A Real Paradigm Shift

Every once in a while you get to experience a real paradigm shift.

A number of years ago I had an opportunity to attend a presentation/demonstration by Monty Roberts the "Horse Whisperer". If you are familiar with horse training vernacular you know that for the last couple of hundred years the technique of training horses has been referred to as "breaking" the horse. In short to teach the horse to "comply" with our will and instruction. Roberts discussed some things that were pretty intriguing to me. The fact that horses are both a herd and a "prey animal". Their primary reaction to threats is to flee. The herd part of their instinct is that they are essentially programmed to "join up" with others rather than attempt to go it alone. With that in mind he proposed a different methodology- rather than "breaking" the horse why not extend an invitation to the horse to "join up" with you and become part of your herd? In the space of a little over an hour I saw a horse that had never been ridden accept a saddle, bridle, and rider. That is a paradigm shift!

Because of what I do my mind immediately went to my own experiences with people and organizations. What if we were to offer an opportunity to employees to "join up" with us rather than try to impose our organizational values or even our personal values for those of us that lead and manage teams? That became part of the fabric of my model of moving from compliance to commitment.

This week I had the opportunity to be exposed to another profound paradigm shift by a brilliant colleague. This model identifies behavioral "channels" in the subconscious mind and allows you to "retrain" the channel to create opportunities for profound and sustained changes in the behavior of individuals and teams. By creating the new "channel" you are allowing them to join up rather than imposing your model or view.

I am not confident or competent enough to discuss this model in detail at this stage, but I assure you you will be hearing more from me on this topic as I understand it and its application.

Thank you Reut for sharing your brilliance and your vision with me and the others. I am very excited about seeing where this new paradigm takes us... What new "paradigms" are you open to exploring?

What "Type" Are You?

Greetings from San Diego. I have the opportunity to be out here and meet with a group of colleagues that I deeply respect to talk about new ways to motivate and work with people.

During my trip I have had a chance to catch up on a little reading and explore some of the work of two of my favorite social and business "system" commentators, Daniel Pink and Seth Godin.

My question comes from a model/theory that Pink explores in his book Drive -the surprising truth about what motivates us. Perhaps the reason I enjoyed the book so much is because what Pink describes and what I believe are in such close sync.

He also tees off on one of my favorite targets- Frederick W. Taylor, the "father" of scientific management. This is the theory that non management people are not terribly intrinsically motivated so productivity is best optimized by routinizing their tasks.

Pink's type "I" argues that at least some part of us is driven by needs for autonomy, learning, and purpose. He doesn't take the position that all work and all people fit this model, but that many do. He even goes further and uses the "P" word, Purpose and suggests that most of us seek this with varying degrees of energy. Kind of resonates with the concept of focusing on what "matters" doesn't it.

If you haven't yet read the book I commend it to you. In addition to stimulating your thinking he also provides some "templates" for both organizations and individuals.

Seth Godin's latest work - Linchpin is another fascinating read. He explores that a new category of critical "player" is emerging in organizations. Traditionally we had labor and management and the lines were pretty clear. Linchpins are those people who can connect groups and individuals.
Their skills are in communication, building trust, and relationships; not sciences or technology. Kind of sounds like they are building engagement doesn't it? He even uses words like obedience aka compliance and how we built it into our work and social systems and the costs we are experiencing because of it. I especially see this represented in the U.S. labor law infrastructure; most of it was written in the 40's and 50's with little meaningful change since. If you are familiar with it you know that it is highly structured and based on an adversarial model.

Any of you that know me or my orientation know that concepts like working with people, creating engagement, and related models speak to my heart; but I think anyone in any organization would benefit by exploring the concepts these two discuss.

One of my favorite quotes talks about "employees being physically, emotionally, and psychologically impelled. They gladly give up other choices."

Maybe it is just me, but that sounds pretty exciting. What do you think.....?

Where Does Engagement "Live"?

I am very pleased to see interest in topics like employee engagement and employment branding gaining some momentum, even if it is just in dialogue.

I have to pay an homage to the people at BlessingWhite for their recent studies and research and Dr's Whitlark and Rhoads for their publication about the "Spillover" effect which provides concrete relationships and data; drawing a direct correlation between high engagement and key performance indicators like sustainability, productivity, and profitability. This is no longer "warm and fuzzy" stuff, but rather hard data.

I do continue to see that for all the dialogue I am still disappointed with the number of organizations and C level executives that are either ignoring this opportunity (some would say crisis) or paying lip service to it.

