Over the course of her life, my mother taught me more about leadership than any class I ever took on the subject, or any one boss I’ve worked for. The lessons were usually prompted by life experiences that she seized on as teachable moments. Her last lesson for me, now permanently seared into my being, took place in the nursing home where she resided, about six months before her death.

 For about seventeen years, my mom, and my dad as her ever-faithful caregiver, dealt with the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. No matter what, he visited her daily, cared for her, and kept the nursing home staff on their toes with respect to her care.

Nearly every waking minute of her time in the nursing home was spent in a “merry walker”, a wheeled contraption made of PVC that allowed her mobility, but afforded protection against falling. Anyhow, mother was famous (6 years in one of those places allows someone to become famous) for scooting around the home in and out of public spaces and various other folks’ rooms, befriending and talking with them. As time wore on and her disease progressed, the “talking” was reduced to something that gave every appearance of being gibberish. The contents of her “hard drive” had been pretty well erased back to early childhood as the result of cognitive erosion caused by the disease.

One early fall Sunday afternoon, dad and I paid her a visit. Having a visit with mom wasn’t exactly a simple process, as it first involved doing a complete sweep of the building just to locate her. After a twenty-minute search, we finally found her in a hallway not far from one of the nurse’s stations. During our “conversation”, in which it was impossible to decipher anything she was saying, my mom kept pointing at me, more specifically toward my feet. Frankly, I had pretty well written off the entire exchange as gibberish until finally, something made me look down to where she had been pointing, and to my complete shock, noticed that my left shoe was untied. All along she had been trying to tell me that!

The lesson I came away with is that listening, really listening can be hard. It takes work, and it takes suspending judgment if you really want to absorb and comprehend what someone is trying to tell you. The people who work on our teams deserve no less effort and attention in that regard than our mom’s do.

I’m no longer able to tell my mom thank you for all the lessons she taught me over the years. If you have that opportunity, take it… today and every other day.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

A recent Huffington Post report highlighted a policy change at CVS Caremark, whereby workers who use the company’s health insurance program will be strongly encouraged, ‘er coerced to get a health assessment (height, weight, body mass index, blood pressure, et. al.) AND to make the results available to a firm that provides benefits support to their employer. According to the HuffPo piece, workers who choose not to participate will be fined $600 for the privilege of keeping their health data to themselves.

Health assessments are neither unreasonable nor new. They represent an effort by employers (who still provide and pay for the vast majority of private health insurance coverage in this country) to encourage workers to take greater interest in their own health. Many of those same employers incentivize (or dis-incentivize, depending on your perspective) people to complete the assessment.

Where CVS appears to be breaking new ground is in requiring workers to turn over the results of that review, or face a penalty. Though companies that take this approach are quick to point out that the personal health data is being held by a contractor and not directly by the employer, that distinction is not particularly assuring.

Our advice to those in the C-suite is that, if they are going to continue providing health insurance for their workers, they should proceed apace in taking sensible measures to yield a better functioning, more efficient, better understood, user-friendly system. Greater cost sharing, and incentivized health assessments for the covered population are part of that, as are much better communication efforts.

But they should be careful not to get heavy handed in their approach. The labor market that has favored employers for the past five years is beginning to shift in the other direction. And, beginning in 2014 with full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, workers, many of whom have felt chained to their jobs by access to health benefits, will have new choices when it comes to purchasing insurance.

It is entirely possible that at the precise moment that organizations are renewing their interest in hanging onto talent, many of their workers, led by the most talented, will be voting with their feet. That”s a challenge we don”t need.

*****

A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

With full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) now within sight, every organization with a payroll and a modicum of good sense is getting serious about determining their strategy and tactics with respect to the act.

Some have already decided to go ahead and upgrade their health care insurance programs to make them compliant with both cost and coverage requirements of the act. Many are taking a “watchful waiting” approach to see how the first few organizations that pay a fine and dump their workforces (in whole or in part) onto the state insurance exchanges fare. Many others, particularly in the retail and hospitality sectors, signal that they will be shifting even more to a workforce constituted of part-time workers in order to escape the act’s coverage requirements. At first blush, the act seems to incentivize some to do just that. Although every management must decide what’s in the best interest of their stakeholders, it is this last group that we’d like to focus on.

