Rumors are the fastest way to destroy trust and culture, not to mention your team’s morale, productivity, longevity—the list goes on and on.

Managers who stick their head in the sand in the hopes that the rumor will die a natural death are in for a rude awakening.

The only way to deal with rumors is head on and publicly.

Call your group together, state the rumor and tell them the truth. If something in the rumor response is confidential level with them and explain why it is.

For example, if there is a layoff rumor it’s either true or false. If true, admit it and explain as much as possible. If you can identify specifics—when, which departments, who, etc.,—and be honest! Or tell them when you don’t have information or that you can’t share it.

People aren’t stupid, if you say there is no layoff coming and it happens two days later they will know you lied and lies cast a long shadow. People will understand that you can’t give details, but lies are something else.

The only way to deal with the rumor mongers is privately and only if you are positive that you have the right person.

If you are sure start by asking why they said what they said.

You may find that it was innocent and actually started in another group or department. In that case make them feel safe in coming to you first if they hear something in the future.

If they deny it and you are still absolutely sure thank them and then watch them like a hawk. If they are real rumor mongers they do it for kicks; thinking they got away with it usually makes them careless and you will catch them the next time.

You need proof to act and that may take time, but the more confident they are the easier it is to catch them; just remember to document everything.

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Yesterday I shared my love of crossing stuff off lists because of the sense of accomplishment it brings, but that kind of stuff is small potatoes; it lifts me up and helps me move forward, but it isn’t a substitute for hitting the goals that move my life.

I just hit the biggest one on my list and want to share it with you.

For the last several years we’ve been working to turn a consulting approach for allocating incentive stock in private companies based on the company’s values and culture into a web-based subscription service (SaaS)—and it’s finally a reality!

Not only that, but because I hate the way traditional Help works, I conceived a brand new, user friendly type of Help that our programmers implemented brilliantly—you’ll love it.

It’s a soft launch, but Option Sanity™ has its second beta client (I’m looking for three more) and is looking good.

But it feels strange; for so long the focus and the goal has been to produce the software and the website. That meant working with the programmers, tons of writing and editing, working with the guy who originated the math and mechanics of Option Sanity™ and who was primary tester and developing my own skills as a user.

Now that it’s done I keep waiting for a massive feeling of accomplishment and although it’s there it’s dwarfed by what needs to be done now—marketing, identifying and closing multiple sales channels, supporting new users, developing a FAQ based on their questions, creating a user community—the list seems endless.

With all that starting me in the face I thought I’d ask for some help.

It would be terrific if you would to www.optionsanity.com, read about the product and click Take the Tour. Unfortunately the tour isn’t done, but on that page you’ll find a link to the full app demo.

Check it out and then leave your comments on the review page. Forward the information to anyone you think would be interested

I know it will take a few minutes, but I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks!

Image credit: RampUp Solutions

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Pizzled is a cross between puzzled and pissed and it’s what people get when forced to work in a Triple A Culture.

RAT culture, on the other hand, leaves employees engaged, motivated and productive.

RAT means rational, authentic and transparent.

• Rational actions that make sense to your people and rational communication that doesn’t employ emotion to manipulate them.

• Authentic eliminates BS, yours and all those who report to you, and stays consistent, stabilizing everybody

• Transparent is saying clearly what you mean, doing what you say and holding everyone to the same standard—no exceptions.

RAT culture is always a top-down function imposed by any manager at any level on those who report directly or indirectly. Sadly, it is almost impossible to enable or enforce RAT culture up through the organization.

Assuming you have RAT MAP, RAT culture is satisfying to build, because it means

• doing what comes naturally;
• not having to remember what you said or did to stay consistent, because it was the truth;
• creating a working environment that’s full of sunshine instead of sh*t where people can grow and excel; and
• where fun, happy, productivity and success are the norm.

Finally, propagating RAT culture is profitable—not just for the company, because of high productivity, and your people, because of goals reached and dreams fulfilled, but for you as you’ll see from your reviews, the ease with which you hire and the pleasure you take in what you’ve accomplished.

So forget pizzled and go RAT, you won’t be disappointed.

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Most people hear ‘Triple A’ and assume that it is the best something can be, but it depends on what “A” stands for.

In this case they stand for anger, aggression and apathy.

Most managers create AAA cultures by accident and there are those who’s standard management style fosters it, but unintentional or not, the result is the same.

