A short time ago while leading a workshop I was asked this question by someone who sounded like an experienced manager. “What do I do with an obviously talented report who just doesn’t seem committed to the work he has been assigned?” The manager and I engaged in a brief dialogue to establish the signs that the employee was not committed. What we rapidly determined was probably not surprising. The manager was not necessarily reporting on the results being produced, she was reporting on her observations of the mannerisms of the employee. She didn’t like his attitude! Though not exceptional, the results were fine, but the employee was often overheard discussing matters related to Fantasy Football with colleagues when time could be used for additional production or education on the finer points of the work.

At first glance this may seem silly to even talk about. However, I am in and around a lot of managers and supervisors, literally thousands over the period of any given year. It is not uncommon for me to hear similar concerns expressed by many who have management responsibility.

{I’ll be the first one to tell any employee that I believe employee engagement is the responsibility of the employee, when I am talking to employees…and in the blink of an eye I’ll be the first one to tell management that employee engagement is the responsibility of management, when I am talking to management. From my perspective the conversation depends on where you are in the relationship and make no mistake about it, engagement is a matter of relationship. Like any other relationship worth being involved with, there is no simply doing your part; you are either in for the whole thing or not at all.}

As the conversation continued with this particular manager I asked an intentionally provocative question. “Have you ever asked this employee what he finds so engaging about fantasy football?” The manager came back quickly with, “Why should I have to do that?” The point of the question was to establish where the manager stood regarding responsibility for this employee’s level of engagement. The question she asked in response to mine quickly established where she stood. She assumed none.

 I went on to ask whether she understood that fantasy football was a fairly complex topic requiring considerable research and attention to detail and nuance. Yes, it was a game that concerned a sport but the skills involved in gaining proficiency called for dedication ,study and analysis of statistics, and a commitment to keeping up to date with an ever changing landscape of information. What if she sat down with this employee and explored his interest in depth, strictly for the purpose of understanding what it was about this game that the employee was so passionate about? Might an exploration like this allow her to understand what it was about the game that captured this employee’s interest and warranted such freely given dedication? Perhaps then she might be able to consider structuring the employee’s work to take advantage of his natural interests and get more of the attitude she was looking for as well as more productivity.

She didn’t buy it! And so it goes.

By now you are probably thinking that this encounter I have described is an exception and managers who follow a compliance-based approach to managing productivity and overall performance are fewer and farther between. I beg to differ and I beg you to consider that to the degree you don’t recognize your own or know your manager’s basic attitudes about employee engagement your employee base, your organization’s working capital, is at risk.

Intuitively I have for a number of years suspected that engagement, productivity, retention and profitability are intertwined like the links of the DNA helix. Mainly I came to this belief this by observing myself in relationship to whatever work was required of me. But now we can all go beyond simple belief or intuition and I think we owe it to our profession as managers to do just that. Thanks to a timely tweet from my associate and colleague Paul Hebert today I received a “heads up” on a newly released posting from Bret Simmons titled appropriately enough, “Employee Engagement and Performance: Finally some Credible Evidence.” Take a look for yourself. Bret’s cites some very sound newly released research evidence on the critical relationship between job engagement and performance. Pay particular attention to the closing words to his post, “If you find yourself lamenting that your employees don’t appear engaged, you are going to have to do something different.”

• The corollary to Bret's closing words of course is that if you are not willing to do something different, you can reduce your suffering by not expecting anything to change!
  

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Working with a group of managers this week we opened what has now become to me a familiar and productive organizational conversation. “How can we learn to need, not just use each other?” The group I was working with was by any standards “high functioning” yet it was obvious upon introduction that they didn’t quite grasp the question they were being asked. So, I tried asking the question in a slightly different way, “OK, what’s the real reason everyone complains about IT?” This proved to be a bit more penetrating as the people in the group began to grasp that what I was pushing them on and what was making them uncomfortable was having to acknowledge something that we have all become familiar with in our organizational lives, avoiding vulnerability. We all do it and we don’t talk about it. But what if we did?

