Working With Others

One of my realities, as a constant traveler is that it is sometimes difficult to get everything done when I want to. So things pile up , like things I want to read. This past weekend I took some time to catch up on the March-April 2008 issue of Utne Reader. I found an article by Matt Labash reprinted from the Weekly Standard titled, “Are We Having Fun Yet , The infantilization of corporate America. The gist of the article is that there is a new cadre of “consultants called “fun consultants or funsultants or funcilitators who have convinced corporations that the road to success is not about “industriousness, talent, and know-how¦[but] fun. Apparently, there is a body of literature that says that employee retention hinges on creating a fun workplace. Of course, Labash says that the word “literature is used loosely here to “mean a series of often ungrammatical double-spaced sentences put on paper, slapped between festively colored covers, and sold to mouth readers with too much discretionary income. (What a great turn of a phrase.) I would add that this “literature is not research-based, but instead is a case of “if enough people say something is true, then that makes it true, and we (the gullible) are certainly not going to question that.

As most of you know, since 1991, I have been an independent consultant who helps managers and teams get work done through and with others in a way that is both satisfying and effective. I advocate that a sense of humor in the workplace is a healthy thing and that at the end of day performance (that is, the result that we get) matters. I have found that what contributes to employee retention is when employees at any level know what is expected of them, how they are doing, how the boss will consistently relate to them, and what chance they will have for development.

When I have been in organizations (or conferences) where these funsultants put participants through bizarre activities that even the most sympathetic would be hard pressed to see as relevant to the business, I have a number of thoughts:

First, I am usually annoyed. Not everyone has the same idea of fun. The activities these funcilitators introduce are usually embarrassing to many and I do not think public humiliation is a good thing in any context.

Second, rarely if ever does the funsultant or the organization explain “why we are doing these humiliating activities. In other words, like the ropes courses of the 90’s they have no business relevance.

Third, I wonder what in the world the leadership of the organization is thinking. Are they covering something up?

Finally, part of the emphasis on fun is the fear that a lot of organizations have that they will not be a hip place for the twenty-somethings to work. The youngest generation tends to claim that school, work, and anything for that matter needs to be fun. In the last MBA class that I taught, the class ranged in age from 23 to 58. When we talked about expectations on day one, the four twenty somethings (out of a class of 15) told me that the class needed to be fun. When I asked what “fun would look like, they uniformly said no lectures, just games! Because of the well-documented talent shortage many , not all – corporations lack the guts to have the “here’s the deal talk with this youngest generation and explain work expectations. Instead, they opt for the “fun is good approach.

Now lest you think that I am a curmudgeon, I’ll end with a quote from the Southwest Airlines web site:

“More than 37 years ago, Rollin King and Herb Kelleher got together and decided to start a different kind of airline. They began with one simple notion: If you get your passengers to their destinations when they want to get there, on time, at the lowest possible fares, and make darn sure they have a good time doing it, people will fly your airline. And you know what? They were right.

Ah, what a refreshing idea, deliver results AND have fun!

It is no secret that one of the biggest fears that workers have with the prospect of losing their jobs in a tough economy is also losing their health care coverage. We are the only major industrial country where medical coverage is dependent for the most part on where one works. And not only is the health care payment system seriously flawed, but access to health care is a problem in many parts of the country. Since moving to the southwest, I have found that simply finding A doctor to be quite challenging – many doctors are simply not taking on new patients.

And then we have today’s New York Times article, “As Doctors Cater to Looks, Skin Patients Wait”. I think this article exactly illustrates that we have a health care system that is broken. The crux of the issue is that when faced with a choice of treating self-paying patients who want elective procedures like botox treatments and those who might have skin cancer and whose insurance company will reimburse doctors at a much lower level than wealthy patients are willing to pay for cosmetic procedures, dermatologists do botox treatments and people who really need medical care have to wait.

Large corporations have an opportunity to be a hero. These organizations have enough buying power to really effect change in health care in the United States. Things need to change and these organizations could lead it.

