Month: December 2015

Employee engagement…how well we aren’t doing

    mike

I just read an excellent article by Mark C Crowley entitled ‘Employee engagement isn’t getting any better and Gallup shares the surprising reasons why’.

In this article Mark discusses why employee engagement isn’t getting any better. According to Gallup, growth in engagement has remained flat for most of 2015. Mark goes on to talk about his discussion with Dr Jim Harter, who is Gallup’s engagement expert. According to Dr Harter, organisations may measure different things whilst attempting to quantify engagement, ‘those outcomes range from basics such as absenteeism, employee retention rates, service levels and productivity: and ultimately it all adds up to about a 22 percent difference in profitability when you compare top quartile business units to the bottom quartile’.

Intriguingly the top organisations Gallup work with have only 65% of their workers fully engaged. Imagine what must be being wasted in terms of motivation, innovation and dedication in so many businesses. This point hasn’t been entirely missed however as Dr Harter goes on to say ‘…it’s serious enough that it’s become a check-the-box HR activity, but not serious enough to have a meaningful impact and raise their score…we are now at just 32% engagement…there’s simply no question that managers are one of the top root causes of low and flat-lined engagement’.

That statistic is quite shocking, as is the fact that this appears to have remained for many a check-the-box exercise.

Dr Harter goes on to suggest that high performing managers/leaders have five talents:

1. They are motivators – challenge self and others
2. They are assertive – push past obstacles, make tough decisions
3. They accept accountability – they help their team deliver
4. They are relationship builders – they personalise how they manage
5. They are decision makers – they solve complex issues and plan ahead

He suggests that these are not too common and that not everyone can ‘learn’ them. This is why I have made the point time and time again, that if people are promoted purely because of their skill, we can, and almost certainly will, run into trouble. And so not only does development have a role to play here, but so does the person or people doing the hiring and promoting.

This is also why we need leaders in place who have a good dose of common sense who can read people pretty well, and who promote and hire from a position of insight and emotional robustness, and not from a position of fear or protectionism, where appointments may be made in both a feckless and reckless fashion. If we have leaders who promote individuals because they are blind to the fact that their ‘favourite’ is simply a bise le derrière aficionado, or has all the emotional intelligence of a paperclip, or is a devious little back stabbing weasel who has more faces than a dodecahedron; then the endless cycle of mediocrity and misery will continue. And heaven forfend that the leader actually promotes someone because of those traits!

And yet we see this time and time again. Something is amiss.

Dr Harter suggests, ‘…for companies who are truly committed to employee engagement, they must raise the bar further…there’s another traditionally unappreciated quality that’s been consistently proven to turn managers into talent magnets: they care deeply about their people…they share, teach, coach, support, and appreciate their employees…regardless of what’s on their plate’.

Now those are the qualities that we should all be galloping towards rewarding and emulating.

Let’s look at my interpretation of what each of these might mean, through the lens of Braver Leadership, and just for fun, I’ve arranged them into a nice little acronym for the hard of understanding. TASCS.

Teach: Can you remember the time when you attended a really bad lecture? And did you by any chance compare that experience to the very different experience of being in the class of your favourite teacher. What was the difference? Well, the clue is in the words. Your favourite teacher taught you, that implies that you learned. Lecturing is just that. No learning required. One person can do that in an empty room. Teaching requires an element of vulnerability. If I go down that road, am I good enough to allow you to learn? Most people can learn most things, given time. The only thing that generally stops them learning is not receiving the proper teaching. The braver leader is able to teach, and understands that it may expose their own failings in knowledge (if you want to master it, teach it) and also that they cannot teach by lecturing. Persistent lecturing belongs in the command and control toolbox of the weak leader. The braver leader will be at your side, helping you understand, guiding, willing you to succeed.

Appreciate (their employees): Genuinely appreciating people is the key here. How often have you met someone who displayed false sincerity, kindness, interest etc. etc. Most of us can spot that a mile away. It’s as insulting as it is depressing. The braver leader understands that despite the grade, the salary, the role…that this is a person who has dreams, hopes, aims, aspirations, ambitions and feelings. Just like us, just like everyone else. They are using up some of their time on the planet to do the task at hand. They are not a number.

Share: Now this requires the leader to be very comfortable with themselves. To be comfortable in their own skin. To be able to be challenged. To accept that someone may come up with a better idea. Leaders who do not share are often fearful that their perceived power base will be eroded, that they may be questioned, that they might even be wrong.