Back in 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge worker’, he then spent a good portion of the next 45 years studying and revamping his theories about knowledge worker productivity and how best to adapt and adjust management practice to account for this new reality. He went so far as to say, “…better knowledge work productivity is our most important economic need.” He further warned that our long term prosperity and even our economic survival depend upon it.

Today more than ever our habitual treatments of Drucker’s ideas as quaint or optional are like “chickens coming home to roost.”

Through observation of this new reality of economic life, the worker as asset not merely resource, Drucker developed some perspectives that the majority of managers are, 5 years after his death, just beginning to grasp. What Drucker saw was the need for managers to simultaneously make their present Enterprise more effective, identify and realize its potential, and create a different Enterprise for a different future. In so doing he suggested that business leaders needed to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas through better knowledge work productivity and innovation.

“ …business leaders need to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas ...”

The implication of this statement is profound and redefines what it means to manage. It is no longer sufficient to think of the role of management in terms of knowing what needs to be done and seeing to it that it gets done. While this definition  remains a portion of what it means to be a manager we must expand the demand on the role to include “knowing” what talent is available at all times and seeing to it that it is put to use for the best advantage of the enterprise. It also means, and this is where the “why we are all afraid of IT” thing keeps coming up; as managers we must be able to recognize what knowledge and skill we need… that we do not have and cannot provide for ourselves… that we will be reliant on others to provide. This last requirement makes us veeerrry uncomfortable. Embracing the interdependency....eeeeeuuuuwwww!

In order to succeed in the manner Drucker is describing we are going to learn to consciously, strategically need the talents, knowledge and skills of not only those people working for us but also of those we will collaborate with. And look at us; we are still struggling with getting our performance reviews done on time, again, this year, for the umpteenth consecutive year. It is time to step up our game or step away from the role!

Tomorrow I’ll go back into my workshop and we will continue to explore this newly introduced distinction between needing people and using them. As the conversations unfolds predictably the managers in the group will begin to see that they

• Need to know a great deal more about themselves in terms of strengths and limitations.
• Need to know much more about the capabilities and interests of people reporting to them, continue to know what needs to be done and now who is best to do it and, what is going to need to get done that we must be preparing for now or we’ll never be ready and who should be doing that and
• Know where they currently have collaborators who are not being related to as assets, what do those assets need from them in order to be able to provide them service and what are they going to need from these collaborators in the future that they need to let them know about now so their expectations stand a chance of being met.

And at some point in the process of becoming fully aware of what is called for now they are going to become overwhelmed with the limitations they have placed on themselves and recognize that they will need to shed some of the protective behavior patterns they have used to avoid vulnerability until now. And they will get a bit panicky, and then they will be fine.

Puff, puff, puff! Whew! The level of complexity is daunting and yet if we (managers) continue as we have with our historical ways of working like we don’t really need as much as we do we are going to get run over by the sheer volume of what we are faced with. Like the man in the commercial said many years ago, “you can pay me now or pay me later.”

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Pretty basic stuff this week but it never hurts to go back to basics.

Assuming that we are all in agreement that engaged employees are preferable to ones who are not, let’s take a brief look at actions we take as managers that actually dis-incent the engagement we say we want.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

                                                                      Upton Sinclair

If I have heard it once I have heard it a hundred times from a potential client in an initial meeting, “Mike, what I am looking for is more leadership from my people!” Notwithstanding that this statement is often made thoughtlessly the first time around, my standard response when I hear it is “Then what we need to do is determine what you and your managers are doing to discourage leadership!” Silence follows.

Once everyone starts breathing again we can begin a fruitful dialogue.

The truth of my experience is that when senior managers strongly suggest they are interested in more leadership, they are muddling leadership with engagement and their real interest is more engaged employees. If it is really more leadership they want, we’ll have a further conversation about how much control they are willing to give up. That is always interesting!

In either case the task becomes one of working with both senior and mid-level managers to distinguish how they may be unwittingly discouraging the very engagement they profess to be seeking.

