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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 If you have been involved in management/leadership development for any length of time I am sure this thought has crossed your mind…

   “There must be a more effective way to do this!”

I’d also be willing to bet that you’ve wrestled with this question…

           “How can we get senior management to see that budgets for management development need to be related to as essential not discretionary?”

You may have also wondered this…

           “Why is it that managers wait to be sent to our programs rather than ask to get in?”

If any of these thoughts/questions seem familiar to you let me then ask you this; do these common elements of a corporate developmental approach seem at all familiar?

Development is done…

• Away from the workplace, with a classroom focus
• On a periodic event basis
• With the assumption that development is learning, meaning we focus primarily on providing new information.
• Centers on individual rather than group learning process, most classes made up of unconnected participants  
• Assumes all developmental issues to be more or less technical, developing skills is sufficient.

If you noticed yourself identifying with any of these elements chances are good that in your version of a “corporate university” participating managers are exposed to the traditional transmission model of adult education. The transmission model is a carryover from the way in which we have taught children for many years. This format rests on the premise that a subject matter expert can transfer crucial knowledge to us by some means, lecture, videos, role playing, simulation etc.  The expectation is that the learner has an insufficient store of information, the expert will “add” some of what is missing and voila! Performance improves.

In this model there is no presumption that the learner may already know what to do and by virtue of other factors cannot execute on that knowledge. The transmission model assumes perfect ability to apply what is being learned and if not then there is some defect of character or attitude involved. These defects of course become diagnosed as opportunities for individual coaching!

So getting back to those opening thoughts and questions… “Why are managers waiting to be sent to our programs…?” Given the way we go about development it is highly likely that they don’t see our offerings as having a critical relationship with what they are accountable for getting done. This can be corrected but it will take be willing to think differently about development.

As for the question, “How can we get senior management to see that budgets for management development need to be held as essential not discretionary?” What if they came back to us and asked, “If we don’t cut your budget what do you really think the odds are of us getting the performance we are counting on from our managers based on what you are proposing?” Would you be willing to put your job on the line?

If we answer honestly we all know there is plenty of research to suggest that betting the mortgage payment on the current and most common approaches to management development would not be wise. Might this not then drive us right back to our lamenting declaration… “There must be a better way to do this!” and encourage us to transform to a more  responsible and engaging statement like “I am going to find a more effective way to do this!”

So where would we start to redesign management development from?

Where would you start if it was your project? **

Consider these questions as part of your process? What if...

• You could link manager's problem solving ability together like computers can be linked for greater efficiency and processing power?
• Management development could become process driven rather than event bound?
• Development and the application of learning took place in a near real time experiential environment using actual situations faced?
• Managers derived most of their developmental benefit from conversations with other managers facing similar issues working collaboratively on real problems?
• Managers engaged collaborative development on a long term basis could dramatically improve their aggregate efficiency and reduce the time it took for results to be produced across all functional lines?

Here is a bigger and tougher question...if all these "what ifs" were possible would you be willing to scrap your existing approach to management/leadership development for outcomes such as these? 

** In coming installments I'll be sharing some of my thoughts on how to revolutionize management/leadership development where it may matter most, in the middle of your organization.

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 “The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.”

                                                                                              William Deresiewicz
                                                                                                                                     

I got around to reading an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by William Deresiewicz titled ‘Generation Sell’ on Sunday morning from which I took the quote I opened with here. In a piece I found very enjoyable to read, Deresiewicz takes us through his analysis of the millennial generation that seems to be so troubling to work with or even understand for many managers today. His central insight is that this is a generation of entrepreneurs…

“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.”

  In Deresiewicz’ view, the Millennials operate with…

“…a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.”

 …so their entrepreneurial inclinations are driven as much from a self-preservation strategy as previous generations were driven by the desire for security.

While Millennials view the small business as the idealized social form of the current times. many of them continue to work in our mainstream organizations. They literally walk among us, having learned how to play the game by developing an ability to fit in rather than drop out and assume the risks of business ownership.

Given the continued premium we place on compliance it is likely that we have not tapped the entrepreneurial instincts of this generation and likely as not this is why they will eventually leave us. As managers we might do ourselves an enormous favor by asking not how we can get them to be like us but rather how can we give them reason to stay and invest themselves in our future.

The November 14^th issue of the New Yorker magazine features a Malcolm Gladwell piece on Steve Jobs titled ‘The Tweaker’. In the article Gladwell identifies Jobs’ genius not so much as that of an inventor but truly more of a “tweaker.” By definition…

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.”

As managers, we might prefer a team of “tweakers” to a team of inventors since inventors are notorious for lacking commercial instincts and often times are satisfied with proving out rather than perfecting their ideas. Cases in point abound but suffice for now for me to remind us all of the boon Xerox research has been to the technology industry, if not necessarily to itself.

So if Deresiewicz is on to something, and from my knowledge of my own twenty- four year son I’d say he is, it is incumbent on us to find ways for our Millennial employees to contribute by “being in charge” of something they view as important. This will have less to do with salary category or titles than it will be the idea of having a lot of say in something important to our business … maybe not the final say but certainly a lot leading up to it.

Turning our Millennial employees loose to “tweak” may seem like an invitation to chaos, but it may just be a formula for the engagement and retention of our best and brightest.

• What can you do to give your Millennials more of a say in the business and an invitation to make what is already working even better? 