In a recent webinar sponsored by People Report and Black Box Intelligence (very credible organizations that provide info. services to the restaurant industry), the unmistakable take-away was that reliance on part-time vs. full-time workers will be a Big.Dot.Issue. 82% of the mostly restaurant managements surveyed indicated that cutting worker hours in order to reduce the number of full-timers with mandated benefits would be their likely approach. Further, 80% of those surveyed indicated that it was their intent to hire a greater ratio of part-timers going forward.

On the surface, swapping one full-time worker for two or more part-timers seems a perfectly sensible thing to do if it helps you avoid a significant expense for worker health care benefits. Yet, managements that make such a move based purely on avoiding the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance are opening yet another, possibly costlier can of worms.

Regardless of the number of hours each person works, the addition of each incremental real, pulsating human being (RPHB), aka “heads” to the beancounters in the crowd, adds significant complexity and cost to the mix. Here are just a few of the factors to consider:

1. Additional pressure on the physical plant (think bathrooms, parking spaces, work stations, et. al.)
2. The task of communicating with and leading, directing, guiding the workforce becomes more complex. At some point, additional managers must be hired due to span of control issues.
3. Recruitment and training costs go up, way up.
4. Barring some clear and reasonably predictable way to migrate from part to full-time status, you must either recruit from a totally different demographic, or face the prospect of having a bifurcated (and not necessarily enchanted or engaged) workforce. (Think A-scale and B-scale and how well that worked for commercial airlines.)

We don’t advocate one approach over another. Rather, that each management team get beyond the surface considerations and consider all the implications. And, not to put any pressure on you, but you need to do it soon.

*****

A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

This week I’m recording an interview with Kathy Tuberville, a University of Memphis Fogelman College of Business instructor who has elected to use our book, Rebooting Leadership in an upper level undergrad course on leadership. As a precursor to our discussion, she posed two questions for me to address in our interview. I did my best to answer them in a fashion that I thought would be most useful to her students, and have shared my thoughts below. To the degree that you have new or young leaders in your organization, or perhaps you are one yourself, you/they may find this of interest:

What are today’s biggest leadership challenges for emerging and newly appointed leaders? The greatest challenge perhaps is that the on-ramp to today’s leadership highway is short, steep, and unforgiving. Less than a decade ago it was still conventional for newly appointed leaders to experience the benefit of some pretty intensive leadership training in their first few months on the job (if not prior), and be on a relatively short leash with their reporting senior during that period. Within reason, mistakes were expected, and were considered part of the learning curve. Today, not so much. Most of the prep work is a DIY proposition, and mistakes are things that your boss may be less able or inclined to provide air cover on, so it’s probably best that they happen to other people.

Not unlike the world of professional football (the U.S. variety), where yesterday’s rookie players (quarterbacks in particular) could expect to ride the bench for a year or more before being inserted into the starting lineup, today’s players are paid (and expected) to be fully productive from day one. And sadly, once on the field, we tend to forget that they are still rookie players, and not fully developed.

I will submit that had a lot to do with the recent re-injury of Washington Redskins’ rookie phenom quarterback, Robert Griffin III during the team’s first (and only) game of the 2012-13 NFL playoffs. As a 22 year old man who, to my knowledge has not spent any time in med school, Mr. Griffin was allowed to be the sole decider as to whether or not his previously injured leg was ready for action. He guessed wrong. It wasn’t, and hopefully he will recover.

Perhaps the most challenging part of this for the rest of us has to do with the fact that today’s newly appointed leaders can’t always count on having a good example set for them. By virtue of having a sour economy for the past five years, it is entirely likely that their boss hasn’t had the benefit of any leadership training either, ergo it’s not unusual to have the blind leading the blind.

The good news (and it is good news) is that, due to the fact that most of today’s workers are more likely to engage with (and on behalf of) their leader rather than the broader organization, the efforts of each individual leader tend to matter quite a bit more. It’s truly motivating when you realize that what you pour yourself into every day is indeed mission critical.

What are your recommendations for students to achieve success as leaders? For better or worse, here’s what I said.

