Skills Assessment

The Employee Engagement ‘Bermuda Triangle’

Introduction: Morale is failing, performance is flagging, attrition is high, you have entered the Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle. Your instruments are failing you, you can’t tell if you are about to get out, or just travelling deeper in, try as you might, you can’t find a way out. How to avoid such a fate?

The stories of the Bermuda Triangle include ships and planes being lost without a trace, and those that survived having experienced failures in critical systems and navigational equipment. The real Bermuda triangle is bounded by 3 disputed points: Bermuda, Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. While mostly a fictitious example of the paranormal, it provides a useful metaphor for mystery, misdirection and disaster.

For managers, one of the clearest signs they have entered their own ‘Bermuda Triangle’ is a high turn-over rate. Their compass is likely pointing in the direction of ‘pay or better benefits’ as being the primary cause, but they will be surprised to find isn’t the top reason. In fact, managers themselves have a part to play in at least 70% of the top cited causes.

According to a 2008 Gallup study, ‘career advancement/promotional opportunities’ is much more often cited as a reason for high turnover, and ‘lack of fit to job’ and ‘management/general work environment’ are cited nearly as often as pay/benefits. If we ignore pay and benefits (somewhat out of a line managers control), we can see that the manager has a significant part to play in an employee’s career advancement, their job fit (or the job’s fit to the employee), and certainly ‘management’.

Now to explain the genesis of the ‘EE Bermuda Triangle’: It comes from an unlikely source*, a comic strip. Hugh MacLeod, describes a metaphor about the ‘white pebble’ which helped provide a simple model to illustrate one of Psyche’s primary roles in our client organizations:

You have three selves: [1] The person that you think you are, [2] the person that other people think you are, and [3] the person that God[**] thinks you are. The white pebble represents the latter. And of the three, it is by far the most important…When life gets really tough, just remember the white pebble. Just remember who you really are. Just remember the person that only God[**] can see…[**]Whatever your thoughts on God or Religion may be, positive or negative, the white pebble is a very simple metaphor that audaciously asks the question: “Who are you, really?”

Not only did this provide three points for our own ‘Engagement Bermuda Triangle’ but also helped us find an accurate compass to plot our escape.

As you can see from the diagram, the top of the triangle is the ‘person you really are’ (the ‘White Pebble’). A triangle is created by joining the green and brown pebbles to this white pebble. The length of each of these lines are significant, representing the delta between who you think you are, and who you really are (green to white), the delta between your self-concept and others concept of you (green to brown), and finally, the delta between your true self and others’ perception of you (white to brown). The larger these deltas are, the larger the size of the ‘Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle’; in this case bigger is not better.

So far you are being very patient to understand how this triangle relates to why people leave organizations of their own free will, and what managers can do about it. Lets get to it:

White – Green = Poor Job Fit: To a great extent, people end up in unrewarding jobs that don’t suit them because of a blurry self-perception of what they are –or are not– supposed to be doing with their lives. There are unhappy doctors with happy parents, non-starving-but-unfulfilled engineers that wanted to be artists, and unhappy managers that used to be great individual contributors (ICs). Whether it was your parents, money, job security, or even promotion (or a combination) that got you to your present state, there is likely an element of not being true to your white pebble. When you aren’t aware of yourself, your motivators and talents, finding rewarding work with a good ‘job fit’ is pure trial and error.

White – Brown = ‘Management’ Challenges: Here is the case of the employee, who has proven their capability at solving detail oriented problems, getting a new pile of such work from their manager who doesn’t realize that it is the employees diligence –not their passion– that leads to repeat positive outcomes. With time, this employee gets sick of doing to the same draining work, and spends days searching the job boards. Meanwhile, a perfectly capable employee, who loves this kind of detail oriented work, is feeling like a failure, because he is asked to solve problems that require considerable creativity, which is not his forte. When the manager can shorten the line between the employee’s true motivators and talents, they can better fit roles to the right employees.

