As a manager, you have the responsibility to plan, organize, implement, delegate, and control. To be a leader, however, you must also inspire your staff, your colleagues, and your workplace. You have the ability to take these people to greater heights,
Quit Your Job, Enjoy Your Work
Making Your Workplace More EnjoyableBy Garth S. JohnsiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Garth S. Johns
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-2716-0Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................viiIntroduction..........................................................................1Chapter 1: Elements of Effective Leadership...........................................5Chapter 2: Leading by Serving.........................................................15Chapter 3: Leading with Emotional Intelligence........................................29Chapter 4: Work/Life Balance..........................................................43Chapter 5: Silos and Organizational Constipation......................................58Chapter 6: Let's Have Fun.............................................................73Chapter 7: Be Nice....................................................................90Chapter 8: The Importance of Ethics and Integrity.....................................106Chapter 9: Conflicts Can and Do Happen................................................126Chapter 10: Change in the New World of Work...........................................145Chapter 11: Being a Better Manager through Coaching and Mentoring.....................165Chapter 12: Alternative Work Arrangements.............................................184Chapter 13: Concluding Remarks........................................................199Notes.................................................................................205
Chapter One
Elements of Effective Leadership
Quick, who is the most influential leader in all of our lives? For those of you who suggest Gandhi, Obama, Churchill, Mother Teresa, or other significant political or social figures, you may be mistaken. Even those of you who may have placed my name in this list (thanks, by the way) may be slightly misguided. These are the names that regularly arise together with organizational directors, sports heroes, and miscellaneous others in numerous research studies that have been undertaken over the last year or two. (All right, it was more like a show of hands during my various workshops and presentations given in that time, and I know it's not very scientific, but ...) Without much doubt, most of those whose names were put forward as great leaders (with the exception of mine) had the potential to inspire great numbers of people through good times and bad. What incredible influence they have carried.
However, I would respectfully submit that the most influential leaders for most of us are our own mothers and/or fathers. After all, they are the ones who, for the first 20 or so years of our lives, were in the driver's seats in terms of inspiring us to greater heights—or not! Mothers and fathers as leaders? Why not say the same about soccer coaches? What about teachers? Union executives? Service club presidents?
One of my key premises when writing Common Sense Leadership is that everyone can lead and you don't need a title to do so. After all, leadership is defined not by our titles but by our actions. My own definition of a leader is simply "one who inspires others to achieve greater personal heights or higher levels of performance." (1)
Our mothers and fathers have unfortunately often been relegated to the status of being "just Mom," just as a receptionist I recently spoke with was, in her words, "Just a receptionist." However, parents, for most of us, have been held in a special place in all our hearts, and they have had such a huge impact on our lives that it is high time they were recognized as leaders. By the way, I appreciate and respect that in today's world, there are so many others who serve as primary caregivers; my terms mother and father should be taken to include others as well. Certainly, they can be the most inspiring people for each and every one of us. They can help us to achieve greater personal heights, and they teach us about ethics, values, and principles.
However, once we get to the workplace, others take over. Could it be that the life lessons taught by Mom and Dad carry over to the workplace? I believe the answer is yes and that the practices and principles that need to be promoted at work are often developed, learned, and encouraged at home as well. Leadership is integral to providing a culture and management style that fosters a healthy, productive, and even fun workplace. We are all leaders in some sense, regardless of whether we hold the title. Learning about what makes leadership effective will improve the workplace and the world we live in.
A few years ago, I began the journey that was to become my first book, Common Sense Leadership. The intent at that time was to try to convince readers that all of us have a role to play as leaders. However, the more I have researched the topic of leadership and the more I read about it and spoke with staff and organizations about it, the more I came to appreciate something so simple and yet so profound. Work is important, but work is only a part of the totality of our lives, and work can be enjoyable. Yes, we can even have fun there. If I achieve nothing else in my life, I hope to be able to contribute, through this book and my everyday efforts, to the creation of a work life where it is okay to be happy. A workplace where staff aren't regularly looking over their shoulders, fearful of colleagues, bosses, and others. A workplace where one does not put work ahead of family, friends, personal health, and one's own spiritual well-being. Perhaps it is time to quit our jobs and start to enjoy our work. Effective leadership is part of how we achieve that.
