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.

It Takes A Village

I had a chance to read several different articles recently that at least to me reinforced something I have always intuitively believed, collaboration is more powerful than individual excellence in an organizational setting.

In many of the presentations that I do I use the illustration of the Nigerian soccer team in the Olympics a few years back. The team was composed of a group of people who were committed to the game and committed to each other. There were no "superstars" that would be recognized internationally. The interesting thing is that this group of committed individuals went on to defeat the "best" teams in the world and win the gold medal.

I think many cultures, at least western ones love the concept of the hero or all star. The individual who will ensure victory. The interesting thing is that these are usually individual contributors. I differentiate these individual contributors, even "superstars" from leaders. I think it is two different skill sets.

Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford is one of my favorite organizational development "gurus". He has written a short article on BNET about so called "stars" in the financial industry and the practice of large players to recruit such "stars" and pay them fabulous sums of money. He decided to do some research on the ROI of such investments. He found they typically fell flat, the "stars" performance rarely approached their previous performance much less exceeded it. He points out similar correlations in professional sports. A great recent example is soccer star David Beckham. The LA franchise that acquired him has yet to see the benefits of the dollars they invested in winning matches. They have seen gate receipts go up because fans will pay to see him play.

Pfeffer points out that it would seem that environment and coaching play a huge role in performance. Having supportive colleagues, access to resources, and good management and coaching seem to matter quite a lot. I think Malcolm Gladwell makes a similar point in Outliers, people who excelled had great innate ability, but they also had access to resources and a highly supportive environment.

The other interview clip I saw on BNET included industry leaders including the VP of Innovation for Google. She was asked about the impact of the recession and other factors leading to innovation or the lack there of. Interestingly she posited that once again the key differential in high performing companies is the human capital and creating and nurturing an environment that allows them to contribute. Pretty interesting coming from a technology firm. She also pointed out that many great companies had their genesis in recessionary times, the people at the firms collectively rose to the challenge and innovated and over came the obstacles.

As a student and advocate of engagement I am a big believer in this model. Statistics show that organizations with high engagement increase per capita 21% higher than their peers and outperform their peers and competitors on every critical metric. The key is that this is collective performance and per capita. The approach is collaborative rather than reliant upon "superstars".

In my previous post Dr. Dolan of the University of Michigan talks about a key attribute of leadership being the creation of an environment that attracts talent and its development. The role of the leader is to attract and develop, not to "perform" tasks as an individual.

So where am I going with this? I am not suggesting that you discard efforts to hire the "best and the brightest", but rather than suggesting that you not rely on hiring somebody else's superstar to increase your organizational performance as an exclusive strategy. Creating engagement and raising the collective talents and performance of your organization would seem to be a much more effective long term strategy.

Leadership should be evaluated in terms of their ability to build and create strong teams and develop talent rather than on the basis of individual accomplishments and talents. Being an excellent "coach" is more valuable than being the best "player" for those we put in management and leadership roles.

Just something to think about....

Shifting Paradigms- An Interesting Endeavor

So here I am again talking about shifting paradigms and why that is so critically important at this juncture. Based on my experiences of the last few years, but especially the last few weeks I thought I would share and discuss "the road less traveled".

As my partner brilliantly explained several months ago, a paradigm is how we see things. It represents our "filter" or belief system. As you might suspect it plays a huge impact on how we do our jobs, live our lives, and view change as either a threat or an opportunity.

One of my clients is engaged in paradigms shifts in two fundamental areas that are both very different, yet intertwined. They are involved in the "business" of philanthropy. Actively seeking donations and dollars from people to invest in the infrastructure of health care delivery. I talk about at least two major paradigm shifts because at minimum that is what we are dealing with.

The cost and delivery of health care in the U.S. has reached critical mass. You can debate where the "fault" lies, but at this stage does it really matter? We have millions of under-insured and uninsured in the system. As the economy continues to falter those numbers will increase, not decrease. In addition to the cost dimensions of the crisis we are reaching critical mass in yet another dimension of delivery- the availability of trained health care professionals at every level, from primary care physicians to nurses and other related skills.

