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Monthly Archives: August 2017

A Marriage of Inconvenience? Pinning Your Company’s Colours to the Rainbow Mast

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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Alan Joyce, CEO, Donald Trump, marriage equality, Qantas, Robert K Greenleaf, same sex marriage, servant leader

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In Australia we are a few weeks off voting in a postal poll that will ultimately decide whether marriage equality will be voted on in Parliament. For a range of reasons, our self-proclaimed ‘fair-go’ culture hasn’t thus far extended to same sex couples who want to commit to their relationship publicly. I can’t recall in recent memory an issue that has so divided politics and (yet to be fully tested) so not really divided the public. Time will tell if my latter assumption here is correct.

As I have blogged about previously, in many cases the corporate world is stepping in where governments have faltered. The adoption of the Paris Climate Accord in the US by big corporates, when Trump pulled out, being the most salient example. And so it is with the marriage equality debate. A large number of companies have publicly expressed their support for marriage equality and this has been recognised by the large logo wall that appears on the http://www.australianmarriageequality.org   website. There are many big names there aside from the obvious like Qantas and Telstra who have made the media when they came out in support. These companies are making a stand and good on them.

Those regular readers of my blog can easily divine that I am in favour of same sex marriage and, to me, other common sense public policy initiatives like support for the LGBTIQQ community. Making our workplaces more welcoming can never reduce productivity or make it harder to attract and retain ‘talent’. A diverse workplace is one of the key ways I believe to establish a great culture and help raise the understanding of all staff. The fact is that as humans we exhibit so many similarities that bind us and that the differences, though often outrageously amplified, are small and at the end of the day quite trivial.

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So it might be surprising to some that apart from my own publicly professed support of marriage equality I haven’t rushed to sign-up to show my support for same sex marriage wearing my corporate hat. It’s not that I have made up my mind to deliberately keep a low profile, it’s more I am still reflecting on the what role or right I have, as leader, to endeavour to promote a long-held ambition through wearing my corporate hat. I’m not there yet. Who knows perhaps in wiring this blog I will reach some conclusion?

In my head the argument goes something like this. A top manager of a company, being the CEO, might take a socially-ethical decision (to them) and decide to promote marriage equality. S/he may do it to reflect the diversity that exists within their workplace. In reality, such a decision is likely to be more of a ‘captain’s call’. What if some of the workforce is against marriage equality? If the naysayers are right there are many in the workplace who believe the sanctity of marriage should be reserved for the union of man and a woman; a number of whom who keep this view to themselves for not wanting to be out-of-step.

Where the CEO raises the flag for the ‘yes’ campaign, that CEO has made a judgment call and must be prepared to stand by it. The argument could also be made that CEO’s need to be principled and authentic and stand by these principles. Lord knows the corporate world has seen precious little truly principled management over the years, especially in the lead up to the GFC. Some might add that the apparent ‘blind-eye’ shown by the CBA over suspicious money transactions is a case in point that principles are held in check in favour of greed even today. So on balance as a CEO, ‘go with the Captain’s call’ my head says on this one.

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But what of the CEO as a leader? If we take a leaf out of the Handbook for Servant Leader written by Robert Greenleaf (wordplay intended). His credo is:

“Caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions – often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent; sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.”

It might well be argued that a servant leader, caring for people, might take soundings of those s/he leads and reflect the organizational viewpoint as a democratic output. It might be possible that in full humility a pro-YES CEO leader might reflect a pro-NO viewpoint to the world. On the face of it this may not be a huge thing but it does go to what is the nature of organisations and into organisational theory. Is the corporation merely a legal entity defined by contracts? Is it the sum of its parts including the hopes and aspirations of its individual workers, or does it exist as a fluid culture that shifts each time a new person joins its ranks? In some ways organisations are trinities incorporating all three. As leader we need to acknowledge how organic the organisation is and given this, how much more complex it is. It’s too simplistic for the figurehead just to be able to stand up and speak on its behalf without consideration of these other layers.

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So where has this reflection got me? I think I’m happy to be pro marriage equality without having to use the vehicle of my company to make the point. I don’t judge those who do. For the likes of Alan Joyce of Qantas his leadership is around a form of activism and I respect him totally for that. But for me it is almost too easy to stand bestride my company’s brand to make the argument. It would be unfeeling. Hopefully my brand that stands alongside, but separate to, my company’s is enough to show my authenticity on this topic.

Where leaders do need to be mindful after Nov 7 – the day of the vote – is that a degree of healing, empathy and consideration will be needed. Some will feel hurt and some elated. Finding a way to focus team members on positives and what we all have in common, aside from individual and organisational goals, will call upon the special skills of managers and leaders. It’s about re-building coalitions in the workplace – a marriage of minds as it were! We can all say yes to that.

 

The Stickability Elasticity of the Digital Brain

04 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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kramer-bagels-no-festivus-yes-the-strike-seinfeld

One of my favourite episodes of Seinfeld is called The Strike where the 12 year long  industrial action at Kramer’s employer, H&H Bagels, ends. My favourite moment though is Elaine getting upset at having given a fake phone number to a guy she dubs ‘Denim Vest’ written hurriedly on her submarine sandwich loyalty card. She finds to her dismay that she was at the point of getting her ‘free’ subway and goes on a futile hunt to get the card back, even though she actually doesn’t like the food there. It’s also a classic for introducing the audience to Festivus and the concept of a ‘two-face’.

