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

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

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.