Today’s headline is intended to provoke you to thought as well as action. Like anything that gets too familiar I fear that there has been a loss of the power in our national/international conversations around employee engagement.

(Yes, that's me in the picture, as I see myself!)

So why would I be concerned? After all, we now have an Employee Engagement Network with over 2600 members internationally. Three years ago this on-line community did not exist. For those who might consider themselves “employee engagement professionals” this news would seem to be immediately exciting. But I wonder?

Is it possible that many of us, far more even than are represented by this rush to join The Employee Engagement Network are much more enamored of our own involvement in the subject of employee engagement then we are at being effective at it, i.e., are we making any difference?

• Who, other than companies selling consulting services is offering to produce employee engagement surveys?
• When Employee Engagement conferences are convened is the audience the choir being preached to?
• How involved are “C” level people in your organization with the topic of employee engagement?
• Have measures of Employee Engagement been adopted by senior management as key leading indicators for your business and the likelihood of its future success?

Yes, I know, I am sounding like a party pooper and my blog title is... The Heart of Engagement. You might think I’d be more chipper !

 Honestly, much of my skepticism at the moment is feigned since I do think a lot of good work is being done by many thousands of committed professional. However, when I see an article like this one, “Employee engagement needs to be high on the agenda when resources are limited” published this month by HR Magazine in the UK I am reminded that it is still much too soon to be patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. If this type of article (just about as basic as you can get) is being published in June of 2010 in a publication of this stature then we are still at the very beginning of the transformation of our places of work.

There is no question in my mind that the transformation of the workplace cannot be left to “the professionals” alone. We need a revolution sooner rather than later. This is an ‘all hands on deck’ scenario and so I have a challenge for each of you reading this week.

Take a look at this link: “The surprising truth about what motivates us”...now

• Share the connected video with your work group. It is about 11 minutes long. Surely you can spare 11 minutes to make a difference in your work group! Well maybe a bit more than 11 minutes, leave room for at least a half hour dialogue after you watch the video. Observe and listen to how your co-workers respond. I don’t think you’ll be surprised, maybe moved by the depth of their passion, including their skepticism. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from your immediate group take the video to the next level of management in your organization. Don’t just email it to them, ask for an audience and watch the video together, stick around for a 20 to 30 minute dialogue. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from the next level of management and you are emboldened by your experience see if you can get a 30 minute meeting with a senior level manager with the promise to share something that has the potential to effect the bottom line for years to come.

If you get this far I think you'll know what to do next…good luck and let me know how it goes! 

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As a manager, especially a manager of younger employees one thing I encourage you to be on the lookout for are occasions that attack the confidence of the your less experienced reports. No doubt you can remember your own baptism by fire when in your earlier years you innocently asked a question of a superior in an open meeting, with the best of intentions, and got handed your head on a platter following a public flaying that left you questioning yourself, your values, the direction of the poles etc. If you were fortunate you had a manager who took you aside and assured you that you were fine and that what you had done hadn’t warranted the treatment you received and maybe there were better ways or times to make your thoughts or questions known in the future. If you were not so fortunate you were met in the hall after the meeting by a co-worker who cauterized your wound with a glib “Glad that wasn’t me” comment, forever cementing in your mind that you were never going to let anything close to that happen again, and were never heard from there or anyplace else that had a similar look and feel. Or maybe you were passed over for a promotion or “thrown under the bus” by a colleague in a public setting, etc. etc.

If you’ve been around for a while you now know the drill, you know you will survive, as Kenny Rogers says, “You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em!” And you know there will always be another day and the point is not so much to avoid the impact of life in the workplace as it is to develop the ability to choose your points of high impact and recover quickly. Nothing will make you more ineffective than

·         the inability to confront events when necessary to get things done,

·         the inability to sustain an injustice and return to the field of play quickly or

·          the inability to leave the past in the past

As object lesson let me present a situation very fresh in the minds of many fans of professional sports. In baseball there are two types of actors on the field at all times, those who play the game and those who officiate the games. Theirs is an uneasy interdependency made necessary by the subjective nature of many of the transactions. Kind of like performance reviews! J Anyway, last Wednesday, June 2^nd, the fans in Detroit’s Comerica Park were on the verge of being treated to one of the rarest events in all of sports, the pitching of a perfect game*. Unfortunately the gods of baseball have a weird sense of fate. On a play that would have been the last of the game a veteran umpire made an erroneous call on a fairly routine play, costing the pitcher, the players and the fans the experience of a lifetime.

*The “perfect game” has occurred only 18 times since 1900 out of something like half a million games played in that period.

I am pretty sure you as well as almost everyone at Comerica that evening can readily see the error of the call made by umpire Jim Joyce.

The fans were stunned, the Detroit players were furious, the manager, Jim Leyland, offered strenuous protest, to no avail. Amazingly, the pitcher, Armando Galarraga, calmly returned to the mound, faced the next batter, got him out and completed a one-hit game for the win.

Following the game a chagrinned Jim Joyce faced the press and admitted his mistake to the press and apologized in person to Galarraga. The next day to no one’s surprise there was an appeal to the Baseball Commissioner, Bud Selig, to reverse the call and award the perfect game. (C’mon Bud you know that wasn’t fair, give the kid a break!) To his credit Bud Selig was true to the game and declined to reverse the call.