This post isn’t about those who intentionally rely on AAA culture to run their organization, they are destroyers (you can learn more about them here and here, although this one can also be unintentional) and the best thing people who work for them can do is leave.

But for the unintentional it works like this.

• Something happens that makes you angry; it may not even be work related but you are angry.

• Whether simmering or roiling, it drives you to act out with some kind of aggression making you short-tempered and abrupt or it can show as impatience, sarcasm, contempt, disgust, obnoxiousness, etc.

• When your management style becomes erratic the team becomes unsure on how to interact, not just with you, but with each other. Since people don’t know what will set someone off they start keeping their head down and getting the hell out there, breathing a sign of relief if they made it through the day safely.

As time goes by the trepidation settles into apathy—a Triple A culture has formed.

As to the cure, that should be apparent from the cause.

Please join me next Tuesday to see why RAT culture is so great, not to mention a lot more fun and profitable to build.

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I read a great post by Jennifer Miller on the ubiquity of ‘perfect’ in descriptions and the dangers of embedding perfection as a goal in corporate culture.

It reminded me that ‘perfect’ and ‘perfection’ are right up there with ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ on the overused/abused scale—more, actually, since they represent a condition beyond human abilities.

Humans don’t do absolutes particularly well.

They do better on a strictly personal level when they have absolute control over all parts of the equation, but even then their score leaves much to be desired—just consider the infidelity statistics.

Add to that the fact that the standards themselves are a moving target. Even those that seem to be absolute, like murder, have a definition that changes with societal attitudes towards what constitutes a victim.

Since humans so often fall short of perfection, society and corporations codify the definitions to make it easier to adhere to them. That’s especially important when it comes to ethical stances, which is why condoning deviations, as described yesterday, is so devastating to the organization.

The take-away is simple: never establish goals that set you or your people up for failure.

If you are prone to talking in absolutes, “we will always…” here is a simple rule to guide you.

“We will always” is acceptable if you are discussing well defined intangibles, such as ethics and values that apply equally to everyone in the organization, but isn’t applicable in setting tangible goals, such as quality rules for defects.

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According to a post in Forbes by Gregory Unruh, citing one at Motley Fool, many corporations include “ethical waivers” in their corporate Ethical Codes of Conduct, including Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, Altria and many others.

Waiver clauses leave the door open for companies to violate their own code of ethics if executives and the board decide it’s a “good” idea. In effect, waivers are a “code of ethics safety valve,” the metaphorical opposite of a blow-out preventer. Why have them? Waivers will just cause problems; a corporate code of ethics is created and designed to limit management decision options to ethical choices. Usually it’s not a problem, but ethics can sometimes impinge on profits. Corporations and their shareholders don’t like to miss out on profits, so the safety valve allows them to sacrifice their ethics if the price pressure is high enough.

Why am I not surprised?

Both authors do an excellent job lambasting the idea that if it pays enough ethics can be waived, so I’m not going to restate the obvious.

Granted, it does take Board approval to use the waiver clause, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Enron’s Board waived the Code of Ethics that prohibited self-dealing by corporate officers and approved off-balance sheet “special purpose entities” and we all know the result of that.

Again, no surprises; not when so many companies put profits, share price and looking good ahead of everything.

What did surprise amaze flabergast, me was that the Goldman Board has issued no waivers.

Confronted about this waiver, a Goldman spokesman responded to blogger ZeroHedge by saying: “The ethics code, including waiver provision, was required under [Sarbanes-Oxley] (Note: It’s not.). No waivers have been requested.”

Isn’t it nice to know that Goldman considers all their actions over the last few years to be ethical.

Wow! I’m not just surprised, I’m speechless.

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This is as true today as it was 38 years ago when Dr Robert McNeish first expounded on it.

1. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an ‘uplift’ for the bird following. By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds 71% more flying range than if each bird flew alone.
Lesson: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier when they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

2. Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly gets back in formation to take advantage of the ‘lifting power’ of the bird immediately in front.
Lesson: If we have as much sense as a goose we will stay in formation with those who are headed where we want to go. (If none are then we know we are with the wrong flock. Ed.)

3. When the lead goose gets tired it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies at the point position.
Lesson: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing the leadership interdependent with each other.

4. The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
Lesson: We need to make sure our honking from behind is encouraging, rather than making less helpful noises.

