Employee engagement:  Something you do with your employees, not to them

We were invited to attend the Public Service Event “Engaging the Human Resource” yesterday. For me the highlight of the day was an inspiring story from Clive Bradley about his trip to the Gambian hospital of Bangtang, which he used brilliantly to illustrate the point that engagement isn’t something you do to your employees, but rather something that you do with them. We at Delta 7 whole-heartedly agree.

Clive and his colleague Michael Cosello delivered a much needed Land Rover to the hospital to help employees travel around the various clinics throughout the Gambia and interviewed the employees to find out what other things they most wanted at work. At this point the hospital had been losing good people to another better equipped Gambian hospital.

It turned out that what people most wanted were simple things like having some books for ward staff to read on the night shift when there wasn’t much going on. When the changes that the staff had requested were made, there were some startling and unexpected consequences. As well as improved staff retention, the infant mortality rates dropped by around a factor of 10.

Clive and Michael were summoned to the House of Commons to explain whether the dramatic reduction in infant mortality could be replicated elsewhere. But the point is that it’s clearly not the giving of books per se, for example, that helped reduce infant mortality. The link is clearly through improving the experience of being at work for those employees whose actions have an effect on infant mortality. Yet there was no one-size fits all engagement “solution” here that worked its magic. Instead, increased engagement, and the dramatic improvements in other areas that went with it, occurred as a result of consulting with employees to find out what they wanted and then acting on it.

Tweet This Post

Last week, we went to an event entitled, ‘Employee Engagement: Communication Matters’ which was jointly held by AIM Research, the CMI and the Institute of Business Consulting. We heard from many eminent speakers during the evening, but what we were most struck by was the disparity between the subject matter and the media through which it was being communicated. Are ‘talking-heads’ with slides on stage, with the audience sitting in silence most of the time,  really the most effective way to  make the point that employee engagement requires quality two-way communication?

At Delta7 we believe that dialogues with employees are a great way to truly engage with them. It gives a chance for all parties to give their point of view, not just those who are deemed to be the experts. We’d love to be involved in  an engagement event that provides the same sort of environment for its participants that it’s advocating they provide for their employees.

Tweet This Post

In Delta7, we fondly call this picture ‘The Blofeld Chair’ – a reference to the archetypal lever-operated chair used by arch-villains in Bond films to dispose of henchmen who have incurred their displeasure.

We’ve heard stories of people who practically roast anyone who dares to disagree but more often than not the threat is less overt and takes the form of a pressure to just agree and not rock the boat. ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ is a gentle reminder that questioning or disagreement is considered negativity.

Have you ever found yourself sitting in The Blofeld Chair? How did it feel? And what did you do?

Tweet This Post

Last week saw us taking a new Big Picture to the PR Week Engaging Internal Communications conference at the Grange City Hotel in Tower Hill. The new picture is a cityscape depicting what happens when organisations don’t pay attention to the 4 key drivers of employee engagement.

According to the McLeod report on engagement, these are:

• Strategic narrative - a clear, compelling vision of where the business is going, why and what’s going to have to happen to get it there

• Engaging managers – people with the ability to communicate the strategic narrative in a way that engages, includes and motivates their people

• Employee voice – the willingess to give employees a voice and to seek, listen to and act on their feedback

• Living their values with integrity – leaders who ‘walk their talk’ by embodying the businesses values and who take responsibility for leading by example

Each of the four main buildings represents one of these key drivers and is filled with examples of what it’s like when these drivers aren’t in place.  People running around without any clear idea of what’s going on; people asking for feedback then not listening to it… in short, a range of things familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in a large organisation.

It was an ambitious picture and great fun to make and our artists worked tirelessly to achieve such a striking result, with it’s dizzying perspective. It’s so convincing that people standing in front of the picture reported they felt like they were falling forward into the story.

Which, of course, is just how we like it!

Tweet This Post

“What are the characteristics of an engaged employee?” is a question they’re asking over at David Zinger’s ‘The Employee Engagement Network’

There are many different ways to characterise an engaged employee but one stands out for me – seeing yourself as part of the organisation rather than apart from it.

In my experience, engaged employees are those who care about some (or all) aspects of the work they do. Engaged employees care about doing their part well because they can see how that feeds into developing and safeguarding the thing they care about. They perceive themselves as part of the business and know where they fit in the bigger picture.

Disengaged employees, on the other hand, care more about their pay packet than the experience or importance of what they do – or how they do it. They see themselves as apart from the business, can only see through the view-frame of their own interests and often speak of themselves as though they were engaged in a struggle against the company.

