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

“The last few months have seen a spate of end of year surveys and forward-looking prediction reports that examine the workplace ‘digital transformation’ to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility.”

David Lavenda, Fast Company, January 2012

As I was reading David Lavenda’s post ‘Surprising Findings About Mobile Worker Collaboration’ this past Thursday in Fast Company I found myself reflecting back to a small conference hosted by the Bionomics Institute that I attended south of San Francisco back in the mid 1990’s.

Among the sessions I attended at that conference was one featuring a panel of then experts on search engine design musing on the true power potential of the technology they were all helping to move forward. It seemed to be the consensus of the panel that day that the major limitation to realizing the full potential of digital technology was more a function of users than developers. In their minds, these experts of the time agreed that people’s communication skills were lagging behind the advancements in technology and that gap was not likely to close anytime soon.

Fast forward to 2012. Honestly, I believe it would have been hard even for those leading experts at the conference that day to have imagined where we would be with technology today. Wow! This is the only term I find that suits what is being daily revealed to us in the technology realm. And it just keeps coming.

But has the workplace ‘digital transformation’ translated to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility; have we advanced our abilities as collaborators and communicators as those experts in the 1990’s said that we must?

David Lavenda offers us excerpts from four different recently conducted surveys on the workplace digital transformation. Among the findings in these surveys you may or may not be surprised to read that,

“The three top reasons why companies are finding it hard to implement tools like analystics, mobile technology, and social media for business are: missing skills (77%), cultural issues (55%), and ineffective IT (50%). It is clear that changing people’s work habits represent the biggest impediment to technology change.”

                                                                                          CapGemini/MIT Survey

Sounds like déjà vu all over again against the backdrop of that conference I mentioned! And yes, I am assuming that among the missing skills cited those involving interpersonal communication are included.

Lavenda offers other studies and factors of course, all of which are worthy of consideration but given my interests I am drawn to consider that “missing skills” continues to play such a prominent role in the digital transformation lag.

In leading up to his conclusion, Lavenda offers these words…

“But, as always, worker reticence to changing work habits is the biggest impediment to adopting new technologies.”

I loved this posting and welcomed the information on research that Lavenda provides; however, I am inclined to go in a different direction when it comes to assigning cause for the findings of these surveys. "Worker reticence" may be more a symptom than a cause in this instance. If we look more closely, we may see that the lag is reflective of factors both inside organizations as well as within the larger society. Here are several questions that immediately came to my mind:

• As we educate future generations of workers, will we continue to emphasize individualistic behavior patterns and measurement and dis-incent collaboration?
• How much does a continued reliance on the sovereignty of hierarchy within organizations retard the development of collaborative practices?
• Why do we continue to use compensation practices that incent the attainment of functional objectives as much or more than organizational objectives certainly de-motivate cross functional initiative?
• What is the source of continued reluctance in many places of work to support worker requests for remote (at home) work settings?

And of course there are more.

There is no doubt some merit to David Lavenda’s claim of worker reticence but it may originate in sources more accessible than only the workers themselves

You might want to pilot some trials in your own organization to see what you can do to promote collaboration. Take sort of a “what have we got to lose” point of view and focus on what you may have to gain.

I suggest starting by addressing some of the questions mentioned just above…but do not undertake educational reform as a first step!

• Ease constraints on work at home arrangements, including what approvals are necessary 
• Establish cross functional operational opportunities where hierarchical input is limited to setting direction and specifying specific deliverables, removing barriers and providing missing resources.
• Design developmental offerings to leverage day to day working community relationships.
• Examine compensation practices for evidence that they may constrain collaboration

Finally, as a manager you can refrain from resolving interpersonal/interdepartmental issues for those reporting to you.

And I am sure you have a couple of your own to contribute as well. 

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“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…”

        Peter Drucker

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice. That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor Department

If you are someone who is concerned about employee engagement yet also appreciates the complexity of the global economy and the challenges and benefits it offers, you will probably find the article ‘Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class’ to be compelling reading, I certainly did. The article, authored by David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampbell, appeared on both January 21 and 22 in the New York Times 

It is a common axiom these days among those of us involved in workforce development or talent management to accept that more employee engagement is better than less. If he was here to offer his opinion, Peter Drucker, as seen in the above, might offer his provisional agreement so long as employee engagement supports the creation of customers.

The quote above from Betsey Stevenson begs a different question which has long lingered in the mythology of the American psyche. Do American companies have some sort of obligation to the American worker to maintain jobs in America? It is still both popular and comfortable to believe that they do yet the macro level of corporate behavior over time would suggest that if there ever was any truth to the myth, it is rapidly crumbling. I say this, there was a time, and it was now a while ago, when American companies could convince themselves and us that they were in fact benevolent to the degree we all wanted to believe. That was because they could afford to put forth that appearance and “afford” is the operative word. That time, as you will hear from an anonymous Apple executive whose words appear below and in the article mentioned, has apparently passed.Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment yet the American psyche still clings to the myth as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries; we don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment (most anonymously) yet the American psyche still clings to the mythology of corporate benevolence as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

The words from Peter Drucker I opened with here are often used in an abbreviated form as a matter of convenience and I think for benign reasons…

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise”

What Drucker was foreshadowing for us is that the “chickens of capitalism” will eventually come home to roost. I am not sure however that even Peter Drucker imagined a society in which an overwhelming percentage of the wealth producing resources were concentrated in the hands of a small segment of citizens to the degree that has become the case in America. At over $400/share, the average citizen will have a hard time managing to have much Apple in their stock portfolio.

So what then is there to be said for our pursuit of increased employee engagement? I think it safe to say that at Apple if employee engagement allows the company to make the best product possible…with the highest return to investors… then the employees will probably have their jobs for another day. When the day comes, and it did at Apple, that a lower cost, faster moving, more flexible and efficient workforce becomes available elsewhere, you can expect the jobs to follow, regardless of how engaged the incumbent workforce may be.

Henry Ford priced his product, the iconic Model T, so that the workforce that built them could be the customer…he saw the growth of the U. S. middle class as the marketplace of the future…

"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

 Ford’s words were uttered at a time when the only viable market for his product would be the American consumer. I wonder what he would say now if he was facing global competition.

American corporate leadership has faced this reality of the global economy; it is well past time for the American workforce to do the same. Engagement is an absolute must but it is not a magic pill that guarantees employment. 

• What are you doing to make sure your workforce knows the game we are really playing these days?
   

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Stuart Burke died last Friday in Rochester, New York at around 12:30AM after a prolonged struggle with cancer. As best I can tell his life ended peacefully and without pain thanks to the wonderful people in the hospice where he spent his last three days. He died in the presence of his two sisters and his wife, Janice, who held him close until the very end and even beyond. Stuart’s passing came as no great surprise. There had been hope, of course, that the regimen of chemotherapy treatments would turn the tide but in our heart of hearts those of us with any experience knew what to expect, after the conclusive diagnosis it was just a matter of when.

Stuart is one of my step-husbands; I have two, having been married now three times to three remarkable women. Stuart’s wife Janice was my second wife; we were married for over 20 years. We are all very close, my step-husbands and their wives, me, my wife and all the other relatives. It’s just a different way to develop an extended family and it works for us.

What took place in the final days before Stuart left us and in the immediate aftermath is worth noting. Among other things, I believe it provides an insight into engagement as a human phenomenon that is not well understood or even recognized. That element I am referring to here is CHOICE.

A while back, maybe eight years ago, in one of my older versions of a Webster’s, I found a definition of engagement that has become a standard for me in my work.

• Engagement: the condition of being associated with any activity as a matter of choice.

Where I find power in this definition is in the perspective it provides; from there the level of engagement is always a function of the engager as much or more than the surrounding events or environment.

Sunday morning January 8^th: As I am preparing for my trip from the San Juan Islands in Washington State to Rochester the following day, I check my email and see a notice from CaringBridge.org that informs us all that Stuart’s condition has declined rapidly and he will be moving to a hospice facility on Monday or Tuesday. (Pam, our close friend of 30 years has CHOSEN spontaneously taken over the notifications so Janice can focus all her attention on Stuart.)  It is apparent to me then that I will be directly involved somehow in Stuart’s final days. I have a role to play and am just not yet clear of the expectations.

• I can CHOOSE what is in front of me or RESIST, I cannot change what is happening.

I continue my preparations, originally planned around a two day client workshop they will now include the last days of Stuart’s life.

