First, this post is not about my vacation. How boring would that be? It’s about a fundamental change in the way people stay connected, or not. But the issue came to light on my vacation, so please indulge me a sentence or two.

Last month, my wife and I took what was, for us, the trip of a lifetime, in celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary. A Mediterranean cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas. In short, the cruise was wonderful. We relaxed, unplugged, saw places I’d only heard of before. The food was good and plentiful. The service – no complaints. And our accommodations were very comfortable. May I never forget how blessed and privileged we were to be able to take such a trip.

If you think these sincere words (and they are sincere) are the wind-up for a complaint, you’re right. Well, not so much a complaint as an observation.

The problem: The Internet service on board the ship was wholly abominable. Indescribably inadequate. And shockingly expensive. It took about ten minutes (and 3 dollars!) to sign in to gmail. Any site that required any bandwidth at all was blocked. And Skype? Are you kidding? One day, I spent five hours of my vacation, and $90, to do about 10 minutes’ work, to send a promised proposal to a client.

Reminder – I’m not whining. I realize how fortunate I am to have taken the trip at all. Now, I’ll continue.

And don’t, as did the “guest services agent” on the ship, give me this lame line: “But you’re on vacation. You shouldn’t be working!”

Earth to Royal Caribbean. As we point out in Rebooting Leadership, the lines between work and play, work and home, home and play, are forever blurred. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. The fact that it is as it is – is not.

We work in our “off-hours” (whatever those are), and, likewise, play at work. Don’t try to tell me you don’t.

Today’s work, indeed much of today’s life, is facilitated online. If you doubt that, try unplugging your home Internet (or if yours is like mine, wait until it goes down naturally; it won’t be a long wait), and turn off your smartphone. Count the number of things you start to do, before remembering that you can’t.

On the cruise, we were traveling in a group of 19 friends. Many are small business owners, like myself. Others have responsible jobs working for someone else. All of us are used to traveling, at home and abroad, and, have gotten used to being able to connect from pretty much anywhere – hotel rooms, airports, coffee shops, you name it. Call us spoiled, if you like. Overindulged perhaps. But you may definitely call us frustrated with the ship’s inability to provide a usable Internet connection. And to charge us stupid money for the frustration.

Royal Caribbean’s excuses (offered as if highly practiced) involved pointing out that we were at sea, that satellite communications are iffy at best, and that there were more than 3,000 people on the ship, many of whom were competing for limited bandwidth. All invalid. The technology exists to let passengers connect as easily as if they were in the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

I’m pretty sure the problem persists for two reasons:

1) Royal Caribbean (and, to be fair, their competitors) don’t want to invest in making the technology work. They don’t believe Internet access on a cruise vacation is important enough to enough people to make the investment commercially advantageous. That’s shortsighted.

2) An old mindset curiously survives, and yet without nourishment from reality. A pipe, slippers, and brandy anachronism in which we commute into the office at the start of our “workday”, chain ourselves to a desk for a period of time, and then commute home. We’re generations past that. Many in the hospitality field are falling all over themselves to realize that, in order to compete. Not the cruise biz. Certainly not Royal Caribbean.

I relish my downtime. Had the Mariner of the Seas had Internet access that could be taken seriously, I would have had more of it on my vacation. For those 12 days, I could have connected, done my work, kept in touch, and taken care of business, in less than an hour a day. That would have been a small price to pay for 23 hours a day of vacation.

Here’s hoping that this summer, you have the chance to take a week or two, get away, and recharge. But I sure hope you’ve got better Internet access than I did!

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

Visiting a new country reminds me a lot of being in a new job. There are so many rules to learn. The written, well-documented ones are hard enough to keep up with. But watch out for the pages and pages of “unwritten rules” – things you need to know, but may never be told. Until it’s too late.

Last month, I had the privilege of visiting six foreign countries – seven if you include the Vatican – on a trip that was part vacation, part speaking engagement. No, the speaking engagement was not in the Vatican. They have that covered. I spoke at two conferences in Singapore.

While my passport is pretty well worn, most of the places I visited on this trip, specifically Greece, Turkey, Dubai, and Singapore, were new to me.