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I haven’t written a piece this long in a while but I am fired up about something…You and I both know that your company’s workforce is not in shape. It may not be top of mind in the leadership meetings or among the board of directors but you know, and you know it is affecting everything that goes on in your business, and you are not doing much if anything about it... maybe because your HR department tells you that you can’t.

If you don’t believe me then check in with your risk management group, ask them about the leading causes of absenteeism and on the job injury in your company. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find that you have an ergonomic plague in your workplace, an inordinate number of injuries and absences related to back and other structural problems. These problems are there because your workforce is overweight and out of shape and aside from the burden this condition is putting on your healthcare costs it also affects the quality of work being done and the energy and creativity available from your workforce at any given time. This is a big deal and it is time we all fessed up and started dealing with it. It is people’s lives and livelihood that are at stake here.

I got rolling on this theme this past week as I finished reading ‘The Coming Jobs War’ by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton.

Clifton has a central thesis and he makes a strong and seriously analytical case for his argument. He makes the bold assertion that job creation and successful entrepreneurship are the world’s most pressing issues right now, outpacing runaway government spending, environmental degradation, and even the threat of global terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs,” says Clifton, “their societies will fall apart. Countries, and more specifically cities, will experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolution.”

Among other things Clifton states very bluntly in his book:

“A nation in which two-thirds of its constituents are obese or in poor health—or soon will be because of their weight, lack of exercise, addiction to cigarettes, bad diets and general low wellbeing –will never win the upcoming fight against global economic competitors. Workers will not be fit enough to win.”

I have a confession to make, although if you’ve ever looked at the picture associated with my blog this may not seem like much of an admission, I have been overweight bordering on obese for the past 30 years of my life. Three years ago with the continual and compassionate support of my wife Pat ("I didn’t marry you so you’d die on me!”) I finally stopped smoking, a habit that I had wrestled with on and off, mostly on, for over forty years. Within the past six months I have begun to successfully deal with my general physical condition. I have lost 50+ pounds and still have a ways to go to get to my goal. Believe it or not I got started with Zumba classes. Turns out it wasn’t so much the Zumba as the classes, I like exercising with other people. For years I have been one of those who made the New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and get fit several times each year only to find myself quickly falling back into old counterproductive patterns because they were simply more comfortable. In my early life, up to and into my thirties I was very athletic; I participated in a variety of sports and even ran marathons for a while. Then around the time I was 35 all that abruptly stopped and for nearly 30 years I simply indulged my appetites in the worst possible ways. It is really a boring story, yes I am a smart guy, I could see what was happening yet I did nothing to honestly step up and take care of myself. My attitude was that as long as I took care of my obligations to family and business I should be free to address my cravings. Like I said…boring.

And now for the first time on 30 years I am effectively, not easily, addressing my well being on a number of fronts. I am grateful to my wife Pat, once again the catalyst for me doing something about my health. Honestly she has had to be courageous, I have not been open to her coaching and she has had to put up with plenty of sharp rebukes from me for coaching when I wasn’t asking for it. I am pretty sure that without her support I would not be as far along as I am, and there is still a ways to go and many new habits to anchor in.

Now, what about your work environment? Jim Clifton states some very stark statistics in his book, among them the fact that currently only one-third of adult Americans are in shape. Another third are overweight and another third obese. Many of these people work for us and we care about them, not just as productive resources but as people and we are allowing them to do what I did to myself for many years, slowly kill myself. I hate to be that blunt but if you are not one of the overweight/unfit you cannot imagine how unhappy a place it is. I can honestly tell you that in all those 30 years there were only fleeting moments of happiness and a lot of self criticism for allowing myself to get in such bad shape. I am betting the people you work with and around who are well out of shape would tell you much the same if they felt safe enough. If you are one of the overweight you know exactly what I am talking about.

So I know this is a big request I am making. If you are currently working with someone who is overweight, obese or in some other way not taking care of their health ask them if you can talk about it. I know all the prohibitions against doing what I am asking but those have nothing to do with caring for your co-workers, they are designed to protect your employer from legal measures. If you are one of the overweight or obese or otherwise self harming folks ask for some help. These issues are almost always more than we can deal with by ourselves. My wife asks me every morning about my weight and if I don’t like what the scale says I am still liable to lie at first before going back and telling her the truth, but I want her to keep asking, I need her to keep asking.  

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One of the most traumatic experiences of my life occurred around the time I was turning thirteen years old. That was a birthday more meaningful than many because I knew from conversations with my parents that they were going to increase my allowance. I was the oldest child and I’d be moving from the $.50/week my other siblings received to $.75/week. In my world, where baseball or football cards were $.05/pack w/ gum these were going to be high times!

Not wanting to get my hopes too far out of line with my understanding from past conversations I decided to check bets with my Mom before the big day. To my surprise and disappointment I was informed that yes, I would be getting the increase as previously discussed but with the stipulation that from the day of my birthday onward I needed to run each of my purchases by my mother in advance so she could insure I was making good choices. Yikes! This is now remembered as my "Bait and Switch" birthday. Up to that point, I had spent my weekly $.50 however I chose, mostly on the sports cards that I so dearly prized at the time. What would the future hold? Somehow this didn't feel at all like I had expected it would.

To say the least, I was crushed! What if she didn’t agree with my spending choices? Moms have different priorities than young boys; they are often looking for opportunities to teach them lessons about the value of money, saving for a rainy day, that kind of thing. Drat! My excitement was dashed in one short conversation. What was the point of having the extra money if I couldn’t decide how to spend it?