There are a couple of other things coming out about engagement that I have long believed that I am pleased to see gaining some traction as well:

• Defining engagement. This a a huge area. Engagement is not happiness or employee satisfaction. Much like compensation the lack of happiness or satisfaction can have a negative affect on engagement, but "happy" or "satisfied" employees are not necessarily engaged. The basic reason for that is that the work place may be providing an outlet for social relationships or other things that employees enjoy that affect those areas, but don't lead to additional productivity or discretionary effort. Measuring those other things doesn't necessarily yield engagement.
• Creating engagement. The other thing we are starting to recognize is that engagement is not an initiative or program it is a culture! To create and sustain an engaged workforce and long term employment brand you must create and sustain a culture.

I think that these "revelations" may be part of what is keeping many organizations from embracing an engagement strategy or employment brand- they aren't prepared to do the work.

The last thing I want to share today is my response to the opening question. In my opinion engagement and your brand live at the front line level of your organization. I am not saying that senior management support and role modeling aren't critical, but how many of your customers or employees interact regularly with C level management?

How many of us encounter Howard Schultz when we visit Starbucks or Steve Jobs at the Apple store?

My point is you must build engagement into your brand through your selection, hiring, training, and performance management and reward systems. I would go further and say that your front line managers are your greatest potential asset or weakness. In fact Whitlark and Rhoads are even more specific;

"One bad manager can pollute multiple levels of an organization, and poor managers bring down employee morale, which spills over into the engagement level of customers.”

My point being that your "engagement" or "branding" effort must be embraced as a culture change and you have to be willing to "de-recruit" employees especially managers who can not or will not make the transition. My experience has been validated by James L. Heskett, author of the book The Service-Profit Chain, who writes-

“… the hardest concept is the deployment of the culture change …which requires that organizations identify values, behaviors, and measures that help reinforce the service profit chain relationships. But it also requires actions. That is when managers are not managing by the values and cannot be admonished or retrained to do so (which rarely works), they have to go.”

So I guess what I am saying is that engagement is mutual commitment and while it is important to have brand champions in the C suite you will be most successful when you embed it into the fabric of your organization because engagement and your brand live on the "ground floor" where your employees interact with your customers. As my colleague Joseph Skursky so elegantly states, Hire Hard- Manage Easy. You will find it a better long term strategy.

Building a Better "Mousetrap"

I am kind of excited. I am in the process of pulling together a group of collaborators to talk about the importance of building a strong employment brand and engagement.

I am excited on a couple of levels. Anyone that knows me knows that I am passionate about these subjects to a level where folks get tired of hearing me. I can't help it, I just fervently believe that this kind of a model working together is just bluntly superior to any other organizational model in the long term, and it works for all kinds of organizations; private or public sector and for profit or not for profit.

I am also excited about the opportunity to educate people about what engagement is and engagement is not. Engagement is not satisfaction and engagement is not "happiness". Engagement is discretionary effort freely committed to by employees in support of a common set of goals, values, and objectives. It is also viral. Your customers and your community will "catch it" to if it is done right.

The last reason I am kind of excited is that this initiative as we envision is a collaboration between the local educational community, the business community and others to begin building a framework for an economic plan for a community that has desperately needed one for a long time; and we are planning to do it together.

We are also going to explore root causes and the real foundation of engagement and strong brands and show local businesses two key things:

• This isn't just about big businesses with big advertising budgets
• The basic building blocks are pretty easy and there are resources in every community to help "spread the virus".

I like "win-win" solutions, and personal responsibility, and action rather than inaction. Think local, act local. I like it!

When Will We Learn?

I have been following a number of interesting discussions on LinkedIn and other places about the issues surrounding employee recruiting, selection, and retention.

They range from the importance of the process to the idea that since we are in a recession and employees don't have anywhere to go we can focus on other more "important" business issues.

Interesting viewpoint. Studies show we are operating at 30% efficiency, employee job dissatisfaction is at an all time high, and to some it is a non-issue. I suspect they are not on the top 100 places to work list.

Another discussion I am following began to target some of what I believe to be the real issue- in many cases our hiring and selection processes are not well thought out and executed. They are ancillary rather than strategic.

That is the difference between truly high performing companies and those firmly "in the pack". The concepts of employee engagement and employment branding are coming into vogue. The idea that engagement and the resulting discretionary effort are built in to the foundation not added on later. A colleague shared with me "at Nike to work there you must be an athlete". They are clear about the JFHF3HCJD6FE culture and hire with it in mind. Other icons do the same.

If you are a senior executive how much time are you spending making sure that the people who are joining your organization or at least your team have the "right stuff", or like many organizations have you delegated this to your HR department? Here is a tip. Recruitment selection and retention of the best people is a management role, it doesn't "belong" to any one department. Top performing organizations have figured this out. It is a big part of why they are top performing organizations.

So if you are taking the time during this recession to focus on the "important" stuff and ignoring your people strategies it will be interesting to see how it works out for you.....