And in each case, I couldn’t help feeling, “Hmmm. How does this work here? How do you do this here?”, “this” being regular everyday things like ordering coffee from a walkup counter, being seated at a restaurant, hailing a taxi, paying the restaurant bill, crossing the street, keeping the lights on in the hotel room (store your keycard in the mystery slot near the door) what to wear, how to greet people, how to use public toilets and public transportation (which in a couple of these places seemed to be indistinguishable from each other), and tipping – tipping the taxi driver, the bellman, the waiter, and even the toilet attendant. The list goes on. There’s nothing right nor wrong with these customs, nothing better nor worse. It’s just the way it’s done wherever you happen to be.

And then there’s airport security! Which countries do and do not have hangups about shoes, liquids, and laptops? TSA – take a trip. Pay attention!

How do we learn these unwritten rules in organizations? Pretty much the same way we learn them when visiting far-off lands. If we’re lucky, there will be someone who cares enough to tell us. We supplement that with observation, research, and simply asking.

I noticed in Brussels, that without exception, in the absence of cross-walk signals, drivers yield, unanimously, to pedestrians crossing an intersection. Expecting the same behavior in Istanbul will result in blood and broken bones.

I ordered Pad Thai from a stand in a food court in Singapore, and, when I asked what they had to drink, the guy looked at me like I was American, and politely directed me to a separate vendor who carried beverages. This was a food stand. No beverages on the menu. What are you thinking? When I gave a Singaporean cabbie a couple extra dollars over the metered fare, he looked at me like I didn’t know my numbers.

At work, not knowing the unwritten rules can have embarrassing, to career limiting consequences. Good leaders help new people navigate these treacherous waters. Aside from the written dress code, how do we really dress for success around here? How do we address those who live north of us on the org chart? In meetings, do we speak out, or wait to be recognized? Does the organization place a premium on doing the right things, or doing things right? Which works better here – challenging things outright, or taking a more considered approach?

Here are some thoughts (I won’t call them rules) on, well, rules:

• When it comes to rules, fewer is generally better. I didn’t say “none is better”. Fewer is better.
• As we wrote in Chapter 21 of Contented Cows Moove Faster, you should have 2 types of rules. Type 1 – a very few inviolable cardinal rules. Failure to comply renders one ineligible for membership in the organization.

Good leaders are crystal clear about these, and consistent in their enforcement. No one should even step foot on the premises on day one without having received clear, written documentation about Type 1 rules.

The immigration landing card you receive when you arrive in Singapore has, in bright red, all capital letters, in an area all its own, “DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW“. Any questions? If you have more than a few of these Type 1 rules, you’re either in a really weird business, you’re hiring the wrong people, or you’re a bureaucracy run amok.

• Type 2, covering just about everything else, is more what this article is about. Sometimes, they’re de facto policies. More often, they’re culture elements that have evolved, for better or worse, as the organization has learned what seems to work best. They’re often the little things that can trip us up, unnecessarily. Good leaders are unfailingly skilled both at recognizing that these rules exist, and in schooling their followers as to how to abide by them, and when, and how, to challenge them.

• Although not the case with Type 1 rules, discretion is a must for Type 2. If you’re a leader interested in having the best performing team you can, you’ll mold, groom, and develop your followers with respect to these “unwritten” rules, rather than punishing them if they don’t always get them right.

• Finally, leaders in healthy organizations regularly examine, and question, the usefulness of their rules, especially those not written down anywhere. Is the “rule” helping our people do their best work? Does it build value for our customers? If you’re not sure, listen to both of these constituencies. They’ll tell you.

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Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

As an American with a British wife, I’m sometimes asked (and no more often than in the last few weeks) what I think of the British royal family. The question is usually accompanied by the implication that the American asking it doesn’t quite understand the value of the monarchy, and thinks the royal family is a waste of time and money.

While I don’t share that view, I do understand why some feel that way.

And while this blog post is about organizational culture, and not about about the Windsors and Waleses, there are some pertinent points. To wit, the Queen’s approval rating among the British is about 80%. Hard to argue (or compete) with that. And, although it’s impossible to know, I suspect that the value of the monarchy to the tourist trade exceeds its cost.

But the real value of the British monarchy, and its associated family is in how it helps to define the culture of the British society. For better or worse, the monarchy is part of – I said part of – the essence of what it means to be British. These historic assumptions and practices have given structure, and some stability, to British society, kind of like protein molecules give structure and stability to a great loaf of crusty bread.

