The Workplace Engagement Solution

by David Harder

  How do we treat the problem?

  Giving consultative sales training to every member of our team is a beginning. This is the sales process in which we don’t make a pitch but ask the questions that help us define the needs and expectations of the other people. When all of us learn how to find the needs and expectations of others, every aspect of organizational performance improves. Encourage people to speak up, to declare, to share vision and innovation.

  As a leader, there is also great value in defining the tribe. For example, employer brands are just as important as consumer brands. When top-tier students graduate from Stanford, the holy grail of tech education, they will consider Apple, Google, and entrepreneurship. How many will think of Yahoo as an employer of choice? A tech organization’s success begins with the quality of talent it attracts, develops, and retains. The best have clearly defined employer brands, one that has become embedded in their heads. That requires consistency in the message and full truth in the definition. Years ago, I was in the midst of a leadership program at Disney. One of the executives asked me what I thought Disney’s employer brand could be. I responded, “To create magic at great profit in the midst of chaos.” Gasps and laughter ensued. I don’t know where it came from but I still believe this is the culture of Disney. Here is a company that has become an indelible consumer brand throughout the world. There have also been mixed messages about Disney as an employer with some ex-workers referring to the organization as “Mousewitz.” Here’s why: For someone who loves creating magic at great profit in the midst of chaos, Disney is a dream employer. People who love this mission have often worked there for 20 and 30 years. On the other hand, if someone isn’t enthused about the brand, it will be an unhappy ride.

  The challenges around declaring our mission or our commitment are learnable. The value of thoroughly defining the tribe raises the probability of “right fit” with our employees and also helping others remain accountable to the tribal needs. Becoming skilled in managing tribal reactions is one of the keys to anyone’s overall success.

  Step 3: Draw Healthy Attention to Ourselves

  “They’ ll hurt me.”

  Our third step introduces new levels of challenge. In order to grow our vision, we have to draw healthy attention to ourselves. In our culture, this very necessary and ongoing action is often thwarted with the message, “They’ll hurt me.”

  Fear of visibility has been with us for thousands of years. Out in the jungle, being visible could have dire consequences. In the jungle of business, visibility might turn us into a target.

  Quite simply, as we increase our visibility, we also increase the risk of getting hurt. But, it is equally true that when we decrease our visibility we also increase our risk of starving. Consequently, many people have developed just enough visibility to get by, but certainly not enough to thrive. In a world where change accelerates every day, the need to draw attention towards us also grows. Because within the world of change, we have to connect with others, we have to be seen, we have to get others to helps us identify the pathway towards the next bridge, and most of us need mentors to shine lights on our blind spots. If we are “flying below the radar” no one will know we are there and change is ruthless to anyone who hides. Returning to the topic at hand, isn’t it common sense that someone who is hiding from attention is also disengaged?

  During the Industrial Revolution, visibility was reserved for sales professionals. The rest of us did what was expected, which was about completing tasks without getting attention. In the modern world, growing transparency gives us no place to hide. Increasing change means having to remarket ourselves in continual ways. As the world speeds up, learning how to give attention to others also becomes a critical and much-needed life skill. Though this move might seem counterintuitive, the world’s greatest futurists and organization development leaders tell us that as software and technology takes over logic-based work, the growth opportunities will go to those of us who are strongly em-pathetic, communicative, influential, gifted storytellers, and able to sell concepts.

  The ability to draw attention to ourselves represents a broad set of skills. It is a bit like comparing someone who can drive a car to an individual who is a very good owner of a car. Driving is but one skill. Learning how to select the right car, get the appropriate insurance, maintain it properly, and make sure all of the passengers are safe represents a series of skills, and this is what most workers need if they are to engage, connect, succeed, reinvent, unlearn, and relearn. Without these varied skills attached to attention, we fail because of isolation. In my work with helping people change their relationship towards work, I find that isolation is central to most everyone’s failure.

  The challenge of isolation and being starved for attention reaches all the way up to CEOs. In many cases, senior management and owners fail because they cannot establish enough muscle or safety to disclose what they don’t know. We hide our inadequacy and create the delusion of adequacy only to find ourselves jailed in an obsolete playbook.

  This isolation is a natural extension in how we lived during the last 30 years of the 20th century. In the 1980s, Alice March, the executive director of Focusing Awareness on Children and Television, conducted in-depth studies about the impact of television on American families. She discovered the average family spends seven minutes a day communicating, four of those minutes are simply commands or requests. That same family goes on to watch television for approximately four hours per day. This means the modern family is no longer an effective laboratory for learning how to draw healthy attention to oneself or give it to others.

