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Matthew Hudson | March 20, 2009

As people, we have been conditioned or programmed to settle for less. We know that it is extraordinary to suggest for a company be responsible for an employee’s self-esteem, but there you go again buying that couch for your office. We are not supporting that you try to influence or control their self-esteem. We want to make you aware of the undercurrents that are at play in a culture change. When you encounter resistance or reluctance to your new ideas, understand where it is coming from. The source is much deeper than plain stubbornness.

Remember this, with a paycheck; you get the hands and feet of your employees. But you need their hearts and heads to build an organization that is legendary.

In these tough economic times, remember the link between your employee’s self esteem and their job. When you have to lay someone off, you are not just impacting them financially, you are impacting them emotionally.

Many companies are trying the tactic of asking employees to take unpaid leave as a way of avoiding layoffs. While this is admirable, the attempt will only work in a culture that has engaged employees who trust and believe in the culture and know that if they make this sacrifice, it will pay back to them. Unfortunately, most companies using this tactic are “copying” others and because of the culture of that organization, this tactic will do measurable harm instead of good.

What is the legacy you are writing in the organization right now? If you left tomorrow, what would the people write in their blogs about working for you, with you and around you? What would you want them to say? You are not here for a paycheck either. You are here for something greater. Perhaps it’s a chance to make history. Perhaps it’s a chance to feed your creative monster inside. Or perhaps it’s to be part of building something that will last long past your tenure.

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Matthew Hudson | March 16, 2009

People draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job.

Self-esteem is linked to service

If people draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job, then you have a responsibility to build a culture that allows them to do so - a culture of nurturing, praising and accountability. If your people are going to serve the customer the way you want them to, they need to feel good about themselves when they do it.

A few years ago, a company by the name of Performance Group Inc. in Dallas, Texas did a survey of 1,000 people who had just changed jobs. They asked these people to tell them why they left their last position. Guess what the number one answer was?

If you are being honest, you probably said money, as did we at first. But the overwhelming answer was “lack of recognition.” What were these people saying? They were saying they worked in a culture that did not value them and did nothing for their self-esteem, so they left.

Think about yourself. You might be working a position now that pays less than the last one you held. Why did you do this? The same reason these people in the survey did. You want to work for a place that allows you to come home to your family and be proud of what you do and who you do it for.
The person is always more important than the position. Remember that!

This pattern started when you were a little kid. You wanted be an astronaut or a fireman or a ballerina – you wanted to be someone important and what made them important was what they did for a living. Make what your company and its employees do for a living the most important job in the world. There are no small parts, just small actors.

The real resolution is for a person to learn NOT to draw their self-esteem from their job. But this book is not about what you can’t control, but what you can! Culture change is an odds game. You must play the odds or percentages sometimes. We put this description in this book to help you understand the basis for many of the things that we suggest. A service culture must be a self-esteem-enhancing machine. Every policy, every award, every process you put into place will be impacted to will impact the self-esteem of your employees.

As you try to capture the hearts and heads of your employees, you will find that the main reason you only get their hands and feet can be traced to the regard they hold of themselves. You have adults who have spent their lives being programmed to settle for less than what they are worth and for less than they can achieve. And more importantly for you, less than what they can deliver!

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Matthew Hudson | March 12, 2009

People draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job.

It’s important to know about this connection for two reasons.

1. It helps you to understand that culture develops on a cycle. When you try to influence your people and your culture by coming into the middle of the cycle, you only make matters worse. You may have a temporary effect, but the patterns are developed already.
2. Studies have shown that people will protect their self-esteem at all costs. This does not mean they will keep a healthy self-esteem. People will put all of their energies into trying not to lose ground or in essence maintaining their current self esteem rather than trying to raise it.

As people, we eventually accept the role we have in life and spend our days rationalizing it and convincing ourselves that this is the way it’s supposed to be. Psychologists call this our comfort zone. The hardest thing to do is push someone out of their comfort zone and get them to perform. But this is exactly what you are doing.

Follow this pattern. If the culture cycle is the development of your culture then it stands to reason that your current culture is somewhat of a comfort zone for your employees. They may moan, gripe and complain about their current work conditions, but these people could get 40 hours pay for 30 hours worked and still find something to complain about. Why? Because that is who they are. This is the regard they hold for themselves. That is what their current state of self-esteem is telling them.

Another example of this is the badge of “busyness.” Employees in the organization try to fill their calendars everyday with meetings to “provide value” to the organization (so they think.) This means that at the end of the day, they have to go home and then do their real work or emails. People in these cultures feel that if there is an empty space on the calendar, then they are doing something wrong.

It gets worse when an organizational culture starts to feed this behavior by regarding it and rewarding it!

So if a person draws the majority of his or her self-esteem from his or her job and their job is really defined by your corporate culture, then their self-esteem is determined and impacted by your culture. As if you weren’t carrying enough weight on your shoulders, we have now added the self-esteem of every employee to the load!

We make this connection to help you understand where the employees are coming from. They will resist you in your efforts. Guarantee it. This helps you understand why.

Point of fact. We are not telling you all of this to make you amateur psychologists. Do not go out and buy a couch to place in your cubicle for your next set of employee one-on-ones! Ultimately, a person is in control of his or her own self-esteem. The culture and the company will definitely impact it, but to what level is still up to the individual.

