Do Try This At Home!

I know for years we have encouraged people to think global and act local, but I want to explore a different paradigm with you.

As you know I am extremely passionate about the concept of creating engaged environments and strong employment brands. Often what I hear from people is " that's great Mark, but I am a small business with a small work force and small budget". The other thing I hear is "how"?

I came across a couple of pieces earlier this week that I thought were nothing short of brilliant in explaining both why and how this is relevant to small business.

Paul Mitchell, the brilliant Australian social scientist www.thehumanenterprise.com.au, shared some things that both resonated with me and were immediately applicable to businesses without regard to their size.

• The first thing that Mitchell did was describe leadership in a simple, but very compelling way. A leader excites their followers to exceptional performance. This definition is especially relevant because performance and effort are what engagement is ultimately about. Not happiness, not "satisfaction", but performance. Those others factors maybe contributors, but at the end of the day we need results.

The next thing that Mitchell talked about were the four key elements that every business should build into their "value proposition":

• Great leaders focus on followers. Mitchell and I share the belief that relationships are the "glue" in organizations. Truly effective leaders do things with people, not to people. With their employees, with their customers, with their suppliers, with their community.
• Build a sense of community. Following that same theme leaders understand they are part of a community and they invest in it. They build and nurture relationships on a foundation of trust and respect. They exchange value and values not transactions.
• Be yourself, but with more skill. Mitchell calls this authenticity. Everyone has allowable weaknesses, his point is to focus on your strengths and core competencies. Seek out other relationships internally and externally that complement your skill sets and offering.
• Focus on what matters. Mitchell suggests that we look for significance in ourselves and others. Find what you and others do right and celebrate it whether they are an employee, a customer, a neighbor, or a stranger. Connect them to the larger community and the larger context. We are a village, not an island.
• Build the excitement. There is an old amusing expression "if you are excited, you might want to let your face know". This speaks precisely to Mitchell's earlier definition of leadership. Be excited and share excitement. If you are not excited and don't believe in "you", how can you expect others to?

Added to this wisdom from over the "pond" I had a chance to see some results from the national survey and initiative on engagement from the U.K. that showed similar things. The country wide study found that there are four elements that build and sustain the engaged environment:

• Listening
• Treatment
• Coaching
• Role and role modeling

Once again it comes down to relationship. Listening and treatment speaks to my guiding principle of respect. Coaching and role speak to the principle of the big picture and autonomy. Role modeling speaks to authenticity and values. The British study also found that when leadership commits to these behaviors they become "viral", they spread through the organization both formally and informally.

By the way they did examine compensation as well and what they found was again consistent. Money may initially attract, but the most important qualities of compensation are perceived equity and fairness. So the short story is if you do compensation well it is a break even, it won't detract from engagement. If you do it badly it will destroy your foundation. Once again we see the tie back to relationship that once we get past survival mode it is about fairness and equity, not dollars.

So when you think about building and reinforcing your brand, be sure you include these elements. The interesting thing is you don't need a big budget or large staff and yes, you can do this at home......

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.

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.....

Brands, Lighthouses, and other Icons

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships”
Charles Simic

Last week as I mentioned in this blog I had a chance to talk with my sister in law; a very talented communications professional, about iconic brands, connections and related concepts.

We talked about what creates an iconic brand, she felt the elements include among other things:

A defining brand truth. Think about the concept of a defining brand truth. It articulates value statement not only to your customers, but also to your employees. It allows them to commit rather than merely comply.

• A set of in transient principles. Great brands refuse to compromise on their principles. They may change a process or a look, but they retain their essence. What they represent is foundational and consistent.
• Great brands are iconic. Think about great brands. Brands like Porsche, Mercedes, Xerox, Kleenex, McDonald's, Starbucks and others. They are a benchmark. Their "brand" is instantly recognizable.
• They create and reinforce an experience. Think about that. Great brands literally create expectancy. You don't just go there or dine there; you experience them in a variety of ways.
  