Fast forward to right now,... the event just described never took place! For the record, I never had a $.75/wk allowance, I topped out at $.50/wk. Sorry for the ruse; I was trying to imagine myself in the situation many managers have reported finding themselves in. A scene similar to the conversation I fabricated with my mother would come after several rounds of the annual budgeting process. Managers then receive their final numbers along with the admonition from the granting authority that they must submit a request for approval of any expenditure of either a certain type or size. Almost anything of consequence is covered by this caveat.

Yaaaaaagh! Hey, Senior Budgeting Authority, what’s the point of granting a budget if you aren’t going to grant full spending discretion along with it? Oh, yes, and by the way, how exactly is it that you hold someone to account or tie their compensation to a number you have final control over?

I am not going out of my way here to be a smarty pants and you are welcome to question the accuracy of the analogy I have created; but not much. Let it burn! I actually think practices like this are frequently and thoughtlessly held in place by habit. How are they tolerated? It is a tough economy where new opportunities are hard to come by.  Or maybe, the managers involved just don’t care enough to push back.

Practices like this one are often fiercely defended by their practitioners if questioned (I doubt that you need me to provide examples, I am sure you unfortunately have plenty of your own).

“Back in the day” , when command and control was the only management approach maybe no one thought a lot about practices such as this, it was just the way it was. These days when every organization is counting on discretionary effort, especially from managers we need to step back and ask, “What exactly is it that we are hoping to accomplish with this constraint on our managers? Maybe we could gain more by encouraging initiative, innovation and creativity?"

Here’s a thought, Senior Budgeting Authority, If you aren’t willing to question your restrictive practices, how about considering that the scores on your engagement surveys are really more of a measure of apathy in a tough job market?  

• Think about what you do as a manager that may be a) communicating to people that they are not trusted or b) constraining them from taking full accountability for what you have told them is expected?    

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Dear World:       

Please be advised…A major talent is being released into your care this week. My youngest son, Jackson Reed Cook, has launched himself and is ready and able to dazzle and amaze you with his “mad skills” and youthful self-confidence. Are you ready?

Jake called Monday to wish me a happy Father’s Day. When he called he was standing in front of the sublet apartment he had just rented in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, NY. There was plenty of street noise in evidence as proof of his surroundings as we talked. He had also called me Sunday but we didn’t connect so he was calling back to make sure he had the opportunity to share his affection and best wishes. He had initiated this process all on his own with no prompting from his mother … a rather new behavior pattern.

But there is a lot about Jake that is new, or more accurately, now just rounding into shape. He graduated in late May from SUNY Purchase with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree specializing in Graphic Design and he is eager to begin his career as a Design Professional. Like most young adults around his age he has had several “job” jobs as he worked his way through college but now it is time to begin his career and for a guy with his ambitions there is probably no better place than New York City. At least that is what he thinks and I am in no position to have an opinion on the matter.

He is taking this new beginning very seriously. He has a Linkedin page and has developed a website and you can also take a look at his portfolio if you are interested. Mainly I wanted to give you some advice about the care and handling of this package of opportunity (my son) that has become available. We talked for a while on Monday to establish some parameters and he is pretty clear about what he is looking for…

• He is looking for a place to contribute
• He wants to be listened to
• He wants coaching and constructive criticism of his work
• He prefers working with others to having individual projects
• He has a keen sense of integrity and fair treatment
• He has a finely tuned “baloney” detector
• He’d like a place where he can grow into more challenging assignments

Of course it should go without saying that he wants to make a decent living and I am not kidding about him being a major talent. This is not my assessment as it comes from his professors.

The main thing I want to stress is that along with his technical talent he brings a priceless package of “intangibles.” He will make your workplace more attractive to others; he is a natural collaborator; he will openly express appreciation of work done by his colleagues; he does not compete; he learns and develops from interchanges with others. Will you recognize and encourage these traits?

As his father I am of course interested in his welfare but I am not too concerned. He’ll find a place to work, probably several. What mainly interests me is how you will receive him. If you don’t offer a workplace that provides what he is looking for he won’t stay long. He has too much confidence in his ability and too much commitment to his vision to hang around where he is not appreciated, respected or allowed to make a difference. If he sees you treating employees with favoritism or what he considers unfairly you better 1) plan on hearing from him about what he sees 2) expect him to depart if you don’t listen or change your ways.

You see, he will arrive engaged. The question is will he be welcomed in kind?

• Do you handle your new employees like they are a precious commodity or simply a commodity?

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A few weeks back I ran across an Op Ed piece by Stanley Fish in the New York Times titled ‘We are All Badgers Now.’ If you follow his columns at all, you may think that the musing of a professor of Humanities and Law from Florida International University in Miami is an unusual source of inspiration for someone like me who thinks and writes about coaching and management development. Au contraire, dear readers! Stanley Fish, aside from his academic credentials, is a student of ideas particularly how they get formulated and communicated, and he is rigorous about this topic in an uncommon fashion. I read his columns regularly and almost always come away the better for it.

In…Badgers… he was joined by a colleague, Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a thoughtful exchange about the relative merits and drawbacks to unionization in higher education. What I was drawn to was a statement Stanley made in the second paragraph as he expresses embarrassment at unmasking the frailness of the thinking that supported one of his strong biases…

“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats.”

What struck me in this statement was the revelation that here, a man of letters, is owning up to the fact that he has discovered that his perspective on a serious topic had been supported for years by nothing more than an emotion.

