Leading Ethical Organizations

It’s easy for leaders to fall into the trap of thinking they need to have the answer to every problem or situation that arises. After all, that’s in a leader’s job description, right? 

At the South by Southwest Interactive conference earlier this month, I went to a fun panel called “Moms vs. Management: Parents Make Awesome Managers,” featuring top managers/parents from Google, Pixar, SAP and Hot Studio, a design firm.

I’ve been reading the recent research on trust completed by CASS on behalf of the CIPD and am posting a half-way review in the hope that Changeboard will include it in their HR carnival focusing on social responsibility coming out tomorrow.
The research focuses on the need for trust with a variety of different constituents including the mission of the organisations, its customers, leaders, line managers and each other (se my recent post on people like us).

 
Plenty of leaders seek to boost their performance by becoming stronger, more agile, more forceful. Matthew E. May has a whole different strategy.

Most leaders seek to boost their performance by becoming more: more decisive, more communicative, more masterful of complexity. Matthew E. May prefers the opposite approach. A former consultant for Toyota, May sums up much of what he learned there about the art of simplification in the word elegance, which he applied to products, processes, and problem solving in his 2009 book, In Pursuit of Elegance. (A new book, The Laws of Subtraction, will be published this fall.) In a recent conversation with editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan, May discussed how elegance applies to leadership.

 
A few weeks ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released its annual charge filing and resolution statistics.
The report tracks case trends from 1997 through 2011. Last year, charges rose to the highest level seen in this time period. Yet the percentage of reasonable cause findings of discrimination stayed relatively flat, at 3.8 percent. The other 96.2 percent of the cases were settled with benefits, withdrawn or dismissed. What's causing people to lodge an increasing number of cases even as the administrative findings of liability remain relatively constant?

 
Last Thursday, baseball All-Star Ryan Braun won his appeal of a positive drug test, but the truth remains clouded, trust has been broken, and he’s left with a tarnished image that may never be repaired.
If you’re not familiar with the story, Braun, the reigning National League MVP of the Milwaukee Brewers, tested positive last October for elevated levels of testosterone and was facing a 50-game suspension as a result. Braun had already filed an appeal when news of the failed drug test was leaked in December (results of failed drug tests are supposed to remain confidential until a player exhausts the appeals process, to avoid this very situation of unjustly tarnishing a person’s reputation). Last week an arbitrator ruled that Major League Baseball didn’t follow the strict specimen collection and handling procedures outlined in the collective bargaining agreement with the players union and Braun’s suspension was overturned.

When the FBI made front-page headlines recently with the arrest of a coterie of  financial traders and analysts charged with tens of millions dollars worth of securities fraud, it was only the most recent of dozens of similar cases over the past two years. Yet, such big-time rip-offs, spectacular though they are, represent only a tiny sliver of the nation's total business-related cheating, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which estimates that U.S. business lost close to a trillion dollars from employee fraud in one recent year.
Is such a massive amount of cheating indicative of  a work force that is hopelessly corrupt? Research in the new issue of the Academy of Management Journal suggests not. It finds that, confronted with clear choices between right and wrong, people are more than five times more likely to do the right thing when they have some time to think about the matter than they are when they have to make a snap decision.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

You were born with seven brain attributes for effective management. How much you turn the volume up or down depends on you--and what you want to accomplish.

 
Today we have a guest post from my colleague, Russell Raath, on an exciting youth leadership training program led by Kotter International.
There is an incredibly poignant moment depicted in the movie,Invictus, when Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa, and Francois Pienaar, the captain of that nation’s rugby team, are seated in Mandela’s office, chatting over a cup of tea.

I’m halfway around the world, in Brisbane, Australia, where, yesterday, I finished an intense two-day strategy session for the top 50 managers of a company determined to take over the world. Maybe not your world, but the world of installing large AC systems.

 
The world’s second oldest profession must be Change Management Guru. 
Change advisors have existed for millennia. Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus observed, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” A century later, Diogenes commanded, “Bury me on my face because in a little while everything will be turned upside down.”  In the 16th century Machiavelli wrote, “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.”  Eight or more of Aesop’s fables were construed as advice on dealing with change.  And in the past four decades alone, thousands of books onchange and management have been published. 
Still, with all of the advice to choose from, more than two out of three organizational change efforts fail.  Why?

If you follow professional cycling, or sports, or just the culture of celebrity in general, you probably know Tyler Hamilton alleged on 60 Minutes that he saw Lance Armstrong use performance enhancing drugs.  60 Minutes also reported that George Hincapie, a teammate for all seven of Lance’s Tour de France victories and one of the most respected figures in the sport, testified to a grand jury about Armstrong’s doping.