Is your company fair? Is fairness part of your MAP? Are you fair to your people? How often have you heard (or said), “That’s not fair!”

People accept that life isn’t fair—more or less. Whereas you can’t walk away from life, but it’s relatively easy to walk away from a company or manager you perceive as unfair.

What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?

The obvious is that they don’t want to be shafted a la Enron. However, fairness refers to more than the obvious, most often to the company/manager doing what they said they would do, i.e., walking their talk.

Fairness is what people want and fairness is what most companies/managers promise—but frequently don’t provide. For example:

Fairness excludes politics

• Official – people will be promoted based on what they do
• De facto – people are promoted based on who they know

Fairness is egalitarian

• Official – everybody will fly economy class when traveling
• De facto – senior management flies first class

Fairness includes parity

• Official – similar skills are compensated similarly with any differences the result of merit
• De facto – compensation differences result from expediency, prejudice, or favoritism

Besides doing ‘the right thing’, why be fair? What’s in it for you?

Quite a lot, actually.

Fairness reduces turnover (and its associated costs), increases productivity, and fuels innovation, all of which makes you look good as a manager and gives your company a good street rep. Yes, companies have street reps, too, and those reputations have a major impact on the caliber of people applying; a rep that is positive for fairness makes it easier to higher great people.

All this means better reviews, increased compensation, a reputation that’s pure gold and a great night’s sleep.

What’s not to like? And all you have to do is do as you say you will.

Please join me Monday to learn why fairness is monkey business.

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Life is all about choices; every day we make choices and as we do our world changes and we move in a new direction.

Some choices are conscious; others are made with little to no thought.

Some choices lead to good outcomes and others not, but one thing is for sure.

No matter what happens, your light is never truly hidden unless you believe it is so.

Always make your best choice, but if it doesn’t work, know that the darkness will pass and you will change direction again with the next choice.

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Management M&M is a new weekly feature focusing on various management misses and messes. I hope you’ll send examples from your own experiences for me to use—anonymously, of course.

I found an interesting bit of idiocy in a recent McKinsey survey (free registration required),

Even though overall reliance on financial incentives fell over the past 12 months, a number of companies curtailed their use of nonfinancial ones as well. Thirteen percent of the survey respondents report that managers praise their subordinates less often, 20 percent that opportunities to lead projects or task forces are scarcer, and 26 percent that leadership attention to motivate talent is less forthcoming.

The technical term for this is ‘how stupid can you get’.

At a time when corporations large and small need the highest level of employee engagement just to survive, let alone thrive, they are making every effort to convince their staff that they don’t give a damn about them.

This attitude essentially says ‘you are worth neither money nor time, but I want you to work harder and produce more than ever before’.

The survey also touches on the reason for the idiocy.

…nonfinancial ways to motivate people do, on the whole, require more time and commitment from senior managers. One HR director we interviewed spoke of their tendency to “hide” in their offices—primarily reflecting uncertainty about the current situation and outlook. This lack of interaction between managers and their people creates a highly damaging void that saps employee engagement.

Well, doh.

The higher you move in an organization the more you are required to accomplish your goals through the efforts of others, but the less time you make to do that.

Sure doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.

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Last summer I coined a term to describe those who are chronologically, but not psychologically, Millennials; I called them aMillennials and there are more around then you might think.

Today I saw a great story about two aMillennials who showed their leadership by taking the initiative and convincing their university to provide comparable classes at a prison.

Four years ago, in fact, Wesleyan balked at a proposal to install such a program.

Two students, Russell Perkins and Molly Birnbaum, who had volunteered in prisons as students, revived the idea last year when they were seniors and figured out a way to finance it.

…a privately financed experiment in higher education that takes murderers and drug dealers and other inmates with histories of serious crime and gives them an opportunity to get an elite college education inside their high-security prison, the Cheshire Correctional Institution.

The professors involved say that the classes are just as tough as on campus.

These aren’t prisoners preparing for a return to society, in fact, some of them may never return. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to learn—120 inmates applied 19 spots.

Skipping the debate as to whether this is a good program or not, the initiative shown is a large lesson for all those who spend their time reading and studying leadership instead of doing it.

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Now click over and see the mindset you need to embrace.

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Now take a look at modern business smarts

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Few things are constant, but management stupidity when it comes to retention is one of them.

Before Wall Street pulled the rug out of under the economy global demographics made the need to cherish workers at all levels obvious.

Estimates of the national shortage run as high as 14 million skilled workers by 2020, according to widely cited projections by the labor economists Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers.

Then came the downturn and executive retention stupidity is once again running rampant.

Two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers. nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers.

The assumption is often that Gen Yers are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte’s human capital division.

However, a companion survey of employees found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of Gen Yers, 50 percent of baby boomers and 52 percent of senior citizen workers who said the same.