“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction…”

You may think this is an obscure insight I am sharing with you. Perhaps, but as a coach especially as a coach of coaches (managers) this personal revelation on Fish’s part occurred to me as profound. If a man such as he, steeped in the discipline of logic, can go for years with a strongly held bias supported by a mere emotional response what do I suppose is going on around me in my workplace with far less disciplined thinkers, such as maybe me and very likely, my direct reports?

I have been thinking recently about how much has been written on the topic of coaching and what there might still be left to look at and distinguish. The inspiration I took from the piece by Stanley Fish is that one of the key unexplored roles of a coach may be to teach those in their charge the art/skill of seeing the world differently, especially when the perspective they are operating from is not offering them actions that are effective.

In The Three Laws of Performance authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan give us a peek under the hood of what lies behind the actions. Whether effective or not, they pose the notion that all our actions originate and are guided by three immutable laws:

First Law of Performance: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. (People act in correlation to what they see in front of them)

Second Law of Performance: How a situation occurs arises in language (What people “see” is a function of what they tell themselves)

Third Law of Performance: Future-based lan­guage transforms how situations occur to people. (If actions are going to ever be different, they need to be rooted in another version of what is being seen)

If you are going to be an effective coach I strongly recommend you not go around sharing these laws with the people you are coaching, that will not be helpful! Being informed by these laws and asking questions is the approach that will probably work best and using questions derived from this knowledge is very likely the way to go.

Here are some examples when you find yourself coaching someone who is “stuck”:

• Do you think there is another way you could see this?
• Are your actions consistent with what you say you want or how you feel about the situation?
• Do you have any facts that support the discomfort you are experiencing?

Space is too brief here for any extended discussion, but I imagine that if you take the three laws at face value and use them to examine your own perspective in a challenging situation, you can practice this technique of questioning your own beliefs and begin to create a set of questions that are reusable in many coaching situations.

• Where are you stuck right now? Does the “sticking” starts with a feeling of discomfort?

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How does an organization sustain the engagement of employees through a significant period of change, not a change management initiative, a continuous period of evolutionary change lasting say, ten years? That experience is one that has been shared over the last decade by the 70,000 + employees of the Boeing Corporation in the greater Seattle area.

Here in the northwest our relationship with Boeing is up close and personal and if you work there, as a leader or not, you might feel like a fish being followed by a group of wide eyed tourists in a glass bottom boat. We cheer when the news for Boeing is good like it was recently when the company was awarded a large contract and we tremble when the company seems vulnerable as it has during the 787 project.

The trials and tribulations of the Boeing’s 787 project are a journalist’s dream come true because so many things have gone wrong. And with a presence as prominent as Boeing’s is here in the Northwest you can bet that EVERYTHING gets reported on and from many perspectives given the wide diversity of agendas that have some dependency on the company. Almost no news day is complete without something being reported out of Boeing.

Something I have wondered about for a while is how any company can maintain employee engagement during this period of rapid and sustained evolutionary change. Boeing provides plenty of opportunity to consider this question. So Monday when an article appeared in this Monday’s (4/4/11) Seattle Times Business and Technology section profiling one of the key leaders at Boeing it grabbed my attention.

I was hoping for some insight into how Boeing’s senior team has been leading the organization? What have they been doing to keep engagement high, have they even been concerned about it? I am a fan of both Bill Bridges and Dick Axelrod. In his highly regarded book ‘Terms of Engagement’  Axelrod outlines three critical leadership practices that are keys to success in any change management process, such as Boeing has been undergoing for a decade. They are: 

·         Honesty

·         Transparency

·         Trust

It is these practices, Axelrod tells us, that when followed create the conditions in which employees can choose to engage fully while leadership is making big demands on them. How is Boeing’s leadership doing as followers of these practices?

As I was reading this new piece I had Axelrod’s model in mind.  

The article by Dominic Gates, the Times Boeing beat reporter, profiles Nicole Piasecki, Boeing’s vice president of Business Development head of Strategic Analysis for Commercial Airplanes. If you live anywhere, never mind simply the Northwest, and are involved in employee engagement you will find some nuggets here, some to save and some to avoid.

The article, as well as being an executive profile discusses some of the key strategic issues Boeing leadership has and is dealing with as it prepares for competition in spaces in which it has been one of two dominant players for many years

Nicole Piasecki has clearly been on both the receiving end of some pretty big decisions made by others that resulted in negative consequences and also an active participant in making some of these same decisions herself. As Dominic Gates points to in his article…

“…some of Boeing's strategic moves in the past decade — which Piasecki had a hand in — now look questionable. Boeing's leadership has conceded that the wholesale outsourcing of work on the Dreamliner (787) program was handled badly. The debacle has trashed the company's stellar reputation for delivering on time and has cost the company billions of dollars.”

Has Boeing’s leadership completely stepped up to full responsibility for the decisions that led to the 787’s problems? Maybe you should judge for yourself but here is how it was reported by Dominic Gates when he directly asked Piasecki about one such decision…

“Piasecki considered her answer for a long moment, pausing, a conversation that was otherwise a fluid mix of lively, confident answers and occasional playful banter.

Finally she acknowledged, as her boss Jim Albaugh did recently, that Boeing's leadership at the time was very focused on shrinking in-house assets to boost Wall Street's assessment of company profitability.”

As I read these words I felt my confidence in Boeing leadership rising and then I read the next sentence…

“Then she briskly moved on, saying she won't "second-guess decisions that have already been made."

