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Articles in Brief
A quick synopsis of what other publications are
saying about topics related to
leadership, employee involvement, quality, and
organizational performance
Business2.0
(www.business2.com)
June 2003
Business Contacts A-Go-Go
It’s a Wednesday night at the posh Williams
Club in midtown Manhattan. For decades it’s
been the kind of place where graduates of
America’s elite colleges have hobnobbed to make
important business connections. Tonight, though, the
scene in the wood-paneled rooms is anything but
traditional.
Twenty-five people sit in a long row of chairs,
trying to look their best. Another 25 face them,
sitting almost toe-to-toe. A bell rings and suddenly
25 manic conversations fill the room. One of the
participants, a publicist, rolls through his success
stories, and then launches into a detailed
description of his ideal client—all in less
than two minutes. A few seats down, a real estate
attorney leans forward earnestly to tell his partner
that he needs retail distribution for a new product
he wants to import, kosher plantain chips.
Every four minutes a bell rings. Then everybody in
one of the rows slides over a seat, and the
mile-a-minute conversations start all over
again.
This is speed-networking, and if you’re
looking for a better job—or just for contacts
that’ll help you do a better job—you may
want to give it a try. Speed-networking nights are
popping up around the country, usually at alumni
association or professional group meetings, and they
could well replace trade show hospitality hours,
Rotary Club meetings, and online chat rooms as the
preferred way to make new contacts.
HR Magazine
(www.shrm.org)
June 2003
HR in Rotation
Sometimes a company’s biggest hurdle to
effectively communicating with employees is a lack of
attention to properly managing the content or
distribution of the message. Consider the following
examples of communications gone wrong:
- Many employees at a major Midwestern energy
company first learned of the organization’s
merger plans not from internal corporate
sources—such as HR, a corporate announcement,
or their individual managers—but from a radio
news broadcast they heard while driving to
work.
- When a small publishing company implemented a
peer evaluation process for employees, the first
time many heard about it was when co-workers
started making casual comments about having
received “a survey about you.” HR
expected managers to tell their employees; managers
thought HR would “take care of
it.”
Do such communication glitches have a negative
impact on employee trust, commitment, and loyalty?
Many communications and HR professionals say
yes.
Those opinions are backed up by a study by Watson
Wyatt Worldwide, a global consulting firm based in
Washington, D.C. The study, “Work USA
2000,” surveyed 7,500 U.S. workers at all job
levels and in all major industry sectors about their
attitudes toward their workplaces and their
employers. Results showed a clear link between
organizational success and a management culture that
encourages employee involvement and communicates
effectively with employees.
Inc. Magazine
(www.inc.com)
March 2003
Employers Try New Rules to Promote E-Mail
Etiquette
As e-mail overload buries
computer users worldwide, much of the blame is
falling on the cc line, which allows e-mailers to
share correspondence with countless colleagues,
friends, or strangers. For e-mail writers who play
office politics, deciding which recipients belong on
which lines—“to,” “cc,”
or “bcc” (blind carbon copy)—has
become a daily struggle. Many resort to unnecessary
cc-ing and sneaky bcc-ing, inadvertently spilling
proprietary information or inappropriately copying an
underling or boss.
The “cc” gridlock isn’t just
impeding worker productivity. It’s also
increasing management’s legal risks, according
to a recent study. As a result, Internet consultants
are advising companies to develop e-mail rulebooks
and recommending new technological tools, such as the
color-coding of less vital cc’d
messages.
Why Leadership is the Most Dangerous Idea in
American Business
Maybe you’ve noticed: Never in the history of
management science has leadership been more studied,
worried over, theorized about, and debated than right
now—probably partially because the world has
supplied leaders-in-training with a (mostly unhappy)
curriculum for the past two years. The stock bubble
collapsed. The economy soured. September 11 came and
begat whole new anxieties that prompted unprecedented
questioning about vocational life and leadership in
communities of every kind. Corporate scandals and
greed brought CEO reputations low and raised ethics
concerns high. And now Iraq.
Throughout the contentious diplomatic run-up and
then during the conflict itself, leaders were
dissected everywhere. You’ll recall the
stories. Bush the autocratic unilateralist versus
Blair the participative consensualist. Rumsfeld
versus the generals. Churchill circa 1942 versus all
of the above (an op-ed smackdown that somehow Winny
always wins). By the time this is published, there
will have been more stories: How to lead. How
we’re being led. How we want to be led. The
world’s curriculum, like it or not, is rich
with object lessons.
The problem is that, for entrepreneurs, those
lessons are all wrong. Not because they’re
necessarily bad in themselves, but because they all
have to do with the wrong kind of leadership. Almost
the entire fevered leadership discussion of the
moment is focused on one broad category of the art.
Call it “charismatic” leadership, the
label most often used by academics and experts
(you’ll hear it called “heroic” or
“inspirational” leadership, too). Please
note that the practitioners of charismatic leadership
don’t actually have to be charismatic
themselves. In fact, plenty of charismatic-style
leaders are as vibrant as brick (think Bill
Gates).
It’s the approach—the
system—that matters, and you’ll find it
in nearly every tiny business, as well as most big
ones. The charismatic approach is in play (whatever
the personality of the organization’s leader)
as long as an organization is designed to be fueled
by the personal energy and vision of a single
individual, a larger-than-life figure. Charismatic
leadership is leadership attempted or executed by
force of personality and inspiration. It’s the
kind in which the leader is counted on to be
tireless, indomitable, never out of answers. Do you
know any companies like that? Thought you might.
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