It’s interesting how often the title of these charts is the name of the company, as if the piece of paper actually is the company itself.

Tweet This Post

Soon, no one wants to talk about the real issues even though they are staring everyone in the face. These things are difficult to talk about and all too often at key briefings and presentations people just sit in silence, unable to say what they really think because it feels too risky to speak up.

What is the Elephant under your table?

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

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

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