Dear Readers,

Screen Time vs. Face Time

Is your obsession with order driving your company to input more data and generate more reports? Is it distracting your employees from delighting your customers?

Yesterday, a hundred megabyte drive was sufficient storage; today it's in the terabytes. The drastic reduction of costs associated with data storage is allowing companies to save, compile, and sort to discover incremental performance of their people. This incessant need to measure, control, and create predictability within the business may be having a counter-intuitive effect on the company and its staff's abilities to serve the customer, however.

In order to successfully use all this data, it needs to be converted into actionable information. Which means someone is entering the data, another is determining the relevancy, and your managers are reading it to take actions. What used to be a single document is now a dashboard full of meters, indicators, and controls. And it's eating up lots of your organization's energy and time. While you're all assessing the data piles, who is serving the customer?

It might be helpful to think of this issue as Screen Time (data collection, information assessment, and dashboard controls) vs. Face Time (human-to-human interactions). What is your Screen-Time-to-Face-Time ratio? What is it for your front-line employees and their managers? If you're like many companies, your supervisors are becoming less capable of managing people (Face Time) and more capable of managing information (Screen Time). Here's the problem: As you try to move all this information to action, your people can no longer effectively engage customers. They have stopped building their people-strengths by spending too much time on Screen Time.

Gary

THE CODE: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL
By: Ross Bernstein - Book Review
Reviewed by: John LeTourneau

To most of us, sports are an activity, form of exercise, or source of entertainment. To others, they're a profession or revenue stream. To Ross Bernstein, they're an opportunity to analyze what really makes us tick—individually, as members of particular organizations, and as part of a larger, national community. Bernstein has written three books in the THE CODE series: one on baseball, one on football, and the one I read most recently, which examines the role of fighting in hockey.

If neither hockey nor fighting is of interest, you might not give Bernstein's book a second glance. But valuable parallels can be drawn between sports franchises and other organizations. This book is particularly instructive, in terms of its ability to shed light on how organizations and individuals handle conflict.

Conflict is a necessary element in every healthy organization and, when handled well, can lead to real and important growth. In organizations and the community at large, we establish laws and codes that direct our activities and, generally, maneuver us away from conflict and toward resolution. While the laws and rules are written, the codes are not. They rise and evolve as needed. Sometimes they're spoken, sometimes not.

What codes of conduct are at play in your organization? Are they in line with the stated values?

The Code series and Bernstein's latest book in particular may help you better identify and understand the unwritten codes of your organization. At the very least, you'll leave with a better understanding of how codes—such as the one in the NHL—promote and support team building, respect, and honor, as well as their role in reigning in destructive or selfish behavior. You might also reflect on the ways your coworkers' passion and intense emotions are currently being channeled and how those might be re-channeled in more constructive, less combative ways.

Meet Ross Bernstein, a CO2 Partners guest author in the Minneapolis Leadership Series, on Tuesday, May 25, 2010 for "What's Your Code? Lessons of Ethics & Accountability from the Sports World".

Upcoming Events

Minneapolis Leadership Series: "What's Your Code? Lessons of Ethics & Accountability From the Sports World." with author Ross Bernstein
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 from 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM (CT)
Minneapolis, MN | CO2 Partners Offices (Level Building)

Minneapolis Leadership Series: Lead From Better Sales Intelligence with author Sam Richter
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 from 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM (CT)
Minneapolis, MN | CO2 Partners Offices (Level Building)

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