Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Why is happy so often equated with fun, as in “if you’re having fun you’re happy.” What makes you happy? A beautiful sunset? Your kids/grandkids? A quiet walk? Time with loved ones? For most people, It takes more substance than fluff to make them happy.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Company culture has been jerked around ever since a few pundits decided that “fun” was the primary component to having happy employees.

Worse, “fun” was equated with silly stuff, such as games, pranks and goofs.

While these things do energize some employees, they don’t do it for long and certainly not alone.

It’s well-proven that happy employees are more productive, but creating happy requires substance.

The components of long-term happiness are things such as challenging work, continued learning, opportunities to grow, clear communications, fair bosses, etc.

All of these require more thought, effort and skill from managers than installing a few foosball tables or gamifying the project.

Flickr image credit: CityLineSouvenir

With 68% of employees disengaged, you would think the board’s critical eye would be turned on the executive suite.

You would think wrong.

One of the greatest causes of disengagement is the difference in compensation between the CEO/executives and the workers.

That difference is the direct result pay-for-performance, coupled with the board’s ego-driven competitiveness and desire for bragging rights.

Name the most brilliant, talented, past or present CEO you can think of, then remove them from their position.

The company may hiccup, but it won’t go down in flames.

Now remove all the line managers/team leaders OR all the workers in a specific department or with a specific talent and watch the company stagger and fall on its face.

An unintended consequence of pay-for-performance is we treat companies as if they are in the airline business, except the only person who matters is the pilot—not the grounds crew, nor the quality control tinkerers, nor the guys who wrangled the ore and fuel from the ground, forged the parts, tightened the bolts and soldered the frame.

In their rush to acquire the “best” talent, boards are likely to forget that corporations are not independent entities

It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

To move in the same direction people need to be engaged.

But how engaged would you be when the proceeds of your hard work show up in someone else’s paycheck?

In the 1970s, shareholders took out about 50% of a company’s profits, while the rest was reinvested in the productive capacity of the firm, including R&D to employee training and rewards. Today, the shareholder gets over 90% between dividends and share buybacks. Today, a 60% or greater weight on equity or equivalents is the norm in pay packages.

Dominantly CEO/ senior pay packages.

The funny thing is that rank and file aren’t looking for similar pay.

They are looking for fairness in relative pay.

Image credit: JustyCinMD

It’s always gratifying when something I wrote in years past, based on my own experience, is validated by current research. Yesterday’s Oldie about privilege is no exception.

I wrote it in 2015 and last week I read the validating research in the Harvard Business Review (love these little ego trips).

There are lots of people held back by bias. And that means that some of the people at the top have advanced partly through privilege.

Our research finds the idea of being advantaged to be uncomfortable for many senior leaders. We interviewed David, a senior executive who recognizes both having benefited from unfair advantages and the injustice of bias. He’s tall, middle-aged, well-educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, white, and male — and these provide David with unearned advantages that he intellectually knows he has, but that in practice he barely notices. He tells us he feels an underlying sense of guilt. He wants to feel that his successes in life are down to his abilities and hard work, not unfair advantage. “I feel like a child who discovers that people have been letting him win a game all along,” he says. “How can I feel good about myself succeeding if the game was never fair?”

Over the years, I’ve found the idea of ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ deeply embedded in people’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where it has a major impact on all three MAP components.

In speaking with leaders about their built-in advantages, we have seen that David’s experience is widely shared. Acknowledging these advantages can challenge their very identities and sense of worth.

As is often the case, normalcy erases awareness.

Our research on speaking truth to power shows there is often a blind spot among the powerful, preventing them from seeing their impact on the less powerful. We call this advantage blindness. When you have advantage blindness, you don’t feel privileged. You don’t notice a life of special treatment; it’s just normal. You don’t think about your physical safety most of the time; you don’t worry about holding hands with your partner in public; when you get angry, no one asks you if it’s because of your hormones; and people in power generally look like you.

The results of the researchers interviews list three negative reactions

• Denying the playing field is unlevel.
• Focusing on one’s own disadvantages.
• Denying the playing field is unlevel.

