Best Of Zen

Blah, Blah, Blah

When did we all start to look alike?  Are associations like long-married couples or people and their pets, looking so much alike we can't tell them apart? 

Lately I have been digging around any number of associations' web sites, looking in vain for a prospective client's heart and soul or checking out a client's competition, and come up empty.  Words, words, words that say nothing and mean less.  Generic, homogenized association speak!

FIrst, it was the switch to meaningless acronyms, abandoning names that identified our cause, and now it's meaningless mission statements, hollow core-values, and self-aggrandizing goals, like this one promising to be a model association that "facilitates the development and execution of coordinated strategy." And don't get me started on the fascinating lists of "benefits," like silly discounts and association code for ways to spend more money.

What happened?  Have we become so obsessed with being business-like that we sold our souls? The antidote is to be human again. 

• Stand for those your members serve, not just members' self-interest or (shudder) your own.  An association is the means to an end, not an end in itself. 
• Stop being a Raccoon Lodge--with apologies and abiding admiration for the mystic order of the Racoon and the Honeymooners--and become a movement.
• Find your voice, your personality, get real and you will truly engage people in your work. Leap out there and be a leader for responsible practice, for a world free from what you want to overcome.

When I land on your home page, show me who your are, what you love, and why I should care--instantly. 

When I read your mission statement, let me sign up--not as a member, but as a believer.

When I watch the video stream, inspire me, engage me, and show me a better future.

O-o-o-o-kay, enough caffeine for me this morning, back to work and hushed, modulated tones. Blah, blah, blah.

Sue P said:

This post should be required reading for all association execs.

Ann Feeney said:

Bless you for saying this! Associations and nonprofits have gotten too fond of sounding "business like," which means that they use the same bland terminology and buzzwords that could describe anything and therefore describe nothing at all. Business-speak feels safe and comfortable. It's blending into the crowd. But don't we want our associations to stand out of the crowd?

(Dis)Engagement

 How can we engage members in our work if association employees are leaving the better part of themselves at home?  For all the lip service given to "engagement" these days, I am amazed by the lack of engagement among association employees. 

Recently, I was hitting a brick wall of stony indifference with the senior management of a well known association, so I peeled them off for personal interviews.  One on one, I was impressed with each exec's energy and ideas, but when restored to the group, everyone shut down and spoke like robots.

The behavior was not a product of the recession--fear of losing one's job--this was the culture, engineered by the CEO to maintain an illusion of control.  The result was a senior team that quit long ago, but are still on the job. 

There is an alternative, one neatly articulated by Henry Mintzberg in the July-August Harvard Business Review on "Rebuilding Companies as Communities." 

Mintzberg argues for an alternative form of leadership, "a more modest form of leadership that might be called engaged and distributed management," what he calls communityship.  "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative."

To create community at work, Mintzberg recommends that you:

1. Start with small groups of committed managers.
2. Take time to reflect on shared experiences.
3. Use insights from these reflections to trigger small initiatives with potential to become big strategies.
4. Model behavior for others in the organization.
5. "(C)ommunityship is firmly established when the members reach out in socially active, responsible, and mutually beneficial ways to the broader community."

"(H)ealthy organizations take corporate social responsibility seriously and gain significant benefits in return. Employees of a company that barely functions as a community can hardly be expected to care about any other community.  But members of a company that has a robust sense of community realize how much their organization depends for sustained success on constructive engagement with the communities around it."

Do less. Be more. Engage members through opportunities to learn and grow, professionally and personally, reflecting on shared experiences in a community of practice, pursuing social justice while making a living.  And do it in every single activity you offer.

That's engagement.  The rest is empty promises of features and benefits in a brochure.

Jamie Notter said...

Okay, I personally hate words like "communityship," but I completely dig everything else in this post. It resonates with what Gary Hamel wrote in terms of "less hierarchy and more community." Also with Senge's definition of leadership as a system capacity, rather than an individual attribute. Nice post.

Start a Conversation on Corporate Responsibility

Last February, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association signed on to the Global Principles for Socially Responsible Associations and Nonprofits.  ASHA's executive director Arlene Pietranton told me it required a brief board discussion because the Global Principles align with ASHA's values and culture.  When we met at the Great Ideas Conference, her question was "Now what?" 

That question led us to tee up a larger conversation, a half-day experimental workshop, bringing together a cross-section of association executives and experts to talk about corporate social responsibility.

BOMA's Henry Chamberlain volunteered his boardroom and brought his senior management team.  Arlene Pietranton brought Janet McNichol, ASHA's HR director, and staff responsible for the internal green team and community service activities.

Creativity guru Rhea Blanken designed real-life role playing exercises that let us all practice how we talk about corporate responsibility, and as BOMA's Pat Areno said, "see yourself as others see you."

Here's what we learned:

• Get outside perspectives.  Practice talking about what you do.  Be ready for skeptics.
• Design the conversation.  Assign roles, limit time, build trust, take action.
• Map what you already do. Be more transparent.
• Spread accountability. Build responsibility into your RFPs and supply chain contracts.
• Widen the dialog. Engage members and their customers and clients.
• Get started!  Do something.