We have heard many stories about people who work jobs that most of us would consider demeaning, but they have a smile on their face and take such pride in their work. Bill Pollard in The Soul of the Firm describes the majority of his company’s people as being this way. ServiceMaster cleans toilets as a business. But the people who do it, work with pride because they are members of a culture that values them as people and that strives to maintain an environment for their employee’s development of a healthy self-esteem.

These are the types of people you want on your team. They have learned to disconnect who they are from what they do. Unfortunately, you cannot go out and fire everyone and start over. If you could, you would not be reading this brief.

You must understand what you are dealing with when you start to mess with a corporate culture. Those 2nd graders did not learn to devalue someone who picks up garbage from school. They learned it from their peers and family. For many years, the rules mandating; hierarchical structured “ring cultures” have taught us all that there are two types of jobs - menial jobs and important (glamorous) jobs.

By the way, a “ring culture” is one where the company promotes from within and the only way to get to the top is by kissing the ring of the top guys in respect for their making it. If you have this type of culture, we pray for you. Someone who spent 20 years kissing everyone’s ring to get there will not easily give up the pleasure of now being the ring kissee. They will be a big challenge for you. Why? You know the answer. They draw their self-esteem from the amount of kisses they receive.

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Matthew Hudson | March 8, 2009

Based on requests from our readers, we are doing another series on the impact and connecttion between coprorate culture and self-esteem. With the current state of the economy in the US, it just seemed to be the right time…

People draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job.

It’s a fact no matter how hard we try to deny it that as humans we create and base our self-esteem on outside influences. Every great motivational speaker from Napoleon Hill to Og Mandino to Denis Waitley always taught us that we must take control of our self-esteem and what programs it if we are to be successful.

In order to have this discussion, we need a working definition of self-esteem. Our friends at the American Heritage Dictionary define it as ‘confidence.’ With this definition, we are not too impressed with our friends. We find it easier to understand if you deal with each side of the hyphen.

The word esteem when used as a verb (as it is here) means ‘to hold in high regard.’ When we give something esteem, we hold it in high regard and give it great importance. When you put the two together your definition becomes “to hold one’s self in high regard.”

This is certainly easier said than done. Most troubled people are such because on the outside they profess to hold themselves in high regard, but on the inside they know the truth. You probably know a lot of these people. These are people who try to put on an outward display of their positive self-esteem. This effort actually induces more stress on them than if they would just face the truth.

All the psychologists tell us, that our fears and behaviors are learned over time. As a matter of fact, as a baby we are born with just two fears – the fear of heights and the fear of sudden loud noises. How many of us still have just those two fears today?

As people we want to belong to something – a group, a team, a gang. We spend our whole lives trying to fit in. The programming that we receive in life is what shapes who we are. Part of that programming is the impact of your company’s culture. There is a definite connection between what we do for a living and our self-esteem.

The problem is that we learn this connection between our self-esteem and our job very young in life and that it becomes more than a connection to us – it becomes a definition of who we are. This is a very powerful statement, one that needed proof.

We wanted to test this presupposition so we visited a 2nd grade class of children one day to talk about “Career Day.” If you do not have kids of your own or your children have warped your mind so that you cannot remember back that far, these 2nd graders are about eight years old.

Before we had any discussions, we told them we wanted to play a game. We pre-made five signs and tied strings to the top corners so that the signs could be draped around the children’s’ necks. On each of the signs was a job type. We hung one card around each child’s neck and asked them to line up in order of importance. Who did they think was the most important? This person should stand on the left and work their ranking to the right.

The signs read: Doctor, Teacher, Lawyer, Garbage Man, and Farmer

Here is what happened. The two children labeled Doctor and Lawyer started to argue and push a little as to who was most important. They both felt they were the most important and should be first. But the teacher knew that he was not as important as the doctor or lawyer and immediately took his place third in line without saying a word. The farmer, knowing that people who wore ties or dressed up for work were more important, took her place fourth in line. The teacher and the farmer both stood quietly not saying a word. We looked for the garbage man, but he was not in line. Instead, the little boy with the label “Garbage Man” was sitting to the side quietly sobbing.

As the tears ran down his face, I questioned him what was wrong. “Please, mister, I don’t want to be the garbage man! I want to be important!”

If we were looking for proof that a person draws the majority of their self-esteem from his or her job, it was there in the teary eyes of that little boy. We have conducted this experiment other times mixing up the signs. We have tried nurse in place of doctor, factory worker in place of farmer and expanded into third graders. Each time the results were the same. There were always two kids fighting over first, the middle children knew their place and the last place person always cried foul.

Where do we learn this? Television? Role Models? Parents? The answer is D - all the above. The impact all of this media or personal contact has on a child’s life only gets stronger as we grow older. But the purpose of Project LEGACY is not to address this problem with our society. That will be for another mission.

The important part for you to remember is that people draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job. This means the more fulfilling your employees feel their role is in your company or organization, the higher their self-esteem. And we all know the connection between a high self-esteem and work productivity and quality.

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Matthew Hudson | March 4, 2009

Okay, for those of you who always write me and ask what i am like in person….

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