LIVE THE SHARED VALUES
Leaders are their organizations’ ambassadors of shared values. Their mission is to represent the values and standards to the rest of the world, and it’s their solemn duty to serve the values to the best of their ability. People watch your every action, and they’re trying to determine if you’re serious about what you say. You need to be con- scious about the choices you make and the actions you take, because other people use these signals to determine whether you’re doing what you say.
The power of the leader’s personal example can’t be stressed enough. Researchers Tal Yaffe of Ben-Gurion University and Ronit Kark of Bar-Ilan University have found that leaders who model the behaviors of a “good organizational citizen”—that is, who persist in attaining organizational goals, promote the organization to outsiders and insiders, and initiate constructive change in the workplace—are much more likely to have direct reports who exhibit the same behav- iors than those leaders who don’t set that kind of example. This effect is strongest when the leader is most visible to direct reports and is
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G E considered by them to be a worthy role model.2 Being credible and
close to your constituents pays off. Cornell University professor Tony Simons offers even more
telling evidence of this. In his research on behavioral integrity, he found that organizations “where employees strongly believed [that] their managers followed through on promises and demonstrated the values they preached were substantially more profitable than those whose managers scored average or lower [on follow-through].”3 In other words, if you want to get better results, make sure you practice what you preach. What you do speaks more loudly than what you say.
Some of the most significant signal-sending actions have to do with how leaders spend their time and what they pay attention to, the language (words and phrases) they use, how they address critical incidents, and their openness to feedback.4 Each of these actions gives you a chance to make visible and tangible your personal commitment to a shared way of being. Each affords you the chance to show where you stand on matters of principle. Simple though they may appear, you should remember that sometimes the greatest distance you have to travel is the distance from your mouth to your feet.
Spend Your Time and Attention Wisely
How you spend your time is the single clearest indicator of what’s important to you. Constituents use this metric to judge whether you measure up to espoused standards. Visibly spending time on what’s important shows that you’re putting your money where your mouth is. Whatever your values are, they have to show up on your calendar and on meeting agendas for people to believe that those values are significant. Take a look at your daily planner. What’s the connection
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between how you schedule your time and what you say are your key values? Take a look at your agendas. When you’re in meetings, what do you spend most of the time discussing?
If you value service to others, for example, and say that store operators are important, you should be meeting with them at their locations. If you say that you’re focused on customers (or clients, patients, students, voters, or parishioners), then you should be spending your time where they spend theirs. If improving sales performance is critical, then you need to meet with customers and show up at sales meetings. If innovation is essential, you should be visiting the labs or participating in online open source discus- sions. If global diversity is a shared value, then you’ve got to be out in the field and around the world. Being “there” says more about what you value than any email message, tweet, or video can ever do.
And you don’t have to be in a managerial position to set a lead- ership example. Informal peer leaders do it too. For instance, Mark Brunello, a sales representative for XO Communications for more than twelve years, in an industry where high turnover is the norm, has been described by his colleagues as “credibility personified.”5 One colleague speaks not only to Mark’s behavior but to its consistency:
Having him as a model to observe on a daily basis is incredibly inspirational. Whether Mark realizes it or not, his consistent behavior is a strong leadership model. We look up to him and respect him because he puts in the hours necessary to be successful. He doesn’t take any liberties with the freedom that some salespeople take when managing their own schedules. He seeks out technical training that is above and beyond that required for a typical sales representative. In this way, he can
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G E answer client questions that a competitor’s sales rep may not
be able to, and he differentiates himself from the rest of the marketplace. Because he pays attention to internal systems and processes, he is not only well-equipped to navigate through service delivery or account problems but when he does call someone for help, his requests get sent to the top of the list because people know they are real and he’s not just being lazy.
The choices that leaders make about where they spend their time and attention, as Mark demonstrates, have a tremendous influence on those around them. The behaviors and actions of leaders send clear messages to others about what’s important and what’s merely lip service.
Vivien Moses, project manager at Adobe Systems, knows this all too well. A new product launch was not going as smoothly as hoped for, and the team, based in China and India, told him that things could be improved if they could get faster responses to their questions. Every morning, it was common to make calls from the United States to the Asia team at 8:00 am Pacific Standard Time. But that meant that the team members in Asia often had to dial into the conference call from home because it was very late at night there. Vivien decided to change this practice and started taking calls during his nights and early mornings: “I thought that I should hold night- time calls myself, to show to the team that I am willing to take calls in the night just like they do. This cut down on the time to address issues, but most importantly it set an example to the team that I am willing to put in the extra effort to finish the task ahead.” Vivien understood the importance of the Golden Rule of Leadership: ask others to do only what you are willing to do yourself. By changing how he used his time, he showed others that he was serious about his dedication to the group and the task.
