t know what it is about engineering and programming, but it sure seems to attract a lot of homogeneous people – like hires like. A lot of people are most comfortable working with people who are like themselves. I’ve worked in offices where I am literally the only (or one of a very few) woman in a sea of white men. Working in a geographically diverse company (West coast offices help here) tends to improve upon diversity somewhat, adding Indian and Asian influences, but there are still few women in engineering. The best software engineering team I ever led was diverse – both from a gender and cultural perspective. I somehow put together a team that was close to 50% female, and represented the US, Canada, China, the Philippines, Turkey, and India. We were white, black, yellow and brown. We were conservative, we were liberal. We were single, married, with kids and without. We were Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Agnostic. It didn’t matter, we were a team. There was mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities and contributions. We didn’t always agree, and there certainly were different viewpoints, which actually improved what the team was able to accomplish. Everyone did their best to approach their differences with kindness and a good sense of humor.
This team reflects my life. I pick my friends based on what kind of a person they are. Do they share my hobbies? Are they kind? Mean-spirited people who take advantage of others need not apply. The older I get, the less I care about differences, I always look for similarities. What’s important??
Maybe I am a little naive, but I think under it all we are more similar than different. We are all human. Yes, our experiences and our culture let us have different perspectives, but this is what good relationships are about. Who wants to sit around with people that are exactly the same as you? What can you possibly learn?
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Appearance, Culture, Diversity, Social Networks, Women in Business
“What we do matters to us. Work may not be the most important thing in our lives or the only thing. We may work because we must, but we still want to love, to feel pride in, to respect ourselves for what we do and to make a difference.” Sara Ann Friedman
“That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.” William J. H. Boetcker
I’ve addressed respect in my blog before, and in reflection I thought it would be interesting to focus on self-respect vs. the respect for others. There is a lot of interesting debate in psychology circles regarding the differences between self-esteem and self-respect. See Psychology Today Self Esteem vs Self Respect for a quick overview. Having high self-esteem is ego driven. Technically a person with high self-esteem feels superior to others and expects preferential treatment. These people are very dependent upon how other people react to them and the feedback that these people provide. Studies have shown that some of the most heinous violent crimes are committed by people who have an unusually high warped self-esteem when they encounter someone who clearly does not hold them in as high regard. They have been “dissed” and it makes them angry. This is not self-respect, it is the pathology of a narcissist.
A person with healthy self-respect is :
Working with these kinds of people is a wonderful experience. There is no jockeying for position or ego driven posturing. Instead, there is cooperation, receptivity to suggestions, and a straight forward understanding that everyone on the team wants to do the right things.
For more reading see this article on Self Respect.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Appearance, Collaboration, Ego, Resilience
Well, here is day 5, on my What is Really Important? series. Once I finish this post I will be half way there. Good thing too – only a few days left before the end of the year and I promised myself I would get all of these posts written before January 1, 2010. I’ve got my work cut out for me.
There are all different types of collaboration and anti-collaboration (is that really a word? doubt it!) that can occur in a company. Some companies are really good at one kind, but really bad at the others. It is really unusual to find an organization that is good at all of them.
Here are the types of collaboration that I find to be very important.
Internal Collaboration
External Collaboration
Categories: Corporate Strategy · Personal
Tagged: Attitude, Collaboration, Competition, Priorities
One thing that I’ve learned over time is that you can never know – or be good at – everything. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Everyone has a few things that they concentrate on and really excel at. The key to a successful project is to have the right combination of those people. If everyone is good at the same things, they will be tripping all over each other. When I build a team, I look first and foremost for wicked smart people, and I try to find ones that have had all different types of experiences. I also I look for people who can work with others, but that’s a topic for another post.
How do you determine who is really smart versus someone who is a poser? Sometimes it isn’t easy. There are a lot of people who talk smart, but when the rubber hits the road they can’t get things done. Really smart people can apply what they know in a practical way. They also learn more from their mistakes than their successes. The fact that they are willing to acknowledge their mistakes is a big part of being smart. Some people never make mistakes – all of the problems they encounter are blamed on external forces outside of their own control. Other people never make mistakes because they never put their ideas into practice. Philosophizing about the best way to do something without actually trying it out isn’t a good way to get smarter.
I like working with people who I consider to be smarter than I am in their area of expertise. As a leader I don’t need to know all of the technical details of a project. Heck, I might not even understand all of it. That’s ok. I’ve got someone who does working for me. It’s really great if they know what they know – and even better if they know what they don’t know. That provides an opportunity for another expert to be involved – or it provides an opportunity for growth and learning.
What is not being smart:
What is being smart:
Categories: Leadership · Personal
Tagged: Creativity, Learning
At first I was going to skip this post because I’ve already blogged about learning on the job and learning off the job. However, today I had another learning experience. I’ve been going back and forth with The Mad Peacock about what he’s trying to accomplish with his blog. He has even asked me to guest blog on his site – and boy do I have a post planned. During this interaction I realized that there are a lot of things that I can do with my blog that I am just not doing. I was worrying about the message but not the delivery. Shame on me. I’ve been treating my blog like it was a hobby instead of like it was a work project. I didn’t have a plan (except interesting leadership/business content), I didn’t have a schedule, and I didn’t make it easy for people to find me or search my site.
Things that are changing/have changed:
Time to apply what I’ve learned. Hope it makes your reading more enjoyable. Please let me know if it doesn’t – or if you have any other ideas to make things better!
This time of year makes point #2 in my post on What is Really Important more poignant. At the end of the year we all reflect on what we did over the past year and how we can do better over the next. For many of us, that focuses not only on our diets and exercise programs, but on how we can be a better person overall. How can we leave this planet as a better place than it was when we got here?
When I was younger my teacher once asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Over the years there were a lot of different answers, but this one I distinctly remember. I told her that I wanted to have enough money to build a community where people who weren’t as fortune could live and get educated so that they could break the cycle of poverty. I haven’t done that – it takes far more money than I will ever have. I know there are many issues with that plan, but I think that it speaks to my ideal of “doing good”. Who wouldn’t want to do good daily in their job?
I don’t think that I could live with being the person who created the atomic bomb – no matter how amazing that discovery was. I’d rather be the person that made nursing homes just a little safer for seniors, or maybe someone who found a way to make green technology really affordable on a mass produced scale. What would be better than saving the planet one kilowatt at a time?
I don’t need to be famous in the good I do, I just want it to matter to someone even if it is in the littlest way. I believe that if enough people are doing good it provides a mechanism for all of the little things overcome the bad. I expect the best from strangers and treat them with kindness (still working on occasional bouts of road rage, but hey, I’m only human!). I’ve recycled since I was a child – before it was fashionable. I’ve carried reusable shopping bags for more than 10 years – who needs plastic. I buy produce, meats, cheeses, and bread from local farmers and bakers. I never buy pets, I always adopt from no kill shelters. If you come to my house in the winter – better bring a sweater… In the summer prepare for a heatwave. I do these things in my personal life, and I want to do them in my professional life as well.
I’m still searching for my next opportunity and I prefer it to be a “good” one.
Don’t you?
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Job Satisfaction, Job Search, Taking Responsibility
Hi -I'm Linda Bonanno and my blog is all about business leadership and management. Occasionally I'll give you a little insight into my personal world as well. Hopefully you don't mind the diversions.