  In 1990, Barry Levinson produced a movie called Avalon. In it, an immigrant family comes to America in the early 20th century and builds a small furniture business in Baltimore. Every night, they gather around the table and discuss the day, argue, gossip, and get into each other’s business. One day, the patriarch of the family comes home with a wooden box.

  He proclaims, “We are going to make a fortune selling this.”

  “This” is was one of the first television sets. In the next scene, the family has moved from the dining room to the living room and they are staring vacantly at the box. The movie closes one generation later in the mid-1960s. Two of the children are now parents with their kids. They sit behind individual TV trays looking at a show. They have forgotten each other. They are learning absolutely nothing about the value and need for attention.

  Perhaps the baseline in our culture is that most of us have inadequate skills for drawing healthy attention towards ourselves and giving it to others. But when we take individuals who grew up around violent attention, the barrier towards learning the skills is much steeper. Of course, there will be discomfort in learning the skills, but on the other side of the learning experience is a more confident and effective life. We become more visible, we sell our good ideas, we pay better attention to our colleagues, we become more at ease in expressing our needs, and we look our customers and coworkers in the eye. These are the skills that few American families are building within their children. Schools are not performing a much-needed intervention. When we reach the workplace, isn’t it ironic that the very skills workers need to be able to change, connect, engage, and reinvent are branded as “soft skills”?

  About 500 yards from our home is a grocery store, part of a big national chain. Every time that I go into that store, there are several cashiers and baggers who will not look me in the eye or connect in any meaningful way. The only reason that we go there is because it is next door. Every time that I see them, I wonder what the story is. Who bullied that person? What happened in his family? Why doesn’t the manager take her under wing and start an intervention? I can’t help but think of our capacity to hurt others so deeply that they have trouble looking a customer in the eye. But these interactions happen every single day and they happen because no one had the heart to intervene and change the legacy. Unfortunately, until these workers are given an intervention, they will also turn off their customers
eight hours a day.

  Intervening with this deep-seated fear of attention is a matter of business, profits, happy customers, and loyal colleagues. Helping our workers open up and connect is not only life-changing, but when we extend it to all workers, it is game-changing.

  In an upcoming chapter, we will outline how to build this skill in everyone.

  Step 4: Build Effective Support Systems

  “Sounds good. What is it?”

  We have arrived at the final step that is the most important ingredient for a healthy workplace, an effective career, and a joyful life. Truly successful people have highly diverse and effective support systems. Many workers don’t define what they really want because, at an often unconscious level, they assume they will not find the support needed to bring that vision to life. Make no mistake: the vision is still there. A true and inspired vision or dream never dies. However, when hidden, it festers. When we operate with a submerged vision, we fall into some degree of malaise, and the job becomes more of a drain than a joy. The trance takes over. But, once we do define our vision, our success is based purely on the quality of our support systems. Therefore, our ability to build support systems is perhaps the single most important skill in becoming successful.

  Year in and year out, Fortune magazine publishes its famed 100 Best Places to Work edition. A central theme with organizations that stay on this list for years is a surprise to many. All of them consciously foster strong relationships amongst their employees.4 When two employees form a strong bond, that relationship becomes a new asset within the organization. These relationships lead to more innovation, increased productivity, and strong morale; when the chips are down, that relationship might be the one asset that motivates them to stay and resolve the problems. It may also occur in the form of someone bonding with an outside entity. This new support system can become yet another asset for the employer by bringing in valuable intelligence, new business, and needed innovation. For example, I find that when we give social networking training to human resources, the team brings the outside world in. They access new talent pipelines, mentors, and business intelligence, and become more effective in building their individual careers.

  When we do define a vision, success is based solely on the quality of our support systems. For most workers, this is a counterintuitive idea until it finally sinks in. In the old work model, we got punished if we asked for help. It distracted us from plugging bolts in holes and filling quotas. Now, the ability to build effective support systems is the single most important skill in becoming successful with change. The importance of these support systems only grows as the world speeds up. For many, shifting gears in this area will provoke discomfort. In the industrial-based work world, asking for help was viewed as a sign of weakness. Today, it is not only necessary, support systems are the single most important assets that help us change and adapt as the world moves forward. Showing all of your workers how to build support systems and holding them accountable to do that within and outside of the organization will transform your culture.

  New support systems can introduce unexpected miracles into the lives of employees. Years ago, I was working with a management team that was facing huge organizational change and daunting competitive challenges. At one point, an executive became emotional and disclosed that she was trying to have a child and that her stress level was so high that her hope of becoming a parent was dissolving. Her colleagues started taking on some of her work to support her. Months later, I was sitting in the lobby of her building. She happened to walk in. We looked at each other and the tears welled up. She was wearing a maternity dress. We hugged. That turning point elevated the lives of her colleagues as well. There are so many myths out there about successful organizations also being ruthless employers; the common belief is that when a woman becomes a mother, the fast track is over. We hear about employers curtailing a person’s future because they stop giving up their life for the job. However, I find it is the organizations that allow employees to develop in all areas of life that sustain success and growth.