Productivity can come from one of two basic motivations: either external or internal.  If you try to force productivity up through external motivation, you end up with an organisation that can only treat its people like slaves: resources to be exploited and controlled through a range punitive measures.  This approach will eventually create disengagement and at best, compliance.

Since you’re going to need ideas, creativity and willingness to keep productivity and innovation high, it follows that the only motivator that really makes sense is the internal one. Helping people to care about the organisation, what it stands for and to see the part they can play in its success will go a long way towards making that motivation personal – with far higher levels of engagement as the reward.

What do you think?

The Employee Engagement Network is free to join and features a wide range of interested people discussing employee engagement.

Tweet This Post

Clients often talk about the need for more adult-to-adult conversations where the leaders treat employees with respect and listen to and value their views and concerns.  Time and again, however, engagement surveys tell us that this just isn’t happening.  ‘Soft stuff’?  Hardly.  In my experience the ability to have these kinds of difficult conversations is the ‘hard stuff’.

This picture reminds me that the engagement gap is also between HR and the rest of the board. How can HR leaders engage with other leaders diferently?

What do you think?

Tweet This Post

One particular table exercise was to discuss “what HR can do to create employee engagement?”

A theme that came up on several tables was: ‘we need to see people as human beings who are valued and respected instead of a simple resource to be used up’.

That really got me thinking.  So many people share that feeling of not being treated by their organisation as human beings – it’s an unspoken that lies just below the surface.  I made this picture to capture both the intensity and simplicity of this issue.

Interestingly, the problem is clearly embedded there, in language, in the name of that most familiar of organisational job functions: ‘human resources’.

So what can HR do to make an organisation treat its people more like human beings and less like resources to be consumed?
What could I do today that would treat the people I work with more like human beings and less like raw resources to be used? What could I change personally?

At Delta7 we know that in order to treat other people with respect we have to first learn how to respect ourselves. What one thing could you do to treat yourself with more respect today?

We’d like to know how this picture makes you feel. Just post a comment (below)

Tweet This Post

In this picture, the leadership team, excited and motivated by their charts and strategic concerns in the comfort of the well-lit office contrast starkly with the demoralised employee dragging himself to work through the rain and cold.

This picture reminds us that the jargon of leadership, if used in the wrong context, can widen any gulf between leadership and the rest of the organisation.

Tweet This Post

The imminent future is one where social issues continue to rise, fed by increased debt and unemployment, while the pipeline of funding is abruptly turned off. While money could be used to disguise inadequacies in the past, this is no longer possible – public sector organisations are going to have to rely on their own “intangible” qualities to weather the storm.

Tweet This Post

This is one of a series of posters around the Underground that have caught my eye over recent months.

It’s part of a Transport For London campaign called ‘Together For London’ aimed at reducing anti-social behaviours across London’s transport system.  The message is ‘A little thought from each of us.  A big difference for London’.

Rather strangely, a search of the TfL website for ‘Together For London’ gives only this.   Stranger still, clicking the link on that page brings you to this page.  No background, no depth, no accountability, no process and no names.  Just those graphic outcomes.

So who is ‘Together For London’ speaking for?  And who is it speaking to?

According to the website text, the images represent ‘key messages’ chosen by Londoners for the campaign to feature; a ‘pet-hate-list’ of antisocial behaviours endured by the long-suffering public.  The list includes people playing loud music on their iPods, putting their feet on seats, hogging empty seats to stop other people sitting next to them, cyclists who don’t stop for red traffic signals and more.  You get the idea.

This all leaves me wondering: if you’re consciously antisocial (eg. you know what you’re doing but don’t care) will this campaign cause you to change your behaviour?  And if you’re unconsciously antisocial, will this campaign wake you up and then cause you to change your behaviour?

At Delta7, we believe that personal change requires a change in thinking and that this happens through dialogue with others. Pictures can be a powerful catalyst for those change conversations; but they don’t just make change happen.  They act as a doorway to dialogue out of which shifts in understanding can occur and then new actions emerge.  Where is the dialogue in TfL’s campaign?  Where is the doorway?

The effectiveness of any behavioural change strategy can only be measured if the underlying assumptions about – or model of – change are surfaced so they can be tested and evidenced.  The nature and placement of the pictures in this campaign seems to belie a change model that assumes that change will happen as a result of picturing or writing the change you want to see in a stand-alone poster.

