My mentor sent me a whatsApp with this above newsprint clipping. He must have been as shocked as the rest of us are by the massacre of innocent merry-makers by Stephen Paddock. Paddock graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1971,[13] and from California State University, Northridge, with a degree in business administration in 1977. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock)
Before i thought of sharing with you the conversation i had with my son that followed, i wanted to check the veracity of this printed clip. It can be found here.
Do we need to take cognizance of this
With more and more humans populating the planet, the base of the social pyramid is getting broader and the pyramid itself getting bigger. More Paddocks are likely but can be minimized. Here’s the balance of the text of the photo-clipping:
…Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”
After every inhuman incident, the mind, however briefly, wonders in bewilderment at what might have caused such monstrosity. One wonders what Paddock learnt at high school and at California State University that got so easily over-ruled by some other inhuman motive.
With this recent incident, at the back of my head, I was lunching with my 17 year-old son and asked him, “Did you have moral science or any other subject on human values?”. He tried to recall and said, ” We had VIA, values in action, we had social studies-which i sucked at” he said bashfully, “and some other stuff”. I told him, “During my education we had this thing called moral science. It was full of stories that were so engaging and made such tremendous sense”. He said, “Yes dad, i remember you had shared one of them– the boy who was trapped on a ledge. It was pitch dark and was afraid of jumping to his father’s arms, because he could not see his father who was calling him to do so, from below”. He said, “I would have loved it as long as in the end they don’t starting grading you for it”. That got me thinking.
I said, ” i recall we did have to answer questions, but the marks was not used to grade us”. He said, “That’s fair. It’s alright to test whether the story’s learnings stuck”.
And boy, did it stick. I must have told him the story when he was a 7/8 year old kid and i recall this story i had learnt 40 years ago. I said to him, “What you said makes me recall a quote, ” Not all that can be counted matters. Not all that matters can be counted”. He said, “Yeah i agree. Glad you think so”, winked and left.
” Not all that can be counted matters. Not all that matters can be counted”
Learning human values comes in the second but very critical category. Example, how will you measure an employee’s ‘adhesivity’ to values like Integrity, Other-centeredness, Trusting nature, respectful nature etc..?
The universe has a special way of navigating people’s thinking based on values. With the brain’s neuroplasticity now being accepted, there is less reason to resign to Paddock’s psychopathic behaviour as genetically pre-disposed. The real culprit is not our brain but our education, or gaps thereof -both at home and school.
4 Things leaders can never do enough of:
Given that employees and ‘talents’ come from varied social and value background every workplace needs to:
Teach values in a way that it can be recalled.
Practise it with behaviours- that becomes your company’s culture
Recognize and reward employees every time they demonstrate a value
Make it count even though it cannot be measured.
Values recall: DOT-UP:
Acronym for: Duty towards yourself, Other-centeredness, Trust and Respect, Uncompromising integrity, Peakism
The Mnemonic implies-Emineo Pursuits is just a DOT-UP. We are a small company (a dot) BIG in action, that’s above the best. We want to be humble hence we say we are perhaps just a dot above the best.
Here’s the meaning of these values:
Duty towards yourself: •The only person you owe what you do, is to yourself and your family.
Other-centeredness: •Happiness comes from within. The gratitude you receive from helping others in need of your help, is the fuel that keeps the flame of your happiness burning. This includes customers, partners, colleagues and your family.
Trust and Respect: •Have faith in your character and the universe and admire your colleagues and people around you for what they bring to your workplace and to the world.
Uncompromising integrity: •What’s yours you take what’s not yours you let go and give back. Your conscience is your guide
Peakism: •We practise PEAKISM™, this is where we take care of ourselves.
Peakism is the self-directed habitual behavioural pattern of coming to work holistically well, seeking to contribute sustainable peak performance for your own self-fulfilment. This includes giving yourself permission to rest and rejuvenate.
PEAKISM™ accelerates absorption of values. It is teachable and learnable. www.emineopursuits.com. Refresh your values, refresh your universe.
If you are looking to ‘do’ the focus, focus, focus thing day in day out and getting stressed, you are not alone. The over-emphasis on focusing on tasks to achieve daily goals has become boring. Useful but boring. What can be another, simpler way? Is there even such a thing.
The answer unravels by asking ourselves, what is/are the thing/s that detracts us from focusing. More commonly referred to as distractions, we all succumb to its seductive, insidious embrace to varying degrees and once we realize it, it often leaves us annoyed with ourselves, embarrassed, anxious about the irreversible loss of time. If you see the meanings of the word distraction from Merriam-webster you’ll know why.
