Reality Check
Get real! It’s difficult to imagine how many millions of times a day that phrase is used around the world. Get real. Be practical. It can be heard on street corners, at cocktail parties and in corporate boardrooms. Frequently, the speaker uses it as a command to dash the aspirations of a person or an organization. Stop daydreaming! What you’re talking about is never going to happen!
We see it differently. Getting real and being practical are essential qualities for the kind of principled behavior that increasingly drives successful business. 
That’s why HOW Online seeks to explore the everyday challenges that confront business leaders at all levels as they seek success through innovation in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
“Talent on demand,” for example, is how management expert Edward Lawler describes the emerging model for relationships between many companies and their employees. In an interview currently featured on HOW, Lawler explains that notions of corporate loyalty are quickly morphing, with companies and employees professing loyalty to one another as long as they’re engaged, but neither having any expectation that the relationship will last forever. It is, Lawler says, “a kind of serial monogamy relationship” required for rapid change in “a new era of organization and design management.”
Managing in that environment is not easy. The success of any business is dependent in large measure on its corporate culture, and that is shaped and influenced by myriad details. Culture is a company’s DNA, the sum total of its history, values, aspirations, beliefs and endeavors.
If Ed Lawler is correct and corporate loyalty has become a temporary relationship - if a friendly divorce is contemplated from the very start - how is a company’s mission understood? How are values expressed? Uniting a group of people behind a single goal or set of goals presents the greatest challenge to any leader; achieving that alignment results in the greatest success. In an environment marked by rapid and constant change, managers and employees all need to be leaders in order to align their interests for their common benefit.
That is all the more true at a time when three different generations - Baby Boomer (born 1945-64), Generation X (1965-84) and Generation Y (1985 and later) - toil together in the workplace, each with very different expectations and values. HOW’s current feature story on “The Generation Gap” seeks to compare and contrast generations by asking more than two dozen workers of varying ages the same question: “How would you react if you were asked to take on additional responsibilities at work - with no extra compensation or incentives?”
The piece finds that for every age group, the prospect of extra work with no compensation raises complex issues of employee trust, loyalty and corporate culture. Representing one extreme is Baby Boomer Kevin Harville: “I realized that I could save my employer a million dollars and still not get recognized for it.” The other extreme is Erin Hay, a Gen Y human-resource specialist: “If the additional responsibility was a good learning or growth opportunity, I would probably accept.”
What’s fascinating, however, is something the generations share: a desire for their hard work to contribute to a common good. “I believe in our company and I’ll do what it takes to see our unique concept succeed,” says Gen X copywriter Scott Hepburn. To varying degrees, that sentiment is echoed by workers of all ages; doing the right thing is a goal that transcends age difference.
How are organizations responding to these challenges? The answer to that question is decidedly mixed. Another current feature, the Value of Corporate Values Study, which polled 150 senior leaders, found that as organizations confront a troubled economy, nearly 50 percent seem to value employees who are inspired by values when making decisions to downsize teams and resources.
In fact, one in two business leaders claim their companies are placing greater emphasis on their mission and values in inspiring greater performance from their employees than in the period before the economic downturn. However, less than one in three companies plan on actually investing more dollars and resources in stressing employee alignment with their mission and values as a means to inspire greater performance.
So it seems that companies are recognizing the benefits of values-based cultures. But the data also shows that the transition to such a culture can be difficult, with companies often struggling to break historical ties to 20th century ways of finding advantage.
Some would say such thinking is pragmatic. The problem is that pragmatic thinking tends to embrace short-term benefits and alleviate immediate pain, but it produces unintended consequences with often long-term consequences. In the 21st century business world, “talent on demand” and the “generation gap” are the reality - as is how business leaders need to provide a steady course in this now-uncertain economy, the subject of my current HOW feature on the era of inspirational leadership. In this modern world, the reality is that only principled decision making can guide the kind of consistency of purpose one needs to earn trust and reputation.
Our recommendation: Get real!
Last 5 posts by Dov Seidman
• Outgreening and Sustainable Competitive Advantage - December 8th, 2008
• Friedman to Wall Street: Get Your HOWs Right - October 15th, 2008
• Outperforming by 'Outbehaving' - October 7th, 2008
• Inspirational Leadership in Difficult Times - October 2nd, 2008
• From Success to Significance - September 5th, 2008
