Loose Environments

A stuffy, restrictive environment can really reduce the creative atmosphere in your workplace. Individual creative styles don't always conform to broad, universal policies. Forcing your Creatives to fit into a box constructed of strict rules and hierarchies can limit their creative effectiveness, which is the reason you hired them in the first place. A looser, freer environment that allows your employees to explore their own creative style and challenge conventional thinking, with a free flow of communication between talented people, can lead to an outstanding final product.

You'll find, though, that too loose of an environment can hurt your ability to lead. Trying to be a buddy makes it tough to be a boss. Lack of hierarchy make sit unclear who has the final say in decisions. No rules can mean no one really knows what they're responsible for, or what's truly off-limits. Going out for drinks with your employees makes it hard to criticize them for coming to work with a hangover.

As with most things in life, what's needed is balance. But figuring out where to draw the line is tough. The easy answer -- and the unsatisfying one -- is "it depends."

The size of your firm matters. Bigger firms tend to be more hierarchical because it's harder to coordinate what a lot of people are doing than it is for a few, If you're trying to get different groups within the company to work together you'll probably need a more formal structure than if you've got 15 people working in a startup.

The nature of the work is a factor as well. If you require a lot of teams you should try to break down the walls between different specialties and avoid stovepipes in your company. If it's mostly individual work, you need to focus on keeping open communication between you and each of your individual Creatives. Try to figure out how the communication needs to flow and then set up your structure to facilitate that.

Consider the maturity of your Creatives. Are they mostly fresh out of school or have they been in the working world for a while? Those who are more experienced are more likely to understand what's appropriate and what's not, and can use their own judgment on things. Less experienced workers might need more structure so they can learn about the working world and how they fit into it.

Consider your own maturity as a leader. Are you new to this, or have you been leading for a while? Did you come from the ranks of the employees into management, or did you come into this company from the outside? Your experience, and your existing relationships with your employees, will suggest how much leeway you can give yourself. If you think you're able to have a casual working relationship but still be tough when necessary, then go right ahead. But if you think you'll have trouble crossing back and forth over that line, then just stick to a more professional relationship for now and leave the looseness for when you're ready.

Early in my career I'd moved into a leadership position in the training division of a large organization. One of our instructors really screwed up, and I had to clean up the mess, a pretty serious mess at that. As I was trying to figure out how to deal with this employee -- what, exactly, should be the consequences for his careless inattention to detail? -- I was stuck with one serious problem: he was my roommate. I learned from that experience that there's a time to be casual and loose and a time to be more rigid and structured, and a good leader is one who's able to tell the difference.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

In case I haven't mentioned it, I'm currently teaching as a Fulbright Scholar in Singapore. This has been an amazing and life-changing experience, and unfortunately it is about to end. Fortunately, along the way I've been learning a lot, which is sort of the point of the whole exchange program. I thought I knew about Singapore before but by meeting people in various industries and government ministries I've got a much better feel for how they do things here. In addition to all the dsadvantages I'd previously seen in their educational, social, and political systems, there are some interesting advantages as well.

One of the things we need to do as leaders of Creatives is identify worthwhile lessons from others and adapt them to our own needs. That's not to say you can learn something from everyone else's experiences, but you should at least be open to the possibility. In this case of Singapore, while there are plenty of negative lessons about change that you might learn, there are also plenty of positive lessons about learning what works and what doesn't and adapting as needed.

As I reflect some more on what I've learned here I'll share those lessons in the blog. In the meantime, even though this blog is pretty American-centric, don't think that America has all the right answers when it comes to leading Creatives. Sometimes, other countries are the ones asking the right questions and coming up with the answers we should be using.

Brain Waste

Last month Diversity Executive magazine reported on a recent study regarding the job experiences of immigrants to the US. The researchers found that 1 out of 5 immigrants with a college degree is underemployed, based on their past experience and education and their current working situation. The study by the Migration Policy Institute "found that one in five immigrants — instead of working as scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers — find themselves working as taxi drivers, maids, construction workers and jobs that require no education," which is a waste of a large pool of talent. The authors found two reasons -- language barriers and a lack of professional networks -- that bore the bulk of the blame.

