Sun • Mar 22nd, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 13
The auditing committee chairman of a board of which I’m a member is inquiring if any board member or employee knows of fraud within the organization. It’s a question now required by new auditing standards. In part it’s driven by the Sarbanes- Oxley Act intended to prevent the kind of accounting fraud that brought down companies like Enron earlier in the decade.
The fraud question is coupled with “whistle-blowing” protection for employees who might otherwise lose their jobs for revealing illegal corporate activities.
Which brings me to a book I read this week – Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, by Barbara Kellerman, professor of public leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Fraud management and whistle-blowing protection are evidence of changes in the relationship between leaders and followers. According to Kellerman, followers are increasingly speaking up and stepping forward even when it means challenging their leaders. Proving her point is the populist outrage over million dollar bonuses from bailout funds to corporate leaders who contributed to if not caused the current financial meltdown.
She has added to a growing body of writing on followership. Just as there are different kinds of leaders, she identifies four kinds of followers: bystanders, participants, activists, and diehards – who depending on the situation may themselves be good or bad. They can be an asset or a nightmare for leaders.
In her view the only consistently bad followers are bystanders who refuse to get involved. The other types of followers may be good or bad depending on whether they support or resist good or bad leaders. The book is filled with examples of followers who have acquiesced to or challenged bad leaders including Germans under the Nazis, faithful Catholics caught up in the pedophile scandal, employees aware of misrepresentation by pharmaceutical companies, and soldiers forced to obey questionable military orders.
Something has changed. She claims that followers in every sector of society are more willing than ever to engage and challenge leaders, both good and bad. She warns leaders to be aware that followers are no longer willing to go along to get along. Technology makes it easier for followers to organize and have access to leaders who until now would have been more or less shielded from protest.
Kellerman criticizes the leadership development industry for being “leader-centric,” at times discounting if not disrespecting followers. Smart leaders, she observes, listen to their followers, learn from feedback and develop action plans that promote the common good.
She notes the use of 360-degree reports, an assessment smart leaders use to get feedback from their subordinates as well as their peers and superiors. Smart leaders want to know what others know that they don’t know about themselves including their blind spots.
In my executive coaching I see the benefit to leaders who listen to and learn from feedback without reacting to their followers. They open lines of communication, invite cooperation, and improve morale. And they avoid being blindsided with otherwise unknown resistance and opposition.
When followers refuse to follow, smart leaders listen.
Tue • Mar 10th, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 2
I’ve been thinking about the moral obligation upon leaders for quality of life issues in their local and global communities while reading The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, by J. D. Trout, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago.
Trout describes empathy as a powerful natural response to human suffering. The problem, or “gap” that perpetuates poverty and suffering, he claims, is our inability or unwillingness to look beyond the needs of those closest to us.
It is a leadership responsibility to make good decisions not only for our personal good but for the good of those we don’t see as well.
I found myself underlining something on nearly every page in the early section of the book where he describes our “inability to practice effective empathy.” In the second half Trout “fits us,” as he says, “with prosthetics for our stunted judgement.”
A few quotes – obviously out of context – worth thinking about.
J. D. Trout’s philosophizing is an up-to-date exposition on the Golden Rule: “Do to others as we would have them do to us.” He would like the “others” to become more than statistics.
Tue • Mar 3rd, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 9
Most of us know someone who has recently lost his or her job. We’ve seen first hand the panic, anger, fear, embarrassment, and the suffering that follows the loss of employment.
In this economic crisis one of the most difficult things a leader faces is the need to lay off employees. Those I’ve talked with agonize over their responsibility to let people go, especially when jobs are hard to find. And some of those who have been laid off react to the impersonal way they were informed as well as to the job loss itself.
Leaders can make this unpleasant task more or less difficult by the way they communicate bad news – what they say and how they say it. From experience and observation here are a few wrong and right ways I’ve learned about letting people go.
Three things to avoid -
1. “Pink slips!” Don’t just send, or worse yet, email a termination notice. And don’t deliver the message through a third party. Respect the employee with a personal call, or better yet a face-to-face conversation. It won’t make the message less disturbing but at least the employee will know she or he has worth.
2. Don’t wait until the last minute. Delay makes the transition more difficult than it needs to be. Leaders who are reluctant to discuss the inevitable early on only compound problems for themselves and others.
3. Which leads to another related issue – don’t over-promise. It does more harm if people are laid off after they’ve been led to believe that their employment is secure and recession proof.
Three things to do -
1. Have a conversation with employees as soon as a force reduction becomes necessary. While this will inevitably cause anxiety, it’s better to give people the opportunity to plan for their future than to surprise them. Some employees will be willing to reduce pay and benefits, even volunteer in some instances to stay engaged.
2. Provide counseling to address issues of unemployment insurance, health care, job training and other benefits that may be available.
3. Offer to provide recommendations and referrals to other potential employers. Laid-off employees need to be confident that they are employable even though unemployed for the moment.
The loss of a job is for many, if not most people a loss of identity as well as a livelihood. A leader who understands and takes the time to respond to the emotions of an employee they have had to lay off will gain the respect of those who remain as well as the one who is let go.