No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results

No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results

by Cy Wakeman
No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results

No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results

by Cy Wakeman

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Overview

The New York Times bestselling author of Reality-Based Leadership rejects the current fad of "engaging" employees and the emotional drama of "meeting their needs"--returning leadership to leaders and productivity to businesses.

For years now, leaders in almost every industry have accepted two completely false assumptions--that change is hard, and that engagement drives results. Those beliefs have inspired expensive attempts to shield employees from change, involve them in high-level decision-making, and keep them happy with endless “satisfaction surveys” and workplace perks. But what these engagement programs actually do, Cy Wakeman says, is inflate expectations and sow unhappiness, leaving employees unprepared to adapt to even minor changes necessary to the organization’s survival. Rather than driving performance and creating efficiencies, these programs fuel entitlement and drama, costing millions in time and profit.

It is high time to reinvent leadership thinking. Stop worrying about your employees’ happiness, and start worrying about their accountability. Cy Wakeman teaches you how to hire “emotionally inexpensive” people, solicit only the opinions you need, and promote self-awareness in your whole team. No Ego disposes with unproven HR maxims, and instead offers a complete plan to turn your office from a den of discontent to a happy, productive place.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250149732
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/19/2017
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 404,794
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

CY WAKEMAN is a drama researcher, international leadership speaker, and consultant. In 2001 she founded Reality-Based Leadership. She is the author of two books, Reality-Based Leadership: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace, and Turn Excuses into Results (2010) and the New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace: Know What Boosts Your Value, Kills Your Chances, and Will Make You Happier (2013). In 2017 she was named as one of the Top 30 Global Leadership Gurus by Global Gurus, a Top 100 Leadership Expert to Follow on Twitter, and was deemed "the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace." She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
CY WAKEMAN is a drama researcher, international leadership speaker, and consultant. In 2001 she founded Reality-Based Leadership. She is the author of Reality-Based Leadership, No Ego, and the New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace. In 2017, she was named as one of the Top 30 Global Leadership Gurus by Global Gurus, a Top 100 Leadership Expert to Follow on Twitter, and was deemed "the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace." She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

DRAMA AND THE DATA

As a committed lover of reality and a student of the facts, my career has been built on deconstructing conventional wisdom and helping people stop counterproductive practices. One of the ways I do this is with scientific studies. As I do research, counterintuitive truths often emerge. When I find something to be the opposite of what I had thought was true, I get super jazzed because of the opportunities that presents.

When I was confronted with a leadership dilemma in the early 1990s, a research project (chronicled in my first book, Reality-Based Leadership) and an accidental discovery led me to become what I consider myself today, a drama researcher.

I was working as a clinical coordinator of several small clinics associated with a large medical center. At that time, cutting-edge technology had me excited about rocking the physicians' worlds with an electronic medical record that would make cumbersome paper charts obsolete. Physicians and staff would be able to enter their notes into a computer in real time. Genius! This technology would make doctors more efficient and give them more time to focus on patients. No longer would they have to dictate comments and wait to review transcriptions of patient notes. Patient records would be centralized and accessible to providers no matter where patients entered the medical system — via the Emergency Care department, the clinic, or hospital admissions. The technology would lead to patients getting higher-quality care with more consistency. We were making a rational move based on a well-developed business plan. Slam dunk, I thought.

Except the physicians weren't ready to have their world rocked. They were openly opposed to using the technology and skeptical about the purported time savings. This small ripple of skepticism led to waves of resistance that churned the entire system. Physicians were convinced this new tool would slow them down, so I fell back on what I knew. My team and I would gather data and see what reality said.

We created a time-study research project. I was excited about flexing my research muscles but wanted to keep the project simple. Observers were assigned to watch physicians as they worked in the exam rooms and to record time increments in one of two columns. The first column tracked the time physicians spent working directly with patients. The second documented time they spent typing notes into the computer. The data collected would allow us to compare the findings with existing data on time spent documenting patient records.

It wasn't long before the observers called to tell me they needed a third column. They insisted something was showing up that we hadn't factored in. Initially I resisted adding a third bucket of data collection because I didn't want the complication. But the third column turned out to provide the most startling revelation in the study.

The Genesis of Emotional Waste

The third column revealed that physicians spent about two hours a day kvetching about the new technology or about the patients. Many doctors even crossed the line of professionalism by complaining about their new work reality to the patients. You don't have to be an expert in research to see the problem with that.

Two hours? Physicians could have invested that time in developing their technology skills, strengthening their patient relationships, and adding value to the enterprise they had committed to serve. Physicians could have used those two hours to get ready for what was next.

In that first study, we hadn't "seen" the need to include a third column because it didn't occur to us that drama-engendered resistance to a new technology would create a major leakage in the productivity pipeline. The technology worked just fine. The resistance to the change, however, eroded the potential efficiency it was designed to create. The study made that visible.

Over the years, it has become clear to me that this study was no outlier. I have observed the same phenomenon with team after team, with department after department, and in organization after organization. Drama generates emotional waste, draining the organization's time and energy. It contributes to destroying the most considered and strategic business decisions. This is why I call myself a drama researcher, and such research has been at the heart of my work for decades.

Taking a Fresh Look

After several years of working in organizations, my team and I decided to revisit, expand, and validate that original research project. We wanted to see how things might have changed since the early 1990s and to expand our knowledge about how leaders deal with emotional waste. We partnered with The Futures Company, a company that specializes in understanding and anticipating change and identifying trends.

We surveyed 800 leaders from more than 100 companies that represent medical, technology, manufacturing, and financial organizations. For purposes of the survey, we defined "emotional waste" as "mentally wasteful thought processes or unproductive behavior that keeps leaders or their teams from delivering the highest level of results." We created questions to calculate the time leaders spend dealing with the workplace drama that generates emotional waste, behaviors such as:

1. Lack of ownership, accountability, commitment

2. Blaming circumstances or other people for lack of results

3. Arguing with circumstances that were nonnegotiable

4. Resistance to change

5. Lack of buy-in to organizational strategies

6. Spreading gossip

7. Projecting (and believing) made-up stories instead of focusing on facts

8. Defensiveness to feedback

9. Dealing with hurt feelings

The survey also sought to know whether leaders believed that dealing with those behaviors was a good use of their time. It asked whether leaders had training programs to deal with such issues and whether their efforts to stop emotional waste worked.

Organizations invest heavily in HR-sponsored initiatives such as employee engagement programs, leadership training, and other ways to increase productivity, so we also surveyed Human Resources leaders. We wanted to discover how much time HR leaders saw disappearing due to emotional waste and the kinds of drama they saw fueling it. Did they see defusing drama as a productive use of their time? Of leaders' time?

Finally, we wanted to get a vivid picture of how drama shows up. Our analysis could illuminate how much emotional waste is costing the bottom line and give us a feel for the cultural collateral damage (i.e., lowered motivation and morale) it causes.

The Headline: Emotional Waste Is Increasing

The biggest surprise that emerged from the study was that, since the 1990s, time lost in drama at work had increased. The data showed leaders were spending almost 2.5 hours a day in drama that creates emotional waste at work.

Sit with that number for a moment. Roll it around in your head.

Nearly 2.5 hours a day, more than 17 hours a week, 68 hours a month, 816 hours a year, multiplied by the number of people in your organization, is leaking out of the business. These numbers likely reveal what you already have felt at work: the wasted time, the energy drain, and the difficulty accomplishing things that shouldn't be that hard.

