The Heart of Engagement : Leadership Development & Executive Coaching : Mike Cook of Vitalwork Inc. / The AMJ Group : Management Education, Retreat Facilitation

I was not planning on another post spotlighting the Pike Place Fish Market anytime soon, or for that matter ever again, until last week when I saw the video ‘FISH!’ for the very first time. To put it mildly I was horrified. Never mind that the production value of the video leaves a lot to be desired, the message in the film was what got my blood stirring. Unfortunately, I can now also see why ‘FISH!” is the #1 selling training video of all time.

Having had the opportunity to see first hand what goes on behind the scenes at the market, learning how the crew manages and has managed to create enthusiasm and joy while tossing fish for twenty-three years, the thought that the “philosophy” has been boiled down to four catch phrases seems unfortunately typical of a nation of training companies who want to give you “The Five Best Ways to This” or the “Seven Things you Must do Whenever.” In short, we are suckers for an appeal suggesting that radical change is easy and methodical, something anyone can learn.

So here they are, according to ‘FISH!’, the principles which took a nearly failing business from absolute obscurity to world fame in a little over 12 years.

• Play
• Make Their Day
• Be present
• Choose Your Attitude

Oh yes, and don’t forget to throw the fish, the little stuffed fish. Yes folks, it is really that simple. Yikes!

Please, could anyone have come up with a system that is more paternalistic and less sustainable than what is suggested in the ‘FISH!’ video? Actually, if I had to say what I thought the video was designed to do it would be to make you feel bad about your business but know that the answers were just a few dollars away.

Certainly the film is inspiring, it also tells you nothing about the process that resulted in what you are witnessing when you watch the fishmongers at work, either on film or in person. What it does tell you is how someone described what they were seeing as they watched the fishmongers at work. Much like a spectator who watches a sporting event the video collapses the distinction between what is actually going on in the market and what it looks like is going on. Maybe you have listened to one of those radio “call in shows” where the fan/caller refers to their favorite team’s performance over the weekend using the pronoun “we”. When you hear these calls you must immediately think the caller is delusional, they cannot tell the difference between themselves watching the game and the players who played it. But you see, that is exactly why ‘FISH’ has such appeal, the producers are passing off their interpretation as fact and it is compelling because it touches very deeply into that area of our psyche where we

• Yearn for significance in our work
• Are drawn to a purpose larger than ourselves
• Aspire to belong to something that we have helped create

Unfortunately, the program as it is pitched also appeals to one of our most base instincts and that is the possibility of achieving something remarkable for little or no risk or effort.

What could be easier to sell, especially to control oriented employers desperate for solutions, than the idea that by putting your employees through a few training sessions, adopting a few simple concepts and investing in some trinkets, certificates and stuffed fish you could transform your organization and have it perform like what you see taking place at The Pike Place Fish Market. ‘FISH!’ appeals directly to “lottery mentality”, for just a small investment you can become RICH!

Since the fall of 2008 no less than three bestselling books have come out attempting to account for the principles of world-class individual success,

• Geoff Colvin’s ‘Talent is Overrated: What Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else’ ,
• Daniel Coyle’s ‘The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How
• Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers: The Story of Success

Of these, Gladwell’s book, currently the best selling of all three is probably the most authentic in that it accounts for luck, special circumstances and privilege as factors contributing to success in many cases. None of these publications, anymore than ‘FISH’ accounts for everything that factors in when pursuing exceptional performance. However, all three books point unequivocally to the need to spend literally hours in preparation and practice to turn even exceptional talent into stand out skill and consistent performance.

This for me was one among several things that were missing in ‘FISH.’ What you cannot see in the film and what is no doubt not sexy, maybe even scary, is the hours of work the fishmongers put in before and after the market is open to insure that when the show goes on it is picture perfect. When I sat in on the PPFM staff meeting a few weeks back I commented to the owner John Yokoyama that his group was the highest functioning that I had seen in my twenty-two years of consulting. John remarked with a smile that it was probably because I had not been at it long enough, he and his staff had been pursuing their World Famous vision for twenty three years! In addition to set up and take down on a daily basis without fail the PPFM staff meets as a whole every two weeks with their consultant for two to three hours to clear the air and renew their commitment to their vision and each other. This is not life on Wii™ or Guitar Hero™.  Neither is this PPFM according to ‘FISH!’

