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

 Managers of current workforces concern themselves daily with how their groups might score on an engagement survey. There are legitimate reasons for this concern, many in our workforce are both anxious and unconscious , neither emotionally or psychologically ready for the challenges of NOW much less those of the future! What are we, managers, doing to address the underlying issues?

On September 16 Edward Gordon wrote a compelling piece, ‘Filling Job Vacancies Today and Tomorrow’ for his posting to the Britannica Blog. Among the many solid comments he offered that day, he said the following:

“The American education-to-employment system is largely failing to prepare people with the required skills to compete in this new labor market era. Laid-off workers often lack the skills to move into jobs in growing sectors of the economy. Job training programs are largely inconsistent, short-term, and too generic.”

But what we need now is jobs…right? I say no, we need honesty and the recognition that doing more of what we have always done expecting things to get “better” is simply a form of collective insanity.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when that state could have been said to be the heart of the US economy. Today, with 13.1% unemployment, Michigan leads the nation in terms of dire economic circumstances…and I worry for the future. It could get worse!

Last Saturday night I had an opportunity to gather with about 50 of my high school classmates for our 45^th reunion. For the most part it was a great experience but some of my conversations left me deeply concerned. Many of my former classmates are of course retired, beneficiaries of a economic conditions that will never be repeated. The ones who have any knowledge of me and my circumstances know that I am still working and several asked my opinion on the current state of the economy and prospects for a return to “normal”, the conditions that prevailed during their working careers.

I could tell they were authentically concerned that the future for their children might not be as rewarding materially as their own working careers had been. Each of them seemed to be rooting for or hopeful about the prospects of returning to a set of circumstance both familiar and favorable. Me? I am more concerned that they think “recovery” is even a possibility.

As I sat with one classmate and his wife, who had raised a large family, all of whom will be working for many years, I raised the issue of Michigan’s legacy from the heyday of the automobile industry. I could see from my travels around the state that the members of available workforce are fundamentally undereducated and not aware of how ill prepared they are. When I posed this issue to my classmate, the response was that the workforce had plenty of skills and what was needed were jobs! This perspective was offered without a moment’s hesitation and without a hint of recognition that the inference was that the creation of jobs was someone else’s responsibility and most likely government’s.

Another conversation directly concerned the topic of “recovery” and the soon-to-be-voted-on question of whether to extend the Bush era tax levels. My classmate was retired from a non-entrepreneurial, large company background. She expressed a concern that if the tax levels returned to pre-Bush levels it would have a stifling effect on small business owners, historically the most reliable source of job creation. As a small business owner myself for the past 23 years, I offered my perspective:

• Most small businesses will always be small, that’s the way the owners want them.
• Growth is less a concern for small business owners than what they are doing and being profitable while they are doing it.
• Owners of small businesses do not make their decisions about hiring or laying off on a short term basis. They rely heavily on their employees and don’t relish the idea of letting them go and then trying to rehire them when things get better.
• Tax rates are only one aspect of the economic circumstances small business owners deal with; they are more likely concerned with overall demand for their offerings.
• If small business owners were going to be creating jobs they would very likely be doing it now, and for the most part they are not. I am not sure what difference the tax rates might make if extended without a change in overall demand.

As I concluded my response to her stated concern she frowned and offered that she was concerned that if the tax levels returned to the pre-Bush levels small business owners might be deterred from creating new jobs! This was in case I had not heard her the first time, I suppose.

Michigan’s problems are really no different than those of the rest of the nation save for the fact that at one time there was such a high concentration of manufacturing jobs within its borders. What has occurred in America has also taken place in previously industrialized nations everywhere. We can name the change China or India just as we named it Japan, Mexico or Korea before now and the “naming” would have been equally inaccurate. The change that has occurred is structural in nature and inherent in a capitalistic economic system. There is no “recovery” coming. There is future similar to our very recent past into which we will continue living, if we are fortunate. Whether currently employed or not, an entirely new future is here now. No return to the past is possible.

Consider the following declarations:

• Whether you are an employee or a manager we have arrived at a point where new ethical imperatives have presented themselves. Sending children to private schools because we can rather than address the issues of our educational system is not an answer; it is an avoidance of responsibility. Our children may end up well educated, but they will pay a price for the choice we have made.