Since I’m one of the ‘converted’ (I don’t do antisocial behaviour), I can’t comment on the effectiveness of this strategy.  Only TfL or the perpetrators of antisocial beheviour themselves can tell us.  For that we would need to hear from anyone whose behaviour had been shifted or changed by this campaign.  I will be surprised if TfL ends up with that kind of data.  Certainly nothing currently on their website suggests they will.

I suppose I could ask the next person I come across on the Tube with their feet on the seats or behaving offensively under the influence of alcohol whether these pictures will help them change their behaviour.

Somehow, though, I doubt I will.

Tweet This Post

After many years working with organisations in change, two things have become clear to me: first, that many leaders see change as something they have to get other people to do and second, that many employees think their leaders don’t ‘walk the talk’ or practice the behavioural changes they preach.

A typical change programme in today’s organisations may come packaged as ‘values-based behaviour change’ – with a call to put the company’s values into action in support of the strategic vision.  ‘We need people to act this and that way for the organisation to be successful’ is the underlying ask from leadership.

The problem isn’t the business case for change since this is usually easy to understand e.g. ‘the environment has just got tougher and we need to do more with less’.  The problem is a preference for avoiding the discomfort of looking at and considering changing our own behaviour.  Unsurprisingly, many leaders prefer to support other people and groups to change rather than work on themselves; those other people, in turn, prefer to help other people change … and so on.

The cost of leaders not embodying the kinds of  changes they ask of others is immense for two very simple and powerful reasons.  The first is that when they avoid exploring the discomfort of change before asking others to, they miss the opportunity to equip themselves with the kind of skills, empathy and understanding that would be invaluable for supporting change in others.  The second is that when they don’t work on their own behaviours, leaders lose the ability to lead by example and are perceived as incongruent.

This incongruence creates a lack of trust, diminishes respect and reduces the capacity to lead.  Internally, it can be even worse: the secret knowledge that he/she cannot walk the talk can leave a leader with feelings of shame that erode their sense of self-worth.

Tweet This Post

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has just published a new report by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke on employee engagement.  We wholeheartedly recommend this report – it makes some great points and is filled with useful case studies.  It’s very hard to get to the end and still avoid the conclusion that having an engaged workforce really does improve bottom line results.

But what actually is engagement?  Is it an attitude (e.g. pride, loyalty), a behaviour (going the extra mile) or an outcome (e.g. lower absenteeism)?  The authors amassed over 50 definitions and share three, all of which are a bit woolly.  Many of the contributors just said “you know it when you see it”.  Here’s the definition they end up with for the report:

Engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.

This is probably a good summary of how the word is typically used in HR and internal communications departments.  There are lots of things to say about it, but my underlying concern is this:  It implies that engagement is something that is done to people.  I want to suggest a different starting point.

The starting point is to notice that “engagement” is a metaphor.  Historically the word means a connection – a coming together.  You use a clutch to engage a gear, armies engage in battle, and of course people become engaged with other people when they buy their services, agree to marry them, or just make an appointment to see them.  The extension of the word into emotional experience is just an extension of this sense of connection.  If I have an engaging experience at the theatre or the cinema, it’s because I’m connecting with something – I care about what happens to the characters, or how the underlying themes are developed.  The same sense is true of engaging books, engaging conversations, engaging stories and so on – they are all examples of connecting with things we find important.

If we take this sense of connection as the central meaning, we get a very clear and simple definition of workplace engagement:  A felt connection between what is important to me as an employee and what is important to the organisation I work for.  A voluntary staff member working for a charitable cause they passionately believe in will obviously be much more engaged with their work than a student working at McDonalds.

By simplifying the definition of engagement down to this level, we can create a clearer picture of what it looks like when people are feeling engaged:

A successful “engagement” intervention is anything that increases the size of the orange overlap in the centre of the diagram, the space in which leadership concerns and workforce concerns connect.  Notice that whatever your role in your organisation – business partner, OD manager, senior leader – whenever you instigate some form of “engagement” activity – i.e. you create this central space – you are taking on the role of a leader.  How engaged people will feel as a result correlates directly with the quality of this interaction:  Its openness, honesty, integrity, clarity, vulnerability and so on.

Tweet This Post

Two things I hate: Train delays and boring Powerpoint presentations. They both waste time, and not in an unrelated way, as I want to show.

The metaphor of time as a scarce resource is a well integrated part of the Western worldview – we don’t just talk about how we waste time, but how we save time, spend time, how time runs out, how some time can be set aside, how to invest time profitably and so on. In business, of course, buying and selling time is literally what happens whenever you employ someone. Your employees’ time becomes another scarce resource you use to realise the vision of the business.