I am not saying that ‘FISH!’ and the process it promotes are entirely without merit, I am sure some good comes from the training. I am also sure that when I go to Chinese restaurants, the ones with the pictures of the food in the menu, if they bring me a picture of food on a plate, that wasn’t really what I had in mind.

What would you be willing to give up for performance like they have at The Pike Place Fish Market?

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“The Dude!”, “El Duderino”, “His Dudeness”, of course there is only one man who answers to all these titles and he is Jeffrey Lebowski, central character of the Coen brothers film classic of 1998, The Big Lebowski. This week I offer “The Dude” as one of the more unlikely yet profound mentors for those of us involved with the workplace environmental factors that contribute to employee engagement.

Sometimes the muse eludes me and sometimes she literally slaps me in the forehead. Last week was a “slap in the forehead” kind of week. Wednesday as I eagerly checked the mail I found that my copy of ‘The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies’ had finally arrived from Amazon. (You know something is up when you go to place an order for this type of publication and it is on Back Order) Then Saturday evening as my wife and I sat having dinner in a Mt. Vernon public house the restaurant was suddenly flooded by a cadre of men in blue bathrobes, shorts, flip-flops and dark glasses, and it is January in northern Washington! (The local classic film theatre had just shown The Big Lebowski and in apt homage this crowd had attended in costume) Finally, Sunday morning as I sat in services at my church of preference listening to harrowing stories of women around the world overcoming cultural oppression it was no longer possible for me to ignore the obvious signs I have been receiving. It is time for a post on authenticity* and there is no one who had a keener sense of the truly authentic than Jeffrey Lebowski aka “The Dude”.

As Victor Hugo asserted many years back, “Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” If I had wondered further whether or not this post would be timely I had only to do a quick blog search on Sunday evening on “The Dude” to be informed that ‘The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski’ will open this spring off-Broadway in NYC with an initial six week schedule. Yes, the signs favoring a focus on authenticity are many and like yellow Volkswagen Beetles, now that I am looking for them I can clearly see they are everywhere.

When he first came into our lives, “The Dude” was not well received either by critics or at the box office, and even to this day he suffers what might be considered an image problem, he is not a mainstream character. Many of us, upstanding, solid character types might have considerable difficulty admitting our identification with a man who at first exposure seems at best the classic “slacker” our parents raised us not to be. And so this prophet of our times has languished in something of a cinematic obscurity slowly gathering what is known as a cult following that now conducts an annual conclave in Louisville, Kentucky known as Lebowski Fest, currently heading into its 9^th annual renewal from austere beginnings in 2002. What stronger endorsement can there be for authenticity and efficacy than sustainability?

Jeffrey Lebowski, everything about the man serves as an outright rejection of that in us and our organizations which is not authentic. His personification may be somewhat easier to address if we consider him not literally but as an extreme expression of every employee, if they did not fear retribution for their honesty. “The Dude” eliminates the oppression of this fear by staying gainfully unemployed and simply not giving a crap. For many of us this is just too much honesty! Absent his respect “The Dude”, like many of our employees, is not above using us for his own purposes thereby perpetuating the notion that in fact the best we can expect from that relationship called employment is a sort of sad, smirking conspiracy where "I’ll use you and you’ll use me" and mediocre is what we’ll settle for, as long as we make our numbers.

If we cannot take our guidance from man who shops for milk at midnight in his bathrobe then maybe we’ll listen to legitimate types, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. These are the authors of ‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’** (And is it such a big leap to also say further, what employees really want?) Gilmore and Pine go to great pains in their book to expose us to what “The Dude” simply lived as a matter of personal expression. “His Dudeness” stated an unequivocal rejection of the inauthentic as an outright form of violence with the memorable words “This aggression will not stand Man!” As academics and researchers, Gilmore and Pine seem compelled to verbosity and taxonomy (‘Authenticity’ is nearly 300 pages and gives us five genres of Authenticity to consider) but they do provide legitimacy to the conversation;

• Natural authenticity- raw, of-the-earth, rustic, stripped down and best of all sustainable
• Original authenticity- the first of its kind
• Exceptional authenticity- stresses uniqueness, the aesthetic appeal, not like anything else
• Referential authenticity- evokes an iconic time, person, group or place
• Influential authenticity-implies or provokes change

If your place of work does not have the appeal of one or more of these categories you can be sure neither Gilmore, Pine nor “The Dude” would be found there, at least not for very long.

