When the economy slows, it’s easy to ignore retention factors because management kids itself into believing that replacing people is no big deal.

But slow as it’s happening, the times they are a’chnging.

At least here and there, in companies that really understand the importance of attracting and retaining scarce talent.

“To reduce “female brain drain,” global companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and dozens of others are increasingly offering a variety of flexible work options.”

Don’t get me wrong. These companies aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their corporate heart or caring social consciousness, they’re doing it because it makes financial sense, AKA, vested self-interest.

“Business analysts and executives say talent retention and the forces of demography are the chief reasons large, traditional companies accommodate the needs of female employees. Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are women, and nearly half of all professional and graduate degrees are earned by women…the number of women with graduate and professional degrees will grow by 16 percent over the next decade compared with an increase of only 1.3 percent among men.”

And the need is going to get worse.

“Whether you can hear it or not, a time bomb is ticking in C-suites worldwide. Its shock waves will resonate for decades. The explosive: indisputable demographics. Surveys…indicate that the number of managers in the right age bracket for leadership roles will drop by 30% in just six years. Factor in even modest growth rates, and the average corporation will be left with half the critical talent it needs by 2015.”

It’s not just large firms, SMB companies are active in the effort, although they often skip the language and the programs are more informal—which is why they’re often described as “being like a family.”

Although the work-life trend started with women, the guys want it, too, and Millennials assume it as a right.

The economy will turn around—it always does; more Boomers will retire; demographics will prevail; talent will be scarcer and the companies that already know how to offer balance will have an enormous recruiting edge.

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Now take a look at modern business smarts

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Raising kids is about teaching values, among other things, but kids learn by watching more than by listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t fly these days.

Cheating is not only a good example, it’s a global one.

Everyone knows that cheating is wrong, yet in US surveys 64% of high school students say they have cheated, while 84% of undergraduate business students and a whopping 56% of MBA students also admit to cheating. Not only is cheating prevalent, parental action often condones it.

Since many of these same parents are leaders in the workplace, the results of a McKinsey survey asking “which capabilities of organizations as a whole are most important for managing companies through the crisis” should come as no surprise.

Ability to shape employee interactions and foster a shared understanding of values.

Only 8% thought that important, which placed ‘shared values’ dead last on the list of nine.

What was first on the list? The item considered the most important?

Ability to ensure that leaders shape and inspire the actions of others to drive better performance.

Number two isn’t much of an improvement.

Capacity to articulate where the company is heading and how to get there, and to align people appropriately.

All the research I’ve seen claims that the best way to avoid ethical lapses is to have sustainable ethics embedded deep in the company’s culture.

And the comments of Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, really resonate.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the McKinsey findings is the suggestion that providing leadership is somehow separate from promoting values. In fact, the two are bound together—the double helix of any corporation’s DNA.

One would think that means the company’s leaders understand the value of values and would proactively work to foster and embed them.

But no, these leaders, likely the same one whose kids admit to cheating, believe that visions trump values.

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Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is Climate Change, so I asked Chris Blackman, who is a strategic consultant specializing finding both private and public funding in the green and clean technology sector, to offer her thoughts on a subject that enrages me every time it comes up—which is more and more often. The subject is the sacrificing of one limited resource for the sake of another.

From Chris…

Would you choose to go hungry and thirsty so that you could have energy?

That choice is the dark side of clean energy.

A ‘clean coal’ power plant uses tens of thousands of gallons of water daily—water that cannot even be reused or recycled—because it is so fouled and contaminated.

To biomass’ benefit the water it consumes is reused over and over again, but turning waste to energy using the aerobic digestion method has a 1:1 ratio—one ton of waste requires one ton of water to process that waste.

In some ways, we have adopted an anything goes approach to producing some green energy and it seems a bit deja vu: using oil products to produce other energy forms.

In this case, it is even worse—it is not only the environmental impact but also the real possibility of going thirsty or hungry if we use our drinking or irrigation water to produce energy.

A recent New York Times article revealed that a solar power company dangled the opportunity to create hundreds of new jobs in a desert community at the cost of “consuming 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of the desert valley’s available water.”