By way of analogy, next time you’re on a busy platform waiting for a delayed train, notice how many other people there are. If there’s, say, sixty people on the platform and the train has a ten minute delay then that’s a total of ten hours worth of time that’s been wasted. If the same train calls at another ten stations to pick up a similar number of commuters, then you have three full weeks’ worth of working time taken out of the economy.

Here’s my point: What quantity is the driver of the train thinking of – the ten minutes or the three weeks? Next time you’re creating your Powerpoint deck, ask yourself the same question. What is the cost to the business of people not understanding what you’re saying? Of not seeing your strategy? Of not knowing how the business actually works? Of not having the same vocabulary? Clarifying exactly what you mean and figuring out how to express it in layman’s terms is obviously a good use of time. But somehow it often doesn’t feel like it when you’re already in a rush.

So next time you’re tempted just to cut and paste together bits and pieces from other presentations and wing it on the day, try to think not just in terms of the immediate time you’re saving as an individual, but the compound time of all the audience members you’ll be wasting.

Tweet This Post

I was working with a client last week at an away-day workshop, one session was about exploring the obstacles to change.  Before we’d got very far, it became apparent to me that the biggest obstacles still weren’t being talked about.  Having had some experience over the years of drawing out unspoken issues to help people talk about them, I challenged the participants: ‘What’s not being talked about here today?”

At first there was a stunned silence. Then someone put their hand up and almost in a whisper said “It’s that the competent people have the most work on dumped on them.   Not only that, we don’t know what to do with the incompetent ones either”.

Within seconds, the room was buzzing with energy as people wanted to share their ‘unspokens’.  Things like “I feel a slave”; “I feel powerless, overworked and unrewarded”. Then many small conversations broke out as everyone wanted add their own unspokens. I could sense in the participants a pent-up desire to talk about what was at the front of their minds; a need to express things they felt unable to voice at work.

In highly charged political work environments it can feel too risky, dangerous in fact, to speak up about what is felt to be most important. When people feel unable to speak honestly about the real issues, it can create the sort of frustration and confusion that soon leads to a culture of low morale, blame, distrust, resistance and ultimately sabotage.

I think this can be a big problem for leaders, as they often get shielded from the truth, so don’t get the honest feedback they need to lead effectively. If this gap of meaning between leader and staff isn’t bridged, it can spiral out into unproductive cycles of unreality and pretence. Eventually no one wants to talk about the real issues at meetings, even though they are staring everyone in the face. It is too dangerous to talk about them.

I often wonder about the financial cost of this fear-driven lack of honest conversation.  If organisations need accurate feedback to function, then the lack of feedback surely has a huge financial cost.  And we need to acknowledge that accurate feedback comprises two kinds of information: the rational and the emotional.  Both are vital if people are to work together effectively. If the organisation doesn’t have a vocabulary to talk about how people feel, then the information it’s working with is incomplete; and that lack of information can have serious consequences.

What do you think?

I believe this is an extremely important issue – maybe the biggest challenge leaders face – if we agree that organisational development and business success are fundamentally based on improving the quality of working relationships.  And we all know that the critical factor in improving relationships is finding better ways to create meaning through open and honest communication.  To this end I will be organising a workshop to explore this issue in September 2009 – please get in touch for more details.

Comments please to: julian@delta7.com

Tweet This Post

I’m always being told how lucky I am to “be able to draw”.  Everyone seems to assume that any artistic ability – musical, visual, poetic or whatever – is an innate skill and that you either have it or you don’t.  Harder edged skills – reading, writing, arithmetic – on the other hand, are basic abilities that everyone should be able to develop.  Now in my work I get the opportunity to blur the edges between what’s hard and what’s soft.  Every day I structure information, solve problems, tell stories and make new discoveries for clients by translating their concerns into visual form.  It’s incredibly powerful.  It’s so powerful, in fact, that I sometimes wonder what it would be like if they could do it for themselves rather than relying on people like me.  So, is drawing a freak skill or something anyone can do?

Now let’s be clear from the outset that for a normal, healthy human brain, drawing should be difficult, because we don’t see things in 2D.  When you look at a table top, you are conscious of its rectangular shape, even though the retinal image received by your eye is probably a trapezium or a rhombus or something.  The brain is more concerned with what your environment is good for (its affordances) than what exactly it looks like, so to be able to draw anything you have to “unlearn” the way you know things are in order to re-create the way they appear.

