Chapter 23
Competing with Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg makes being a leader difficult. He created a platform where everyone looks amazing all the time. And he created a company where no one seemingly has to work. Everyone sits in beanbag chairs, wears pajamas to work, takes as many vacation days as needed, and plays ping pong all day long. It's tough competing with Zuckerberg. But you must.
Heavy lifting used to be just that. Our economy once relied much more on physical labor than it does today.
Today, your heavy lifting is about competing for the time and attention of your people when there is always something better, newer, and shinier out there. One example is the chronic issue of employee engagement and how it's our job as leaders to inspire people. If we don't, they'll drag down the organization or simply leave.
Digital Disconnect
One reason that engagement lags is the shift from physical to mental labor. Typical work today requires significantly more mental focus; most people can't just zone out and do their job. And where focus is required, distraction always threatens to upend it.
But there's an even larger component that leaders, if they're focus-wise, spend their energy cultivating. Few things drive performance like emotional engagement.
As organizations and the economy become increasingly complex, employees are often denied the emotional benefit of seeing their labor bear fruit. People crave the excitement of experiencing a customer using their product or seeing a community helped by their services. But many of us work on only a tiny piece of a large whole. We're several steps removed from witnessing the difference we make.
Technology also distorts our people's perception of human experience, sapping their emotional energy. Social media paints a skewed picture in which friends and family live perfect, pain-free lives. Because that's what people post: a must-try drink at Starbucks, a postcard sunset from a beachside hotel, an anniversary picture in France. I'm sorry, but no Instagram filter is going to make your Lean Cuisine look like a five-star meal. That's all in your head.
As leaders, we're also competing with the image of companies like Facebook and Google. Fun at their offices is apparently compulsory, with employees doing little work between team-building games and giant-beanbag brainstorms. All while making stacks of cash.
Employees have never been exposed to more carefully crafted false narratives romanticizing all the things their jobs aren't letting them do. And they're so overwhelmed that they have less space to process and consider the purpose of their work.
Can we blame them for being emotionally disengaged?
Analog Leadership
To keep our people engaged, we must respond to the digital onslaught with analog leadership. That term—which I learned from a four-star general—refers to actively listening and intentionally connecting face to face. In a world of constant change from digital, what your people need most is to experience you in analog form. During my time working with military leadership, I witnessed firsthand how this general's approach filtered through the 400,000 people he leads as the head of this massive (though often unknown) branch of the military.
Ironically, the top-down hierarchy, often associated with the military, that dominated much of the twentieth-century corporation didn't pay much heed to inspiring employees. “A paycheck is motivation enough,” you can almost hear a boss growl as he chews on a cigar. Maybe it's time for the twentieth-century corporation to learn from twenty-first-century military leadership.
This doesn't work in our digital world. You can't rely on software to expedite this part of your leadership duties. It's like vinyl records. The reason they refuse to go away, despite the scratching, popping, and hissing, is that no one has figured out how to replicate their warmth in a digital format.
Records, unlike MP3s, require cleaning, polishing, and proper storage—all “in-person” tasks. Employees require their own kind of care that must be in person.
Analog leadership is developed through practice, work, and intention. And it's absolutely indispensable to the task of inspiring your people.
A quick word on engagement versus inspiration. We've been using the terms almost interchangeably. Now let's draw a quick distinction, illustrated by Michael Mankins.
An engaged employee is 44 percent more productive than one who's merely satisfied, he tells Fast Company. But an inspired employee is 125 percent more productive.1
The point is that inspiration first requires engagement. And though no one can feel inspired all the time, it's still the goal.
“We've been taught that you're either a General Patton and can inspire others or you're not, but this is not true,” Mankins continues. “Inspirational leadership can be taught.”
So where do we start?
A Direct Link to Motivation
Guiding your people to focus wisdom will automatically increase their engagement because the importance of their work will become clear. They won't be overwhelmed by the urgent and the trivial. But effective focus on a specific task isn't enough.
Emotional engagement springs from connection. As a leader, you have to help your people bridge the gap between what they do and what they care about. I call this a direct link to an effective motivator.
Let's have a look at some potential motivators.