The notion of hanging on way beyond when you should let go is something I have been contemplating lately. I have also been reflecting on the lack of patience at holding on in there. These two things might seem, at first glance, contradictory but I think they co-exist quite happily in our lives at the moment – which is not really a good thing.  Digital media is making this more prevalent.

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While driving home the other night I put I played iphone music through my car’s Bluetooth. Bear in mind this is a selection of my favourite artists. I flicked endlessly from one song to the other on shuffle seldom hearing a song the whole way through. Having the ability to shuffle and flick forward at the touch of a button on my steering wheel is both a bonus and a drawback. Now, if the song doesn’t ‘capture’ me in the first few bars it gets flicked until some tune appeals. If that song starts to meander, especially through a bridge (the song not the engineering variety) then it too gets the flick. It doesn’t matter if it’s Springsteen, Dylan, Morrison, the Beatles or the Doors you’re only getting a nano-second to get me hooked. Convenience and massive catalogue are now two weapons in my listening arsenal.

I’ve become very fickle with little patience to stick with a song to see how it builds. In the analogue days of LPs, to move a song on meant getting up and going to the turntable. This built up a certain patience with the song and made the musical listening experience much more rewarding and certainly much less frenetic. The other ‘beauty’ of the analogue experience was that you were ‘stuck’ with the artist for the entire side if you decided the trip to the turntable from the bean bag was just too big an effort. In the listening, the concept of an album being curated became something to reflect on. Why was ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ placed next after ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ on Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band for instance? Now the curating of song list is done by a pretty clumpy Apple shuffle program. The more tools I have to flit around, the more I am prone to use them.

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That very same evening I sat down to watch Netflix and put on House of Cards as we have been busily watching episodes on an every other night basis. I found myself watching it, not for enjoyment – as a piece of TV it lost its way after season one and went inexorably downhill from there – but to get to the end. It was my viewing equivalent of Elaine’s submarine sandwich loyalty card. I found myself sticking to something I should have bailed from long before.

It would appear we suffer simultaneously from attention and curatorial deficit disorder. Once something has got its hook in you it’s hard to unshackle yourself. I think it has to do with the fact that to be hooked in the beginning takes some effort, so if the TV show for example was capable of doing that, it is worth the extra loyalty. Many a program has tripped me up in this respect. Orange is the New Black is one, but surely the most striking example would be Season 3 of The Fall. That’s hours of my life I will never get back.

While that may seem frivolous, it is time I could be devoting elsewhere. It also, on reflection, makes you think about what you haven’t seen because your attention deficit meant you didn’t get hooked to start with. This is where my daughter, counter-intuitively a Gen Y, comes in handy. She insists I sit through a show again even when on occasions I have bailed before the end of the first episode. Breaking Bad, Making a Murderer and The Keepers being striking examples of my initial lack of appreciation. These have been moments of TV gold – definitely worth the perseverance.

This cognitive re-orientation, partly driven by the digital nature of services nowadays, compared to the softer warmer analogue of days gone by, is something we need to recognise and take seriously. It is having a profound impact on our lives and we need to at least acknowledge this. In the world of work we are told that we all need a brand and a narrative that is immediately going to ‘grab’ the audience. Web pages now need to have something that compels the eyeball to click-through. At work we get over 1,0000 unique visits to our website each month. Our click-through rate sits at a pretty dismal 10%. That is, on reaching our webpage, only 100 of the 1,000 visitors choose to click and move forward to find out more about us. This lack of stickability manifests itself in all sorts of situations in the workplace. For example when I’m interviewing someone, my digitally manic brain is searching for the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ bias in my judgment of them as a potential employee, now in seconds rather than minutes.

When someone starts a job, our tolerance of their learning curve in our company may be quite limited. The speed of climbing a learning curve is only partly associated with how good they are. The other component is the time it takes for the full range of complex experiences with which you can judge a worker’s competency, to arise naturally in the workplace. Maybe we should consider what impacts our recently digitised minds are having on the hiring, inducting and firing process? Perhaps we are judging our new employees too early and harshly and keeping hold of our long-serving staff for familiarity reasons for too long? We need to slow down and have moments that can quieten the manic brain. Equipping ourselves with the means to combat the negative impacts of our VUCA world is now an essential tool in a worker’s toolbox.

Women dressed as handmaids promoting the Hulu original series "The Handmaid's Tale" stand along a public street during the South by Southwest Music Film Interactive Festival 2017 in Austin

Just something to ponder as we get impacted by Netflix, MP3 music and convenience that strips fidelity from our lives. Ever wondered why people’s homes in science fiction movies seem austere and sterile? Digital is a much colder experience. Oh there is one exception – that’s in The Handmaid’s Tale on SBS On Demand. That is one TV show I am sticking with…for the time being at least!

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