How do you define success? Do you (or your boss) look only at the numbers and other recognized metrics or do you go a step further and evaluate the harder-to-define areas? Numbers and other business metrics are important, but they measure mostly the present, i.e., short-term results. What does long-term success look like? How can you evaluate yourself in terms of long-term success? Do you care? If your answer to the third question is “no” then you probably won’t be interested in the rest of this post, but if it is “yes” read on. Whether you are a newly promoted supervisor or Fortune 100 CEO, one easy way to know if you are succeeding is to ask your team. Asking is like a 360 degree review without all the bells, whistles and forms. It’s immediate and gives you a fairly accurate reading of the trust level of your team. If you hesitate to do that or your people won’t provide honest feedback then

• Your hesitancy means you already know there is a problem and aren’t comfortable with, or not interested in, changing to accommodate the feedback.
• If your people won’t be honest then you have propagated a belief that the messenger will be killed and that belief is typically entrenched in a larger culture of fear.

Either way, the source of the problem is you—not your team or even the general company culture (unless you are CEO), just you. You made it happen and if you want to fix it I suggest you have a long talk with your MAP because that is where the problem lies. The good part is that it’s your MAP and your choice to change it. Your comments—priceless Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

I read a fascinating article today about Americans, their stuff and their penchant for storing it instead of getting rid of it.

“The US has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. (The Self Storage Association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman and child, it’s now “physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self-storage roofing. …one out of every 10 households in the country rents a unit…”

According to Derek Naylor, president of the consultant group Storage Marketing Solutions, “Human laziness has always been a big friend of self-storage operators, because once they’re in, nobody likes to spend all day moving their stuff out of storage. As long as they can afford it, and feel psychologically that they can afford it, they’ll leave that stuff in there forever.”

I’ve said for years that people aren’t water faucets, able to turn off emotions and thoughts or change their MAP just because they change environments from home to work or vice versa.

Reading the article made me realize a hidden reason that makes changing culture so difficult.

It’s not just that the parts of the culture changes, but that the employees won’t let go of the parts that are changing or being replaced; instead they store them away to sort later.

But later never comes, so, like the stuff in the storage units, it sits in the back of their minds running up a bill that is paid in energy, focus and productivity.

As a result of the economy, many of the thousands of the units that were in use for no other reason than laziness are being cleared out, or at least downsized, and the stuff gotten rid of.

Perhaps this is a good time to work with your employees to clean out their mental storage places; to purge the cultural residue and clutter that fills them up.

So clear out the rubbish, open the windows and let the fresh air flow through reenergizing everyone.

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Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

I was sent an advance copy of The Pursuit of Something Better: How an Underdog Company Defied the Odds, Won Customers’ Hearts, and Grew its Employees into Better People and it’s a great read.

What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?

You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.

In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.

Jack Rooney is as far from a  rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.

Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.

The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.

Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.

“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”

And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.

It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.

And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.

I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating.  You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.

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Image credit: Elser Kruger