Just like in any workplace the two protagonists in this drama returned to work the following day. In a gesture most rare and inspirational Armando Galarraga met Jim Joyce at Home Plate with the daily lineup card, (a task normally completed by the team’s manager), gave him a pat on the back and a hug and assured him that he forgave the mistake and affirmed his confidence in Joyce’s ability to proceed to effectively call the balls and strikes that day. Remarkable and rare, a story worth repeating and one I encourage you to share with your younger employees.

In any interdependency, marriage, co-worker or business partner there is room for disappointment. At times we will let each other down. These are the moments that define relationships; these are the moments that define careers. When they occur will we withdraw from the field never to risk again or will we return to play knowing that somewhere in the future we will experience disappointment again? Can we learn to apologize, can we learn to forgive, even when we know the game will never be fair. For those who cannot…there will always be tickets for the game, that’s why they call them spectators.

·         Are you noticing any of your reports becoming spectators?

·         Are there apologies for you to make or forgiveness to grant?

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“Disengagement happens, and poor management isn't always the cause. The fact is that being an inspirational leader and an excellent coach aren't always enough.”

Nick Tasler, Business Week, 03/26/2010

‘Help Your Best People Do a Better Job'

 When it comes to a lot of things, technology,fashion, new books or movies, I must admit to being the "100th Monkey" of urban legend fame. You know me, I'm the guy who finally buys the 3.0 version of the I-Phone then runs around the office showing everyone what it can do like he just invented fire! Like for instance, I just discovered while creating this piece that you can edit a JPEG file. Did you know that was possible? Cool stuff!

With most things that would describe me, but not with Job Crafting, no Sireee, with this relatively new concept I was waaaay ahead of the curve.

You see the guy in the picture? That might have been me back in 1976, without the desktop and corn plant of course. ( I think that’s corn!) Sitting in my office in the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company on any afternoon, except Friday, when it was slower! How did we deal with boredom on the job back then with no internet to surf, no texting etc.? I really don’t know about anyone else but I can tell you that one advantage of working in a large building in the center of San Francisco was that you could get lost for hours at a time and the window shopping was terrific. Sad I know, but true I swear.

I didn’t do well with the window shopping for all that long, maybe a couple of months and then I started to make regular trips down the hall to see if my manager had anything with a deadline that he wanted to hand off. When that didn’t work I’d stop in my co-workers offices and ask if they needed any help with anything. Both these tactics were an improvement on the window shopping routine but neither was really a sustainable solution. The big problem I was facing then was that we simply had too many people for the amount of work that needed to be done. What can I say other than to remind you that this was before the globalized economy and all the ensuing competition.

When after two years in the head office my manager made this sideways offer to me; “You wouldn’t want to transfer to Mississippi would you?” I snapped it up. Back in the plant environment it wasn’t like there was an overwhelming amount of work to be done either but I could cross functional lines more easily and there were always operations managers with cool analytical or people problems that they were more than happy to have me dive into. I was Job Craftin baby, and it wasn’t even 1980!

When I started my own organizational development company a few years later I remembered the pain of the experience of having every one of my managers happy with my performance and being bored beyond words. As we built the organization we made a practice of letting people involve themselves in what interested them, as long as they had their assignments covered. We only had two rules regarding working in the company. If you needed to be managed we probably didn’t need you and if you were not entirely happy doing the job you had been assigned you should either get busy and figure out what we were doing you did enjoy or leave and find something suited your interests. We did not want anyone there because they needed a job and for sure I wasn’t about to be the enabler of someone wasting even a day of their life just to pay the bills.

We never got to be more than a fifteen person company but over the 20+ years we had the business we had four employees join us as office administrators, get interested in our consulting practice, train themselves up on the job and eventually become billable consultants, no college degrees, just a big bucket of "I wanna!" Two of these folks now have their own practices, one works as the business manager in her husband’s medical practice and the other has gone back to office administration but with a strong focus on customer service and account management. They all remain close associates. Somewhere in their experience with us these people really got the message that their satisfaction was their responsibility and we meant to partner with them as long as what they were doing was consistent with the needs of the business.

I am pretty sure we had an advantage over many workplaces because I have always been willing to use my company for experimental purposes and wouldn’t ask any client to try out something we had not tested on ourselves. But I think it is also a matter of values and having your practices match your words. Something like, we believed our employees really were our most important asset so we acted like it!

In doing research for this post I ran across a couple of very solid sources you may want to tap yourself. McBassi & Company ran a short piece in their blog  on April 14 (Mike Powers) which hooked me up to Nick Tasler’s piece in Bloomberg/Businessweek (see above) which introduced me to Amy Wrzesniewski and what she has been studying on "job crafting" for more than a decade. Nick’s article looks at the opportunity of “Job Crafting” from the manager’s perspective and offers some tips on trying this out especially if you are concerned about keeping your best people engaged. Another source worth looking at ‘Hate Your Job? Here’s How to Reshape It” authored by Jeremy Caplan appeared in Time last December. Amy W. gets kudos here again and this time the issue gets examined from the employee perspective.

I guess this 'Job Crafting' thing is really heating up huh? Where were all these guys back in 1976 when I was washing the mud off my sweet potato?

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"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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