Much of what managers do to discourage or dis-incent engagement will have a reasonable explanation in the minds of the managers and will look like blatant chicanery in the eyes of employees. Some cases in point:

• “Our manager says she wants us to speak our minds and offer ideas and suggestions. When she holds a meeting she tells us to hold our questions and comments to the end of her presentation. Then as she gathers her things to leave she asks if we have any questions!”
• “Senior managers tell us we can contact them directly; when we do they ask our managers why we are bringing this matter to senior management attention rather than handling it more locally.”
• “The only way for me to make more money in my current position is to create opportunities for overtime. The easiest way to do that is to slow down so my work takes extra time and then I get labeled as a mediocre to poor performer.”
• “I can easily complete my assignments most weeks in 30-35 hours; I am good at what I do. There’s no real incentive to perform at a higher rate cuz every time I finish early my manager adds work from some of the poorer performers.”
• “I’ve offered five suggestions for improvement in the past year and not received a positive response on any of them. Managers promised they would get back in writing on all suggestions within 72 hours of receipt. I’d just be happy with that”

When confronted on this behavior, managers will often respond that it was a one time occurrence, they were pushed for time, it made sense when they took the action, etc. etc.

NOW HEAR THIS…all ye who would manage. The basic employment relationship is predicated on a mutually understood imbalance of power. You have more than the people reporting to you, at least in theory!.

Without question, at this point in time the majority of employees, no matter what the organization, are keenly attuned to this imbalance and on constant alert for any sign that their status in the “royal household” may be in jeopardy. This is to say that if you make a sudden move to scratch your head don’t be surprised when they duck. This underlying and unspoken unholy understanding is only made worse by our failure as managers to acknowledge the truth of it.

In my experience as a manager I have directly said to employees, “I seek your partnership. You are not worth much to me if our relationship is based in fear. Unless I can trust you to speak up when there is something to be said I will be essentially working alone. Whatever we need to do to work through whatever fear you have of me or managers in general, I am prepared to work through with you. I am not prepared to hear after the fact that you knew something and didn’t express it.” Not everyone who received this offer accepted but everyone who accepted has not been disappointed, nor have I.

• Take a look at the bulleted items above and examine yourself not just by reading the examples but by checking yourself against the spirit of the message.
• Can you come up with your own list of unconscious behaviors on your part that may be a dis-incentive to engagement?

In case you are wondering, I am not a "management hater." I do hold managers to a certain standard because of the power balance I speak to here. My highest loyalty is always to what at any point in time I see as the "best interest of the organization."

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Entry into a new realm of working expectations is a big deal; it needs to be related to like a big deal. The process whereby a new employee is taken into the working community ,a new manager is introduced into the clan of management or a manager is elevated to an executive or officer rank are all cultural rights of passage that hold the possibility of being seminal events in any career.

The complexity of the transitions commonly referred to as employment or promotion is far greater than often acknowledged or recognized and the preparations and monitoring processes should be developed accordingly. To describe the process of facilitating these transitions with the use of a “term of art”, ‘Onboarding’, not even a recognized word in our language, is to my way of thinking an insult to the spirit of the events themselves. I do not mean to imply that anyone means to insult or not take seriously these events. Rather, what I am pointing out is that in many ways people in the HR profession appear to be insensitive to the very fact that they are dealing with human beings. It does occur to me more frequently than I enjoy that the HR profession has often drawn not so much people who appreciate people as much as it draws people who appreciate rules and regulation.•

·         I cannot imagine the thought has not crossed many of the readers’ minds as well, whether you are inside or out of the HR function.

If, as I do, you subscribe to the type of thinking represented in this video of Steve Zaffron, author of ‘The Three Laws of Performance’  talking about the work he and co-author Dave Logan have been bringing to companies for the past 17 years. You’ll immediately recognize the counterproductive effect of the use of the term ‘Onboarding.’ The foundational principle of my work as a consultant over the years is this; relationship is the origin of all results in an organizational context. Further, relationship is function of how situations occur, i.e., are perceived. Steve Zaffron points out that performance will correlate to how people ‘see’ or how a situation ‘occurs.’ As importantly as this first postulate is the second; that situations ‘occur’ for people in language.

• …We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or as we are conditioned to see it.

                                                                      Stephen Covey

When we introduce employees, managers or executives to their new roles and relationships by using a mechanical term, ‘Onboarding’, we instantly communicate that an event is taking place. These occurrences are not events, they are transitions, they are in fact state changes, ones that require the reinvention of who one is in order to perform with full engagement inside a new field of relationships. Viewed from an organic perspective these transitions are much more akin to organ transplants than they are to changing the tire on a car.  Unfortunately, the later perspective often prevails in many of our workplaces.

In view of the persistence of the mechanical,event, transactional based perspective that seems to pervade much of the HR profession I'd like to share some recommendations:

Personally I am in favor of the dissolution of the HR function as it currently exists as an extension of the industrial age economy when employees were at best resources and at worst always expense, therefore expendable.

Specifically what would I like to see? Glad you asked!

I’d like to see all matters currently considered the responsibility of HR come under critical strategic review on the following basis:

• Consider. If, as employers need to be reminded, their employees are their most valuable asset these days their care should be in part the responsibility of the company’s asset managers. Compensation and benefits should become the purview of the treasurer’s group.
• Consider. If, as employers frequently need to be reminded, the actual real value of their company leaves the building each evening and then decides  whether to ever return whoever has accountability for Risk Management should be closely involved with matter related to the evaluation, development and retention of employees.
• Consider. There is an inseparable connection between recruitment, development and advancement of employees. The establishment of a function strictly devoted to this continuum would be strategic in nature and need executive level visibility at all times.
• Consider. All actions that involve shaping new performance expectations, employment or movement into management or executive roles are fraught with risk that should be shared equally by all parties involved. Trial periods, no harm no foul, where all parties to transitions of this type can mutually determine whether success has been achieved can save productive assets from being lost to an employer. (There is not sufficient room here to adequately discuss this suggestion)

At best ‘Onboarding’ suggests the movement of passengers up a gangway onto a ship, a mechanical function. At worst the term suggests the movement of a piece of cargo from a dock to the deck of a ship, another mechanical act.  If HR professionals are going to continue to employ language suggesting people as pieces to be moved around on a game board I suggest then consistency.  Henceforth all employee exits will be referred to as ‘Offboarding!’

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 Today’s headline is intended to provoke you to thought as well as action. Like anything that gets too familiar I fear that there has been a loss of the power in our national/international conversations around employee engagement.

(Yes, that's me in the picture, as I see myself!)

So why would I be concerned? After all, we now have an Employee Engagement Network with over 2600 members internationally. Three years ago this on-line community did not exist. For those who might consider themselves “employee engagement professionals” this news would seem to be immediately exciting. But I wonder?

Is it possible that many of us, far more even than are represented by this rush to join The Employee Engagement Network are much more enamored of our own involvement in the subject of employee engagement then we are at being effective at it, i.e., are we making any difference?

• Who, other than companies selling consulting services is offering to produce employee engagement surveys?
• When Employee Engagement conferences are convened is the audience the choir being preached to?
• How involved are “C” level people in your organization with the topic of employee engagement?
• Have measures of Employee Engagement been adopted by senior management as key leading indicators for your business and the likelihood of its future success?

Yes, I know, I am sounding like a party pooper and my blog title is... The Heart of Engagement. You might think I’d be more chipper !

 Honestly, much of my skepticism at the moment is feigned since I do think a lot of good work is being done by many thousands of committed professional. However, when I see an article like this one, “Employee engagement needs to be high on the agenda when resources are limited” published this month by HR Magazine in the UK I am reminded that it is still much too soon to be patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. If this type of article (just about as basic as you can get) is being published in June of 2010 in a publication of this stature then we are still at the very beginning of the transformation of our places of work.

There is no question in my mind that the transformation of the workplace cannot be left to “the professionals” alone. We need a revolution sooner rather than later. This is an ‘all hands on deck’ scenario and so I have a challenge for each of you reading this week.

Take a look at this link: “The surprising truth about what motivates us”...now

• Share the connected video with your work group. It is about 11 minutes long. Surely you can spare 11 minutes to make a difference in your work group! Well maybe a bit more than 11 minutes, leave room for at least a half hour dialogue after you watch the video. Observe and listen to how your co-workers respond. I don’t think you’ll be surprised, maybe moved by the depth of their passion, including their skepticism. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from your immediate group take the video to the next level of management in your organization. Don’t just email it to them, ask for an audience and watch the video together, stick around for a 20 to 30 minute dialogue. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from the next level of management and you are emboldened by your experience see if you can get a 30 minute meeting with a senior level manager with the promise to share something that has the potential to effect the bottom line for years to come.

If you get this far I think you'll know what to do next…good luck and let me know how it goes! 

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Is it too easy to beat on British Petroleum right now? Perhaps, yet the saga unfolding is more than an environmental catastrophe, and it certainly is that. This is not merely the story of one company behaving badly; this is the comeuppance of a context. We might name the context "Management's Apparent Sense of Entitlement." On a larger scale we may even see it as the comeuppance of a national culture of entitlement; our own.It is important to see ourselves in everything taking place in this set of events. 

I know there is a lot of "piling on" taking place right now, most of it well justified, some typically politically motivated, some pre-emptive in an attempt to shed responsibility for the blame which will eventually be spread far and wide. It may be particularly hard to see the lessons to be learned for all the noise and emotion. However, rather than be concerned strictly about and for the actions of BP let's take a look at the similarities between what we are seeing in the public behaviors of this international giant , those of previously similarly embattled corporate "citizens" and our own actions at times as managers. If you are a manager I'd ask that you pay particular attention this week.

In order to get the full benefit (if I can call it that) from the tragedy being played out in front of us in this disaster we need to be able to see ourselves in the behaviors of the BP spokespeople and executives. From the very beginning there has been plenty of evidence that BP was going to spend a lot of energy deflecting and limiting its responsibility in the matter, as did TransOcean and Haliburton, the other major antagonists in this multi-act spectacle. But is what we are seeing so different really from the behavior of Enron executives several years ago? How about in the collapse of Global Crossing?

·         Take a look at this incomplete but fairly comprehensive list of corporate scandals from recent history.

 In the case of each of these events someplace in the back-story there is a justification on someone’s part, an interpretation that allowed otherwise “good” people to behave badly. I am calling this phenomenon Management’s Apparent Sense of Entitlement and I want to stress “apparent” because no matter what the real motivation it sure looks like someone thought they were entitled to act the way they did. And, this behavior, played out repeatedly to a lesser degree daily in our places of work has a withering effect on employee engagement. In the same way that repeated exposure to radiation would poison the body, repeated exposure to a lack of accountability and inauthenticity on the part of our managers poisons the soul. On the grand scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster it has the effect of calling into question our very way of life.

What we are witness to has been played out on a lesser scale countless times before just not so much on the world wide stage. There is a sense of entitlement, a right to not be held to account that has been repeatedly asserted by corporate leadership for many years now.

Whether we are apt to admit it or not, as often as we observe and condemn behavior similar to that we are seeing on the part of BP representatives, we are all infected by the virus that thrives in this context.

Just focus on your work place for the moment. Have you ever participated in an employee meeting where a question to an executive was met with an “I’ll have to get back to you on that” response and you felt the spirit in the room droop as a collective experience of disillusionment took place? There would be no "getting back later". How about the director who is repeatedly late for her own meetings and always arrives with a handy excuse? Or, the manager who routinely schedules last minute meetings expecting their staff to dismiss whatever other commitments have been made to attend? Thankfully these examples are not a Deepwater Horizon equivalent event. However, I assert that they are justified from the very same context, “management has its privileges.” Until we can see ourselves in the BP disaster we are not going to be able to develop either an appropriate response in ourselves or consciously correct our own behavior.  

