I don’t know if there’s a secret magic pixie reading WorkPlay, but I found a nice one-year subscription to Harvard Business Review waiting for me in the mail today. Thank you secret magic pixie, whoever you are.

From the latest issue of HBR, here’s some juicy thinking from Henry Mintzberg. It falls under the article title of Productivity Is Killing American Enterprise. Consider that our organizations are organic systems. They exist only because of the people who operate within these systems.

Here’s Professor Mintzberg’s advice:

Treat the enterprise as a community of engaged members, not a collection of free agents. Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human “resources”) collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.

Take care of the organizational relationships that drive and sustain your business. It’s your people, not your profits, that will define your organization’s success.

I’m back from my own experiment with retreat and reflection, spending some time with my gals and extended family at a beach house without television and computer. Lately, the television hasn’t been that prevalent in my daily life; though, I must admit that if it is on it’s usually tuned to a baseball game. On the other hand, the computer tends to be an interesting presence in my life. It serves as a portal to the wider world and creative catalyst through my blogging ventures. It also seduces me toward more frivolous websurfing activities (rather like channel surfing and getting caught up in a stupid movie that I regret watching later). It’s that lack of intention that leaves me with an empty feeling. One remedy is to introduce or re-introduce retreat and reflection into life.

I’m going to try something new here…I’m going to incorporate a monthly theme into the WorkPlay blog. While other folks have done it with great success, this will be my first foray into this type of writing. So, July will focus on ideas of reflection: uses in our lives, but perhaps more importantly, uses in our work. Let’s see where it goes and what we can learn. See you soon.

Bernie DeKoven at DeepFun.com asks, Must we compete? Perhaps a better question is, When should we compete? I don’t see competition as an all-out negative compared to cooperation. That would ignore the benefits of competition. One way to compete is with ourselves as a way to improve our skills and experience.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because folks can take competition to the extreme doesn’t mean it’s a negative. Competition can teach just as well as cooperation. We need to be well-rounded and that means knowing when to compete with ourself and others and then when to cooperate.

In a terrific example of synchronicity, it seems that Annette Clancy, Shawn Callahan, and I were all thinking about the importance of belonging in organizations last week.

Shawn offers the perspective that belonging is, at it’s core, an act of social learning. He offers the idea of induction as the first step to belonging:

I have been asking people, “How long after starting here did you feel you really knew the organisation and job you were doing?” Most people said it took them 12-18 months in a large organisation to really feel on top on things. Staff induction, therefore, needs to be more gradual and unfold over time as we experience the organisation we’ve joined. We need a slower and longer-term approach, one that better balances intellectual and emotional learning.

He starts with right spirit and my only gripe is that his first year induction plan is still too HR procedure-focused…and only focused on the first year. Great retention strategies involve an element of helping individuals evolve their own sense of belonging. Else, like anything, what was once new and exciting becomes stale and unimpressive. It’s a good beginning model, though, and should get the mental gears turning as to how to build on it and encourage joiners to truly belong.

It seems the ‘war’ for talent is still at a fever pitch at some organizations…at least if we gauge it by the corporate perks offered. Okay, maybe it’s not quite at the same level of the dot.com heydays, but we’ve all heard about the companies that offer gourmet cafeterias and concierge services for their employees. All of these additional perks still conjure up concern that they’re fooling employees into working more and spending greater time at the workplace. For the latest, see Can A Workplace Be Too Enticing? at the Fast Company Experts Blog. Are we really still experiencing a hangover from the dot.com days?

Let’s consider the true purpose of the ‘perk.’ In the non-profit world, these benefits help make up for the lower-than-standard salaries. In the corporate world, perks may be what set two similar companies apart. At organizations that are great places to work, cool perks add to this feeling…they’re the cherry on top of the hot fudge sundae. On the other hand, cool perks at a crap job aren’t going to make that job any more palatable. It’s idiotic window dressing that won’t fool smart people for very long.

I experienced a moment of lucid learning today that’s well worth sharing. Hopefully, this will resonate with you, particularly if you work directly with customers and clients in a relationship-building capacity.

I have a client who is delightful in most ways, but is rarely specific in their requests. They sort of know what they want to achieve, but have a hard time communicating this with me. In the current case, they know they want a new website design for one of their events but that’s the extent of it. They know the design should be similar to the rest of their site but also different. This could mean nearly anything which is frustrating when trying to scope a project and understand their needs. What adds to the frustration is this lack of clarity (or at least lack of clarity in communication) is typical to how this client approaches our work together. It’s increasingly obvious that the client needs help in getting more detailed about what they want…which is leading up to the equally obvious trap of me knowing exactly what this client needs and how they need to do it.