Green – Brown = Career Opportunity Misalignment: The delta between between self-deception and reality is the most significant when it comes to career aspirations (x2 in fact, because two people are involved). Imagine the employee that wants to move up the ladder, and sees becoming a manager as the only way to progress, but doesn’t realize that they aren’t suited to management. Everyone has experienced the scenario of a manager being promoted as a reward for good service as an IC, not for leadership talent. Now, the senior manager becomes complicit in the disengagement, when they see that the manager’s capabilities don’t warrant further promotion in a leadership role, but fail to recognize that their real capabilities and potential may lie elsewhere as an IC. In this case, much is to be gained by both the manager, and senior manager, getting to a better level of understanding of the individuals white pebble.

Including these deltas, the diagram starts to look more like this:

Unfortunately this problem is an epidemic fostered by the following dynamics:

A still common concept of the worker –borne of the industrial revolution– as an interchangeable cog that does the same job the same way
An education system that focuses on measuring capabilities not motivators, and drives people to specialize on existing training tracks instead of exploring their unique areas of interest
The majority of companies hire based on experience and qualifications, not on passion and intrinsic motivators
No standard lexicon exists to discuss the concept of motivators and talents (you need to have a commonly understood language to have a conversation, or be really good at mime)

Clearly this is simplistic –not holistic– view of engagement, nor will it completely eliminate employee attrition (nor should it), but it provides a generative metaphor to illustrate one great method for improving the engagement of employees: talent & motivation awareness. Any process that will help create a better understanding between employees, their peers and their managers on their underlying motivators and talents helps to reduce the size and negative impact of this ‘Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle’. Employees better understand the kind of functions that will help them contribute and grow the most, managers can better tailor roles to fit each individuals talents and motivators, and a meaningful dialogue can occur between the manager and the employee on a realistic and fulfilling career development path.

Psyche’s approach to employee engagement focuses on reducing the size of this triangle through interactive team-centric approaches. In our next post on the EE Bermuda Triangle, we will further explore how this triangle can help us understand manager-employee dynamics.

*If you have read Hugh’s great book ‘Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity‘, or are a fan of his comics, this will not surprise you at all.

Learning the Language of Inspiration

Run a quick search on the following question: “Are you Leader or a Manager?”

You will see that it is a very popular topic, and for good reason: people want leaders not managers. If you want your business to outperform, or the team you ‘manage’ to flourish, you have to ditch the ‘manager’ mind set and learn the language of inspiration*.

Why?

The old levers to motivate people aren’t working.

Let’s take a look at some of these levers and their challenges:

Performance-based Differentiation

Promotions, salary increases, bonuses, options or trips to Cancun are all means that rely on identifying and rewarding those team members are performing ‘better’ than others.

Problem: This means some –if not most– of your people have to be identified as ‘not as good’. You’ll notice it’s usually the same people every review that are labeled the top performers. This will become a de-motivator to many, and those that are constantly rewarded will start to wonder if they could actually do even better elsewhere. Finally, money is a very short-term motivator for most people.

Fear

Whether it’s overt-threats of rants, humiliation or job loss, or the –much more common– less-overt threats of people’s jobs moving to China or expectations of 60-hour weeks, fear is still leveraged in the work place either intentionally or unintentionally.

Problem: Your people will turn on you at the earliest opportunity and/or leave. Also, since businesses rely more and more on creativity to generate profits and value, it should be a big concern that creativity doesn’t flourish in an environment of fear. Finally, because there is a coming shift in the supply-demand relationship (less-more) in our workforce, as well as a shift in attitudes of the new generation of employees entering the workforce, fear will decrease from its already low effectiveness.

Recognition

Aside from the financial awards mentioned above, there are methods to reward individuals and teams for great performances or meeting key milestones. These might include the celebratory lunch for hitting a product release, certificates of achievement or public recognition of individuals or teams.