• They are inspirational and aspirational. As we have talked about with the new definition of engagement a great brand creates a pride of affiliation. Employees and customers take pride in their association with the organization; they champion the product or brand. They become benchmarks.
  
• Great brands are enduring. They continue to deliver value to their stakeholders; shareholder, employee and community.

We posted our thoughts on the popular social networking site and got some terrific insights and opinions from others as well. They ranged from brand as promise, to brand as purely a marketing tool or tactic. I think there is room for both.

There were also some interesting discussions about whether organizations start out striving to create an iconic brand, or iconic brands happen over time. I believe that iconic brands are deliberate. The “crafter” starts with a premise rather than just a product. I don’t think that can be created by a group of marketing professionals alone, no matter how talented. It must be planned and systemic. I also see a convergence between iconic brands and true engagement.
If you examine some of the things I have discussed previously in my writing about true engagement you come across Pepper and Rogers definition of the old engagement model: the intellectual, behavioral, and emotional model. At the intellectual level people (your employees and hopefully your customers) agree with your vision statement or brand premise. At the behavioral level they start to operate with a sense of brand loyalty, they seek out your product or service. At the emotional level they go further; they recommend you to friends and family.
Pepper and Rogers go on to describe new levels: the levels of best product or service, and the pride of association. To me that describes being a benchmark, and finally achieving almost cult like status. Does every brand seek or achieve that level- no, but I would submit that is what differentiates an iconic brand from a regular brand. Do we really believe that just happens coincidentally? Or that the marketing department can create that kind of affiliation by itself?
Pepper and Rogers also describe that this true engagement can only be built upon a foundation of trust, and that you will never enjoy greater engagement from your customers than you enjoy from your employees.
To be iconic, both your employees and your customers must trust you and what your brand represents. They go further indicating that a 2003 survey indicated that outstanding service represented the compelling “buying” decision in 51% of the consumers surveyed and over 80% indicated they would terminate a relationship because of a bad experience. So to a great extent your employees are your brand.
Is it just me or do you notice a significant degree of correlation between my sister in law’s elements of a great brand and Pepper and Rogers description of the elements of engagement? They both require a huge investment in developing and nurturing relationships.
You might be asking yourself – where are you going with this? Okay, I’ll get to my point. Our future is dependent on trust based relationships; not technology, not product innovation, but relationships.
I want to explore that through a couple of different avenues.

Exploring Engagement
In my last “corporate” job I was an executive with a financial services organization. As a credit union we really felt like we owned the market on the relationship thing. Credit unions like to point out- we are member owned. We have members, not customers. I remember being told we have 90,000 members. Being an outsider and therefore not very bright I asked – “how do we define members?” Boy, did that cause a shit storm!
It turned out that we defined “member” essentially as anyone who had an account with us. We were pretty bummed out when we applied metrics closer to the ones espoused by Pepper and Rogers and found out most of our members were not members at all, they were customers, and frankly not all that engaged.

We spent almost three and a half years developing and implementing an engagement strategy. It included all the elements that are included in both Pepper and Rogers and my sister’s model. We built it from the inside out. At least for a period of time we enjoyed the fruits of that endeavor, we went beyond a financial organization to creating true engagement with the financial metrics to validate our claim. I won’t bore you with the details. If you are interested they are available in my previous white paper- New Paradigm for Credit Unions. I can’t say whether they have transcended the boundary to iconic or merely enjoyed an interlude. That is for others to judge.
One of the other models I would like to examine is my sister in law’s iconic brand. I won’t specifically identify it, but I assure you, you would immediately recognize it. They have taken it beyond a beverage to creating affiliation and brand loyalty. They aspire to do that with other brands they own and manage. They are doing that through a systemic multi faceted approach that includes both external and internal branding.

A Call for a New Leadership Foundation
In the credit union industry and in fact across financial services we have looked for our “leadership” and new strategies to come from two primary areas- finance and operations. I think if you were to examine the career paths of the vast majority of CEOs in both banking and credit unions you would find that one of those disciplines represents their career path. In fact as a culture I think the U.S. is much more comfortable with leaders coming from these “hard” disciplines. We revere technology and product. We tend to shy away from relationship based strategies. Our labor relations legal infrastructure is in fact one of the most archaic and adversarial in the developed world.