In the survey, leaders were asked to identify the major sources of drama that they experienced ("drama" was defined as "mentally wasteful thought processes or unproductive behaviors"). There was high agreement between the leaders' group and the HR leaders' group on major sources of drama. Based on the highest-ranked sources of drama on which they spent the most time, the responses boiled down to five major categories (a scattering of one-off listings were outliers and accounted for 10 percent of the responses, of which the highest was 3 percent and the rest were minimal):

These are the five categories traditional leadership philosophy has concentrated on for more than 30 years. And the focus of our work at Reality-Based Leadership is to move beyond these worn-out leadership philosophies and strategies and to call for very different approaches to these sources of drama.

To reduce the amount of emotional waste in the workplace, leaders need to challenge current thinking about these five categories. The role of leadership must change so it can more effectively address the waste and drama created by these behaviors and mental processes. In addition, leaders need to be better equipped to defuse the drama driven by these main sources of emotional waste.

Leaders who become fluent in bypassing the ego will address more than 30 percent of the issues and have the biggest opportunity to eliminate waste in the workplace by facilitating No Ego Moments with their teams. The remainder of the sources of waste can be addressed by evolving the current thinking in HR and leadership development by questioning long-held beliefs and assumptions about change management, engagement, accountability, and buy-in.

Almost half of the leaders surveyed recognized that dealing with drama behaviors was not a productive use of their time. And 62 percent said they had learning and development tools and programs to deal with the issue. But in spite of such resources, 2.5 hours a day continued to leak out of the productivity pipeline due to emotional waste.

The average worker spends 2.5 hours per day in drama.

Why is this happening? Why aren't those tools, techniques, and training working? What is preventing leaders from plugging up the leaks emotional waste generates?

Traditional tools and programs being taught and used over the last few decades simply don't work for six reasons:

1. They feed the ego.

2. They tolerate dissent to nonnegotiable strategic decisions.

3. They focus on fostering engagement but without accountability, which leads to entitlement.

4. They coddle people's preferences rather than helping them grow their business readiness.

5. They don't help employees develop better mental processes through reflection and heightened self-awareness.

6. They actually generate, rather than eliminate, emotional waste.

This list reflects the flawed logic that Human Resource philosophies and programs have been delivering to leaders for years, with serious, damaging results. Employee engagement and change management programs employed over the last three decades are broken and have proven to be counterproductive. The result has been that organizations are inadvertently creating coddled workforces that demand leaders motivate them, boost morale, and make them happy. How is that even possible?

Today's work experience is so full of emotional waste that for many people, it's seen as normal. It's considered a cost of doing business, an inevitable surtax you pay for working with complex human beings. But once our research had identified, named, and helped us understand emotional waste, it was clear that the financial impact was real. Since that time, I have devoted my career to helping people recapture the time spent on fruitless drama and redirect it to add value and great results.

Hello, My Name Is Reality. Have We Met?

We all have mental filters that distort or obscure reality and transform it into a self-serving, ego-approved story. Our stories are invented to make us look good or excuse our lack of action. They support our viewpoints so that we can get what we want. These stories make us feel safe, let us off the hook, and give us someone to blame when we don't get what we want. The mental filters are the opposite of prescription eyeglasses, which are designed to help us see more clearly.

As a therapist, I saw great benefit in helping my clients bypass ego and get acquainted with reality. We worked together to deconstruct ego-infused stories to reveal the circumstances as they truly existed.

One of my strategies was to help people find the facts rendered invisible by the mental filters they used to interpret circumstances. Their perceived unhappiness, lack of success, or reluctance to be fully engaged at work had to do with deep-seated, often subconscious desires to bend reality. For example, a frustrated client might tell me she was passed over for a deserved promotion.

I would ask, "Why do you think you didn't get the promotion?"

Well, the system is rigged.

"How is it rigged?"

Well, for one thing, my micromanager boss makes it impossible for me to be successful. He is always checking up on my work.

"What happens when he checks up?"

Well, a lot of times I am behind on my work or about to miss a deadline. But it isn't always my fault.

"What did you see the other person doing to get a promotion?"