A state of wildly excited activity or emotion
The act or activity of providing pleasure or amusement
A state of mental uncertainty
With the lethal combination of mobile phones and internet we can see how much of wild excitation, wild emotion, pleasurable activity and amusement is within arm’s reach…nay in our palms.
Contrast this to the meaning of the word “goal“: Again Merriam-Webster: “something that one hopes or intends to accomplish”. That’s it. Lets check out “task“: ‘a piece of work that needs to be done regularly’. Can there be more boring definition!!
Contrast these two words even when combined, with ‘distraction‘ and you can clearly see who wins.
There is no way that humans would naturally gravitate to focus on tasks when we are naturally pre-disposed to seeking the dopamine rush of distractions.
So is it hopeless? Maybe not..
In Machine learning, much time and effort is spent upfront in ‘cleaning’ the data. Fancifully called exploratory data analysis(EDA). In terms of actual coding one can argue that more than half the overall time taken to develop a machine learning(ML) model, could get consumed just in EDA. One of the major outcomes of doing this is to help the algorithm know what to focus on. For making this happen we study a whole bunch of ‘distractions’ (columns of attributes/dependant variables/themes etc.) very minutely sometimes and then and only then, are we able to eliminate it. There’s a moral here for humans. i.e. we need to study our own distractions and get conscious of it first, before we can more easily and fluently train our mind, just as we train the ML model, on our boring ‘tasks’. The good news is: as in ML, this is a one time exercise.
So here are the 5 things:
Sit in a place. Compose yourself and make a long list of the things that you feel routinely distract you from achieving what you set out to achieve every day.
Study each item on this list and label them as WMC (within my control) or OMC (outside my control)
First look at the OMC labeled items and look at which of these are mitigatable. e.g. a loud colleague distracts. This is an OMC. So look to find a quiet room or a different desk/ area in your workplace to get the more important things done while that colleague is around. Plan to do this. Like this, systematically go down the list of OMCs and think up a mitigation for every OMCs on your list — consciously.
Look at your WMCs. We need to treat these variables with more nuance than OMCs. We give them categorical values 0-Stop, 1-Reduce. There is no 3rd category of Continue. Sorry. And you are the judge. If you categorized any WMC as 1 give yourself a meaningful and actionable handle to actually reduce it i.e. if you are given to watching korean serials on the sly endlessly, give yourself the pleasure of watching it for say 10 mins, and do it without guilt. A measured dose of distractions are good for our well-being. But also add a dis-incentive that it could take you upto 20 mins to shake-off the hangover thoughts. So budget for it. This means you’ll need to budget 10+20 i.e 30 mins time off for a 10 min permitted distraction.
Keep this list in a place you can refer to from time to time. More during the early ‘training’ phase. So you can iteratively arrive at a happy balance.
Here’s the interesting parallel. ML models too, are developed iteratively until the desired accuracy and outcomes are demonstrated. Once you train the model that way and test it, it will run exactly the way you trained it, in the real world. In a very disciplined and trustable way. Likewise for us humans. Once you try out the above 4 steps and tweak it day by day, you will get to a point where you have trained yourself to run your rest of the day smoothly. In a very disciplined and trustable way and for every day of the rest of your life.
And yeah, by the way, you’ll end up accomplishing your tasks alright. Without the cliched focus and consequent stress! Won’t hurt to try. Try it.
Give this approach a shot and share some of your OMCs and WMCs with the other readers and how you will master it.
Because trust plays a big role in your overall performance. Be it at work, at home with your loved ones or in any team sport.
One of 1 Cloud Hub’s greatest corporate values is trust. The other being integrity. Almost all successful companies have trust as a company value. While at HP, Trust is given and its for you to lose, at AWS for example, trust has to be earned. There’s a difference in the two approaches and that impacts behaviours and culture within the company.
While onboarding new employees at HP, I’d ask : “At HP Is trust given or is it to be earned?”. 90% would reply, its to be earned. Because that’s how the world behaves towards strangers. You have to earn someone’s trust. True but at HP, Bill and Dave Packard had the foresight and the opposite recommendation for HP’s employees. We trust our employees. It’s for them to lose.
So whats the diff:
In AWS’s case an employee would constantly be looking into earn everyone’s trust. i.e. you are off the trust boat and have to climb into it.
In HP’s case an employee would constantly be looking to not have people lose their trust. i.e. you are on the trust boat and need to ensure you don’t fall off.
Questions for you to answer and a fun self-assessment tool.
a. In which of these scenario are you like to be more open.
b. In which scenario do you think teamwork is likely to flourish
c. How and when would you ever know that now you have earned everyone’s trust in scenario 1.
d. In which scenario would you like your colleagues to be.
e. what kind of corporate cultures would the two spawn off. HP’s now almost an 80 year old organization and needs no proof point that this way of looking at trust is enduring and has worked
Make your choices and see how it changes the way you view your colleagues.