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Watch Your Language
Try talking about an organization for a day without using the words employee, manager, boss, supervisor, subordinate, or hierarchy. You may find this exercise nearly impossible unless you’ve been part of orga- nizations that use other terms—such as associates, crew, cast members, team members, partners, or even constituents. Certain words have come to be accepted as the reality of organizational life. Those words can easily trap people into a particular way of thinking about roles and relationships.6 Exemplary leaders understand this and are atten- tive to language. They know the power of words. Words don’t just give voice to one’s own mindset and beliefs; they also evoke images of what people hope to create with others and how they expect people to behave. The words people choose to use are metaphors for concepts that define attitudes, behaviors, structures, and systems. Your words can have a powerful effect on how your constituents see their world, and you should choose them intentionally and carefully.
One company that clearly understands how to consciously use a different vocabulary to reflect its unique set of values is DaVita, the largest independent provider of dialysis services in the United States for patients suffering from chronic kidney failure. The special language begins with the choice of the company name, as selected by DaVita teammates (employees). DaVita is definitely a name that fits the nature of their work. Roughly translated from the Italian, the phrase means “he or she gives life.” Every day in every clinic, DaVitans—that’s what they call themselves—work hard to give life to those suffering from renal disease.
At DaVita, memorable catchphrases infuse the daily conversa- tion and reinforce the company’s values and management practices. The Three Musketeers maxim “One for all, and all for one,” for example, permeates the culture of the company and reinforces the
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G E idea that everyone in DaVita is in it together, looking out for each
other. Corporate headquarters is called Casa DaVita (house of DaVita). Employees are all “teammates”—be prepared to put a buck in a glass on the meeting table if you should ever use the “E word.” The company is called the Village, and DaVita’s CEO, Kent Thiry, is its mayor, signaling that DaVita is really like the small town in Wisconsin where Kent grew up. Teammates become “citizens” of the Village when they are willing to “cross the bridge” and make a public commitment to the community. Every member of the senior leader- ship crossed the bridge as part of his or her symbolic rite of passage into those roles. The company’s long-standing emphasis on execu- tion and operational excellence is embodied in the slogan “GSD” (get stuff done); the highest compliment to pay a teammate is to say that he or she is “good at GSD.”7 “At a quick glance,” says Javier Rodriguez, DaVita’s senior vice president,
our language can appear to be a play on words—semantics. Quite the opposite. The words we use, while simple in nature, are packed with meaning. They create imagery and communicate history, traditions, and beliefs. Since the language is so pervasive in the organization, we get the added benefit of it serving as cultural alignment and an accountability “acid test” for behaviors— as in human medicine, an organ will reject inconsistent words and actions. In addition, our vernacular serves as a filter for recruiting. That is to say, candidates feel affiliation and alignment to our words or find them “odd” if not consistent with their beliefs.
Paying attention to the way you use language isn’t one of those ideas-of-the-month that’s the trendy thing to do. Researchers have documented the power of language in shaping thoughts and actions. Just a few words from someone can make the difference in the beliefs
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that people articulate. For example, at an East Coast university where there was a publicized incident of hate mail’s being sent to an African American student, researchers randomly stopped students walking across campus and asked them what they thought of the occurrence. Before the subject could respond, however, a confederate of the researchers would come up and answer. One response was something like, “Well, he must have done something to deserve it.” As you might expect, the subject’s response was more often than not just like the confederate’s. Then the researchers would stop another student and ask the same question. This time the confederate gave an alternative response that was something like, “There’s no place for that kind of behavior on our campus.” The subject’s response again replicated the confederate’s.8
This study dramatically illustrates how potent language is in influencing people’s responses to what’s going on around them. Language helps build the frame around people’s views of the world, and it’s essential for leaders to be mindful of their choice of words. If you want people to act like citizens of a village, you have to talk about them that way, not as subordinates in a hierarchy. If you want people to appreciate the rich diversity in their organizations, you have to use language that’s inclusive. If you want people to be inno- vative, you have to use words that spark exploration, discovery, and invention. The expression “Watch your language” has come a long way from the days when your teacher scolded you in school for the use of an inappropriate word. It’s now about setting an example for others, demonstrating how they need to think and act.