One group of people who are very good at this is autistic savants (think Dustin Hoffman in Rainman).  The Economist last week had a report into savant-skills, and referenced one of the most famous autists, Temple Grandin, who has (with a lot of effort) written books about what it is like for her to “think in pictures”.  The thing I found interesting in the report was a reference to new findings that suggest a lot of these skills may be learned rather than innate.  My understanding was always that savant-skills were already there in everyone’s brains, but were normally “masked” by other abilities; in autists these abilities (empathy for example) were somehow “switched off”, allowing the brain’s incredible computational powers to run riot.  But what if this “switching off” wasn’t “unmasking” unlearned skills, but rather freeing up time for practice?  To quote the article, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”  So perhaps the visual savant who can draw photographically from memory has developed this skill because his/her pathological disinterest in other more “normal” human concerns has freed up time to observe the appearance of things with microscopic precision.

This is all very well for prodigies and geniuses, but what about the rest of us?  Well I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made with the everyday skills we take for granted.  Just stop and think for a moment how complex a task reading and writing is – the ability to learn from scratch an (almost) completely abstract system for notating spoken language.  Yet whenever we pick up a newspaper or start writing a note we aren’t at all conscious of alphabets or grammar or syntax – it all just flows naturally.  It’s a skill we take for granted because we were all forced to learn it over many years from infancy.  What would happen if primary school children were forced to spend the same length of time learning to notate music, for instance, as they currently spend learning to read and write?  Everyone recognises (and most people can hum) melodies, but no one can write them down because no one was ever taught.  We all know when someone is singing out of tune, even if we don’t know how.

Similarly, everyone knows when a drawing someone else has created is wrong, but very few people have learned how to correct the mistakes.  I saw a presentation a few years back at the RSA about the experience of some schools who brought in an artist to teach primary school children how to draw.  The results were astonishing – within a few weeks of being taught the rudiments of proportion and perspective the children were creating imagery that would have shamed most adults.  What was more astonishing was the reaction of some of the parents, who were upset that the lessons seemed to be “corrupting” their children’s innocence, on the basis that “real” children draw people with eyes at the tops of their heads and houses with windows in the corners.  This seems strange, because I don’t know any parents who encourage their children to carry on making spelling mistakes and adding up wrong because it’s sweet and adorable and childlike.

So, can anyone draw?  I think the answer is yes.  Obviously it comes much more easily to the naturally gifted than to the rest of us, but then that’s true of everything.  I think the reason people can’t draw is because they aren’t taught, and the reason they aren’t taught is firstly because there’s no one to teach them and secondly because no one sees any real need to.  Which is a whole new article …

Tweet This Post

For some reason, the saga unfolding around Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension revelations last week made a connection in my brain with distant memories of economics lectures.  The lecture in question was on the “behavioural theory of the firm”, taken from a book of the same name by Richard Cyert and James March.  Before this book was written in the sixties, the main theory of the firm in economics circles was that of “transaction costs”, which says that the reason businesses exist is that individuals find themselves trading at a sufficient volume for it to stop making sense to work independently; trading as a single entity saves everyone time and money, so that’s what everyone does.  This is the sort of theory that economists love – transaction costs can be measured and modelled, because you can put numbers against them.  The behavioural theory, on the other hand, says that actually firms exist and behave for a set of very non-rational reasons that can be hard to quantify.  To understand why firms act in certain ways, you have to understand the underlying behavioural drivers of the people involved.  Cyert and March suggested, for example, that while the owners of a business would typically be more interested in longer term profit, the managers would be more interested in shorter term growth.

This is where Sir Fred comes in, as his behaviour since he took over at RBS in 2001 would make him a fitting poster boy for the behavioural theory, and his decision to hang onto his enhanced pension pot has put his character into the public spotlight in a way that most executives will never experience.  Former colleagues have given us insights into the personality and behaviour of a man who drove one of the most rapid and aggressive expansions of a financial institution ever seen.  To put it politely, it doesn’t sound like Sir Fred was suffering from any ego-related problems during that period.

Now it’s been a long time since I studied the “behavioural theory” at business school, and I must confess that I’ve never looked in detail at the original source material, but the question that struck me last week is this:  Isn’t it a bit odd that we even have something called a “behavioural theory” to describe this kind of thing?  Doesn’t it all seem incredibly like common sense?  Ego-driven personalities in charge of organisations are surely going to find ways to justify aggressive business expansion just as much as similar personalities in previous centuries justified military expansion.  Everyone who works in an organisation knows this, and it’s visible at every level, not just the top.  Fiefdoms tend to emerge around egos, not rational process boundaries, and most people can see from how rapidly certain individuals’ fiefdoms grow exactly who is going to make it to the top.

