Pitting one employee against another in a way that denigrates the character of a fellow employee and bruises his or her self-image is not what I’m advocating. What I am advocating is a safe environment in which all people are heard, mirrored, and validated for their ideas and where those thoughts can safely be challenged. Best Place to Work companies are especially skilled at this. There’s a kind of virtuous cycle in this: Connectedness allows constructive conflict and chaos, and the ensuing commitment to authentic dialogue can actually give us access to the connectedness we seek.
The ConnectionPoints™ Are Ten Connecting Conversations
While there are a multitude of hidden, disconnecting conversations that serve to sabotage company performance, there are just a handful of connecting conversations—ten of them.
The ability to manage these ten conversations between employees and managers is the best indicator of a great workplace with a culture of high performance. They shape the way people connect and help the organization produce breakthrough results.
These ten conversations are for—not about—the following:
Contribution
Acknowledgment and Appreciation
Alignment
Accountability
Communication
Relatedness
Responsibility
Integrity
Possibility
Fun, Rewards, Gratitude
As I mentioned in the Introduction, changing the word about to the word for calls people to action. Keep that in mind as we elaborate on each conversation.
The Ten ConnectionPoints™ of a Best Place to Work Company
The Conversation for Being ContributableThis conversation gives everyone a voice in the organization. Suggestions and issues that anyone raises are taken and acted upon or resolved in such a way that each member of the organization feels he or she is being encouraged to contribute individual ideas and perspective.
I first became aware of this conversation long after I completed my initial research into Best Place to Work companies. At that time, there were only nine ConnectionPoints. I was engaged to help a nonprofit that was struggling with growth and needed to fund-raise to support that. What I discovered was that the organization suffered from “scarcity thinking.” People firmly believed that there was not enough money available in the community to help them achieve their mission. So, while their primary focus was on fund-raising, and while they were open to receiving a check to support their mission, that’s where the outreach stopped. They really knew how to take the fun out of fund-raising.
People who give substantially look upon their donations as investing. Most investors I know, including myself, are very interested in the outcomes that their investments produce. In the case of a nonprofit, when I write a check, I want to do it through a relationship where they want more than just my moolah. Any organization that doesn’t recognize this and doesn’t develop a meaningful relationship with its contributors is going to be severely disappointed.
There is a parallel to the workplace. Employees are investing hugely of their time and intellect in going to work for you. They could be working for someone else. They want a return on their investment. Believe it or not, that return is delivered in the form of being allowed to make a difference—to contribute something meaningful to the outcome of the organization and be appreciated and acknowledged for it. I’ll say more about that in a moment.
In other words, the return employees want isn’t what you thought it was. The primary reason most people work for you isn’t to get a paycheck. A bigger salary is akin to the better-car syndrome: When you buy a better car, you feel the pride of ownership, but soon it’s the new normal; it doesn’t matter all that much after a while. Giving an employee more money isn’t the answer to high performance. It never has been, and I suspect it never will be. Instead, the answer is allowing them to make a difference with you. Y.O.U. That’s what being contributable means.
When you’re not contributable, employees will leave you for what they perceive as a greater opportunity to matter. Rarely do people leave for a salary that’s only moderately better. On the other hand, when you assign responsibility and allow people to provide solutions that you actually put to use, they’ll speak highly of you, and they wouldn’t think of leaving. In fact, they’ll want to work harder to make you even happier.
The Conversation for Being Acknowledged and AppreciatedEmployees tend to adapt themselves to the reality that life is an effort. You work hard, and if you’re lucky, you get ahead. We do what we do and get what we get. This is also too often the view of employees who have been wounded in the workplace before you hired them: They’ve been passed over for promotions and given insufficient compensation for hard work. When you hire them, it’s not apparent how they have been treated in the past—and it’s also not your responsibility to fix them or compensate for past wrongs. But once they’ve been in your workplace for a while, they may—or may not—decide that it’s not all that different “here” from how it was “there.” That is your opportunity to transform people’s lives.
When I first realized this was an important component of Best Place to Work companies, I devised a way to introduce acknowledgment and appreciation into my clients’ workplaces. Your first impression might be that it is awkward and feels clumsy, and your employees may feel that way at first as well. I promise you, however, the rewards of your effort will greatly outweigh your initial discomfort. You’ll be giving your employees a gift they’ve never received anywhere else, and they’ll feel a sense of wholeness that they’ve never experienced at work.
To introduce acknowledgment and appreciation into your company, start by setting a date and telling all your team members that you are hosting an Acknowledgment and Appreciation Lunch. Don’t give them any details. Tell them to bring a bag lunch, or provide food and drinks if you wish.