Sunday afternoon January 8^th: I receive a phone call from my youngest son Jake; he is 24 and lives in Brooklyn. He too has been informed of Stuart’s decline. He is going to take off work for a couple of days, head home, and do what he can for his mother. He asks if I can help with a train ticket to Rochester since he has no internet service yet in his new apartment and cannot make the reservation for the following morning. I CHOOSE to accept his request. I look up the schedules and give him the options, we agree on the best time and I complete the ticket purchase on line.

Sunday evening January 8^th: It occurs to me that I have not notified Janice that I will be in town and I know it will make a difference to her in some way. When I call Stuart and Janice’s number, a voice I immediately recognize answers. It is Betsy and we have not spoken in about ten years. Betsy lives in Orinda, CA and is in the area coincidently to visit her elderly father in Buffalo. She has read the Caring Bridge notification as well and CHOSEN to drive to Rochester to see how she can help. She is now managing the incoming phone calls so Janice can get some sleep.  She will pick Jake up at the train the following day before heading back to Buffalo on Tuesday morning.

Monday January 9^th: I fly to Rochester. When I land, I find an email has arrived from Janice. She is glad I am going to be in town at this important time. She also let’s me know that Jake was planning to gather his furniture while in Rochester, rent a truck and drive it all to Brooklyn when he leaves. Upon hearing this I CHOOSE my role and it is to work with Jake, modify my plans and travel back home from New York City after driving with him to Brooklyn.

I also receive an email from my work partner Laurie telling me that her daughter’s water has broken and she is going into labor with her first child two weeks early. It looks like a C-section is in the offing, Laurie has made a CHOICE and is already on her way to New York City to be with her daughter. It now seems I’ll be doing the workshop by myself, having never led this one before. I make a CHOICE, this can all work and I’ll need to do some intense preparation with Laurie over the phone.  

Tuesday January 10^th: I have a buffer day before the workshop begins, (Lynn, another friend of twenty years calls and says she has heard I am in town and wants me to know that she and her partner Barb, another long time friend would welcome me if I was looking for a place for dinner that evening. She and Barb and a group of others have been running meals daily to Janice and Stuart for the past two weeks. I CHOOSE to decline the offer but let her know that it means a lot). Laurie calls in the afternoon and tells me the baby has arrived in the middle of the night, Mom and baby are doing well and she has decided the work we are doing is too important to linger in NYC. She and her husband have CHOSEN to make the seven hour drive home that night, following a similar drive the night before.

I finish a dinner meeting that evening with a special client/friend and CHOOSE to drive to Janice’s home to see Jake. He is so sick he cannot get off the couch. I suspect a strong emotional response to seeing his step-father in an extremely emaciated condition. Janice later confirms that she shares my suspicion. He’ll be fine in time.

Wednesday January 11^th: Laurie and I successfully conduct the first workshop with our new client. She is brilliant and acknowledges around 2PM that she is fading. I CHOOSE to lead the last three hours of the workshop.

That evening I drop by to see Jake after having dinner with one of my former partners. He tells me that Lynn and Barb CHOSE to come by and took him out to dinner. He was grateful and feeling better.

Thursday January 12^th: The previous day Laurie and I had been notified by our client/sponsor that his mother was in intensive care and he would not attend the morning of second day of our workshop. We had planned to meet with him after the session to look forward to plan the balance of the process. We CHOSE to tell him to let go of the workshop, do what was needed for his mother and we’d catch up this week. That’s what he CHOSE. We have a call set with him for Wednesday afternoon.

After the workshop and some follow up debriefing with Laurie, I head over to help Jake move furniture in preparation for an early morning Friday departure. When I arrived, it was obvious that the house had been thoroughly cleaned. Jake said that Lynn and a couple of other friends had CHOSEN to deal with the house and the aftermath of Stuart’s declining health that had piled up for several weeks.

We packed and went off to dinner. We invited our friend Keating who was arriving back in town from a week of work in Arlington, VA. She CHOSE to accept; she arrived at 8PM and drove from the airport to meet us at a restaurant. Jake had always been a favorite of hers and she hadn’t seen him in over a year. We had a great time; Jake started to unwind a bit by the time we were done.

