The Five Floors of Relationships

I know thousands of people, and many of them wield tremendous influence. If life and business were all about “who you know,” then I’d be set. But none of those relationships took on extraordinary value unless I approached them with the idea that they mattered for something above and beyond the transaction.

I think of relationships in terms of a five-floor building. The deeper and more meaningful a relationship, the higher the floor it resides on. My closest, deepest relationships are Fifth Floor or Penthouse, relationships.

Let me be clear – relationships seldom fit neatly into a box (or a building). They’re far too dynamic. Some overlap on different floors, and others seem to move up and down floors like an elevator. But the Five Floor plan helps give me a reference point and allows me to think about the boundaries that define my relationships, so that I can continually work to make them stronger and more rewarding. I try to develop strong relationships at every level. And because my relationships with others matter so much to me, and because I come to them intending to help others, many of these relationships develop into something more meaningful than anything I had imagined.


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About the Author

Tommy Spaulding is president of The Spaulding Companies LLC, a national leadership development, consulting, and speaking organization. Before starting his firm, he was the head of the international nonprofit, Up With People. Tommy is the founder of Leader’s Challenge, which has become the largest high school civic and leadership program in Colorado. He is the co-founder of The Center for Third Sector Excellence and the founder of the National Leadership Academy. Tommy also created Dialogue for Tomorrow, an annual international global leadership conference. He received a BA in Political Science from East Carolina University, an MBA from Bond University in Australia, and an MA in Non-Profit Management from Regis University. In 2007, Tommy received an Honorary PhD in Humanities from the Art Institute of Colorado. To read Tommy’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 36 – The Warning Signs of Employee Disenfranchisement

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Episode 36 – The Warning Signs of Employee Disenfranchisement explores the warning signs of employee disenfranchisement; indicators that lost productivity, contribution and rising attrition may be eminent. During our discussion, Michael Lee Stallard, author of Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity and co-Founder and President of E Pluribus Partners, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • the benefits leaders realize as a result of better engaging their employees
  • observable behaviors, policies, and organizational structures that disenfranchise employees
  • precursor indicators that can be used as an ‘early warning system’ to detect the onset of employee disenfranchisement
  • processes, monitoring systems, and performance measures leaders can use to recognize the onset of disenfranchisement
  • the extent leaders should enlist the assistance of outside advisors to evaluate their business environment and workforce sentiments and the benefits of doing so
  • key attributes separating leaders who successfully engage employees from those who do not

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Michael shares in Fired Up or Burned Out and this edition of the StrategyDriven Podcast are the resources accessible from his websites, www.FiredUpOrBurnedOut.com, www.EPluribusPartners.com, and www.MichaelLeeStallard.com. Michael’s Connection Culture Manifesto can be downloaded for free by clicking here. His book, Fired Up or Burned Out, can be purchased by clicking here.

A special gift for StrategyDriven readers…

We are pleased to announce that Michael has made the electronic version of his book, Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity, available for download at no cost to our readers. Simply click on the link above to download your copy of this remarkable book on how to better engage employees; igniting their creativity, imagination, and spirits to the success of the organization.

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About the Author

Michael Lee Stallard, author of Fired Up or Burned Out, is co-Founder and President of E Pluribus Partners, a consulting firm specializing in helping leaders create ‘Connection Cultures’ to form strong bonds among the management, employees, and customers of an organization. Michael’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Leader to Leader, Human Resource Executive, and Fox Business Now. He has spoken at conferences organized by The Conference Board, GE, Google, NASA, Johnson & Johnson and Yale-New Haven Hospital. To read Michael’s full biography, click here.

“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 1 of 2

Viral marketing and social networking have arrived on the scene after a long, strange trip indeed. The Grateful Dead were much more than a bunch of rock-and-roll geniuses; they were pioneers of the digital age marketing landscape.