However, despite our best efforts as leaders, there are challenges to achieving a healthy, fun workplace. In his book, Coming to Our Senses: Reclaiming the Dignity of Organization Life, Ron Knowles noted, "Organization life is plagued with serious contradictions. They are well known to anyone who spends time in businesses, government departments, or not-for-profit agencies ... The biggest contradiction is the contrast between the fast-moving, customer centered, efficient organizations, which have emerged from the recent era of radical transformation and the human angst and despair which seem almost universal in those same organizations." (2) Examples of these contradictions are found everywhere and in far too many organizations:
• When we recruit new staff, we tell them how great we are. We tell them we are team oriented, progressive, supportive, and concerned about them as individuals. When they leave, they tell us at exit interviews how demoralized they were, how we didn't care about developing them, how negative the environment was, and how poor our management practices have been. While this isn't the universal experience, it is more prevalent than we care to admit.
• We crave outstanding leadership but so often practise something totally different.
•We know how to resolve conflicts through third-party interventions, but we have no idea how to make staff "play nice in the sandbox" together, promote effective conflict resolution, or otherwise manage conflict in a positive, proactive, and productive fashion.
• We talk about our people and note how important they are in our missions, visions, and values, but how often do we expect them to be available to us on a 24/7 basis (especially those who are not paid for overtime)? Why do many managers insist on playing favourites? Why do we so often fail to ask for or respect the opinions of our staff? Why do we refuse to take advantage of their collective wisdom?
• We know change is inevitable, and we know that the rate of change is ever increasing. And yet we continue to resist it in so many ways.
• We preach integrity, but a "what's in it for me?" attitude often prevails.
• We continue, as leaders, to demand that staff serve us, when we in fact need to learn to serve them. We need to make them better leaders in their own right.
• We say that we are here to serve and care for the customer but too often we seem to be only concerned that they pay the bill.
By the way, in case you think I forgot them, I believe that parents know a thing or two about over-promising and under-delivering, about conflict management, about working overtime, change management, integrity, listening to their charges, etc. We just never think of them that way.
My point is that this sort of thing happens far too often and in this changing world we work in, inconsistencies between messages given to potential staff and the reality of our workplaces cannot continue to be so diametrically opposed. We are entering a period of intense competition for limited human resources. We all want to proclaim ourselves as "employers of choice," but the only way we can wear that label with pride is by walking the talk, and that starts with understanding what a good leader is and how leadership impacts the corporate culture and management of the employees.
Words Leaders Live By
While I encourage managers to be more than a person simply employed to plan, organize, implement, delegate, control, and measure, I likewise beseech everyone to do their part to make things better. I have three words written on the white board in my office: attitude, gratitude, action. These are three words that I try to remember in my work life and home life. They are words that guide me as a husband, father, manager, at home, at work, and in the community. They are also words that all people and all leaders (and, after all, we are all leaders) can live by.
It is our collective attitude that determines whether or not we have fun at work, or for that matter at home. So many of us fall into the trap of bemoaning how hard we have to work, how little we are appreciated, how we don't have enough of anything—money, power, supplies, equipment, staff, etc. However, it is our attitude that makes our work valuable, valued, memorable, a source of pride, and a positive contribution to the betterment of the workplace and society.
Our approach to work and our attitude toward life can make a huge difference. As a young man, I spent many hours fishing with my father. Often hours would go by without so much as a nibble or meaningful action of any kind. However, what was more meaningful to me were the chats we had about life, careers, and our contribution to society. One of his key messages was always that a person's vocation was not nearly as important as his approach, his enthusiasm, and his dedication to his chosen profession. He would say to me, "I don't give a damn what you choose to be, but if you choose to be a garbage man, just make sure you're the best garbage man who ever walked the face of the earth."
Perhaps Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a bit more eloquent when he said, "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, `Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'" That is what attitude is all about. Whether you choose to be a stay-at-home mom, a company president, or the organizational receptionist, be the best you can possibly be.
We can complain about how nasty others are to us. We can claim that schedules aren't fair. We can protest that our work is no fun, that we get no respect, or dozens of other workplace concerns. However, responsibility always lies with each and every one of us and in our attitude toward life and work. Many writers have spoken about attitude when it comes to work, and have noted the importance of being passionate about your work. It's not just a job.
In addition to attitude is the need for a daily reflection on gratitude. We have so much to be thankful for, and yet so many of us don't appreciate the good things we have, always desiring more and better. We need to be thankful for our friends and families, who are so often there to share with us and support us. Most of us enjoy good health but lack the wisdom to truly appreciate its value. A wise man once told me, "I used to complain about my slippers until I met a man with no feet."
We have so much to be thankful for. We are all part of many different teams. Those teams may be our families, work teams, leadership teams, community teams, boards, unions, or parks associations. Frankly, if we do not appreciate every member of our team and fail to realize how important each and every member is, we become that much less effective. Andrew Carnegie said, "No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it." We have so much to be thankful for.