1.    For openers, be bone honest with yourself about whether or not you are up for this particular ride.

• Do you have the courage to make tough, unpopular decisions, and to deliver bad news without blaming them on someone else? How about telling a friend that they either need to change or leave?
• Do you have the resilience to take shots and beatings that are intended for other people (your team) without whining? You better be, because that’s part of the job.
• Are you willing to subordinate personal interest for the good of the team?
• Are you willing to liberally share credit with others, perhaps even more than what they deserve at times? If so, proceed. We need a lot more like you.

2.    Early on, it’s important that you become a real master of your time and priorities. On day one, and every day thereafter, you’re going to have a hundred fresh emails and other incoming items of varying importance before you even get to work, and a line out the door (oops, doors are a thing of the past) when you do. How you handle that stuff and keep it in proper context will materially impact your success as a leader, not to mention your sanity.
3.    Though you must be ever mindful of the fact that accepting the mantle of leadership means that you are held to a higher standard, you must at the same time, be authentic – be real. People who are not comfortable in their own skin have a habit of becoming petty tyrants.
4.    Be grateful, and show it, every day. Really. Leadership is not about you. It’s about the mission, and it’s about them.
5.    Become a good listener. It’s one of the quickest ways of gaining the respect and trust of others, not to mention being a great path to the answers you need.
6.    Lastly, unless you find that you’ve been blessed with having a really good boss who is both competent and willing to invest a lot of time in your development, get a coach or mentor that you can rely on – somebody who has been around the block a few times, who cares about you, and won’t blow smoke up your nose.

These are my thoughts. You are invited to join the discussion.

*****

A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Earlier this week, alongside 199 of the brightest, most talented people in the healthcare space, I attended the 2012 Forbes Healthcare Summit. Held at the The Allen Room at Jazz @ Lincoln Center in New York, the conversation and content were as spectacular as the venue. Hats off to Steve Forbes for hosting an event that lived up to its billing, and for allowing me to attend. Given that we frequently coach and train managers and executives from hospitals, big pharma, device manufacturers, and eldercare, I attended the event in an effort to stay current on the trends, opportunities and challenges in their world.

Somewhere late-morning as I furiously scribbled notes, I realized that, despite not being mentioned on the meeting agenda, one word had come up… a lot, almost as much as words I was expecting to hear, like gene, physician, science, payor, and the like . The word – culture. “Its about the culture you need to create.” Mikael Dolston (Pfizer); “The problem is trust.” Peter Tippett (Verizon); “It’s all about culture.” Andy Slavitt (Optum); “The biggest challenges are culture, culture, culture.” Dr. Richard Rothman (The Rothman Institute). “The culture is critical.” Sandra Fenwick (Boston Children’s Hospital). The clear implication from each and every mention was that if you want to innovate, optimize, execute, and get better outcomes, you had better pay attention to getting and keeping the culture thing right. Indeed, sparks flew for a moment or two when one of the presenters suggested that his business might never have gotten off the ground if he had been forced to recruit workers with a public servant mindset from the government sector. Yikes!

Whether in healthcare or elsewhere, I don’t think it’s too big a reach to suggest that the primary burden of responsibility for getting the culture right rests with those of us who occupy a leadership role – generally anyone with a trailing “R” in their job title, like officer, director, manager, supervisor, or leader. So what does that entail? Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order:

In my little pea brain, culture, at least as far as the workspace is concerned, is about expectations, customs, norms, and languages. It lends definition to the tribe. It means we have given serious thought to what it takes to be happy, productive, and successful here, gene mapping the organization if you will. It means that we have set, and abide by certain behavioral boundaries and expectations. It also means that we eject, like a virus, those who prefer to behave outside those lines. It means that, when recruiting, we are as careful about organizational fit as we are talent. Because of these expectations, things like respect and trust are usually in greater supply than elsewhere. As a result, people are more free to perform because they don’t have to waste precious time and energy looking over their shoulder. My questions to you are, how much time and attention are you giving to getting and keeping the culture right in your organization? How stridently do you, as a leader, explain and defend your culture?

These are my thoughts. You are invited to join the discussion.

*****

A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows