2010 June

About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.

You can also subscribe to the RSS Feed for LWD.

Nexus of the Week: Literally hundreds of posts are reviewed each week, and when the finalists are tabulated, it becomes very clear that certain sources provide a goldmine of material, whether it is original or in summary form. Some are notable web/print media outlets, like HBR.org & Fast Company, but the intent here is to identify those less widely recognized. This week it is the Six Disciplines Blog, which has “over 1,500 blog posts about strategy execution, business coaching, leadership development, and business process improvement”. Much like LWD, Six Disciplines helps to gather the best of the web! Some of their great stuff from the past week:

What’s Driving Dawn’s Commitment to Oiled Bird Rescue? Profit, Purpose, Product and Authenticity by CV Harquail

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts can be a great way to improve engagement in an organization. In many businesses, the way that they contribute to society aren’t readily apparent, even if it is only in the corporate and income tax paid to the communities they inhabit. Getting organizations involved in supporting charities & education initiatives can build a stronger bond between companies and the communities they service, as well as between the employees themselves, who end up collaborating to help society.

In this post, CV illustrates a great example of a very visible CSR effort (oil spill wildlife rescue), and helps us understand a framework on which to evaluate potential CSR initiatives, to strike a balance on:

Profit Motivations: “The expectation that these efforts will be noticed, create good reputation and goodwill, and that good reputation will contribute to the organization’s financial success.” [Customer engagement fits here, if you can avoid cynicism illustrated in CV's article.]
Purpose Motivations: “Businesses and their members actually do care about social issues and they find meaning and inspiration in their corporate efforts to make a contribution beyond their business through their business.” [This is where employee engagement comes in.]
Product Motivations: This link invites the organization to get involved and make a commitment, because they uniquely can contribute. They either have the product that’s needed or the process skills that will make a difference. [Both employee and customer engagement fits here: When employees see how their product/service can uniquely provide help, and customers see how the product/service they buy excels in the role.]

By discussing P&G’s (manufacturer of Dove soap) efforts to save oil-soaked wildlife, in the context of all the recent attention drawn by the gulf oil spill, she provides an excellent case study to consider in your own CSR efforts. If one of your main goals in launching CSR initiatives is employee engagement, focusing on purpose and product motivations will net the best results.

Delivering Happiness: Zappos and Positive Psychology (Book Review) by Jeremy McCarthy

Zappos must be on a big marketing push this week, because they seem to be popping up on the radar everywhere! The good news, is that the coverage has brought to light some interesting ideas from Zappos on leadership, employee engagement, and the linkage to building a brand.

One consistent theme, as discussed in this post, is the very open approach that Zappos has with its employees, suppliers, customers and even competitors. For example, if you are curious about the guiding principles that drive the business, they will send you their ‘Zappos Family 2009 Culture Book‘ for free! If you think this sounds loopy (if you are a Nordstrom employee, you probably won’t), the description Mr. McCarthy’s provides of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s perspective on business may clinch it:

For him, the company is not about shoes at all: it is about a culture of happiness and the very best in customer service. His hope is that one day, no one will even remember that Zappos started as a shoe company. It will simply be the place to go to get whatever you need, efficiently, and in a way that brings a little more joy into peoples’ lives.

You might imagine some dreamer wearing Birkenstocks and a peace t-shirt, but this is a serial entrepreneur who has sold one company to Microsoft for $265M, and later, sold one to Amazon for $1.2B! It seems that Hseih’s approach is –in part– based on principles of positive psychology (a focus on what makes people succeed, not on what causes mental illness):

Hsieh devotes the last chapter to his own studies of positive psychology and how they have informed a lot of his decisions. By including that chapter, Hsieh makes this the most prominent public example of the application of positive psychology to a business.

This review definitely sold me on reading ‘Delivering Happiness’ for some ideas on how to “create a workplace that is fun and engaging and brings meaning to employees and customers”.

