Introduction
SHUT THE CONVENTIONAL DOOR
My entry into Reality-Based Leadership started with the Open-Door Policy.
After several years as a family therapist, I got a promotion in my organization. For the first time, I would be leading a team, which got me a free ticket to the Human Resources boot camp for managers. Designed to prepare me for my new organizational role, it was a crash course in the current conventional wisdom around leadership.
One particularly juicy leadership gem, delivered to me by trainers with all the confidence in the world, was that a great leader always has an open door.
An open door? That was easy. Not only was I going to have an Open-Door Policy, I was going to ace it! I hustled down to the gift shop at the health center where I worked and bought a doorstop to make a visible and decorative point: I’d have the most outstanding open door in the organization.
The Open-Door Policy did exactly what it was supposed to do. Soon team members began popping their heads into my open door.
“Do you have a minute?” they asked.
“Sure, I have two!” I’d reply. “Come on in.”
It didn’t take long to realize that these people were liars. They’d ask for a minute or two, but they stayed planted in my office for an average of 45 minutes.
Now, if they had really needed me—to talk through a critical decision for serving the business or to help them develop or hone skills—the time investment would have had a satisfying payoff. But people weren’t coming to me for that.
People came in to tattle on others. They wanted to tell me stories about things that had happened only in their heads. Or they’d vent about circumstances that couldn’t be changed (what I call reality). They’d use our time to spin fantasies about a dismal or doomed future. Frequently, it was a combination of these things. I spent the majority of these impromptu “Got a minute?” meetings listening to elaborate narratives that had almost no basis in reality.
The kicker? At the end of the meeting, they would say to me, with a straight face: “Please don’t do anything about this. I just wanted you to be aware.”
As I witnessed the economic effect of this Open-Door Policy in action, it made no sense to me. Where was the return on the investment I had made in that doorstop? Can you imagine what would happen if I went to the CEO and said, “I plan to spend 10 hours a day in a series of 45-minute one-on-one meetings talking about stuff that doesn’t add one whit of value to the company. And I’m going to expense the doorstop”? I’d soon be opening the door to the unemployment office.
The HR wisdom that had been drilled into me said having an open door was the right thing to do. It was touted as a best practice that would lead to happy, engaged employees. We had been instructed that we should allow employees to vent, because venting is “healthy.”
During my time as an Open-Door Policy devotee, I don’t recall team members ever tattling on themselves. They weren’t coming to me and saying “You know, I am really having trouble aligning my actions and decision making with the strategy of this business. I’d like to become more effective at serving our customers. Can you help me develop my skills and work processes so I can meet company goals, add value to the team, and better contribute to return on investment?”
No one came through my open door to directly ask for coaching on handling sticky issues in a more effective, productive, and efficient way. In fact, they drove their BMWS (bitching, moaning, and whining) through the open door and parked with their engines idling, wasting fuel and polluting the atmosphere. Then they demanded that I withhold the kind of direction and assistance that would help them get where we needed to go.
I realized pretty quickly that the open door was a portal for drama. It catered to ego, fueled feelings of victimhood, and contributed to low morale. Worse, it cost the company a lot of money. We had been hired for the value we could contribute to the important work we did, not for the ego-based, drama-filled stories we could concoct. I knew my time would be better invested in helping people reflect, increase their self-awareness, and look at situations from a higher level of consciousness.
After this proverbial “aha!” moment, I abandoned the Open-Door Policy. It was one of my first acts of Reality-Based Leadership. I didn’t shut the door on my team members, exactly, but I began changing the conversation when they asked for a minute. Instead of passively listening or directing, I began asking questions:
“What do you know for sure?”
“What is your part in this?”
“What are your ideas for resolving this issue?”
“What are you doing to help?”
When they came to me with narratives about the problems they encountered, I gave them a mental process that forced them to deconstruct their “stories” and move into action. The process shifted their thinking to a focus on the facts. And it asked them to outline proposed solutions or helpful actions that would positively affect the situation.
A core philosophy of Reality-Based Leadership is Stop Judging, Start Helping. My employees always had one question on the back of their badges: “How can I help?” Whenever they came to me to tattle, I encouraged them to go directly to the person they were judging and ask “How can I help?” instead. Asking this simple, sincere question would lead to instant teamwork.
