Strengths-based development

The Employee Engagement Bermuda Triangle (EEBT), 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 'EEBT'

This week we will talk about the EEBT ‘Co-Deceptive State’. In our experience, this state is more common than the ‘Perfect Storm’, but can be just as perilous for employee engagement.

A well-meaning manager can spend a lot of time understanding what an employee wants out of work, but if the employee’s self-perception is far out of whack the manager can become complicit in assigning roles or tasks that continue to frustrate the employee. There may be strong agreement in career-advancement opportunities, but the employee will struggle to meet goals to take that step, and suffer from poor job fit. Without being able to execute effectively on established goals, the manager will be wary of giving the employee higher-stakes assignments that will prepare for that next promotion, and the employee may end up being resentful of the manager for not following through on career advancement commitments.

It looks like this:

: EEBT Co-deceptive State

How Did It Come to This?

Inevitably, the statement ‘the customer is always right’ leads to a lot of debate. While some people will say, ‘ask your customers what they want’ the discussion typically ends with someone quoting Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In other words, if all you do is ask the customer what they want, you miss out on an opportunity to add value in a way that the customer didn’t expect. Henry ford was in a unique position to see a new opportunity that the layperson did not: a mass-produced car.

Much like Mr. Ford, the manager needs to leverage their own unique position (experience, broader view of the business, objective view of the employee’s behaviour and abilities, etc.) to gain a better understanding of the employees innate talents and motivators. The co-deceptive state can happen when the manager relies too much on the employee’s (incorrect) opinion of themselves, instead of other means at the manager’s disposal.

Several things can increase the chances of this happening: If a person wants to be something they are not, they can certainly put on a good act, which may be very hard for even a seasoned manager to see through. The high paced work environment drives many managers to reduce the amount of time they spend monitoring their employees’ performance and behaviours. The increasing prevalence of teleworkers and geographically-dispersed teams can make it difficult to gain a good understanding of an employee. Finally, some managers just don’t have the knack for reading people (but are good at other aspects of management). If you are having trouble thinking about your own experiences with this, think back to the first few years of your career; who were you trying to be?

Sources of Engagement

Previously, we discussed some of the key elements of engagement, and it is worth noting how this co-deceptive state has a negative impact on these elements:

A Feeling of Security
A Sense of Purpose
To Satisfy a Desire for Mastery

Lets talk about Bob (not his real name), who has been made a member of a team deciding on technology direction for a high tech firm. Diligence in his past roles has shown that he is able to become a subject matter expert in any technical topic, and has proven that he can facilitate complex discussions with the top technical talent in the organization. What Bob and his manager don’t know is that 1) Bob has an innate desire to help and develop people, and 2) he just can’t bring himself to care about the technology in question. Based on biannual performance reviews, both the manager and the employee generally agree on the employee’s skills, strengths and motivators.

Security: This employee can’t help but feel insecure. He is surrounded by people who debate the subject matter with a passion that the employee just can’t find in himself. How can Bob compete with people that have so much passion for the technology? He is exhausting all his ‘self-control’ trying to stay remotely as interested as his peers in the subject matter, and wonders what is wrong with him.

Purpose: Bob understands that what the group does is important, it helps define the future direction of the company, but the purpose is very misaligned with his own (unknown) inner purpose, to help & develop people. Each week Bob finds himself asking, “Is this really going to be my contribution to the world?”

Mastery: Bob, is a fabulous guitar player. He practices –on average– 5 hours a week and most of his friends regard him as the ‘best guitar player they know’. He clearly has a desire for mastery in the things that he is passionate about, but in his job this is absent. He is constantly trying to find his niche, where he can find the purpose he desires; as a result he is falling behind his peers in his level of technical competence, and never feels ‘in the zone’. When his peers take home technical papers for review, Bob just picks up his guitar.

Bob’s manager is constantly perplexed at Bob’s unwillingness to grasp new opportunities that would extend his technical capability. They had agreed upon Bob’s development targets, and his next career move: an external representative in technical standards. Bob’s manager just can’t see how Bob will be able to take that next step; while his peers get into heated debates about the minutia of a new technology, Bob just seems to stare off into space.

How can you diminish the EEBT?

There are a lot of ways to approach the challenge of reducing the area of the EEBT. Suggestions for the Co-deceptive State closely follow the suggestions for the ‘Perfect Storm’, with the exception that the manager and employee already seem to be communicating.

For the employee, they can use assessment tools to better understand themselves, like the Strong Interest Inventory, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Career Drivers, 360 surveys or our favourite, the Clifton Strengthfinder. 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 the 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. Asking peers about their perceptions of the employee can be a great resource for either the employee or manager.

Once their is a better understanding of the employee’s key strengths and motivators, techniques like Job Crafting can be used to make the existing role much more engaging for the employee. In cases where there just isn’t a way to create an alignment between the employee’s talents and motivators, and the business objectives of the group, other roles within the organization should be explored. Employees are a valuable asset, and engaged employees are many times more valuable to your organization.

More on the EEBT

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 (and past) posts. These include:

The Misdirected Self-Aware EEBT
The Deceptive EEBT
The EEBT ‘Perfect Storm’

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

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.