A number of years ago, we sent our daughter to a two-week summer language camp in northern Minnesota. The first contact that we had with her after she left was not until the parent-child event on the last day of the program – which was part of the deal. While she thought we had banished her to Siberia, and while she complained about the absence of TV and not being able to use her hair dryer (NB there were no cell phones in those days otherwise that would have been part of her rant!), she is still in contact with some of the campers some twenty years later and is among one of the most independent and self-reliant thirty-somethings I know.

Then this article appears today in the NY TImes – “Dear Parents: Relax, It’s Just Camp”. MSNBC coined the term “helicopter parents” about eighteen months ago. These are parents who “hover” over their children’s every move. They call the school constantly to check on their kids, confront teachers if their child did not get an “A”, and show up at job interviews to negotiate compensation packages for their budding executive. Now we have these upper income parents – who obviously don’t have enough to do – calling residential summer camps multiple times a day to check on their child.

Here is what is wrong with this picture, as noted in a comment to “Another Frustrated Boomer”, the behavior of these helicopter parents is contributing mightily to producing a generation of self-absorbed people who cannot function or think independently, and who lack discipline. The NY Times article talks of parents who give their camper-children TWO cell phones (the use of which happens to be banned at these exclusive camps) and tell their kids “if they take away the first one you still have a back up to call me every day”. So we have parents who are condoning rule breaking and then we are surprised when this generation grows up, enters the work force, and ignores the policies and procedures that a company puts in place. Something is very wrong with this picture. How much of this ludicrous behavior are we willing to tolerate?

As I follow the 2008 Presidential, Congressional, and Senate campaigns, and listen to others talking about them, I hear a lot of criticism about “government. I hear words like inefficient, unresponsive, and incompetent when people talk about government-run services. In the same breath, these critics say that we need private sector solutions – particularly for health care.

Has anyone tried to get medical bills paid through a fragmented health care delivery and payment system lately? Have these critics tried to resolve issues with their credit card, cable or cell phone company only to find it to be a miracle when you can actually talk to a person.

Here is my favorite private sector stories for this week.

First, I ordered a product on the internet and paid for two day shipping with one of the main stream private sector shipping companies. I tracked the package online and discovered that it was not going to be delivered on time because of “an emergency situation beyond our control. After a phone call to the 800 number I learned that (a) people at the call desk and even at the local distribution center have no idea what the emergency actually was; (b) that designation is often used when the driver simply runs out of time to make the delivery; and (c) because it is “beyond the company’s control the consumer is not entitled to any refund! It is also curious that the local distribution centers cannot take incoming phone calls and can only be contacted by the central call center by E-MAIL! When I have mailed an express letter through the much maligned USPS, and it does not arrive by the promised time, I have gotten reimbursed for the cost of the postage.

Second, a couple of months ago I am embarrassed to say that I cut my thumb while preparing dinner. After a not so quick trip to the ER and several stitches later the “fun actually began. The hospital where I went staffs its ER with physicians from a non-hospital clinic. The billing department at this private hospital is supposed send the patient’s insurance data to the physician’s practice administrator, but routinely does not. While the hospital bill was paid without a glitch, I am still getting bills from the ER physician’s clinic – in spite of the fact that I personally sent them my insurance info.

Third, I recently got a new VISA business card – it only took THREE mailings of the new card until this company finally got my name spelled correctly!

So how about we change the discourse about incompetence to include these “private sector solutions as well?

It seems that a lot of my work lately is around coaching Baby-Boomer bosses on how to work with the newest generation in the workforce – the twenty-somethings (AKA “Millennials”) – and teaching the twenty-somethings what no one ever taught them – how to get along in the world of work. On the same day last week, a health care professional and a chef/restaurant owner bent my ear about their frustrations with this youngest generation. What was not surprising was the usual rant about how much time many members of this generation spend on their cell phones either talking or text messaging their friends, their aversion to anything but positive feedback, the apparent lack of time management skills (“you mean deadlines matter?!?”), and their sense of entitlement. However, what I am beginning to hear more frequently is a frustration around the twenty-somethings’ lack of common sense and good judgment, the ability to “think”, and the extent to which they are totally self-absorbed. What both of these bosses told me last week was that each has to spend a great deal of time telling the millennial exactly what to do – long after they should know how to do their job – and that when something occurs that is “off-script”, the typical twenty-something becomes “fartoost” which is a great Yiddish word that means bewildered, disoriented, discombobulated, and otherwise seriously confused. Such behavior on the part of the millennial causes these two bosses to exclaim with great exasperation, “Don’t these people have a brain”.

