Reclaiming Higher Ground

If re-engineering was the answer, what was the question? Why are old-style business leaders, in their desperate search for answers, finding no relief in traditional techniques such as empowerment, customer service, total quality and re-engineering? Why hasn't it worked? Why are millions of Souls hurting? Why do 80% dislike their work? Why do the majority of heart attacks and strokes occur on Monday mornings? Why are four fifths of the world's population suffering from a hunger of the body and one fifth suffering from a hunger of the soul?

The Universe is sending us a wake-up call. Clearly, something is missing from modern organizations. That something is respect for the Soul. For more than a century, organizations have been appealing to the personality. Now it is time to appeal to the soul. We don't need re-engineering, we need regenerating. Reclaiming Higher Ground describes a new paradigm in which organizations reinvent themselves by regenerating people and inspiring their souls - a Total Quality Program for people and their spirits.

A new era is emerging, led by pioneers who speak to our hearts and our minds. Reclaiming Higher Ground proposes changes that promise to transform organizations so radically, they will no longer exist as we have known them. He challenges us to realize our potential by transforming workplaces into what he has called, Sanctuaries, where we:

• Make Work Soulful
• Replace Controls with Culture and Values
• Restore Values in the Workplace
• Provide Open-book Management
• Dismantle Functional Hierarchies
• Mend Relationships (Friendships) at Work
• Nourish Creativity, Innovation and Improvement
• Deepen our Communications (Conversations)
• Build Self-esteem & Personal Durability through Learning
• Design Compensation Plans that Reward the Soul
• Transform Corporate Ownership
• Create Work Environments that Inspire the Soul
• Trust People to Make People Decisions
• Remove the Toxic Concept of Competition
• Become Active Community Leaders
• Redefine the Role of Profit

Capitalism has survived the contest with communism, but it is now challenged by a more dangerous threat - extinction of the soul. No institution on Earth has equaled democratic capitalism in its accomplishments for humanity and none holds as much promise for meeting and enhancing the expectations of ordinary people. As evolved leaders, we are the new missionaries and it is our responsibility to assume our true role as custodians of the human spirit by creating the appropriate environment in which the soul can flourish. Leaders who offer a soaring vision of their organization's purpose on this planet will create soulful workplaces - Sanctuaries - that invite employees to bring their souls, as well as their minds, to work.

This is the Higher Ground that beckons. This describes how we reclaim it by doing things differently, paying attention to the Heart, Mind and Bottom Line.

Definitions

The Primary Values (Mastery, Chemistry and Delivery)

MASTERY: Undertaking whatever you do to the highest standards of which you are capable.

Mastery is possessing a commitment to do what it takes to be the best in whatever we do, being devoted to continuous personal and professional improvement, to setting standards for personal development, polishing one's skills, competencies and practices, being an expert and respecting knowledge, wisdom and learning. Mastery embodies a commitment to excellence in everything one does. Walt Disney used to tell his employees, "Do what you do so well, that others will come to see you do it again." That's Mastery. The mission of all of us is the same: to do what we do so well that others will come to see us do it again - no matter what we do.

CHEMISTRY: Relating so well with others that they actively seek to associate themselves with you.

People with Chemistry possess characteristics and attitudes that favor building strong relationships. They place a high value on harmonious interaction with others, taking the initiative to repair, maintain and build friendships, and they seek to fathom the depths of their relationships, going beyond the usual superficialities. They know that interest is the most sincere form of respect. Truth-telling and promise-keeping are keystones of Chemistry and result in the establishment of emotional bonds with others built on trust. Those with Chemistry enjoy the company of others as much as their own solitude, being a team player as much as a soloist.

DELIVERY: Identifying the needs of others and meeting them.

Delivery is being respectful of the needs of others and having a passion for meeting them. This focus on the needs of others is motivated by enlightened self-interest and altruism. Delivery honors meeting the needs of customers over mere profit-making. Delivery is founded on "win/win" deals and relationships that treat customers, employees and suppliers as partners rather than adversaries. Delivery is being concerned with doing the right thing more than doing things right.

The Accelerators (Learning, Empathizing and Listening)

Learning: Seeking and practicing Learning and Wisdom.

Learning: If Mastery is chopping wood, then Learning is sharpening the ax. The dictionary defines leading as "showing the way to" and teaching as "showing how to." Therefore, leading is teaching and teachers show learners how to learn. To acquire greater Mastery, this learning must come from masters - in person and through their teachings. Mastery is never perfect, just as there is no perfect knowledge or wisdom. Knowledge and wisdom are always incomplete and so continuous learning - that is, life-long learning - is essential if continuous Mastery is to flourish in all areas of our work and personal lives. Notice that the value is learning not training: training is for dogs - learning is an attitude.

Empathizing: Considering the thoughts, feelings and perspectives of others.