All that community needs to do is to look at the legal battle being waged right now amongst the states that have access to the Colorado river to vividly understand why they should not sell their water rights, in the hopes of procuring water from their neighbors.

Already there are many parts of the country in which the water is already unusable in spite of the Clean Water Act.

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. … the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.

I am not in any way advocating stopping our investments in clean and green energy; however, it is tunnel vision to invest in clean energy at the cost of clean water.

There are places in this country better suited, where the solar and water requirements are better aligned: Florida and the rest of the Southeast, at least in most years. (See Chris’ post on how dark, rainy Germany used US-invented technology to become a global solar leader.)

The opening question may seem melodramatic, but I wonder what the former Soviet Republic would give today to have the Aral Sea back, since today it is mostly a dry lifeless bed of blowing salt.

Was its loss, and the salt poisoning of the surrounding lands, worth the measly two decades of cotton they produced while depleting its water sources? The environmental and economic toll of the Aral Sea’s destruction could end up being as costly as Chernobyl.

That is not melodrama, that is precedent.

Want more proof? T. Boon Pickens, who isn’t known for his ‘friend of the community’ attitudes, is betting 100 million dollars that water is the new oil.

‘Oh Father, spare me the need to eat and drink so that I may use these resources for electricity’ – who would ever pray for that?

We still don’t get “the vision thing.”

When will we begin to approach our economy and the environment as a single integrated whole?

When will we balance out the true costs and benefits of our activities?

When will the options we choose from include using less, instead of always inventing new ways to consume more?

When will we learn?

What do you think?

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“Leaders tend to be narcissistic, but you don’t have to be a narcissist to be a leader.” –Amy Brunell, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.

“…narcissistic behavior is a “trait predicting charismatic leadership. People who are charismatic and charming… They think they’re entitled to it. They think they’re smarter than other people and they can get away with it.” –W. Keith Campbell, head of the psychology department at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Narcissism isn’t necessarily bad, but it is growing. When psychiatrists deemed it a bonafide personality disorder in the 1980’s it affected 1% of the population; in 2008 the number stood at around 6.2%.

Most politicians are narcissists, as are many media personalities (neither is surprising), but it seems that more and more business leaders fall in that category also.

There are 7 component traits that are measured.

• Authority
• Self-sufficiency
• Superiority
• Exhibitionism
• Exploitativeness
• Vanity
• Entitlement

Although I have no proof, I bet that most, if not all, Wall Street honchos would score fairly high on these traits.

“A study published in December in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people who score high in these traits are more likely to be leaders, but these individuals don’t necessarily perform any better and potentially may become destructive leaders.”

So much for the much-ballyhooed ‘charismatic leader’.

Now let’s have some fun.

Go to Take the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and take the test.

Then come back and share your score and whether you believe it fits you.

My score was 11, but if I had taken it 30 years ago I think it would have been at least 5 points higher. (Age is either mellowing me or I’m more realistic:)

There are no right or wrong answers and even if you score off the narcissism charts that doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’—as with any trait it is how you handle it in every day life that matters.

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Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.

One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.

The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)

Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what he did.) as opposed to the felony created by lying.

Ensign is prominent member of the Promise Keepers leadership, which lists seven basic tenets, the third being, “A Promise Keeper is committed to practicing spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity” and the fourth, “A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and Biblical values.”

Ensign violated both and compounded the violations by having his parents pay off his mistress.

These don’t count, since Promise Keepers isn’t a legal entity and, obviously, lying to your followers and constituency isn’t illegal—just unethical and immoral.

What kids will absorb is that there are no real repercussions; Ensign still holds his Congressional seat, will probably win reelection, hasn’t changed his role in Promise Keepers, and is still cheered when he gives a speech. And if reporters dare to raise additional questions, his response is “I’ve said everything I was going to say about that.”

We may ring our hands and lament the lack of accountability of society in general and the Millennials in particular, but we don’t have to look very far to find the cause.

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I never really paid attention to leadership as an industry until I took over Leadership Turn a couple of years ago. But now I realize that it’s as pronounced and cyclical as the fashion industry.

Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership describes it well.