Problem: Often people see it as silly for recognizing people just for ‘doing their job’. Also, this often mis-fires as people who don’t like to be singled out in public are put on the spot, or people that added a significant contribution to the project are accidentally left out. Since some managers promote their teams & projects better than others, there is often a lot of resentment build up when less-promoted projects are ignored.

So what does this all have to do with the topic of leaders vs. managers?

In the plethora of quotes from great leaders of the past, the one that captures the new perspective required is “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” - John Quincy Adams (6th PotUS)

*At this point, there will be a few readers that are saying to themselves “This makes me uncomfortable, I don’t think I am an inspirational person and I am certainly not a dreamer. I am a practical person that solves the problems that are given to me with the resources I have.” I think you are selling yourself short, here is a great opportunity for you to become more by using practical and concrete methods to inspire and engage your employees.

If you’ve read this far, and are still keen for more, I am tempted to say “drop me a line and we will show you how” (because that is what we do), instead, I will give you some free pointers on how to get started, and you can contact Psyche if you get stuck.

Back to JQA: Note that he didn’t say ‘your top performers’, he said ‘others’; unlike the ‘old levers of motivation’ mentioned above, if you learn the language of inspiration this will speak to all your employees. The most successful businesses engage all their employees to a higher level of performance, not just those regularly identified as ‘top talent’.

The biggest challenge to inspiring your employees is to create a common language to capture what intrinsically motivates and inspires each unique individual. But since each person is different, and will not necessarily share the same motivators as their leader, it is often hard for that leader to translate the business objectives into the individual or group tasks that will inspire their people to higher performance. The discussion about this can’t even begin because the leader –and their employees– don’t have a common language to discuss what gets their motors running.

In our post “Beyond MBTI” we introduced the psychometric assessment called Strengthsfinder® from Gallup®. This assessment uses 34 themes that provide a perspective on skills AND preferences of people. By creating a systematic way of identifying the basic elements of what motivates us (striving themes), how we motivate others (impacting themes), how we build relationships (relating themes) and how we perceive and analyze the world (thinking themes), Gallup® ended up creating a comprehensive talent lexicon. To date, this is the best new ‘language’ we have found to enable the discussion between leaders and their employees on what motivates employees, and how their roles can leverage their greatest strengths. If you would like to learn more about the 40 years of research behind StrengthsFinder®, and the ‘themes’ themselves, you can see a technical report, HERE.

Armed with the knowledge of your own key themes (e.g ‘strategic’, ‘maximizer’, ‘arranger’, etc.), and the themes of your employees, a very analytical approach can be taken to align employees, and combinations of employees, to tasks that will become the source of their inspiration (yes, the work becomes the inspiration!). This approach leverages each employees intrinsic motivators, the way they are pre-wired to achieve results. The language of inspiration lies in people’s strengths.

A simple example on how this can work: You have two employees, Fatima and Jack, who are good performers but they always seem to get stuck at different points in their assigned projects. A profile is created on each employee, and you find that one of Fatima’s top 5 (of 34) themes is ‘Maximizer’ and one of Jack’s top 5 is ‘Developer’. This tells you that Fatima likes to take things that are ‘good’ and make them ‘great’, while Jack enjoys fixing things that are broken. You realized that this makes total sense in the context of their project challenges; Jack’s motivation seems to ebb once a project is ‘back on the rails’ where Fatima always seems to get frustrated when assigned troubled projects. With this new knowledge of their respective interests, you can A) make it clear that you have observed and appreciate this characteristic and B) keep this in mind when assigning projects. Now, when you identify a project that has run into problems, you can leverage Jack who will be naturally motivated to work on it. On the other hand, if you have a particularly picky customer who is only satisfied with the ‘best’, Fatima will be eager to rise to the challenge. In time the will come to respect you for your ‘uncanny’ ability to identify how their unique attributes bring value to your organization (and keeping them in their ‘zone’: dreaming, learning, doing).

Like any new skill, it takes consistent practice and effort to master it. But with practice, managers can learn this language of inspiration, and become inspirational leaders.