Anyone who has taken a knowing breath and been within reach of a portal to the outside world this week has heard the howls of outrage over the TSA’s stepped up body scans and searches. Purportedly in an effort to discover weapons and explosives secreted on the human body, the agency has recently deployed advanced imaging equipment together with more aggressive groping, ‘er pat down procedures.

When it comes to security measures, the flying public ‘gets it.’ We really do. What agency management fails to grasp is that we’re not stupid, and we still retain quite a bit of choice as to how cooperative we’ll be when “security measures” are visited upon us. Ironically, it’s not appreciably different from the way our employees react when new procedures are implemented in the workspace.

Rather than beating the TSA like a rented mule, let’s revisit a few practices that lend themselves to more successful outcomes, be it in the airport or our more pedestrian businesses:

1. Selling trumps telling.  Rather than announcing new procedures at the “tip of the spear” e.g., when passengers are nearing a new screening device for the very first time, find ways to communicate ahead of time, what changes are being made, and why they are beneficial to the traveler, ‘er employee, ‘er customer. If you want me to buy into the change, tell me reliably and convincingly how the change is going to make my life better. Better yet, show me.  Telling someone to “Do it because I say so, or because I have the badge and you don’t” didn’t work a hundred years ago, and it sure doesn’t work today.
2. Be authentic. Stop the canned responses and lame rationale for asking people to do obviously stupid things. Be quick to admit and remedy your mistakes. People really don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to be honest.
3. Lighten up a little. In case you haven’t noticed, most of us are self-absorbed, nervous, and wrapped a bit too tightly these days. We don’t respond very well to having overly officious security officers, supervisors, senior vp’s  or spouses barking orders. Smiles help. So does “please and thank you.”

If you think about it, what’s going on in airports today is akin to behavior that I’m told exists in strip clubs, but for the fact that no one is making money or having any fun at it. Perhaps DHS Secretary, Janet Napolitano should consider hiring some younger, better looking screeners and giving them a daily stack of $1 bills to tip passengers for putting some skin in the game… or dancing while we’re in the AIT machine:-)

Your views as always are welcome.

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A thought leader 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. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Today’s managers go thru life feeling as if their lips are wrapped around an information fire hose, a condition we refer to as “Data Waterboarding.”  Indeed, various sources have suggested that email volume alone has now reached a level of 100 billion messages per day worldwide, a majority of which is, guess what… spam.

Having more information than you could ever possibly use, right at your fingertips, is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that, as we approach the decade of the 1’s, there simply aren’t many secrets any more. If you really want to find something out, you can do so, quickly and relatively inexpensively. The downsides? The very second you toggle the data switch into the open position or venture near an open web portal, you experience the digital equivalent of what radio host, Erich “Mancow” Muller felt when he volunteered to be waterboarded in his unsuccessful effort to prove that it didn’t constitute torture.

Even more so than the rest of us, managers experience this at some level every day, dealing with scores (hundreds?) of data impulses that come to them in digital, paper, telephonic, and human form, and many days it indeed feels like torture. “When will I have time to do MY work?” And just like what occurs everywhere else, a lot of this is spam, too. If you’re a part of a larger organization, the “switch” gets toggled for you, as others both inside and outside the organization have virtually limitless ability to dump things into your in-box, ‘er snorkle, and dump they do. Clearly, it’s not all stuff that you need or want.

To show how far we’ve come (notice I didn’t say progressed), my parents’ generation considered it very bad form not to examine and then respond personally to each and every incoming phone call or piece of written correspondence. In fact, my dad still gets annoyed whenever he hears that I’ve “rail dumped” an entire batch of email forwards from certain of his friends. Clearly, for the better part of three decades, we’ve been moving at a velocity and with volumes of input which make that totally unthinkable. So don’t try. Here’s what you CAN do though…

Get ruthless. Realize that, not unlike the function performed by a medical triage manager, you MUST sort thru this stuff, and become proficient at separating the vital (the ones that have stopped breathing) from the merely urgent (slow bleeders) and the folks who are just seeking attention or bloviating (hypochondriacs). Fail to do this, or do it poorly and you will drown. And, consistent with good triage, be clear that a lot of your inbound, a majority perhaps, doesn’t need to be opened or read EVER!

Triage derives from the French term, triagere, meaning to “sort”. The concept was first practiced by Napoleon’s battlefield surgeon, Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, who deduced that having some process by which to best allocate the needs of casualties to limited medical resources would yield much better outcomes. Triaging seems highly applicable to the process of optimizing data flow to the modern manager, as it depends on rapid assessment of need (relevance and quality of data in our case) and rationing of care (time and attention in our case). Managers must constantly bear in mind that, while data is useful to doing their job, it is not the job itself. Moreover, in most cases, having too much data is as debilitating as not having enough. No, it’s worse.

Gen. Colin Powell, one of the truly exemplary leaders of our time has long subscribed to a decision making theory that the optimum practical point to make a decision is when you have about 60% of the available information, AND you’ve expended no more than 60% of the available time. That’s the point at which you’ve likely got sufficient data to make a reasoned decision, and can still take advantage of being an early mover. General Powell’s advice is helpful for another reason as well. It reinforces the value of having not just the right amount of information, but getting it at the right time. Stale data is about as useful as stale bread.