Start the lunch with a few announcements and find some reasons to acknowledge a group or two that are responsible for some great performance. Do not allow any negative results to be discussed. This is a positive Appreciation Lunch, and you want it to build on what works and what is great about your organization.
After the initial announcements, hand out a sheet of paper and pen to all the participants. Ask each person to write down everything he or she would want to be acknowledged for accomplishing over the past six months—not just company matters. Tell participants they may also include things from their personal lives. For example, parents could include something about their children or their spouse, or participants could mention something they are doing to further their education. Anything is fair game.
What would you be proud for someone to discover about you?
What would your coworkers be surprised to learn about you?
Give each participant time to come up with at least six items he or she is proud of. Ask each to put his or her name at the top of the paper and hand it in. Shuffle all the papers and distribute them to the group (making sure no one gets his or her own).
Now for the fun part: It’s the job of every employee to be acknowledged for exactly what he or she wants to be acknowledged for. Choose a person to start, ask him or her to stand, and then ask the person who has the chosen person’s list to stand as well. Have the two of them face each other.
If you have a whiteboard, write the chosen person’s name on it followed by the words “I want to acknowledge you for …” Then instruct the person who has the list to read what’s on the board and then read the list. Then, if the person with the list knows the chosen person well, encourage him or her to acknowledge the chosen person for anything else that isn’t on the list, as long as it’s positive.
Odds are, the person receiving the acknowledgment will be uncomfortable. No one is used to being acknowledged. In fact, most people would rather acknowledge than be acknowledged—even though they secretly wish to be acknowledged. On the other hand, most people are willing to acknowledge if they know what to acknowledge—that’s infinite
ly more comfortable.
The beauty of this exercise is that the person who gets acknowledged is being acknowledged for exactly what he or she wants to be acknowledged for, and no one has to guess or make up an acknowledgment that might fall short of what the chosen person wants to be acknowledged for.
Acknowledgment and Appreciation events like this will transform the belongingness in your company and elevate the endorphins people get from being singled out and told how great they are in front of everyone else.
By learning how to acknowledge, everyone starts getting comfortable with giving it away. You should plan to have an Acknowledgment and Appreciation event every month because eventually, leaders, managers, and everyone else will stop waiting until the next event to exercise their newly developed muscle of acknowledgment.
The Conversation for Being AlignedBest Place to Work companies have an almost crazed desire for alignment, for everyone moving in the same direction. It’s a work of art when a leader can cause alignment in an organization. In a diverse group, alignment creates energy, which is what you need to execute your strategy. To some, it might look like alignment is simply following directions. But there’s more to it. You know how important it is to have wheel alignment for your car; otherwise, you feel the vehicle wobble, and your tires wear unevenly. The same is true in the workplace: Uneven alignment causes the organization to wobble and sometimes even go out of control.
In Best Place to Work companies, everyone works to stay headed in the same direction, not necessarily just by following the leader but also by making sure that when any strategic element is altered, everyone has an opportunity to contribute to changes that must take place in other areas of the business. Operations in aligned organizations have minimal confusion. There are no territorial disputes, and everyone looks out for everyone else, because everyone is in the same boat headed in the same direction.
If you’re a CEO or executive leader with final authority, it’s important that you use the conversation for being contributable (ConnectionPoint #1) to allow others to bring ideas to you. Your job isn’t to find the holes in their concepts but to be able to say whether you can be aligned with the proposed effort or action. If you can, then you empower others to dig deep into themselves and contribute. If you can’t, then share what’s preventing you from being aligned. That becomes a teaching opportunity.
When people are aligned, they understand the business goals for the year and the role each goal plays. They recognize there must be alignment for their efforts to affect the bottom-line success of the company.
The Conversation for Being AccountableChapter 21 is devoted to mapping and establishing accountability, so I will say only a few words about it now. When employees are being accountable, they make specific promises to take action to accomplish goals. Everyone sees everyone else’s promises, and there are no secret deals to undermine the effort to keep those promises. The results of people’s actions are fully measured, and everyone’s contribution is visible.
The Conversation for Being in CommunicationWhen I first address communication with a client, it’s usually near the beginning of the consulting process but after I’ve measured this conversation in the Connection Points™ Employee Survey that I give them. Communication generally gets the lowest rating and is therefore the largest gap to close.
Even Best Place to Work companies struggle to shore up communication. But in companies where there is a high degree of communication, employees hear from management about anything that happens or impacts the way they do their job in a timely manner. They don’t find out about it accidentally or after the fact. It doesn’t reach anyone first through gossip or the grapevine.