* Many thanks to Dwight Garner, book critic for the New York Times. His piece on November 29th, 2009 was the original inspiration for this post.

** If you are interested in an executive summary of 'Authenticity' send me an e mail to theheart.amj@gmail.com

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"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" a remark often attributed to Peter Drucker, is one of those statements that so clearly frames a truth that among others things you wish you had been the one who said it!

These words are so rightly on the mark. Why does it seem that business leaders will to do almost anything BUT heed the reality described in Drucker’s words? The data, the data, the data… over the years the data makes an unequivocal case for the fact that ignoring the gravitational force of culture almost always brings change initiatives to their knees and smothers or slows the ones that do manage to succeed.

 In my post of December 28th I spoke to the issue of control (command culture) as a damper on engagement. Shortly after that post a friend sent me a note suggesting that it was one thing for me to talk about the concept of senior leaders giving up control to get more leadership and engagement throughout an organization and another to provide real examples of how this might all work out if tried.

OK then, let's talk about examples! In the December 09 issue of the Harvard Business Review on-line magazine an article appears that speaks right to my friend's suggestion. What could be a more on point title for the article than To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority ? The authors, Amar, Hentrich and Hlupic begin with what I believe is a very authentic statement, based on their research,

"Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control—establishing non-hierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company’s decisions—guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare.”

Maybe you are like me, maybe not, but I have wondered for years about the pace of the democratization of our places of work or more accurately the non-pace. We, the self-proclaimed democracy loving-est people on the planet seem to enjoy talking about democratic principles in our matters of government but when it comes to our places of work we prefer, put up with, or settle for top-down, functionally oriented, command and control type organizations. Freedom of speech in the workplace, not so much; freedom to act, not unless you run it by the boss first. I do not know a company that I have worked with over the past twenty plus years where within hours of my arrival and encouragement of communication someone hasn’t piped up with the quote of quotes, “If I said that I’d be fired!” In these very same companies, I have heard senior managers lament the lack of passion and innovation from the ranks of non-managers and never make the connection between their complaint and the web of constraints they insist on.

Good for our three guys from the HBR article above. They do provide anecdotal and factual information about two companies they have worked closely with and from their experience; they have concluded this about leadership;

       “Furthermore, we’ve found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business.”

Kudos to the authors for pointing out that this definition of leadership applies mainly to knowledge organizations. This acknowledgment lends itself to the idea that any credible definition of leadership must make accommodations for situation, circumstances, and context.

While this type of research and analysis provides credence to the idea that applications of democratic principles are legitimate and successful in a management context there is still the question of numbers. As the authors state, “…. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare.” True enough, but what about when the company is a tech giant like Cisco? Maybe this one counts for a lot?

In the not too distant past John Chambers, renowned CEO of a company with a $20+ Billion cash cushion observed that the organizational structure and culture that had gotten Cisco to its prominence would very likely not take it to where it wanted to go, among other places the leadership position in Telepresence video.

The move by Chambers to turn over operational control of Cisco to a community of internal leaders using a structure of commitments to mutual success and committees has not necessarily drawn cheers from all quarters (20% of senior leadership has exited since this transition began) but it has drawn a lot of attention and much of it from various media concerns. A November, 2008 article by Ellen McGirt in Fast Company, 'How Cisco's CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist' provides a very comprehensive view of the makeover John Chambers seems to have in mind. The article title, using the term "Socialist" is likely a bit inflammatory. However, given the limited experience we have in America of using any participatory management approach I am not surprised that only terms with which we are immediately familiar would be used to describe something we do not know a great deal about.

What I do know is that the Fast Company article continues to draw comment, as recently as January 11, 2010. I find this unusual, there is something very psychologically provocative going on at Cisco. This change is obviously about a lot more than just economics. I also know from perusing various blog sites and reading the business pundits that the jury is still out on whether John Chambers is going to eventually be viewed as this generations Jack Welch. Has Cisco, under the direction of John Chambers found a way to not only keep culture from eating strategy for breakfast but maybe now serve its realization? At the time the article appeared in Fast Company Cisco stock was trading at just over $17/share, last Friday it closed at just over $24. In our copy cat business culture you can bet that if this trend continues John Chambers will have plenty of imitators.

