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Category: Human Resources

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Growth Human Resources Leadership Personal Development

Level Five or Machiavellian: Which Leadership Approach Wins in Employee Engagement?

A widely-accepted assumption is employee engagement is influenced by how the leaders of the organization behave. Another way to say this is, the work environment is influenced by leaders and that work environment influences employee engagement. Both Level 5 Leadership and Machiavellian Leadership can create outstanding results but how does Level 5 Leadership behavior stack up against Machiavellian behavior regarding engagement?

The purpose here is to make the case for higher employee engagement. There are two big distinctions between Level 5 Leadership and Machiavellian Leadership that provide key insights for action.

First, we need agree on clear definitions. I prefer using the Conference Board’s definition of Employee engagement. I paraphrase, “Employee Engagement is a strong emotional connection an employee feels with their organization and team such that they are willing to give extra effort without being asked bribed or threatened.” (Gibbons, 2007)

Level 5 Leadership is the term describing leaders who were uncovered by Jim Collins, and his researchers, while writing Good to Great. (Collins, 2001) Level 5 Leaders are both modest and willful. They are humble in behaviors and fearless in their pursuit of results. They avoid letting their ego interfere with their ambition to achieve a great result for their organizations.

Machiavellian Leaders are also willful. They believe people are self-interested creatures and will put their self-interest ahead of other considerations. This is a key characteristic they share. In part because of this belief, they also believe it is better to be feared than to be loved. Machiavellian leaders hold efficacy and foresight as important characteristics. Humility is not needed to achieve results. Humility is not needed to achieve power and achieving power is a high priority for these leaders.

There are two key insights which can help us decide which leadership approach is best to build engagement. The first is trust vs. fear. The second is autonomy vs. dependency.

Trust trumps fear

Trust is much more effective than fear for achieving engagement. If we choose to accept the engagement definition above the presence of fear proves there is little or no engagement. Engagement is an emotional connection where employees are willing to put in extra effort without threats. Threats create fear.

If employees are willing to put in extra effort they must feel safe to do so. Safety suggests a lack of fear. Innovation and risk taking requires reduced fear, not more. If Machiavelli prefers fear to love from followers, it suggests engagement would be reduced with a Machiavellian leader.

Autonomy trumps Dependency

There are two laws attributed to Machiavelli which might cause concern for those who value engagement. The first one is:

“Learn to keep people dependent upon you: To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.” (Greene, 2000)

To be fully engaged, people need autonomy. They need freedom to make decisions to innovate and to feel fulfilled. If the Machiavellian leader purposely creates dependency, it follows that engagement will naturally be reduced.

The second is:

“Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability: Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable.” (Greene, 2000)

Unpredictability creates uncertainty and fear. It can lead to a lack of trust. It can prevent people from taking risk and/or acting at all.

Al Dunlap of Scott Paper fame exemplifies the Machiavellian Leader and is profiled by Jim Collins in Good to Great. Dunlap cut expenses at Scott Paper, mostly by cutting jobs and lay-offs, sold the company, and pocketed millions for himself, all in less than two years. He then wrote a book about himself drawing a parallel to Rambo. He demonstrated unpredictability and a dependence on him for success. His changes could not have been sustainable and it is probably why the company was sold (besides the desired outcome for Dunlap to hoard millions for himself).

In contrast is Arnold Palmer. One of his quotes on his website is, “Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.” This could easily be attributed to a Level 5 Leader, a fearless pursuit of results while demonstrating warmth and humility. He had thousands, if not millions, following him in Arnie’s Army. He touched thousands of lives, made his sport much more popular, and positively changed the world in numerous ways.

In summary, Machiavellian Leadership is great for beating down competitors. Beating competitors can certainly lead to success. Level 5 Leadership is great for employee engagement and generating positive results with minimum unintended consequences and enormous leverage. There is value in both but the place to use each is very different. I personally would recommend you stay away from Machiavellian techniques if you find engagement an important outcome.

Resources:

Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great . New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Gibbons, J. (2007). https://www.conference-board.org/publications/publicationdetail.cfm?publicationid=1324&centerId=1. Retrieved from https://www.conference-board.org: https://www.conference-board.org/publications/publicationdetail.cfm?publicationid=1324&centerId=1
Greene, R. (2000). The 48 Laws of Power. New York NY: Penquin Books.

Level 5 and Machiavellian Leadership Video

Wally Hauck, PhD, CSP helps leaders boost profit by unleashing the genius of every employee. By showing leaders how to get the best from their teams, with proven methods and by avoiding morale-busting mistakes, leaders can achieve their strategic goals more quickly and with less waste.

For more than 20 years Wally has worked with nearly 200 organizations, hundreds of leaders, and thousands of employees to optimize engagement and customer experience. Many have achieved significant transformational improvements.

Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. Wally is a Certified Speaking Pr
ofessional or CSP. As a professor of Organizational Change and Development at the University of New Haven in Connecticut Wally received the highest ratings of all professors in 2012.

Wally is married to his lovely wife Lori for over 26 years. They have two daughters, one son, three grandchildren, two rescue dogs a very dysfunctional cat. Wally has passion for golf, family, politics, and good movies not necessarily in that order.

Dr. Wally Hauck, CSP helps leaders boost profit by unleashing the genius of every employee. By showing leaders how to get the best from their teams, with proven methods and by avoiding morale-busting mistakes, leaders can achieve their strategic goals more quickly and with less waste.

For more than 20 years Wally has worked with nearly 200 organizations, hundreds of leaders, and thousands of employees to optimize engagement and customer experience. Many have achieved significant transformational improvements.

Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP. As a professor of Organizational Change and Development at the University of New Haven in Connecticut Wally received the highest ratings of all professors in 2012.

Wally is a proud member of the C-Suite Advisors Network

Video

Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development Women In Business

Knowing What Great Leaders Do and Doing What Great Leaders Do Are Two Different Things

The other day I heard a leader speak to his team of fifty. He was sharing that he wants his managers to walk the floor and identify ways to improve processes and procedures and to identify a person who should be acknowledged for giving their all to the job.

After his talk a group went to lunch and he invited me along. He shared with us about his desire to grow his managers and encourage them to lead. He shared about his speech. One of his friends laughed and asked, “when was the last time you walked the floor and told someone ‘good job”? I know it wasn’t lately” The whole table laughed.

Sometimes leaders talk a good talk but don’t walk the walk. When you don’t walk the walk your reputation is diminished, people don’t trust you and even your friends know when you are just giving lip service.

To be a great leader who has influence, impact and the ability to inspire others cultivate the following:

Have Integrity – Do what you say you will do. If you can’t do it say so. If you don’t know something, say that. Integrity is about follow through and commitment. This is especially true for those who follow you. They are watching you and they know the person you are by how you follow through.

Model The Behavior You Want Others To Have – if you want an enthusiastic, energized workforce set an example. If you want helpful, customer focused culture you have to emulate that in everything you do. That also means that you find teaching moments to share how you would do it and people can model you. Think about how you greet people in the morning, are you inquisitive, are you sincere? It is okay if that isn’t your style, just don’t demand that from others. You are the one who sets the standards of behavior. If you can’t behave in a certain way then shift your vision of what you want or move on.

Standards – This is so important and so often missed. Missed because you, as the leader, take it for granted. You have standards for yourself, have you ever written those standards down? Have you shared your standards of behavior to your new hires, your executive team, even to your family? Too often leaders assume that others know, that others have the same standards. They don’t. Every single person comes from a unique, distinct and diverse background compared to you, including your children. They have different perspectives of the same event, location, or person than you. It is normal. That is why it is critical that you write down your standards, your values and be clear about them.

I have a friend who is a local politician with a great career ahead of her. When we worked together we worked through these three key components. It became such a strong foundation for her new career in politics that she had two works of art commissioned that reflected her standards and values. They hang in her office. Her core team has her value statements and standards on a card on their desks. Her meetings with her executive team start with reading her standards and values so that everyone is on board, with clarity and focus.

Everyone can be a leader. It takes focused action to be a great leader.

Categories
Human Resources Leadership Marketing Personal Development

The Top Traits an Employee Needs to Deliver Great Customer Service

Everyone needs great customer service skills because every employee deals with internal and external customers, or both.

“But what exactly are the traits an employee needs?” a subscriber asked me recently.
“Are you asking about the traits that a support rep must have?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “I am hiring to fill an IT position.”

First, I told him, as you think of traits, they come in two categories: skills and attitudes. A skill is self-explanatory. For instance, if you’re hiring someone who will be doing a lot of corresponding with customers, you’ll obviously need someone with good communication skills – a command of the English language, as in punctuation, spelling and grammar. An attitude is the way you would describe someone’s personal characteristics. For example, he or she is optimistic, witty or a team player.

To determine traits, we do an exercise in our customer focus workshops. We set a large whiteboard or flipchart in front of the audience. Then we ask the audience to shout out the traits of someone who would be good at customer service. As you can imagine, we get lots of adjectives. A few of them are:

Confident, empathetic, engaging, friendly, funny, good communicator, good people skills, happy, helpful, honest, kind, knowledgeable, nice, outgoing, passionate, poised, polite, positive, responsive, sympathetic – and the list typically goes on.

