Recently a relatively new manager asked me how he could get more candid feedback from his employees.   This particular manager is a superstar in the eyes of his own manager and he had received good feedback from his peers and direct reports on a 360 assessment.  But he is genuinely interested in continuing to grow and develop and wanted to solicit input and suggestions from his people.

This situation is intriguing to me because I have seen it repeated with numerous leaders and managers.  In the leadership development field, we lament the fact that many managers aren’t open to feedback.  Yet those who are often struggle to get it!

Here’s a quiz for you: Which of the following tools is the most powerful for motivating employees?
•    Support for making progress in the work
•    Recognition for good work
•    Incentives
•    Interpersonal support
•    Clear goals

If you are like 95% of managers who responded to a Harvard study, the answer may surprise you.  Most managers believe that recognition for good work has the most impact on employees’ emotions and motivation.  But a decade-long study from Harvard shows that support for making progress is actually the most powerful lever, especially for scientists, engineers, programmers, marketers, and other knowledge workers.

For more than a decade, researchers from Harvard tracked the emotions and motivations of knowledge workers by having them keep detailed diaries of their days. By analyzing the diary entries, the researchers discovered that employee emotions, perceptions, and motivations fluctuate every day.  Lead researcher, Teresa Amible, writes, “We found that the most common triggering event for a ‘best day’ was any progress in the work and the most common event triggering a ‘worst day’ was a setback.” Amabile and her colleagues named this phenomenon the progress principle and they detail their research, findings, and implications for managers in their new book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.

I just finished working on the design of a leadership development program for senior leaders of a multi-national company.  As I my partners and I collaborated with the client’s internal HR team we had lots of good conversations about what this group of leaders did well and where they needed improvement.  One thing that surprised me was that this senior leader population needed to get better at delegating.  Now these aren’t brand new supervisors.  We are talking about directors, and senior directors who have been in leadership roles for years – decades in some cases.  Why haven’t they mastered delegation?

As we conducted focus groups with the target population, we quickly learned that the word “delegation” had a negative connotation.  Managers associated delegation with “dumping”.  In the words of one participant, “Oh, I’d never delegate to someone.  I give my people assignments all the time, but I don’t think it’s fair to just dump stuff on others just because I don’t want to do it.”

Leaders taking the helm of a team, department, division, or company often recognize that the organization’s existing culture may hinder successful strategy execution. Culture is often defined as the beliefs, values, norms and attitudes that form a group’s patterns of thought and action. Put another way, culture can be thought of as “unwritten rules about the way things are done around here.” Ultimately, changing a culture requires changing the ways that people feel, think, and act – which is a significant undertaking.

In my own work and research, I have identified eight best practices for culture change:

1.    Engage people in the process.

People commit to what they help create. The most successful changes happen when leaders actively engage people at all levels in all phases of the process and when there is a constant feedback loop between people on the front line and the leadership team.  Rather than hinting at the culture you want to see – be explicit about what changes are needed and collaborate with your people to implement the next seven practices.

A colleague recently sent me a link to Ben Zander’s TED talk from 2008. I’d heard of Zander, a talented conductor famous for his inspiring pre-concert speeches. I’d even read and recommended his book (The Art of Possibility) some years ago. Zander is always fun and inspiring to watch so I knew I’d enjoy the TED clip. What really struck me in watching this video this time around was a concept that Zander shares near the end. Watch the whole video if you can. If you are short on time, fast-forward to around 17:30 for some fabulous thinking on what it means to be a leader.

To me, Zander’s points illustrate exactly what it means to be an Energizing Leader. Imagine the impact we would all have if we remembered and lived by his three simple points:

• The conductor of an orchestra (leader) doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful.

As I’ve watched events unfold in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and other countries these past few weeks I have been struck by how these political revolutions mirror a revolution that is happening in corporations today. Quite simply, we are moving to an age where being the leader does not necessarily equate to holding ultimate power. And lashing out and trying to subdue and control people no longer works – no matter whether the stage is a country or a company.

I’m certainly not the only person making this comparison.  Last week management consulting guru Alan Weiss wrote, “We are watching popular uprisings gain traction or fail largely based on whether those in power and the military are willing to turn their guns on their own people or refrain from doing so. In organizations, the ability to change for the best is often a question of whether senior people will listen and offer avenues for communication to do so, or whether they are insulated and aloof, and those with new and bold ideas get “whacked” by the status quo.”

Last fall a client hired me to help design, plan, and facilitate a conference for her organization’s top 60 female leaders.  To be honest, at first I was surprised by the request.  I thought, “Do women leaders really need to meet in a forum separate from their male counterparts? Doesn’t doing so actually marginalize women leaders?”

It turns out, I wasn’t alone in my initial hesitation.  As part of the design phase I interviewed 27 of the women who would be invited to the conference.  Their responses to my opening question, “What is your response to the idea of Women’s Leadership Conference?” ran the gamut.  About 50% of responses were highly positive:

As I work with leaders on change projects and strategy execution I always make it a point to talk with the people on the front lines of the organization.  Whether I am conducting one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or larger input meetings one theme emerges in company after company: “Our leadership makes decisions without understanding what we really do and how those decisions impact us.”

Hundreds of others have said it, but apparently the point bears repeating:  If you want your people to accept and support change, you must first show that you understand the organization from their perspective.

When we try to motivate others or mobilize energy for a change, the most important element is being able to connect with people.  An authentic connection has a lot of ingredients, including understanding:

• What matters to this person;
• What is this person’s reality;
• What is this person trying to accomplish at work;
• What is getting in the way?

On Jan. 2, Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN was dedicated to the topic of “How to Lead.”  Zakaria’s guests included Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Former Governor Christie Whitman, and Yale University President Richard Levin among others.  While the program was about leadership, not change per se, I was struck by how much of the interviewees focused on how to lead change.  In fact, Lou Gerstner (form CEO of both IBM and RJR Nabisco) said, “Leadership in my opinion, is all about change.”

Repeatedly, the leaders being interviewed stressed the importance of communicating a sense of urgency, setting a clear direction/vision, aligning processes with the direction, and empowering people.

Here are a few more sample quotes:

- Tony Blair

One of my favorite authors on leadership is Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford University.  Sutton is the author of numerous books, including Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule.   One of the most memorable concepts Sutton talks about is something he calls the Toxic Tandem.

According to Sutton, research confirms what many of us have long suspected: People who gain authority over others tend to become more self-centered and less mindful of what others need, do, and say. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded because a boss’s self-absorbed words and deeds are scrutinized so closely by his or her followers. Combined, these tendencies make for a toxic tandem.

Check out this video of Sutton describing the Toxic Tandem and other concepts in a presentation at Google:

I’m curious . . . if you are a leader have you learned to  avoid the toxic tandem?