Our top business schools also tend to focus much more on “operational” and financial skills rather than communications and the skills around building trust and engagement. Current headlines are screaming that the MBA degree is largely responsible for the current financial crisis and demise of so much of our economy. How interesting that we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for reinforcing that culture through our hiring and succession planning activities.

I will go out on a limb and make myself even more unpopular by stating that much of what we teach would it in what my colleague Ty Warren would describe as “mapping” skills. We claim to revere leadership, but we teach and reinforce mapping.

I have found that most traditional approaches to engagement are focused almost exclusively externally. We measure customer reaction, loyalty, and satisfaction. We spend billions in crafting marketing campaigns and strategies to capture them. I also find it interesting that the first two areas that organizations usually cut in financially stressful times are marketing and training- the relationship building things.
A few years ago I took a position that the most important “management” functions in organizations were going to be marketing and human resources management. I stand by that premise today and I would like to take through my argument as to how true engagement represents the appropriate hybrid of both disciplines.

A New Solution
It is easy to blame the unions or the business schools for where we are and how we got there, but the real issue is the American labor relations model which requires the negotiation on the effects of technology, but not its implementation and the traditional model of capitalism which rewards the shareholder at the expense of the stakeholder. Both are both huge contributing factors. I would submit that the codependency that accompanied moving from an agrarian to an industrial society contributed as well. We abandoned personal competency. The model almost makes engagement in that setting impossible.
It is still interesting for me today to talk with employers and individuals about the “systems” that are going to facilitate our recovery from the current recession. We are still looking for a technological solution rather than a relationship based solution.

My friends Pepper and Rogers say that organizations that successfully embrace an integrated engagement strategy enjoy competitive advantages in three key areas: Productivity, Performance, and Sustainability. I don’t know about you, but those represent my big three! The advantages are in the personal commitment that each person makes to the goals of the organization, not their technological superiority.
Now let’s examine the critically of the integrated solution. My colleagues in marketing play a critical role in building the baseline of engagement. They gather the information regarding the needs and desires of the served and un-served customer base. They report on our ability to interpret the customer’s requirements and meet or exceed their expectations. They identify the potential opportunities and create the framework for the trust between customer and vendor.

Let’s talk about what they can’t do by themselves. An earlier quote said,”to your customers, your employees are the brand.”

A quote from the Harvard Business Review puts it even more succinctly –
“Too many organizations focus on what customers think – to the exclusion of what employees think. Companies are more likely to be growing if employee’s opinions of the company are better than customers’.”

Guess what, your marketing department can do a great job crafting and shaping your brand, but your management team has to make it real at the individual level.

How important is the manager you ask? Well, that same HBR article puts it this way-
“One bad manager can pollute multiple levels of an organization, and poor management brings down employee morale, which spills over into the engagement level of customers.”
James L. Heskett, one of the authors of the Service Profit Chain says “….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.”

Before you delegate this to Human Resources you need to stop and recognize that this is a systemic issue. In short this is a leadership issue. Too many times I see Marketing or Human Resources being put “in charge” of these initiatives. That is corporate speak for nobody else wants to manage it and address the fact that we may have to make real changes.
I can’t tell you how many times in my career I have seen organizations tolerate management performance that is unacceptable. I hear “He’s really a great manager except for the people thing.” Guess what, the people thing is at the core of engagement.

If we look at the failure of the financial institutions and the automotive industry I believe we will find that the key mistakes were made in these areas of engagement and leadership. It was not technology that failed us, it was people.

So I would challenge you to examine the elements of those sustainable brands and my Compliance to Commitment model™. I would submit you are going to find several common elements:
· They are about congruency.
· They are about clarity.
· They are experiential.
· They are shared by people.
· They are systemic and synergistic.
· They are built on the same foundation, the foundation of trust.

