Author Archives: Jason Young

The Value of Values

Culture

The Value of Values

core-valuesEvery organization has values. It’s not enough just to have values, because values can drive companies toward mediocrity and failure, just as they can drive them in good and profitable directions. It’s important that the values are the right ones that ultimately produce the type of behaviors that will achieve the company’s stated goals.

I operate from a belief that values are important because they drive attitudes; and attitudes determine behaviors; and behaviors produce outcomes. That’s why I see clearly how a company’s values ultimately impact the bottom line (i.e. outcomes).

Companies that give little thought to the values that flow through their organization are often victims of their own doing without realizing the source of the problem.  If your goal is to achieve Culturetopia (a high performance, high fulfillment culture), one of the first questions to ask about your company is this: What are my company’s values?

It’s a simple question but it could lead to great things.

There are two ways this question can be answered. Typically, the first and easiest answer is found by looking at the formal statements made by the company to its employees. These values statements can often be found in the “About Us” section of the company’s website or they could be hung in a nice frame in the corporate boardroom. They might be reiterated at annual meetings or management conferences and met with nods of approval or rounds of applause. These values statements are expressed to shareholders and to the world at large — “This is who we are!” Those are called expressed values.

Unfortunately, expressed values don’t always represent reality. Because what we say isn’t necessarily what we actually believe or represent how we behave.

The other way to answer this question requires greater analysis. If you really want to know the true expression of your company’s values, take a look at the attitudes of the employees followed by the way the people in the company behave. These are called implicit values and represent the true, honest implied values that the company actually lives by. What gets measured? What is emphasized? What behaviors are rewarded? What is talked about the most in meetings? Answer these questions and you’ll begin to get a sense of what really matters to the company which may not be consistent with what’s written on the website, on the walls, in the boardroom.

If you really want to know the values of your company, look at what your company does, not what it says. Working backwards from behaviors to attitudes to values can be a sobering process but an honest and true assessment of your company’s core values.

It’s a great place to start, but it’s only a starting point.

 

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About Jason Young. Author, speaker and consultant. Jason Young has been called a “rare breed” when it comes to developing leaders, teams and customer service initiatives. As a former senior-level manager at Southwest Airlines, Jason learned the value of a successful workplace culture. During his 10-years with the airline consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction, he was a key driver in creating and developing the company’s innovative training programs for its successful leadership and customer service culture that have become renowned in the business world. Today,  Jason shares his vision in developing successful corporate cultures and workplace environments with forward-thinking companies, including Starbucks, Coca Cola, Radio Shack and Tyson Foods, to name a few. He has even captured his philosophy of creating high performance cultures in his new book, The Culturetopia Effect. Find out more at www.culturetopia.com

Maximize Employee Engagement

Culture

Maximize Employee Engagement Beyond 70%?

gearsToday’s business mantra: Do more with less.

Doesn’t sound too motivating does it? Your company expects more but you have less to work with. Less money, less resources, less benefits, less support, less infrastructure, less people and on and on. But by all means, do more!

It seems the bar keeps raising and employees have less ability to reach it. Or do they?

What if…the “more” that is required is already there and just needs to be tapped into. What could your organization do with another, say 30% effort (and productivity) by every employee?

According to Impact Achievement Group research, “The average American employee feels that the effort a person has to give in order to keep his or her paycheck is about 70% of what they feel they could be giving.”

Wow, that’s quite a deficit between the potential and the actual effort from the average employee. This is called “discretionary effort” and best defined as the difference between the effort an employee is capable of bringing to a job or task and the effort actually required to just get by.

Consistent research indicates that 72% of employees admit they aren’t giving their best effort. And that’s just the honest ones!

There’s a real and pervasive disconnect between what employees are capable of and what many actually do. One can only imagine the negative impact on bottom line performance and employee fulfillment – which happen to be two important indicators of a healthy culture.

So in an attempt to reduce this “discretionary effort” of employees, organizations respond with various programs and training designed to motivate greater effort from employees. While these types of initiatives are admirable, they will never have the desired impact if they are ad hoc, inconsistent or not integrated into an overall enterprise-wide strategy.

When it comes to achieving employee engagement at closer to 100%, it can only happen if there is a commitment to a culture that supports certain ideals (or what I call Culturetopia values), such as:

– Excellence as a standard

– Managers exists to support employees

– Everyone is a leader (a person of influence)

– Everyone has a clear sense of direction and purpose

– Customers are priority one

While these ideals are not comprehensive, they will serve as a firm foundation of achieving what we all face, whether we like it or not – doing more with less. Perhaps even 30% more?

