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

"Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won."

                                        Dr. Suess

Turn back the clock to an April afternoon in Michigan in the spring of 1965. A young man leaves the back door of the high school gymnasium headed for baseball practice. Cleats slung over his shoulder, mitt under his arm, he is hailed by members of the track team and challenged to a footrace in the school parking lot. The young man has developed something of a reputation for being fleet of foot, at least on the baseball field, regularly stealing two and three bases a game. His colleagues on the track team want to see if he can translate his speed on the bases to speed on the track.

The runners gather at a line on the asphalt lot measured 100 yards from a finish near the baseball diamond. The young man was not prepared for this race; he wears low cut canvas sneakers and long pants. His challengers from the track team are dressed for their practice in shorts and running shoes. At the sound of the starter they are off and 10.2 seconds later the young baseball player crosses the finish line several yards ahead of the members of the track team.

The track coach who has been watching the proceedings approaches the baseballer and asks him about joining the track squad. Flattered, the young man expresses interest provided that he can also remain on the baseball team, his first love. In response the coach says that the young man will have to choose between the two sports and points out that he could likely be very successful as a sprinter for the track squad. The young man thanks the coach for the offer but chooses to remain with the baseball team. Later that spring at the all-city track meet the 100-yard dash is won with a time of 10.0, two tenths of a second faster than the young baseball player had run in sneakers and long pants with no warm up that April afternoon.

Fast forward to early 2009, the former young baseball player, now an experienced OD consultant leads a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary initiative on behalf of a client interested in generating innovative thinking and solutions in some critical customer facing areas. Players in this initiative are offered the opportunity to work on one of five suggested projects where major improvements are necessary and desired within a twelve- month period. Each employee involved, chosen because they were identified as “high potential”, is allowed to self-select to work on a project where they feel their talents will be put to good use. These are real projects with real needs and real dollars (in the multi-millions) and real customer relationships at stake.

When the initiative nears completion, four of the five projects have shown solid progress. The fifth project team, working on the most entrenched and critical customer servicing processes, presents a set of ideas for segmenting and servicing customers that stands to revolutionize not only the client’s business model but the industry model as well. Key contributions to this revolutionary set of ideas have come from diverse and unanticipated sources. The project team leader is a woman with less than five years experience in this 40-year-old company. Her most valuable collaborators have been a senior Human Resource analyst who was virtually unknown outside of HR when this initiative began and a finance director who had no experience in the customer facing areas of the business in his fifteen-year career with the client company. Prior to this initiative the only one of these three people who would have been invited to participate on this project was the woman team leader and she would have been given a secondary role because of her limited experience.

The connection between these two stories is of course the baseball player turned OD consultant (me) who never forgot what could have been that spring of 1965 if a different model had been in place. What if the track coach had focused attention on making use of the best available talent, regardless of the source?

Today’s organizations might not be as strapped for talent as they might imagine. Quite possibly their mental models for what it takes to contribute are the true limit to what they are experiencing when it comes to innovative thinking.

• Where is your organization trapped by its adherence to a tradition of finding solutions to current problems from among the available functional knowledge and experience that created them?  
• What would it take to allow people with talent, passion, initiative and creativity to become involved regardless of current assignments or functional history?   

ps  If you are one of those employees looking to get your “light out from under the bushel” like to ones described at my client above, take a look at what Paul Herbert has to say over at Fistful of Talent. Check out Paul’s March 2, 2010 post about your responsibility in the matter.

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I was not planning on another post spotlighting the Pike Place Fish Market anytime soon, or for that matter ever again, until last week when I saw the video ‘FISH!’ for the very first time. To put it mildly I was horrified. Never mind that the production value of the video leaves a lot to be desired, the message in the film was what got my blood stirring. Unfortunately, I can now also see why ‘FISH!” is the #1 selling training video of all time.