And three positive ones

• Owning personal prejudice and bias.
• Empathy from connecting with people who are “other.”
• Putting personal advantage to collective good use

The one problem with the research is it’s focus on executives, which is to be expected from Harvard, but the same advantages, bias, guilt, and negative reactions can be found at all levels.

The good part is that the positive approaches discussed also work at all levels.

What should you do next?

• Read the article.
• Consciously and honestly identify your own advantages.
• Write (not keyboard) them down.
• Reread the list often.
• Heighten your awareness.
• Lower your defensiveness.
• Implement the actions described and add your own.

While you can’t eliminate societal advantages, you can put them to work for the greater good. Doing so will go a long way to validating your advantaged success.

Image credit: Duck Lover

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

I often field questions about compensation, stock allocation and bonuses that revolve around the idea of fairness.

There have been more calls since a rise in media attention to gender pay inequities, especially focused on tech. They look at what other countries are doing, such as a recent UK law, and wonder if similar things could happen here or if someday down the line they will have to do as Marc Benioff did.

Whether the subject starts with diversity or compensation, my callers fall in two distinct camps.

• Those looking for ways to bake fairness into their company’s DNA; and
• The ones who want to cloak current unfair actions in a veneer of acceptability.

(I have to admit that listening to the second group stumble around trying camouflage what they want to do is amusing, but definitely not funny.)

Of course, it’s easiest for founders just starting, since they have no historical staff or (hopefully) bad habits, but any size organization can do it if management is determined and has the grit to follow-through.

Here are some basics actions:

• Develop core values around fairness, diversity, transparency, etc., make both values and culture public on their site, and follow-through when recruiting.
• Salary and stock offers should be based on the value and effect of the position on the company’s success, as opposed to the person you are hiring.
• Before approving compensation compare it with similar people inside and out for fairness, especially if the candidate is a woman or minority.
• Talk to others, such as Gusto cofounder and CTO Edward Kim or the folks behind the Founders for Change coalition.

The most critical factor is a willingness to pass on hiring people when it’s obvious they are assuming it’s just talk or that you should make an exception for them because they are special.

As I’ve said in the past, “If you pay your people equally when you hire and promote there won’t be a pay gap for you to erase.”

Image credit: HikingArtist

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of some of the best posts during that time.

We haven’t participated in Blog Action Day for a couple of years; we were somehow deleted from their mailing list and I didn’t check, because I just plain forgot.

Today’s Golden Oldie is KG’s post from 2013. What he said was important then and still is, if not more so. Things have gotten worse, not better. (Check out the previous comments.)

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Human Rights – something that is often talked about but little is done to define or uphold.

What is human rights?  It seems so right yet appears such a fable.   Most of the time we hear about human rights from some government official speaking about how some other government is negligent.  Yet it is never defined.

Is it privacy rights?  The right to use the internet without being monitored?  Is it the right to healthcare and education?  Is it having food, shelter, safety from violence?  Or is it to uphold human dignity?

We never quite know since it is never defined properly, or has so many definitions as to become worthless.  Is it the right for poor African Americans to be treated fairly under the law?  Male African Americans?  Why does the US with ¼ of the population of China have more than three times the amount of persons incarcerated?  Mostly black and Latino males?  Is this human rights?

Confusion is maybe the name of the game – as long as we don’t know what it is, it is a useful tool for controlling our thoughts and actions.  Who is it that want to make us act without thinking?  Who is it that defines another human being as an enemy and want us to take hostile action towards him/her?

Are there universal human desires?  For such things as food, safety, love, nurture, communion?  If there are, why are they not fulfilled?  Why do we allow ourselves to be derailed from attaining these and passing them on to others?  Is there any doubt that today we can easily feed the world and no one needs to go hungry?  Or that we can eradicate most of the common diseases that kill children?

We choose not to.

Isn’t there a gift in giving?  Why does it suit us to hoard “things” – money, land, items and safety?  If we recognize the universal desires and needs of our fellow humans, why don’t we work to get and give?  What is it that prevents us?

Ultimately, we want to receive from others, but need to be aware that giving is also receiving.  Can we reasonably expect to receive without being generous?  What is the origin of our selfishness?  Don’t we know better?