• If we are managers and we see that those reporting to us are resting on their current skills, we have an ethical responsibility to confront them on their prospects for the future. They are not going to be surprised by what you say, unless they have their heads in the sand, in which case the discomfort they experience will outweigh the consequences of the ignorance they will shed.

Are either of these statements true? It really should not matter. Both open the possibility for futures other than the one that is predictable today, whether it be Michigan or elsewhere in the world. New opportunity (jobs) is far less our challenge today than is a new way of seeing the world around us.

• How can you help your children or those reporting to you to see the future clearly?

• What actions should you, your children or those reporting to you be taking immediately to improve their readiness for the challenges of NOW?

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 Twitter me this, Batman! It doesn’t matter if it is Yammer, Slammer, Stammer, Wham Bam Thank You Mammer or Caller ID; we are a long way from realizing the full potential of the use of intra-company social media tools.

Recently I was reading a review of the progress being made by Yammer as it becomes one of the latest social media products to go completely viral around the world. This is a company that opened its doors in September of 2008 and already has 80,000 businesses as customers.

As I was reading, I flashed back to a conference held by the Bionomics Institute in the mid-1990s. While there, I attended a session featuring a panel of “industry experts,” people responsible for search engine development and innovation. If you remember names like Alta Vista, Lycos, Netscape, Magellan and others, you know the kinds of people I was listening too … pioneering, brazen, hip and bright.

The central topic of the conversation that morning in Silicon Valley was how to address and close the widening gap between the rapidly developing on-line communications tools and people’s actual interpersonal skills. In the view of the developers on the panel, the full value of the web as a communication medium would not be realized until this gap was addressed. There was no evidence in their minds that this gap had even been recognized. Following the panel presentation, the audience proceeded to engage in a number of rowdy arguments effectively proving the point the panel experts were making!

In an unrelated incident, I had occasion to reflect on closing this communication gap and on just how best to approach the continuous process of presenting the case for the Power of Context, the bane of all amateur communicators, which means most of us. (Read this lovely post by Eliezer Sobel) More specifically, how does our limited appreciation for Context continue to undermine the power of rapidly evolving social media tools?  

I was staying at a friend’s house overnight. She needed to make a trip to the local grocery store. On her way out the door she shouted over her shoulder, “If you are hungry there is pasta salad in the fridge!” Pasta salad, pasta salad, when we did we start calling cold pasta in a bowl a salad? “Salad” has been confusing to me since I was a kid, but I have learned to live with and am for the most part at peace with its seeming ambiguity. I now know that the seeming endless procession of salads in life is constrained only by the boundaries of definition:

Salad: noun a cooked or uncooked food prepared with a savory or piquant dressing and usually served cold. (This definition does not include German potato salad which is of course always best served warm!)  

However, a couple of years back another friend, a mischief maker I might add, turned my salad world on its ear one evening when he posed the following scenario. “If you see chopped up vegetables in a bowl …lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, etc… you readily recognize that mixture as salad. What if you dump those same elements out onto the table top, is it still a salad? Or do we see garbage?" For a moment, time stood still …, and then I got his point. When we see something out of the context we expect it is sometimes hard to recognize it for what it really is. Are we not the same way about people and the messages they carry?

We all learn early that here are some immutable facts in our lives, most of them in the physical realm:

1.      If you drop something under normal conditions it will proceed in a downward direction until it meets a solid surface

2.      If you go without water for a certain period of time death ensues, the same for the absence of oxygen, etc.

Generally speaking, if you are reading this post you know these immutable aspects of the physical world and honor them! (Ipso Facto, you'd be dead, and not reading this post.) However, when someone misinterprets our meaning or intent in an electronic communication we act like someone who is surprised when they drop a glass and it breaks when it hits the floor. We keep getting killed (emotionally) or injured over and over wondering how this could be happening to nice, well meaning people like us. Its the context dummies! Actually the absence of context.

Yes, Yammer is great, so is email and Caller ID. Linked In can be a remarkable resource for inter-company communication. However, until we address our ignorance, apathy and sloppiness about the Power of Context we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over. We will confuse the message and the messenger, we will take opinions as facts because of the source, we will apply discounts to information presented from certain sources or simply ignore the information altogether. And we will suffer similar experiences at the hands of others. In short we will undermine the social media tools we and/or our company have invested in because we have not advanced our communication practices to match the power of the tools at our disposal. We still do not recognize that meaning and value, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.