The Conversation for Being RelatedRelatedness is what I often call the source of all results. Nothing meaningful happens unless first there is a relationship. When there is relatedness, it’s very easy for an employee to talk to his or her direct supervisor, because that supervisor listens. And there is real solidarity among executives, managers, and employees. If someone needs something, there is no problem with starting a conversation that gets the issue handled. This is how connectedness cures a host of ills.
The Conversation for Being ResponsibleWhen most people hear the word “responsible,” they assume it has to do with blaming others for what went wrong or for not doing what they said they would. No Best Place to Work company practices that. For them, being responsible means taking the initiative to do or cause what is necessary to get the job done. When employees are being responsible, they don’t wait for a supervisor to tell them what they need to do before taking action.
The Conversation for Demonstrating IntegrityWhat does it mean to demonstrate integrity? It begins when management says they are going to do something, and the statement is followed with authentic action. Their actions are always in step with what they said they would do. This is not the same as being honest, decent, or virtuous. Integrity is a way of being in which management says X is going to happen, and X happens. And it applies beyond management. There is a clear and total match between what people in the organization say and their actions.
The Conversation for PossibilityThis conversation means there is a future for this company. When employees can see and understand where this company is going and can feel connected to their company’s plans for the next three to five years—and longer—they will not fear that their job could end suddenly through no fault of their own.
What future do you see for your company in the next three to five years?
What conversations are your employees having about the company’s future?
The Conversation for Fun, Rewards, and GratefulnessWhen your employees get up almost every morning excited and grateful about going to work and being on time (and often early), that is the greatest reward possible. On most days, employees of Best Place to Work companies can’t wait to get to work. They say things like “This is a great place to work, and I feel grateful to have the opportunity to be here with these great people.” Often, they say they can’t believe they get to work there.
The Hidden Viral Conversations That Undermine Your Company’s Success
Let’s jump from the frying pan right into the fire. In Section 2, you’ll begin to see what’s keeping you and your team from executing your organization’s strategy. What I call execution viruses plague just about every company today. These are the disconnectors—the conversations that undermine success.
I know that disconnected companies struggle. After all, I was there once, too—ok, more than once. And whether it concerned our strategic planning, our client relationships, our innovation, the actions we took, or our results, we were either working to avoid failure, or, we were attempting to somehow leverage our strengths. Neither approach helped us get the outcomes we wanted, because something else was missing. As a team we weren’t connected.
You, too, may have struggled and failed, and you certainly don’t want that to happen again, so your focus is on making damn sure it doesn’t. However, when leadership is focused on avoiding bad things, it can’t also be focused on growth. Before you know it, other circumstances come into play, and you’re not running your own company; as you will see, some other unseen force is running it for you.
Working to avoid failure is counterproductive. It results in disconnection and then in failure itself.
Here is what I’ve learned: High-performing connection-driven companies are positively challenged by the possibilities of a huge future. Disconnected-driven companies are being constantly tested by the small outcomes brought about by their recurring failure to execute in the past.
The future connects. The past disconnects. One thing is for sure. You’re always choosing one or the other.
When I first started out in business in my mid-twenties, I was pretty proud of myself and the work I was doing. After all I was the youngest person I knew who had the guts to start a business. The truth is, my pride bordered on hubris and my ego played a huge part in causing me to overlook so much of what
business is really all about. Back in those days we didn’t have business coaches. But if I’d had a coach he or she probably would have given me the kind of advice I really needed. That advice would likely have been that “what I do and what I say is insufficient to make a real difference in my success.”
There was another aspect to business that I never saw that would have allowed me to act in new ways. It’s this: successful businesses are predicated on relationality. To be honest most businesspeople don’t use words such as “relationality” even today; probably, among other reasons, because there isn’t even a definition for it in the dictionary. I’m making it up. What you want and need is relationality in your business.
As you work through the chapters in this section you will begin to see that there is a relational equation to the most successful businesses. Focusing on who I was being would have altered the balance of things in my favor and improved my business. Best Place to Work companies innately understand this and adopt a culture of relationality—what I now refer to as connectedness. In the chapters that encompass this section, I outline for you how this connectedness works so that YOU, as the connected leader in your organization, can promote this thinking for your company. These are the core principles and practices of companies that exhibit the performance characteristics of a THIRTEENER.
A Tiny (but Deadly) Viral Conversation
In my early career, I built a company designed to help businesses manage their use of the new digital telecom technology that had become available after the breakup of Ma Bell. Most of my clients were hotels, which in those days resold telephone services to their guests at a fairly decent profit, if their systems were designed properly. Our job was to redesign and optimize our clients’ phone business, help them take advantage of the new age of telecom technology, and run interference between our clients and service vendors (who had the advantage of understanding the technology). As we learned more about our clients and how their businesses worked, new opportunities emerged.
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