Monday, July 18, 2011

E-mail as a Leadership Task


When teaching about leadership, I remind participants that whether they realize it or not, their colleagues are watching them and paying attention to their behaviors. My usual examples are about whether leaders’ behaviors and actions are in sync. If you say people are important, do you actions show that people are important? There are numerous examples, but today I want to suggest that leaders need to pay attention to their e-mails. Think for a minute - what messages do you receive from the e-mails sent by the people in leadership in your organization; what messages do you send through your e-mails? I don’t mean in the text, I mean from the messages themselves, the number and the time they are sent.

Yes, it is important for a leader to inform others. In fact, one of the attributes of an effective leader is a willingness to share information rather than hoard it. Yet, if leaders don’t pay attention to the way they send e-mails, the information sharing may be more stressful than helpful. Leaders who send e-mails constantly, all weekend, at all hours of the day and night may think they are keeping staff informed, but in reality they are sending messages about expectations concerning the way to work in their organization. Often this ‘e-mail message’ is in direct contraction to stated messages about healthy work/life balance. Of course staff are quick to pick up on that message. A message of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ is never going to be believed by staff members.

As a leader in a large organization, I work the hours needed to get the job done, but I also practice creating a balanced life and I encourage that mix for the people I work with. As a result, once I get home, I glance at e-mail occasionally, but unless there is an emergency, I don’t respond until the next day. I rarely send an e-mail on the weekend or after traditional work hours unless there is a specific need.

E-mail management is a challenge for all of us in many ways. I just recently learned the term ‘e-mail bankruptcy’ though it has been around for a while. In case you don’t know it, people declare e-mail bankruptcy when they have gotten so far behind in their e-mails that they can never catch up – so they delete them all! (Does the very idea give you hives or a sense of relief? Both responses make sense to me.) What would happen if we changed our thoughts about e-mails from a management question to a leadership question? Thinking about the messages we send beyond the text by paying attention to the timing of our e-mails and the number of the e-mails is a leadership task. Take a moment to look at your Sent Mail and pay attention to details. Remember staff members pay attention to what their leaders do. How well are your words and actions matching? Are your e-mails sending the message you intend? Something to think about….

Best wishes,

Gage

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Mission and Creativity

This past week I interacted with two very different organizations, an airline and a college, but they had something in common – a strong sense of mission. The airline was Southwest Airlines, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The Southwest mission says the airline is dedicated to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and Company Spirit. Nowhere in that statement does it list the things needed to run an airline or even fly an airplane, but it sets a very clear tone. It also sets the mark for customer service and employee behavior. That mark leads to phenomenal stories of staff going above and beyond to help customers. That mark leaves Southwest with one of the best safety records in the industry even though safety is never mentioned in the mission statement. Neither are turnaround time, timely-departures, etc., all of which are ways in which Southwest excels.

I traveled on Southwest to work with the staff at a college in the south. I interviewed 16 people and read the survey results from about 40. In this economic environment, this small college is facing financial challenges severe enough that the division I was working with has cut 10 positions in the last year or so, resulting in several people working the equivalent of 2 or more jobs. And yet, while people ,of course, identified staffing as an area of concern, no one was complaining about it. One might expect the morale to be low, and people certainly are feeling anxiety, but pride was evident as they talked about their work and their college. I believe this was due to everyone having a clear sense of the mission. When I asked what should never be changed, no one repeated the mission word for word, but all of them talked about the same values and ideals – they have clarity and congruence in mission.

What I found interesting about these two organizations is the impact of this mission clarity on individual and organizational behavior. A well thought-out mission statement defines the boundaries for decision-making and program-development: in other words, a well-understood mission opens the possibility for creativity by the members of the organization. The amazing customer service stories from Southwest are possible because the employees understand the mission and know they not only have organizational space to be creative, they are encouraged to find the best way to make things right. In this college I visited, people know that times are tight, but they know what is important in this organization and within those boundaries they are being wonderfully creative in finding ways to create programs and solve problems that support the college’s purpose.

If you find yourself wondering why your organization isn’t more creative, perhaps it’s worth taking a step back to look at the mission. Do people understand it? Do organizational policy and decision making follow the mission? People who know they are in sync with the organizational mission will feel more comfortable trying new ideas in part because there is less risk that they will move outside the organizational tolerances. Supervisors will be more comfortable with staff initiative because they are confident people understand the necessary boundaries. What will members of your organization say if they were asked about their mission? I suspect those answers will tell you something important about organizational creativity.

Best wishes,

Gage