The Heart of Engagement

Showing Loyalty is Practice that Builds Trust

Mike Cook — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:16:55 -0800

“The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.”

Rensis Likert, American Educator and Organizational Psychologist

Rensis Likert was one of America’s pioneers in the field of organizational behavior? Chances are good he offered these words above sometime between 1940 and 1960, a good while ago. They seem to me to be as true today as ever even when you consider the changes in the basics relationship between many employees and their employers. It is commonly said these days that there is no longer any loyalty shown by employers towards employees…was there ever, really, or were we confusing paternalism with loyalty? I think loyalty in its pure form may just be lying there waiting for us to pick it up and put it to use as a tool for building sustainable performance.

There is nothing normative or judgmental in the way Rensis Likert expresses the power of loyalty here. This is pure pragmatism and group dynamics. Believe it; for the most part our business is a social system with an economic purpose, a community intentionally developed for a purpose, pragmatism in action. We are loyal to our company and to each other because it works towards producing the results we are seeking.

“Showing Loyalty” as a practice is one key to the kind of power we are seeking as managers. The community that supports the business purpose is a function of satisfying many social needs. integrity, recognition, gratitude and loyalty among them. Each piece of this practice is intended to reinforce and acknowledge the interdependence that underlies the success of the larger enterprise.

Consciously recognizing that whatever success the business has experienced is the product of the actions of many, not just a few employees is the foundation for this practice of loyalty. When we can stay present to this “fact” it is easy to realize that giving credit to the contribution of others is a reinforcing act and power building practice in itself. Who doesn’t want to be around people who readily recognize our contribution and thank us for what we have provided?

“Showing Loyalty” is most powerful yet may be tested when those we may be speaking of or about are not present. Can we discipline ourselves to always speak of someone else as if they were with us? Wow! Wouldn’t it change how we felt about each other if we knew that no one would ever say anything about us that they would not say in our presence? Would we not also be quick to want to return that loyalty in kind?

Questions for Reflection:

1) Scan your work group, peers, reports and manager. Are there instances where you have not been “true” to one or some of these people? Can you commit yourself to never speaking of or about them in any way other than how you would in their presence?

2) Scan your work group for opportunities that have been missed to recognize someone’s contribution and thank them for it. Take action if you do see the opportunity. Hint: often the last person we think of in this regard is our own manager.

Reprise:Emotional Immaturity Stands Between Many in the Workplace and Full Engagement

Mike Cook — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:40:24 -0800

“Employees will be unable to engage fully with their work at the levels needed today for sustained periods until the issue of emotional intelligence is adequately addressed as a key strategic issue by management.”

In virtually every management development program I have created or delivered in the past 25 years the point has been made that the greatest limitation facing managers today is the level of emotional intelligence of the people reporting to them. The fact of emotional intelligence, born out now by years of research and anecdotal references, continues to bedevil managers today. The problems sustained by this failure as well as their consequences continue to grow and be continually misdiagnosed as resulting from some other cause. And…a great, terrific, fabulous reward and recognition system will not resolve this issue.

It usually goes without saying but bears repeating here that business in general and certainly the experience of being at work today must be considered a contact sport.
As our economy has evolved over the last 25 years, the amount of contact has increased dramatically
Experience strongly suggests that the majority of people in our workforces remain unprepared to participate effectively in a game that requires significant personal initiative (self management).

To put it bluntly, the levels of interpersonal skill displayed by both employees and employers are insufficient to the current state of need for this proficiency. It is probably also very safe to say that many employers are not ready to participate with a workforce possessed of a high social intelligence quotient if this situation had somehow occurred (which it did not) as part of the evolutionary process.

The perpetuation of ugly engagement scores cited in major studies such as this one Mercer recently released, ‘What’s Working Around the World should really come as no surprise. This is an issue that apparently no one wants to own, including our institutions of secondary and higher education (colleges and universities) that have yet to make emotional intelligence a priority.