Before we go judging others here’s a way to judge yourself and raise your own bar.
One of the rare times the YouTube algorithm pushes something that is deeply interesting.
To say Robert O’Neil and his bunch of buddies up at SEAL are awesome, would be crass. Words cannot do justice to what he and his fraternity across the free world do every day to protect the vulnerable and the weak. If you need a refresher on what SEAL means, here’s some help.
For the benefit of some of you, who are in a rush, I’d not want you to miss out on the powerful learnings. Just remember as you read this: We are talking about a SEAL saying this. Here are some gems. There are many more hidden in the video like the one on fear. I’ll leave that for you to dig thru.
“Nobody wants to work for a jerk”. “I had a boss who said please and thank you for normal work, not all the time, but to let you know you’re part of the team” – People skills.
When morale is high the team will work harder”.
“The perfect plan only exists in the planning room, the moment you leave the room Murphy shows up and everything seems to change. Life is happening around you while you are planning this stuff and 95% of the plans that you worry about never happens any way. “What’s the worst that can happen” ” the helicopter could crash in the front yard” and it happened.”
“Know the difference between over-planning and being prepared” – Preparation over planning.
“Your initial reaction is the wrong reaction. Its important to take a second even if a second is all you have, to make and informed decision. I try to apply it every day.”
“Take emotion out of the decision making process”.
Pause to “look at What’s the problem and what’s the emotion I am associating with that problem and that’s enough time to make an informed decision”.
“Even in combat don’t react, do respond “
“You’re having a bad day or series of bad days and you say: “that’s it. I quit, am done”. You’re not having a bad life, You’re having a bad day. Take a rap off, time heals everything, it will get better”
“No matter what, we never quit”.
“Stress is a bag of bricks, which you choose to carry”.
“Stress is a choice. Just put the bag down”.
“When you are done saying what you’re saying”
– stop saying it.
“Never pass up the opportunity”
-to shut up.
“Time heals everything”
Know the vast difference between what you truly hold dear and everything else
“Push to talk – “
– i need you to think (so stop pushin’)
“You are about to go to war for the first time and your enemy is: all your doubts, all your fears and everyone you know back home who told you you were not good enough to do this”.
Keep your head down, keep moving forward and never quit and you will be just fine.
The one that resonated most with me:
“My life starts right now: Am as old as i have ever been, but i’m also as young as i will ever be”.
I know you will apply some of these immediately.
A SEAL is an extreme example of a person demonstrating #PEAKISM(TM) behaviours. Check out how much on your PEAK are you.
Best wishes.
Epilogue
If you do decide to watch the video, or, contributed to one of the 293,344 views including me who have watched it, you are bound to re-live some of the moments O’Neil describes. Like, ” There’s a big difference between saying good night and goodbye to your kids . . . knowing it may be the last time you’ll see them”. This is one of several poignant points in the video. Another is when he shares the reason why its worth taking the trouble to be a SEAL.
“We are not going for fame and we are not going for bravado. We are going for the single mom who dropped her kids off at elementary school on a Tuesday morning and then 45 minutes later she jumped to her death out of a skyscraper, because that was a better alternative than burning alive because it’s 2,500 degrees inside, and her last gesture of human decency, was to hold her skirt down so nobody could see her underwear, as she committed suicide. She didn’t want to do any of that. She wasn’t supposed to be in the fight. We’re supposed to fight that’s why we’re going.”
They find that higher calling to do it. The above anecdote teared me up. Enough said. I’ll let you find what resonates most with you.
Gurunath Hari is the author of “The 6 Dimensions, Overcome Presenteeism: Excel in work and Life”. He has over 25 years of corporate experience, including leadership and management roles. His working life started at the end of the pre-computer era and continues to the present ‘everything-mobile’ era. He with his mentor Sir Prof. Cary Cooper, invented the term PEAKISM – the opposite of presenteeism and absenteeism. The book became an Amazon best seller in 2016.
The kindle and hardcopy version of 6 Dimensions book is available at Amazon!!
Whether its new employee orientation programs or leadership programs, at some point during the course there is an explicit or a subliminal call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there.
I’d like us to explore that a bit. What is “whole being” ? Why is that important? Who does it benefit? How can you do it- sustainably? Is it even achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this. Are they really serious about this or is it one of those desirable holy grails whose cause is lost even before the journey to find it starts? Lets start with the what.
What does leadership mean when they ask of employees to bring their
“whole being”?
Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We’ll settle for one:’constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’.
We human beings are complex. The being is the sum total of our physical, mental, social, financial, environmental and spiritual states and all permutations and combinations of interactions among ourselves from a manifestation of all these states within each of us.
Bring your ‘Whole being’ would mean “Bring your total sum or undiminished entirety to work”. The whole being needs to be focused on producing results for the corporation.
Why is that important?
The oft quoted recent Gallup poll comes to mind. 87% of the global workforce is disengaged and these include all variations of disengagement including presenteeism and absenteeism. If any one of the 6 dimensions called out above are compromised, it impacts the “whole being”. Hence if corporations are serious about having employees bring their whole being leaders and managers would need to take some accountability to enable it besides the employees themselves. We’ll see how in a minute.
Who does it benefit?
The answer to this question may surprise you. The obvious answer is the corporation. The less obvious answer is a whole nation. The reason is because everything in this world is connected. From getting the wonderful news of the complete remission from a life threatening carcinoma of my colleague and friend’s daughter living in a city in the US to News of Michael Schumacher being grievously injured and recently making a recovery. We get it know about it. It takes up mindshare. We connect. It becomes a talking point for many and can detract from our activities. I call these out to remind us of how fragile our attentiveness is. In turn how vulnerable our ability to stay “whole” is. So any investment in bolstering the “whole being” can only yield positive outcomes.
How can you bring your whole-being and do it sustainably?
The tempting answer is..No that’s not possible. And that could well be true i.e. you can attempt to bring your whole being and contribute immensely to your company on one day and another day you could be missing out all the action. So we have a dilemma. The way to tackle that dilemma was partially in my earlier post, CEOs, wake up to Presenteeism in your Organization, June 16, 2014. It starts with measuring Presenteeism. Presenteeism is tactical disengagment. If Presenteeism is neglected or ignored it can lead to chronic presenteeism which then becomes a strategic problem of lack of engagement. So it is the responsibility of the employee to remember and be honest to why they are in the job and here’s what been missing in corporate policy…their side of the wager– which is to not just be interested in the employee’s peak output and opinions but in the well-being of the employee’s ‘whole-being’ as well. In the 100 plus years of the largely western model of large scale businesses, CEOs and managers with very rare exceptions have fought shy of caring for the employee holistically. Some believe that by offering extended insurance coverage to employees’ families its a done thing. It’s neither a done thing nor is it an equitable balance of trade. Employees are expected to give up their discretionary time even to meet corporate objectives and are not expected to get more than what’s on contract in terms of total rewards. So here’s the thing…Corporations cannot expect sustainability until they play their part in nurturing it. The challenge and opportunity is in How can you nurture it? There are some ideas later in this post.
What’s stopping CEOs from making this achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this.
Here are a few reasons why nurturing sustainability is a challenge:
1. Its getting into unchartered territory. In today’s VUCA world, besides few CEOs/ex-CEOs like those of Costco, HCL or Zappos, no one is willing to make that mental shift and walk the talk of “We Value our people”. Its more truthfully rather, We value our people’s contribution. We need to develop the will to change that.
2. Belief systems that are rooted in old-world thinking – The demographics of Most CEOs of large successful corporations world-wide are para-Baby Boomers. These folks did not have to carry laptops and get pinged 24×7 in their most productive years of their lives. I am one of them. Once you have lived long enough in that rarefied orbit and made it big, its an entirely different world of priorities. It scares the daylights out of us to even imagine how complicated the life of a Gen X/Gen Y call-center employee is in trying to balance his 14 hour work day with a working wife, a pair of elderly parents and a new born kid to boot. Multiply that by the number of employees in that mode and we’ll choose to steer away from it.
Whereas Gen X and Gen Y folks have inherited a different work culture. One that demands them to be ON 24×7, one where its relatively easy to be substituted, one where change is the norm. Yet they get to see very little in terms of support on several of the essential dimensions of wellness. So here’re some ideas worth sharing on what motivates these folks: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/206502
3. The tools of nurturing are still being invented. The best tool corporations have today is Mentoring. Its a great start. The opportunity to take this forward and deeper is there. Dr. James Prochaska and team uncovered 11 factors that can act as barriers to sustained productivity in their paper “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism”. Look out for means to uncover these in ways that Gen X and Yers are comfortable participating in i.e.mix of using electronic means to communicate with them and face-to-face meetings. This generation is far more fluent and comfortable with technology than any other group and today forms the bulk of the workforce. CEOs should invest in looking for the means to uncover these barriers. The investment will pay back with interest over time.