 

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About Jason Young. Author, speaker and consultant. Jason Young has been called a “rare breed” when it comes to developing leaders, teams and customer service initiatives. As a former senior-level manager at Southwest Airlines, Jason learned the value of a successful workplace culture. During his 10-years with the airline consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction, he was a key driver in creating and developing the company’s innovative training programs for its successful leadership and customer service culture that have become renowned in the business world. Today,  Jason shares his vision in developing successful corporate cultures and workplace environments with forward-thinking companies, including Starbucks, Coca Cola, Radio Shack and Tyson Foods, to name a few. He has even captured his philosophy of creating high performance cultures in his new book, The Culturetopia Effect. Find out more at www.culturetopia.com

Living Things Grow

Leadership

Living Things Grow and Leaders are Learners.

plant-nutrients

Look around in nature. One thing you’ll notice is a lot of living things. Just outside my window right now I see hedges, plants, an oak tree, a brown squirrel scampers down the tree, black birds jet by, a butterfly flutters along – all very alive. Such beauty. Such life. One of the things these living things have in common is they are all growing.

That’s the nature of living things. They grow.

It’s the same way with human beings. We are alive and we grow, we regenerate, we progress, until, well until we are not alive anymore. But while we are alive, we not only grow in a physical sense but we also grow mentally, emotionally, spiritually – all the ways that make us human.

For some, growth is a passive process that happens despite any intentionality or actual effort. For these, the growth can be slow, ineffective, excruciating. For others, growth comes from a commitment to a life-long, daily process of intentional actions leading to growth that is vibrant, dynamic and life-giving.

That’s what Leaders do. They grow.

Leaders grow not by accident but by choice. Leaders are committed to learning and growing as a life-long process. It’s foundational to effective leadership. Leaders choose to be learners.

In a Harvard Business Review article, “The Making of an Expert,” K. Anders Ericsson say it takes 2.7 hours of practice per day to really improve at a skill – whether playing tennis, honing your golf swing or learning keys on the piano – or becoming a better leader. The key the article says is, “you will need to invest that time wisely, by engaging in deliberate practice.”

Research shows that those leaders who engage in learning are more effective as leaders. So, what does this look like in practice?

  • They spend more time in learning activities by reading, talking with others, observing, and reflecting on their own leadership behaviors.
  • They ask more questions. Then they listen.
  • They don’t assume they know everything.
  • They aren’t afraid to admit mistakes.
  • They ask for feedback and accept it as a gift by taking it seriously, whether the feedback is positive or negative, always asking, “What can I learn?”
  • They encourage others to take risks and accept failure by asking, “What can we learn?”

How do you fit 2.7 hours of deliberate practice on your leadership skills every day? It’s likely you already spend significant time each day doing many of these learning activities already. But there is always a need for being more deliberate, of being more committed as a learner.  There is always room for growth. Because leaders never stop growing, never stop learning.

In what areas of your leadership do you have room to grow?  Are you committed to being a learner? What activities do you do regularly to deliberately practice and improve your leadership skills? Read a good book this week?

 

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About Jason Young. Author, speaker and consultant. Jason Young has been called a “rare breed” when it comes to developing leaders, teams and customer service initiatives. As a former senior-level manager at Southwest Airlines, Jason learned the value of a successful workplace culture. During his 10-years with the airline consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction, he was a key driver in creating and developing the company’s innovative training programs for its successful leadership and customer service culture that have become renowned in the business world. Today,  Jason shares his vision in developing successful corporate cultures and workplace environments with forward-thinking companies, including Starbucks, Coca Cola, Radio Shack and Tyson Foods, to name a few. He has even captured his philosophy of creating high performance cultures in his new book, The Culturetopia Effect. Find out more at www.culturetopia.com 

The Best Leadership Development is Relational

Leadership

The Best Leadership Development is Relational

mentorMost organizational leaders will tell you that one of their primary needs is for more leaders, at all levels. It’s a universal problem and yet solutions are everywhere. We live in a time of unprecedented leadership development resources yet we still struggle with identifying, developing and equipping people to lead in our organizations.

If you Google “leadership development” you get 7 million results.  If you search leadership on Amazon you’ll see over 65,800 books.  There are over 5,000 leadership videos on YouTube.  So why do we still have a shortage of well equipped Leaders? (Note: I capitalize the L in leaders because I define a true Leader as a person who exhibits intentional influence towards a defined outcome. More on that coming in a future blog.)

I’ve found a major problem in developing Leaders is that too often we’re looking first for a program, curriculum or a special event to equip leaders rather than looking to Leaders to equip Leaders. That’s right, the answer is not so much found in a program but in a person – a Leader.

Real leadership development is most effective in the context of relationship. People-on-people, one-on-one, life-on-life. Leadership competencies are not just taught, they’re caught as the learner interacts with and observes an experienced Leader. That’s why the most effective leadership development is done in mentoring or coaching relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of room for classroom learning (virtual or in-person) for skills and competencies, but nothing can take the place of shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face, and walk-with-me kind of learning.

