Tony Carr on LinkedIn: It's a favorite of many leadership coaches and management experts. The… (2024)

Here's an example of something good Amazon continues to do.Coming out of the pandemic, a number of big tech corporations started making private investments into the creation of low and medium cost housing. This was partially a response to backlash in their cities, where housing prices were driven up and squeezed lower income families. And it was partially a recognition that people care about social issues, so if you can do something good which is also good for business, you get a reputational credit as a bonus.While this has mainly died off, Amazon continue to do it. They've been more successful than others, particularly in Washington DC. They've driven the right bargain and negotiated the right deals to keep the program aligned to its objectives.Now, to be sure, this isn't a "goodness of our hearts" move. Amazon isn't making grants. It is facilitating low-interest loans and grabbing millions in annualized revenue from this effort.And I know many Amazon employees will not appreciate hearing how gracious the company is behaving in securing housing for strangers when it's paying them too little to afford the very houses it's helping to build.But this program is also creating a lot of goodness, and will be life changing for many families.

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Lots of people recognize Dave Goldfein as a recent United States Air Force Chief of Staff. In my humble opinion, one of the best we've ever had. His tenure marked a time when airmen started to reconnect with their leadership. Trust and confidence made a comeback, though there is still a ways to goWhat many don't know about Gen. Goldfein is that many years before he ran the whole USAF, he was shot down in an F-16 over Serbia, successfully evading until he was rescued behind enemy lines. When discussing the 1999 incident, Goldfein always omits, downplays, and diminishes his own role in events. He doesn't make it about himself. Instead, he showcases the positive roles played by others in creating a successful outcome, particularly those of the rescue team who took a lot of risk and won a race against a closing enemy force to get him home safely.This is part of a personal philosophy Goldfein has carried and articulated throughout his career. "Share success, own failure." If more executives thought this way, we'd be in a very different world. If you've never read his book, here's a link. It's free. I can't recommend it enough.https://lnkd.in/ehAGU79nBut the most remarkable aspect of Goldfein's origin story is that he has continued to flight follow and support his rescue team in the years after the shootdown.When members of that team have confronted tough challenges, when life has gotten the better of them, he's been there to support and get them back on their feet.He didn't shy away when his job got political, and association with those facing addiction or legal issues might have created complications for him. He never made it about himself. He took care of his wingmen.A lot of character is revealed by this loyalty, this humility, this unselfishness. This belief in formation integrity and mutual support as more than slogans, but as guides for life and relationships. We seldom see this sort of character in people who have risen to levels requiring detachment, occasional inhumanity, and constant pettiness. Too many of our organizations incentivize the wrong qualities in leaders. We are then somehow mystified when those we've promoted are inept, miscast, or downright toxic.Character is what we should be seeking in leaders. But it is scarce. And even when it exists, it tends to not shout about itself, making it even harder to locate.

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The data on flexible working has been clear and resounding. Corporations choosing to mandate their people back in the office are clearly not referencing data.Or they are protecting an interest they're not mentioning aloud.I'd like to see Amazon and others engage in a real conversation about it. Don't flex your authority. Listen to people, review the evidence, and make a data-driven decision.

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With respect to Adm. fa*gan, who in one sense just happens to be left without a chair when the music has finally stopped, this is not a good response.There's no such thing as wanting to be transparent. You don't need to want to be. You just are. Redacting entire documents to protect corruption is the exact opposite.There's no such thing as committing to providing everything requested. You just do it. Holding back information to obscure corruption is an action which drowns out such piddling words.USCG is no different and no better than the other services, and if anything seems to have an especially severe problem.Coming clean about it can only help. But to do that, you gotta get over this urge to protect the organization at all costs.

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This is a powerful post from Fredrick Bullard and I want to make sure my network see it. His story touches on the dishonesty of talent management practices within Amazon that I've written about recently. https://lnkd.in/dJuWvwANThat article touched a nerve and opened a huge conversation. I hope someone within Amazon's S-team is listening. Because there is a massive well of seething resentment in the company about practices that force people to choose between integrity and livelihood.Frederick elaborates on integrity in his post, and his advice is spot-on.He also touches on two other prominent features of work in Amazon ops that I mention plenty but can always bear repeating.1. The company is irresponsible in what it expects, and doesn't care if you work yourself into a state of ill health trying in vain to keep up.2. Coercion is a first move way too often in Amazon's culture. Senior managers and executives like to knock people back into a defensive posture, use their disadvantage to express leverage, and then start making demands.If it happens here and there, we call that "toxic leadership." It refers to individuals.If it happens as an accepted norm, we call that a "toxic leadership culture." It refers to the whole organization. It helps when people share, because it makes others realize they're not on an unreal island. They're connected to a broader issue impacting others.But to share this openly takes courage and vulnerability. I appreciate this from Frederick, and it indicates the kind of leader Amazon managed to chase off the pitch.