When you think marketing visionaries, what companies come to mind? Apple? Google? Maybe even Microsoft? It’s true that each of these companies in one way or another has come to define marketing in the digital age. But the practices they’ve been pushing – viral marketing, social networking, giving away products or services, asking for and acting on input from customers – have somewhat, well, groovier roots than you might imagine.

These marketing ploys were born on the road with one of the most iconic bands of all time – The Grateful Dead.

Everyone knows the Grateful Dead as rock legends and amazing musicians. But not as many realize they were marketing pioneers. In the 1960s the Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses across all industries use today. Every business can learn from what the Grateful Dead has done over a 45-year career.

The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing. Most of the band’s many marketing innovations were based on doing the exact opposite of what other bands (and record labels) were doing at the time. The Dead pioneered a “freemium” business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music. It’s a model that has influenced many of today’s very best marketers. For example:


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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

Business Performance Assessment Program – The Vertical Slice Assessment Approach

All company functions are constrained by limited resources. As such, it is impossible for an organization to self assess every activity it performs. Therefore, business performance assessments need to be executed in a way that identifies the significant improvement opportunities at the lowest possible cost. One such approach is to do a thorough end-to-end review of a few occurrences of high value process.


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Additional Information

An illustration of how data is effective merged from various sources to identify performance issues is presented within the StrategyDriven Information Development Model.

Recommended Resources – An Interview with Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan, authors of Leading Outside the Lines

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results
by Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan

Every enterprise has an informal as well as a formal organization. The formal is the side with which business people are usually most familiar. It consists of analyses, strategies, structures, processes and programs – all codified in memos, charts and Power-Point presentations. These tools are designed to align decisions and actions. The informal is generally less familiar. It consists of emerging ideas, social networks, working norms, values, peer relationships and communities of common interest – the elements that often hide beyond the boundaries of the formal. In Leading Outside the Lines, authors Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan make the compelling case that it is in the less familiar informal world where magic happens… yet one without the other is unlikely to sustain peak performance over time.

Additional Insights… An Interview with Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan, authors of Leading Outside The Lines

StrategyDriven Contributors recently interviewed Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan, authors of Leading Outside the Lines; receiving many invaluable, beyond the scope of the book insights.

SD: Why did you write Leading Outside the Lines?

JK and ZK: To help leaders gain a powerful performance ‘boost’ from their informal organizations. In our years helping leading organizations improve performance, we’ve learned that leaders at all levels have a difficult time with, or don’t realize they need to address, a key avenue to success: balancing two distinct dimensions of human behavior and organizational performance – the formal and the informal elements. Learning how to mobilize the informal elements of an organization to accelerate the formal elements goes a long way in helping leaders fill the gap between intention and results. Further, the recession and slow recovery have forced many organizations to reduce headcount to a bare minimum, and have undermined employee motivation. Without making changes to headcount, systems of performance management and processes, leaders can tap into the informal elements of the organization to realize additional performance potential, and do so ‘for free.’

SD: What is the ‘informal organization?’ And what is the ‘formal?’

JK and ZK: The informal unlocks the emotional side of behavior; the formal is the rational side. The informal organization is a bundle of organizational elements that are often hidden from view, but exert strong influence on people’s decisions and behaviors. The informal includes values that drive decisions, networks that guide personal interactions and the spread of information and emotional feelings about the work that drives the amount of effort and commitment that people put into their jobs. The formal organization, on the other hand, includes the codified elements of organization that are usually disseminated on paper. They include strategies, structures, processes, metrics, etc. In other words, the informal organization is comprised of interpersonal connections, influences and “rituals” that happen beyond, around and beneath the formal rules; they are seldom codified or reference-able. The formal is the structural lines, boxes, rules, measures and processes that describe how things are supposed to work; they are almost always codified and reference-able.

SD: What do you mean by ‘Leading Outside the Lines?’