In creative fields you should consider reaching out to this talent and taking advantage of it. For one thing, foreign Creatives offer a different cultural perspective, which often leads to different ways of thinking and an improvement on your firms's creative and problem-solving skills. It isn't just a matter of using them to reach foreign audiences or clients...I've found, in a course I'm currently teaching in Singapore, that even when they're looking at issues involving the US, simply having that different perspective allows them to see opportunities and challenges that those raised in a Western culture might not. Secondly, immigrants come from a variety of educational systems that emphasize different approaches to problems and ways of thinking, which can complement your American-schooled employees. Finally, while good Creatives tend to be highly motivated about working in their field, many immigrants bring an extra motivation...they've gotten here, they've got a shot at doing what they've wanted to do, so they're going to work hard to take advantage of it. My friends who have come to the US from other countries find that, in many cases, this is the first chance they've had to pursue what they want to do and succeed on their own merits, and they're going to take advantage of that opportunity.

If you're not actively recruiting overseas, but instead are considering those who've already come to the US and are now searching for jobs, you're going to want to do some outreach. Don't wait for them to come to you, because as the report's authors pointed out, they often will have trouble finding you. Instead, go looking for them! Place recruiting ads in foreign language magazines. Use the professional networks that DO exist, limited though they may be sometimes, to try to reach out to talented immigrants. Use the social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and remember, there are versions in languages other than English. If you have foreign language speaking employees already, have them help you out, but if that fails, go outside the firm and get someone to read through profiles, blogs, and other online resources for finding folks whose talents meet your needs.

As an employer, you can't afford to have your workforce go unfilled, but you also can't take people on just to fill spaces...you need the best. Sometimes, those best may be hard to find, but in the end, it's worth the effort to put together the sharpest team you can. Talented, motivated people are going to waste professionally, and that doesn't help anyone.


Get the complete study here.

Take Good Notes

It's very important to provide feedback to your employees. Some companies -- especially large ones -- will have a formal employee evaluation system in place, whereas others prefer a more low-key approach more concerned with one-to-one discussions than with documenting employee performance.

But it's important to document in between feedback sessions, whether formally or otherwise, because it's hard to keep track of everything your employees do.

I tend toward the informal route. I keep a notebook where I keep track of things my employees do, good or bad. Even the really good things they do probably won't stand out in my mind 6 months later without some sort of memory jogger. Your Creatives often will be involved in multiple projects or do work for multiple clients, and it's hard to keep all that straight without some sort of record.

Sometimes these aren't even specific events, merely observations, such as somebody's work improving, or a sense that someone else isn't really pulling his weight. I don't just review this notebook at feedback time, but instead look at it every now and then to see if there are any trends I should notice or any observations that could use some follow up.

There are some things that will help you with this:

Objectives You should have objectives for each employee. These should involve such things as their job performance, things they and you want them to improve upon, milestones toward future goals, and other issues related to your firm's mission and their own development. Keep a list of those with the notebook so you can refer to it and see when they're making progress or sliding backwards.

Good and bad Keep track of their success as well as they're failures. You want to be able to show them where they made progress while also identifying areas for improvement.

Suggestions If, as an employee has a problem, you think "wow, I wish he'd done THIS," then write down what THIS is while you're thinking about it. You won't remember it later. Even if they two of you discuss it at the time, keep track of what you discussed so you can refer back to it later and see what they've learned from the problem.

Review Take a look at this every now and then to see what trends are popping up. If you have an employee who's continually having problems, maybe there's another area where they can work. Perhaps your web artist should be working in print media instead, that sort of thing, and it's better to have a course correction earlier rather than later. And before you have a feedback session with your employee, make sure to look this over first and think about what you're going to say. That's why you put the work into it, right? Even if someone sticks their head into your office and says. "Gotta minute? How am I doing?," it's better to take the time and get ready for it rather than just talking off the cuff. Feedback is too important to be wasting an opportunity.

I use something like this when I teach. Typically I'll have a "class participation" grade, and it's tough at the end of the semester to remember who was active early on and who sat back and let everyone else do the thinking. Few of us have good enough memories to remember all that people do over time. A few good notes will make our feedback so much more valuable.

Dealing with the "Innovation Gap"

Last month, the folks at The McKinsey Quarterly posted some discussions with Silicon Valley's Judy Estrin about what she calls the innovation gap. Her main point is that the sense of innovation in the US that was so prominent during the Cold War has fade. despite all the great innovation still coming out of the US she argues that the pace of that innovation and the system supporting it have both declined.

Take a listen to Ms Estrin and see if you recognize any of the problems she discusses sound familiar. If so, then consider what you might do to reverse them. If she's right, and many companies have reduced their innovative abilities, then you may have an opportunity with your firm to step in and fill that gap.

