Hello. I’m Michael Burchell and I am an author, speaker and business advisor on workplace issues. Since we invest more than 30% of our time and energy into our work I am most interested in helping organizations create and sustain great workplaces. On this website, you will find out more information about my life’s work, and invite you to comment on my blog, follow me on Twitter, or contact me. Thank you for coming by my virtual home and take good care.Consider this. Over the next decade, 40 million people will enter the workforce, about 25 million will leave the workforce, and 109 million will remain. Of the 40 million that enter the workforce in the US, nearly half of the additional workers will come from the 55-and-older category, while about one in five will come from the youth labor force.
Projections suggest that the Hispanic and Asian shares of the population will rise from 14 percent in 1995 to 19 percent in 2020, and Latinos now make up the majority of public school students in California.
Today, more than half of US workers spend more than two days a week working outside of the office. 65% of women in senior management positions have children, and keep their job. And this is just in the US. And all of these dynamics impact how your organization addresses issues of diversity and inclusion.
As Dr. Robin and I listened to how best companies were evolving to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s workplace, we noticed that the discussion about diversity and inclusion had moved decisively away from a “numbers approach” (just ensuring that there is ‘representation’) and beyond a “programs approach” which advanced some training or a website or an affinity group to a real clear focus on making diversity and inclusion a part of the culture – a clear aspect of how a company leverages differences in order to meet its business goals and objectives.
As testament to this, many of the employees we spoke with in our focus groups talked not just about being included but being valued. One woman of color I spoke with shared how there were fewer “micro-inequities” in her current (best company) employer than in any other organization she had worked in previously. This company was working to drive out bias and unearned privilege AND to bring in creativity and difference and experience.
In essence, the old paradigm was the metaphor of a “boundary”. Employees and businesses had less permeable boundaries with little need to move beyond their comfort zones in order to grow. Their entire supply chain, employee base and customer base were in a ten mile radius. No longer.
Today, the idea of a “boundary-less organization” has more currency. Indeed, one might think of the new paradigm as a “borderland” – a multicultural workplace where the organization and its workers need to inhabit that space between borders. It requires a mind-shift. Managers and employees need to be flexible and adaptive, responsive to the changes in the external environment and be able to anticipate how those changes will impact work relationships and work processes.
Ernst & Young, number 77 on this year’s Fortunelist, is a good example of how companies are addressing this evolving trend. Jim Turley, Global Chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young, has offered “The knee-jerk reaction is to relegate diversity to the realm of human resources, associated with fair hiring practices and good corporate citizenship. But any company that clings to that old-fashioned notion of diversity risks limiting its creative potential and ultimately losing its competitive edge. In a globalized world, diversity is much more than just a question of race or gender. It is a spectrum of attributes, including culture, generation, educational background, skills, personality, education, and life experiences. And research shows that capitalizing on these differences is a powerful factor in encouraging innovation.”
And Ernst & Young is thinking broadly about how to span boundaries and borderlands. Recently, Ernst & Young released a new report at the World Economic Forum is Davos, Switzerland entitled The new global mindset: driving innovation through diverse perspectives. In it, they identify four principles that leaders must consider in this new era, and E&Y is actively changing their own culture through the application of new experiential learning opportunities that provide an opportunity for employees to sidle up to diverse people and perspectives and take on this new global mindset.
So, as demographic changes in the US challenge how businesses recruit, hire, train, develop, and manage their workforces AND how geo-political, demographic and economic issues impacts how we think about diversity and proactively respond to it, it seems clear that companies will need to put the management of “boundaries and borderlands” at the top of their agenda. Leaders at best companies have already jumped into the center of this evolving trend.
Recently, I was asked the question “what should leaders be tracking this year?” The question was inspired by an article on the “Quantified Self” movement – where people use technology to track self logs. Practitioners of “life logging” sometimes use paper journals, while others use their smart phones, and some wear “logging” devices such as pedometers or cameras or the like to capture data about their activities.
“What”, I pondered, “should a CEO or other executive keep constant track of?” All of the CEOs I have worked with or know seem to be quite busy and are bombarded with data. Indeed, a colleague of mine observed that given the mountain of data most leaders have to contend with, the most successful leaders tend to focus on the vital few things (the 20%) that impact their business the most (the 80%). Indeed, in the best companies, leaders tend to be very focused on what data they track and how that data tracks with other important business and people outcomes. Genentech, for example, tracks the number of papers that their researchers publish on a yearly basis. It is one of the reasons why this company is able to attract so many top scientists – because their culture is somewhere between an academic and a corporate culture (and it comprises the best of both).