Empathizing: To be a friend (Chemistry), we must walk in the moccasins of others, because to relate well with them, we must first understand them. This is often best achieved by imagining their feelings, emotions and sensitivities, thinking how we would feel if we were in their situation and then trying to behave as we would want them to. So our goal is to be in a continuous state of empathy, behaving in a way that would make each of us the kinds of people with whom we would want to be friends if our roles were reversed. This leads to great Chemistry.

Listening: Hearing and understanding the communications of others.

Listening: We cannot meet the needs of others (Delivery) if we do not pause to hear what those needs are. Listening is not, "not talking." To truly listen, we must shut down our "mental chatter" and genuinely, and non-judgmentally, listen to each other. Then, and only then, can we hear their needs, and only then will we be in a position to take the appropriate actions to meet them. Of all human skills, listening is perhaps the most difficult. In one exercise I sometimes use in my seminars, participants are required not to talk, but only to listen to each other. They always tell me how exhausting they find a full day of enforced silence. This is because it is an unfamiliar activity for them. The fact that it is such hard work probably explains why we do so little of it - there is a reason why we have one mouth and two ears! We are experiencing a growing social ailment - a sense that we are not being heard. It starts in our youth, with our parents and friends, and continues throughout our lives. Unconditional and totally attentive listening is a beautiful gift to the soul of another. Arguments and conflicts are caused when people stop listening to each other, focusing instead on convincing others of their points of view, explaining them to each other in as many different ways as possible until they "win." Conversely, conflicts are always resolved as soon as both parties agree only to ask questions, cease making assertions and listen.

The Shifts

The values on the back wheel provide Power to our lives and our organizations, as well as Acceleration. But our motives can be flawed unless they are tempered by the values on the front wheel, which provide our Direction. While most of us are familiar with the back wheel values, to a greater or lesser degree, we simply need to increase our practice of them. This cannot be said of the front wheel values; they are qualitatively different. Most of us are not committed practitioners of the values on the front wheel - in fact, we need to shift from "old" values to these "new" ones. This is why we call them "Values Shifts."

The Back Wheel Shifts

"Shift from ME to YOU"

From me to you. We are emerging from one of the most self-absorbed eras in human history. The personality-driven way is dangerously egocentric. The Values Cycle is other-centered and seeks win/win combinations. It assumes that when we help others to win, we all win. It recognizes that a proposition that is good for me but bad for you is, in the end, bad for both of us. It eschews egocentric forms of structure such as "self-directed teams," favoring instead a holistic, systems approach in which the members of any team are sensitive to their impact on all other parts of the system. The shift from ME to YOU assumes that a customer is more than a walking credit card.

For each of us, our mission is to meet the needs of employees, customers and suppliers, and if we do so brilliantly, all the time, we will be rewarded with a team of dedicated and loyal employees who no longer dread work but celebrate its rewards and have fun, a growing legion of customers who become our fans and a support team of suppliers who love doing business with us. More importantly, a shift from me to you offers a much needed balance to the preoccupations flowing from our personalities, by shifting our focus from increasing our market share, sales, cash flow or power to being of service to others and our planet.

"Shift from THINGS to PEOPLE"

From things to people. Helmsley, Milken and Trump perfected the science of questing for things. The genius of Western management has been our unsurpassed ability to acquire, measure, analyze and count things. But in revering analysis and acquisition we have forgotten that organizations are the sum of people not of things. Now, we must catch up by developing the soft technologies of The Values Cycle. The things approach obeys politics, procedures, policies, manuals, formal systems and salary levels. The things approach prompts retailers to forbid customers from taking more than three garments into a changing room. The people approach, as practiced by Don Cooper, a Toronto fashion retailer, is a sign proclaiming, "Please - take as many items into the change room as you wish." The things approach assumes that you can't trust people and that systems must be established to protect retailers, for example, from the dishonesty of customers. The people approach recognizes the universal desire of people to be trusted, respected and loved. In the Sanctuary, "people are our most important asset" is not a slogan but a genuine concept. Mechanical organizations have not yet made this discovery. If they really believed this much in the value of people, they would be included in the balance sheet. Some will suggest that goodwill is a means of defining the human asset in the balance sheet, but goodwill is a concept of the mind not of the heart. It is the personality's definition of people in the balance sheet, and a clumsy and inadequate measurement of the most precious asset in any organization of souls. Until we consider people to be a superior asset to things, we cannot be taken seriously when we proclaim, "people are our most important asset." The technology for doing so is known; the will to do so remains absent.

"Shift from BREAKTHROUGH to KAIZEN"

From Breakthrough to Kaizen. The favorite heroes of management gurus are breakthrough specialists: great inventors, entrepreneurs, promoters and marketers. They are the hares who turn their innovative breakthroughs into personal fortunes, but we need to celebrate tortoises too - and just as passionately. As Aesop said, "Slow and steady wins the race." There are two ways to grow: by innovating (finding a different way) and kaizen (finding a better way).