And yet if the leader keeps people at ‘arms length’ we know that this can cause a sense of elitism, and that employees can become demotivated when they do not have a sense of ‘being in on things’.

Coach: Receiving coaching from a leader is one of the most positively transformative things that a leader can do for a team member. However, one of the mistakes that a leader can make is to use a coaching session as a vehicle for telling and grandstanding and passing judgement and opinion. Coaching is performer centric not egocentric.

Support: In many ways the supporting leader is already supporting if they do all of the four things mentioned above. Supportive is a mindset. And having a supportive mindset is often connected to having the quality of humility. (Humility is often misunderstood and hugely underrated. I have attached a link to a video below, in which I discuss humility and its importance in leadership).

The findings of Gallup will not come as too much of a surprise for those of us who have been paying attention. Have you ever looked around an organisation or team and wondered whether perhaps the apparent madness of sycophancy and egomaniacal behaviours was actually normal, and that perhaps it was you who was mad after all? Hopefully you came to the (in my opinion very rational conclusion) that you were indeed sane and that something was indeed sadly awry. And yet you are far from alone. Talk to most people in most organisations and they all tend to want similar things. Words like ‘purpose’, ‘camaraderie’, ‘fun’, ‘belonging’, ‘a sense of achievement’, ‘feeling valued’ are commonly used. This madness I would suggest stems from only a few, but they can infect many, and without a different type of leadership the malaise will continue, with more and more people becoming desensitised to what are actually pretty abhorrent behaviours. Engagement can only be nurtured and grown. It cannot be attached to an organisation or an individual using Velcro. We must educate, promote, assist, develop and nurture a different type of leader who can change the resonance of a business. That type of leadership approach can take honesty and endeavour, and of course courage, but that courage is likely to be greatly rewarded.

As I have said for quite some time now, ‘profit by all means, but not by any means’. Perhaps if we concentrated more on getting the people bit right, everything else would fall into place.

If you would like to contact me directly to discuss any of your development needs, please get in touch via this website, email, or by phone.
Seasons greetings
Mike

Link to the article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-engagement-isnt-getting-better-gallup-shares-mark-c-crowley

Video: https://vimeo.com/148804852
Twitter: @braverleaders

Oh for a world where everyone itches for ethics

    mike

Have you ever paused to consider where the ‘tone’ of an organisation or team comes from?
One way of thinking about the emotional tone is to consider it as part of the culture. Organisations and teams are made up of people, and people have feelings, and feelings drive behaviours; and so it is very important to be aware of whether the residents of any particular corporate village are fearful, or happy, or sad, or energised. I would suggest that the single largest resonant emotional frequency is broadcast from the leader. They transmit the strongest signal, and if that signal is suspicion, the villagers will tend to be suspicious of the leader and of each other. If the signal is anger, the villagers will tend to be fearful and/or angry. Leaders, by their way of being, define so much. They can define the moral high ground, or even if there is going to be a moral high ground.

I was intrigued by a recent article by Dina Medland entitled, ‘The Dangers Of “Window Dressing” when Raising The Bar On Corporate Ethics’.

Consider this quote from the article, ‘ nearly half of employees (45%) are not willing to raise their concerns about misconduct. Among those who have ‘spoken out,’ the proportion who say that they were not satisfied with the outcome has doubled’.

Even if those figures do not reflect all organisations, it still makes for pretty shocking reading. I would suggest that some of these organisations are in an emotional abyss, and that that abyss is essentially a giant sink hole upon which the moral high ground once lay.

This brings me to one of the key components of what I consider braver leadership to be about. As I have already suggested, the leader sets the tone. So who must be setting the tone in these organisations and teams, where results come before ethical behaviour and where almost half of a workforce won’t speak out? Ethics doesn’t belong simply in a committee, or in a ‘hand book’, it belongs in every conversation and decision. And the braver leader may go beyond the ‘hand book’ anyway, realising that a simple tick box exercise often isn’t enough for the situation at hand.

Naturally, there is no one answer as to how this might be achieved, and there is much work to be done in various different ways to help evolve corporate thinking. However, one of the ways to perhaps begin this journey is to consider the mindset of the leader. There is a link below to a new video where I consider some fundamental approaches that a leader may take in order to help set the correct emotional tone.

