In Great Company

by Louis Carter

  Create a Culture of Civility

  One of the main reasons people provide for being rude and uncivil at work is time constraints. They are in a hurry, late, behind schedule, or otherwise time starved. As a result, they exhibit rude or ill-tempered behavior that sows discord in the workplace. A second everyday reason people provide for incivility? Personal issues. They are preoccupied with life’s events or problems at home, and they carry their stress and negativity with them into the office.

  From where I stand, these common justifications for disrespect are poor excuses for the garden variety incivility that, if left unchecked, can lead to more extreme bad behavior such as bullying and belittling. Before long, employees are treating customers with disrespect as well. Conversely, the workplaces that are role models of respect have a very low tolerance for incivility.

  At Starbucks, for example, “it was almost impossible to get fired for missing your numbers. But if you treated people with disrespect, we would talk to you and coach you, . . . but if it became a pattern, you were going to be gone,” Behar said. “That was the quickest way out the door because that’s what mattered most to us.”

  The best way to create a culture of civility is to model it from the top down. When leaders are even tempered and able to treat people in a polite manner, it trickles down. And 360-degree feedback is the best tool to hold people at all levels accountable. Basic respect matters enough to people that it will come out if you include the right questions as part of routine management assessments.

  Creating a baseline of civility is so important, in part, because it is simple. If it falls to the wayside, much more gets destroyed with it, and suddenly incivility is simply a symptom of a much larger problem.

  Put Fairness First

  Fairness is yet another pillar of respect, and it manifests in many very different ways: rewarding people justly for their accomplishments, treating them well when they are leaving or laid off, keeping an open mind and withholding blame when something goes wrong, giving them airtime when a decision will affect them, holding everyone accountable for the same rules, and rewarding people equally, and so on.

  Many times, we can enable fairness simply by putting processes in place to ensure that everyone is treated similarly and justly with transparent due process. What are the milestones for promotion? How many months’ severance do people receive? What is the family leave policy? If everyone knows the rules around these and other issues—and the policy is fair and just—it will cut down on people feeling that they have been treated unfairly.

  Acting consistently and fairly is not always the easiest or the fastest way to do things, but it is the most respectful, and it will pay dividends in engagement, productivity, and loyalty.

  2. Respect Differences

  Inclusion is about trust, civility, and fairness all rolled into one. It is arguably the single biggest facet of respect and perhaps the most important to organizational success and emotional connectedness. Inclusion, which I define as active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity and the commitment to treat people fairly and value them equally regardless of their differences, has proven over and again to be good for bottom-line business and great for engagement.

  As a recent McKinsey study shows, “Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.”17 In addition, a separate study showed that diverse companies had higher cash flow per employee over a three-year period than nondiverse companies.18 Findings like this abound.

  Inclusion has worked for Wegmans, just as it has for so many other organizations. The grocer’s proactive stance on diversity landed it at number 8 on the Forbes list of America’s Best Employers for Diversity in 2018.19

  Yet, my favorite example of inclusion as a lever for emotional connectedness is the Girl Scouts of the USA under the leadership of the remarkable Frances Hesselbein. During her 24 years at Girl Scouts, including 14 as CEO, Hesselbein mobilized a critical turnaround for the organization. During her tenure, membership quadrupled, diversity more than tripled, and the organization was transformed into what Peter Drucker called “the best-managed organization around.” Hesselbein accomplished the amazing turnaround with a paid staff of 6,000 and a volunteer staff of 730,000.20

  “To start, we studied ourselves and found that we were not nearly as representative as we needed to be,” Hesselbein told me.21 She enlisted Vernon Jordan, then president of the National Urban League, and Robert Hill, the noted sociologist, researcher, and advocate for African American equality and civil rights, to help identify ways the club could start to appeal to minority girls. Yet, changing a 106-year-old organization with a rigidly established culture and traditional values is far easier said than done. At the time, the organization was designed to draw the vast majority of its members from white middle-class America.

  Hesselbein said the real inaugural step to change was envisioning a more inclusive future. “When you have a vision designed to ignite a vast and multicultural organization, and when you have a clear, powerful statement of why you must transform, it’s amazing how you can take the lead and move right into the future and give other people the courage to do the same,” she said.

  One of the most important, and exceedingly challenging, aspects of the change process was updating the organization’s powerful touchstones—the ubiquitous Girl Scout pin and the iconic Girl Scout Handbook.

  About the pin, she said, “Here we had 788,000 adults in the organization, and we had used this pin and this logo since 1912. How do you move into the future without alienating or having people feel they’re part of the past, and yet you know you have to be part of the future?”