Everyone surveyed worried about job security. Gen X and Gen Y were most likely to complain about pay. But a ”lack of career progress,” was by far the biggest gripe from Gen Xers, with 40 percent giving that as a reason for their restlessness, compared with 30 percent of Gen Yers, 20 percent of baby boomers and 14 percent of senior workers.

Gen Yers, meanwhile, were more likely than the other generations to cite ”lack of challenges in the job” as a reason they would leave, while baby boomers more often chose ”poor employee treatment during the downturn” and a ”lack of trust in leadership.”

Let me spell this out.

The economy will turn around.

The Boomers may stay in the workforce for now, but they will retire.

Gen Y is being held back because of the economy and may never catch up, certainly not fast enough to run American enterprise when the Boomers retire.

That leaves Gen X, which is being ignored.

Stupid attitudes towards employees is nothing new for the folks running companies, but this one is really going to come back and bite not just them, but our country’s competitiveness.

One can only hope that the stupidity is global, so we’re not the only ones dealing with it.

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Are you familiar with The Onion?

I came across an old headline and laughed at how applicable it is to so many of us.

Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years

Phil Gerbyshak described himself in response to Becky Robinson’s Be Who You Are, in which she said that she couldn’t separate her business self and personal self.

But would she want to?

We are all a product of our MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

The biggest difference between personal and professional is the words used to describe what’s going on. We have ‘relationships’ in our personal life and ‘interactions’ in our professional one.

Knowing who we are is important, but constantly updating our knowledge is even more important, because we continue changing as long as we live.

Stopping your search could mean being stuck at that point like a fly in amber.

Along with continued searching, we need to share the information with the world, not just in words, but through our actions. I came across a quote from the movie Fat Like Me that says this best and has always resonated with me.

The world will tell you who you are until you tell the world.

And another one I read somewhere.

What we are never changes.
Who we are never stops changing.

So be your MAP, tell the world and update them frequently.

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The Hart Research Associates poll showed that top executives are even more disliked than politicians. … The vast majority of potential jurors see corporate CEOs as greedy and willing to break the law.” —LA Times, 11/10/09

It’s a sad day when business leaders are lower on the trust pole than politicians. Actually, I didn’t think any group could be rated lower than politicians.

The saddest part is that the great majority of men and women running small, medium and even large companies don’t lie, cheat or steal; they aren’t particularly greedy and they don’t break the law.

The problem is that many of those who do fit the profile, and there are plenty, run high profile companies in the same or related industry—think financial services and autos to name two glaring examples.

I think part of what’s going on is the spread of the lemming mentality.

You see it a lot in the venture world. During the internet boom no matter how good your business plan if it wasn’t .com you could pretty much forget getting funded. These days the magic markets are green/clean tech, healthcare and mobile anything. In other words, if one jumps off a cliff all the rest will follow.

I have a friend who says that the more expensive the suit the lower his initial trust level; I might agree except that I’m sure that the folks wearing them are aware of the prejudice. Therefore, I have to believe that they are either arrogant enough to believe we are all dumb/disinterested/ignorant not to notice or they just don’t give a damn.

The real question in all this is what are we going to do about it?

Are we going to wring our collective hands, tar all business with the same brush, lament the mentality that drives our distrust and then let it all sink back into the muck when the economy turns around—out of sight, out of mind?

Or are we going to get active, demand better accountability, force business leaders to toe an ethical line and avoid our normal memory loss?

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I probably shouldn’t say this, but I do get tired of having managers ask, how to get workers to think/do/work “outside-the-box.”

For decades they’ve been exploring a plethora of business books, articles, seminars, coaching, consulting, discussions, etc., on the subject—some good, some not so good—and are still searching for how to lead their workers out of that dreaded box.

I hear, “How do we get the team to think differently?” “What incentives work best?” “How do we engage our people?”

What I don’t hear is “What do I need to change in me [to make it happen]?”

What annoys is the assumption that the solutions all involve changing the staff, environment, compensation and any other external item that might plausibly make a difference—except self.

If you want your people to think/do/work outside-the-box then you need to lead/manage outside-the-box and that usually means changing your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) before you can expect your people to change theirs.

This is rarely what leaders/managers want to hear.

I keep saying it, as do others, but many still don’t get it or just ignore it.

Today I’m saying it again loudly and very publicly:

You (there are no exceptions, none) manage/lead based on the way you think, what you think, how you think, and what you believe—in other words your MAP. No matter what you read, hear or talk, you will always walk your own MAP—that is your authenticity and you can never get away from it.

It’s not enough for you to know, you need to accept this as truth along with the knowledge that any changes are your choice and in your control.

That said, why not adopt RampUp Solutions taglines as your own.

To change what they do, change how you think.

Leadership: outside-the-box/inside your head.

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