We have relied historically on employer and government based systems to provide much of the care. As employers "get out of that role" we will see increased pressure on the government side. Health care organizations are also seeing more patients "present" or access care through the emergency room, the least efficient way for that to occur. It is also the most expensive and providers are being forced to "write off" more and more care. As the economy declines I fear that trend will increase rather than lessen.

The philanthropy model in many cases has the "grateful donor" as its core. The grateful donor is based on care being provided to a loved one or the person themselves and their willingness to give something back. There is also the approach of providing for the less fortunate as a sense of "noblesse oblige". My concern is that neither of these models addresses the root causes of the problem.

Another client, also in the health care "business" is engaged in an effort to address issues like cost management, efficiency, reduced reimbursements, and other issues as well. Like many businesses engaged in such a culture change the tools of benchmarking, cost reduction, lean delivery, and others are being evaluated and implemented.

Next week, I am going to have the opportunity to talk about Web 2.0 or "social networking" with a group of business people and why it is relevant to them.

What ties all of these things together is that each requires a paradigm change, a new way of looking at things. That change is behavioral and emotional, not just systemic.

I have written a great deal about the concept and criticality of engagement over the last few months. Engagement is the art and science of successfully executing a paradigm shift. Done successfully the organization enjoys significant competitive advantages in productivity, profitability, and sustainability. Done unsuccessfully or attempting to execute change without considering engagement and you have a melt down. Can you say Detroit or the financial services debacle?

I had the opportunity to read an interview with Roberto Sebutal, CEO of Itau Unibanco in the McKinsey Quarterly. I am attaching the link for you here: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Change_Management/Transforming_a_high-performing_company_An_interview_with_Roberto_Setubal_2312

I would suspect that most of you like me, have never heard of him before. He is the CEO of a financial institution that by market capitalization represents one of the top 20 banks in the world.

He may be my new hero. The interview describes his decision to boldly embrace a new paradigm and embrace a change strategy in an organization that was performing well and considered highly successful both internally and externally. Mr. Sebutal was a visionary who saw the need for change and embraced it before his institution was in crisis. His strategy also embraced some things that would bring terror to the average Boardroom, among them:

• Decentralization of decision making to the lowest appropriate level.
• Creating forums for people involved in the decisions to have input and challenge "conventional wisdom" without fear of retaliation.
• Changing the human resource management systems to include; hiring "right", performance management, compensation delivery, and other key behaviors and metrics.
• Making commitment to the new culture mandatory for continued employment and either allowing or encouraging individuals who couldn't or wouldn't make the change pursue other options.
• Building transparency into the decision making processes for both employees and customers.
• Holding himself and his executive team personally accountable for role modeling the appropriate behavior.
• Recognizing it is a journey rather than an event.

When asked where the bank was in the transformation process he responded " we have been at the process for about three years, I see us as being about halfway there."

Mr. Sebutal didn't just execute a change program, he is leading a paradigm shift. The other interesting thing is almost all of the key initiatives he discussed are about people and relationships rather than about systems and numbers. He is creating commitment rather than compliance and building upon a foundation of trust rather than systems.

So my point is that the paradigms we are currently using are going to have to change. The old ones simply aren't relevant and they aren't working.

If you take a look at Sebutal's approach and my Compliance to Commitment model(TM) you might just see some parallels.......

An Afternoon With Bob Dylan...

I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with Bob Dylan today; not literally of course, but in my car traveling between client engagements. Maybe it was the fact that it was a beautiful afternoon, a rarity in Oregon this early in the season, my mood or whatever. It gave me a opportunity to listen deeply to someone I believe to be one of the greatest poets and storytellers of this century. One of his songs about "Maggie's farm" was especially compelling with the lines "I have so many ideas in my head I think I may go insane" and another "the more you try to be yourself the more they try to make us all the same". Pretty profound stuff, especially if like me you find yourself occasionally traveling to the beat of a different drummer.

My time this week is being spent differently, yet somehow the same.

