Three Tips to Manage a Toxic Work Environment

Organizations are full of individual and group relationships. Even if you work on a small team in a mid-size organization, it’s possible to have over 25 different working relationships when you consider a relationship with each person on your team, peers, colleagues on other teams, clients and vendors.

According to the 2014 Globe force survey, 78 percent of people who work between 30 to 50 hours per week actually spend more time with their coworkers than with their families. Having friends at work increases organizational commitment, improves employee engagement and increases overall employee satisfaction levels. However, unhealthy work relationships decrease each one of these factors. 

Impact of unhealthy work relationships

A Harvard Business Review article states that there are three traits top leaders use to maintain healthy and powerful relationships: a clear purpose, an understanding of the kind of relationship needed and a commitment to pursue that relationship even in the hard times. In addition, healthy relationships include trust, integrity and respect.

While we all want healthy work relationships, unhealthy work relationships can develop. Unhealthy work relationships lead to workplace stress, higher disengagement and lack of loyalty. About $500 billion is lost by the US economy because of workplace stress. According to a study by Queens School of Business and Gallup, disengaged workers have 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects. Lack of loyalty leads to the increase in voluntary turnover by about 50%.

One thing that creates unhealthy work relations is organizational power dynamics, which refer to how different levels of employees deal with each other and where one of these employees / groups is more dominant than the other employee/group. This use of dominance does not involve use of force; instead it uses workplace influence, which could be created by gender, organizational hierarchy, ethnicity, social bias and other factors.

The development of careers, particularly at senior levels, depends on acquiring power. How does this happen? Individuals gain power in absolute terms at someone else’s expense. As most organizations have a pyramid structure, there is a scarcity of positions as one moves up the organizational hierarchy. This is what determines how the power dynamics play out.

How can leaders spot unhealthy power dynamics before the workplace relationships become toxic?

Three Tips for Managing Workplace Power Dynamics

1. Create clear, professional boundaries

Regardless of the organizational size, ensure there are established, professional boundaries in the workplace. For example, if a boss calls a direct report on the weekend, is the direct report expected to return the call on the weekend or on Monday? Is alcohol allowed on the workplace premises and if so, what are the norms when someone says something inappropriate or wants to drive while under the influence of alcohol? Finally, what is allowed or not allowed while traveling? Establishing workplace norms prevents an imbalanced power dynamic from occurring.

2. Monitor language

Words matter because words become thoughts and thoughts become behavior. So be mindful of the accepted organizational verbiage. Expressions such as ‘Man up!’ or ‘Don’t be so emotional and sensitive’ are generally said by one gender about another gender and therefore sexist. ‘You don’t understand how the game works’ shows an imbalanced power dynamic, as one person implies that s/he is smarter or more experienced than the other. Someone regularly saying, ‘That’s not what happened’ can create a feeling of gas lighting, making the other person question reality and become subservient in the power dynamics. So listen for language that may inadvertently create an unhealthy power dynamic.

3. Notice office volatility

Employees are human, and regardless of how talented they are, every person has flaws. Some of those shortcomings may create a volatile work environment, which creates havoc on work relationships and causes stress for everyone. The key to managing this volatile environment is to manage individual responses. Take time to learn what triggers people’s emotions and avoid conversations that can contribute to the overall volatility. Employees need to stay calm rather than engage in office drama.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

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Quick Tips to Drive Employee Engagement, Innovation and Loyalty

By all accounts, low engagement levels and employee turnover rates plague organizations of all sizes and shapes. In fact, recent data from Gallup put employee engagement rates worldwide at about 15 percent and estimate that 51 percent of employees are looking to leave their current jobs. These statistics have significant economic consequences, as unengaged employees tend to be less productive, and organizations are forced to expend significant resources on recruitment and training to replace employees who leave.

Even the most high-performing organizations struggle with the ability to retain and engage high-quality employees. Nevertheless, despite incredible odds, we can also see some “bright spots” – organizations that have higher engagement rates and below-average turnover. Their secret sauce? These organizations promote “intrapreneurship” by encouraging employees to learn and apply entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and mindsets within their current organization. When done well, this approach increases employee engagement and retention by giving creative and growth-seeking employees opportunities to develop new products, services and business ventures – all without having to look elsewhere for these opportunities.

What’s more, there are three basic “leadership actions” taken by leaders who successfully advocate this approach in their organizations: they provide the right types of leadership development opportunities and employee engagement training program, they provide the necessary resources and they enable a culture of innovation. Let’s look at each of these leadership actions in more depth.

Provide the Right Types of Employee Leadership Development Opportunities

Not all leadership development is created equal, and as Deborah Rowland, change management researcher and author, notes, the most effective leadership development is experiential, influences participants’ intrapersonal emotional intelligence along with their external actions, is linked to participants’ specific contexts, and enrolls facilitators who act as guides rather than subject matter experts.