Neglecting to provide food to the hungry, clothing to the naked and safety to the threatened is antisocial behavior and lack of empathy.  Which of us have any remorse about this behavior?

Our conduct is very similar to the definition of psychopathy – “a personality trait or disorder characterized partly by enduring antisocial behavior, a diminished capacity for empathy or remorse, and poor behavioral controls” (Wikipedia).  All wealthy people and governments have the possibility to address the needs of human rights.  I define almost all of us living in North America and Europe as relatively wealthy, as well as large, affluent, segments of the developing world.

For whatever reason, we choose to exhibit this behavior.

Is there such a thing as human rights?

To psychopaths?

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Expediency seems to be the lens through which everything is viewed these days. Not that that’s new; this post dates to 2011 and it wasn’t new then. Flexibility is a great trait, but there are things it doesn’t enhance — such as company values. In fact, it destroys credibility, as described below.

Join me tomorrow for a great take on trust from the inimitable Wally Bock.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do clichés annoy you? There’s a good reason some of the tired, old clichés stay around—namely, they work. They say what needs to be said in a way that isn’t left open to interpretation, like ‘walk your talk’ as opposed to ‘authenticity’.

I was reminded of this after listening recently to an entrepreneur.

Here are the salient points of the conversation,

• he had built a culture based on fairness, trust and authenticity;
• he worked hard to hire the smartest people available;
• salary and stock options were based on necessity, i.e., he did what he had to do to land the best candidates.

I asked him what would happen when people learned of the discrepancies between their package and a peer’s; that the approach seemed to fly in the face of his “fairness, trust and authenticity” statements.

He replied that

• people trusted him to do what was best for the company;
• he was fair to each person based on their individual expectations;
• any effort to implement a uniform compensation (salary and/or stock) policy would hobble his ability to hire stars; and
• it was a non-event because nobody knew anyone else’s package.

I have to admit, the naiveté of his final point cracked me up (I managed to control my hilarity).

Basically, he seems to believe that fairness, trust and authenticity have flexible meanings and that expediency trumps them all.

What do you believe?

Image credit: kevinspencer

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Money. Everyone’s favorite subject that no one wants to talk about. Especially when it comes to work, as in, “what were you making previously” and “what are you looking for now?”  

Tomorrow’s post focuses on a new law enacted in Philadelphia and New York City that has the potential to change that entire, unwanted conversation, forcing managers/companies to focus on the future, as opposed to history.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

In a post last week I asked for opinions on the ideas presented in a series of articles in Business Week on managing smarter but especially one that claims that “treating top performers the same as weaker ones is ‘strategic suicide’” and said I would add my thoughts in a future post.

Bob Foster left two interesting comments (well worth your time to click over and read). Regarding pay for performance he tells the story of a company where everybody from the CEO down all quit.

“Taking on the task to salvage the company, I hired new people that met unusual qualifications: they had to be qualified for the job they were applying for; they had to be unemployed and available immediately; they had to work at sub-standard wages; they had to work while knowing the company could close at any minute; and they had to work without supervision. The team that came together produced a highly successful company, and it was not because of high pay, or performance bonuses (there were none). The team stayed together, and performed, because of mutual respect, trust, appreciation, and consideration—people were ‘valued.’ To me, this is the truest form of ‘pay for performance.’”

I agree that trust was one of the key ingredients in what Bob accomplished, but it wasn’t the only one—or maybe I should say that it needs to be based on fairness and honesty.

Bob says the pay was ‘sub-standard’, but I assume that it was universally sub-standard relative to position and experience. If he had chosen to pay part of the team, say 10% more than their peers, the team wouldn’t have coalesced.

And that is exactly why I disagree with the idea of paying top performers, AKA stars, big sign-on bonuses or higher salaries than their peers.

• Based on my own experience, 98% of star performers become stars as a function of their management and the ecosystem in which they perform. Change the management, culture or any other parts that comprise that ecosystem and the star may not survive.

• Just as a chain is as strong as its weakest link there is no star in any sport, business, media, etc., who can win with a team that is subject to constant turnover and low morale.

Consider this common example.

