Stan Slap's Blog

Check out John’s interview with Stan about his presentation at this year’s Secret Service Summit.

Let’s get right on top of the bottom line: You must live your personal values at work. This isn’t some woo-woo new paradigm management rhetoric. This is, flat out, the quality of your life.Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values. They may be good, important strategies, but they’re strategies all the same. Values are different; values are deeply held personal beliefs.

Family. Integrity. Health. Freedom. These are examples of values. If these are some of your own biggest values and you feel that you have to compromise them in any way to do your job, you may not be fully living your values at work. This isn’t a matter of your intelligence, maturity or skill; there are relentlessly seductive forces being aimed at you as companies attempt to replicate a sense of personal-values fulfillment for managers but insert corporate priorities in its place. You can be a smart and sophisticated manager who has Family as a core value—and easily end up believing that you need to never see your family so you can make a bunch of money to take care of your family by killing the competition and, by extension, other people and their families, even though Harmony and Spirituality are also among your top values. And you can ignore that this is happening even though your value of Integrity, of which issues like accountability, self-awareness and congruency play key parts, is being regularly jeopardized.

Hmmm.

“Manager” can be a great job to have and you may be having a great time doing it. But embedded in any manager’s job description is the requirement to regularly subordinate or compromise personal values in favor of company priorities. This doesn’t mean you’re out there committing vile acts as part of some Faustian bargain (even if you are, pay attention), but it does mean that what your company wants done and how it wants it done must often take precedence over your own deep preferences. This is what it means to be a manager: Serve your company first.

Emotional detachment is a logical reaction in the face of this constant struggle. Warning: Detachment only seems like a safe place. It takes far more energy to be emotionally detached than emotionally committed, to maintain a wall between your inner and outer selves. This is energy that’s no longer available to put into realizing the rest of your life.

Could you choose to live without always meeting your values at work? Sure, but the problem is, life doesn’t get graded on the curve. It’s impossible to spend over half your waking hours ignoring, subordinating or compromising your deepest-held personal beliefs and the other half in total fulfillment of those same beliefs. There is no safe container to store your values while you’re at work; not living your deepest values is going to leak on you.

 

From Stan Slap: I don’t usually feature anyone else’s writing on my blog. As you know, I’ve got plenty to say as it is….   But Rob Denker is a friend of ours and asked that we feature this article so here you go. Plus it’s about integrity, which is always important.

It’s not like you have to be reminded to bring your integrity with you to work. That’s like reminding you to bring your foot: it should show up when you do. However everyone is not as emotionally evolved as the readers of this blog. So soak it up for the value it gives you, print it out, fold the print into a pointy paper airplane and aim it squarely at whoever nearby needs it.

Good stuff. Thanks much, Rob.

Leading With Integrity & How To Evaluate If You’re Doing It Right by Dr. Robert Denker

When business leaders are asked to describe key traits that correspond with the best managers and professionals they deal with, “high integrity” often tops the list.

The irony though, is that many of these same leaders do not have a clear understanding of what it really means to “lead” with integrity.

Leadership integrity is not merely a moral trait but a dynamic process of making empathetic, responsible, and sound decisions – doing what is right and fair, following through with your commitments, and being trustworthy and honest.

In short, integrity means doing the right thing, consistently.

Doing The Right Thing, Consistently

Behaving with integrity is probably easiest in the presence of others.

Knowing that others will observe and judge us often puts us on our best behavior.

Sometimes, in situations where no one is directly observing us, or where an action cannot easily be linked back to the individual, people are tempted to relax their standards and act in their own best interest rather than doing what is right or best.

There’s a saying: “To really know someone, watch what they do, not what they say.”

For some of us, the most difficult aspect of integrity is consistently doing the things we have promised.

Especially in modern, ever-changing work environments, at times it might be difficult to keep all of our commitments, whether we’re being observed or not.

The key to remember is that we should hold ourselves to high standards at all times, and be the type of leader others can count on to deliver what we said we would.

Most importantly however, as effective leaders we cannot ignore unethical behavior.

Ignoring the unethical behavior of others is also unethical and can lead to great harm for the company, yourself and all concerned.

Your Integrity Audit and Leader Self-Evaluation

Just as organizations conduct systematic audits of their financials and other key processes, so too should all leaders wishing to become more effective in their ability to lead with integrity audit themselves.

Without self-awareness, you cannot understand your strengths and weakness.

It is self-awareness that allows a leader of all levels to get a handle on where they are and where they need to go.

To help keep you on the “integrity track” perform this self-audit quarterly.

Leaders who demonstrate integrity:

• Act ethically in all situations

• Consistently treat others fairly

• Tell the truth

• Follow through on their commitments

• Do not ignore the wrong doing of others

Selecting for Integrity

Selecting leaders who demonstrate integrity is key to ensuring positive organizational outcomes.