JK and ZK: Influencing results by using informal mechanisms beyond the hierarchy. The lines represent the formal organization – the usual elements of strategy, structure, hierarchy, metrics, etc. Most effective leaders are well trained in using those elements. However, the best leaders also learn how to mobilize the informal organization – the values, networks, and sources of pride that drive motivation and high performance. These elements are more responsive to leadership outside the lines, so to speak. So, leading outside the lines is really stepping outside of formal roles and responsibilities to influence emotions that accelerate behaviors that determine performance.

SD: Why is the ‘Leading Outside the Lines’ concept and call to action any more important now than it was, say, five years ago?

JK and ZK: The recessionary recovery challenge demands emotional as well as rational leadership capabilities. There are two reasons. First, managing the formal organization has become a widespread and broadly used discipline. In the past, optimized processes and fact-based strategies gave companies an advantage. Now, anyone can buy them off the shelf, so it’s hard to gain a competitive advantage through formal elements alone. The informal organization, however, is mostly uncharted territory. There’s lots of excitement about social networking and the like, but there aren’t many practical frameworks or approaches for using informal elements to gain performance advantages. And the advantages gained from the informal organization are very, very hard to copy. Second, as mentioned before, because of the recession and slow recovery, most companies are in much greater need of leadership capacity that both the formal and informal organizations provide.

SD: You say that if the informal isn’t working for you, it’s working against you. What do you mean by that?

JK and ZK: Informal forces are always at play – you cannot simply turn them on and off by command. The informal is working all the time: It’s not ‘stoppable or start-able;’ it’s only influence-able. It either resists and de-rails what the formal is trying to accomplish, or it supports and accelerates it. It is never ‘in neutral.’ So, the chances that the informal organization is working for you without any deliberate attempt to mobilize it in the right direction are fairly low. In many cases, when left unattended, the informal works against you even if you’re not trying to change anything. In fact, the informal organization can align itself in the opposite direction that leaders want to take the whole company if the informal organization hasn’t bought into the change.

SD: What are the results when leaders successfully balance the informal with the formal?

JK and ZK: Emotional commitment supplants rational compliance to optimize performance results. Overall, leaders can accelerate performance results by combining the best of both the informal and the formal, and do so without having to make trade-offs. They get the efficiency of the formal with the creativity of the informal; the focused execution of the formal with the responsiveness to new opportunities of the informal; the accountability of the formal with the emotional commitment of the informal. In other words, you get behavior change that yields higher performance results or faster results – and often BOTH!

SD: You tell a lot of stories in the book. What’s your favorite one?

JK and ZK: We don’t have a single favorite; it depends on the issue. We like all the stories, and there are different categories. Perhaps our favorite ‘informal miracle’ story is the one about the transformation of Aetna. Early in the decade, Aetna had been on a treadmill to nowhere – even though it had tried three different change programs. It continued to lose $1 million a day. But a new CEO, Dr. John Rowe, had a vision to turn it all around – by bringing the company’s pride back. He engaged all levels of the informal organization and created evangelists for formal change. The core of the program was known informally throughout the company as ‘restoring the pride.’

SD: You mention types of workers call ‘fast zebras.’ Who are they? What do you do with them?

JK and ZK: People who get important stuff done quicker by going down informal as well as formal paths. In the wild, the fast zebra gets to the watering hole quickly and escapes predators who might be waiting. Similarly, in organizations, there are those who can quickly find innovative ways to realize their objectives without getting bogged down by organizational predators like bureaucracy, politics, senseless policies, outdated rules, etc. They have learned how to get things done by using a dynamic variety of formal and informal mechanisms; they know when to follow the rules, when to bend the rules and when to change the rules. The best thing to do with them is to learn from them, and draw on those learnings to make changes to the organization so you can enable potential fast zebras. Give them room to interact, get them together to energize one another and listen to – and act on – their insights.

SD: What kinds of leaders are best at ‘Leading Outside the Lines?’