“Initially the gurus told us that leadership was a superlative individual characteristic reserved to the elite, then a democratically distributed attribute accessible by all… first to vision, then decisiveness, then courage, then team-building skills, then forcefulness, then empathy. It’s about looking inward to one’s core self. No, it’s about communication and connecting with others.”

The list of leadership fashions is actually much longer than Jim’s list; different looks are marketed by different leadership houses and each has a name designer at the helm with more junior designers doing much of the actual work. Every so often one of these junior people leaves and starts her own house and so the industry grows.

Along with the major houses are the small independent designers who may be aligned philosophically with a larger house, but put their own spin on the product.

Just as fashionistas drive the cutting edge (which can be pretty weird) in clothes, anoint designers, models and wearers as icons and then trash them for being out of touch or too <whatever>, so, too, do leaderistas drive what’s fashionable in leadership, hold icons up for adulation, dump them from their pedestals when their feet soften and switch when more trendy designs comes along.

The greatest difference is that fashion products are made of real stuff, while leadership products are built of words.

Consider Lao Tzu, who, 2500 years ago said,

“The superior leader gets things done with very little motion. He imparts instruction not through many words but through a few deeds. He keeps informed about everything but interferes hardly at all. He is a catalyst, and though things would not get done well if he weren’t there, when they succeed he takes no credit. And because he takes no credit, credit never leaves him.”

and

“As for the best leaders,
the people do not notice their existence…
When the best leader’s work is done,
the people say, “We did it ourselves!”
To lead the people, walk behind the.”

In 1987 The Leadership Challenge presented the 5 Practices of Leadership

• Model the Way
• Inspire a Shared Vision
• Challenge the Process
• Enable Others to Act
• Encourage the Heart

These days the hot terms are thought leadership and servant leadership.

If you’re getting tired of the leaderistas go back to Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching; I have a copy that, measured in inches, is 4.5x3x3/8 in an easily readable font.

It will rev up your brain, sink into your MAP, juice your leadership abilities and add peace to your soul—not bad for a book you can put in your pocket.

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Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.

Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.

“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him [Livingston] personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”

“What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily—fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and built from there.” (King David, who slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, had the husband killed, married the widow, but continued to ‘lead’.)

“Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served—that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.”

“We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period,”

I hope you’ll come back tomorrow as this conversation continues.

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As you know I am a great believer in the power of words.

Words can hurt or heal; they can lift us up or throw us into the darkest chasm; words can do most anything.

Right now times are tough and too many of the people I hear from are down or depressed and some are close to giving up. And words can help that, too.

When times are tough I’ve found some of my best inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt. I find her comments to be pithy and filled with common sense; stuff that’s so solid you can grab hold and it will carry you through the rapids of life. She was an amazing woman.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences. (It’s the one thing on which you should always pig out.)

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. (It’s been said many times in many ways, but no matter how bad your situation there’s someone in worse straits whom you can help.)

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. (That which you ignore will ignore you.)

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. (I call it MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and it’s the one thing in life over which you have complete control; where it goes and how it grows are always your choice.

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CEOs have been envied for decades; the pedestal kept getting higher and we all know that the higher the pedestal the further the fall. Things started changing in the eighties and now CEOs as a group are scorned and reviled as symbols of ego and greed who caused most of the problems we’re facing.

Certainly some do qualify for that title, but tarring all CEOs with that brush is plain stupid, as stupid as judging any group based on the actions of a tiny minority—no matter how high profile its is.

Today’s links offer up info on the folks in the corner office, whether they’re one of the vast majority who work hard and are getting a bad rap or one of the folks who screwed up.

First for the good guys.

The Milken Institute’s Global Conference 2009 offers a video discussion at their recent conference called CEO: How Will It Stop Being a Dirty Word?

And a new website offers a place where CEOs post stuff to show that Not All CEOs Are Jerks.

Do you apologize when you screw up? An article in Chief Executive says that an apology can improve performance; while Steve Pearlstein talks about an almost confession from a Wall Street bigwig—as he says, it’s a start.

Last is a bad guy; an interview with a jailed CEO courtesy of the BBC. Remember Dennis Kozlowski? He of the $600 shower curtain? Listen to what he has to say about himself and current events.

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