I spent yesterday morning with a deeply committed executive and community steward who is embarking on a new role to create a system of philanthropic outreach in multiple communities to address the issue of health care costs. Our discussion was about a new paradigm both for the team he will be working with and the communities they serve and the donors they aspire to cultivate. Philanthropy has traditionally been interpreted as charity. We are trying to redefine it as an investment in both a societal infrastructure that is critical and as a potential economic engine to catalyze a stalled economy. It is also vitally important to him that this team see him as a resource and coach rather than an "imposer" of corporate solutions. In his own way he wants to build an infrastructure and relationship based on commitment rather than compliance. An endeavor I applaud.

This morning I had a chance to speak to a group of human resources professionals about "hiring right". I deliberately chose to take an esoteric track and talk about attributes and commitment rather than profiling and skills assessment. I truly believe than technical skills are not enough. When I look back at the model created by Roger Deprey, the Human Resources Pyramid; Paul Hersey's Situational Leadership, and Ron Willingham's congruency models I see a lot more potential about creating engagement and the resulting benefits than I do with DISC or other profiling techniques. I am not saying profiling for skills and attributes lacks validity or value, I just don't think they create engagement. I took the tack this morning that the first step in creating real engagement is your selection process. Hiring "right" is as much about values and cultural fit as it is abouts KSA's, maybe more.

Tomorrow and the next day I am getting an opportunity to work with a cross functional, multi level group including supervisors, union stewards, and executives on conflict resolution. The fact that we are doing it at all and doing it in "mixed" groups is a brave experiment for this organization. The first step of addressing an issue is admitting you have an issue. I am intrigued and excited about my opportunity to work with this group on their "maiden" voyage of a training like this.

Perhaps because I am so committed to it I see all three of these endeavors as people and organizations taking a step towards recognizing and embracing the power of relationships and people as well as the importance of "systems" in addressing the issues that face us as both business people and members of society. Maybe I am just seeing things and Dylan and I have that "insanity" from too many ideas in common. I wonder.

I don't think the current paradigms are going to work, we are going to have to challenge, experiment, "fail", and try again.

In the meantime if you get the chance to spend an afternoon with Bob Dylan I strongly recommend it. If you really listen it will tell you a story and make you think, and I think that is what great poetry and great music are supposed to do......

The Right Team

As President elect Obama goes through the next few weeks he will have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something very few of us ever get a chance to do- individually select the members of his "executive team" or cabinet.

I have had the opportunity to serve as an executive with several different organizations. With the exception of my own business, I have never had the opportunity to assemble my own "team" with a blank slate to start with. That is not to say that I have not hired new team members or everyone that I "inherited" was not a good fit or a keeper, still the prospect of making each decision is an intriguing one.

My colleague, Joseph Skursky, specializes in helping his clients select the right people. He calls his model- "Hire hard- Manage easy". The intent is clear. Think about not only the "technical" aspects of what you want in your team mates, but their values, commitment, and other attributes.
Matt "Boom" Daniel talks about his experiences as a Marine Corp aviator, and the importance of having each others "six" or looking out for each other and how important that is especially in combat situations.

In my previous blogs, monologues, and presentations I have talked about some other things that I think are cogent to this discussion. Specifically I would include the role of a leader in providing clarity and eliminating ambiguity and the concept that leadership is a gift from those who freely elect to follow your direction and "join up" with you to achieve commonly understood and accepted goals. That is the essence of Compliance to Commitment.

Some of the most interesting dialogue around President Obama's selections is his past relationship with some of his key appointments. Whether they have personal animus or "like" each other or not. He seems to be approaching his selections in a very pragmatic way- the qualifications of the person to do the job, and their commitment to the vision.
Sounds like the way a good executive would make those key decisions.

Many people I have talked to indicated a key decision point for them in deciding who to vote for in the presidential election was Senator McCain's selection of Governor Palin as his running mate. Some felt her so unqualified as to bring his judgement into question, others felt the decision was a concession to political constituencies whose values and positions they found unacceptable.
Do I think Senator McCain lost the election because of Governor Palin, no, but she was definitely a polarizing choice.

At the end of the day I hold leaders accountable for their choices of their "team". They either selected them, or chose to retain them. Either way the leader who complains about their "team" isn't much of a leader to me. Who is on our team is our responsibility.