Having had the opportunity to see first hand what goes on behind the scenes at the market, learning how the crew manages and has managed to create enthusiasm and joy while tossing fish for twenty-three years, the thought that the “philosophy” has been boiled down to four catch phrases seems unfortunately typical of a nation of training companies who want to give you “The Five Best Ways to This” or the “Seven Things you Must do Whenever.” In short, we are suckers for an appeal suggesting that radical change is easy and methodical, something anyone can learn.

So here they are, according to ‘FISH!’, the principles which took a nearly failing business from absolute obscurity to world fame in a little over 12 years.

• Play
• Make Their Day
• Be present
• Choose Your Attitude

Oh yes, and don’t forget to throw the fish, the little stuffed fish. Yes folks, it is really that simple. Yikes!

Please, could anyone have come up with a system that is more paternalistic and less sustainable than what is suggested in the ‘FISH!’ video? Actually, if I had to say what I thought the video was designed to do it would be to make you feel bad about your business but know that the answers were just a few dollars away.

Certainly the film is inspiring, it also tells you nothing about the process that resulted in what you are witnessing when you watch the fishmongers at work, either on film or in person. What it does tell you is how someone described what they were seeing as they watched the fishmongers at work. Much like a spectator who watches a sporting event the video collapses the distinction between what is actually going on in the market and what it looks like is going on. Maybe you have listened to one of those radio “call in shows” where the fan/caller refers to their favorite team’s performance over the weekend using the pronoun “we”. When you hear these calls you must immediately think the caller is delusional, they cannot tell the difference between themselves watching the game and the players who played it. But you see, that is exactly why ‘FISH’ has such appeal, the producers are passing off their interpretation as fact and it is compelling because it touches very deeply into that area of our psyche where we

• Yearn for significance in our work
• Are drawn to a purpose larger than ourselves
• Aspire to belong to something that we have helped create

Unfortunately, the program as it is pitched also appeals to one of our most base instincts and that is the possibility of achieving something remarkable for little or no risk or effort.

What could be easier to sell, especially to control oriented employers desperate for solutions, than the idea that by putting your employees through a few training sessions, adopting a few simple concepts and investing in some trinkets, certificates and stuffed fish you could transform your organization and have it perform like what you see taking place at The Pike Place Fish Market. ‘FISH!’ appeals directly to “lottery mentality”, for just a small investment you can become RICH!

Since the fall of 2008 no less than three bestselling books have come out attempting to account for the principles of world-class individual success,

• Geoff Colvin’s ‘Talent is Overrated: What Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else’ ,
• Daniel Coyle’s ‘The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How
• Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers: The Story of Success

Of these, Gladwell’s book, currently the best selling of all three is probably the most authentic in that it accounts for luck, special circumstances and privilege as factors contributing to success in many cases. None of these publications, anymore than ‘FISH’ accounts for everything that factors in when pursuing exceptional performance. However, all three books point unequivocally to the need to spend literally hours in preparation and practice to turn even exceptional talent into stand out skill and consistent performance.

This for me was one among several things that were missing in ‘FISH.’ What you cannot see in the film and what is no doubt not sexy, maybe even scary, is the hours of work the fishmongers put in before and after the market is open to insure that when the show goes on it is picture perfect. When I sat in on the PPFM staff meeting a few weeks back I commented to the owner John Yokoyama that his group was the highest functioning that I had seen in my twenty-two years of consulting. John remarked with a smile that it was probably because I had not been at it long enough, he and his staff had been pursuing their World Famous vision for twenty three years! In addition to set up and take down on a daily basis without fail the PPFM staff meets as a whole every two weeks with their consultant for two to three hours to clear the air and renew their commitment to their vision and each other. This is not life on Wii™ or Guitar Hero™.  Neither is this PPFM according to ‘FISH!’

I am not saying that ‘FISH!’ and the process it promotes are entirely without merit, I am sure some good comes from the training. I am also sure that when I go to Chinese restaurants, the ones with the pictures of the food in the menu, if they bring me a picture of food on a plate, that wasn’t really what I had in mind.