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"Creating a great place to work is one of the best things a company can do for its bottom line. It’s no accident that the organizations consistently identified as winners also happen to be some of the best places on earth to work.  This occurs not as an afterthought, but as a vital, premeditated element of business strategy."

        Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, The Contented Cows Partners

I have been associated with Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden since early 2000, just about the time they self-published their first book 'Contented Cows Give Better Milk.' Since that time Bill and Richard have remained among the vanguard of voices providing fact based reasoning for why it is a sound business practice to take good care to see that employees have an environment to work in that fosters productivity.; appreciation, training, tools and technology etc. For them and for me it isn't simply a matter of values,it isn't just "nice to be nice to the nice", this is dog doo practical stuff and the facts back it up.

As practical but perhaps not as easy to swallow is the notion that leaders/managers must be willing to consider themselves among the environmental factors that affect overall levels of engagement. Much is made of the idea that customers will vote with their feet, highly mobile employees, usually the most highly prized, will do the same thing but maybe faster when faced with disengaged managers.

When it comes to answering the question of whether I am pro-management or pro-employee my answer is always "Yes!" If I am anti anything, I am anti-stupid where by stupid I mean to distinguish thoughtless action, driven by force of habit and justified in some fashion by past success or privilege of position. So no, in case you are wondering, I do not mean to imply or assert that employee engagement is the sole responsibility of leadership or management, as you prefer. Engagement, what it takes to be sufficiently involved to be highly productive is everyone's responsibility. However, it falls to leaders to recognize, i.e., not be stupid about the fundamental condition in the workplace. There is at worst an imbalance of power in the workplace and at best a perceived imbalance of power. While I would be quick to say to an employee that their engagement is first and foremost their responsibility I would also hurriedly add that perception is fundamentally, in the absence of trans-formative thinking, reality, and leaders who ignore this truth are, for lack of a better phrase, acting stupidly. Oh yes, and as a manager, since your value is added through the actions of those reporting to you...

Is there evidence for this assertion, for I am certainly making one here? Of course there is, you do not ask a question like this unless you already know the answer! Gary Hamel, in a recent posting to his blog in the Wall Street Journal blog “Management’s Dirty Little Secret” cites the recently published Global Workforce Survey from Towers Perrin showing that of the 90,000 people surveyed 21% reported that they are truly engaged with their work! If I am not mistaken this number is lower than that initially reported in the early Gallup surveys similar in nature some years back.

Hamel chides managers in a more polite way than I do. He suggests that managers are heedless of the issue of engagement where I say stupid about. OK, potato/pototo, tomato/tomoto, he has better  street cred than I do, let’s go with heedless for now. Net, net, after Hamel dismisses the possibility that the heedlessness might result from 1) Ignorance-not realizing that employees are emotionally disconnected. (He uses the Dilbert strip as essentially exhibit “A” for the Prosecution in this instance.) He then goes on to check off 2) Impotence- meaning mindless, uninspiring work as a possible source of the disengagement (surprisingly 86% of those participating in the Towers Perrin survey indicated that they loved or liked their work) and finally he arrives at 3) Indifference – managers see engagement as a nice-to-have but not financially important. In his words,

“…if we’re going to improve engagement, we have to start by admitting that the real problem isn’t irksome, monotonous work, but stony-hearted, spirit-deflating managers.”

While he does not say this, I will; by stony hearted, spirit-deflating managers he means at all levels and most importantly, the top where the privileges provide the greatest disconnect between head and heart.

Hamel, like Drucker in his later years, has clearly made a connection that makes him dangerous to the management establishment. He is “the man” when it comes to the “X’s and O’s” of business so he cannot be waved off. In addition, he has come to understand that while the applications in business may be economic, the operating system is social.

As we roll along here, in future postings we will tackle just what an individual manager can do about this sad state we all find ourselves in, among other things.

Thank you for your attention.

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It must be very complex, leadership that is. It must be or why would Amazon currently carry nearly 382,000 titles containing the word leadership? A quick Google query on the word "leadership" gives a response of over 143,000,000 entries. I smell a rat and I have been smelling a rat for several years now. Maybe there is something else afoot here and it is time to tell the truth about it.