There is no magic solution to the times that we find ourselves in. I believe that only through creating and reinforcing models that incorporate trust, communications, personal competency, and personal accountability at every level will be find our way to a new model.

Melanie and I have chosen to build lighthouses. They don’t chart your path, they light your way. Each person has to plot their own course, but by creating a lighthouse you expose the rocks and the shoals.
We agree with Marcus Buckingham-
“ Today’s most respected and successful leaders are able to transform fear of the unknown into clear visions of whom to serve, core strengths to leverage and actions to take. They enable us to pierce the veil of complexity and identify the single best vantage point from which to examine our complex roles. Only then can we take clear, decisive action.
Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant…They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear.”

Isn’t it time to explore a new model before we lose another “icon”?
“Commitment is the act of being physically, psychologically, and emotionally impelled. It means that employees gladly give up other options.”
Ken Matejka, Why This Horse Won’t Drink, 1991

Creating the Perfect "Brew"

I had a chance this week to spend some time with my very creative and talented sister in law. She works in the internal communications area in the adult beverages industry; they make beer, very good beer.

Her role is to assist in crafting the messages for their internal employees to understand the values and mission of the organization and how their individual and collective roles fit into it.
We were talking about the parallels between making beer and crafting a great message- it isn't just simply a recipe. All the right ingredients without that something "else" and you just have beer, not great beer. All the slogans and mission statements and team building without that something else and you have a good organization, but not a great one.

Her charter is to help her organization create extraordinary brands and she and her colleagues identified six elements that they feel are essential to accomplishing that objective. I would go further and say that like congruency and other concepts I have shared on this blog and other places these elements speak not just to beer, but have a dimension of universal application to them. These are the elements:

• A defining brand truth. Think about the concept of a defining brand truth. It articulates value statement not only to your customers, but also to your employees. It allows them to commit rather than merely comply.
• A set of in transient principles. Great brands refuse to compromise on their principles. They may change a process or a look, but they retain their essence.What they represent is foundational and consistent.
• Great brands are iconic. Think about great brands. Brands like Porsche, Mercedes, Xerox, Kleenex, McDonald's, Starbucks and others. They are a benchmark. Their "brand" is instantly recognizable.
• They create and reinforce an experience. Think about that. Great brands literally create an expectancy. You don't just go there or dine there, you experience them in a variety of ways.
• They are inspirational and aspirational. As we have talked about with the new definition of engagement a great brand creates a pride of affiliation. Employees and customers take pride in their association with the organization, they champion the product or brand. They become benchmarks.
• Great brands are enduring. They continue to deliver value to their stakeholders; shareholder, employee and community.

I am struck by the parallels between their elements and those described by BlessingWhite and others in achieving engagement. To operate consistently within the framework created by her and her colleagues is not for the faint hearted. The elements are systemic, you can't do one or two of these things you must do them all and you must do them consistently.

These elements are also built upon a foundation of relationships. They are based on interactions of people. Technology and systems will not create this alignment, they can only reinforce or erode the elements.

She is a passionate advocate for her "brand". She believes in it and works very hard to articulate the principle behind it to others. She "gets" engagement in a very visceral as well as intellectual way. She is committed rather than compliant. She also recognizes that as skilled as she is in communications that the real engagement will occur not in articulating, but rather living the brand promise. Every employee will look to their boss for consistency with these values. She is an explorer rather than a mapper!

I like their elements, I think like the five elements of moving from compliance to commitment (respect, responsibility, information, rewards and loyalty) they are clear and simple without being simplistic. They focus on relationships rather than abstracts. I especially admire their organizations commitment to crafting and communicating this message of who and how to all of their employees giving them a chance to "join up" rather than simply comply.

So I would be curious, what are the "ingredients" in your particular brew? Are you committed to creating and sustaining an extraordinary brand or content to be one of the "pack"?

Thanks for sharing with me Mel. You gave me some great insights and I am excited to see people and organizations recognizing that only through engagement will be be able to build the iconic organizations that so many of us claim to aspire to. Your "brand" is lucky to have such a passionate advocate!