For my part, and she may not have intended it to be so, I found this response cavalier and I was left deflated. I know Boeing employee’s read this piece and I wondered whether they might have the same impression as I did. Is this the kind of transparency, honesty and trust that provides a foundation for engagement?

So I am now left wondering a) whether Boeing’s leadership is fully prepared to create the conditions for employees to continue to choose to engage at the high levels the company no doubt needs and b) whether those 72,000 + employees working for Boeing in the Seattle area are coming in each day fully engaged or whether they may just not have anyplace else to go?

•  What about your own leadership? Have you made decisions that went badly? How did you handle these with the people affected?

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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 Friday morning around 6:15AM as I was waiting to check in for my flight in Rochester, New York the lines for boarding passes were moving very slowly for what is normally the busiest time of each day. As I looked at the people standing in front of the self-service kiosks I noticed several who appeared to be frozen in front of the terminal screens.

If you’ve flown in the past couple of years you know that almost all check-in service at most airports is now done without the assistance of airline personnel.

There were at least ten kiosks and two airline attendants shuttling back and forth behind the machines grabbing baggage tags and calling out names. No doubt you’ve seen this show more than once. The airline attendants didn’t seem to notice the four people stuck in front of the terminals or the lines of folks backing up and starting to grumble at how slow things were moving. I stepped up to one of the “frozen” people and asked if I could help. My assistance was welcomed and within a couple of minutes I had helped three other people and the lines started moving again and those folks were on their way. (I am no urban hero, I was stuck behind these people myself so my actions were very self-serving.)

You can probably imagine that if you don’t travel very frequently the routine we now go through at the airports, while necessary, might also be confronting and almost overwhelming for some people. If you are a operating an airline why have a minimum number of people on hand at what is known to be the busiest time of the day and why have those that are there doing the same thing rather than attending to what is needed? No doubt you know the answer, attempts to reduce operating expense. If you’ve flown recently you have also no doubt heard the little speech each airline I fly gives at the end of each flight about how they know we have a choice of who we fly with and they appreciate our businesses, blah, blah, blah. This speech comes of course after having been short changed on the front end of the flying experience and now you are telling me how much you appreciate my business. How does the saying go, “Actions speak louder than words?”

For the infrequent traveler that front end experience can be more than confounding, it can be humiliating. I wonder if the recognition of what people might be going through crosses the minds of the cost cutters at airlines headquarters?

Have you had a frustrating IVR experience recently, you know, Interactive Voice Response limbo, one of those calls where you suddenly realize that if you hit two yet one more time you may arrive at the fifth level of Dante’s Inferno? The thought crosses your mind that maybe the website is a better idea, after all they mentioned the website at the beginning of your call, maybe this cul-de-sac approach is their way of encouraging you to use it?

How about entering a lobby on your first visit to a new or potential client and finding yourself in a locked enclosure? You are greeted by a written message next to a house phone indicating that you need to dial the party you are there to visit and they will come to the lobby to meet you.

I know why all of these things are done and I cannot excuse the absence of leadership behind each action of this type. Somewhere along the line someone I will never meet has decided I am not going to be made to feel welcome or maybe worse, even discouraged from participating with this company, all in the interest of some savings in operating expense. And no one with a customer facing responsibility has stepped up and said there could be a cost to this approach to saving money. Well congratulations, you have saved the money, now figure out how you are going to replace my business! Does this sound harsh? It should, this is the age of choices and I will exercise mine and so will those people who were humiliated while standing confused in front of your kiosk or feeling unwanted while they stumbled through your IVR maze or thumbed through your employee directory looking for the name of their “host.”

•  What expense reduction practices does your organizations employ that may well be driving customers away?

• What practices does your organization employ that might suggest to employees that they are expendable or taken for granted?

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Ever Since our friends at the Gallup organization came up with their famous Q12 many professionals in the consulting world have become obsessed with further identifying and refining the "drivers" of engagement and practices focused on improving overall levels of engagement have become the rage in businesses across the country.

The Q12 as you may already know asks 12 questions that purportedly measure strong feelings of employee engagement. There is reportedly a strong correlation between high scores on the Q12 and superior job performance.

Based on their initial work in the area of employee engagement Gallup, using an extraordinary amount of data, determined that Nationally, in 2005, engaged employees made up 28% of the work force globally, not-engaged employees made up 54%, and actively disengaged made up 17%.  With numbers like these it is no wonder Gallup has gone on to develop an enormously successful human resource consulting program.

I believe the Gallup organization through their research and others doing similar research have done the world of business a tremendous favor by uncovering this provocative information. What I am not as certain of is whether the conclusions they arrived at are equally valuable or valid.

My own suspicion is that what Gallup has determined is that only 28% of the players in our national workforce have found work and workplaces that are both truly satisfying for them. This may be as much a function of commitment as it is a response to external factors. The people in this fraction of the workforce just keep moving and/or communicating until they find what they are seeking, possibly following some vision in the manner expressed by George Bernard Shaw

"Reasonable men adapt to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves. That's why all progress depends on unreasonable men."

And I am betting it didn't always feel good, until it did!

It just may be that the majority (54%) of our workforce has “settled” for something less than satisfying and 17% of the workforce is simply pissed off for any number of reasons, perhaps even resentful about having to work at all.