Finally, I believe in action. There is an old adage that says the smallest of actions is better than the greatest of intentions. We can take steps to make our personal lives and our workplaces better, but we have to take action. Talk is cheap, as my father used to tell me. Fear is usually the cause of inaction: fear of failure, fear of success and how it may raise the bar for us, fear of criticism, fear of the unknown, fear of simply taking the first step in a journey of a thousand miles. But each one of us, no matter what our role, can make things happen.
In the movie The Fellowship of the Ring (the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), there is a scene where Frodo Baggins tells the elf queen, Galadriel, that he no longer wants the role of being a ring bearer, as it is too much of burden and he is "only a hobbit." However, she explains to him simply that, "Even the smallest person could change the course of the future." I regularly encourage all leaders (and we are all leaders) to work diligently every day to make someone's life a little bit better. It seems simple enough, but it does require some effort.
As my good friend Dan Carter said in his book Right Time Now, "Remember the true gift of life is making an impact on someone else's life because we have been created at this time and at this moment to help ... There is no need to wait for someone else—it is the right time now. If we act together, we'll not only make our communities a better place, but we will truly find our assignment in life."(3) At the end of each day, we should take a few minutes to reflect on how we have helped to make someone's life a bit better, how we have made our organizations better, or how our sons and daughters have grown because of our efforts. That is true leadership.
Leadership Themes
In addition to gratitude, attitude, and action, other themes weave their way through every other aspect of leadership. Those themes are communication, relationships, discipline, and education.
Communication
I was once told by a former hospital CEO that the two most difficult jobs in any organization are HR and communications. He told me that HR is difficult only because so many people sincerely believe that they understand all there is to know about people. As for communications, everybody claims to know how to communicate. Obviously, he was being a tad facetious; he did not necessarily believe that these two jobs were literally the most difficult. However, effective communication was one of the key leadership principles that I promoted in Common Sense Leadership. In fact, the 7 Key Skills that I spoke of then are worth repeating now.
1. Listen carefully to what others tell you. The good Lord gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we spoke.
2. Maintain an open-door policy. It conveys the impression that you are open to a free exchange of information and the sharing of new ideas.
3. Be approachable and available. Leaving the door open is no good if folks are afraid to enter.
4. Promote face-to-face communication. Make it comfortable. Don't rely on texting. Do coffee, breakfast, or lunch. The personal touch is worth a fortune.
5. Remember the importance of nonverbal aspects of communication. Does your body language tell others things that your words do not?
6. Always be candid in your communication. Leave politics to politicians. No need to be brutally frank—just open and honest.
7. Be consistent, not up one day and down the next. Remain calm under fire and remember, the stars only come out at night. People need you when things are darkest. Anybody can lead when things are going well.
Effective communication cuts through every aspect of leadership covered by this book. It contributes positively to our culture, allows us to have fun, shows respect, resolves conflict, and so on. Don't ever underestimate the power and importance of good communication skills.
Relationships
We achieve very little in life by ourselves. There are other members of our teams, those whom we lead, people we work with, customers to consider, and myriad other stakeholders who make our world go 'round. I can think of no better way to be successful at any level of any organization, in the community or at home, than to build a network of positive, effective relationships. The more people we know, the more networking we do. Assuming they are the right kind of people (as opposed to the kind you find in police lineups), the more help we both ask for and offer, the more likely it is that we will all benefit. Remember, a person's wealth is not measured in material possessions but rather by the number of friends and associates whose company he enjoys.
Discipline
The discipline that I refer to here is not the heavy-handed type so often discussed in employee relations or labour relations situations (e.g., warning, suspension, termination). Rather, it is self-discipline so often expected of us in life. It doesn't matter if we need to exercise more, lose weight, stop smoking, go to church, be pleasant with others, or simply instill new leadership habits. All these require discipline. It is my understanding that it takes 21 days to establish a new habit or to break an old one. There are plenty of tips in the following pages to develop meaningful and productive new habits, some of which will require time and energy. Remember that leadership is not easy. It takes hard work, day in and day out. We can't simply decide to make a change one day and that will be it forever more. It takes at least 21 days. But the effort will always be worthwhile, and there is no time like the present to get started. I have already referenced Dan Carter, and I will now add a comment by Mother Teresa, who said, "Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Quit Your Job, Enjoy Your Workby Garth S. Johns Copyright © 2012 by Garth S. Johns. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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