Its doable with the following simple things in place:
1. Senior Leadership’s collective will to truly value employee’s sustained well-being and Not an employee’s sustained output alone. The former precedes the latter. The evidence of this collective shift will be seen when this will prompt Strategic initiatives and allocation of funds to take action, create metrices and provide the necesary trainings and alignements in HR policy to support the “whole-being” while on the job and beyond even.
2. Choosing the most suitable partner(s) to provide an unambiguous process, the IT framework, and governance to periodically run assessments, guide targetted mentoring and training and measure outcome and trends. Start small with a pilot over 6 months and 100 employees and test the results. Learn from it, iterate and move forwards.
3. Look for associations between this strategic initiative and business successes over a couple of quarters and feed it back to the employees that the new actions fostering and nurturing the “whole being” are a true win-win!
4. Encourage everyone to become ambassadors and Multipliers of the new initiative. In the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Wiseman and McKeown look at various types of leaders and identifies two different types of leaders, Diminishers and Multipliers. Multipliers see genius in others; create intensity that requires best thinking; extend challenges; debate decisions; and instill ownership and accountability. On the other hand are so called Accidental Diminishers. Those who hinder and otherwise keep their employees’ productivity at a minimum. The authors give what they consider to be solutions and guidance to the issues they bring up in the book.
Recall that Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We settled for one: ‘constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’. So lets refrain from hindering action or ignoring the effort needed to foster the “whole-being” and lets refuse to become a collective accidental Diminisher at such a most foundational level.
In conclusion: Whether its a new employee or senior leaders and mid-level managers there is an ever-present call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there.
What has been your experience…what actionable ideas might you suggest to make you sustainably whole at work?
Presenteeism has been called “working while unwell,” and is meant to refer to the lack of productivity, and cost to employers, when employees show up to work at less than full steam.
It represents disengagement with the task at hand for whatever reason, not just during cold and flu season. Simply put, it is a multi-billion dollar global concern and your company is more likely than not, contributing to that statistic. Yet, try dropping the word presentee or presenteeism in your day to day conversations with your leadership team and you’ll typically get a bewildered look. I get that half teasing statement even, ” You made that word up, didn’t you”. I didn’t but Prof. Cary Cooper did in the mid-nineties and it is now a mainstream term. Dictionary.com defines pres·en·tee·ism [prez-uhn-tee-iz-uhm] as a noun:
2. T hepracticeofworkinglonghoursatajobwithouttherealneedtodoso.
Do the factors that cause people to be presentees resonate with you?
The modern day Presenteeism is a result of barriers to an employee’s wellness. In a seminal study, “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism,”James O. Prochaska, et al, captured a holistic set of well-being related performance barriers. Their study revealed two distinct clusters—personal barriers and work-related barriers. Each of these barriers were chosen from many other factors based on how strongly they co-related with productivity loss. In the end, 11 factors were cited between the two clusters. One cluster cited personal related causes of presenteeism.
Health
Caring for others
Financial
Personal issues
Depressed/stressed
… while the other cluster cited workplace related causes of presenteeism.
Lack of Resources
Issues with coworkers
Not enough time
Issues with supervisor
Technical issues
Lack of training
A Quick Practical way to measure it
There are simple yet smart ways to assess Presenteeism in your company. Once that’s done its an easy task to quantitatively estimate the $ impact to your business from the loss of productivity.
In a letter to persons interested in “content and scoring rules for the WHO HPQ absenteeism and presenteeism questions,” dated May 1, 2007, Ron Kessler, Maria Petukhova and Keith McInnes of the Harvard Medical School, and T. Bedirhan Üstün, of the WHO gave a quick way to compute presenteeism as shown below. They extracted the key questions from the WHO HPQ survey. Try this simple one-question dip-stick test with a sample of your workers and see what you get:
B 9 — On a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is the worst job performance anyone could have at your job and 10 is the performance of a top worker, how would you rate the usual performance of most workers in a job similar to yours?
Worst Performance Top Performance
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
The scoring rules are pretty straight forward: Absolute Presenteeism % scoring rule: 10 x B9
Start by thinking about your role.
Walk through the above question, and answer it with honesty.
What answer did you get for Absolute Presenteeism?
Ask each employee in your team to answer the question with all honesty. Compute the average Absolute Presenteeism. Taking the average Absolute Presenteeism as a percentage times the sum of annual salary of the employees in that team will give you the estimated gain in productivity if you removed the individual barriers leading to each employee’s presenteeism.
My research efforts into how these barriers get addressed today resulted in a shocking revelation. These range from being totally ignored to pill-popping lip-service. Addressing the root causes of the factors is the way to go. Its non-intuitive but doable.
How does your organization estimate the prevalence of presenteeism?