Cause and effect are tricky questions. When it comes to people and their behavior of one thing I am fairly certain, relying on strong feelings, emotions, for anything, is like laying a foundation in quick sand. The divorce rate in our country may be more indicative of this belief than any piece of research I could site. Everyone  becomes engaged when they “feel” like they are in love. Then they marry and the eventual strength of a marriage comes from the way we behave when we no longer “feel” like we are in love. Will we remain engaged? Can we operate from the commitments we have made and have that be sufficient to sustain engagement? Here is an example from my own life of what I am pointing to here:

I don't do yard work. It's not that I am lazy, if the task is going to the grocery store, picking up the dry cleaning, taking out the trash, driving the truck to the recycling center, just let me know it needs to be done and I am on it.. Loading the dishwasher and scrubbing pans after dinner are actually two things I find relaxing. I just don't do yard work; not mowing the lawn yard work, that's fun. No, I mean yard work, like planting flowers, spreading compost, pruning and worst of all, weeding! But I do love my wife and she really enjoys having an attractive yard and works hard at it. As an expression of how much I respect her commitment to the yard we have created a game. She’ll want something done in the yard and I ask if what she wants is “yard work. She of course then says “no” and I say, “Well all right then, I’ll do it.” This works for us and especially because it gives us time together. Except for weeding! We have an unwritten rule that under no circumstances will I engage in weeding.

A week or so ago my wife set out to do some weeding in the rhododendron garden and her back cramped up. I knew she was counting on getting this bit of weeding done so from that place where I am profoundly related to my wife I said, “You know I do not do weeding but I am going to make an exception this week because of your short term disability.” I got down on my hands and knees and for two hours pulled weeds and did a presentable job. Did I have a strong feeling of connection to the task after all? Hardly! In fact I have no more interest now or connection to weeding than I ever did. Yet, because of the commitments my wife and I share this was a satisfying experience. It just didn’t feel like it!

• Where are you waiting for the right feeling before taking action?
• What factors about your working environment have you been putting up with rather than making a request or saying what's on your mind?
• Take a look at where you are working and what you are doing right now? Is this it for you? If not are you willing to take action to get it to be or find another place that will?

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"On November 15, 1990, in response to mounting evidence that air pollution contributes to water pollution, Congress amended the Clean Air Act and included provisions that established research and reporting requirements related to the deposition of hazardous air pollutants to the "Great Waters." The waterbodies designated by these provisions are the Great Lakes, Lake Champlain, Chesapeake Bay, and certain other coastal waters (identified by their designation as sites in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System or the National Estuary Program)"

In July, 2009 Puget Sound  (Lots of great pictures!) was added to this list of treasured and protected waterbodies.

On February 3.2010 the Seattle Post Globe ran this headline...

Puget Sound getting sicker; Obama budget slashes money for Sound cleanup by 60%.

You may be  thinking that somehow you got on a link to the wrong site, let me reassure you. This is The Heart of Engagement and yes, in part the title of this post reflects current ecological conditions in and around the Puget Sound, Washington State.The other part of this week's title, (...Why Would You Ever Care?) may seem a bit sarcastic, however, that interpretation would really miss my intention here. What I am attempting is to make an experiential connection between those things in our lives that we are aware of yet do not respond to. Often we do not take action merely on the basis of awareness, because regardless of the conceptual awareness, we are not engaged; we have not chosen to be responsible for the matter at hand. There are many issues I could have mentioned instead of the health of Puget Sound

• The well being of the people of New Orleans post Katrina
• The current Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
• The AIDS epidemic in Africa
• The unemployment level in America
• Name your favorite issue suffering a lack of engagement

About a week ago I was sitting in the basement of the local union hall in Anacortes, WA along with a number of other local citizens. This gathering was a monthly event sponsored by supporters of one of our two major political parties. Topics range from campaign finance reform to immigration concerns to the pluses and minuses of the recently passed health care legislation. On that particular evening we were hosting Kevin Ranker, local state senator who was doing an update for us on progress being made to recover some of the Puget Sound Restoration funds cut by the Federal Administration as mentioned in the article from the Seattle Post Globe.

As Kevin spoke that evening it gradually became clear that the Puget Sound dying is not such a simple issue to deal with. Here's a shot from another angle  of what may be the most recognizable feature in the Puget Sound area, Mt. Ranier.

 Oops, this does change the frame a bit does it not? Rather than simply see the situation through the lens of "Puget Sound is Dying, ain't it awful and somebody ought to do something cuz it's beautiful", we can now see that we/humans are reliant on this body of water and are also helping it die. The manner in which we have/are employing this resource whether it be ferrying business commuters to work or baseball fans to the Mariners games at Safeco Field, loading and unloading cargoes from Japan. China and Southeast Asia or serving as home port for an Alaskan fishing fleet is not very likely to change immediately in response to the article from February in the Seattle Post and Globe. There are too many seemingly independent interests in play. People freeze up in the face of this amount of complexity.

This takes us to the Heart of Engagement, in my view: Choice. No matter what the situation, it is possible to engage. The key is to be able to stand in the face of the complexity, free of judgments of right and wrong, good or bad, should or shouldn't etc.and take action effectively.

...

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There is much merit in the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Take this picture for instance.In case you don't know this is Mt. Ranier in Washington. This particular shot was taken with my Palm Treo from the window seat during a flight I was taking from Seattle to Fort Worth two summers ago. I think it is pretty great given no time for set up and it sure does a much better job of showing the magnificence of this peak than if I was to tell you how "really big" it is.

 Sometimes though you really do have to hear the story to get the picture.

We go to the gym to stay in shape, we hire a management coach to stay in shape, we go to church on Sunday to stay in shape. Repetition seems to be a fundamental practice for those who would stay sharp, whether it be in body, mind or spirit. And so it goes with those of us who create these periodic blog posts.So again it is time to repeat something we have heard countless times before.