Scientists as Business Owners

Much of our discussion of Creatives tends to deal with what we think of as creative fields, like different kinds of design, graphic art, hairstyling, fashion, and so on. But let's not forget those who create new knowledge: professors. Those who take the work done before as a starting point and add their own grains of sand to the mountain of human knowledge are operating in a environment that demands a brand of leadership that recognizes the unique requirements and motivations of this particular group of Creatives.

In a recent New York Times column, Professor Steve Quake of Stanford talks about the "small business" part of life faced by university scientists who need to fund their research. Many people don't realize how much effort a professor has to put into finding the resources to conduct their research. Dr Quake writes

When a university hires a professor, they typically agree to provide a start-up package to support that professor’s research over the first few years, after which the professor must seek external funding. This funding is needed to buy research supplies, pay stipends and tuition for graduate students, and even to support the salary of the faculty member. In fact, the university rarely pays the full salary of the professor — depending on the department, the professor must find between 25 percent and 75 percent of his or her salary from outside grants.

Now, if you're a department head or an administrator at a university you certainly know all this, but for everyone else, it's useful to know just how this research gets paid for...and what the impact is of this method.

It’s almost like a small business — each faculty member is essentially running an enterprise for which he or she must find revenue (grants), manage finances, balance the books and pay expenses like salaries, tuition, rent and even taxes to the university for the space used.

Such a system does not come without its own perils. It is not so easy to ask our young scientists to think out of the box when a significant portion of their salary (and mortgage payments) depends on guaranteeing a steady source of funding. Consequently, professors become highly attuned to the institutional priorities of various funding agencies — often at a cost to their own creativity and desired research directions.

Though this article is unique to academics, the lessons can be applied to many Creatives. The big lesson is: be careful about loading up your Creatives with support tasks or you'll take their attention away from their creative work, which of course is what you hired them for.

I've argued before against creating a support system that doesn't really support your Creatives. I stand by that argument. At the same time, there are tasks that must be done but don't require your Creatives' best efforts, so why have them spend time on, say, administrative tasks when they should be doing creative work? In the case of academics, they are the ones who are going to have to write the grant proposals -- because the researcher is the one who best understands what they're asking for and why -- but once they've got it, do they need to do all the administration of that grant? If your academics are spending 40% of their time on grant-writing and 40% on administration, with only 20% on the actual research (numbers suggested by a commenter on Dr Quake's article), then something is definitely wrong.

There's little that individual universities and their departments can do about the overall academic research funding process, though they can address issues within their own schools, and the larger universities could try working with the funding organizations to bring about change. Dr Quake highlighted a number of efforts among agencies such as the national Institutes for Health, and within the comments on his blog are other examples plus some pretty good suggestions.

American academia is forcing its professors to be "small business owners" in a way, but if they wanted to do that, they probably wouldn't have gone into academia...instead, they'd be small business owners. One result of this is fewer people going into academic research. I have a number of friends who stopped their education at the master's degree level, or who got their PhD and headed into private industry, where someone else handled the administrative details. The ultimate result is a reduction in academic research in the US, which means either that the answers will be found elsewhere, or they won't be found at all. One result is bad business, the other is just bad.

(A word of disclaimer here: I spent 7 years teaching at a small college in the western US. But because it wasn't primarily a research university, I didn't have to spend all the time on grants and other research funding that's discussed above. Similarly, as I write this, I'm teaching as a Fulbright Scholar in Singapore, and because all my funding is secured through that program, I don't need to deal with finding additional resources. Lucky me.)

Professional Reading

Lifelong learning is important, particularly if you want to be a leader. Not only are you a much more interesting conversationalist, you will more importantly remain up to date in your field of work and in the environment in which you do your job. For leaders to adapt to change they need to first know what those changes are, and the easiest way to do that is to continue your education indefinitely.

Formal education is useful; go get yourself that master's degree. It doesn't even have to be related to your specific industry. You'll find that learning, no matter what the subject, provides you the mental tools to succeed in any field. Simply learning new ways of thinking offers a lot of benefits.

But don't limit yourself to formal programs; after a half dozen master's degrees you'll find the marginal benefit gets pretty small! Instead, complement some formal education with ongoing informal education...go learn on your own through reading. One way to develop new ideas of your own is to expose yourself to others' perspectives, which will often spark an idea in your mind or help you develop your own best process for innovation.

