People Leadership Made Simple(r) Part 1

Use the “People Slice” of the Welch Business Triangle to Lead with Confidence

People Are Complicated

Imagine how simple things would be if we all communicated like song birds. The same song, maybe slight variations, but the other birds would know exactly what we meant by our song. Amazingly, we humans are packed with infinite variations. Yet we expect to understand each other. If you are a leader of a business, the possibilities for things to go wrong are endless – as are the opportunities to make things go right. That very complexity is why the People slice of the Welch Business Triangle merits three articles instead of just one.

Learn From My Scars

Surely being fired is one of the most humiliating experiences in the corporate world. I am not proud to admit that my company once fired an employee for non-performance after he had been with us for over five years. Yes, five years. He wanted a meeting with me before he left the company. In that meeting, I encountered a 40+ year-old military veteran in tears because he did not understand why he was being let go for non-performance. 

Perhaps because he was such a nice person, none of his multiple supervisors (until the last one) had been honest with him to frankly address his failures to meet expectations. Instead, they reassigned him to other roles in the hope that his performance would improve elsewhere.  

After this incident, I realized we needed dramatically greater responsibility for managing people. And we resolved that non-performance must be discussed frankly and concerted effort made to cure it. But under no circumstance would a termination ever again be a surprise. As his employer, we failed him in at least two ways.

Models of Human Dynamics

I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to stimulating models explaining the human dynamics within organizations. In a simplified form, one model I recall explained the progress of these dynamics like this:

That model moves from (i) the business’ purpose (expressed in Vision, Mission, Values, and Strategy) to (ii) its Processes & Practices with its people, which creates (iii) the Culture that emerges from those practices, which enables (iv) the measurement of the People’s Performance, and finally results in (v) the Performance of the Business. Interesting stuff for gaining a conceptual understanding of the relationships of these ideas to each other.  

Executives Need More Than a Conceptual Model

But as an executive, we want more. We want a construct that can tell us more about responding in the here and now – when actual “people events” happen. When encountering a new situation, what are our key guidance points? When people need direction, what are our best options? How do we respond? How do we keep moving forward? In my CEO career, all too often I felt like I was making it up on the run.

Through my work as an executive coach, I can now articulate what back then I could only intuit. Our people encounter their employer in two distinct ways: Atmospheric and Personal.

Atmospheric and Personal Encounters

The Atmospheric encounters between the employee and the company are ephemeral, frequently invisible, yet clearly understood by employees. These encounters are more akin to “the way this company acts is in the air around here.” That’s why I call it “Atmospheric.”

The Personal encounters between the employee and the company are highly specific and connected to situations that are loaded with emotion for the employee. The common denominator for these situations is the sense of exposure or vulnerability being experienced by the employee. 

The People Slice

In order to give us a tool capable of helping us in the here and now, the People Slice of the Welch Business Triangle distinguishes between these two types of encounters – the Atmospheric and the Personal encounters. Depending on the type of encounter, our response is quite different. (And it is this informed response in the here and now that we seek.) 

Expanded Learning From My Scars

After this employee’s termination, we never again surprised an employee with non-performance. A modest victory. An expanded understanding of this situation would have revealed that we failed the employee in important ways in both Atmospheric and Personal encounters between him and the company. 

In my next articles, I will examine both of these types of encounters more closely. In the meantime, if you have a People issue burning a hole somewhere in your organization, feel free to reach out to me directly.