Leadership and Vulnerability

So many leaders I hear or read about seem to believe that if you are a leader, you have reached some magic pinnacle where you are all knowing—they seem incapable of not knowing the answer to a question or have lost the capability to show any sign of being vulnerable. It appears to me as if they see being vulnerable as “anti-leader”.

In reality, some of the strongest leaders I know are ones who readily admit they don’t have all the answers. Rather than appearing weak when saying they don’t know something, they send a message to their team that they are human and they are not perfect.  They also feel they have to be right all the time!  I’ve observed that showing vulnerability is sometimes more difficult for woman leaders who have had difficult roads to leadership.

I read the Corner Office column every Sunday in the “New York Times” business section.  Each week a different leader is interviewed on a variety of topics. The August 10, 2014 interview was with Sarah Barnett, President of Sundance TV.

In the interview she says, “I’ve come to realize that, as a leader, it’s O.K. for me to fail in terms of my management at times. I think women are ridiculously hard on themselves about needing to be both nice and perfect in managing people.”  I really like that she used the word “fail”—and I don’t think she really meant she isn’t successful. I think she meant it is ok to not be perfect and, in fact, when you show your team that you don’t have all the answers, it sends a message to them that they need to learn—you can be a success and still be learning and growing!

She also says, “…that conflict or even a failure of communication is something that’s not only survivable, but can get you to a more open and honest and trusting place.”  How great is that for a very successful leader to say that she really wants to be in an open, honest, and trusting place at work?  I love that and wish more leaders had her strength.

Ms. Barnett also says that one of her strengths is she likes ambiguity and shaping things.  She says these are good skills in her current job which she believes is to “synthesize” ideas and concepts.  Again, these are not words we typically hear from leaders so it is refreshing and honest!

How do you appear to your staff?  Do you feel you have to know everything and be right all the time or do you allow your own vulnerabilities to show through?  

Curiosity and Life-Long Learning

When I am interviewing a potential new-hire, one of the things I look for is how curious they are.  I love it when an applicant asks me a question that no one has ever asked before—gives me an opportunity to learn something new which is a passion of mine, and I hope yours.

I once met an adult in a class I was attending who said she really didn’t want to learn anything anymore—she was retired and knew everything she needed to know. I was horrified and it caused me to think about how many other people might feel the same way. 

I am just the opposite—learning new things is so motivating and so critical to being alive. In fact, if you’re not curious, you’re dead because no one day is ever like the one before it.

That’s why I love to meet new people and ask them questions. Friends tell me I ask too many questions and that is probably a fair statement but I will probably not stop.  Getting answers to our questions is how we learn.  This didn’t come easy to me. I once was rated low on a performance review because my manager said I never asked any questions. I didn’t ask questions because I thought by asking a question I was showing I didn’t know everything about the topic at hand.  It was a great learning experience for me and, yes, I may have taken it too far but I’ve learned a lot in the process!

There is so much information available to us on so many levels every day!  And, you don’t have to wait a second for it—it is available to us on our phones, iPads, tablets, TV’s, radios…and from the people we meet.  Getting to know new people can be a challenge but if you just ask a few questions and show genuine interest in the answers, you will learn a great deal. This works in your business life as well as your personal life.

Asking people to tell me their story is probably why my favorite part of being a human resources professional is recruiting—I get to ask questions for a living and learn so much from each and every interview I do. Even if the person isn’t right for the job, I always learn something new and that is highly motivating!

Curiosity opens many windows—try asking more questions and see what you learn!

A Day in the Life

If you follow the news from Washington DC (I can't blame you if you don’t, but I live there) you know that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been under fire for abuses to its telework program. A Commerce Department Inspector General's (IG) report found that teleworkers (translate working from home) surfed the Internet, exercised, watched TV, and did laundry when they should have been "working." The IG also found that these teleworkers spend more time examining applications because they take less sick, vacation and personal time. In fact, they spend 66.3 more hours a year examining patent applications than in-house examiners. 

Surfing the net during working hours, shameful! I flashed back to a former corporate life when we were trying to craft a policy on use of electronic media.  Keep them off-line—they need to be working.  Exercising during working hours, disgraceful. Yet I remember two men I worked with, both executives, who spent their lunch hours exercising, one at the gym across the street and the other jogging on the trails around the business park.  Watching TV, outrageous!  Yet I remember times when coworkers and I huddled around TVs to watch sobering news events such as the Columbine shootings and Oklahoma City bombings. The closest thing to doing laundry during work hours in my corporate years was running to the dry cleaners at lunch.  

At a Writers' Digest Conference Barbara and I attended recently a writer (translate: someone who receives royalty checks on a regular, steady income from writing) was asked what his day was like.  It went something like this: breakfast, take the kids to school, back to the home office to write for the morning, lunch, gym in the afternoon (a by-product of that, it increases endorphins) then into the office for a while.  Another writer talked about watching movies on TV.  She has to convince her husband she's working when she does it—she’s studying characters!  When she's blocked, she does laundry.  It clears her mind, gives her a chance to reboot, and makes her feel that she is being productive.

Anyone who's ever worked in an office environment can attest to how much time workers are capable of wasting.  Gossip around the water cooler or break room, folks dropping by to chat, smoke breaks, coffee breaks, and oh yes, surfing the Internet in the office.  Having experienced both corporate life and independent consultant's life, I can attest that I'm much more productive working from a home office.