Conventional Wisdom Fail
The Open-Door Policy failure got me thinking more about the conventional wisdom that had been dispensed in my leadership training. What if what we had been taught in HR’s leadership boot camps was all wrong? Based on the results we were getting, the traditional leadership methods certainly didn’t seem to be working.
I could see the damage being done when employees were what I came to label “emotionally expensive.” These were the folks who spent their time arguing with reality instead of confronting it directly. They contributed opinions instead of taking action. They judged others instead of offering help. They saw themselves as victims of cruel circumstances instead of recognizing that circumstances are the reality within which they must succeed.
One of the first mental processes I taught employees, adapted from my cognitive therapy background, was to edit stories and eliminate the emotional churn that muddied the waters and obscured reality. People began to learn productive ways to resolve their own issues. They began to figure out what the real business issues were and come up with productive options for tackling them. They stopped the BMW driving. It wasn’t long before our team began operating in a completely different way. Although leaders in other departments were getting bogged down in constant firefighting, the teams I worked with were becoming independent, efficient, and highly engaged.
That recognition sparked in me even more introspection about the role of a leader. I began to wonder: What if a leader’s role isn’t to improve morale or motivate employees? What if a leader’s role isn’t to keep employees engaged and happy? In fact, that expectation sets up leaders for failure. They can’t motivate others—people make their own choices about motivation, accountability, commitment, and happiness.
A leader would better serve the organization by refusing to foster the daily theatrics at work and by coaching employees in ways that are grounded in reality. After all, not a single budget I have ever seen or managed has a line item for Ego Management. But even my short experience with the Open-Door Policy had shown me drama and emotional waste were costing the company big time.
Costly Leakages
After more than 20 years of working with the Reality-Based philosophy and honing Reality-Based tools in hundreds of organizations, I’m excited to be writing this book because I now have research data that quantify the cost of ego-driven emotional waste. Organizations are losing billions of dollars annually.
They lose money in two ways. First, they’re investing money and organizational energy in employee engagement surveys, HR initiatives, and learning-and-development programs that actually exacerbate the problems they’re trying to solve. Second, organizations aren’t developing leaders who have the mind-sets, methods, and tools they need to help them bypass ego and eliminate costly emotional waste.
Although I have more than 20 years of qualitative experience from consulting in hundreds of organizations, I wanted to quantify the amount of emotional waste found in typical organizations to help leaders calculate the costs of workplace drama. My company, Reality-Based Leadership, recently partnered with The Futures Company to capture data around the phenomenon that the Open-Door Policy brought to my attention.
Our research found that the average employee spends 2 hours and 26 minutes per day in drama and emotional waste.
Wages and salaries vary greatly from organization to organization, of course, but let’s use a hypothetical company with 100 employees, each earning $30 an hour and working 40 hours a week. Annually, wages paid would equal $6,240,000. Based on our research on the cost of emotional waste, well over $1,794,000 would have to be written off as a loss.
Now imagine that hypothetical organization has 10 senior leaders, and each spends a minimum of 5 hours a week dealing with the drama that creates emotional waste. (And that’s a conservative estimate, based on our research.) Let’s give these leaders salaries that average $60 an hour. That’s another $156,000 of money spent on something that has no return on investment.
Would you continue pouring money into a stock that consistently lost that kind of money? You’d be crazy to do that, but at least you’re able to see when a stock is losing money. In organizations, emotional waste has been an invisible leakage, much like the slow leak in the upstairs shower that goes unnoticed until the ceiling and walls collapse and cause untold damage.
Recapturing Resources
Imagine the dramatic impact on profitability that would be seen if you could recapture the two-plus hours per employee per day expended on emotional waste. That is what the Reality-Based philosophy is all about.
Not only have organizations that we’ve worked with seen profound cost savings through the increase in productivity and improved results, they have seen measurable improvements in engagement, collaboration, and cross-departmental teamwork. They have been better able to retain the employees who are highly accountable, do more work with less staff, and increase innovation. They have experienced measurable improvements in organizational metrics, such as work efficiency, quality control, safety scores, and customer satisfaction.
In this book, I’ll show you what is possible by sharing stories collected in my decades of work using the Reality-Based philosophy to dramatically increase employee accountability, which leads to increased engagement and improved results. Most important, this book provides easy-to-use tools and methods, which can be implemented immediately, to help you recapture the hours wasted on processing drama. It builds on the concepts in my previous books, Reality-Based Leadership and Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace. You will learn to see the science of employee engagement in a new way and understand why the ways organizations have historically measured employee engagement are fundamentally flawed. You will come to understand that the means by which most leaders seek to manage change actually fuels drama and stunts employee development.
