I learned three counterintuitive motivations behind our actions:

1. Autonomy
2. Mastery
3. Purpose

A focus on pure profit alone hurts businesses, workers, and consumers.

I attended a coaching workshop on Friday and I especially liked a portion of the workshop that talked about outcomes of various management styles. When we started white boarding we brainstormed the outcome of what happens when a manager tells, advises, and directs.

We came up with the following list:

• Compliance
• Little ownership
• Zombies
• Submissiveness
• Employees who want to be told what to do

We next discussed the outcome of what happens when management listens and came up with another list:

• Employees that are self motivated
• Employee that come up with creative solutions
• Employees who have increased performance
• Employees who show ownership

Now after reviewing the outcomes above, can you guess which response Jeremy came up with?  If you guessed zombies you’re a winner.  I really said it and I really mean it and the purpose of this post is to discuss what I mean about the “zombie effect” in the workplace.  Wikipedia defines a zombie as “a creature that appears in books and popular culture typically as a reanimated dead or a mindless human being”.  The scary thing is you are likely working with zombies and you may not even know it.  Zombies that become infected with the zombie virus don’t bite a victim who then suddenly becomes infected.  Instead, I’d argue that employees become zombies over the course of weeks, months, and even years.  When it comes to the zombie effect, ignore everything you’ve seen in comics or movies.

I’m an animal lover so just no that no frogs were harmed in the making of the video (wait until the very end).  Even though no frogs are harmed it is still a bit disturbing but if you know anything about me you know I like to help illustrate my point via multimedia examples.  I’m a more of a visual learner and if you are too I think you will be equally fascinated by the video below of a frog in a pan of water.  If you don’t have the heart to watch the video, good for you, I’ll tell you what happens to save you the pain.  At the start of the video the frog sits calmly in a pan of room temperature water but the person performing the demonstration slowly turns up the gas burner beneath the pan.  Because the temperature is slowly increased, the frog doesn’t notice the temperature increasing.  Eventually the water starts to boil and the frog dies as a result.  Organizations who do not listen of course aren’t going to say they don’t listen their employees but if they continually ignore ignore the danger around them, eventually bad things happen around them and to them.

Now that you have seen what can happen to zombie employees you of course want to avoid them which begs the question “how can you tell if you work with zombies, or worse, decide if you’re a zombie employee?”  I think it’s simple, if you want to spot zombies in your organization, look for these common signs:

• An employee who walks like someone three times their age into work and half their age walking out of work
• An employee who answers every question you ask of them with “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure”
• An employee who responds to an answer of why something is done a certain way with “I just work here”
• An employee with eyes which are constantly glazed over
• An employee who struggles with being punctual

When I said not listening to employees and always directing produces zombies employees in the class of course laughed, but why did they laugh?  I’d argue they laughed because in today’s workplace we have become accustomed to calling things by their politically correct names.  When that doesn’t occur it catches people off guard.  Therefore, you likely haven’t heard of zombies in an organization, you may have heard terms like employees being unmotivated, unengaged, or even being under-performing. Corporations are big ships, change happens slowly so few stop to ask “hey, is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?” which is a very dangerous situation for an organization to be in.  If organizations aren’t doing pulse checks an organization can start losing its focus and ultimately lose its employees and customers.

Source: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/12/braindeath_by_m.html

The zombie function is simple, the more you micromanage the employee, the less the employee will think for themselves.  The theory says “the more you use your reins, the less they’ll use their brains.”  If you’ve ever been micromanaged you know how it can feel to have someone constantly looking over your shoulder.  Leaders who don’t trust their employees tend to constantly focus on where their employees are as opposed to the output they are producing.

Inc. Magazine has an article by John Case titled “The Open-Book Revolution” where he defines open book management as “a way of running a company which gets everyone to focus on helping the business make money.”  Leaders often feel threatened when associates they manage think of better ideas than their own so they instead choose to make decisions in isolation.  In doing so, leaders who choose to not get input and feedback are creating zombies.  Additionally many leaders feel they know best don’t trust their employees to make decisions, and furthermore micromanage them to make sure everything is done exactly as they would want it done.  Don’t get me wrong, employees do need to be overseen and guided.  I merely argue that few employees are given proper responsibility and training for that responsibility.  They are also not set free and held accountable for what they were hired to do which is producing results (within an agreed upon timeframe).  When the idea or decision is eventually communicated without involvement of others in the organization what typically tends to happen is associates learn to stop questioning, stop thinking, stop caring.  When they stop those behaviors however they simply start doing as instructed.

You can cure a zombie in the workplace by doing the following things: training, coaching, mentoring, listening and changing things when needed.  Whenver possible of course be honest, be a good communicator, keep information you receive confidential, and conduct team building exercises.  We know zombies can spread their disease to others and when it does we also know it can spread to customers so cure the problem within your organization before it is too late!