In our project planning call today, I decided to take a stern approach with them. The overall tone of my voice was “look, it’s time for you to get your act together if you want this work done.” I didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was the vibe that I communicated. With some clients, I can take this approach and be okay, but for them it clearly wasn’t what they needed at the time. I later found out through my partner that I seemed ‘angry’ and ‘more hostile than usual.’ Yeah…big red flags.

Through this encounter, I recalled an important concept from my coaching training: each action should always be in service to the client. If you think about it, that’s actually a liberating idea. It opens up the opportunities for how we interact with our clients. If he or she needs to be encouraged and have their confidence fostered, then a coach can approach from this angle. And if he or she needs a loving kick in the rear, then that approach is also viable and honored as long as it is in service to the client and their ultimate needs. The danger is approaching as I did, which clearly did them no service. My actions actually diverted them from their overall objective.

So, what’s the learning?

1. Know the client and where they want to go.
Building the proper relationship with our clients is vital to a healthy, long-term partnership. There are no short cuts on this one. In order to help a client define and create their future, it means understanding what makes them unique, what fuels their purpose, what they most desire from your product or service.

For those who practice good client communication, that’s usually as far as they’ll go. Here’s the challenge: take it deeper. Actually make it a goal to know your client as an individual. Why do they work for themselves or their organization? What is it that personally drives them? What defines success for them? Knowing the answers to these questions is what separates the true partners from the service providers.

2. Match tone and approach to their purpose not our own.
This means putting our own personal preferences aside. If we’re getting ready to deliver a good stern lecture to a client who is waffling in their decision-making, we’d better be prepared to honestly ask if this is our preference or whether it’s truly in service to the client’s needs.

It also means setting our own emotional attachments aside. If a client’s indecision is driving us nuts, getting pissed off at them is not going to help them get where they need to go. That doesn’t mean their indecisiveness gets ignored…it’s still important to be open about it’s impact on their business objectives. We’re still trying to practice a caring partnership and that means sometimes addressing tough subjects. The key is to do it in a way that moves them toward their goals rather than farther away.

A fine bottle of wine single-malt scotch needs to make it’s way to Jamie Notter for keeping me informed about all the juicy items in the Harvard Business Review. Once upon a time, I had a subscription and it was one of the best professional development investments I made. Which begs a question of…why don’t I subscribe now?

Anyway, back to Jamie and a recent article he brings to light, which focuses on the power of conversation in our working life. Poet David Whyte notes that most executives are hungry for a “larger language” that cuts through all the typical corporate bs that passes for communication. If you regularly play buzzword bingo during company meetings and win several times over, you understand what this type of shallow language is.

Jamie highlights a paragraph from the article that bears highlighting again, if for no other reason than to focus on one particular word: belong.

At the executive and managerial levels, work is almost always conversation in one form or another, and yet we spend almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines necessary for holding real exchanges. That’s partly because they involve a great deal of self-knowledge and a willingness to study how human beings try to belong—skills we hope our strategic abilities will help us get by without.

What is so compelling about the notion of belonging? And how can our daily language foster a greater sense of belonging – not only for ourselves but others around us?

When I worked in the non-profit association world, I witnessed the potential of belonging in a professional setting. When an actual spirit of belonging is present, it’s a dynamic and inspiring thing to behold. It not only energizes the individual, it invigorates the group. Yet, all too often, we get the agreement to join and stop there. Joining is the easy part. Cultivating a spirit of belonging takes work, preparation, and, as David Whyte notes, a willingness to curiously study what it means to belong to your group, your set of shared values, and your organization.

If you’re a manager or a team lead, what can you do to foster a sense of belonging in members of your group? Consider that each person has their own need for belonging and it’s your responsibility to figure out what this is. It goes beyond the question of why they’re working in your organization. It gets more to the relationship connecting the employee and their work. We don’t want to belong to something we don’t believe in; rather, we want to belong to something that truly matters to us.

Ask yourself…why would someone want to belong to your workgroup? Your department? Your organization? Taking the job and joining a company is the easy part. Helping someone truly belong to their work is where the power is.

What are you doing today to cultivate a sense of belonging?