Job Recognition
Most people pursue a field they enjoy, and an effective leader catalyzes their strengths to accomplish productive work. But for employees, true fulfillment comes from seeing, and hearing about, the results of what they do.
Spotlight the growth in your people's work, including challenges they've overcome. Or how a project they just finished helped a colleague sign a client. Put a reminder in your calendar: “Did I make the direct link to an effective motivator this week?”
A pat on the back is even more satisfying when multiplied. Publicly celebrating someone's work guarantees he or she will see it differently.
A Shared Mission
Though “mission statements” can elicit eye rolls, having a purpose at work is the same as having one in life. Sadly, an organization's mission can be lost among layers of leadership, never energizing the people who most need to feel its impact.
Utopian Coffee is converting fields in Colombia from cocaine to coffee, bettering the lives of people in that country and far beyond. Brendon Maxwell, the company's founder, is constantly reminded of the deeper reasons behind what he does.
But he realized his staff in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wasn't seeing the full impact of Utopian's mission. So he created the huge board mentioned in Chapter 21. It connects every step in the project to photos of families whose lives are being changed.
“Sometimes on a Tuesday afternoon, the work you're doing just feels like a job, not a calling to make an impact in the world,” Maxwell told me. The picture board “allows us to be more consistently connected to our bigger goals and properly aligns our cultural leaning from the moment someone walks through our door.”
A True Sense of Community
Except for the dedicated Luddites among us, we all live in some sort of digital community (probably several). But as the need for analog leadership reminds us, the digital is no substitute for face-to-face community.
Neither is the automobile. As we mull the pros and cons of technology, it's easy to forget this pivotal piece of tech.
The beginning of our romance with cars signaled the cleaving of another relationship: work life from personal community. Before then, everything we did—school, commerce, church—was in some way communal. We simply didn't have the mobility to separate the spheres of our life.
What does this mean for you as a leader? It's important to remember that your team may very well lack a community outside of work. The irony of isolation is that we can feel it even when surrounded by others (including colleagues).
A shared mission is key to community, but so is fun and a general commitment to serving communities beyond work. Remember birthdays, and don't forget the cake. Schedule regular happy hours or their equivalent. Band together on a Saturday to clean up a park.
What We Create
Humans are built to work with a sense of purpose. When your folks know the end goal—the reason why their work matters—they are much more motivated to trust the entire process and deliver high-quality contributions—even if they may never see the end result.
I spoke at an aerospace and defense company and got to hear about the game-changing James Webb Space Telescope, which will study the formation of the universe and solar systems that could support life. It's set for launch in 2018.2
The majestic cathedrals of Europe took generations to build, requiring a buy-in from contributors who wouldn't live to see what we cherish today. The telescope offers a good analogy at scale. Far from a “fail-fast” schedule, the project began in 1996 but has kept its people energized with a sense of purpose that drives the work.
It might be a lot to ask an organization to inspire the same kind of focus and enthusiasm for two decades. But it also shouldn't be a galaxy that far, far away.
Fearless Leadership
Speaking of effective motivators, what about you?
Never underestimate the power you have to shape people's perceptions. I've watched countless CEOs and other leaders, for example, circle the wagons after making a mistake. Your people will respect you more if you're authentic with them.
Clearly there's work to do. Consider this sobering indictment: The vast majority of people do not trust the top leader of the company that employs them, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.3
Kim Scott, a CEO coach and former Google executive, says leaders will vary in style, but the best of them all have one thing in common: “radical candor.”4 People will work harder for you if they see your honesty and vulnerability—something never to be confused with weakness, by the way (recall the manager who cried in Chapter 16).
Sometimes it comes down to a well-timed, well-delivered speech to elevate motivation from a wall poster at work to a way of thinking far beyond it. You don't have to be Tony Robbins (as long as you don't expect to be paid like he does for a speech) to rally the troops.
Whatever your style, try closing out each speech by letting people know how their work has affected your life. I used to think the sentiment felt canned, but I've learned that people need to hear it. And it works.
I'll leave the final word to Simon Sinek, whose famous TED Talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” is a call to purpose in our work. Here's the conclusion of his speech:
You'd be hard-pressed to find a better definition of leadership.