There are questions as to whether managers at the PTO used the tools available to determine if work was getting done.  If they did not, the problem may lie with the managers and not the teleworkers.  Results, (translate, what gets done) not place, (translate, where it gets done) should matter. And managers should be managing!

The point, workers have lives and during their daily 8 to 5 routines, they need to have the time to take care of their business and not be "chained" to their desks or workstations.

The Motley Fool - An Organization That Lives Its Values

Does organizational culture really matter? It sure does – just ask the employees at Alexandria, VA-based investment firm The Motley Fool. They will tell you (and you can learn more about it personally on YouTube or on their website www.culture.fool.com) that there is a real difference when you work for an organization that lives its values.

The name of the firm comes from Shakespeare – whose wise fools both instructed and amused and could speak the truth to the king without getting their heads chopped off! As they describe their culture, "it is as irreverent as our name." But don't miss the point that this band of "motley fools" makes up a highly successful investment company.

Here are their values:

·      Be foolish!

·      Collaborate – Do great things together.

·      Innovate – Search for a better solution. Then top it!

·      Fun – Revel in your work.

·      Honest – Make us proud.

·      Competitive – Play fair, play hard, play to win.

·      Motley – Make Foolishness your own. Share your own core value. _________

The last one on this list is such a great idea. They ask each Fool (that's what they call their employees) to fill in the core value they bring to the organization!

Motley Fool was recently named by Glass Door as the best medium-sized company to work for – all on the basis of interviews with current employees.

We recently heard Lee Burbage, People Fool [M1] at The Motley Fool, speak to a room full of HR professionals who seemed amazed to hear that the company has no time off policy--employees can "take what they need." Of course we all were wondering how such a radical idea would work, and wouldn't people take huge amounts of time off all the time? ”How does the work get done,” we asked. Well, the answer is that "fools treat themselves, their company and their co-workers with fairness and respect--so the management is pretty sure fools will not abuse such a wonderfully foolish benefit." And, if someone does misuse the trust the company puts in them, it becomes a management issue. I love that they trust their employees, and it sounds like the employees trust the management as well!

They don't really have a dress code – just some things that are unacceptable, including Viking helmets with strapless gowns, plaid with polka dots, and more than three colors not found in nature! You have to love that!

The Motley Fool believes in developing its employees and that continuous learning is essential to their staff and to the organization. They don't just support development--they expect it. And, to that end, they have a corporate university with topics including everything from communication and computer skills to improvisation and golf classes!

The company offers generous benefits, including PAID maternity and paternity leave. They have a wide variety of clubs for employees, to encourage people to spend time together participating in activities such as reading books, bowling, watching movies, and more. They have an amazing recognition program that encourages employees to gift money or prizes to co-workers. And they even subsidize pet insurance--because, as they put it on their website, "sometimes the most important person in your life isn't a person."

Here is what I find most interesting – they know that their culture isn't right for everyone. Therefore, they do a great job in recruiting so that any applicant is fully aware of their culture and the possibility that they may see the CEO riding a scooter around the office someday! Motley Fool is a little crazy and zany–and it is a highly flexible organization that changes often. But the company's employee turnover is extremely low because they do a really good job of selecting people who will thrive in their culture. One thing they are clear about (and we wrote about this in The Big Book of HR) is that great people like to work with other great people, so they take time to hire the right person and work hard to engage and retain them.

Lee Burbage shared that the leadership at Motley Fool works very hard to keep their employees engaged in jobs they love and a mission they support, and left us with a challenge that I now pass it along to you:

"Our goal is that you consider the kind of organization you are creating and make your culture an intentional and deliberate part of your business strategy."

Origins of Labor Day

On March 25, 1911 as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company burned, a young social worker who was in Washington Square looking on in horror as the seamstresses jumped to their deaths.  That young social worker was Frances Perkins.    It was because of this event that she left her office as head of the New York Consumers League and become the executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the City of New York.

When you walk into the Department of Labor’s building in Washington DC you are greeted by a statute of Frances Perkins.  In fact, the building is named for her.  Frances Perkins was the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.  In this role, she had an unenviable challenge: she had to be as capable, as fearless, as tactful, as politically astute as the other Washington politicians, in order to make it possible for other women to be accepted into the halls of power after her.

While famous simply by being the first woman cabinet member, her legacy stems from her accomplishments. She was largely responsible for the U.S. adoption of social security, unemployment insurance, federal laws regulating child labor, and adoption of the federal minimum wage.

Marking the end of the summer vacation season and return to school, Labor Day, is celebrated on the first Monday in September, as a tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. some 10,000 workers assembled and marched from City Hall, past reviewing stands in Union Square, and then uptown to 42^nd Street.  The workers and their families gathered for a picnic, concern and speeches.  It was organized by the Central Labor Union, an umbrella group made up of representatives from many local unions.

Debate continues to this day as to who originated the idea of a workers' holiday, but it definitely emerged from the ranks of organized labor at a time when they wanted to demonstrate the strength of their burgeoning movement and inspire improvements in their working conditions.

By 1884 similar organizations in other cities followed the example of New York and celebrated a "workingmen's holiday" on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country. By 1894, 237 states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories