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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