The organization where you work has a culture. And that culture goes a long way toward defining what – or who – that organization is.

Two eminent scholars, John Kotter, and Edgar Schein, have studied and written much about organizational culture in the last 30-40 years.

Harvard’s Kotter asserts that culture is part of why some organizations succeed and some fail.

MIT’s Schein defines culture as “A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems…, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”. He points to what he calls “artifacts”, as the outward manifestations of that culture. The architecture of the corporate headquarters, dress code, our hiring practices, and how we treat employees are all examples of these artifacts.

At the heart of Schein’s thesis is that assumptions drive practices. Think about your assumptions with respect to people in the workplace. Whatever those assumptions are, they give structure to your organization, and allow it to function, with some consistency, over time. Do you assume that people are on the asset side of the balance sheet? Or the liability side? Do you assume that they’re trying to cheat the company, or make a valuable contribution? That they want to learn, grow, and develop? Or stagnate, collect, and retire on the job? These assumptions are critical to how you respond to, treat, and therefore lead people.

Here at Contented Cow Partners, we tend to agree with Dr. Schein. Assumptions drive practices. And carrying it further, practices drive results.

As you sit and watch the endless loop of today’s Royal Wedding coverage on TV, wherever you are in the world, ponder anew what your assumptions are about the people you work with. And how those assumptions make it to the bottom line.

Cheers!

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Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

Have you seen “The King’s Speech”? My wife (who happens to be British) and I saw it this weekend, and we give it two enthusiastic thumbs up. I liked it not only because it’s a great movie, but for the leadership lessons it teaches.

Story first, then lessons. In a nutshell, Prince Albert (played by Colin Firth) has a speech disorder so severe that it’s nearly impossible for him to speak publicly. As the 2nd son, that wouldn’t have been so bad, except that his older brother, who becomes king when their dad dies, gives up the throne to marry a twice-divorced American. Suddenly, Albert becomes king, and promptly changes his name to George VI (are you with me?) While princes can get by with ribbon-cuttings at train stations, kings must address nations. Especially as they go to war.

As the threat of war in Europe loomed, George knew it would be his duty, and his alone, to tell the news to Britain, and indeed the world, using the new technology of radio. And whatever you may say about George VI, and his queen, Elizabeth, who most of us knew as the Queen Mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter), they understood the importance of duty.  The new king toiled, at first reluctantly, and then with greater commitment, to improve his speech. Working with his unorthodox and uncertified speech therapist, Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), the king eventually minimized his stammer, and the attendant anxiety, so that he was able to deliver, in nearly flawless cadence, in 1939, the most important address of his life, announcing to a worried and frightened nation, that the second World War had begun.

Here’s what I took away from the film, from a leadership standpoint:

• People need to hear directly from their leaders – not through an intermediary – especially in times of crisis. King George could have commanded any number of more eloquent spokespersons to deliver the war message, especially since, in his case, speech was so excruciatingly painful. But sharing difficult news is a DIY job, not something to be outsourced to mouthpieces. Get help in crafting the message, to be sure, and, if necessary, as in the king’s case, with enunciating it. But deliver it yourself. Sooner, rather than later. And in person, if possible.
• We never know when we’ll be thrust, unexpectedly, into a position of leadership. Be ready, as Albert was, to find yourself in a job you thought somebody else would do. Sadly, too many of today’s future leaders, coming of age in a bad economy, haven’t been afforded the necessity of much leadership development. Their employers will pay a price. Those who take it upon themselves to develop leadership skills will find themselves in an advantageous position when the time comes to step into the breach.
• Learn to speak to those you lead, and to others, in a public setting. And learn to do it well. If you have a fear of public speaking (many do, we don’t), get help to conquer it. We’ve followed lots of corporate execs on stage, too many of whom did a shamefully incompetent job at the podium. It makes our job easier when that happens, but that’s not really what we’re after.
• Hire the best, as the king did in hiring Lionel Logue. Worry less about degrees and whether or not the person has specific experience in your industry, and more about results. Logue had no degree, and he’d never treated royalty before. And yet his results speak, quite clearly, I might add, for themselves.

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and Contented Cows MOOve Faster, and the brand new book Rebooting Leadership. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.