Why?

Because integrity plays a significant role in the decision process used by associates/employees when deciding whom they will trust and follow, to whom they will be loyal and committed, and ultimately for whom they will perform.

Given this, if you are selecting leaders with an emphasis on integrity as an important aspect of the role, or if you have questions about the integrity of a candidate or someone on your team, the following selection questions will prove helpful:

• Describe for me an ethical business dilemma that you have faced. What were the circumstances?

• What did you do? Why?

• Tell me about two situations in which you have seen others be unfair or dishonest. What happened?

• What would you have done differently? Why?

Going Forward:

Most organizations rarely if ever talk about or emphasize the role integrity has on their leadership, their teams and ultimately their business.

It is then incumbent upon us as effective leaders to not only evaluate ourselves honestly, but to also stand fast in the face of convenience and unethical behavior in order to continually foster an environment of trust, accountability and results.

 

BIO:

Dr. Robert Denker is the Managing Principal of the results oriented executive coaching firm rd&partners headquartered in Chicago, IL. His clients consistently see tangible, real-world benefits working with him in a straightforward and honest way to make behavioral changes that fundamentally improve the organization’s bottom line and their own career success.

Photographer Steven Somerstein talks to the slap company about his coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Selma March.  slap’s lobby has one of Steven’s great pictures (shown behind him) of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to 25,000 civil rights marchers at end of Selma to Montgomery, Alabama march. March 25, 1965

 

 

 

Stan visits the Rackspace Studios in San Francisco to talk with Robert Scoble about revolutionizing company cultures in the tech world.

Slap is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures—-the three groups that decide the success of any business.

We don’t mean a bunch of managers, employees and customers. When these groups form as cultures in a company, they are far more self-protective, far more intelligent and far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence. Our unique expertise is in understanding how these cultures work and how to work them.

From your manager culture, we will achieve emotional commitment, the source of their discretionary effort and worth more than their financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. From your employee culture, we will get you fierce support for any strategic or performance goal: protected, course corrected and promoted to your customers. From your customer culture we will get you true brand status, allowing you to transfer sustainability of your company to your customers, who will advertise and sell for you, and step up to protect you if you stumble or get attacked. We deliver our solutions as custom consulting assignments. Since our purpose is to transfer competency to our clients, there are management development training components imbedded in our consulting process. These sessions can also be purchased on a standalone basis. In all formats, slap solutions are highest rated in many of the world’s highest rated companies —-the kinds of companies that don’t include “Patience” on their list of corporate values. No one has ever called slap work ordinary—-methods used or results achieved.

Stan visits the Rackspace Studios in San Francisco to talk with Robert Scoble about revolutionizing company cultures in the tech world.

Slap is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures—-the three groups that decide the success of any business.

We don’t mean a bunch of managers, employees and customers. When these groups form as cultures in a company, they are far more self-protective, far more intelligent and far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence. Our unique expertise is in understanding how these cultures work and how to work them.

From your manager culture, we will achieve emotional commitment, the source of their discretionary effort and worth more than their financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. From your employee culture, we will get you fierce support for any strategic or performance goal: protected, course corrected and promoted to your customers. From your customer culture we will get you true brand status, allowing you to transfer sustainability of your company to your customers, who will advertise and sell for you, and step up to protect you if you stumble or get attacked. We deliver our solutions as custom consulting assignments. Since our purpose is to transfer competency to our clients, there are management development training components imbedded in our consulting process. These sessions can also be purchased on a standalone basis. In all formats, slap solutions are highest rated in many of the world’s highest rated companies —-the kinds of companies that don’t include “Patience” on their list of corporate values. No one has ever called slap work ordinary—-methods used or results achieved.

Some clients include:

Appcelerator

Banana Republic

CNN

Deloitte

eBay

Electronic Arts

EMC

Google

Hallmark

Hewlett-Packard

HSBC

IONA

ITT

Informatica

McAfee

Microsoft

Nimsoft

Northern Trust Bank

Oracle

Rackspace

Sony/Columbia

Texas Instruments

Travelers Insurance

Warner Music Group

Viacom

Vodafone

 

 

Stan Slap discusses:

How can directors maintain a culture of accountability, even when times are tough?
Tough times will not last forever.
The story of how your credit union stood up to tough times will last for ever.

Imagine telling Bill Gates of Microsoft

…in front of his entire leadership team “I don’t want to talk about sales.  I want to talk about me.  I want to talk about the fact that I can’t be real in this company.”  He went on to close with these words – “There isn’t an empire in history that thought it was going to fall before it fell.”

-From Michele Price of BBS Radio.

