| One of my favorites
is You’ve Got Mail with
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. He’s a millionaire chain
bookstore owner and she’s an independent book seller.
They have an Internet romance and hate each other in person.
It has a happy ending, of course, with “Somewhere
Over the Rainbow’ running in the closing credits.
One of my favorite lines in the film happens when they
are finally deciding, in person, that they will be friends.
He asks her if she can forgive him for putting her out
of business by telling her, “it’s not personal,
it’s business,” and she tells him
how much she hates that saying because “no matter
what it is, it should start out with being personal.”
What’s the matter with being personal?
I was so happy, recently, to find Ronna Lichtenberg’s
book It’s not Business, It’s
Personal quoted in an online interview. I was unhappy;
however, to request it at my local bookstore to find it
was sadly, out of print, even though it was published
in 2001! Yet, the shelves were stocked with plenty of
books on business, finance, selling, marketing, and leadership,
ad infinitum. To be fair, I like some of those other books,
but this was the one I wanted. The one I told
my friend Tamara I probably shouldn’t read because
it would only make me more self-righteous about the people
thing.
Once, I found myself in an uncomfortable position with
a former colleague who had been on an interview panel
for a position for which I was applying. I was trying
to get some feedback from her. “Your leadership
style is about people,” she said, “You develop
relationships with them and then they follow you.”
I was waiting for the punch line. “And? So?”
I queried. “It’s supposed to be about the
work,” she emphasized. I was dumbstruck. My response
to her--“If it’s not about the people first,
then the work just isn’t that important!”--hung
there in the air. I left that job in less than two months.
I’m trying very hard to understand organizations’
discomfort with the people thing. Sure,people are messy,
chaotic, unpredictable, funny, extreme, intense . . .
the list goes on. What strikes me as odd and oddly dysfunctional
is the either/or dichotomy I run up against in organizations
over and over. It’s as if we want to reclaim the
business model of the Industrial Era—the one that
revolutionized manufacturing—that we’re all
supposed to perform the same tasks in the same way, day
after day, as if we are working on an assembly line. Even
that isn’t an accurate picture of modern production
and manufacturing. Why isn’t work about the people
and the work itself? Why do we persist in thinking the
people thing doesn’t matter, is secondary to the
work itself? It isn’t. Systems theory, Quantum physics,
common sense . . . these all support the notion that we
are not fragmented beings, we are interconnected. We don’t
need a self-help guru to tell us that our personal lives
should be balanced without some inkling that our work
lives should be balanced, too.
In the Great Places to Work® Trust Index®, employees
respond to “57 statements that cover credibility,
respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie”. These
elements are about principles, values and relationships.
Trust is the foundation of any strong relationship, no
matter the context. Patrick Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions
of a Team, begins with the foundation of trust in rebuilding
a team that’s broken. The Twelve Questions developed
by the Gallup Organization are designed to measure the
strength of a workplace and primarily center on clarity
of expectations, regular feedback, relationships, and
people being able to work in their areas of strength.
There are plenty of articles and books piling up on my
bedside table to support this integration of the work
thing with the people thing, so why do we still resist
it?
I think it’s about fear. Fear that our great plans
for work productivity and performance will get all messed
up with the messy people. Someone’s mother will
die. Someone else will get divorced. Our team leader will
get breast cancer. Our IT guys don’t get along and
now we can’t get our software loaded. Everyone’s
scared of the HR director. All of these people issues
are about being human and imperfect. Smart leaders not
only make room for the people thing, they embrace it,
cultivate it, grow it.
They engage it and use it to make their organizations
stronger, more productive, and more successful. And they
care about whether or not the people thing is
working because, in the end, if it doesn’t, the
goals of the organization won’t be working either
because they are supposed to do the work! (I’m
resisting writing ‘duh!?’ –well, I guess
I did it anyway.)
How can you impact the human element of human
performance?
Here are five smart strategies for improved
results:
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1. Clear the swamp.
Find out what’s going on that gets in
the way of people doing their best work. What are the
obstacles to high levels of productivity, trust and
morale?
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2. Create opportunities for building trust.
If you’re not the person to plan the event,
activity, project or contest, find someone who is. Assign
work to teams, encourage team building and collaboration.
Take time to find out about your coworkers as people
by offering opportunities to get to know one another.
Opportunities for team building are not just about touchy-feely
exercises—meaningful work and opportunities for
growth within your organization help to build the essential
value of trust.
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3. Help people learn to confront effectively.
Issues around poor performance or disruptive
behaviors have a huge impact on people. Most will tell
you they’ll do anything to avoid conflict or their
past attempts at confrontation have been unsuccessful.
The cost of not dealing with these issues is too high
for an organization to ignore.
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4. Facilitate Problem Solving. Effective
problem solving often takes time, but if you are willing
to get at the real issues by listening, asking
good questions, and encouraging the move out of victim-mode
into a place of action, this will increase productivity
and impact morale, too.
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4. Recognize, or else. One
size does not fit all for recognition of good
work and praise, so take time to find out how people
like to be recognized-gesture of thanks and faith, increased
responsibility, compensation, etc. Most importantly,
you can impact performance by offering specific
praise and recognition so that people will know what
they did well and that they can do it again!
Let’s make a commitment to change our either/or
paradigm about the workplace. It’s not personal
or business, it’s personal and
business. The people thing is essential to the
work!
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