Strengths-based leadership

Is Your Career Lost in the ‘Perfect Storm’?

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!

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.