 

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Stan Slap conducted the opening keynote for NMX and durring his keynote trended #NMX to #2 on all of Twitter. NMX is the largest conference in the world geared specifically to bloggers, podcasters, web TV content creators, social media enthusiasts and all new media content creators. Besides learning from Stan Slap the very best speakers and educators in their respective fields were also there. NMX is also THE place for everyone in new media, from beginners to seasoned veterans, to network, share ideas and take their online content to new heights.

Three groups are deciding the success of your business while you read this sentence: your manager, employee and customer cultures. You already know you have managers, employees and customers in your business but it is only when they’re uniquely understood as cultures that chronic problems are finally resolved and unattainable opportunities are finally realized.

How to gain maximum commitment from these three cultures is what this talk is ostensibly about but Stan’s real purpose is to make the business case for humanity. When we lose humanity in business we’re all doomed. When we save it – company-by-company and manager-by-manager, we’ve saved ourselves. This is not soft stuff; it is also the stuff of hardcore business results.

Stan is a New York Times bestselling author and the president of the international consulting company SLAP, which is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures.

He created the brand strategies for companies ranging from Intel to Viacom that have achieved legendary impact in highly competitive markets. He designed the plan that helped Oracle sell their strategic intent to an employee population in 167 countries. He reversed attrition of top sales talent in McAfee from 35% to 5% in a single year. He created employee reengagement plans for HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. Hewlett Packard credits him with helping to achieve their coveted channel partner relationship, considered the model for market domination.

 

TAKEAWAYS: 

 

How to gain emotional commitment from your manager culture, worth more than managers’ financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined.

 

How to gain dependably fierce support from your employee culture for any strategic or performance goal.

 

How to become branded by your customer culture, not just for what you sell but also for how and why you sell it.

 

 

This is not a management book. This is a book for managers.

Ever have the feeling that no matter how rewarding your job is that there’s an entirely different level of success and fulfillment available to you? Lingering in the mist, just out of reach…

There is, and Stan Slap is going to help you get it.

You hold in your hands the book that entirely redraws the potential of being a manager. It will show you how to gain the one competency most critical to achieving business impact, but it won’t stop there. This book will put a whole new level of meaning into your job description.

You Will Never Really Work for Your Company Until Your Company Really Works for You.

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is about igniting the massive power of any manager’s emotional commitment to his or her company-worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. Sometimes companies get this from their managers in the early garage days or in times of tremendous gain, but it’s almost unheard of to get it on a sustained, self-reinforced basis.

Of course your company is only going to get it if you’re willing to give it. Slap proves that emotional commitment comes from the ability to live your deepest personal values at work and then provides a remarkable process that allows you to use your own values to achieve tremendous success.

This is not soft stuff; it is the stuff of hard-core results.

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is the highest-rated management development solution at a number of the world’s highest-rated companies—companies that don’t include “patience” on their list of corporate values. It has been exhaustively researched and bench tested with tens of thousands of real managers in more than seventy countries. You’ll hear directly from managers about how this legendary method has transformed their careers and their lives.

As Big as It Gets Stan Slap is doing nothing less than making the business case for a manager’s humanity-for every manager and the companies that depend on them. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B gives managers the urgency to change their world and the energy to do it. It will stir the soul, race the heart, and throb the foot used for acceleration.

Buckle Up. We’re Going Off-Road. Slap is smart, provocative, wickedly funny and heartfelt. He fearlessly takes on some of the most cherished myths of management for the illogic they are and celebrates the experience of being a manager in all of its potential and potential weirdness. And he talks to managers like they really talk to themselves.

“This book is game changing in a way I have never seen in a business book. I learned about myself and gained new insights into the work I’ve been doing for thirty years. It is a spectacular read.”

– John Riccitiello, CEO, Electronic Arts

1. New York Times bestseller

2. Wall St. Journal bestseller

3. USA Today bestseller

4. 800-CEO-READ best in category

5. Inc. Best of 2010 list

6. Fast Company Best of 2010 list

7. Miami Herald Top 10 business books list

8. Soundview Executive Summaries Top 30 best list

9. Booklist: starred review

10. Publisher’s Weekly: “must read”

 

 

A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success;any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted, said Einstein. This is a guy who conducted early nuclear experiments on his own hair and so is perhaps not your most reliable organizational thinker; still, he had a point. The really important measurements of emotional commitment include the ones a company can’t see until managers need to show them. Ferocious support for the company when the company needs it most is one of these hidden metrics. Any manager can appear fully productive and enthusiastic simply because they’re financially, intellectually and physically committed. But if you’ve ever witnessed a human being emotionally committed to a cause—working like they’re being paid a million when they’re not being paid a dime—you know there’s a difference and you know it’s big.