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

When I look around my natural surroundings in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, or do organizational research as I frequently do by watching Animal Planet or Discovery Channel (more the older programming about bugs,snakes and Wildebeest, not the new stuff like ‘MythBusters’ or ‘Dirty Jobs’), I am constantly reminded of the principals of diversity, interdependency and inclusiveness that underlie the workings of the natural world.

On the other hand, when I consider many of the models employed when evaluating, developing and rewarding employees in our commercial enterprises I am confronted by the focus on internal competition as well as the heavy emphasis on rewarding individual performance, despite exhortations to pull together, be a team, think big picture etc. Does it ever occur to us that these practices may serve more to confuse than to encourage employees and thereby produce a negative impact on engagement?

I am referring here to regular practices of putting individual employees or groups of employees in artificially competitive situations or force ranking employees for compensation purposes, like that ever made any sense! How about the discussions that many of us have participated in where we cull out our “A” players or make lists of High Potential Employees, (Hipos? Hypos? more non-words from the HR/OD vocabulary)  all without much recognition for or questioning of the models that give rise both to the vocabulary we use and the practices we engage in.

To what degree might your own organization routinely and thoughtlessly engage in these and similar practices without questioning whether, 

• the fundamental assumptions on which they were originally based are or ever were valid, 
• the degree to which (validity aside) the practices we employ when evaluating or rewarding employees contribute to or impede the basic level of engagement of the major contingent of our employee base 
• key measurements used to establish the basis for rewards or developmental opportunities are true measures of performance or really “roll-ups”, reports of aggregate outcomes of other measures which if considered separately might be much more meaningful, if not for purposes of reward most certainly for developmental planning,
• there is the slightest recognition of the nature or fundamental motivations of the factions within organizations that insist on the preservation of traditional models , especially compensation models that favor the few over the many?

And all this is to say that possibly the compensation systems we so doggedly cling to are only satisfactory for a minority of employees but that minority is responsible for designing the systems.

In my real life corporate working career as an HR professional I was once “forced ranked” among a group of 97 other professionals, most of whom had highly technical backgrounds. According to my manager I was ranked #15 among the group. Not too bad you say! How about the fact that I could not have performed the work of any of the people ranked above or immediately below me on the list?

When they wrote ‘First Break All the Rules’ back in 1999 Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman gave managers everywhere a collective “big shove” between the shoulder blades and suggested it was time for us to wake up. They offered anecdotal references and data that suggested that there was significant evidence that many of who they considered to be the world’s best managers did not play by the traditional rules. They actually, of their own volition, did what they considered to be in the best interest of each employee, without regard to past practices of existing policies. How far have we come since then? Eleven years after its first publication, Amazon reports ‘First Break…’ among its top ten best selling titles in both Management and Leadership Categories. For me that is pretty compelling information.We're still a'studyin, maybe soon we'll get to more doin!

How do you feel about normal distribution curves, I mean as they relate to human characteristics like IQ, talent etc.? Personally, I am a big believer in the laws of natural distribution. That is one reason why I have never understood the arrogance of highly intelligent people. How do you become arrogant about an accident of nature? Given my beliefs in this regard 

• I do admit to a natural bias on my part towards models that support and reward collaborative performance. 
• I also admit to a bias towards systems of reward that honor individual accomplishment, especially performance that benefits the larger collective of employees and the organization as a whole.
• Finally, I admit to a bias towards developmental practices that originate with both a deep understanding of organizational needs and a deep and comprehensive understanding of individual talents and strengths. I favor having these practices grounded in a commitment to optimize the interests of all parties involved.

Do these biases and beliefs of mine sound contradictory or paradoxical?  They should if they are meant in any way to reflect the true complexity of dealing with human beings in increasingly complex commercial settings.

• Where do you shy away from the complexities of employees?
• Do you embrace simplistic thinking when it comes to employees because it saves time or is just so much easier to understand?
• Do you shoot for practices and policies that encourage collaboration and inclusiveness and build on the strength of diverse perspectives and talents?

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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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