In no way do I mean to condemn all management or all corporate activities. It is the insidiousness of the assertion of a categorical right to not be held to account by many leaders of larger organizations that fouls the water for all of us.

• Where are you opting to not account for yourself with your reports?

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As a manager, especially a manager of younger employees one thing I encourage you to be on the lookout for are occasions that attack the confidence of the your less experienced reports. No doubt you can remember your own baptism by fire when in your earlier years you innocently asked a question of a superior in an open meeting, with the best of intentions, and got handed your head on a platter following a public flaying that left you questioning yourself, your values, the direction of the poles etc. If you were fortunate you had a manager who took you aside and assured you that you were fine and that what you had done hadn’t warranted the treatment you received and maybe there were better ways or times to make your thoughts or questions known in the future. If you were not so fortunate you were met in the hall after the meeting by a co-worker who cauterized your wound with a glib “Glad that wasn’t me” comment, forever cementing in your mind that you were never going to let anything close to that happen again, and were never heard from there or anyplace else that had a similar look and feel. Or maybe you were passed over for a promotion or “thrown under the bus” by a colleague in a public setting, etc. etc.

If you’ve been around for a while you now know the drill, you know you will survive, as Kenny Rogers says, “You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em!” And you know there will always be another day and the point is not so much to avoid the impact of life in the workplace as it is to develop the ability to choose your points of high impact and recover quickly. Nothing will make you more ineffective than

·         the inability to confront events when necessary to get things done,

·         the inability to sustain an injustice and return to the field of play quickly or

·          the inability to leave the past in the past

As object lesson let me present a situation very fresh in the minds of many fans of professional sports. In baseball there are two types of actors on the field at all times, those who play the game and those who officiate the games. Theirs is an uneasy interdependency made necessary by the subjective nature of many of the transactions. Kind of like performance reviews! J Anyway, last Wednesday, June 2^nd, the fans in Detroit’s Comerica Park were on the verge of being treated to one of the rarest events in all of sports, the pitching of a perfect game*. Unfortunately the gods of baseball have a weird sense of fate. On a play that would have been the last of the game a veteran umpire made an erroneous call on a fairly routine play, costing the pitcher, the players and the fans the experience of a lifetime.

*The “perfect game” has occurred only 18 times since 1900 out of something like half a million games played in that period.

I am pretty sure you as well as almost everyone at Comerica that evening can readily see the error of the call made by umpire Jim Joyce.

The fans were stunned, the Detroit players were furious, the manager, Jim Leyland, offered strenuous protest, to no avail. Amazingly, the pitcher, Armando Galarraga, calmly returned to the mound, faced the next batter, got him out and completed a one-hit game for the win.

Following the game a chagrinned Jim Joyce faced the press and admitted his mistake to the press and apologized in person to Galarraga. The next day to no one’s surprise there was an appeal to the Baseball Commissioner, Bud Selig, to reverse the call and award the perfect game. (C’mon Bud you know that wasn’t fair, give the kid a break!) To his credit Bud Selig was true to the game and declined to reverse the call.

Just like in any workplace the two protagonists in this drama returned to work the following day. In a gesture most rare and inspirational Armando Galarraga met Jim Joyce at Home Plate with the daily lineup card, (a task normally completed by the team’s manager), gave him a pat on the back and a hug and assured him that he forgave the mistake and affirmed his confidence in Joyce’s ability to proceed to effectively call the balls and strikes that day. Remarkable and rare, a story worth repeating and one I encourage you to share with your younger employees.

In any interdependency, marriage, co-worker or business partner there is room for disappointment. At times we will let each other down. These are the moments that define relationships; these are the moments that define careers. When they occur will we withdraw from the field never to risk again or will we return to play knowing that somewhere in the future we will experience disappointment again? Can we learn to apologize, can we learn to forgive, even when we know the game will never be fair. For those who cannot…there will always be tickets for the game, that’s why they call them spectators.