What the A-Team Can Teach Companies About Building Highly Functioning Teams by Shawn Graham

In this fun and educational post, Mr. Graham illustrates how the composition of the ‘A-Team’ –a fictitious paramilitary team that has been the subject of a successful 80′s TV series and is now a feature film– can help us understand how to build effective teams.

He characterizes each of the roles as follows:

John ‘Hannibal’ Smith – The Leader, “calm under pressure and instilled confidence in those around him.”
Templeton ‘Face’ Peck – The Glue, “the team member who was always able to find creative ways to address their challenges.”
Bosco “B.A.” Baracus – The Muscle, “the person with the raw horsepower to get the job done even if they don’t have the requisite experience.”
“Howlin’ Mad” Murdock - The Specialist, “someone who can excel in a specific area or who possess a certain skill set”.

A great example of how, by understanding the unique talents of each team member, you can assemble your own ‘A-Team’. What wasn’t obvious in the post, but what was clear if you saw the series, is that each team member seemed to enjoy the role they played in the team, or as Hannibal said: “I love it when a plan comes together.” In closing, Mr. Graham provides some sage advice that certainly resonates with us:

If you don’t have a chance to chose your team, work with your staff to make sure they’re in the roles that allow them to flourish. If you have the chance to hire new team members, think about the roles mentioned above and how they might fit with your current needs.

The Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle, a metaphor for mystery, misdirection and disaster in the work place, can actually have many different shapes and sizes.

A model for improving employee engagement

The 'Bermuda Triangle' of Employee Engagement

This week we will talk about the EEBT ‘Perfect Storm’, where employee engagement gets lost without a trace.

The Perfect Storm has an employee who is clueless about what talents, motivators & goals they have, and has a manager who has to time, interest or patience to find out what they are. In this scenario, the manager not only doesn’t know what the employee’s white pebble is, they don’t even know what the employee thinks it is (green pebble). Each of the deltas (white-green, green-brown, brown-white) are all at their largest, the area of the triangle is at its maximum, and employee engagement is at the greatest risk. It looks like this:

The Employee Engagement 'Perfect Storm'

How Did It Come to This?

How is it possible that any employee-manager relationship could experience a Perfect Storm? It seems unlikely that a manager would be so out of touch with their employee, AND an employee so out of touch with themselves.

In many business settings, this is actually the norm. Most minimum wage jobs have this dynamic, where employees are just ‘doing it for the money’, and managers don’t see any reason to invest their time in low-paid, usually high-turnover, employees. As a customer, I am sure you have experienced what it is like to be a patron of such organizations.

This dynamic exists far beyond minimum wage roles, as I am sure many readers will attest. This lack of introspection on the part of managers and employees alike is ingrained in us culturally, by our fast-paced work environments, and general lack of effective manager training and employee career counselling. For example, think about how much of your school career you spent studying topics that have no relevance to your life today (Shakespeare & calculus are likely candidates), and how much time was devoted to evaluating your talents, motivators and how they might align with your career options?

Sources of Engagement

Fulfilling jobs and workplaces are as varied as the people that comprise them, but there is a common thread that exists in all of them. For an employee to be fully engaged in their work they need:

A Feeling of Security: If an employee is constantly worried about losing their job, having their ideas stolen, being ridiculed or physically threatened, you can safely assume that their engagement will be near zero. If they feel hopeful about the future & secure in their job, they can focus the majority of their energy on performing their assigned role, personal growth, and growth of the company.
A Sense of Purpose: An earlier attempt to catalog sources of employee satisfaction resulted in over 50 different sources. How each of these map to an employee’s sense of purpose, from those who want to contribute to world peace, to those who just want a shinier car, is as varied and complex as each individual. This complexity is the main reason why it must be established between a manager and employee, and tied to the purpose of the job, and then to the company. When it is aligned, chances for engagement is significantly improved.
To Satisfy a Desire for Mastery: When you perform work that aligns with your innate talents and motivators, you can’t help but strengthen your mastery of the skills associated and even reach a state of ‘flow’. The more opportunity you have to do this as part executing your role, the more likely you are to be engaged by it. As you improve this mastery, you become more valuable to the organization, which has a supporting impact on purpose and security as well.