Not all leadership development is created equal. The most empowering intrapreneurship-focused leadership development experiences also specifically target the following proficiencies:

• Being proactive and taking initiative
• Embracing design thinking (solution-focused and oriented toward a desired future)
• Enhancing emotional intelligence, especially coalition-building skills
• Implementing project management
• Taking risks and learning from failure

In other words, while general leadership development, when done well, adds value for all participants, leaders and managers who want to cultivate intrapreneurs in their organization also need to ensure that they are providing training that addresses these specific competencies.

Provide the Necessary Resources for Self-identified, Employee-Driven Projects

More than talking a good game about innovation and creativity, leaders and managers who inspire an intrapreneurial mindset put their money where their mouth is by providing the time, space and financial resources necessary to support employee-driven initiatives.

For example, at Centiva Software Solutions, a Utah-based technical services organization, developers are given two days per month to work on a project of their choice. After learning about the problems faced by a local homeless shelter, developer Blake Kohler and his team were inspired to create a software solution that helped the shelter prioritize beds for clients. After developing and presenting an initial mockup to senior management, their team was given three months to further develop the product – the offshoot of which was a new product for the organization’s commercial line.

Similarly, with Kickbox, an innovation process designed by Adobe, employees or teams with an idea are given $1,000 and instructions and tools to measure progress, along with a Starbucks gift card and candy bar (purportedly to provide the necessary caffeine and sugar boost that innovators need). To date, Adobe has distributed more than 1,000 Kickboxes to employees around the world and made the program instructions available to others under a creative commons, share-alike, attribution license.

Design, Build and Encourage a Culture of Innovation

According to Clinton Longenecker, director of the Center for Leadership and Organizational Excellence at the University of Toledo, and Dale Eesley, director of the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, organizational culture is the “key gateway” to intrapreneurship within a company.

In our experience, there are four defining features of this type of culture:

1. Employees are given a high degree of freedom and flexibility, which promotes autonomy and, thus, motivation.

Suzanne Smith, social entrepreneur and blogger, recalls how she started her career as a social intrapreneur within the American Heart Association: “The leadership, including now-CEO Nancy Brown, let me invent, lead teams, and grow in multiple roles within the organization.” Smith believes that by following the same methodology, other organizations can better tap into their existing talent pool and especially the Millennial base (those people born between 1981-1996).

2. Employees are encouraged to test out the competition and compare their company’s product or service to products and services from a different industry.

Justin Reilly, head of customer experience innovation at Verizon Fios, describes how he made the case for improving the company’s MyFios app: “On my phone, the Uber app is right beside the MyFios app. If I open Uber and hail a ride in two or three intuitive clicks, and then open the MyFios app and the experience isn’t as easy or fast, I’m going to judge Verizon Fios service on that experience. That means we’re competing against every customer’s last best experience. So that’s what we use as our guidepost to innovation and improvement.”

3. Employees are encouraged to ask questions and challenge processes.

Tim Houlne, a Fortune 500 intrapreneur-turned-startup entrepreneur, recalls that he received a lot of pushback for asking questions early in his career. Now, as CEO of Humach, an organization that provides customer contact solutions, he aims to create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and rethink solutions: “As a tech startup, we must constantly look for better, cheaper and faster ways to operate; we have a culture where everyone feels comfortable presenting their ideas and innovative solutions are recognized.” So create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and rethink solutions.

4. Employees have permission to fail (or understand which types of failures are acceptable and unacceptable).

Most researchers agree that risk-taking is a defining feature of entrepreneurs (cf, Antoncic 2003); however, one of the defining features of intrapreneurs is that they are actually more risk-averse than their entrepreneur peers. With this in mind, organizations that want to enable and empower intrapreneurs should regularly communicate that failure is a natural part of the innovation process and even celebrate failures. In situations where failure is not an option, leaders and managers need to make that clear.

At the end of the day, there are many factors that drive high levels of employee disengagement and turnover. As leaders and managers, we often assume that these factors are entirely outside of our control, which is a mistake. Promoting and enabling intrapreneurship is one strategy that can benefit both employees and organizations. While successfully implementing all three leadership actions is a significant undertaking, it’s also one that organizations would do well to consider, especially if they are struggling to engage and retain high performers.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, find me on Twitter.

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Three Ways Learning Agility Can Help Your Career Growth

We have a guest blog this week about a fascinating topic: Learning agility. Thanks for David Hoff, co-author of Learning Ability-The Key to Leader Potential.

Learning agility is finding yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do – but then figuring it out.

Why would that be important? In an organizational context, if you are promoted from one function to another or from an individual contributor to a manager role, how do I know you will be successful? The answer is that I don’t, because you’ve never done the job before. The research says if leaders make that decision without the help of an assessment process, the odds of the person being successful is 50-50 – essentially the flip of a coin.

What is the cost if the coin lands on the side of being unsuccessful? It depends; the range is anywhere from one to three times that person’s fully-loaded pay, including compensation and benefits. That’s an expensive coin toss!

Most organizations use a performance management system to give employees feedback on their performance and to equitably distribute merit increases. The output of this process is supposed to be a development plan, which describes the key objectives a person should achieve in the coming year and the areas he or she should begin to improve.