In fact, let me tell you a story right now. It happened at a major Midwestern medical center I worked with. In a potentially disastrous situation, a leader who had Reality-Based training asked one key question that led to fast, profound change for her, the employee she was coaching, and the experience of a patient.
A nurse who had just begun her shift entered a patient’s room. Her mission was to explain the surgical procedure for which the patient had been scheduled and outline the preparations that she, as the assigned nurse, would be doing. The details were contained in the electronic medical records.
Unfortunately, the nurse was explaining a procedure that the patient wasn’t scheduled to have. The information on the record was incorrect, and the wrong procedure was listed.
You can imagine the drama that ensued. The patient, already fearful and anxious about having surgery, became borderline hysterical. She questioned the competency of the nurse and the hospital, as well as her decision to have the procedure in the first place. She demanded to leave.
The nurse was equally furious about being put in the position of giving bad information to a patient. Instead of trying to calm the patient down or reassure her that she would get to the bottom of it, she told the patient abruptly, “This is not acceptable! Excuse me. I’ll be back.” And she left the room to find her supervisor.
In an unmitigated state of fury, the nurse catapulted herself into a BMW and drove it to her supervisor’s office. Loudly and angrily, she began to vent. How could admissions be so incompetent? What the [expletive] was she supposed to say to this patient? Errors like these cause patients serious harm, injury, or even death! Someone should be fired! If she, the nurse, had done her job in such a sloppy way, she surely would be. And why should she have to be the one to clean up this mess with the patient?
The leader knew the distraught patient was waiting, and there was no time for extensive coaching or problem-solving. She asked the nurse to take a deep breath or two in order to calm down a bit. She acknowledged the difficult situation. And then she asked the question: “Tell me, what would great look like right now?”
The nurse was taken aback. But to her credit, she took the question seriously.
Well, she said, “great” would be acknowledging to the patient that an error had been made and then doing her best to calm and comfort a fearful, angry person who was asking to be discharged immediately. “Great” would mean tracking down the orders for the procedure the patient was scheduled to have, with the signatures of the patient’s doctors. Another way to be great would be to reassure the patient that the situation was not indicative of the quality of care she could expect from this hospital. It would mean finding the patient’s doctors so they could visit the patient before the procedure and provide additional reassurance. “Great” would be doing everything in her power to serve the patient, doing her utmost to ensure the best possible outcome. And “great” would mean being helpful to other members of the healthcare team instead of criticizing and demanding someone lose his or her job.
“Good,” the supervisor replied. “Then go be great.”
NO EGO CORE BELIEF
Professionals give others the benefit of the doubt—they assume noble intent.
That’s what the nurse did. “Once I went back in there and responded in a way that greatness demanded, the way I think I should have in the first place, it was fine,” she told her supervisor later. “I told the patient that I was happy this mix-up had been caught and I was going to take care of her and make sure she got the procedure for which she was scheduled and the best possible care. I emphasized that everyone at the medical center was committed to her care.”
The patient had been grateful and reassured, and the nurse felt great about helping her get there. Everything turned out the way it should. The nurse acknowledged to the supervisor that after she had calmed down and thought about it, she realized admissions typically did a superlative job. Human errors happen, and the admissions process had been designed with a backstop in mind—it required a second check by the nurse to ensure accuracy of the records.
The nurse would benefit from a similar process backstop, as someone else would be required to check on her work to make sure the patient was safe and treated well and had a great outcome. Even so, the nurse offered to help go over the breakdown with the admissions team in an effort to prevent future errors.
The simple question “What would great look like right now?” is completely disarming. It demands that people reflect on their own contribution to great results. It stops emotional waste in its tracks. It relies on a positive belief that everyone is capable and smart and knows what great looks like. People often just need coaching and encouragement, in the moment, to recognize reality, move beyond their egos, and make the choices that will lead to greatness.
In our work, we tell leaders one of their principal roles is to issue “the call to greatness” and help others be great. That’s the definition of leadership. Keep reading, and we’ll show you how to do it.
Copyright © 2017 by Cy Wakeman