You should be doing some regular reading, such as newspapers, magazines, and academic or professional journals. For some good weekly reading, for instance, consider something like The Economist, which discusses business in the context of many different cultures and political situations. It's good "general" reading, but you should also consider magazines unique to your particular field, so you can keep up on what others are ding and hopefully spark some ideas of your own. Step away from "headline" news sites and read through a real daily paper; The Wall Street Journal provides national and world news along with plenty of business news, of course, while the New York Times and the Washington Post serve as great national papers as well (and if you insist on picking a paper based on your political views, there are plenty to choose from). Through other people's actions you're liable to learn a lot about your field, your operating environment, and your options when it comes to leadership, so start reading and take advantage of others' mistakes and successes.

Don't forget books. Reading about your industry, reading about leadership, whatever, you should be reading. If you want to know what to read you can get ideas from your peers, your employees, your friends...what have others found interesting? Look for suggested reading lists by users on Amazon that reflect your interests. Take a look at Facebook -- there's a nice "Books I've Read" application that allows you to see what people with similar interests are reading.

Encourage professional reading among your employees. make learning a part of their job and allow them to make time during the day to do some reading. When I was working in a strategic planning position in an international relations office I used to read Foreign Affairs and other foreign policy journals, but I was often made to feel I should be doing that on my own time. I always figured my boss and my peers should have been happy I was keeping up with things in our field instead of sarcastically chastising me for "wasting time."

Too many leaders look only for measurable results at the end of the work day, and forget the intangibles. But in creative fields, it's the intangibles that lead to tangibles. You should be engaged in professional reading if you want to stay relevant, and you would be wise to encourage that among your Creatives, too. It's hard to advance fresh ideas if you don't continue to advance your knowledge.

Advancing Someone Else's Education

The following is from Design Leads Us Where Exactly?, a great blog by Lucy Kimbell at University of Oxford. They are conducting a "think-and-make-tank" later this spring and are hoping to find some funding support. Lucy can explain it better than I can so I'll put this back into her words and hope that you or your organization can help them out.

This year's MBA elective in Design Leadership at Oxford from April-June will include a one day workshop in which the MBA class will collaborate with design students to help social enterprise Soul of Africa address some of the challenges they currently face. The exact details are being worked out, but I'm putting up this post now while the MBAs are considering signing up for the elective.

A think-and-make-tank is a participative, creative workshop that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. A one-day event such as this will crystallize ideas that can be taken forward by the organization, complementing its other activities.

The people involved on the day will be:
- approx 20-25 MBA students from Saïd Business School, taking the Design Leadership elective
- approx 8-10 MA design students from different disciplines such as product design, fashion and design management
- people from the Soul of Africa organization, including co-founder Lance Clark
- Saïd Business School faculty

To make best use of the day, Lance has identified three challenges facing the organization which the workshop will be designed to tackle, which are: marketing and communications; service operations/organization design; and product management. The combination of creative and bright students from management and from design will, we hope, serve to generate tangible, useable ideas for the organization, as well as offering an engaging learning experience.

We are seeking a small amount of funding to support this workshop, so please get in touch with me if you can help.

If you are able to provide some funding for a unique educational experience that mixes design and leadership perspectives to create some great social benefits, please contact Lucy through her blog.

Physical Fitness

Ever notice how there are more people outside your office on bikes during lunch hour than during commuting hours? Do your employees talk about distances in “K’s” rather than in miles? Do your Creatives ever show up on Mondays with tales of their weekend kickball exploits rather than a recap of the NFL game they watched? If so, then maybe you’ve got employees who value physical fitness. And if so, you should encourage that.

Encouraging physical fitness in the office should be common sense for leaders. Too often, though, we tell employees to do that sort of thing on their own time. But there are benefits we accrue when our Creatives are physically active and in good shape, and we should be willing to invest in that.

First, the obvious financial benefits: lower health care costs, and less sick leave taken. Many insurance companies will offer you lower rates if you have active fitness programs. Also, the less your employees get sick and actually use their health benefits, the fewer increases you should see in your premiums. Healthy employees lower your costs, and since a lot of creative work involves sitting around, then you can help improve their health by creating opportunities for activity.

For more qualitative benefits, consider how better physical fitness can improve your Creatives’ job performance. Physical activity can help recharge their batteries, providing a break away from work that lets them come back re-energized rather than getting bored by continuous work. Creative work is mentally taxing, and a break for physical activity helps them keep their edge. You also have the opportunity here for some bonding and team-building (but avoid making it mandatory, or creating the sense that they’re expected to be involved if they want to get ahead). It’s amazing how much those team practices or the shared experience of a marathon can bring people together. Finally, consider the effect on employee loyalty: they care more about a company that cares about them. Showing you have your employees’ health as a priority goes a long way toward increasing your employees’ interest in working for your company.