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Amazon PR agents will commonly cite internal employee feedback to refute negative press reporting about treatment of its people.Be skeptical. When you get vagary, it's obscuring an unfavorable fact.When you get a general metric quoted against a specific problem or issue, this is obscuring an unfavorable fact. For example, if a media story is about stress on managers, there is a Connections metric which tells us something about that. Citing general satisfaction among everyone at all levels is deceptive and dodges the point.When you get data points de-contextualized, this is misrepresenting the meaning of the data, which can only be understood in context.And any time Amazon is quoting Connections data, you're not getting the whole story, which includes a lot of caveats about how we should interpret it.Connections is a good system overall and good innovation. Start misusing it as a PR tool and you can quickly drain out all the goodness.I'll save a more detailed discussion for later. Meantime check out Jason Del Rey's excellent reporting on this issue.

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Many empowered agents benefit from the perception that crime is out of control. That there's a bloodthirsty ninja with twin AK-47s lurking in every shadow.Fear is a strong motivator. Maybe the strongest.People afraid of rampant crime spend a lot of money to feel safe. Security systems. Security monitoring. Anti-theft vehicle alarms. CCTV cameras feeding to their phones. And of course, the tools of self-defense. Guns, bullets, knives, mace. Plus the safes to store them in, the fees to register them, the training to legally carry them. Karate lessons. Self-defense books. And the list goes on.The perception of unchecked violent crime feeds prison budgets, justifies hiring more police (so we can also have more speed traps and low level fines), and drives distance between untrusting neighbors, which decreases actual safety and security in communities.And of course, if crime is perceived to be running wild, it becomes popular to pass more laws to criminalize more things and layer on more and longer prison sentences. Incidentally, this makes us all less safe because it exposes us more and more to arbitrary law enforcement power. If everyone is constantly in violation of some law or another, then government can choose to investigate and prosecute whoever it wants.Most of us are committing multiple felonies every day, usually without even realizing it. Which, of course, is no defense. A lot of people make a lot of money and gain a lot of power from the perception of escalating violence across the whole of society.Which is why we hear about it so much, both explicitly and subliminally.But it just ain't true.Year over year, rates of major crime are once again improved, continuing the general trend for a long time now.Why don't we hear about this? Because there is very little commercial or political interest in people feeling like their neighborhoods are getting safer.But of course, it would work wonders for all of us to actually feel that way. To actually see crime rates and probabilities accurately would be massively therapeutic to the collective psyche.We could be a lot safer as a society. But our levels of fear and fear-driven spending are totally untethered from the reality of a continuously improving rate of violent crime.Go and peruse the data yourself at: https://lnkd.in/d_Z2q6q4#Data driven arguments and #fact driven approaches are best, on this issue and any other.

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Our world is awash in fraud. Deceit everywhere.It's a common topic of political debate these days, but national politics is the least of our worries. We get lied to left and right in just existing.For example, we all work. We interact with employers every day. And unfortunately, most employers struggle to talk straight and be transparent with their own people. Some actively deceive and straight-up lie to their employees.When you see entire departments of people dedicated to "Internal Communications," this means messaging to employees is carefully coordinated and formatted. The truth doesn't require all that. Straight talk travels in a straight line. No detours to be manicured or approved by a propaganda officer.The number one goal for liars, and the most dangerous thing, is to separate us from our healthy skepticism so we stop asking questions and just believe.When you hear critics being marginalized, this is a signal that someone is worried about too many questions being asked. Someone dealing in truth welcomes questions. So shouting down disagreement is a dark red flag.Our tendency to believe things which emanate from authority makes us susceptible to believing liars so long as they have status. But it's important we retain the capacity to doubt and question. When lies are being told, we need to be introducing friction and disruption and subversion. This reduces the incentive to lie. When every lie triggers a backlash that threatens empowered interests, dissuasion is starting to prevail. If we dissuade enough, the script flips. Truth becomes incentivized. When we have truth, we have the ability to truly self-determine by making informed decisions and giving informed consent. To bargain for everything we should get rather than settle for what a dishonest premise convinced us was enough.Lately I am interested in how organizations treat honesty. Members lose psychological safety when they come to realize the assurances and actions of their leaders cannot be trusted. Once they are unsafe, they remain preoccupied until they feel safe again. Less productive. Not at their best.Lying to people triggers distruct and distance and antagonism. And of course, it's also just wrong.From a business perspective, it's bad for the bottom line when your people figure out you're not being honest with them. Which eventually happens no matter how effectively you lie.If you want a productive workforce, you need a safe workforce. And that means treating them with honesty so they feel secure.

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🤣 Which is to say there *are* benefits. Many of them. But these ain't them.The bargain needs to be strong enough for a good percentage of elite performing people to decide it's a good career for them *and* for their families.If that bargain erodes, we end up unready. And unready, in military terms, is a check made out to "Failure" just waiting for an enemy to cash it.

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