Appending the word “theory”, though, brings the whole thing back into the comfortable territory of scientific language, which is where economists like it to be.

And that’s why I think the behavioural theory is a useful parable for organisational life as a whole.  Because we live in a culture where legitimacy is bound up in what is scientific and rational, we find it really hard to deal with things that we know are real but don’t reduce easily to numbers.  Everyone might know from experience who the best and worst performers in a firm are, but decisions still have to defer to the outcomes of the performance management regime, because we have no way of dealing with things that aren’t measured.  Everyone might know that a plan is never going to work, but when confronted by a dictatorial boss, they can’t rely on their intuition because it isn’t backed up by “hard” analysis.  Everyone might know that the real reason a board member stepped down had nothing to do with their personal life, and that the financials are going to suffer as a result, but how do you quantify executive politics?

The current financial crisis actually isn’t too difficult to model and understand rationally, as is nicely demonstrated by Jonathan Jarvis’ visualisation (see below).  What the visual telling of the crisis highlights is that rational theory and modelling can’t stop humans doing stupid things.

There’s a deeper problem though, which is this:  We lack an organisational language for discussing things that don’t reduce to numbers.  Information that is quantifiable becomes “hard”, a metaphor that equates tangibility with reality – you can see and touch hard things, whereas feelings and intuition are “soft”, not to be trusted.  The message is this:  If you can’t put a number on it, then it ain’t real, and should be left outside the meeting room door thankyou very much.

And so we insist on trying to squeeze everything into models with absurd rational names like “behavioural theory”.  I like to think that this is just a hangover of industrialisation, and that with time (and probably a few more crises) a new paradigm will emerge.  Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.

One closing thought:  If there’s a danger in thinking that the only fact is a “hard” fact, there’s an equal danger in the opposite direction.  The problem is not that we are using rational, quantitative “facts” when we should be using experiential, intuitive “facts”.  The problem is that we find it necessary to split the two apart in the first place.

Tweet This Post

What does a meaningful workplace actually look like?

In my review of Gurnek Bains’ Meaning Inc my main criticism was that it barely said anything about representation, without which there can be no meaning. Unfortunately there wasn’t any space to develop the idea further, and as it probably sounds a bit arcane on first reading I want to spend some time filling in a few blanks.

Back in the nineteenth century most scientists believed there was a very strange substance that filled the universe called luminiferous aether, or more simply, ether. It was invisible, intangible, in fact completely impossible to observe. So why did they believe it existed? Because they had figured out that light was a wave, and they knew that all waves needed a medium to travel through. Neither of those statements turned out to be completely true, but they seemed so obvious back then that no one really challenged them.

Taking this as a parable, ether was to a previous generation of physicists what I fear meaning is becoming for the current generation of HR directors. Employees are happier, fitter and more productive when they can (in Gurnek Bains’ phrase) “connect their work to experiences that are important to them”. Meaning then becomes the invisible, unobservable, hypothetical medium through which the connection is made.

It becomes treated as a quantifiable thing, as people observe that there “is (or isn’t) much meaning in our workplace”, or “we need to bring more meaning into our employees’ lives”. Budget is then spent on meaning-generation activities – bringing values to life, empowering workers, improving communications and so on.

Now I really like the definition of meaning as the connection between what I do and what’s important to me, but I suggest we need to get beyond the “ether” model of how this happens. For the whole concept to be useful, we need a much more precise understanding of exactly what is being connected with what, and that can’t be done unless we understand how people represent their experiences. In short, meaning is not a connection between experiences but between representations of experiences.

If I say “our strategy is meaningless”, I’m not thinking about a disembodied, abstract concept that just somehow came to be in my mind, I’m thinking about how I felt when I picked up the 16 pages of jargon with corporate branding on the cover and the CEO’s picture on the first page that landed on my desk, or the hour long presentation of business-speak and pie charts I was subjected to in a darkened conference hall at the start of the year. If I say our organisation’s values are meaningless, I’m probably talking about the list of words on my mouse pad or my screensaver, which seem totally divorced from my everyday experience.

Similarly, if I say that what I actually do at work is meaningless, I’m referring to physical interactions with physical people and physical things, not an ethereal atmosphere that pervades my surroundings. The meaning is (or isn’t) being represented through the spreadsheets I fill in, the components I assemble, the programs I write, the conversations I have and so on. Either these represent something that is important to me or they don’t.