• Whose communications do you regularly discount because 1) The author was wrong before 2) The author hasn’t been around long enough.3) They are part of THEM.

                          - What could you do to intervene in this pattern and why would you bother?

• Whose communications do you accept without question?

                         - Why? Might it be worth challenging the source periodically?  

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Last week I led with the theme of storytelling and the power it offers for managing/leading. The implication of the piece was that as a leader/manager it is incumbent on you/us to develop an ability as a storyteller in order to continually provide teams and individuals with a sense of direction through sharing in a relevant context.

Of equal importance is a firsthand knowledge of the story being spoken into and a willingness to let it alter our reality, the one we may think everyone shares, if we plan to stay connected to the people we are leading/managing. This is true especially if the people are twenty-somethings and we are a forty, fifty or in my case sixty-something.” 

In July I wrote a piece that strongly suggested managers get interested in what their charges were passionate about. This as a strategy for being able to understand how to “job craft” towards a particular set of enthusiasms younger people might be bringing to the workplace. In mid-August I asked if your managers might be being put in a disempowered position by certain company policies and practices. This week I bring together the central themes of both these pieces and offer that as leader/managers we would be well advised to engage ourselves in a course of study on the “world of twenty-somethings” if we plan to be relevant to the people reporting to us. If we are not willing to discover what tickles their fancy, we may find that as a leader we are indeed “bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

 Whenever I need an update on “twenty-something” reality I check in with Jake, my own “twenty something” son. He is 23 as of August this year. Jake spent the summer interning in Manhattan with the magazine Complex that aims right for the psyche and interests of the 20-35 year-olds in our culture. Having just returned from this sortie into the mind of the Millennials, I knew his ‘intel’ would be fresh.

We sat down this morning for breakfast and he gave me the “411” on what he and his friends are interested in. It will be no great surprise to find they spend a lot of time on-line. Before you dive into the websites I am going to share with you, ask yourself whether you are really willing to spend the time to grock what is going on. Beware all ye who enter here!

Organizations, the ones most of us work in, do have an economic purpose and we have been taught for the most part to think if them as machine-like or mechanical in operations. In reality they are, especially today’s highly knowledge based organizations, social systems with an economic purpose. Since they are social in nature as well as substance knowing the norms of important segments of the population would seem to make a lot of sense . 

 Almost for certain you are familiar with You Tube. Knowing what Millenials are watching on You Tube is another matter altogether. Try these references for starters:

                    Jurassic Park HEY                                            David After Dentist    

Double Rainbow Original Video                                             Double Rainbow Song

By the time you finish with these references you may be certain you’ve been transported to another world… and you have! Just for fun take a quick trip to

                                                   Garfield Minus Garfield

By now you'll be certain that your own grip on things is slipping.

To get your bearings back spend some time at Know Your Meme. This site offers explanation, based on research, as to what accounts for the attention getting aspects of certain web phenomena. You may find the "Yo Dawg" episodes particularly educational.

If you get through this and have an appetite for more I suggest Technologically Impaired Duck back at Know Your Meme and if that doesn’t do you in try %&@ck Yea: Struttin Leo.

Having these experiences under your belt you’ll be ready for the relative sanity of Buzz Feed to get caught up on current events, Millennial style, topped off by a visit to Funny or Die.

Congratulations…you are now nearly an honorary Millenial. The only thing left for you to do is take a ride in your car and tune in to one of the 200 AM stations around the US that carry the Jim Rome Show (aka The Jungle). Once you share three hours with Jim and his 2.5 million listeners you’ll have little concern that as we turn things over to the Millenials all is well.

Here are a few fast facts courtesy of the Pew Foundation** regarding the Millenials;

They are history’s first “always connected” generation. Steeped in digital technology and social media, they treat their multi-tasking hand-held gadgets almost like a body part – for better and worse. More than eight-in-ten say they sleep with a cell phone glowing by the bed, poised to disgorge texts, phone calls, emails, songs, news, videos, games and wake-up jingles.

They embrace multiple modes of self-expression. Three quarters have created a profile on a social networking site. Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). Nearly one-in-four have a piercing in some place other than an earlobe –about six times the shar.e of older adults who’ve done this.