"Interpersonal communication and other so-called soft skills are what corporate recruiters crave most but find most elusive in M.B.A. graduates,"

-- Wall Street Journal

So we have unfortunate breakdown. Who is to blame, maybe nobody, at least for the problem itself?

Evolution may be a catch-all phrase when talking about how the economy has "morphed" over the years but one feature is worth considering; the process generally happens outside of our standard measurements of time and so changes often go unnoticed for extended periods. So we should really not be talking about who is to blame for making emotional intelligence so important, it just sort of happened. However, to allow the breakdown to go unaddressed…now we can start assigning blame.

A quick look back may serve a purpose here. The industrial economy offered the majority of people in the workforce

narrowly defined sets of tasks
high degrees of supervision and
limited individual discretionary action (We still do too much of this!)

Never mind whether this was good or bad; it was what it was and created the foundation for the standard of living we enjoy today. As the economy has proceeded along its path and we have been brought to where we are today certain unfortunate aspects of that industrial economy were carried over, including ways of thinking about management. Meanwhile what we need from employees has changed gradually yet dramatically. Many managers say now that they want more initiative, creativity and passion from those reporting to them. OK, but they seem to approach these desires as if they were merely additives to the compliance that was the hallmark of a prior time in the workplace like some sort of simple snap-on modules. There is no free lunch. If managers want initiative, passion and creativity they must be prepared to give something in exchange.

I say the expression of passion, creativity and initiative is there to be had but employers/managers need to be prepared to make the first move. This outcome begs for unprecedented changes in management practices, transformational education and investment in skill building .

Before patting yourself on the back and thinking that this posting is for someone other than you, ask yourself and honestly answer these questions:

Am I able to participate successfully in every conversational exchange without hesitation or caution or defensiveness?
Am I able to have the conversations I really need to have with my reports so I am optimizing their development as well as their productivity?
Do I ever see or suspect instances where my reports "hold back" with me even though I have repeatedly encouraged them to talk to me about everything?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you were probably being authentic. The question that remains is, "What is the price you are paying in terms of

1. Your own full engagement at work

2. Your own productivity

3. The level of engagement and productivity of those you are charged with developing

This is not so much an issue of answering a question as it is one of making a commitment. As managers, are we prepared to work as hard as needed and invest accordingly to bring the social intelligence of our workforce to the levels required to meet the demands for contact and complex thinking our organizations require to perform as they now must?

Fostering Environments that Invite Engagement: The High Cost of Seeing the Limits Rather Than the Possibilities

Mike Cook — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:15:12 -0800

“The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.”

Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg News, 01/14/2007

Few of us have ever missed hitting the barn by as much as Matthew Lynn did in January of 2007 when he wrote the piece entitled ‘Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late Defensive Move.’ I’ll ask you to take a look at this piece from a number of perspectives.

With your 2012 eyes simply enjoy the article for the sense of irony you experience as you read each argument Mr. Lynn outlines.
With your 2007 eyes (you must keep them somewhere!) stand alongside Mr. Lynn and imagine the world he was living in at the time he wrote his article.

Matthew Lynn was simply a columnist writing for a daily publication that focuses primarily on matters related to business, not technology. As you go through his column you’ll find clear references to the audience he believes he is addressing. Words like these, “…it is too early to start dumping your Nokia shares…” would seem to indicate that he knows the readers of Bloomberg Daily are investment oriented, financially motivated and management oriented. If he had been writing for another type of publication, ‘Wired’ for instance, he may have taken a different approach; actually it doesn’t sound like he is part of the ‘Wired’ readership either so that example may be a bit far fetched. But clearly he was writing for an audience that he thought he understood.

Now with an entirely different set of eyes see if you can imagine what the world would be like today if Matthew Lynn had been head of product development at Apple and the idea for the iPhone had been brought to him? Hard huh?
Now ask yourself how many improvements, much less paradigm busting ideas, get shot down by managers in your organization each year because when new ideas are presented they get viewed through eyes know their audience wants the future to look like the past?

