How Your Company Should Address Staff Engagement Questions

With regards to employee engagement, what do you do if your executive team can‘t agree?  Some see symptoms of deep disengagement, while others don’t. Suggestions for how to intervene go nowhere, stuff that used to work in the past no longer succeeds and other companies’ case studies seem not to apply.

As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

My experience supports the notion that each company experiencing disengaged, disempowered employees is different from its counterparts. Here’s a way to find a unique approach for your firm.

  1. A Custom Definition

Unfortunately, most people explain disengagement using soft, psychological objects such as “motivation,” “mindset” or “vibes”. While these constructs are better than nothing, they aren’t quantifiable by the average business.

Instead, it’s much easier to focus on behavior which passes the Video Tape Test. That is, it can be captured by a movie camera.

With this new definition, bring your executives together to agree that a core set of behaviors (such as arriving late or being absent) should be taken as components of disengagement. This helps separate agreed-upon-fact from interpretation.

However, even after this definition has been created for your company, pause to explore an extra question: “Has a critical mass of employees always been disengaged?”

  1. Custom Interventions

If you can find the precise moment when engagement fell, immediately search for broken promises. As I have shared in prior columns, they pollute your company’s culture, causing even new employees to become disengaged in a matter of weeks.

While this task may be painful to undertake, the only remedy is to take responsibility for all violations of trust. Owning them publicly on behalf of executive teams past and present is the best way to make amends.

But it’s just the beginning. Construct a cause-and-effect diagram to list all the possible causes of disengagement. Once they are enumerated, conduct tests to see which ones are at play.

Use anecdotal, non-quantifiable data if you must. While your analysis may not reach an academic standard, it will work for business purposes.

Based on these analytic results, custom-design interventions to change behavior. But don’t be surprised if most of them fail. That’s just your way of weeding out false causes in your hunt for the few that yield the best results.

Don‘t stop there. Now, look for ways to embed new habits and practices in employees’ lives at scale.

  1. Custom Communities

Back in the 1970’s, Tea Parties and Fashion Shows were accepted ways of building communities around specific interests. Today, these anachronisms are stale.

By the same token, there are new channels and technologies being used to connect staff today, but many companies see these changes as one-time shifts, rather than permanent trends.

For example, the technologies most of us use every day to message others (i.e. email, Facebook and Whatsapp) didn’t exist in 1995, 2005 and 2010 respectively. They have changed the way we join with each other at scale, allowing us to reach far more people than we ever imagined possible.

However, most companies struggle and never catch up. Why? First, there’s an age gap. Most executives are in their fifties and sixties while their employees are in their twenties. They only have a superficial experience of the latest technologies, because the communities to which they belong don’t use them.

As a result, they don’t know how to build the kind of communities required to engage employees. Their ignorance is costly.

A few years ago, I worked in Trinidad and noticed every professional using Whatsapp. When I returned to Jamaica two years later, our professionals had caught up.

During that time, my year-group at Wolmers started a Whatsapp group. Prior to its existence, there was little individual contact and no communal activity.

Momentum built quickly and today the Class of 82 group includes over 50% of our colleagues from around the world. More importantly, this month we had our first reunion and donated a million dollars to the school. In summary, a community which was recently formed is now making a tangible contribution where none was expected.

Without the appropriate channels none of this would have happened. Does the same apply to your company? Unfortunately, if you aren’t using technology to bring together employee communities in just the right way, it’s unlikely that your custom interventions will amount to much.

Furthermore, building communities in the modern age is a moving target. You must be prepared to keep adapting the latest tools, thereby empowering people to maintain behavior changes. It’s the only way to get ahead of a disengagement problem which isn’t likely to fade away. If you use the right approach, you may be able to stay ahead, applying fresh custom solutions that produce sustainable results.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20180923/how-your-company-should-address-staff-engagement-questions 

Easy First Steps to Become an Enlightened Leader

Do the skills required to be a great leader spring from an inborn set of traits? Or can they be developed over time? Here’s a surprising answer – not only can they be grown, but they all come down to a single, rarely talked about ability that isn’t taught but certainly can be learned.

There are lots of articles with “Top-Ten-Skills-for-Leaders” floating around. They promise to answer a simple question – “How are leaders made?” – with a simple answer.

You may already reject the notion that there are one-size-fits-all solutions. No leader is complete, or perfect. They are all works-in-progress, even if they appear to already know everything and have the ability to accomplish anything.

Yet, few of us are deceived by such shows of bravado. Instead, most understand that professionals who manage, lead, captain or champion others can always improve their skills. If leadership is defined as “the production of desired results through the efforts of groups of people”, then it’s easy to see gaps. Everyone who steps up to this higher level of accountability is imperfect.

However, there is a way to be almost perfect.

In my book Perfect Time-Based Productivity, I quote Winston Churchill who said: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” If he is to be believed, then we could say that the best leaders see themselves in an ongoing process of growth. They consciously put themselves in situations where they must “change often” using the following three techniques.

  1. Repeated Discomfort

The few professionals who decide to lead and grow at the same time eventually realize that their next stretch goal is more than an obligation – it’s an opportunity to expand their skills. Consequently, they willingly sign up for the next plateau to conquer.

You may find them picking up optional challenges like marathons or part-time graduate degrees. While the rest of us struggle to keep up with everyday life, they invite added complications by committing to new, harder, more demanding goals.

They are restless: unable to sit on their laurels.

For example, a colleague of mine left his local degree program in mid-stream to go abroad to study. He switched majors, losing a year in the process. Why? He yearned for a new challenge, one that he found at MIT, where he was surrounded by others who were even more hungry. His switch worked, as they tend to, even when there were significant setbacks along the way.

  1. Finding a Coach

However, setting bigger goals isn’t the only method.

Few professionals see the value in paying someone else (a coach) to point out their weaknesses and push them out of their comfort zone. They have no problem seeing the benefit of sports coaching. But few have colleagues in the professional world who would do the same. Most are caught up in old thinking: “Anyone who needs such help is weak.”

I often answer by sharing that for over a decade, I benefited from the services of paid, trained coaches. On a weekly basis, they pointed out my flaws as a business-person.

As you may imagine, I gained the most when I set aside my ego, ignored defensive feelings and followed the expert advice. Being “coachable” was a proficiency in its own right I was pushed to improve in each conversation.

  1. The Best Skill of All

While setting challenging goals and having a coach are powerful methods, they are limited in their value if a third, overarching skill is missing.

If you can’t assess your performance ruthlessly, using insights into your blind spots gained from the initial two steps, you won’t get very far.

When I was lucky to do my first, structured self-assessment as a teenager, the tools were crude and paper-based. Today, they are better designed and available free online, but only the rare local professional does them on their own.

The one I did as a teen (the DiSC) gave me great initial insight into my preferred personality selected from four archetypes. Later on, in my early twenties, I did the more elaborate Myers Briggs Type Indicator. This assessment consists of 16 styles and offers more depth.

Consider both of these tests to be a first step in becoming a student of yourself. But not in the narcissistic sense. Instead, it’s possible to systematically look for faults, gaps in skill and flaws in character that get in the way of accomplishing what you want in life.

There’s even a second step; ask everyone you know to do these assessments also.  As you share and compare your preferences, your insights will deepen dramatically.

Together, these skills enhance your ability to drive your own growth via self-learning. It’s a powerful combination that can’t fail to improve your performance, no matter what your aspirations might be.

 

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20180909/francis-wade-easy-first-steps-become-enlightened-leader