As you closely examine the list above, notice how many are skills and how many are attitudes. You’ll find that most of the traits are attitudes while just a few are skills! “Good communicator” and “good people skills” are obviously skills. You can even argue that “knowledgeable” is also a skill. But we find that out of the twenty or so traits that are typically mentioned, only about three of them are skills. Yes, we could add a few more skills to the list to try to balance it out, but for every skill we could add, there are probably three or four more attitudinal traits we could add as well.

By doing this exercise of creating a list, we’re not trying to imply to the audience that skills just aren’t important. They absolutely are. For example, if a medical center needs to hire a skilled nurse, they are going to be looking for more than just somebody with a great attitude or somebody who really wants to be a nurse. Any serious candidate for the job will have gone on for continued schooling, passed exams, got a degree and became licensed. Without those qualifications, all of the attitude in the world won’t land someone a job as a nurse.

And this discussion isn’t meant to support the saying “hire for attitude and train for skill” either. That may work for some jobs, but for many jobs, a person needs certain skills just to get the job, such as that of a nurse.

Another example of a group of employees that needs specialized skills are those whizzes in the IT department. They can understand things the average human can’t easily comprehend. However, regardless of how strong someone’s technical skills are, without the right personality, as exhibited by many of the aforementioned attitudes, a single employee can potentially bring down an entire customer-focused culture.

So what are the traits of an employee capable of delivering a great customer service experience? More importantly, how can you determine them for a position that you are trying to fill?

My suggestion is to have a group of employees in your company go through the whiteboard exercise we just mentioned. List all of the traits you can think of that are both attitudes and skills. Hone the list down to the top ten core attitudinal traits needed to be customer-focused in your organization. Then add to the list the specific skills required for the job. An accountant needs accounting skills. A doctor needs medical skills. And, of course the IT department needs people with technical skills. When you add the ten attitudes to the needed skills, you may have found that next AMAZING person to work with!

Categories
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Skills Women In Business

Be The Speaker You Want To Listen To

Do You Really Know Your Audience?

 

One rule of thumb that applies to almost every aspect of life is that just because something is simple, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy.

 

When I was faculty at the University of Pennsylvania for a decade or so, teaching in a master’s program for educators, one of the rules of thumb I constantly reiterated was, “be the teacher you wish you’d had.”

 

That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Yet so many of my students seemed to find it surprisingly difficult to apply in practice.

 

We can all recall boring lectures given by teachers and professors who seemed to be burnt out after years of teaching the same content day in and day out. For many, sadly, this seemed to be the rule rather than the exception.

 

But we can also recall those instructors who stood out, who made their subjects come to life, and lit a fire of curiosity and genuine interest in us that we never would have imagined possible in that subject.

 

This dichotomy is no different from what happens in corporate life.

 

When speaking to a group, whether in front of a camera, on stage or in the conference room, the seemingly simple rule of thumb is: be the speaker you’d actually want to listen to.

 

So why is it so difficult?

 

Whether professor or executive, it’s unlikely that most speakers aspire to be boring. Nobody actually wants to be remembered as the worst example of anything. But somewhere along the way, something gets lost in translation.

 

When you give a speech or presentation, facilitate a meeting, or even have a one-to-one conversation, what impression do you leave? Do you project confidence, approachability, authority, leadership, enthusiasm, and overall positive energy?

 

But what if you were sitting in the audience? Put yourself in their shoes (or seat, as the case may be.) What kind of speaker would you want to listen to? You’d probably use words like “inspiring,” “passionate,” “open” or “relatable.”

 

But in the vast majority of the meetings I’ve sat through, presentations I’ve seen and talks I’ve attended, the speaker comes across as under- or over-emotional, intense and unapproachable or bored (and boring), or like they’re just going through the motions to get the discussion over with and go back to whatever they’d rather be doing.

 

So what happens that creates such a gap between how you come across when you speak and how you want to come across?

 

First and foremost, you forgot the rule of thumb: to be the kind of speaker you’d want to listen to if you were in their seat.

 

Here’s video #1 from my mini-video series, “Capturing your Confidence on Camera,” with tips on how to connect with your audience:

 

It gives you ideas for how to frame your content and your delivery in a way that will help you connect with the audience.

 

Because when people walk into the room, subconsciously they are hoping you will answer one single question: “What’s in it for me?”

 

You can’t just run through your material with the sole purpose of checking off all the topics you think you need to cover. While this is the default approach most people take, that makes it all about you, and it comes across like a laundry list.

 

You have to think about who is in the audience, what matters to them, and what would make them leave feeling like their time spent with you was the best possible investment of their time, when there are so many other competing priorities.

 

Then, you not only need to consider the value of the content from their perspective, which gives people a reason to listen, you have to be mindful of how you deliver that information.

 

That’s where the experience shifts from one where your audience appreciates your content, to one in which your audience connects with you.

 

And that’s where the magic begins.