Friday January 13^th: Upon awaking it was immediately apparent that the expected 2-4 inches of new snow would be much more. I had previously planned to meet Jake at the airport and drop off my rental car. We proceeded with that part of the plan but as the snow continued to fall, I could see that driving to Brooklyn with a truckload of furniture was out of the question. As I waited for, Jake I CHOSE to create a new plan, send Jake back to New York by train so he could work Saturday as was expected and to wait until Saturday morning and to drive the truck myself to Brooklyn. He CHOSE immediately, I didn’t have to ask him twice, he saw the same thing I did and was grateful for the opportunity to return to New York on Friday.

Saturday January 14^th: I drove the truck to Brooklyn and arrived without incident. We unloaded the truck and we CHOSE to order pizza delivered.I also insisted on wings!

Sunday January 15^th: Jake needed to be at work so I walked with him to his subway station. I told him I would get a cab to La Guardia from there. He CHOSE to leave me standing on the corner but not without making me promise to send him a text when I arrived safely at the airport, which I later did.

In retrospect it was a peaceful week, blessedly peaceful. It had its moments but what day, week or month doesn’t? Lot of opportunities to CHOSE or RESIST and little chance of changing anything that was happening; CHOICES made by myself and others, many not mentioned here, to do what was needed when it was needed.

We have Stuart to thank for giving us most of these opportunities. Laurie's new granddaughter gets the rest of the credit  Nice gifts I’d say. 

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Last week while working with a group of mid-level managers the topic of “What’s OK to say in the workplace?” came up as it frequently does these days when managers get into conversations about interacting with their reports. After a few minutes of dialogue we reached a consensus that despite much of the counsel provided in harassment training you can still probably say just about anything to anybody depending on whether or not the relationship you have provides sufficient context to hold the comment. I recognize that saying this may raise the hair on some HR professionals’ necks but I am not a big fan of making policy that punishes or constrains the many because of the indiscretions of the few.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to addressing the issue of workplace harassment. Despite all the policies, harassment training, etc. I believe we still step over the most fundamental and powerful aspect of the employee/manager relationship, that it is based on an implicit power imbalance. This fact has a costly (immeasurable) and invisible impact on employee engagement and it is frequently ignored, especially when it is in the manager’s interest to do so.

Are there bullies (harassers) in the workplace? You bet there are and they should be dealt with in decisive, not tentative fashion. As I was reading a piece by Chris Iliades  titled ‘How to Deal with Adult Bullies’ I noted my own blood begin to simmer with recollections of experiences I had as a youth with “the big kids” who thought that being big meant they could get away with tormenting the smaller younger children. Perhaps like you I have been disappointed to find similar behavior taking place in the workplace, often on the part of people who know they have the advantage of position power. Unfortunately this is life in the workplace and I am hopeful that as companies become more enlightened as well as sensitive to public embarrassment many of these folks will find their way out of our lives.

But even as we work to eliminate the bullies and the sexual harassers a certain level of unconsciousness continues to pervade the ranks of managers. When it comes to the negative impact simple position power yielded thoughtlessly can have I find many managers don’t want to be held to account.                                                                                                                                         

‘Office Space’ may be the quintessential motion picture depiction of the negative impact of the unchecked boss/employee power imbalance. The boss,Bill Lumbergh, shown here at right is addressing Peter Gibbons on the left, the story’s protagonist. Lumbergh is obvious in his understanding that his position allows him a certain amount of leverage when it comes to infringing on his report’s personal time, he’s big on last minute requests for Peter and others to work weekends. Eventually this and other unchecked abuses of managerial power and simple disrespect catch up with Lumbergh in the form of an epiphany Peter has about the choice he has to simply not return to work. The events that follow this realization are what have made “Office Space’ a cult classic right down to the bobble head dolls of several of the film’s main characters that can frequently be found in employee’s cubicles.

Employees find ways to deal with the Bill Lumberghs in their workplaces, eventually sabotage of one form or another will take these characters down. Lumbergh knowingly abused his power, we might even say he was a soft spoken bully. What concerns me most are the unconscious actions of managers who otherwise have the respect of their reports. In these instances the manager has created a line of credit with the reports based on mutual understanding and mutual respect. However, and this is what makes the behavior so insidious, from time to time requests are made by these same managers that are an imposition on the personal time or commitments of their reports and the assent that occurs often reflects a passive conceding, without expressed doubts or objections rather than an engaged acceptance.  I see these occurrences as costly in the long run and one of the contributing behaviors that are not reflected in the separation interviews.

