Cohesion Culture

Proven Principles to Retain Your Top Talent

Dr. Troy Hall

• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781633939301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

“When a company prioritizes its culture, individual growth and employee retention, the organization itself can achieve sustainable growth. Troy nails it!” —Rick Miller, Former President, AT&T Global Services, and Author of Being Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title, www.beingchief.com

DID YOU KNOW that 63% of employees are actively searching for a new position? In today’s war for talent, the focus should be on talent retention, not just talent attraction. C-Suite Executives, Company Founders, and Sr. HR Leaders need to develop an organizational culture where employees want to belong. Dr. Troy Hall helps you create a “Best Places To Work” environment, where your employees love to work, and stay to work.

Chapter 1

How We Inspire Others to Do Great Things

“A boss has the title; a leader has the people.”

—Simon Sinek, NY Times best-selling author, motivational speaker, and organizational consultant

KEY CONCEPTS:

1.1 Leader: A leader is someone who motivates, influences, and enables other to do something they otherwise couldn’t do on their own.

1.2 Leadership attributes: Seven distinct attributes a leader exhibits to foster a culture of cohesion.

1.3 Mindset: To lead a Cohesion Culture, leaders must be aware of how they react, engage, and measure market influences, business opportunities, and complacency.

1.4 Influence thinking: This skill combines thoughts and mindset with outside counsel to produce a result.

1.5 Transformative principles: Such mindfulness is to embrace and celebrate the leader’s potential for change.

As you read through Chapters 1 and 2, keep in mind that there are three important concepts that successful leaders of Cohesion Cultures overlay and integrate into all of their daily actions. First, the leader must adopt the seven attributes of an effective leader, understand how influence thinking impacts his behaviors, and practice transformative principles. Once the leader commits and follows this practical leadership advice, he is ready to begin shaping a culture of cohesion with the sole purpose of retaining talent and helping employees become their best selves.

In spite of the extraordinary advances in the last hundred years, the way leaders lead continues to matter. While collectively we are now able to engage and influence one another differently and on grander scales and on countless platforms, what it means to treat one another with respect and reverence hasn’t changed, and how to be our own good stewards hasn’t changed either.

We see this again and again in the classic examples of American leadership: our presidents. Historian David McCullough, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography Truman, shared in a 2008 Harvard Business Review interview that

Truman was no great charmer, but he was admirable and effective in many ways. He understood human nature. He had great common sense, and one of the lessons of history is that common sense isn’t common. He wasn’t afraid to have people around him who were more accomplished than he. . . . [He] surrounded himself with people who were better educated, taller, handsomer, more cultivated, and accustomed to high-powered company, but that didn’t bother him. He knew who he was. He was grounded, as the Quakers would say.

McCullough quoted Truman as saying:

“Look after your men” means take care of your employees. Take a genuine interest in them. Be empathetic. Treat them well. I’m appalled when I’m taken to see a factory and it’s clear that the people running it have seldom if ever walked among the men and women who work there.

Another US president whose leadership I admire is Ronald Reagan. His decisive leadership drew from his strong communication skills and relational abilities. He did what he said; no one ever had to read between the lines. He was one to admit mistakes, and he never took himself too seriously. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described him thusly: “While adhering to his convictions, Reagan was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiation and compromise.”

While I suspect it came naturally to him, Reagan mastered what is known as emotional intelligence (EQ), which, as I define it, is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.

EQ dates back to a 1964 paper authored by Michael Beldoch, but the construct was made popular by a 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. In it, author Daniel Goleman suggests that emotional intelligence is what separates good leaders from great ones. In a later book titled Working with Emotional Intelligence, Goleman offers a solid example of how Reagan’s stellar emotional intelligence conclusively swayed how Americans voted in the 1984 presidential election and how EQ trumps IQ.

During his presidency Ronald Reagan was known as “the Great Communicator.” A professional actor, the emotional power of Reagan’s charisma was shown in a study of how his facial expressions affected those of his listeners during an election debate with his opponent, Walter Mondale. When Reagan smiled, people who watched him—even on videotape—tended to smile too; when he frowned, so did viewers.