In practice I have had occasion to have more than one senior leader say he or she was interested in seeing  more leadership from the people in their organization. A typical response from me might be to suggest my sincere doubt in this expressed interest! A provocative remark like this better have a good follow up and there is one available, if you can get that first line out of your mouth. Played properly this exchange can have the desired effect of creating a "teachable moment" or at least one where you have an opportunity at offering something I think is infinitely wise. When challenged in these cases, as I always have been my response is similar to that offered by Doug Sundheim, Executive Coach from New York City. I'll paraphrase Doug here; "I bet you have been taking responsibility for all of the critical decisions - and thus the critical thinking behind them. Your people feel alienated, with no sense of ownership, and you wonder why you can't get them more engaged.There is a direct correlation between employee's stepping up and whether there is any room to step up." This exchange often has led to a visible shrug of recognition and a sheepish question from the potential client, "It sounds like you are saying I am the problem?" So here the "teachable moment" presents itself. My response to the potential client will be to say "First, you are not the problem but you are certainly part of the problem and if you are willing to at least be part of the solution we can make some progress. And is there a connection between what you have been doing and the level of engagement you see, oh yeah!"

It is occasions like these that are also moments of truth for those of us who fancy ourselves organizational catalysts, the conversations that now follow are not only going to determine whether this potential client becomes a client, they are also going to determine whether you are going to go back out on that wire without a net yet one more time, make that promise that things can be different. From here the exchange might go something like this, " To begin with when you have been saying you wanted more leadership I suspect that what you meant was more do as I want you to-ship." This is always hard because invariably this assertion produces a flash of recognition coupled with awkward silence and the tension of embarrassment. But it passes fairly quickly!

I then ask the by now fully engaged executive or manager another question, "What are you willing to give up?" This question almost always requires further explanation so I just go right on. "There is a difference between 1) a 'desire to be in charge' and  2) a willingness to lead. The first is a matter of personal interest or motivation and not necessarily even a qualification for the second, where I imagine almost anyone asked about the topic would say that leadership and accountability are inseparable and many who wish to be in charge just want that, not that accountability stuff!  You very likely have no shortage of people in your organization who like the idea of being in charge, because of a number of incentives that go with that territory but they do not necessarily aspire to accountability because it doesn't work that way.Accountability isn't yours to give or expect anyway. It is, however, something you can request or offer and as in any deal there needs to be an exchange of value, something that provides for mutual, not necessarily equal, benefit . If what you truly want is leadership then you need to be prepared to give up something and generally the give up you are least likely to want to give is the final say."

This statement usually brings up the first " I am not really comfortable with that!"  My rejoinder to that might echo the words of Sue Tupling, "Feeling uncomfortable? So you should!" in the piece she authored recently describing the emotional hurdles many senior leaders face when they first begin to confront the need to let go in order to get what they want. Personally, I have seen leaders knowingly choose control over business results or staff development on more than one occasion, especially when they knew they could make their numbers without letting go.

When we reach this point the conversation turns solemn, like something ominous is about to happen. Thankfully, at least on some occasions something really productive emerges from the somber mood and the executive or manager sees that not letting go is going to constrain them to results similar to those they have already achieved and if they are up to anything more the give up is the price of admission into a new realm of possibility. But the positive thing does not always occur and on those occasions my mood may become a bit sarcastic , "If you can make your numbers without letting go what are you complaining about? Unless of course your intuition is telling you there is something more to be had than just making the numbers. Or maybe you simply want someone to blame if things don't work out?" Shortly after this I usually leave their office.

By the way, it was probably initiative they wanted anyway, much less expensive than leadership but to the control oriented, knowing what they would want, that distinction does not readily appear.

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When I created The Heart of Engagement, I was looking for a metaphor to express my passion for distinguishing factors that contribute to establishing intentionally engaging work environments. From the very start, I have assumed that there is no real “heart” of engagement, I thought of the title mainly as a way to designate a direction for an inquiry, not necessarily a destination. Recently I had an experience that has made me reconsider my own assumption; maybe there really is a heart! It happened in of all places the Tai Tung Chinese Restaurant on King Street in Seattle. I wish you could have been there!