Susan Gorin, executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists, said: "Sustainable social responsibility requires ongoing discussion among all members of a community or organization (and) ensuring that there are different perspectives around a table when a plan is being formulated enhances the outcome."

For more on the workshop and a list off all the terrific people who participated, see my commentary in the June 5 Association Trends. For more ideas on how to start your own conversation on corporate responsibility, look for the forthcoming Journal of Association Leadership (Spring 2009) and my article, Shared Responsibility: Collective Action for a Sustainable Future.

Creative Brief

Have you seen the new ad for Shredded Wheat cereal?  Unchanged for more than 100 years, the iconic cereal promises to continue its boring way. In the ad, the corporate guy in a suit announces: "We put the NO in Innovation."

If you are boring and proud of your 100 year history of never changing, you too can be Shredded Wheat.

Odds are though you need a different approach. Given what's being thrown at us 24/7, improvisation and good reflexes count more than ever. No wonder simulations and gaming is so popular.  It's exactly the training and experience we need at work to navigate every day's helping of unexpected threats.

So here's the thing.  Control is an illusion.  Get over it!  Everyone attached to your mission needs to make 10,000 decisions every day, confronting challenges unimagined by you this morning.  Do you really think there is any competitive advantage in commanding an army of corporate droids, clones with one way of thinking and acting and looking?   Isn't it more feasible to have hundreds of different life forms, points of view and intelligences looking at the same problem or managing the same dilemma??

Problem definition is the challenge and focused creativity is the response.

You need to engage your team, your evangelists, your members in real-time inquiries to grow confidence and skills, to test assumptions and challenge conventional wisdom.  You need a shared set of principles to guide action.  You need clarity around your shared values and agreement around your goals. 

Sure, you need efficient processes, but more than that you need transparency.  The decisions you make are not as important as HOW YOU MAKE THE DECISIONS.The black box is empty, and we know it.

Keep your eyes on the prize.  HOW you mobilize others to achieve your mission IS your BRAND of experiencing the world.  Who are you taking along for the ride?

Getting Serious About Diversity

On the brink of the last recession, after the dot com bust and before the 9/11 attacks--Joe O'Connor, the new chairman at the Urban Land Institute made inclusivity his cause for his two-year tenure.

Appointing a task group to identify the most effective means of engaging greater numbers of public officials, women, minorities, and young professionals, Joe gave us permission to get serious about diversity.  Despite the downturn, membership doubled.

Thanks to Joe, ULI stepped up to support a new initiative, the Real Estate Association Program (REAP), with an annual $25,000 grant and an equal amount in administrative, in-kind and staff support.  Funding continues today.

That was the beginning of my association with REAP, working with the founder, Mike Bush, to build a new talent network of career-changing minority professionals.  REAP is funded by dozens of companies and a number of commercial real estate associations, chief among them ICSC--the International Council of Shopping Centers--led by Mike Kercheval. 

The story of this industry-wide program appears in the 2009 edition of Association Now's Volunteer Leadership Issue. With permission, a pdf of the article Breaking Through is available to download at REAP's web site, projectreap.org.

By sharing responsibility across all segments of the business, pooling the efforts of many associations and a variety of employers, we all escaped from those well meaning, but lame, feel-good programs and shared the heavy lifting of creating genuine opportunity.   The real winners are the REAP associates who gained the widest perspective to find the best fit for their interests and abilities.

The quest now, in the face of the current recession, is to build capacity, transition beyond the founder to a new exec, and establish vibrant local networks in five cities.  Crazy timing, but when you are in it for the long haul, economic cycles smooth out.

What Color Is Your Parachute?

If your parachute isn't golden, you might be looking for some help finding your way to your calling, your next career move or your legacy.   So here's an exercise that not only helps you look in a mirror, but to see yourself as others do.

Try this at a meeting to create greater self-awareness and groupsourced career counseling in less than 30 minutes. Alchemist Chris Grant designed this exercise for The Vine and called it resume unbound. 

Giving us five minutes, Chris had each of us write out two or three phrases under three headings on a single piece of paper:

• my values at work
• the value I add
• skills, characteristics and qualities.

Then, you and the person sitting next to you take five minutes to exchange resumes, explaining what you have written before standing up and wandering the room holding your partner's resume.  In the next five minutes, you must talk to at least three people, pairing up to ask what they would do if they could borrow the person you represent for a year.   With surprising answers in hand, you return to your original partner to download life-altering career suggestions.

My partner was the ultimate blend of Jim Collins and Deprok Chopra.  He came back with three suggestions for me:  run a think tank; be a facilitator and consensus builder; or become a community organizer.   Works for me and it makes a much better elevator speech!

Mentor for Life

At the Shackleton workshop, we were asked to tell the group about our favorite leader, someone we knew personally and who served as our role model of leadership. After a dozen stories about past bosses and heroes, I was compelled to say that my mentor is my mother.  I can hear her laughing now, but the more I have thought about it this week, the more I know it is true.

