Psyche

About LWD: The goal of this weekly newsletter is to bring to the fore quality articles –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those I follow on Twitter, and/or members of the Employee Engagement Network.

Just About Anything by Seth Godin

Seth doesn’t position himself as a leadership guru, or a engagement expert, but this professional marketeer certainly has enough sage advice in each of these areas to warrant regular consideration for LDW. The biggest challenge with Seth, is keeping up with all his amazing posts; he posts with a frenetic frequency, but somehow the quality stays really, really, high. ’Just About Anything’ isn’t a title of Godin post, but 3 separate URL links to 3 articles in the past week, which have a lot to contribute regarding leadership & engagement.

In his post Sentences, Paragraphs and Chapters, Seth points out that “It’s laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement” while “finding people … to criticize the very arc of what you’re building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy… is insanely valuable and rare.” Seth is using writing as a metaphor here, but the same logic can be applied to presentations, project plans, customer strategies, etc. Great managers are rare, because the ‘substantive feedback’ also is.

In Surfing is the New Career, Seth isn’t making a case for web surfing professionally, but for finding in your job the experience that “combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.” Some might call this a ‘peak experience’, and for unengaged employees, these never happen. If you can’t remember what that feeling is like, change something, for your own sake.

Are You an Elite? changes the perspective on the term ‘elite’ to mean “actively engaged in new ideas, actively seeking out change, actively engaging” vs. “people who accept what’s given and slog along”. In attempts to increase the number of actively engaged employees in organizations, it is exactly this group of ‘elites’ that companies seek to increase. So Seth’s suggested approach is worthy of some though: “The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that  engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from. Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach.” Maybe more results would come from identifying and connecting the already engaged, instead of trying to make the unengaged into the engaged.

21 Powerful Points on Employee Engagement From the UK MacLeod EE Report by David Zinger

David provides some great highlights [consider this my 'highlight of highlights'] of the UK Macleod Employee Engagement Report; a report commissioned by the UK Secretary of State for Business to look into employee engagement in the UK, and its impact on business. To give you a flavour of the report, it recommends that:

1. A national awareness program in the UK to expose industry and the public sector to the potential benefits of engagement.
2. Government-funded organizations should further align their support for those trying to address employee engagement.
3. Generally improving the level of support for engagement-related activities.

Pulling form the summary David compiled of his 21 favourites, and some of the many resulting comments, here are some of my favourites:

• Managing to Engage. An engaging manager is at the heart of success in engaging the workforce. Accenture’s internal research showed that 80 per cent of the variation in engagement levels was down to the line manager. As a result, employees’ most important relationship at work is with their line manager; people join organisations, but they leave managers.
• Get planning and doing. Accor report that 75 per cent of leaders have no engagement plan or strategy even though 90 per cent say engagement impacts on business success.
• 1 of 50 definitions. “Engagement is about creating opportunities for employees to connect with their colleagues, managers and wider organisation. It is also about creating an environment where employees are motivated to want to connect with their work and really care about doing a good job…It is a concept that places flexibility, change and continuous improvement at the heart of what it means to be an employee and an employer in a twenty-first century workplace.” (Professor Katie Truss)
• “No one ever got a pig fat by weighing it.” (Andrew Templeman via R.P. Cordock) referencing how the act of measuring engagement does nothing to improve it [measuring engagement is where many companies start and stop].
• No cookie cutters for employee engagement. The way employee engagement operates can take many forms – that is one of the most fascinating aspects of the topic – and the best models are those which have been custom-developed for the institution.

The Leaders We Need Now by Tamara J. Erickson (Note: This content is available for subsribers of the Harvard Business Review online or print version.)

The world is run by baby boomers, “90%+ of the world’s top 200 firms are led by Boomers or older”, and even though many are deciding to extend their careers beyond traditional retirement, it is clear a transition to Gen X leaders is inevitable (unless the Boomers can last long enough to pass on the reigns to their grandkid Millenials)! Understanding the general style differences between these leadership generations, and their origins, can help organizations realize their maximum potential, and avoid the culture clash that leads Boomers to perceive Xers as slackers, and Xers to perceive boomers as pig-headed.

This article discusses the differences in experience between the Boomers and Gen X leaders, and how that has led to different priorities and management styles. Here are some of Xers’ “context-creating leadership activities that are well suited for today”:

1. Increasing collaborative capacity due to the Xers greater tendency to create and maintain networks in contrast to the Boomer ‘competitiveness’.
2. Asking compelling questions. – “[Xers] are less likely than Boomers to use statements that rest on positional authority—an essential aspect of asking effective questions and drawing others into the solution.”
3. Embracing complexity and welcoming disruptive information. – “Xers have translated a youthful preference for “alternative” things and their early experiences in making their own way into an inclination for innovation and proven entrepreneurial achievements.”
4. Shaping corporate identity. – “Shaping organizational identity and maintaining consistency between work and personal values—is the key to creating discretionary energy and is therefore a key leadership skill today” and “Xers’ formative experiences left many of them with strong, value-oriented sensibilities.”
5. Appreciating diversity due to “the richly multicultural experiences of Xers give them a more unconscious acceptance of diversity than preceding generations had.”

Perhaps the biggest epiphany from this article was that the Boomers grew up in a zero-sum world, where for you to win meant someone else had to lose. The Xers tend to see the world as much more collaborative, non-zero-sum, and ripe for ‘coopetition‘.

Omissions? If you think I have missed a really good article in the area of Employee Engagement & Leadership, there is always next week!  Drop me a line in the comments below.