I guess most HR or OD directors would love their people’s representation of work to be whatever they’ve written in their people strategy: “A challenging, rewarding, exciting … (fill in the blanks) … place to work” or whatever. But this is the land of ether. Meaning in reality is created by individuals, with individual experiences. You can’t create meaning for them, but you can create more meaningful representations.

That NASA janitor everyone talks about who supposedly said that scrubbing the floors was helping to put a man on the moon might not have been quite so upbeat if no one had mentioned to him the moon part. This is the situation in most large organisations – there is no JFK figure giving the big picture that people can locate themselves in.

So how do you make a meaningful representation? The answer is that you connect what you are saying and the way you are saying it as closely as possible to the actual working experiences of your people. Sounds fine in theory; here are some ideas in practice:

• Read the Sun. Then use the same vocabulary for your internal comms. Stop speaking the language of your leadership team, because their experience is absolutely not the norm for everyone else.
• Tell stories. People will sit for two hours enthralled in a cinema, but will be fidgeting after two minutes in the average corporate presentation. People make connections through narrative, not through bullet points.
• Make space for conversations. How many people in your organisation would say that their most meaningful experiences of the day are talking to friends over the water cooler? When people can speak (without feeling guilty about wasting time) to colleagues from other parts of the business, they are creating connections that help them see how they fit into the bigger picture.
• Be honest if you don’t know the answer. Leaders too often fill the vacuum of uncertainty with the right-sounding words. Because the words aren’t meaningful though, they just serve to disconnect people further.
• Be visual. Not wanting to sound too much like a sales pitch, but people find visual representations of ideas and stories easier to follow and remember than purely verbal ones (think cinema again). Everyone says that for a workplace to be meaningful, people need to see how they fit in the bigger picture, but ironically all we usually show them is words.

Tweet This Post

Eighteen 5-star ratings out of eighteen is a pretty good sign – and the reviews for this ‘comic-book’ about comics from Scott McCloud certainly explain why.  On one level this book is a powerful validation for a whole movement of artists who feel their art form has been overlooked and undervalued by critics.  It’s a clenched fist “Yesssss!” moment of long-overdue recognition.

On another level it’s a beautifully-articulated argument for the effectiveness – and the pedigree – of this medium and what’s great is that the argument isn’t expressed in words.  It’s expressed directly through the medium itself.

Some of the book’s best moments come with the kind of mixture of shock and delight that – arguably – only the comic form can deliver – such as when the artist turns into a shaded, photo-realistic representation of himself for a single frame.  Or when McCloud reminds us that we create the (unshown) grisly murder in the gutter between frames.  Wonderful.

McCloud reveals all the major comic conventions as he takes us on a journey that weaves in and out of history,  narrative,  perception, psychology – to name but a few disciplines along the way.  As such, it’s an excellent primer for any budding comic creator and by the end of the book, we’ve not just read about the comic form, we’ve experienced it too.

Understanding Comics offers some important insights into the effectiveness of our Visual Dialogue™ process, too.  Why are comic characters most effective when they have least detail?  The less detail they have, says McCloud, the more we can project ourselves into their place in the story.

Our experience of how readily our clients see themselves in the pictures we create for them certainly bears this out.

Watch Scott McCloud talk about the book in this TEDTalk.

Tweet This Post

Meaning Inc:  What does it all mean?

Meaning Inc came out about a year ago now, and is basically a manifesto from business psychology consultancy YSC. Although its stated author is YSC’s CEO Gurnek Bains, judging from the Acknowledgements it was very much a collaborative effort. The models and case studies (not to mention cover recommendations) are evidently drawn from client history. This isn’t problematic, although the content does sometimes wander into sales-pitch territory, and I think awareness of potential clients reading the text has probably watered a lot of it down.

There’s a long line of purpose / values / culture books that started with Peters & Waterman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the early eighties, all stressing the importance of motivation through vision, values, culture and so on. The question is, is YSC’s “blueprint for business success in the 21st century” genuinely new, or is it the same old ideas re-packaged with new labels? The authors raise this question themselves by making a big deal about the year 2000 as a reference point for change, saying that “what worked in the 1980s and 1990s is not working any longer”. So do they have a different answer?

What is meaning?

The whole package revolves around the central concept of meaning, a word that I imagine will scare off quite a few people right from the off. So what do they mean by it?