Last Thursday evening at the invitation of my friend and colleague Jim Bergquist I attended a staff meeting for everyone who works at his most well known client, the Pike Place Fish Market, a group of around twenty. The market is located in Seattle, though I am sure that fact hardly needs mentioning since it is after all “World Famous.” Jim , who has been consulting with the market’s owner, John Yokoyama, as well as the rest of the staff since 1986 had met with me over lunch that day and happened to mention that I’d be welcome to attend and I jumped at the opportunity. {Certainly hundreds of thousands of people have watched the fishmongers toss the fish over the past twenty years but I imagine the number of outsiders who have sat in on a staff meeting is pretty small.}

I knew of Jim Bergquist more than I knew him when I arrived in Anacortes in late 2006. Some years past, about twenty or so I guess, Jim and I had been volunteers for The Hunger Project. I had read about his work with Pike Place Fish in ‘Catch: A Fishmongers Guide to Greatness and we had both started our consulting practices around the same time. So now, we live about three miles apart and are able to get together on a regular basis. The Pike Place Fish Market is a frequent topic of our conversations, mainly because I am so interested in what took a near bankrupt fish market to a twenty-year run of successes and made it a brand highly recognized in the world of organizational development.

What I saw last Thursday evening came pretty close to answering for me why the truly standout companies are not afraid to share their secrets. Like Toyota, Pike Place Fish Market has been openly sharing the philosophy that led to its sustained success for years and after all this time has very few imitators. Why? I cannot be sure I have the  answer but from my recent experience I certainly now have an informed opinion. It turns out that the folks at Pike Place Fish operate from a central purpose, a commitment to “World Peace and Prosperity for Everyone.” Yea buddy, that is what I said. Nearly every one of the staff members present was wearing either a hoodie or a cap with this purpose prominently stated someplace on the garment and as each staff member shared something that evening it wasn’t more than a minute or two before someone else tied that contribution back to their purpose. As I write this, I have a good idea how it sounds and I can tell you that I have never witnessed anything more authentic in my life. The experience was humbling and inspiring.

The folks at Pike Place Fish Market, with the help of Jim Bergquist, figured out a long time ago that their daily work had to be about something larger than just making money, c’mon, it is fish they are selling! You get the fish in the morning, you stack them up, you sell them, and you go home at night and then do it again the next day. How long can you do that and stay inspired? The guys at Pike Place Fish have figured out how to do it consistently for over twenty years and John Yokoyama  told me Thursday evening that this team is their best ever and they are definitely at the top of their game.

What struck me part way through the meeting was that this was not a special event; they do this every two weeks, without fail, and have been for over twenty years. Jim Bergquist has been a regular contributor for these twenty years and is clearly a revered part of their tradition. The folks at Pike Place Fish do not need Jim Bergquist, they want him there, he is an integral part of their team and philosophy and a source of objectivity when they get tangled up in their shorts, and they do!

As a professional catalyst I couldn’t have been more validated by my experience last Thursday evening. And, like I said, it is clearer for me now that the very best have nothing much to fear from the rest of the companies out there, even in their own industries. Honestly, what makes the Pike Place Fish Market rare is that the owner and employees are up to something a lot more naturally engaging than making money, and not that many companies see the possibility in that.

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This past weekend my wife and I had an opportunity to visit with our granddaughters, my son and his wife. Besides seeing my granddaughters, I also had another agenda this trip, doing a little recon on my son’s employment situation. In January, this son, the oldest of my three, was laid off from his position as a project architect at a very large firm in the town where he lives. My own response when I first heard this news was, “Yikes!”

Honestly, I had previously wondered for some time about behaviors my son described relative to his employment situation; among other things, he always left his office at 5:00PM regardless of the workload and he did not take work home on either weeknights or weekends. Being somewhat old-school  myself I was concerned that if push came to shove as it sometimes does he would end up on whatever short list was created for staff reduction if there was an economic crunch that affected his firm. Of course then there was an economic crunch and he was out the proverbial door.

So, Friday afternoon as we sat in his living room, just over eleven months after his last day of work. I was curious about his experience of the process he has been engaged with. Economically he and his wife had made the adjustments necessary quite successfully but I was more concerned about his emotional and psychological state.

My initial questions to my son on Friday had the effect of uncorking a bottle of champagne! He talked virtually non-stop for the next 45 minutes about what a great time he had been having. I was thinking to myself, “Oh dear, this has finally gotten to him.” A few months earlier, back in July to be exact, he had expressed similar enthusiasm but I thought that would have worn off by now as reality set in and anxiety displaced his early bravado. Actually, he is now more excited than ever and while he did admit that there is a certain amount of anxiety he contends with each day it seems to him to be a natural part of the process that he has accepted and appreciates.