So now you know the warning signs, if you see one, or if you are one, get help or help yourself!  Do you have any thoughts on zombies in the workplace?

Last week I was at a Communications Media Managers Association (CMMA) event in Plano, TX (not too far from Dallas, TX). The keynote speaker for the event was BJ Fogg a Stanford University professor who talked about “Hot Triggers & Rituals The New World of Persuasion.” There were some technical difficulties which delayed his presentation which I know rushed him and didn’t allow him to get through all of the content he wanted to present.

The best example I think he gave was of Oil of Olay which required him to do morning and nightly treatments to help “fight wrinkles”. He was noticing he wasn’t remembering to apply the treatment consistently, he would either apply in the morning or at night but often forgot to do both each day. He then told himself “I need a trigger to remind me to do it twice each day.” Like most Americans, he brushes he teeth twice a day, once in the morning, and once at night. Therefore to help remind him to apply the treatments he put the treatments in the sink where he normally brushes his teeth. That way he had to physically look at and remove the product from the sink before he could do anything else (it was a trigger/reminder).

His theory is essentially people need a reminder (a trigger) to do things and there are a number of circumstances which can either promote or prevent a task from being done. You can see his research at http://behaviorgrid.org/. Below are my notes from the meeting:

• Started by talking about how it is best when you can automate persuasion.
• Types of Behavior changes:
  • One time
  • Fixed period
  • From now on

• Core motivators
  • Pleasure/Pain
  • Hope/Fear
  • Social Rejection/Social Acceptance
• Simplicity has 6 elements
  • Time
  • Money
  • Physical effort
  • Brain cycles
  • Social deviance
  • Non routine
    • Each person has difference resources. These vary by context.
    • Simplicity is a function of your scariest resource at that moment.
• Motivation, ability, and trigger must be present at the same time otherwise if one is missing, the behavior will not occur

• You can increase a person’s ability by simplifying, not by training
  • Put “hot triggers” in the path of motivated people (hot triggers are when users can take immediate action on something that reminds them to do something)
    • New triggers if successful lead to new rituals which leads to new platforms (Facebook…Farmville etc)

• Best Buy got rid of “time and place” for workers.
• They no longer dictate work hours or workplace…where you have to work.
• They create outcome based goals for what each employee must achieve. It unleashed a whole new envelope of innovation of morale with those workers which allowed them to drive high level performance we’ve seen with Best Buy.
• Customizing workplace to meet employee needs. Provide flexibility to employees on flexibility and freedom while holing employees accountable for goals and objectives.

I collect magazines like they are going out of style.  At home I have a huge stack of them on my coffee table, some unread and some read.  I did some traveling down to Dallas, TX today for a Communications event over the next few days and took a handful of magazines down with me while on the plane.  One of the magazines I took was Fast Company December 2008 which featured John Chambers, Cisco’s infamous CEO.  I really enjoyed it and the below are my favorite excepts from that article.

• “The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. “In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us,” he explains. “All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there.” Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos.
• Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.
• Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye.
• “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,” he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory.
• The open-source nature of the culture has yielded a litany of surprising results. For instance, while PCs are the official desktop hardware at Cisco, Mac users in the company have created their own unofficial help desk using the company’s social tools, outside the official purview of the IT department. Mitchell’s team created its own “rogue deployment,” as he puts it, called C-Vision, a YouTube inside the firewall that has become one of the company’s most popular communication tools. Most of the videos are short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates, all created deskside and published directly to the network with the click of a mouse. No filter, no lawyers. It is a petri dish for ideas and exchange.
• “We are always looking for the applications that help people really have water-cooler talk, something that we thought was impossible in a global business”
• In the company’s old “cowboy culture,” strong personalities were rewarded for jostling one another out of the way to get Chambers’s approval. After he launched the reorganization into boards and councils, “there were times when everyone, even the CEO, was very uncomfortable,” he admits. The internal economy of the old Cisco was very much market based. Chambers chose to redistribute the wealth: Executives are now compensated on how well the collective of businesses performs, not their own individual product units. (Playing well with others is also an increasingly important part of rank-and-file employees’ performance reviews.)
• Chambers wants nothing less than a total redesign of the corporation as we know it. Starting at the top: “You won’t have to depend on the CEO anymore.” About those Cisco execs who left, he says he came to realize that “some people need a command-and-control environment.” But that’s not the way of the future: “We now have a whole pool of talent who can lead these working groups, like mini CEOs and COOs. We’re growing ideas, but we’re growing people as well.” In fact, he says, “where I might have had two potential successors, I now have 500.”
• “I now compensate our leadership team based on how well they do on collaboration and the longer-term picture,” Chambers says. “If we take the focus off of how they did today, this week, this quarter, it will work.”
• But Ricci admits, “I think that culture is really a reflection of the CEO personality.” Ricci believes that Cisco’s guideline for collaboration is a great way to run a company and build a great workforce, “but only if it is what the CEO believes, that this is how people should behave.”

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