Why is the Perfect Storm so Disengaging?

“The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation. “

— C. Northcote Parkinson

The distance from the green (mossy) pebble to brown: Both the manager and employee haven’t invested any time helping each other understand the employee’s innate talents, motivators and goals. In this case, even if this were to happen, the employee would likely have a hard time articulating what they are, because of the white-green delta. The very absence of this discussion almost ensures that the employee won’t be working on activities that promote mastery, will not have an idea of how their own motivators align to the purpose of the role (and its purpose to the company), and it is hard to see how they would feel secure in it. With a large employee-perception & manager-perception delta, the potential sources of engagement will only be found by pure chance.

The distance from the green (mossy) pebble to white: For the employee with little self-awareness, spending time on things that allow them to build mastery will be elusive. More likely, they will continue to be assigned work they are shown to be able to execute on successfully, but are not necessarily aligned with their innate talents and motivators. Without introspection on what brings them satisfaction in their work, this employee will not be able to find a meaningful way to link their own motivation to the objectives of the role, and the role’s contribution to the company. A feeling of security comes when an employee feels they are an indispensable link to achieving the goals of the organization; if they aren’t even sure they are good at what they do, this is unlikely.

The distance from the brown pebble to white: The manager is not aware of the innate talents & motivators of the employee. Even without a discussion with the employee (which, in this case, could potentially diminish green-brown, but increase brown-white), some experienced managers have the emotional intelligence (EI) to get a fairly accurate gauge on a person’s talents and motivators. In the Perfect Storm, this EI is either not present or is being impeded by the employee-manager relationship. This manager is at a loss as to why they sometimes get results from the employee, and others just disappointment. Sometimes their employee is keen to take on a task, just to lose motivation as the task progresses. This leads to frustration that can hurt the manager-employee relationship, and make things even worse. The employee feels that the manager ‘just doesn’t understand them’. The manager cannot find appropriate tasks that will align with the employee’s talents, and won’t feel comfortable offering the risky stretch objectives that might lead to mastery of a skill. When performance is discussed, the manager can provide little feedback that will make the employee feel secure about their future in the organization. Because the manager can’t help the employee stay in their ‘zone’, sustained engagement is not possible.

How can you diminish the EEBT?

There are a lot of ways to approach the challenge of reducing the area of the EEBT. As you can see in the Perfect Storm, the manager and the employee both have a role in improving the situation. The good news is that a willing employee can improve the situation independently, as can a manager, but best results will come with both involved.

For the employee, they can use assessment tools to better understand themselves, like the Strong Interest Inventory, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or our favourite, the Clifton Strengthsfinder. Another useful approach is to write down occasions where they experienced a state of flow –being “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”– and trying to identify what were the common elements in those experiences.

The manager can suggest that the employee use techniques above and then discuss the results. Or, independently (and where possible), a manager can dig into the employee’s past roles and discuss with past supervisors where they tended to express their talents and motivations most; some of these past supervisors may have been in a better position to observe behaviours that the current manager cannot. Asking peers about their perceptions of the employee can be a great resource for either the employee or manager.

Just the act of initiating a discussion on this topic can increase the level of engagement, as a manager expressing an interest in these topics shows the employee that the manager wants to invest in them, and when initiated by the employee, shows a manager the employee wants to excel in their role.

Beyond the Perfect Storm

There are other scenarios that still allow a lot of room to get lost in this Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle, which will be the topic of future posts. These include:

The Misdirected Self-Aware EEBT
The Self-Deceptive EEBT
The Co-Deceptive EEBT

We will explore these with the intent to get to the ‘Ideal’ state where all three pebbles converge.

Luckily, there are ways to reduce the size of these knowledge gaps, and the area of the triangle, and in the ‘Perfect Storm’ there is clearly a lot of room for improvement!