·         Are you noticing any of your reports becoming spectators?

·         Are there apologies for you to make or forgiveness to grant?

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Ever Since our friends at the Gallup organization came up with their famous Q12 many professionals in the consulting world have become obsessed with further identifying and refining the "drivers" of engagement and practices focused on improving overall levels of engagement have become the rage in businesses across the country.

The Q12 as you may already know asks 12 questions that purportedly measure strong feelings of employee engagement. There is reportedly a strong correlation between high scores on the Q12 and superior job performance.

Based on their initial work in the area of employee engagement Gallup, using an extraordinary amount of data, determined that Nationally, in 2005, engaged employees made up 28% of the work force globally, not-engaged employees made up 54%, and actively disengaged made up 17%.  With numbers like these it is no wonder Gallup has gone on to develop an enormously successful human resource consulting program.

I believe the Gallup organization through their research and others doing similar research have done the world of business a tremendous favor by uncovering this provocative information. What I am not as certain of is whether the conclusions they arrived at are equally valuable or valid.

My own suspicion is that what Gallup has determined is that only 28% of the players in our national workforce have found work and workplaces that are both truly satisfying for them. This may be as much a function of commitment as it is a response to external factors. The people in this fraction of the workforce just keep moving and/or communicating until they find what they are seeking, possibly following some vision in the manner expressed by George Bernard Shaw

"Reasonable men adapt to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves. That's why all progress depends on unreasonable men."

And I am betting it didn't always feel good, until it did!

It just may be that the majority (54%) of our workforce has “settled” for something less than satisfying and 17% of the workforce is simply pissed off for any number of reasons, perhaps even resentful about having to work at all.

Cause and effect are tricky questions. When it comes to people and their behavior of one thing I am fairly certain, relying on strong feelings, emotions, for anything, is like laying a foundation in quick sand. The divorce rate in our country may be more indicative of this belief than any piece of research I could site. Everyone  becomes engaged when they “feel” like they are in love. Then they marry and the eventual strength of a marriage comes from the way we behave when we no longer “feel” like we are in love. Will we remain engaged? Can we operate from the commitments we have made and have that be sufficient to sustain engagement? Here is an example from my own life of what I am pointing to here:

I don't do yard work. It's not that I am lazy, if the task is going to the grocery store, picking up the dry cleaning, taking out the trash, driving the truck to the recycling center, just let me know it needs to be done and I am on it.. Loading the dishwasher and scrubbing pans after dinner are actually two things I find relaxing. I just don't do yard work; not mowing the lawn yard work, that's fun. No, I mean yard work, like planting flowers, spreading compost, pruning and worst of all, weeding! But I do love my wife and she really enjoys having an attractive yard and works hard at it. As an expression of how much I respect her commitment to the yard we have created a game. She’ll want something done in the yard and I ask if what she wants is “yard work. She of course then says “no” and I say, “Well all right then, I’ll do it.” This works for us and especially because it gives us time together. Except for weeding! We have an unwritten rule that under no circumstances will I engage in weeding.

A week or so ago my wife set out to do some weeding in the rhododendron garden and her back cramped up. I knew she was counting on getting this bit of weeding done so from that place where I am profoundly related to my wife I said, “You know I do not do weeding but I am going to make an exception this week because of your short term disability.” I got down on my hands and knees and for two hours pulled weeds and did a presentable job. Did I have a strong feeling of connection to the task after all? Hardly! In fact I have no more interest now or connection to weeding than I ever did. Yet, because of the commitments my wife and I share this was a satisfying experience. It just didn’t feel like it!

• Where are you waiting for the right feeling before taking action?
• What factors about your working environment have you been putting up with rather than making a request or saying what's on your mind?
• Take a look at where you are working and what you are doing right now? Is this it for you? If not are you willing to take action to get it to be or find another place that will?