Some companies put additional time, effort and money into critical jobs and/or high-potential employees. There are different definitions of high-potential employees; a common one is a person with the ability to be promoted two levels above his or her current level. An example would be a manager with the ability to be promoted to a vice president. You can’t spend significant additional dollars on everyone, so who gets this extra time and attention? That is the $64,000 question.

One answer is to spend time on the most learning-agile person. But how do you determine learning agility? That question has stumped people in the talent management field for some time. My favorite response is, “Those who can learn on the fly.”

How do you operationalize that definition? What would I see a learning-agile person do? How would I teach someone to? Be more learning-agile? These questions are where learning agility becomes more complicated.

Researcher Scott DeRue, from The University of Michigan, established a model that identifies speed and flexibility as the two most important factors determining learning agility. Learning agility is about being able to digest a large amount of information quickly and figure out what is most important (speed). DeRue defines flexibility as the ability to change frameworks to help you understand how different things are related or connected.

DeRue also made a distinction between learning agility and learning ability. “Ability” means the cognitive ability or “smarts.” Ability is important to a point, but then, smarter is not necessarily better. Earlier, I noted that learning agility is being in an unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out. The ability takes you to a certain point. Then, agility becomes more important.

DeRue says there are both cognitive and behavioral components to learning agility. The cognitive ones – the “hard wiring,” if you will – are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The behavioral ones are more learnable, because if you do the things described by the behavior, then you are demonstrating that part of learning agility.

Another researcher, Dr. Warner Burke from Columbia University, confirmed what DeRue described and found seven additional dimensions of learning agility. He embraced speed and flexibility; his research also identified experimenting, performance risk-taking, interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information-gathering, feedback-seeking and reflecting. Burke also developed a test to measure learning agility; his work led to a valid and reliable tool with years of research to support its results. This is a huge step beyond the 50/50 coin flip to determine who we develop and promote.

Here are three tips for using learning agility in your work:

1. In the future, people are more likely to be hired less for what they “know” and more for their ability to figure out what they “don’t know”. So get curious about what you don’t know as a way to make a difference in your career.
2. To increase your flexibility (one of the learning agility dimensions), take the opposing point of view (from your own position) during a discussion. Support that contrary position as strongly as you would your original position.
3. When seeking feedback (a dimension of learning agility), seek to understand what the other person is saying by truly listening. Defensiveness gets in the way of learning agility.

Want to learn more about learning agility? Reach out here.

Why Leadership Training Fails

It happens all the time. Senior leaders seek leadership training to strengthen the leadership team. Yet they don’t know exactly what will make their individual leaders better in their roles.
Some will base their leadership training on the flavor of the month, such as emotional intelligence. They have heard in leadership circles how powerful emotional intelligence is for leaders, so think training in that capacity will improve their individual leader’s abilities. And while that might be true, it might also be true that a particular leader is actually not lacking in emotional intelligence, and there are other skills that would maximize the results of their training. This is how leadership training fails.
For effective leadership training, we must know what the leader needs. This need should also be aligned with the organizational vision and mission, which requires foundational work. And in order to do that work, competencies must first be established.

The Foundational Work Needed for Leadership Training to Succeed

Sometimes referred to as ‘KSA’, competencies are the things people need to know (knowledge), do (skills) and have (abilities) to be successful in a specific role. Competencies can be grouped into technical, foundational and leadership areas. They are defined by specific behaviors that describe what that competency would look like if someone were using it effectively. These behaviors are often laid out across a proficiency scale so the employee can clearly assess her current behaviors and understand what behaviors are needed for the next level.
Some examples of competencies are problem-solving, conflict management, technical skills and speaking up. While some competencies will be applied to every employee, others are role dependent. The CEO of a large organization likely won’t need to have specific technical competencies, and a coder on the tech team likely wouldn’t need to be competent in sales communication.
Once competencies are defined, the next thing to do is identify five clearly defined proficiency levels. For example, for problem-solving skills, level one might be, ‘asks questions and looks for information to identify and differentiate the symptoms and causes of every day, defined problems’. Level five might be, ‘anticipates problem areas and associated risk levels with objectivity; uses formal methodologies to forecast trends and define innovative strategies in response to the implications of options; and gains approval from senior leadership to solutions of multi-faceted problems".

After competencies and proficiency levels are clearly defined, the next steps are:

1. Determine the expected proficiencies by job position.
2. Assess the employee’s competencies using a standardized process, on a regular basis. Competing an assessment will help the leader know which competencies to focus on for future leadership training.
3. Facilitate career conversations with employees to match organizational needs, career aspirations, and current employee proficiency to a leadership development program.
4. Track progress using accountability measures in the leadership development training.

Read in depth about each step here.

Using this process will prevent your leadership training from failing. You seek training because you are invested in your employee development. If you’re willing to make that investment, it’s worth doing all the foundational work necessary to get effective training that elevates your leaders.

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