Even in prosaic roles, as a manager doing performance reviews or organizing a project or speaking up at work when something needs to be said, it's my mother who has shaped my behavior, not B-school.  Her mother lived by the golden rule, and it still seems like the right standard for business and life. 

Fortunately, I had the good sense to write my mother a letter at the end of my first semester in college and tell her how just much of what she had been trying to impart to me for 18 years actually stuck.  Faced with a series of choices those first few months away from home, my test was to bounce it against the admonition I heard every morning when I set out the door:  Make your mother proud of you and be careful crossing the street.  That made most choices pretty simple.

And, it was 18 years after that when the letter was returned to me that I discovered just how important it is to tell people not just that you love them, but how they change your life.  My mother died in an automobile accident, and the letter was in her purse when she died.  Her friends told me later that she would take the letter out and show people what I had written years earlier.

My mother was funny, generous and kind.  She was no fool, but never made you feel like one.  She had a hard life, but never complained or regretted her choices.  She worked hard, laughed a lot, and had dozens and dozens of friends she maintained over many years. She was my cousins' favorite aunt and her bosses' most reliable colleague.  She worked full time and raised three children. She believed in buying quality shoes for growing feet, and always found the money for a book one couldn't live without.  But more than that, she believed in you.   She just knew you were doing your best, and that was more than enough.

So, yes, my model for leadership is my mother, and I think she would be proud of me--well, most of the time, anyway.  (And come to think of it, her example of who to be led me to my husband, who is like her in all the ways that matter--and it's no coincidence that he has a great mother, too.)

Like Sir Ernest, my mother could turn her back on the past and step into the future. She stepped up to deal directly with adversity, and stepped back to let others do their part.  Like Shackleton, she was a realistic optimist and a leader.

Realistic Optimism

Like pornography, most of us know leadership when we see it.  Experts list dozens of attributes, traits, and behaviors that when mixed in proper proportions magically produce great leaders.  Others observe followers and reduce the equation to trust, followers' belief in the competence of the leader to get them to the goal.  A few have abandoned the 'great man' theory, and find that leadership emerges when and where it is needed and that leadership is organic.

Extreme conditions test any theory, and few tests can approximate the experience of the crew of the Endurance and their leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton.  The goal was to cross the continent.  The achievement was survival.  In 1918, the entire team was rescued after being stranded in the Antarctic for two years.  All attributed their success to one factor, their leader and his optimism in the face of impossible odds.

Yesterday, I was fortunate to be one of 18 people--a mix of land use and association professionals--to sign on to a one-day adventure, guided by the author of Shackleton's Way, Margot Morrell, and Linkage facilitator and executive coach Dick Gauthier.  One of the exercises in the workshop included the use of an assessment tool, the results of which arrayed participant's scores in the four quadrant box all consultants adore.  One scale was realism, the other optimism.  The assessment brought home Shackleton's secret, his extreme realistic optimism, best illustrated by his reaction to watching his ship succumb to the pressure of the ice pack.  He gathered his crew, turned his back on the sinking ship, and said, "So now we will go home." 

Contrarian that I am, I couldn't help thinking of Abraham Lincoln.  Isn't he the opposite of Shackleton yet also one of the greatest leaders the world has known?  Does realistic optimism hold up?  I think so because Lincoln was not a pessimist. (See my January 11 post on  Lincoln's Melancholy.)  He was what Victor Frankl called a 'tragic optimist,' all too aware of the danger of the future but deeply secure in his belief in the group, the promise inherent in "the abundance of man's heart."

In the workshop, I also noticed that the developers--members working in both the public and private sectors--live in the same space as Sir Ernest, realistic optimists all. Association professionals, on the other hand, appeared to be aspiring to the median score. And there lies the opportunity. Rather than worry about what's missing, be realistic, but turn your back on setbacks and don't hold back.

In boldness, there is magic, as Goethe said.  Leadership is about stepping up, committing, knowing what really matters, and trusting our ability to find a way. 

In the extremes, there is greatness and in members' hearts there is promise.  Go for it!

Tell me more

We all want to be heard, yet how well do we listen? 

One technique to improve the odds is to respond more often with the phrase, "Tell me more."  One-on-one, "tell me more" signals respect and a willingness to listen. It implies that judgment has been suspended.

In meetings, you will need to change the rules to ensure active listening.  If not explicitly negotiated at the outset, group norms will determine the order, frequency and duration of each person's speaking time.  Tinker with the dynamic by deferring to, or extending, a lower status individual's air time. Invite more people into the room.  Change the seating pattern. Eliminate the table.

If you are trapped between two persistent states of talking and waiting to talk, find ways to default to listening. Even if you approach it as performing random kindness and senseless acts of beauty, the same benefits follow.

Improving Your Vision

Vision, clearly communicated, is the ultimate delegation tool.  With a shared vision, each of us is  confident to make decisions and take actions, knowing we are moving toward a larger goal.

As a leader, even if you have 20/20 vision, you will will need to supply:

• Regular eye exams for your team; 
• Bifocals for project managers to focus on the immediate task and see ahead; and,
• Lasik surgery for others to escape from out of date lenses.