CIOs Must Build Staff Trust in Times of Uncertainty

From the CIO blog ... Toyota Motor Sales CIO Barbra Cooper makes herself more available to staff through fireside chats and by creating her own IT "stimulus package."

How do you keep your staff motivated and inspire courage in this time of job uncertainty?

During a similar time of duress and economic uncertainty in the mid-1980s, I was vice president in charge of a very large IT distributed operation. It was impossible for me to get information from my bosses about what was going on. It was awful; I felt totally hamstrung, and my staff was looking to me to provide them with something. This taught me one of the biggest lessons: People fear the unknown more than they fear bad news. You are far better off saying that you may be facing layoffs at some point, but you don't know when. It gives people an opportunity to plan their lives and prepare for the choices they may face.

The most important strategy at this time is trust. Your staff may not trust the company during a downturn, but if they feel they can trust you and that, at a minimum, you will be fair and forthcoming with information when you know it, they will have more courage in facing ongoing uncertainty.

In a large organization, you have to design some techniques to bring people to the table that don't normally get proximity to you. I bring in groups of five and spend an hour answering their questions in a safe zone where they should feel comfortable and free to ask anything and share their concerns. If your direct reports are doing that too, you can get a critical mass going and keep the lines of communication open. It's a release valve that you can't achieve through internal blogs or the "rah-rah" e-mail that goes out once every couple of weeks. Intimacy is critical.

Read the rest of the article ...

The Horse, the Magpie, the Buffalo and the Hoop

I just received word of a fascinating "multi-media" post from Andrew Campbell, combining Lakota Indian wisdom and the thoughts of a Roman Catholic Priest (Patric). Patric has spent over twenty years studying the works of Maturana, Flores and Varela.

I am posting this because we only recently visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian - and my family and I were touched by the experience and our resultant better understanding of Indian views of the Universe.

As Patric wrote:

"One of the realizations today is this. I trust you.

The 'oar' (your background of human endeavour, human relationships and domains of expertise) are vast and beyond my capability to understand even if we lived together for next 100 years. I do not under-estimate the significance of what we are sharing and effective action is in taking the comment of Maturana and living it with others in real-time and pure-play.

My invitation to you is "open conversations of possible possibilities" within your network of trusted friends, associates and relationships.

In freedom let's see what emerges and I am always already with you in the 'speculative conversations' that may emerge. I am committed to entering effective actions in our heart's desire and I know that all of us are ready for some new 'surprises' to arise in our joyful concern to designing a new future together."

A thoughftul and thought provoking post .... read it here.

You Can Still Lie, Even Without Saying A Word

From the Slow Leadership blog ...

Authentic communication, the cornerstone of all trusting relationships, requires far more than speaking the truth.

Amidst all the articles and advice on being authentic, one area that isn’t looked at as often as it should be is how communication that isn’t authentic destroys trust. I don’t just mean lying — deliberately setting out to mislead or twist the facts. Communication can be just as inauthentic when every word and sentence is correct (factually at least), yet the overall impression left with the other person is derived from a false image of who you are, what you believe and where you are coming from.

In the words of the old song: “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.” The words you use, the tone of voice, the circumstances in which the ‘message’ is passed — even your facial expressions and body language — can all be used to create a false picture in the other person’s mind; one that will give your words a different meaning from their face value. When this happens, your hearers (or readers) are as thoroughly mislead as they would be if every word of what you said or wrote were untrue.

We are surrounded by people who deliberately use words in ways that conceal their true meaning. They add a gloss that changes the message, conceals a hidden agenda, or is designed to evoke specific emotions. All the time, they are calculating what will make what they say convey something other than the plain words express.

Advertisers, copywriters, PR people, spokespeople for special interests, lawyers, politicians: all are adept at using their words to conceal and manipulate. The authenticity of their communication is low because they are striving to create a specific impact, without revealing anything of themselves or what they truly believe. They show little, if any, empathy for those they are dealing with either. They care next to nothing about them, just so long as they react as required and buy, vote or believe in whatever way they are being told to do.

Once people understand what has been going on, they feel cheated and abused — even if the message passed was factually correct. These people — The Manipulators — cannot be trusted because they always have hidden agendas.

Read the rest of the article ....