Well, she sucked up. She stayed late and worked with other people to make sure she got her assignments done on time. In fact, she did whatever the boss asked her to do. She was always in the boss's office filling him in about her work. Oh, and she got a master's degree.

My client unwittingly listed a lot of great ways to show the boss you're ready for a promotion.

"Have you talked to the boss about what you might do to be in a better position to be promoted?"

Well ... no, I haven't. I've been too mad.

"Maybe if you want the promotion she got, you could willingly do what she did."

What is the reality behind the lack of promotion? Was the system really rigged, or was my client's thinking stuck in ego? What might the story have been if she did her work on time, kept the boss informed on projects, and continued her education?

In organizations, HR and leadership philosophies about change management and employee engagement have been based on similar, counterproductive assumptions that allow and even encourage people to argue with reality. The thinking is that if leaders can soften the blows of change and focus on people's comfort and happiness, employees will be committed and produce better results. Many leaders and HR professionals believe that asking people what will make them feel engaged, and then meeting those demands, leads to happy, successful employees. That's another form of telling employees that great results come from changing reality. But it doesn't work. Reality can't be changed.

NO EGO CORE BELIEF

Suffering is optional and usually self-imposed.

The Leadership Buffet

Modern organizations approach leadership strategies like a buffet. Each leader often chooses his or her own HR-blessed approaches and solutions — whether evidence shows the approach to be effective or not. This approach inserts massive variance into organizations that demand tight processes based on solid evidence. It is a departure from how most companies typically manage productivity, which is to maximize resources by standardizing best practices based on data and business insights.

Human Resources has come under a lot of scrutiny and criticism in the last several years. In 2015, the Harvard Business Review even called for HR to be blown up. In that issue, Wharton business school professor Peter Cappelli says that HR needs to be a strong advocate for excellence. But too often, HR has been the dispenser of conventional wisdom that has only transactional or incremental impact. Our study shows that leaders don't view dealing with drama as a good use of their time or capabilities. In fact, the survey makes clear that HR resources, training, and development aren't actually solving the emotional waste problem, and most people don't realize the philosophy and tools are actually contributing to drama.

The question becomes: If companies blow up HR, what's to be done with the rubble? The HBR article advocated an HR "long view" that is directly connected to the pressures businesses are encountering. Reality-Based Leadership is about that: a simple approach, backed by science, using intentional mental processes and higher consciousness to reduce drama and eliminate emotional waste. That's what this book is about. Ultimately, leadership is about manifestation of the truth by directly confronting reality.

Reality-Based Leadership processes and techniques interrupt nonproductive thinking. They show people how to bypass the ego to create self-awareness, reveal new truths, and settle the mind. The easy-to-implement approaches drive big results. We show leaders how to call people to greatness, over and over again in daily conversations, to bring out something that already exists within each willing employee. As employees internalize these mental processes of RBL, they begin to self-manage, become more productive, and, as a result, understand the connection between their choices and their states of mind and the results they deliver. Anyone can achieve this, but it starts with leaders.

These behaviors are common symptoms of the ego being engaged, bruised, chafed, or battered.

The cost of emotional waste is staggering. Ego-based resistance to change, employee disengagement, lack of alignment to strategic initiatives, and the lack of buy-in is costing companies millions of dollars per year. And while there is no lack of training, tools, and techniques available, the root causes of emotional waste haven't been dealt with.

(Continues…)



Excerpted from "No Ego"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Cy Wakeman.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Introduction: Shut the Conventional Door,
1. Drama and the Data,
2. Ego versus Reality,
3. A New Role for the Leader,
4. Broken Engagement (Let's Call the Whole Thing Off),
5. The Happy Marriage of Accountability and Engagement,
6. Understanding Accountability,
7. Change Management Is So 20th Century,
8. Business Readiness,
9. Buy-in,
Conclusion: Making the Call,
Appendix: Reality-Based Leadership Ego Bypass Toolkit,
Index,
Also by Cy Wakeman,
About the Author,
Copyright,

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