5. When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow him down to help and protect him. They stay with him until he is either able to fly or dies. Then they launch out on their own with another formation or to catch up with the flock.
Lesson: If we have as much sense and compassion as the geese, we’ll skip the politics and knives and support each other.

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For 30 years I’ve preached the power of culture to the managers with whom I’ve worked.

I believed that good culture was the difference between great companies and the rest.

As a Silicon Valley headhunter, I made it a point to recruit for companies with good culture and from companies with bad ones, which is why 75% of my placements stayed 4 years or longer.

These days everyone is talking about the importance of culture—the media, bloggers, academics, pundits, CEOs—especially CEOs.

People like me who promote culture know that it must be like stain, not paint, to work.

Unfortunately, many CEOs use “cultural paint,” believing their employees will think its “cultural stain.”

The difference is obvious; cultural stain is absorbed into the very fiber of an organization, thus affecting everybody’s thoughts and actions, while cultural paint sits on the surface where it is paid lip-service and its effects are grounded in convenience.

Cultural stain is the direct result of walking the talk and making sure that everybody else walks it, too. It’s intentional action and it requires paying attention.

It’s not the output of an underling, although it can bubble up from employees if the circumstances are right, but “I didn’t know!” is never an acceptable reason for anything when coming from the person who ultimately is supposed to be in charge.

The ideas and desires that do percolate up may be included in the culture, but only if the top person really buys into them (think ROWE)

But if they are included only to make the employees feel good the result is cultural paint.

Like real paint, cultural paint can hide the dry rot and structural weaknesses in the company, but in the long run it won’t hold the people, because no matter how much paint is applied and no matter what the CEO tells himself and his Board, people aren’t stupid and they will vote the culture with their feet.

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More proof that culture is the difference between winning, losing and turning around.

What can culture make happen? Just about anything.

What do Apple, McDonalds, IBM, Continental Air Lines and ABB have in common with Western Digital, U.S. Steel, Waste Management, Nutrisystem and Orbital Sciences? They all came back from near death experiences or brushes with irrelevance.

Culture drives everything that happens in a company.

Steve Jobs says that Apple has a startup culture and it was the culture he focused on when he came back to bring the company back from the brink.

When it comes to culture Jim Goodnight’s 30 year-old SAS is at the top of the heap and likely to stay there. Goodnight decided not go public because he “didn’t want analysts on Wall Street telling him how to run his business and forcing him to cut out the elements of SAS’s culture that give it an edge” and what an edge that is.

Finally, there is no way today’s column can end without a reference to Zappos.

You’ve probably already seen it, but the article in Inc. Magazine on why Zappos was sold to Amazon is actually an excerpt from Tony Hsieh’s new book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.

In his column about Zappos Chris O’Brien supplies a great close to today’s post.

If you treat employees like they’re just a bottom-line expense, they’re bound to act like one, delivering the very least performance possible. And if you treat customers like they’re a problem, then they’ll eventually get the message and go away.

Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr

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Ask anyone if it’s easy to accomplish a task through others and be prepared for eye rolls and laughter.

In a post at Managing Salespeople, Dr. Jim Sellner talks about why managing is so difficult.

Management is not something you do once then sit back and enjoy your work. It’s a never-ending, unfolding story with many subplots. It is a mindset, a viewpoint, not only of work, or people, but of one’s worldview. It’s about making unique, often seemingly disconnected associations, connecting the interactions no one else sees. It is ongoing curiosity, questioning, searching for something new, different, better — posing the uncomfortable questions like “What if?” or “Why not?” That is the stuff of managing people.

Sounds a lot like a description of parenting, doesn’t it?

No, your team members aren’t children or crazy hormonal teenagers, although at times they may act that way, but even when they are acting like responsible adults they still need you.

• They need you to share the vision, so they know and understand why they are doing the work they do. They need you to provide all the information to do that work efficiently.

• They need you to challenge them, so they can grow to and beyond what they think is possible.

• They need you to trust them enough to let them make their own mistakes so they can learn from them.

• They need you to believe in them, encourage them and cheer them on.

So the next time one of your team comes to you, whether at work or at home, don’t short-change them with a brush-off response.

Remember that it was your choice; nobody put a gun to your head and forced you—you chose to be a manager, you wanted to have kids.

Now is the time to be the best that you can be—even if your manger/parent isn’t/wasn’t.

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