Here’s the tried and true mentoring model that works for any kind of people development: I do, you watch > I do you, you help > You do, I help > You do I watch.

It’s that simple. It’s development in the context of relationship. For centuries this was the model for the apprentice to learn from the master. It works for creating a skilled blacksmith and works for developing Leaders.

Bottom line, any leadership development effort that does not have a commitment to a relational component (i.e. coaching, mentoring) will never succeed in creating Leaders we desperately need.

Aloha!

 

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About Jason Young. Author, speaker and consultant. Jason Young has been called a “rare breed” when it comes to developing leaders, teams and customer service initiatives. As a former senior-level manager at Southwest Airlines, Jason learned the value of a successful workplace culture. During his 10-years with the airline consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction, he was a key driver in creating and developing the company’s innovative training programs for its successful leadership and customer service culture that have become renowned in the business world. Today,  Jason shares his vision in developing successful corporate cultures and workplace environments with forward-thinking companies, including Starbucks, Coca Cola, Radio Shack and Tyson Foods, to name a few. He has even captured his philosophy of creating high performance cultures in his new book, The Culturetopia Effect. Find out more at www.culturetopia.com

 

Necessary Endings in Life and Business

Culture

Necessary Endings in Life and Business

pruning-rosesThe only thing we hate more in life than change is pruning. It’s true. Change is uncomfortable but pruning is, well, just down right painful. But pruning is necessary, natural, and beneficial for anything that is alive. That’s true for rosebushes and true for our relationships and in business.

In another great book by Dr. Henry Cloud, Necessary Endings, he uses the rosebush as a metaphor for the pruning that is necessary and too often avoided in life — to our detriment. Pruning enables rosebushes to realize full potential. Without it, they are just average at best and far less than they were designed to be. The same goes for life and business.

Henry says in there are 3 types of pruning necessary: 1) Things that are good but are siphoning resources from the better, 2) Things that are sick and dying and 3) Things that are dead.

In business and in life, executing the three types of necessary ending (i.e. pruning) is what characterizes people who get results. 1) if an initiative is siphoning off resources that go to something with more potential, it is pruned. 2) if an endeavor is sick and is not going to get well, it is pruned. 3) If it is clear that something is already dead, it is pruned. This is a threefold formula for doing well in almost every area of life.

The areas of your business and life that require your limited resources — your time, energy, talent, emotions, money — but are not achieving the vision you have for them should be pruned. Just like an unpruned rosebush, your endeavors will be merely average without pruning. We need it when things are going well and when things are not going well; it is a natural part of life’s seasons and a requirement for real growth.

So the question is: Are you only achieving average results at best in relation to where you or your business or team is supposed to be? Are you reaching full potential or just average? Let the pruning begin and don’t delay. Your full potential awaits.

 

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About Jason Young. Author, speaker and consultant. Jason Young has been called a “rare breed” when it comes to developing leaders, teams and customer service initiatives. As a former senior-level manager at Southwest Airlines, Jason learned the value of a successful workplace culture. During his 10-years with the airline consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction, he was a key driver in creating and developing the company’s innovative training programs for its successful leadership and customer service culture that have become renowned in the business world. Today,  Jason shares his vision in developing successful corporate cultures and workplace environments with forward-thinking companies, including Starbucks, Coca Cola, Radio Shack and Tyson Foods, to name a few. He has even captured his philosophy of creating high performance cultures in his new book, The Culturetopia Effect. Find out more at www.culturetopia.com

 

A Case for High Fulfillment and High Performance

Culture

A Case for High Fulfillment and High Performance

Too many people in too many corporations don’t like to get up in the morning to go to work, and see their job primarily as a way to make money. They are just trading dollars for hours. They are neither passionate nor inspired and engagement is low. Despite many methods and programs that companies use to get ahead of this issue, employee engagement mostly stays low or far below expectations. The current economic environment is tough in nearly all industries. The harder it is to survive, the more we seem to care for profit, process, and tools and the less affordable it seems to put energy into “people focus.” Employee centered topics typically come “after” the other stuff gets done.

Is it possible to drive high performance in sales and profit way beyond industry averages and at the same time drive high engagement in the workplace? I know that the answer is yes and have experienced it. The reason this not happening everywhere is that a fundamental shift in the perception of leaders is necessary. This shift is from seeing profit as the goal to profit as the result of meaningful things done in fulfilling ways. Although this may sound improbable in the first place, the secret is found in corporate leaders becoming as fully responsible for supported people in the workplace as they are for sustainable profit. It’s not about “either/or.” It’s about both at the same time. I call that high fulfillment and high performance.