In his March 25th post in All Things Workplace this year Steve Roesler does a great job of outlining the lesson I have mind for us to review today. In his words,

"I've coached executives and conducted workshops on all aspects of presentations for many years. One of the liveliest parts of the discussion emerges when I introduce the fact that influential presentations require at least as much time listening to the audience as speaking to them. For many, that's counter-intuitive to the common notion of influence."

Listening...there it is again...whether we are in the midst of a presentation or a one-on-one conversation, how many times have you heard said that listening is more important than speaking, especially when it comes to gaining respect or establishing influence? If you've heard it once I bet you've heard it a thousand times...and still it bears repeating.

So now that story I promised...

Some thirty years back I held a real job in a real company, actually a Fortune 50 company in the petroleum industry to be as exact as I need for my purposes here. One of my favorite assignments during this period of my career involved a two year stay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in a large refinery.

On one particular morning my manager showed up at my office early asking of I had time for a special assignment. He had in mind for me to do a comparative analysis of the healthcare plan we offered our employees and one offered by a local chemical company. The assignment seemed pretty straight forward so I took it on and within a short time was waist deep in charts and tables.

What I noticed fairly quickly was that on virtually every feature the plan offered by my employer was equal to or superior to the plan I had been asked to analyze comparatively. After about an hour I sat back and pondered the assignment for a few moments and just as I concluded it was a waste of time I headed upstairs to see my manager. He was someone I respected a great deal and if he had asked me to do this he had a good reason; I needed to know what that was before proceeding.

When I asked my manager how it was that he came to make the request of me to do the analysis the picture began to take shape. Late in the afternoon the day before one of the more vocal plant workers, a man who seemed to have a certain following, had stopped in to see my manager. He spent about half an hour complaining to my manager about how much better the medical plan offered by “so and so company” was and wondering aloud why we couldn’t get a better plan, to the point where my manager finally said he would arrange for an analysis and see what might be done.

I told my manager of my preliminary findings and he said maybe I should continue my analysis because the company was committed to doing whatever could be done within reason to keep the plant employees from thinking they needed union representation. Now I grew suspicious.

An interesting feature of this particular refinery was the fact that it was not unionized, like virtually all other refineries in the United States and the company management took great pains to make sure that was the way things remained.

I asked my manager if he minded whether I arranged a visit with the employee who had stopped by to see him and he said that if I thought it would help I could go ahead. Later that day I had the employee stop by and we began talking about his issues, and of course all the other employees who agreed with him. Within a short period of time listening to him I could not get a clear understanding of the problem, just the vague sense that something more was going on than the simple complaint. Finally I just said to him point blank that if he could not be more specific it would not be possible for me to determine whether we should or shouldn’t consider a different medical plan and I made it clear that I wanted to help if at all possible. The employee was silent for a few moments and then said that the employees at the other plant had this plastic membership card they could show at the doctor’s office or drug store and that was all they had to do to make a claim for coverage. Our plan required the employees to complete a form, attach a receipt, mail it in and wait for reimbursement. So that was it; that was what all the fuss was about, the claims process? Well, that was almost all of it!

We talked for a while longer and it became apparent that there was a cultural factor involved. This was some years back and this was a culture where the moms in a family stayed home to raise the children and take care of the family business. Virtually all the refinery employees then were male and most worked rotating shifts so they were only on a 9-5 schedule once out of every three weeks and their wives handled the household affairs. Many of women at home didn’t understand the claims forms and since the men were used to them handling everything they were embarrassed by giving them something that was hard to understand. So this was the real problem, we had placed our male employees in a position where they were letting their spouses down and those very same spouses talked with other women who’s husbands worked at the chemical plant with the plastic card and…you get the picture. This was an emotional issue not rational but if you were not listening you would never have heard it.

We got it all worked out. I offered to set up classes for or take phone calls from the wives to help them understand the claims process. I also promised to work with our health plan administrator to simplify the claims process. The issue of considering another plan never came up again while I was there and not since as far as I know. My manager was stunned,; he realized that he was so tuned to listening for anything that might lead to unionization that he could not have heard the employee’s real request no matter how many times they talked. I was new so my biases had yet to be established.

So there’s your 1000+ words, did you get the picture?

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This past weekend my wife and I had an opportunity to visit with our granddaughters, my son and his wife. Besides seeing my granddaughters, I also had another agenda this trip, doing a little recon on my son’s employment situation. In January, this son, the oldest of my three, was laid off from his position as a project architect at a very large firm in the town where he lives. My own response when I first heard this news was, “Yikes!”

Honestly, I had previously wondered for some time about behaviors my son described relative to his employment situation; among other things, he always left his office at 5:00PM regardless of the workload and he did not take work home on either weeknights or weekends. Being somewhat old-school  myself I was concerned that if push came to shove as it sometimes does he would end up on whatever short list was created for staff reduction if there was an economic crunch that affected his firm. Of course then there was an economic crunch and he was out the proverbial door.

So, Friday afternoon as we sat in his living room, just over eleven months after his last day of work. I was curious about his experience of the process he has been engaged with. Economically he and his wife had made the adjustments necessary quite successfully but I was more concerned about his emotional and psychological state.