The capacity to do the same thing a little bit better every day may not look like a spectacular achievement in the short run, but it is in the long run. The Japanese call this kaizen: Continuous improvement in personal life, home life, social life and work life, involving everyone. Kai-zen is a Japanese word that literally translates into "better way." But it is not simply a Japanese idea; it is an intelligent idea. It is an attitude that honors the act of micro-excellence achieved through daily personal mastery and learning.

A kaizen team at a ball bearing manufacturer detected a minor problem on the assembly line. Bearings of different sizes were dropped from a hopper on the assembly line, into the boxes that were eventually sold in stores. The entire process of production and packaging was automated. But customers were complaining that sometimes they got a box containing no ball bearings. This would occur once in every 100,000-200,000 boxes (a quality ratio that most Western executives can only dream about). Although the cost of replacing empty boxes after delivery was minimal, the kaizen team convinced the company that inclusion of the empty box itself could seriously damage the company's reputation.

The kaizen team originally suggested installing an X-ray system to detect the empty boxes, but they abandoned this idea because of its high cost. They tried many other ideas but these failed to meet cost/benefit criteria. After discussing it further, they came up with the solution: a small $9.99 fan. They installed it at the side of the assembly line so that it blew the empty (and therefore lighter) boxes right off the line. Later they upgraded the process by using pressurized air that was readily available in the factory. Now, with minimal expense, the company was error-free - 100% of the time. The kaizen team practiced what the Japanese call warusa-kagen: things that are not yet problems, but are still not quite right. All values honor the needs of others, but Kaizen is a process for doing so.

Such dedication to continuous improvement propels organizations to excellence and builds the self-esteem of individuals and teams. While acknowledging the importance of being a world class innovator (by finding a different way), The Values Cycle recognizes that it is just as important to practice kaizen (by finding a better way). This subtle difference propels outstanding individuals and therefore organizations into a class of their own.

"Shift from WEAKNESSES to STRENGTHS"

From weaknesses to strengths. Researchers claim that during an average business meeting each idea introduced is met with nine criticisms. According to Dr. Marilyn L. Kourilsky, former dean for teacher education at UCLA's Graduate School of Education, 97% of U.S. kindergarten children think creatively, only 3% form their thoughts in a conforming, structured manner. By the time they complete high school, the balance has begun to shift - 46% think creatively while a more rigid, structured style is preferred by 54%. The process of losing our individuality, passion and creativity is completed in the workplace: by the time we are 30, a mere 3% enjoy the freedom of practicing holistic, original thought processes, while 97% of us subject all our thinking to a structure which screens for orthodoxy and social correctness - "group-think." In other words, we begin our lives honoring the magic of questions but eventually, by overlooking questions and only being open to answers, we fall under a spell of spiritual impotence. We do not start out thinking like traditional managers - it is something that we acquire. By criticizing, judging and jeering we suck the self-esteem from the souls of individuals and therefore organizations. When we get the financial statements, we immediately hunt for the red ink, the brackets, and the negative performance data. Too seldom, do we celebrate our strengths or study and perfect our successes. By mistakenly placing our faith in the Aristotelian notion that by attacking ideas we will strengthen them, we have perfected our mechanical skills of rational thinking and criticism. But imagine if every person and every organization devoted as much passion and time to building on their strengths: our souls would begin healing until we became awesome.

Psychologist, James Loehr, has helped to train, among others, tennis great, Martina Navratilova. Loehr has studied what the best tennis players do when they take a 20-second break between points during a match. Loehr discovered that mediocre players use that time to react to the previous point - scolding themselves, after a missed point, for example. The best players, Loehr found, spend the time preparing for the next point, relaxing, energizing themselves, planning their strategy and tuning their minds.

"Shift from COMPETITION and FEAR to LOVE"

From Competition, Hostility and Fear to Love. Winning has come to mean defeating one's opponent - it seems there must always be a loser. Metaphors of war spike the vocabulary of modern leadership. One of the highest paid speakers on the rubber chicken circuit is "Stormin'" Norman Schwarzkopf who earns $75,000 each time he tells business executives that leading a business team is the same as leading a war machine. Aspiring leaders devour titles such as The Art of War for Executives, Marketing Warfare, The Leadership Secrets of Atilla the Hun and How to Swim with the Sharks. The first of these books, which is based on the teachings of Sun Tzu, a Chinese military expert from 2,500 years ago, advises us that, "The secret of deception is knowing how to manipulate an enemy's perceptions" and "Fighting many is the same as fighting few". Life has become an endless competition, in which we are all gladiators at some level, seeking to vanquish our opponents (who in truth are our colleagues) at school, work, home - even within our own country.

Life is not a battleground - it's a playground. War or the fear of losing does not motivate people. We would rather be alive serious than dead serious. Virtuoso performances are romanced from people not beaten out of them. If we love what we do (Mastery), love the people with whom we do it (Chemistry), and love the reason for doing it (Delivery), would we still call it work? People are inspired to do what they do well by the love they feel for what they do (Mastery), by the people they do it with (Chemistry), and by their reasons for doing it (Delivery).