** The Pew Foundation has produced a fabulous report on the twenty-somethings titled simply MILLENNIALS. Download the PDF.

• So now, when will you sit down with your twenty-somethings, share your new knowledge and find out what I didn’t tell you about?

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It is unusual to find someone these days who hasn't heard some version of this old parable of the bricklayers:

‘One day while wandering, a young monk came across three bricklayers. He asked the first bricklayer what he was doing.

“Laying bricks,” he told the monk.

He asked the second what he was doing.

“Making a brick wall,” he replied.

He asked the third the same question.

“Building a cathedral,” he explained.’

The first time people hear this tale they say to themselves something like “Cute! What a great way to get the message across about the value of a positive attitude.” Unfortunately this is a very weak lesson to take from this simple story. The truth about humans, the one all great leaders know inside and out is that humans and stories are inseparable. In fact it just may be that what it is to be human is to be a being that lives the stories they are telling themselves.

If this is so, and I believe it to be then as a leader where I want to be is attending to the story I want people to be paying attention to, the one to be made real in the best interest of all concerned.

Let’s go back and consider the bricklayers for a moment. Aside from reporting on what they are doing each might also be considered to be reporting on their current state of engagement. The first, the one laying bricks might be reporting that he, or maybe she, is in a condition of engagement I’d call resistance. Not necessarily resistance to the work, resistance to being involved with anything outside or larger than themselves. The second, the one building the wall may be reporting on a condition of compliance, doing what there is to be done, a task to be completed, nothing more or less. The third, the cathedral builder, may be operating from a state of contribution and connection, clearly identifying with something greater than him, or her, self.

The pitfall here for the leader is to think that any one of these “stories” is better or worse than the others. They all seem to be getting the work done! So what of it?

Each story describes a field (see definition 6a), in this case a field of possibility. Ask yourself, from which story does there seem to be a greater sense of possibility for reward, satisfaction, sense of empowerment, which story is richer?

Last week my wife and I jointly took on the challenge of finally rebuilding a brick garden enclosure we had de-constructed about two months ago. That was Phase I. The original garden box was falling apart and not very useful. I had been deeply involved in this phase, taking the wall apart, digging up the foundation and chipping away all the old mortar on the bricks so we could start all over again, essentially building an identical structure using the same materials. (Have I told you how much I detest manual labor, especially working in the yard?) You can imagine how much fun I had with Phase I!

Having done everything I could think of to avoid being involved in Phase II I awoke one Sunday morning to find my wife curled up with her coffee on the couch watching ‘You Tube’ videos on how to construct brick walls. I was trapped without a plan for evasion. One of the many things I love about my wife is that while she knows my aversion to things yard related she is happy to pursue many tasks on her own and with the others she uses the old “Tom Sawyer” method, making whatever she has in mind seem like so much fun I wouldn’t want to be left out.

If I am resistant she takes what that provides, if I am compliant she works with that as well. However, she is always keen to let me know how much she is fully engaged and the fun she is having and how welcome I would be to join her.

In this case I fell for her enthusiasm and decided to make a game of it myself and since I knew she was bound to be the mason I offered to be her “hod carrier", mixing the mortar, fetching and wetting the bricks, setting them in a handy place, telling her what a great job she was doing, etc. Lo and behold a few hours later the two us grimy with lime dust stepped back and admired our completed construction; high five all around! The miracle? It was not that the work got done but that the work got done and I didn’t even notice the passage of time. I had been enchanted by a master storyteller and swept from resistance to contribution ending up in a place of shared accomplishment, all because she simply allowed me to be where I was and stuck to her story.

There is more than magic in becoming a master storyteller, for most of us it takes work and as a leader it is inherent in the role that you master the art. If you have the interest I recommend a blog called appropriately, ‘A Storied Career’, authored by Katharine Hansen. Her September 7^th entry deals specifically with the topic of storytelling in blogs but there is much more information on the art available through Kathy and her site.

• Where is it that you can see that you have let the story get away from you and be told by others? Can you see how to get it back?
• Where do you see the need for a good story and people are just waiting for the storyteller to arrive?

ps: I just spoke to my wife, she is in the midst of painting the kitchen and I’m on the road and won’t be home for another week. Yippee!

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