Best wishes
Mike

Video: https://vimeo.com/146151116

Dina Medland’s full article:

http://onforb.es/1kNfGFa

Lazy Doctors, or just a small case of insanity?

    mike

The recent dispute in the UK about Doctors’ hours and pay has attracted a lot of attention. What should we think? Lazy Doctors, or just a small case of insanity?
In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Doctor Kamalvand quite elegantly lays out the current challenges facing doctors…and therefore everyone else.

Is it not perhaps even a tad mad to take some of the most sophisticated thinkers around, and subject them to the stress of sleep deprivation (which some would argue is thee most effective means of torture) amidst the omnipresent stress of life and death decisions, and to that mixture, stir in a soupçon of job, contract, and career uncertainty?

This would appear to be a little bit like putting an expensive wristwatch in a microwave oven. At best, sparks will fly, and at worst, you may find that you’ll need to use the sun, moon and stars to plan your next few meetings.

Does it not seem really odd to you that we seem to penalise the very people who are the built-in heroic archetypes within our society?

Why is it that the professions that are so important for upholding and promoting a humane, healthy, intellectual and safe society are the very ones who appear to get penalised and treated so shoddily?

The doctors and nurses, the ambulance drivers, the police, the firemen, the teachers and the men and women who directly defend us. Why them? This seems to me to be like some kind of lunatic inversion.

And it doesn’t seem to matter which political party mouthpiece is mouthing, they all never seem to get it quite right or go far enough. What is stopping them? Who is voting for the bankers to become even richer? Not even a lot of the bankers these days I suspect.

So are we doomed to live in a dystopian present, where the good, the decent, the honest, the hardworking and the brave are penalised, whilst the fractional reserve lenders, the untaxed, and the sociopaths are glamorised, rewarded with given kudos for their latest great strategic thought?

I for one think not. We can do better than this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-shebby-kamalvand/junior-doctors-contract_b_8286172.html

The Volkswagen emissions scandal…what should we think?

    mike

The recent scandal surrounding the emissions from some Volkswagen vehicles is still generating headlines in the media, and no doubt will continue to do so, as it would seem that Europe as well as the U.S. may also be living under the cloud of corporate double dealing and nefarious cheat the test schemes. However, as sure as night follows day, the media wolf pack will move on, eager to feed our apparent and alleged insatiable need for some new shocking and/or tragic scenario. However, when the dust (and nitrogen oxide) has settled, do we simply write this off as ‘things that organisations do’, or accept that ‘they’re probably all up to something’?

Or instead do we conclude that things must and will change? It is perhaps long overdue that collectively we should see this much more as the exception than the norm, that the individuals behind this particular ‘scam’ have not only potentially threatened the health of thousands of people, but have also threatened the livlihood of thousands of individuals, and so they are not just a bunch of ‘naughty boys/gals’ (or in this case noxy boys/gals) but are morally reprehensible. If so, then we should expect much more from so many more individuals/leaders in so many more organisations/institutions. Honesty is the new sexy.

I have copied below a link to a video that I produced about this subject.

The Bank of England’s chief economist is bang on the money

    mike

The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane chief economist is bang on the money!
It is a couple of months now since Andrew Haldane suggested that shareholder power is leading to slower growth, and yet the shockwaves can still be felt. How utterly refreshing to hear someone with such potential ‘clout’ espouse such ear piercing common sense! Mr Haldane points out that in 1970, £10 out of each £100 profit was paid to shareholders (via dividends). Apparently, that figure today is between £60 and £70. Coupled with that, it would seem that in 1945 a share was held for approximately six months, and now it is approximately…six years! Andrew Haldane goes on to argue that the model of the shareholder dominated firm of the last century and a half, may well be doing us more harm than good. And meanwhile researchers at Stanford have concluded that pressure to meet quarterly earnings may be reducing R&D spend and negatively impacting U.S. growth by 0.1% per annum. Bravo Mr Haldane, bravo Stanford researchers.

At last, we are beginning to see the green shoots of pragmatic, balanced thinking. We must think longer term. We must think about sustainability. We must think about a fairer system of reward, lest we allow a truly dystopian ‘mash-up’ to manifest as the hunger games meets a zombie apocalypse, where a drooling set of jogging morons, eager to feast at the altar of avarice, literally eat us out of house and home!

A link to the original FT article is pasted below:

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