What would you be willing to give up for performance like they have at The Pike Place Fish Market?

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When I created The Heart of Engagement, I was looking for a metaphor to express my passion for distinguishing factors that contribute to establishing intentionally engaging work environments. From the very start, I have assumed that there is no real “heart” of engagement, I thought of the title mainly as a way to designate a direction for an inquiry, not necessarily a destination. Recently I had an experience that has made me reconsider my own assumption; maybe there really is a heart! It happened in of all places the Tai Tung Chinese Restaurant on King Street in Seattle. I wish you could have been there!

Last Thursday evening at the invitation of my friend and colleague Jim Bergquist I attended a staff meeting for everyone who works at his most well known client, the Pike Place Fish Market, a group of around twenty. The market is located in Seattle, though I am sure that fact hardly needs mentioning since it is after all “World Famous.” Jim , who has been consulting with the market’s owner, John Yokoyama, as well as the rest of the staff since 1986 had met with me over lunch that day and happened to mention that I’d be welcome to attend and I jumped at the opportunity. {Certainly hundreds of thousands of people have watched the fishmongers toss the fish over the past twenty years but I imagine the number of outsiders who have sat in on a staff meeting is pretty small.}

I knew of Jim Bergquist more than I knew him when I arrived in Anacortes in late 2006. Some years past, about twenty or so I guess, Jim and I had been volunteers for The Hunger Project. I had read about his work with Pike Place Fish in ‘Catch: A Fishmongers Guide to Greatness and we had both started our consulting practices around the same time. So now, we live about three miles apart and are able to get together on a regular basis. The Pike Place Fish Market is a frequent topic of our conversations, mainly because I am so interested in what took a near bankrupt fish market to a twenty-year run of successes and made it a brand highly recognized in the world of organizational development.

What I saw last Thursday evening came pretty close to answering for me why the truly standout companies are not afraid to share their secrets. Like Toyota, Pike Place Fish Market has been openly sharing the philosophy that led to its sustained success for years and after all this time has very few imitators. Why? I cannot be sure I have the  answer but from my recent experience I certainly now have an informed opinion. It turns out that the folks at Pike Place Fish operate from a central purpose, a commitment to “World Peace and Prosperity for Everyone.” Yea buddy, that is what I said. Nearly every one of the staff members present was wearing either a hoodie or a cap with this purpose prominently stated someplace on the garment and as each staff member shared something that evening it wasn’t more than a minute or two before someone else tied that contribution back to their purpose. As I write this, I have a good idea how it sounds and I can tell you that I have never witnessed anything more authentic in my life. The experience was humbling and inspiring.

The folks at Pike Place Fish Market, with the help of Jim Bergquist, figured out a long time ago that their daily work had to be about something larger than just making money, c’mon, it is fish they are selling! You get the fish in the morning, you stack them up, you sell them, and you go home at night and then do it again the next day. How long can you do that and stay inspired? The guys at Pike Place Fish have figured out how to do it consistently for over twenty years and John Yokoyama  told me Thursday evening that this team is their best ever and they are definitely at the top of their game.

What struck me part way through the meeting was that this was not a special event; they do this every two weeks, without fail, and have been for over twenty years. Jim Bergquist has been a regular contributor for these twenty years and is clearly a revered part of their tradition. The folks at Pike Place Fish do not need Jim Bergquist, they want him there, he is an integral part of their team and philosophy and a source of objectivity when they get tangled up in their shorts, and they do!

As a professional catalyst I couldn’t have been more validated by my experience last Thursday evening. And, like I said, it is clearer for me now that the very best have nothing much to fear from the rest of the companies out there, even in their own industries. Honestly, what makes the Pike Place Fish Market rare is that the owner and employees are up to something a lot more naturally engaging than making money, and not that many companies see the possibility in that.

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