To be continued in our upcoming book, Rebooting Leadership…

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A thought leader 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. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Our 1998 book, Contented Cows Give Better Milk, called attention to the substantial advantage in business outcomes achieved by companies with sensible leadership and employee relations practices. In it, we compared the difference in business results for a group of 6 companies with reputations for being great places to work (Contented Cows) versus a half dozen of their direct competitors with not quite the same workplace reputation (Common Cows). One of the companies profiled as an exemplar was Wal-Mart.

Despite very good business results, in the intervening years Wal-Mart has suffered more than its share of reputational black eyes inflicted by competitors who’ve endured countless beatings at the hands of the beast from Bentonville, labor unions that have grown weary of the company’s strident union-free posture, and yes, some mis-steps of its own.

Through it all, we’ve defied popular sentiment, maintaining instead that Wal-Mart is still a pretty good place to work, not to mention a convenient place to shop for a huge assortment of items at relatively low prices. Is it sexy? Nope, not one bit. Though I’ve never worked for the company, I get the distinct impression, gained from hundreds of store visits, interviews, and talking with acquaintances who do work their, that the work can be taxing (think long hours, hard floors), not especially lucrative, and, with  2.1 million people on the payroll (fully 50% larger than the active U.S. military), not particularly flexible. Moreover, consistent with lessons learned from other high performance workplaces, evidence abounds that employment at Wal-Mart is not for everybody. But it is right for a lot of people, and if you’re currently looking, you might give it some consideration.

What Wal-Mart lacks in “sexy” it makes up for in “steady”, something a lot of us are finding renewed appreciation for as the economy continues to quake and quiver. To wit…

• Unlike employees at 3 of the 6 designated “Common Cow” companies (Consolidated Freightways, United Airlines, and General Motors) and a long list of others that have gone through bankruptcy since the book was published , Wal-Mart employees have enjoyed growth, relative prosperity, and job security.
• Despite all the carping from organized labor about the company’s conservative approach to pay and benefits, Wal-Mart is now among the retail industry leaders in workforce health care insurance coverage. Indeed, the industry’s largest trade group, the National Retail Federation is apoplectic that Wal-Mart has endorsed congressional proposals that would require employers to provide health insurance for their employees
• And, they actually are doing some exciting stuff on the environmental front. The company is currently working with environmentalist and entrepreneur  Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) to develop and produce recyclable clothing

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A thought leader 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. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

P.S. Bill Catlette does not currently own Wal-Mart stock, nor has he ever taken a dime from the company.

Much is being written and said these days about sustainability as it pertains to environmental, economic, and social activities. Because of an increasingly global arena, and factors such as overpopulation, the need to maintain commerce at a high level, lack of education and the like, achieving sustainability in any meaningful way is a real struggle. Nowhere is the issue of sustainability more important (and difficult) than in the workplace.

In the early (pre-email) days of FedEx, or Federal Express as it was then known, company founder, Fred Smith used memos printed on bright red paper (red memos) as a way of communicating important thoughts or instructions (okay, orders) to the management team. We probably didn’t get more than one or two such missives a year, and, as memory serves, they frequently pertained to the announcement of a company-wide hiring freeze. Freeze meant just that – freeze. By the time the red memo landed on your desk, the bean counters had already applied a giant tourniquet to the payroll, and, barring special dispensation from Smith himself, no new names would be added, period.

Those of us who were actively involved in recruiting dreaded the arrival of each red memo, as it often meant that a lot of our recent efforts were about to go to waste, as offers could not be extended to candidates in the pipeline. As big a pain in the a** as this was, we silently appreciated what was going on.

You see, Smith was quick to hit the brakes in a slowing economy because one promise he had made to every one of us was that we would never be sent home due to a lack of work, unless the very survival of the enterprise was at stake. It wasn’t a formal policy as much as a personal promise. Still, the net result was that, whenever the economy slowed (and it did), and whenever we found ourselves temporarily overstaffed because a big project (e.g., Zapmail) crashed and burned, we were able to keep both eyes on our work, and worry about customers, rather than whether or not we would have a job.

For the same reason that FedEx stopped just shy of having a no layoff “policy”, wise managements studiously avoid making Big 3 (automaker) type commitments for benefits that employees haven’t earned, and the company simply can’t afford. Doing so is nether smart, nor sustainable, and in the end, it does no one any good.

Much has changed in the intervening years, most particularly the social and economic construct – the ‘deal” if you will, in the workplace. Terms like job security and loyalty have all but vanished from the workday vernacular. One thing that has not changed, however, is the fact that people who are proud of their work, and who feel that they are treated with respect and consideration are a lot more prone to part with copious amounts of their discretionary effort, or what we call, Oomph.  For this reason, organizations desiring to exit the current rough patch with their better players still on the “home” side of the field would do well to think about both the effect AND the sustainability of their employment practices.

A thought leader 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. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com