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For the past fifteen years I have greeted business leaders clamoring for more leadership and accountability in their organizations with this challenge, “What are you willing to give up? The question is almost always met first with silence followed by a familiar response, “What exactly do you mean by give up? Then the fun begins.

I have been adamant for some time that employees want to give their employers the best they have to offer and employers behaviors and practices often serve to constrain this from happening. Many employees are not going to give their best for conventional rewards and they certainly are not going to give it for nothing, but they will give it for free. I know this without data to back it up, I just get it in my bones and I bet you do too.

“Thankfully, there are those writers who do like data and they often do the research to make the connection between “hunch” and reality. Every so often a new voice bursts on the management/leadership development scene with an unconventional take on familiar themes and they can back it up with facts and then many of us shout “I knew it!” No author may be as "right now" in this regard as Daniel Pink, author of 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

This is not going to be my review of Drive, there are already plenty in circulation, in fact if you are interested I’ll send you right to one written by Andrew O’Connell that appeared in Harvard Business Review earlier this year. Better yet, if you’d like a pretty compelling synopsis of the book by the author himself I recommend setting aside ten minutes or so to watch the video animate created by RSA.org. I am betting that after you watch this piece you’ll buy the book if you haven’t already.

Without the benefit of the research presented in ‘Drive’ my company stumbled on some of Daniel Pink’s fundamental new truth through direct experience back in the mid-1990s while working with our local independent telephone company. (You may recall the 1990s as a time when telephone companies were still relevant!) During that period we were working with this company to bring about a shift in thinking, a transition from seeing the world though the eyes of a regulated utility to seeing the world through the eyes of a player in a competitive marketplace for telephonic services; a tall order at the very least.

Among the many changes that the telephone company was working to bring about at that time was to turn Customer Service from a pure expense center into another of the company’s revenue generating locations. The idea; pretty simple really, since the company could count on a regular inflow of contacts from customers with issues or questions why not address each of these contacts as also a sales opportunity. Calling features were in vogue then, Call Waiting, Three Way Calling etc. and each was available, for a price.

To motivate the customer service representatives who would be involved in making this change the company put in place a financial incentive program knowing full well that the employees would jump at the chance for additional income…they didn’t, and management was confused and perhaps not surprisingly they were angered as well. “Everyone” knew this was a great idea, why couldn’t these employees just buy in and get with the program and "hey, don’t forget the money", the money was a good thing.

We came on the scene about three months after this program had been put in place and the situation was getting very tense. The managers who had first proposed this program had gone on record promising their seniors a big payback and it was not showing up. Knowing that their idea was sound the managers determined that if they could not entice desired behavior with incentive they might as well initiate some negative consequences for not “playing ball.” And so they did and suddenly the union representing the service reps got very involved and then no one was having any fun.

When asked if we had any possible remedy to offer the first of our questions set the stage for a dramatic shift in perspective. We asked, “What made you think that people who had been basically performing the same or similar functions for on average twenty years were suddenly going to care about making more money?” The answer was pretty simple and understandable. The managers assumed that the customer service reps were motivated by the same things that motivated them. Within a short period of time we were able to determine that time off, an afternoon to spend on family issues, a simple recognition luncheon, a book of car wash coupons, or just the time to spend with a customer without worrying about who was next in the queue, all these were more meaningful to the service reps than a chance to make more money. All of these motivators were virtually free but they did mean management would have to change their behaviors, and they did.

It is now fifteen years later. Daniel Pink tells us that autonomy, mastery and purpose are the motivators that matter to much of the current workforce in the conceptual age. You might think this would be good news for many employers. Not necessarily so. Providing these incentives means management will need to give up control of employees’ time and direction to some degree. For many employers, they would still rather let go of money than they would control.

• Where are you struggling to gain employees' 'buy in' but you have failed to offer them any freedom? What are you prepared to give up?
• Can you envision your role without any supervisory or directive aspect? What could you do with the time freed up?

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