There is strong evidence that leaders, in general, have much work to do when it comes to developing trust with employees, customers and other stakeholders. Certainly, as the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer suggests, trust in CEOs as credible sources of information remains low, behind industry analysts and NGO representatives. One can make the case that one of the main causes of the recent economic recession is due to a lack of trust in the marketplace. And firms that have taken a “slash and burn” mentality to their people investments just so that executives continue to receive large bonuses and shareholders can make an extra dime have been pummeled in the media. And so it would seem that CEOs have an uphill climb to establish or enhance their credibility.
As my co-author, Jennifer Robin, is fond of saying, ‘you can’t talk your way out of a situation you behaved your way into.’ You have to behave differently and create a new habit to obtain a different result. And her voice echoed in my head as I considered this question of what leaders should be tracking. It became clear that leaders need to be tracking trust – now more than ever. There are many ways to track certain behaviors that impact the development of trusting relationships with employees, and focusing on certain behaviors can help build your own leadership habits. Some examples include:
- Keeping track of the number of times you spend the “extra 60 seconds” with employees in order to get to know them better;
- The number of times you stop by their office to check in with them;
- The number of genuine corridor “hellos”;
- Keeping a commitments log wherein your actually log your promises to people, so that you can keep them;
- Total time invested in people related matters each day;
- Number of genuine thank you notes or phone calls you make to congratulate someone on a job well done;
- Number of hours spent mentoring, coaching, questioning, and supporting people in terms of their development.
In all of these ways, leaders can begin to track key behaviors that directly impact the development of trusting relationships with employees. Keeping a log or tracking such behaviors is a great way to keep this work top of mind and form new habits. What other trust behaviors would you recommend leaders keep track of?
Clients sometimes ask me why they should focus on trust as a business imperative. Trust, after all, just seems, well, “squishy” and vague like ‘satisfaction’. “Come on now, focusing on trust really doesn’t help us, does it?” they ask, in an incredulous tone. The truth of the matter, however, is that trust is very concrete and real. It is a skill that can be learned. And the impact of high trust or low trust in an organization is quite tangible with real-world consequences.
As a manager, think of someone you trust at work. Chances are quite good that communication between you is easy, honest and open. You may engage with them more often, and discuss new ideas and innovations – trusting that you will get an honest assessment in return. Decision making is quicker and there are less hidden agendas. Because you trust this person, you are likely to delegate more responsibility to them, and give them the room to take the project and run with it. The more the relationship develops, the more the trust. The more trust, the greater the return.
Now, consider someone whom you do not trust. Communication takes more time, and has to be carefully measured. The shorthand you use with the people you trust isn’t there. Decision making can be a pain. And when you see this person in the hallway, you might think “gosh, I hope I don’t have to engage too much with this person”. Moreover, if you manage this person, you delegate less. And you feel you have to follow-up with them constantly. In fact, you probably have to hire more people because somehow the work you don’t delegate to this person has to be done by someone, so you have a handful of people doing this work. Clearly a case of diminishing returns.
If both of these people are on the same team and earn roughly the same salary, the different return on your investment is quite evident (even if the trusted person earns slightly more, there is a limit because salaries are usually banded). So, the lack of trust is costing your organization money.
This is at the micro level – between you and people you work with. And if you consider the implications of this line of thinking when you expand it to consider your entire organization, it becomes quite clear that trust really does help a business become more successful. A good business example of this, writ large, is the purchase of McLane Distribution Company by Berkshire Hathaway some years ago. Following a two hour meeting, the $23 billion dollar acquisition was finalized in under a month. Both companies were public and therefore their records could be scrutinized by the public. Warren Buffet said, “I trusted Wal-Mart (who owned McLane), I trusted the people I worked with. I knew everything would be in exactly the order they said it would be and it was. We did no due diligence.” They saved a lot of time and money because of trust.
You can even extend this thinking further, to institutions such as “business”, “government” and so on. Lack of trust in the financial markets recently resulted in the biggest recession since the Great Depression. And lack of trust between banks and businesses and consumers is making our recovery slow and painful. So, in a future blog, I’ll address how trust is actually a concrete leadership skill. But for now, it’s important to position the role of trust in your organization rightly: trust matters.
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