So, how do you do this? The easiest way is to just make time available for your employees to engage in physical fitness. If you’re in a traditional office setting, make it a policy that time spent on fitness during the day counts as part of their working hours. Some companies take that farther and subsidize gym memberships; check with your local gyms about corporate programs. If you have a snack room, make sure it’s stocked with healthy fare as well as Skittles (does anyone but me still eat Skittles?). Health promotion seminars and classes on smoking cessation and alcohol intake can help prevent problems that will be more expensive if they require rehab programs paid for by insurance. Speaking of which, talk to your insurance company about rate reductions in response to health promotion, and if they aren’t willing to work with you, look for a company that is.

Taking things outside the workplace, look into sponsoring employee teams in community leagues. Look for annual community events like a dragon boat festival or AIDS Walk, something people can prepare for and accomplish together. Running and biking clubs provide an ongoing means of fitness with the occasional competitive event. At a minimum, it’s nice to acknowledge employees’ achievements outside the office, so congratulate people on events that are important to them.

Health promotion and physical fitness help your bottom line, so don’t be afraid to put some time and other resources into it. Your employees are likely to turn in better work as a result, plus you may save some overhead costs, so don’t force them to do it outside of work where they have other competing priorities. The benefits you gain from better health and fitness among your workforce should outweigh the costs you incur.

And I’m not just saying that simply because I ran the Hong Kong Marathon yesterday.

Book Review: Traffic

Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) breaks down the reality of traffic into terms we can all understand. Through his explanations, analyses, and anecdotes, he opens the reader's mind to different perspectives and encourages new ways of thinking. It's more than just traffic; the book provides a new lens for examining any common task, anything we take for granted. It also encourages exploring the potential consequences of your actions, future effects that might contradict the conventional wisdom. In doing so, the author provides Creatives with the spark to ignite new thinking about their respective fields.

Traffic shows how the way we think we drive, and the way we actually do, are two VERY different things. It challenges the reader to confront biases and accepted ways of thinking, and demonstrates how perception changes when perspective shifts. For Creatives, this helps challenge notions of conventional wisdom and accepted truths. Sure, some truths are accepted because they are, well, true, but in many cases Creatives would benefit from at least taking a look at their beliefs to see what, if anything, is coloring them.

Exploring consequences carefully is useful for those in strategic planning positions, or Creatives who try to influence others, such as those in the advertising industry. Vanderbilt looks at why common traffic conditions exist and explores the effects of different solutions. In many cases we find the most commonly suggested solutions actually add to the problem. Very often it is the counterintuitive solution that actually fixes the problem. He makes the point that you really need to examine the past effects of similar options rather than just accepting the common sense answer. Traffic reminds us to carefully evaluate the likely results of our actions.

Traffic is not a book about design, but it encourages designers to look at different viewpoints from alternative perspectives. It is not a book about strategic planning, but it leads planners to plot out the effects of their recommended courses of action. It is not a book about leading Creatives, but it helps us understand just how challenging things get when an odd variable - people - is involved.

A Recession is Still a Time to Innovate

Tim Brown wrote last month that

"There is an Eskimo proverb that says the storm is the time to fish. We are in the middle of a pretty big storm at the moment and organizations are asking questions about how committed they should be to innovation"

The answer to that question is: VERY committed, as some of the comments on his blog suggested. I'd like to add my own folksy quote to the mix:

"I never did fix that hole in my roof. When it's raining, I can't get up there to fix it. When it's not raining, it doesn't leak, so what's the point?"

I'm pretty sure it was my grandfather who said that. Or someone's grandfather, anyway. Chances are it was a grandfather.

The point to take from that is that maybe you SHOULD fix the leak, but the process for doing that will be different in different circumstances. When it's not raining you've got the luxury of time, so you can focus more on the most efficient way to do it, and get the best results. When it IS raining, you're going to need to rig up a tarp or something to work under, and your focus will be on speed rather than the highest quality. If you add those two quotes together, what you get is that it's raining now, and it's time to stick a fish in the hole in the roof. Or something like that.