Each morning he gets breakfast for both girls while his wife sets off to work. He takes his now five-year-old first daughter to kindergarten each morning and then spends the rest of the time until noon with his one year old who gets dropped off at day care for the afternoon, when he begins “his work.” Right around 5:30PM, everyone comes home and he gets dinner in one form or other.  Since this process began he has applied for and been granted a general contractors license , taken and passed four of the seven exams to be certified as a licensed architect, visited nearly a hundred potential properties for sale, interviewed and made tentative plans with several specialty contractors,  purchased and learned how to use a bidding and planning software package and is nearly complete with a set of prototype plans for a residential multi-family building that he can use to develop bank financing, something he works on at times until 3:00AM, on his own time.

As time has passed since his layoff he has become clearer and clearer that he had wanted to leave his employed situation for quite some time but the pragmatic “I am a father now with responsibilities!”, part of him held him in tow like a “tractor beam” to an employment situation that increasingly offered him little other than financial reward. To be certain he felt as though the experience he had gained in his first few years with this employer had been a valuable apprenticeship. However, for at least the past three years he was increasingly distracted and I noticed him often finding fault with his employer’s decisions and practices. This was something I found strange since the employer had always seemed willing to accommodate his limited work schedule and habit of extending lunch hours so he could visit his daughter in day care. What is the phrase, “Be careful not to bite the hand that feeds you?”

Aaaanyway, this post has gone on a bit too long. Somewhere near the center of this large question we are addressing together is a lesson to be both learned and shared. If we are serious about optimizing the experience of the time of our life, it is insufficient to find something to be involved with where all that is required is our competence. This is not how our self would want to invest if we truly gave it voice. Competence does not necessarily equal engagement. Unfortunately, I fear that this is among the most common of stories we might hear about how many of our children, or perhaps even ourselves, have chosen to spend the productive years we have been given. The net effect is unfortunate to a degree that is almost unimaginable. While it satisfies the basics that Maslow so brilliantly described in his work it inevitably leads us to adopt a certain bitter perspective towards life in general and resentfulness towards others who have made the choice to satisfy their soul as well as their pocketbook. In the end, it also robs our employers of the opportunity to have the most engaged workforce possible, but that is another discussion for another day.

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Employees, and their managers will be unable to engage with their work at the levels needed today for sustained periods until the issue of emotional intelligence is addressed as a key strategic issue in the "C" level suites around the country.

In virtually every management development program I have created or delivered in the past 20 years the point has been made that the greatest challenge facing managers today is their own limited interest in developing their own understanding of this psychological breakthrough , (probably now more appropriately defined in a workplace context as social intelligence ) or these needs among the people who report to them. The fact of emotional intelligence born out now by years of research and anecdotal references continues to bedevil  managers today and the problems created as well as their consequences continue to grow. (In many instances we simply have the wrong people managing but that is a topic for another day)

It usually goes without saying but bears repeating here that business in general and certainly the experience of being at work must be considered a contact sport.  As our economy has evolved over the last 25 years, the amount of contact has by design, certainly not intent,  increased dramatically and my experience strongly suggests that the majority of people in our American workforce are not adequately prepared to participate in a game that requires significant personal initiative and interpersonal skill. For that matter it is probably safe to say that just as many employers are not ready to participate with a workforce possessed of an high social intelligence quotient if this had occurred as part of the evolutionary process.

Evolution may be a catch-all phrase when talking about how the economy has "morphed" over the years but one feature is worth considering; the process generally happens outside of our standard measurements of time and so changes often go unnoticed for extended periods. Management in the American workplace is now standing in front of the outcome of just such an evolutionary outcome, what Peter Senge undoubtedly meant us all to notice when he popularized the term "unintended consequences" in his landmark work, The Fifth Discipline.  Educationally and emotionally, many, many people in the workplace today are not prepared to deal successfully with the level of interpersonal complexity they face daily.

