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Randy Manner

We had the honor of interviewing Randy Manner (Ret.), a former senior military officer turned executive leadership coach. For more than three decades, he served in various positions in the Pentagon and around the world. Prior to retiring from the army as a major general, he served as the deputy commanding general of the United States 3rd Army in Kuwait, the acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, and the acting and deputy director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He facilitated the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, helped neutralize chemical weapons in Russia, oversaw investments in biological prophylactic research on deadly pathogens, and helped coordinate military emergency response support to the United States during natural disasters.Resilience has been and still is an integral part of Randy’s life and career. He coaches executives as they transition to more senior levels, mentors business leaders in improving their value propositions, and coaches senior military officers on leadership, ethics, and transition from service to our country.We asked Randy these questions:Can you define, in your own terms, resiliency?Resiliency is the ability of an individual or team to bounce back or sustain performance while encountering difficult challenges and situations. It can also be the ability to endure, over time, trying circumstances.What is the difference between hardiness and grit?They are both components of resiliency. Hardiness is the degree to which an individual or team can meet extreme challenges and perform in a calm, cool, and collected manner and keep striving toward their goal. People who are “hardier” are typically able to stay healthy under stress in comparison to others. Hardy people tend to be flexible and adaptable to changing conditions. They usually are able to stop, evaluate, and change direction when needed. Grit is the focus and dedication needed to accomplish tasks.Can you give an example of resiliency done well and resiliency done sub-optimally?An organization that has a concept of resiliency built into its culture will provide a higher order of performance. In the military, it is integrated in training throughout a person’s career from the first day. As a result of long-term and sustained military operations in the initial years after the September 11th attacks, the critical importance of resiliency gained increased attention and value to help to militate the impact that repeated deployments had on service members and their families. To help reduce the number of stress-related issues like PTSD, the army created a Readiness and Resilience campaign that, in many cases, includes family members.,Do you think resiliency can be developed?One-hundred percent, yes. It also depends on the desired outcomes. The army’s desired outcomes of increasing resilience were to increase the ability of its soldiers to deal with long-term stress and reduce the time it took soldiers to recover from mental and physical wounds, injuries, and challenges. For businesses, sports teams, and so on, high performance is also the desired outcome, particularly under difficult and adverse conditions.What are some ways leaders can promote hardiness in the people around them?The first thing is to increase awareness of what resiliency means. The Hardiness Resilience Gauge (HRG) measures three qualities that comprise a person's level of hardiness: challenge, control, and commitment. Challenge is about taking a risk and putting yourself out there. Control is your belief in your ability to influence outcomes. Commitment is about purpose and believing that what you spend your time on truly matters. The second thing would be to clearly identify what your desired outcomes in business are for having resiliency be a part of your culture. The third component would be to identify metrics and measure your progress toward your desired goals. Lastly, it is important to understand there are no “quick fixes” to integrate a resiliency program into your culture.

The 3 C’s of Resilience: An Interview With Major General Randy Manner

August 2016 - The Public Manager

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Employee loyalty. Workforce productivity. Customer loyalty. High Revenues. What organization doesn’t want these types of coveted results? None that I can think of. But now comes the harder question: How can we achieve these results?According to the 2013 Employee Engagement Trends Report from Quantum Workplace, the answer lies in employee engagement, which they found strongly correlates with each of these keys to organizational success. Its Employee Development Planning Report suggests that to keep employees engaged, organizations must increase learning and development opportunities. The study points to the fact that engaged employees perceive such opportunities as the second highest form of preferred recognition, preceded only by pay increase. With this information in mind, it seems critical that we take steps to increase and sustain workforce engagement levels by engraining continuous learning and development into the culture of our organizations.This is where the practice of modern mentoring enters the picture and can become a key driver of employee engagement. Simply put, modern mentoring is connecting people to learn from one another about learning needs, skills, interest areas, and competencies that are relevant to their daily work. This is not your father’s mentoring (a.k.a. traditional mentoring), which is categorized by one-to-one relationships that last years and typically consist of one older mentor who sponsors and develops one younger mentee. Modern mentoring means enabling your workforce to connect with one another via technology for learning and development that occurs in a just-in-time fashion, and it affects the daily work-related productivity of participants.  When people are effective at critical peer interactions, such as those that occur with modern mentoring, average engagement capital can improve by 66 percent, according to The Power of Peers from the Corporate Leadership Council.Yes, I am telling you that in addition to increasing engagement, your organization can use modern mentoring as a way to spread knowledge, increase productivity, and serve as just-in-time performance support for your employees. Sounds pretty good, right? **Pillars of modern mentoring**Think modern mentoring might be a worthy development option for your employees?  When implementing the practice at your agency, be sure to build it around these four pillars.Open and egalitarian. For uninhibited and meaningful learning to take place, allow modern mentoring to occur in an open environment where people have equal access to one another. Expand thinking about mentoring beyond programs with limited populations, and start thinking about how to give your workforce access to engage with one another.Diverse. Diversity can help modern mentoring thrive because different perspectives within mentoring communities and relationships help novel ideas and approaches arise in answer to organizational problems or issues people are facing.  Cross-functional, cross-geographical, and cross-generational participation in modern mentoring relationships are key to this practice. Flexible. People should be allowed and encouraged to shift in and out of the mentoring program and of the learner and advisor roles themselves, as learning needs and knowledge strengths evolve. This adaptability and flexibility allows insights to be shared and applied on the job in a just-in-time manner, with people seeing real work results from their mentoring activities. Self-directed and personal. Adults want to drive their own learning. Give them a technology to use or a mechanism where they can reach out to anyone at any time for any learning need. This empowers individuals to be in control of their learning and removes some of the burden from L&D professionals.If you build your organization’s practice around these key pillars and properly enable modern mentoring at your organization, you will find that the social learning behaviors that it produces will become ubiquitous. In this way, modern mentoring can help you create a culture built on continual learning and development, which can help you sustain and increase the engagement of your agency’s workforce and unlock the keys to organizational success produced by high engagement as a result.Want to know more? Join me on March 19 for the webinar, “Creating a Modern Mentoring Culture.”  Register here.

Randy Manner

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