Think about this. As leaders, if those we lead don’t mirror or model our behavior, at the very least they are guided in their reaction and their engagement. At its core, EQ is an ability to be aware of one’s emotions and those of others. Much of the power to inspire others to accomplish great things comes down to compassion and responsiveness. This approach suspends judgment. Instead, it focuses on behavior. How a leader walks into the office first thing in the morning has the potential to set the mood for the rest of the day—as does whether she walks among those she leads. There are no ivory towers in a Cohesion Culture.

In a January 25, 2019, article in Forbes, “The Top Four Choices of Emotionally Intelligent Leaders,” Chris Pearse wrote, “Emotionally intelligent leaders tend to speak less and listen more . . . or as Lao Tzu put it: ‘A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.’” EQ breeds trust, and when leaders trust their employees, they build openness and credibility.

Currently there’s no validated test or scale for emotional intelligence as there is for general intelligence, but keep in mind that EQ can be honed. Some of us, like the Gipper, may have been born with a high EQ, but all of us have the ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. In a seminal 2004 Harvard Business Review article entitled “What Makes a Leader,” Goleman studied 188 companies. His conclusion: “[The] higher up one climbs in the corporate world, the more important emotional intelligence is to effective leadership.”

Beyond having a knack at EQ, my mother—known to family and close friends as Fanny—one of the greatest leaders of the twenty-first century, had a superhuman ability to consider other people’s perspectives and experiences. She taught me how to “excel at patience,” especially when it came to anyone who was different from me. She taught me never to dismiss anyone. She always said, “If you wait, they’ll show you.” As Harper Lee declared in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Of the lessons my mother taught me, I remember two most vividly:

1. If you speak words of affirmation, you will never have to worry about being misquoted.
2. If you have to tear someone else down to build yourself up, you aren’t that good to begin with.

Good leadership involves transparency. Although I have made considerable strides in leadership, there were times when I failed miserably at following the advice of my trusted counsel.

In one of my not-so-shining moments when I failed to live up to my mother’s advice, my son announced over breakfast that his ideal car was a souped-up Camaro. He described it in detail. I was driven—pun intended—to quash his dream. It wasn’t until Vickie, my high school sweetheart and wife of forty-plus years, spoke to me later that afternoon that I realized what I had done. She too pointed out the obvious, but first she asked, “What happened?” Proudly, I told her how I had set the record straight. Next, she asked, “How many more years will it be before he drives?” I answered, “He’s twelve, so maybe three and a half, maybe four years.” Her response: “Exactly.”

My son’s proposition was absurdly unrealistic, and I became so consumed with pointing out the obvious that I failed to participate in what might very well have been his first aspirational vision that was bigger than himself. Even now, as I write this, I could kick myself.

When leaders respond in ways that fail to serve others, they miss the point. As my son’s leader, in moments where he spit-balls an aspiration, my job isn’t to judge or be dismissive; it’s to listen. It’s a little like when small kids scrape their knees. It’s best that the caregiver on hand remains calm. It helps a child figure out how to react, how to take it all in and move forward. How leaders cope directly affects those they lead.

VALUES THAT ENCOURAGE COHESION

Simple things are sometimes the hardest to see, and there are those among us who, with swanlike finesse, bring light—even life—to dense, distant, and complex concepts. So, even though the swan is paddling madly, her body moves smoothly across the water.

When we’re thrust into leadership roles, especially when we’re young, we’re often consumed with a self-imposed pressure to render decisions with perfect outcomes. We find ourselves in the position to be know-it-alls. But instead, what if you focused on being the Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Learn-It-All?

As we wade further into what it means to be a leader who has the ability to inspire her employees, we see that objectivity, evenhandedness, and letting go of arrogance is the best way to serve others. That said, before leaders focus on the bigger picture of serving others, they must first know themselves. They must become increasingly self-aware. They should know their trigger points, what they believe in, and how they want to act. Only in acting in a way that is true to their individuality will they tap into the entirety of their strength as leaders....