“Here is a broad, yet precise, definition of the term: essentially the meaning of any word is directly related to the other words it connects with or the external reality to which it relates. It is the sense of connectedness with something that lies at the heart of meaning in a literal sense … Meaning is experienced when we are able to connect our thoughts or activities with something else in a way that creates a sense of relevance or context.” P79

“(Meaning Inc.) refers to companies whose success is founded on creating meaning for their employees, as well as for their customers and other stakeholders”. P15

So meaning, at its simplest level, is connection. As the quote suggests, this is most obvious when we talk about the meanings of words, but it applies to other forms of meaning as well. For businesses, meaning arises “when people are able to connect what they are doing to things that matter to them”. The connection idea may seem a little abstract, but it’s actually a really helpful concept. Firstly, as the authors suggest, it matches what we know about the way brains physically work. When we make sense of something, the wiring in our heads actually changes, making new connections to reflect the new learning. Secondly, it gives leaders a simple mental picture about what meaning creation looks like: Somebody somewhere is connecting whatever they’re seeing reading / hearing / overhearing to something that’s important to them. Similarly, meaninglessness is disconnection. Think of the average corporate conference – lots of slides, lots of presentations, but no meaning if people can’t connect what they are seeing and hearing with the things they care about.

Meaning creation

The book proceeds to cover the various ways that leaders can help their employees create meaning, which can be summarised as follows:

• Articulate the “why” – not just the what and the how. To do this, leaders need to be more authentic, which means doing one or two things really well rather than trying to be all things to all men.

• Move the company’s purpose beyond either simple metrics (the “we will be number one” mentality) or an existence rationale (“we make great widgets”). You need to “place employees as players in a wider social narrative”.

• Help employees connect to the organisation’s history and values, creating meaning by locating themselves in an ongoing story. Everything else may be moving, but the “corporate DNA” has to stay consistent.

• Base the brand on the corporate DNA, and make sure it’s lived from the “inside out”. Brands “find life in the behaviour of people”.

• Help people have an impact, by giving them clear outcomes and the freedom to achieve them creatively.

• Promote employee growth – both professionally and personally. As with leadership, this means turning “spikes” of competency into “towering area of distinctiveness”.

• Help people feel “liked, accepted and validated” in order to create a sense of belonging.

• Take work-life balance more seriously.

But why “meaning”?

This is a great list. My problem is, exactly the same content could be (and has been) written many times without needing to talk about “meaning” at all. All of the above activities are supposed to create meaning by connecting what people do with things that are important to them. I’m not saying for one minute that they don’t, but surely the question is how? Because the exploration of meaning itself is so shallow, the question of how never arises … all the practical chapters could be re-written without reference to meaning at all. I suggest there are two foundational building blocks missing, which would cast the list above in a new light:

Firstly, the relationship between meaning and personal experience. Things are more meaningful to us when they are more closely connected to our experience. If a child wants to know what a word means, I need to explain it to them in light of what they already know. So I explain the meaning of “horse” to a four-year old in relation to “cow”, not in relation to “mammal”, because I can connect to their experience of cows, not mammals.

The problem in business is that most leaders try to connect what they are saying to their own experience, rather than the experience of their people. “Profitability” and “competitive threat” may be highly meaningful to a chief executive, but probably mean nothing to a fork-lift truck driver.

Secondly, the relationship between meaning and representation. Meaning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the “components” of meaning the authors describe – purpose, strategy, values, “corporate DNA” and so on – are described in the abstract, but they are things that people have to represent to themselves in some form if they are to have any meaning. The strategy has to be written down. The business plan has to be drawn up.

This makes it astonishing to me that there is virtually no discussion at all about communications. The main way in which leaders attempt to pro-actively make meaning for their people is through communications. I think most of those attempts fail because – as I said before – people can’t connect the abstract content they hear and read with the physical experience of their everyday lives.

So, in conclusion: There’s little here by way of practical advice that I haven’t read before. That doesn’t mean the book won’t be hugely valuable as a stimulus and source of ideas. But to my mind there’s a much fuller popular analysis of meaning yet to be written, that could cast new light on the problems this book addresses.

Tweet This Post

Our re-working of the old adage “a picture speaks a thousand words” is transforming the way clients communicate in their organisations. By translating current context, vision and strategy into large, colourful pictures, we provide a powerful catalyst for discussing the challenging and complex changes which organisations must negotiate successfully.

Our ‘Visual Dialogue’ process pulls together collective thinking to create shared understanding, consensus and ultimately action that creates change.

Tweet This Post