A quick look back may serve a purpose here. The industrial economy offered the majority of people in the workforce

• narrowly defined sets of tasks
• high degrees of supervision and
• limited individual discretionary action

Never mind whether this was good or bad; it was what it was and created the foundation for the standard of living we enjoy today. As the economy has proceeded along its path and  we have been brought to where we are today certain aspects of that industrial economy were carried over, including some unfortunate ways of thinking about management, meanwhile what we need from employees has changed dramatically. Many managers say they want more initiative, creativity and passion from those reporting to them but are not able to recognize that these additives to the compliance that was the hallmark of a prior time in the workplace are not simple snap-on modules. This outcome begs for transformational education and skill building is also required.

Before patting yourself on the back because you don't fall into the category of the emotionally underdeveloped or see what I am talking about in your immediate reports, ask yourself and honestly answer these questions:

• Am I able to participate successfully in every conversational exchange without hesitation or caution?
• Am I able to have the conversations I really need to have with my reports so I am optimizing their development as well as their productivity?
• Do I ever see instances where my reports "hold back" with me even though I have repeatedly encouraged them to talk to me about everything?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you were being authentic and the question that remains is, "What is the price you are paying in terms of

1. Your own full engagement at work
2. Your own productivity
3. The level of engagement and productivity of those you are charged with developing

This is not so much an issue of answering a question as it is one of making a commitment. As managers, as executives, are we prepared to work as hard as needed and invest accordingly to bring the social intelligence of our workforces to the levels required by the level of contact and complexity our organizations require to perform as expected? I can tell you from experience that our educational system has yet to even recognize the enormity of the problem.

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When it comes to conditions that promote engagement how much does facing a challenge play a part? If it does is it the challenge being faced or the individual being challenged that makes the difference.?

If the statistics from the Gallup organization are to be believed (and why wouldn't they be?) only 27% of our national workforce reports being fully engaged with the work they are doing everyday. I am less concerned with what this statistic means as far as productivity being lost than I am with the implications it has for the presence of passion, creativity and initiative, full engagement with the work at hand and a concern for the success of the whole enterprise. In other words that people have work to do that they feel is really worthy of the time of their lives.

The statistic cited certainly does not mean that the rest of the folks, those either less than engaged or even worse unengaged, don't have enough to do. Actually the reality seems to be quite the opposite as companies continue to rigorously maintain headcount at near absolute minimums and for exempt workers the  work weeks continue to leak well beyond 40 hours and include portions of weekends as an assumption by many employers. The question it seems to beg is whether simply having a lot to do is a challenge that engages?

In my own work for the past 20 years I'd have to say that rarely have I encountered a management team that understands what it takes to keep the majority or their workforce at or near full engagement. They certainly know the results that need to be produced and they of course know how to offer significant rewards and consequences to keep the results flowing. However, the idea of focusing on engagement as a source of results still remains unexplored territory and I think mainly because managers are trained to focus on actions or behaviors not conditions. This is an unfortunate carry over from our industrial period and much of the work that was done on time/motion studies.

In 2008 Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Fortune magazine published 'Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else, a book that is still selling briskly. Colvin's fundamental premise is that while top performers are talented they also work very deliberately and intently on being the very best in their chosen field. Honestly, and he has data to back it up, these world-class types simply out practice the rest of their competition both in hours and focus. What Colvin's writing suggests is that there are truly few among us willing to go through the rigors of what it takes to become outstanding performers. This I think would echo a basic belief held by the majority of managers in our country, hence the rationale for many of the draconian management practices many of us have encountered.

I am of course interested in the performance of outstanding individuals, however,  I am passionate about exceptional organizations. So what does a study of top individual performers and the challenges they set out for themselves have to do with organizational performance? Colvin does get into this question a bit, but not enough to satisfy me. For my own part I believe that whether consciously or not people are motivated to find something that challenges them to be the very best they can be and also to be part of something greater than themselves.

As I continue my own study of engagement, I want to suggest that having top talent choose you as a manager or your place of work as their own does have something to do with knowing that yours is an environment that challenges people to be their very best, not just work hard on what the organization needs to have done. It also has to do with having people see that there is in your place of employment an opportunity to be part of something worthwhile that is larger than themselves. This does not just happen or at least as a manager or employer you cannot to afford to believe that it will. There is as much deliberate practice in producing a highly engaged workforce as there is in producing outstanding individual performance.

(If you have any interest in the topic of performance I'd definitely recommend reading the book, it is both enjoyable and informative but you may want to start by checking out his article in Fortune which summarizes his argument).

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