I think they do. However, most are products of a seriously flawed education system where passing standardized tests has replaced helping students to learn how to think.

The tension between the generations in the workplace is increasing dramatically and the reality is that these twenty-somethings are the ones filling the pipeline of talented workers and future leaders as the baby-boomers retire. I am interested in hearing from others on not only their experience with generational tension in the work place, but also how we can better prepare twenty-somethings for the world of work AND how the world of work needs to adapt to this newest generation.

In the movie, “When Harry Met Sally”, Harry tells Sally that there are two kinds of women: high maintenance women and low maintenance ones and that Sally is the worst because she is high maintenance but thinks she is low!

Through the years I have observed that the high maintenance/low maintenance designation is NOT gender specific. In the workplace there are employees that are high maintenance and low maintenance. Managers tend to like the low maintenance types who keep a low profile, do their jobs, and don’t necessarily ask questions – and don’t take up inordinate amounts of the manager’s time. In contrast, managers tend to view the high maintenance direct reports as demanding, hyper-sensitive, and time sinks, usually because they ask questions and demand more time from that supervisor. What a lot of managers miss is that sometimes, people who are inquisitive, want to learn more about why they are doing something, and want to develop will take more of the manager’s time and that’s part of the role of being a manager. The dirty little secret is that many of the twenty-somethings joining the work place now would be what Harry would call high maintenance people. If managers ignore the demands of this group, they may miss out on the talent that this youngest generation can bring. More about this later….

People in my seminars and workshops often ask me “what business books do you read?  I answer, “I don’t read business books. The group is usually stunned.  What I found through the years is that  many business books don’t really offer any new ideas and often lead readers to the conclusion that there are simple answers to complex problems. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Patrick Lencioni is a writer and consultant that a number of people admire.  His books often have a number in the title: The Five Temptations of a CEO; The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive; and The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Let me be clear that Patrick Lencioni and I probably have a great deal of common ground in our shared passion for making workplaces better.  His books are very accessible and seem to have struck a chord because his book sales are off the charts.  And I do not disagree with the major themes in the books above.  What is a problem for me is how the work gets applied.  Most people in organizations who cite his works tend to have read them non-critically and believe that, “if we can only overcome these five dysfunctions we will be a better team.  What is missing is the question, “might there be a sixth or seventh dysfunction or temptation that is really tripping us up?  Patrick Lencioni provides an example of what philosophers refer to as reductionist thinking – the tendency to reduce problems and solutions to the simplest set of principles.  Another example would be Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  The finite number of principles that reductionist thinking yields are not necessary bad or incorrect principles.  I have worked with teams that, in fact, exhibit all five dysfunctions about which Lencioni writes – as well as others!.  However, reductionist thinking has a way of making people lazy.  Instead of asking “are these really the three, four, or five things in play or better yet, might there be other principles that would apply, there is a tendency to accept as true the results of this reductionist thinking.

Another book that I have seen get mis-used is Jim Collins’ Good to Great.  Collins talks about great organizations making sure that they have “the right people on the bus.  I have talked with a number of executive who extol the virtues of this book and especially cite the part about getting the right people on the bus.  The way this passage gets interpreted is to hire (that is get people on the bus) who look like, think like, and act like the people doing the hiring.  So without real diversity do we really have businesses that can be as great as they could be?
So what do I read?  I read biography, history, and poetry.  I am currently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  This is the story of how Abraham Lincoln selected for his cabinet four of his rivals for the Presidential nomination in 1860 and forge them and others into a team that lead the United States through the Civil War. If you really want to learn about getting the right people on the bus and building an effective team read this book. But read it with a critical eye, ask questions, then decide how you want to move forward.