  Hesselbein acknowledged and addressed the challenge and moved ahead with resolve. About the updated pin, which depicted three diverse female faces looking out toward the future, she said: “When any little girl or young woman in the United States looks at the pin, she must find herself.” And the handbook: “If I’m a little girl on a Navaho reservation, I should be able to open my Brownie handbook and see myself there.”

  Hesselbein succeeded in transforming the Girl Scouts and leading the organization to a new, more diverse era of dynamic success. It was that repetition in the storytelling, consistency of messaging, and Hesselbein’s ability to envision the change that was called for that made her so powerful as a leader and change maker. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 in part for her work in Girl Scouts.

  Hesselbein’s example is as instructive as it is inspiring, and hers is one of the stories that illustrates the prescriptions that follow that make inclusion a main lever for unleashing respect within organizations of any type.

  Dig Deeper with Data

  Having a rigorous process in place to measure and monitor inclusion is a cornerstone of success. Without systematic transparency and dedicated resources and effort, inclusion can quickly fall to the wayside.

  At the beginning of her transformation of the Girl Scouts, Frances Hesselbein used a process to measure their current level of inclusion and set an ambitious goal for the future. Many notably inclusive organizations have since taken this best practice to an even higher level. The Australian enterprise software firm Atlassian, for instance, mentioned in Chapter 3, is known for its unusually in-depth analysis and reporting on inclusion and diversity within its workforce. For its part, Atlassian delivers data on inclusion not only at the aggregate corporate level but also at the individual team level, so the organization and their stakeholders can see how inclusion plays out across all groups. This state-of-the-art reporting sets the standard for the tech industry and creates a benchmark for Atlassian’s competitors to match.22

  Detailed transparency into diverse representation within your workforce makes it possible to get beyond generalities to measure representation on teams, in roles, and around the leadership table.

  View Inclusion Broadly

  In practice, inclusi
on on teams should go beyond statistical multicultural diversity. The governing norms and workplace environment needs to be such that people feel safe and able to participate and be themselves. In particular, people need to feel free to disagree and even dissent.

  Dominic Barton, global managing partner for McKinsey & Company, takes this idea even further, saying, “One of our most important values is the obligation to dissent. Which means not only do you have the right to say, ‘I disagree with you,’ or ‘I don’t like that piece of thinking,’ or ‘I don’t like the way you’re approaching this or how you’re talking to me,’ or whatever, but you must say it.”23

  Honest dissent and truth telling are both forms of respect in a functioning meritocracy, Barton told me.

  Hesselbein put this idea into practice at the Girl Scouts as a means for engaging people in the change effort. She allowed local councils to make their own decision in the beginning about which pin and logo design to order, for example. “Doing this is a key principle in managing change and mobilizing people around it,” she explained. “If you act in a dismissive way when people oppose you, they will never support the change, but if you give them time, attention, and your genuine respect, it creates a tremendous amount of goodwill.”

  We get far more emotional connectedness from the inclusion imperative if all ideas and ways of thinking are represented and taken into account and when people feel able to authentically participate and dissent.

  Make Inclusion Mission Critical

  Inclusion needs to be a core value in organizations—thereby going beyond a human resources or compliance purview and making it everyone’s priority. Yet, it needs to be built into the fabric of business as well.

  Hesselbein knew that expanding the Girl Scouts’ appeal beyond white middle-class members to include the full range of diversity in America was the only way the organization would survive. It was a values imperative, to be sure, but it was also a business priority. The more ways we can build inclusion into all parts of organizations from culture to commerce, the faster it takes hold as a way to connect us to each other and the organization.

  3. Lead with Respect

  If we look at the CEOs who have the highest Glassdoor ratings, respect comes up over and over again as one of the key factors for their success.24 Unfortunately, research also shows that 54 percent of employees have said they don’t receive the respect they need from leaders.25

  Given the dominant workforce trends, leading with respect is especially important going forward. First, as organizations become less hierarchical, flatter, and more team based, leaders rotate in and out of roles, come into contact with many different types of people, and need to operate within a paradigm of empowerment. Respect is a key leadership trait that makes flat or matrixed organizations operate more smoothly.

  Next, leaders can’t hide behind their mahogany desks or rely on middle managers to interact with frontline employees. With social networks and myriad new channels of communication connecting us to each other, leaders are required to interact regularly and respectfully with employees as a way to engage and inspire them. Finally, it is no secret that millennials and younger workers, like many generations before them, are looking for jobs that matter more and match their values. As part of that, they expect leaders to communicate transparently, use influence as opposed to pure authority, and act based on trust as opposed to job title. In short, respect has become a leadership imperative.