My initial questions to my son on Friday had the effect of uncorking a bottle of champagne! He talked virtually non-stop for the next 45 minutes about what a great time he had been having. I was thinking to myself, “Oh dear, this has finally gotten to him.” A few months earlier, back in July to be exact, he had expressed similar enthusiasm but I thought that would have worn off by now as reality set in and anxiety displaced his early bravado. Actually, he is now more excited than ever and while he did admit that there is a certain amount of anxiety he contends with each day it seems to him to be a natural part of the process that he has accepted and appreciates.

Each morning he gets breakfast for both girls while his wife sets off to work. He takes his now five-year-old first daughter to kindergarten each morning and then spends the rest of the time until noon with his one year old who gets dropped off at day care for the afternoon, when he begins “his work.” Right around 5:30PM, everyone comes home and he gets dinner in one form or other.  Since this process began he has applied for and been granted a general contractors license , taken and passed four of the seven exams to be certified as a licensed architect, visited nearly a hundred potential properties for sale, interviewed and made tentative plans with several specialty contractors,  purchased and learned how to use a bidding and planning software package and is nearly complete with a set of prototype plans for a residential multi-family building that he can use to develop bank financing, something he works on at times until 3:00AM, on his own time.

As time has passed since his layoff he has become clearer and clearer that he had wanted to leave his employed situation for quite some time but the pragmatic “I am a father now with responsibilities!”, part of him held him in tow like a “tractor beam” to an employment situation that increasingly offered him little other than financial reward. To be certain he felt as though the experience he had gained in his first few years with this employer had been a valuable apprenticeship. However, for at least the past three years he was increasingly distracted and I noticed him often finding fault with his employer’s decisions and practices. This was something I found strange since the employer had always seemed willing to accommodate his limited work schedule and habit of extending lunch hours so he could visit his daughter in day care. What is the phrase, “Be careful not to bite the hand that feeds you?”

Aaaanyway, this post has gone on a bit too long. Somewhere near the center of this large question we are addressing together is a lesson to be both learned and shared. If we are serious about optimizing the experience of the time of our life, it is insufficient to find something to be involved with where all that is required is our competence. This is not how our self would want to invest if we truly gave it voice. Competence does not necessarily equal engagement. Unfortunately, I fear that this is among the most common of stories we might hear about how many of our children, or perhaps even ourselves, have chosen to spend the productive years we have been given. The net effect is unfortunate to a degree that is almost unimaginable. While it satisfies the basics that Maslow so brilliantly described in his work it inevitably leads us to adopt a certain bitter perspective towards life in general and resentfulness towards others who have made the choice to satisfy their soul as well as their pocketbook. In the end, it also robs our employers of the opportunity to have the most engaged workforce possible, but that is another discussion for another day.

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When it comes to conditions that promote engagement how much does facing a challenge play a part? If it does is it the challenge being faced or the individual being challenged that makes the difference.?

If the statistics from the Gallup organization are to be believed (and why wouldn't they be?) only 27% of our national workforce reports being fully engaged with the work they are doing everyday. I am less concerned with what this statistic means as far as productivity being lost than I am with the implications it has for the presence of passion, creativity and initiative, full engagement with the work at hand and a concern for the success of the whole enterprise. In other words that people have work to do that they feel is really worthy of the time of their lives.

The statistic cited certainly does not mean that the rest of the folks, those either less than engaged or even worse unengaged, don't have enough to do. Actually the reality seems to be quite the opposite as companies continue to rigorously maintain headcount at near absolute minimums and for exempt workers the  work weeks continue to leak well beyond 40 hours and include portions of weekends as an assumption by many employers. The question it seems to beg is whether simply having a lot to do is a challenge that engages?

In my own work for the past 20 years I'd have to say that rarely have I encountered a management team that understands what it takes to keep the majority or their workforce at or near full engagement. They certainly know the results that need to be produced and they of course know how to offer significant rewards and consequences to keep the results flowing. However, the idea of focusing on engagement as a source of results still remains unexplored territory and I think mainly because managers are trained to focus on actions or behaviors not conditions. This is an unfortunate carry over from our industrial period and much of the work that was done on time/motion studies.

In 2008 Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Fortune magazine published 'Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else, a book that is still selling briskly. Colvin's fundamental premise is that while top performers are talented they also work very deliberately and intently on being the very best in their chosen field. Honestly, and he has data to back it up, these world-class types simply out practice the rest of their competition both in hours and focus. What Colvin's writing suggests is that there are truly few among us willing to go through the rigors of what it takes to become outstanding performers. This I think would echo a basic belief held by the majority of managers in our country, hence the rationale for many of the draconian management practices many of us have encountered.

I am of course interested in the performance of outstanding individuals, however,  I am passionate about exceptional organizations. So what does a study of top individual performers and the challenges they set out for themselves have to do with organizational performance? Colvin does get into this question a bit, but not enough to satisfy me. For my own part I believe that whether consciously or not people are motivated to find something that challenges them to be the very best they can be and also to be part of something greater than themselves.

As I continue my own study of engagement, I want to suggest that having top talent choose you as a manager or your place of work as their own does have something to do with knowing that yours is an environment that challenges people to be their very best, not just work hard on what the organization needs to have done. It also has to do with having people see that there is in your place of employment an opportunity to be part of something worthwhile that is larger than themselves. This does not just happen or at least as a manager or employer you cannot to afford to believe that it will. There is as much deliberate practice in producing a highly engaged workforce as there is in producing outstanding individual performance.

(If you have any interest in the topic of performance I'd definitely recommend reading the book, it is both enjoyable and informative but you may want to start by checking out his article in Fortune which summarizes his argument).

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