A recession provides you an opportunity to innovate, for a couple reasons. First, if the workload has dropped, you have time now to try some new things, some ideas you wouldn't have gone with before because the "tried and true" methods were faster and you needed to meet client deadlines. But if the workload is down, then rather than letting employees go you should make use of this time and invest in the future by changing your innovation process and taking advantage of the extra time. You should look at your end product as well: if you're hoping to sell during the recession then you need to develop ideas that will be affordable and practical in a downturn, but if you're saving your ideas for the post-recession upswing, then you can design toward the high end market.

The latter idea requires some confidence on your part that you can hold out during the recession and still be in business when things turn up again. To do that, you're going to need to keep the cashflow going. that leads back to the former idea -- design suitable for a recessionary environment -- which was addressed by Bruce Nussbaum in a blog entry last month. He cites, for example, Amazon's Kindle, which is a well-designed device that's priced appropriately for the recession. Many of your competitors may be laying low until things calm down, so this is your chance to increase your market share by keeping products out there.

So, you should first consider your design objectives: long term or short term? With that in mind, you then need to figure out a design process that takes advantages of the opportunities you have now, meets the challenges, and satisfies your goals. then, look at the product you're aiming for, and make sure it's appropriate for the conditions in which you expect to sell it.

Many firms will go under in this economic downturn. Yours doesn't need to be one of them. With some good planning, a willingness to adapt your innovation process, and an eye on an appropriate product, you can come out of this stronger than before.

Mandatory Fun

I'm a fun guy. No, seriously, PhDs can be fun people. In the right setting. With the right atmosphere. And the proper phase of the moon.

There are things I like to do, things that keep me relaxed and help to recharge my batteries so that when I come back to work I'm better for it. I can do a better job and be happier about my work if I have something to help me take a break and take my mind off of it.

But what's fun for me isn't necessarily fun for you. And that's where "mandatory fun" can become a problem.

When you're in a leadership position you might feel compelled to come up with fun things for your employees to do. Maybe you want to help people relax, or perhaps you're encouraging team building, or maybe you want to bring everyone's families and significant others together. You might have picnics, ski trips, parties in the office, "rope courses," whitewater rafting, rock climbing, golf tournaments, or something else that you think would be fun. But just because YOU think it's fun doesn't mean anyone else does. And when you make this sort of thing mandatory you can lose a lot of the benefits you're hoping for.

Consider the goal of trying to help people relax and forget about work for a while. How easy is that to do when they're surrounded by other people from work? Even if you're out of the office, all of the office relationships still apply. What happens to that employee who's never picked up a golf club...will he be penalized when his bosses see his skills are more suited to Putt-Putt than to Bushwood Country Club? Probably not, but he can't know that for sure, so instead of helping him relax you're putting extra pressure on him. An office function still has the word "office" in there, so it's hard for people to really relax...even if you pick an event they'd normally enjoy, which isn't always the case. A group of Creatives will have very diverse interests, so finding something everyone finds enjoyable is going to be tricky.

How about team building? That's a good objective, particularly in creative fields like advertising or software development or other places where group work is necessary. But is an out-of-office event the best way to do that? I've always felt that the best way to build teams is to do it where it matters: in the workplace. If you need people to work well together then let them do that through work rather than through some artificial "team building" event. A lot of people resent the suggestion that they aren't professional enough to do what the job requires, so be careful about using some fun event to try to accomplish what you should be accomplishing in the workplace.

One of the favorite reasons for mandatory fun that I've heard in my career is that it provides a chance to get our families involved in our work environment. Well, so what? Is that necessarily a good thing? Is there some reason my kids need to play with my co-workers' kids rather than with the other kids in our neighborhood? (OK, I don't have kids, but if I did, the question would apply) I've met co-workers families and wondered, "what's the point?" If I'm not going to be seeing them regularly, what's the benefit of seeing them now? And if I do want to see them regularly, I don't need my boss to set that up, I'll just hang out with them on my own. Of course, the single employees without a current significant other, the gay employees who aren't yet "out" to everyone and don't feel they can bring their partner, and that employee who's in the middle of an ugly custody battle in an even uglier divorce, are all going to feel excluded, and that's not helpful at all.

None of this is to say that socializing within the workplace is a bad idea, but what IS a bad idea is forcing people to do it. Plenty of the people who work for you will want to spend time socially together, but they can do that on their own without your oversight. Lots of people will want to organize office outings and parties, but it's best to let them do that on their own so that your involvement as the boss doesn't make people feel pressured to participate. Office environments develop their own social culture, and trying to purposely create that culture through required events will advance that development...but possibly in a direction you don't like.