  Yet, while the leadership paradigm has changed, not all leaders understand the shift. Many still operate in command-and-control mode where showing respect is either optional for leaders or reserved for their executive peers. The reasons are varied. Some leaders are not self-aware enough to know when they are acting with disrespect; others are too busy to offer the recognition and appreciation that employees associate with respect; still others are the type of toxic leaders that leave people running for the exits the first chance they get.

  Regardless of the reason, leaders need to see that respect matters most. Throughout this book, I take the perspective that being In Great Company is a collective effort, and emotional connectedness matters to everyone. But the fact remains: if leaders don’t exhibit respect, they won’t receive it in return. When organizations operate based on fear instead of respect, people don’t give their best, and they withhold loyalty. Luckily, the opposite is also true. When employees respect leaders, it establishes trust and keeps people committed and connected.

  As an executive coach, I work one-on-one with leaders to help them make the changes they need to be successful. In this case, helping leaders to see the powerful role respect plays in emotional connectedness comes down to a few actions, described below, that have more to do with mindset than systems or structure.

  Practice Self-Awareness

  Toxic leadership aside, most of us want to project respect, but we face hidden barriers within ourselves. Some of us are slightly disconnected from reality, and we don’t realize how others perceive our behavior. Others are accustomed to being treated with deference, and they are thrown off when someone speaks the truth or dissents. Most often? When we act in a disrespectful manner, it is because we don’t fully respect ourselves.

  The leadership psyche is complicated, and most of us are clueless about the things that trigger our bad behavior. This is where self-awareness comes in. In his bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, psychologist Daniel Goleman defines self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.”26 If that sounds esoteric and unimportant, it’s not. A 2010 study by the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations found self-awareness to be the strongest predictor of overall success in leaders.27 It makes intuitive sense. Self-awareness helps us play to our strengths, understand our fatal flaws, and surround ourselves with people who can fill in the gaps.

  Pursuing honest self-reflection aimed at isolating our development needs is a proactive endeavor. Luckily, most companies offer multiple opportunities for executives to get to know themselves, hear the feedback they need, and begin to see what motivates their decision-making and behavior. Executive coaching is one common path to help leaders reach enlightenment. Others are 360-degree feedback and leadership assessments. The easiest way? Ask people you trust to tell you the truth about how you are perceived—and listen to them. Leaders who can get to the root cause of their problem with respect are in a position to solve it before it does irreparable damage to their reputation and relationships.

  I put it this way to leaders: pursue self-awareness as if your career depended on it, because it does.

  Communicate Your Respect

  There are numerous ways for leaders to signal respect. As we will see in the next section, it is often the little things that mean the most to people—making eye contact, thanking them for their help, remembering their names, and countless other intimate gestures. However, I would argue that communication in general is not a little thing. It’s everything when it comes to demonstrating your respect.

  Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40, is a big believer in communication as a tool to truly connect with the 450 “tribe members” at the company. In an interview, Ridge said, “Communication doesn’t come in one flavor. The key to communication is the permission to communicate. There are four things that come into play here: care, candidacy, accountability, and responsibility. I care about my people. I take a deep interest in who they are and what they do. I consistently take initiatives to make them feel cared for. Ultimately, communication is all about consistency.”28

  Communication means a lot to Ridge, and he is an expert at engaging with his tribe in an impactful and positive way. How does Ridge let employees know that he respects them and their needs? He encourages them to reach out to him directly with concerns, and he responds within 24 hours.29

  Communication is at the core of human relationships, and it is the greatest tool leaders have to lead with respect and create a workplace that keeps people coming back.

  4. The Smal
l Things Are Big

  Dr. Terry Jackson, noted author and executive coach, shared his experience leading the turnaround of a multibillion-dollar business. It was a massive challenge, and Jackson needed to gain as much knowledge as he could before beginning. Some leaders in his position would do a deep dive into the numbers, examine future objectives and corporate history, and stop there. But Jackson went further. He sat down with all of the employees individually to hear about their professional and personal goals, and he listened to as much as they were willing to share about themselves. He collected data on their birthdays, wedding anniversaries, the names and birthdays of their spouses and children, and even the names of their pets. His approach was designed to demonstrate his genuine interest in every person and to make the emotional connection that would give them a better chance to succeed.

  “The ultimate objective was to improve people’s engagement and drive increased productivity, which would deliver increased sales, revenue, and profit,” he said. “On a deeper level, I believed that their success was also my success. If I cleared the obstacles, they could do what they do best: close deals that generate revenue.”30