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.

...

Continue Reading...

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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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