  Helping a colleague develop insights around the need and value for support systems can change their lives. This past year, a young man was sent to me to discuss his difficulties in getting a film deal. He is a devoted father and his family comes first. He was seriously considering dropping out of the film business and going into a more “practical” line of work. But the quality of his film work was world class. Unfortunately, his support system was almost nonexistent. He had a notion that it was unmanly to ask agents, producers, and studio executives for help. We threw all of our energies into developing a personal brand and developing a solid support system. Within three months, the Sundance Film Festival picked up his first film. Today his career is skyrocketing. Instead of being someone’s gopher, he has a skilled assistant of his own.

  Mentorship is one of the purest forms of building high-quality support throughout an organization, leading to employees become more supportive of the organization. Customers can feel it. We teach our employees to practice courage when we learn how to draw effective attention to ourselves and to give it to others, to look each other in the eye, and to ask someone to help with the problems that matter to us the most. Perhaps, if we work hard, our renewed workplace becomes the home that prepares us for the future of work.

  It doesn’t get better than that.

  • • • • •

  Learning how to navigate these steps represents a fundamental beginning towards helping each and every employee to change and engage with the world around us. As they learn, the beginning might feel counterintuitive. Perhaps some will say they don’t have the time to work on anything other than their work. But as they do become involved, more will be revealed, the path will become clear, and they will see how important it is to reinvent and stay ahead of the waves. They will help each other and as they do, the culture turns into something new. The culture won’t become soft. Transparency will become a positive tool for engagement. But more than anything, results will create a new enthusiasm that builds the mission and provides multiple new dimensions to the culture. All will be sustained because everyone is engaged and everyone is accountable.

  4

  Mission, Vision, and Purpose: Fuel for Change

  “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

  —Socrates

  Effective personal change begins with a vision, mission, and purpose that are personal, meaningful, and absolutely real. When these elements are intact, translating vision into reality is one of the most transformative of all human experiences. The journey you must take to get there elevates lives, both your own and those of the people around you, and orchestrates your growth along the way. Without a clearly defined personal mission, vision, and purpose, we operate in a state of relative aimlessness and barrenness. We begin to wither, and the resulting trance perpetuates the notion that a fulfilled vision is simply out of our reach. The added frenzy supports the idea that we don’t even have time to look at what we want out of our lives. It’s a self-reinforcing trap, and we lose the skills of self-inquiry that can lead to meaningful insights, personal change, and staying competitive.

  We must understand that defining and connecting to all that are precious and meaningful to us raises our motivation to an entirely new level. Establishing purpose brings clarity to our day-to-day living. Though the value of developing a strong organizational mission, vision, and purpose is drummed into business leaders throughout their professional lives, far less emphasis is placed on the need for personalized mission, vision, and purpose, if at all. Instead, much lip service is given to the idea of employees needing to get behind the mission, vision, and purpose of our organizations. Yet we are not as conditioned to ask our employees what they want out of life, what they wish to accomplish, and what is precious and meaningful to them. This isn’t done maliciously, but mindlessly. Despite the fact that business leaders such as Stephen Covey promoted personal vision, the behavior of most organizations demonstrate that a pers
on’s personal vision, mission, and purpose doesn’t matter. And this is how we’ve lived for more than 300 years.

  In the game of employee engagement, how far has this pursuit taken us? Nowhere. The minute we ask employees to adopt and support the company vision without even inquiring about their personal vision, we step back into the old miserable paradigm that implies a “do it or else” mandate. With decades of moving employees around like numbers, what kind of cynicism and contempt can you imagine comes up when we ask people to buy into a vision that in many cases is only about raising shareholder value?

  Maya Angelou’s missive, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,”1 is relevant in your own organization. When we dismiss someone’s vision, they will likely give up on it. George Washington Carver was born into slavery but became our country’s most influential botanist and inventor. In 1941, Time magazine placed Mr. Carver on the cover and referred to him as “America’s Black Leonardo DaVinci.”2 Carver said, “When there is no vision, there is no hope.”3 By ignoring the deepest seeds of meaning and purpose in our employees, we actually contribute to setting the stage for barrenness in their lives.

  Great leaders recognize that stakeholders become engaged when we help them access what they most want out of their work, their lives, and their careers. Well, it is the same for our employees. And as we develop the skills of self-inquiry, the process becomes both lighter and enlightening. Time and time again, we find that a large portion—if not the majority—of America’s talent at some point settled for what they got over what they wanted. We have become so busy that the purpose that would drive us forward, that would inspire us to be our very best, only sits quietly until the self-inquiry begins.