JK and ZK: Those who have learned the power of the informal through trial and error. They are very open to the informal – and realize they don’t have all the answers. They are willing to take personal risks by drawing on emotional intelligence as much as analytical intelligence. They spend time with people at any level, particularly the frontline, and not just with a select few at headquarters. Most importantly, they believe that while the informal organization may appear to be unruly chaos and resistant to control, they know it can be mobilized to generate real performance results.

SD: What are the biggest mistakes leaders make when trying to manage and maximize the informal organization?

JK and ZK: The biggest mistake is to try and manage the informal like the formal. It can’t be told what to do; it must be convinced, influenced and energized. We tell clients that they must mobilize the informal and manage the formal. Therefore, it’s a big mistake to think that top-down communication will keep the informal interactions positive. It’s also a mistake to believe that broad-based ‘engagement scores’ are indicative of informal support and to underestimate the importance of emotional commitment over rational compliance.

SD: Are you saying that strict ‘traditionalists’ will fail in this environment?

JK and ZK: Only if you define under-performance as failing. They won’t actually fail – and that’s part of the problem. Right now, any leader who can’t use the formal organization has a very short career. So they get weeded out quickly. However, those who don’t use the informal will usually accomplish good enough results, as there aren’t many who know how to use both and who achieve outstanding results. However, we expect that as the discipline of using the informal spreads, the pressure to be versed n it will increase. We do believe that those who only take advantage of one side of the “organizational brain” will fall short of their potential – and end up as mediocre guardians of the status quo.

SD: What happens if a leader backs off from the informal organization and just lets it grow organically?

JK and ZK: He competes with one hand tied behind his back. It would be the same as forgetting about marketing and hoping your customers buy your products by chance. It’s an asset that needs to be used with purpose. It may adapt to support you organically if you have effective and committed leaders down the line, but it can also align against you if you change the status quo to which it has evolved. Remember, the informal organization has a mind of its own, which may not be in sync with your priorities. More often than not, when left to evolve on its own, the informal organization works against you. Put another way, it would be analogous to letting ivy find its own home.

SD: Your book mentions ‘master motivators’ and ‘pride builders.’ Who are they, and what do you do with them?

JK and ZK: They are people in supervisory situations who know how to make others ‘feel good’ about the work that has to get done every day; they instill pride in the work itself. We use these terms inter-changeably. We urge leaders to listen and learn from them, and get them into networks and communities where they can spread motivational skills experientially among peers and colleagues. The people who work for them ‘never want to disappoint them’ and the people who work beside them want to learn their ‘secrets.’

SD: What can leaders do to get better at actively leveraging the informal and balancing it with the formal?

JK and ZK: Keep working at it; if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. The first thing is to get an understanding of your current informal organization – the values, the networks and sources of pride. Front line leaders can seek out peers who are natural pride-builders; leaders at the top can find ways to connect with them, learn from them, and spread their behaviors; leaders in the middle can do both.


About the Authors

Jon Katzenbach is a senior partner at Booz & Company and leads The Katzenbach Center, where promising new approaches in leadership, culture and organization performance are developed for client application. His consulting career has been largely focused in these areas, and spans several decades across several different professional books, including The Wisdom of Teams, Peak Performance, Why Pride Matters More Than Money, and the new Leading Outside the Lines. He received his MBA from Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. Jon is a founding partner of Katzenbach Partners. To read Jon’s complete biography, click here.

Zia Khan, co-author of Leading Outside the Lines, is vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation, which supports innovations that help people share globalization’s benefits more equitably and strengthens their resilience to social, economic, health and environmental challenges. Zia also advises leaders on the integration of strategy and organization as a senior fellow of the Katzenbach Center, which he co-founded with Jon Katzenbach, and as an individual consultant. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Zia established and led Katzenbach Partners’ San Francisco office and West Coast Practice and pioneered the firm’s work on the informal organization. Zia hold a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. To read Zia’s complete biography, click here.