• Where do you suspect you may have been getting “yes’s” to requests when what you really been getting are an acquiescence to your position power. Maybe it’s time to have some of those conversations before the costs become prohibitive.

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The next six weeks at the gym are going to be a pain in the butt and you know why! Every year, thousands of us who have known for some time … maybe years … that we need to lose weight or get in shape will once again resolve that this is the year when we finally, finally do it, lose the pounds. Or we’re going to establish the fitness routine that returns our body (and hairline) to the 25 year old image of ourselves that we still carry in our minds like a worn photo of an old lover in our wallet. For many after a few weeks our trips to the gym will taper off to a trickle and then simply stop. Our resolve will wither and we will once again settle for disappointment in ourselves in place of the weight loss or the fitness we had promised ourselves. We will conclude (again)* that … we have some defect of character we have not the strength to overcome, we are too busy, or some such baloney, none of which will be true, and we will eat pizza and make mental notes about getting our fitness routine back on track soon. For me the net effect of all this false resolve will be that from early January to late March my Body Pump and Step classes will be uncomfortably crowded.

Knowing that we need to change, knowing what we need to do to affect change, knowing where we need to go to bring about a needed change … none of these has even close to enough power to bring about desired or needed change. If we cannot tell the difference between a reaction/wish and a creation/commitment we’ll be doomed to repeat our cycles of failure and disappointment.

Companies, maybe yours as well, are a lot like people in many ways and very like people when it comes to making resolutions to bring about needed changes. In companies, resolutions for change are made anytime something unpredicted occurs, especially something like losing a highly talented employee. But are these events really so unpredictable and is there any real resolve in these resolutions?

Eric Jackson is a venture capitalist. Among other things, he is also is a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine. Back in mid-December he took the time to tell us the ‘Top Ten Reasons Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent.’ This piece, which appeared on December 14^th has received well over one million views.

You can read Eric’s blog post if you’d like, in fact I encourage you to. Then, after you finish, ask yourself if there was truly any information there that you didn’t already know. I bet you won’t find much new there and you’ll also find that many people in your organization know his top ten reasons, have known them for a while, have resolved to make the necessary changes every time the company loses a key employee…and it has made no difference. We know what needs to be done yet we repeatedly don’t follow through with the necessary changes. So someone else will dust off Eric Jackson’s article around this time next year, cite a couple of new sources, publish someplace other than Forbes and get another million readers to check in because we know the answer lies in the “knowing what to do.”

Robert Kegan of Harvard might offer that companies for the most part lack a “developmental stance” or commitment to being a continuing home for the transformation of talent. It’s not that companies don’t know what to do or that they cannot see what Eric Jackson has seen. They lack the collective will to address themselves to talent development and retention in a generative rather than reactive manner. Along with his partner Lisa Laskow Lahey, Kegan has identified the attributes of a culture that would be the antithesis of that described in the Jackson article.

Attributes of a Developmental Culture

1. It recognizes that there is “life after adolescence,” that adulthood, too, must be a time for ongoing growth and development.
2. It honors the distinction between technical (simple) and adaptive (complex) learning agendas.
3. It recognizes and cultivates the individual’s intrinsic motivation to grow.
4. It assumes that a change in mindset takes time and is not evenly paced.
5. It recognizes that mindsets shape thinking and feeling, so changing mindsets needs to involve the head and the heart.
6. It recognizes that neither change in mind set nor change in behavior alone leads to transformation, but that each must be employed to bring about the other.
7. It provides safety for people to take the kinds of risks inherent in changing their minds.

• I’d invite you to review these attributes against the background of both Eric Jackson’s blog post and what you see taking place in your own company. Rather than wait to read the next version of Top Ten Reasons large Companies Fail to Keep There Best Talent commit yourself to seeing what you can do to bring about a development stance in your environment.

*This past year I had a personal breakthrough in the habitual pattern I describe here. No medals will be awarded I assure you since I waited until I was 64 and had knowingly tolerated an overweight condition for at least 24 years. That’s a story for another day and I have already told it in a previous post.  

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