Two people are hired at the same time with the same background, same GP0 and similar work experience, but with the one exception. One graduated from a ‘name’ school and the other from a community college. Starting salary is $50K, but the manager adds a 20% premium to the first candidate’s offer on the basis that she must be better to have gone to that school.

Neither candidate lived up to their potential because the manager made poor choices. In doing so he set both up to fail but for different reasons; one thought she had it made and the other that he was low value.

Merit bonuses fairly given for effort above and beyond acceptable performance levels make sense as long as they don’t come at the cost of developing new talent.

But one problem with ‘pay for performance’ is the pay often comes before the performance, but there are others and I’ll discuss them more Thursday. In the meantime, here are links to five posts from 2006 that give more detail on the trouble with stars.

Stars—they’re in your MAP

More about stars and MAP

Rejects or stars?

Star compensation

Retaining Stars

Image credit: sxc.hu

There were several interesting comments on the original post; check them out.

There is much talk about Megyn Kelly’s announced move from Fox News to NBC last week, but that’s not what this post is about.

It’s about Bill O’Reilly’s twisted thoughts on what constitutes loyalty.

“I’m not interested in making my network look bad.”

Later that day, he continued the thought in a commentary on his own show in which he appeared to question Ms. Kelly’s loyalty to Fox by saying, without naming her: “If somebody is paying you a wage, you owe that person or company allegiance. If you don’t like what’s happening in the workplace, go to human resources or leave.”

Agreeing with O’Reily means that if your boss hits, grabs, gropes, insults, harasses, etc., your only recourse is to tell a person/department that too often has little-to-no power, and sometimes no interest, in fixing the problem or get out of Dodge — even if it means breaking your contract.

Read anything about professional loyalty and you’ll find that it is the company’s responsibility to give people a reason to be loyal.

Reasons include a workplace that don’t tolerate any type of harassment no matter who it is from — up to and including the CEO.

Additional reasons include fairness and respect, although there are many others.

We do owe loyalty (and protection) to ourselves, but I don’t believe anyone owes loyalty to a a person or company where they have to constantly look out, whether for a knife in the back or death by a thousand cuts.

Flickr image credit: DonkeyHotey

An interesting article in the Washington Post focuses on a study that shows people are less stressed if their boss is consistently unfair than if she is unfair one minute and fair the next.

“Intuitively, you would think the more fairness you get, the better,” said Fadel Matta, a researcher at Michigan State University and the lead author of the paper, in an interview. “But that’s not what we demonstrated. It’s better if supervisors are a consistent jerk than if they’re fair sometimes and not fair other times. People want to know what they can expect when they come into work.”

Reading that reminded me of something I wrote back in 2009.

The action is inconsistency and the primary effect is fear. Secondary effects include intimidation and insecurity. (…) It’s not knowing that really gets to people—even more than expected abuse. (…) That fear grows exponentially once it takes root and distrust typically increases at the same rate.

As far back in history as you care to go, no matter the circumstances — work, personal, relationship, religious — inconsistency has always been a negative.

What also seems to be a constant, in this case in the workplace, is the inability for bosses’ opinions of themselves to accurately reflect their employees’ take on the same subject — although the disconnect does embody a kind of consistency.

In short, when evaluating your own actions for consistency don’t ask yourself, your boss, or your peer.

Ask the people who actually experience you every day of their lives.

Ask your team.

Flickr image credit: Susanne Nilsson

The other day I was thinking about downloading an ad blocker, because the auto-video ads make me crazy.

But even before I read about the Washington Post blocking people with ad blockers from reading their articles I decided not to.

Why?

Because I know that, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“Many people already receive our journalism for free online, with digital advertising paying only a portion of the cost. Without income via subscriptions or advertising, we are unable to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us.”

No one expects to get a free car or for even Amazon to give away books, but when it comes to content on the Internet they cry, “That’s different!”

Copyrights are suddenly meaningless and any effort to generate revenue to pay for the creative talent, technology and other expenses required pollutes the experience.

Even sites that are built on user-generated content have expenses.

You deserve to be paid for your work and your company deserves to generate revenue to pay you — and so do they.

Think about that before you block ads or complain about pay walls.

Flickr image credit: Jason Tester