On Saturday, December 1, 2007 at about 7PM CST, my dear friend Andrue Scott died peacefully at the Benedictine Care Center in Minneapolis, MN. Andrue had battled HIV-AIDS for more than 16 years. A 1966 graduate of NYC’s School for the Performing Arts, he always had an uncanny sense of timing. So by dying on World AIDS Day, Andrue was being Andrue until the end. What finally caught up with him was that sarcoma that had metastasized before his leg was amputated in June, 2004.

I met Andrue when he was managing the Barnes and Noble Music Department in downtown Minneapolis. I went in one day at lunch to purchase one opera , Puccini’s La Rondine and left with TEN operas and a new friend.

So why am I writing about Andrue who was born Drue Scott Oppenheim in Queens, NY on May 25, 1948 in a blog about working with others? Reader’s Digest had a feature entitled, “The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Ever Met. (Maybe they still do, I haven’t looked at an issue since Lyndon Johnson was president!) Andrue would be my subject if I were to write that essay today. He was very opinionated, somewhat assertive, and quite frankly, well, bossy! However, he had a certain wit and charm with which he could put people at ease and endear himself to many. His circle of friends included the rich and famous as well as the everyday regular people of the world. He was high on the likeability quotient.

There are at least two things we could learn from Andrue. The first is that he maintained that everything worth learning about in life comes from either a Broadway musical or a TV sitcom , and he could cite the exact show tune or episode to support his claim. Of course, this was back in the day when both musicals and sitcoms had substance. Second, Andrue always communicated directly , he said what he meant and meant what he said. I’ve maintained that if people could only communicate clearly with each other, many workplace issues would go away. So thank you Andrue for your friendship and what you have helped all of us to learn.

After a lengthy hiatus, www.workingwithothers.com is back.  Or more accurately, I am back with (hopefully) regular contributions once again.  Thanks to many subscribers who sent me emails wondering if I had dropped off the face of the earth. No, I didn’t.  I was just gathering more material and trying to practice what I’ve offered in this blog.

When my stepchildren were involved in youth sports, I remember a conversation among the parents in which we would wonder about the new coach. People would ask, “Is this person a screamer. In other words, except for when the coach is shouting encouragement or trying to get a player’s attention from across the field, does the coach routinely yell at the players – especially if they make a mistake , which (news flash to ALL coaches) they frequently do because they are learning how to play? We did not like the screamer coaches.

I’ve noted before that there are many websites devoted entirely to bad bosses (e.g., www.badbossology.com, www.badbosses.net). A question being asked around the water cooler is now, “Is that boss a screamer? In other words, is this boss someone who yells at his/her staff? It is a pretty sad state of affairs when this happens.

Well, here is the deal. It is NEVER OK for a boss to yell at a peer or a direct report in the workplace and that includes one-on-one meetings as well as larger gatherings. I think the worst example of this kind of behavior I have witnessed was when I was asked to coach the CEO of a small privately held services company several years ago. This CEO spent the entire leadership team meeting publicly humiliating each member of his team , for very trivial things. And if a given VP had not done anything wrong, this CEO would still berate them on general principles. What was even more amazing is that this team put up with it.

This happened to me once. It was about twenty years ago, and my boss started screaming at me because I responded to a request from her boss directly without having my boss review it before it was sent , not that my boss ever communicated this expectation. We were in the boss’ office. When she finished, I very calmly said, “It is quite reasonable for you to communicate your expectations about how you want me to handle a given situation. It is not acceptable for you to scream at me. I treat you with respect and I expect the same in return. My boss sat in stunned silence. She then apologized and said that she might have overreacted.

Sometimes bosses scream because they are scared of something , and more often than not because the organization has allowed the person to get away with it. Simply letting them know what is and is not acceptable , very calmly , will work most of the time. When it does not , then you have more data that will help you decide what to do. About six months after my conversation, I started my own company.