Here’s the rub, Matthew Lynn still writes for Bloomberg Daily, he’s not a bad guy, he just couldn’t see the iPhone for what it was, all he could see was what it wasn’t and he knew nobody wanted that. Oh yes, and one more very important thing, nobody had to listen to what Mr. Lynn had to say, either then or now, Bloomberg News is very clear with their readership about that…

"… (Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)"

I am betting in your organization when you bring an idea to a manager and he/she doesn’t see the merits they don’t quickly follow up by saying something like, “But hey, I only work here and this is just my opinion, you should feel free to ask my boss what he thinks of your idea.”

Honestly, using Matthew Lynn’s column from 2007 is sort of a cheap trick, there are not that many iPhone ideas floating around any organization. But all good ideas don’t have to be as great as that, maybe it is just as important that all new ideas get a fair hearing by more than one set of eyes and ears. In my experience it is very engaging for employees to know their ideas will be given serious consideration. Grown ups know they will not get everything they want but knowing they were authentically listened to will keep them coming back.

Do you feel invited to present new ideas even when they don’t necessarily agree with past practices? How about those reporting to you?

Communicating Respect: Is the Language of Your Leadership Engaging?

Mike Cook — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:52:16 -0800

"Respect...is appreciation of the separateness of the other person, of the ways in which he or she is unique.” --Annie Gottlieb

As managers everything, we do/don't do, say/don't say, communicates to our reports. Are we conscious of what we are communicating?

Last week I re-posted a piece that was intended to focus attention on the need for management “authenticity” as one crucial element in the apparently elusive equation that paves the pathway for employee engagement. This week I look with you at another…

Respect; it may be more central to engagement than authenticity and it is certainly trickier to tackle since it hides cleverly within the folds of the enigma that is diversity.

Some years back I was approached by the CEO of an independent telephone company regarding a challenge he said he was experiencing motivating certain employees to “engage” with a new direction senior management wanted to be going. When I asked for specifics he said (Remember, this is a few years back!) that in an effort to capitalize on newly developed residential phone options management had decided that customer service representatives should begin making sales overtures to customers when they called in about their bills, service or whatever.

Once he described the situation he had my full attention. Putting myself in the position of those customer service reps. I asked him, “So this was your idea, right? This was not the reps. coming to you and suggesting they might take this on?” He confirmed my suspicion about the origin of the idea which led me to express my assumption that the reason for the call was that the plan was not unfolding as hoped for. “You got that right” he said, “We put in place what we think is an attractive incentive program but all we seem to be getting is a lot of pushback from the employees. We thought they would jump at the chance to make more money.”

So I asked him, “So in effect you were saying to the reps. that you know they are just like you, the managers, and are motivated by money. In other words they speak the same language as you do. What made you think that these reps. many of whom have been doing the job for over fifteen years, would find the extra money attractive or see themselves as just like you only doing different jobs? Did it occur to you that if money was a prime motivator they might have moved on by now?” Silence! Then he began, “I guess we just assumed that what motivated us as managers would motivate them as well. What can we do, the idea seems to make a lot of sense?” After a pause I said, “If it was me I'd start with an apology to the reps for assuming that they see themselves as the same as managers, they don't.I also don’t think you can plan for the reps to love this idea, more likely than not they are service minded not sales minded. I suspect that some work needs to be done to demonstrate that the products are a benefit to the customer as much as the sale benefits the company. The other thing I suggest is to put the plan on hold for a bit and talk with the reps. about both the need the business has and your interest in knowing what would be an incentive for them.” So the CEO went back to work with his managers and developed a communication program for the reps. based on the mutual benefit premise I had suggested. They had a “grown up” conversation about recognizing that the reps may not like the plan but it was what they were going to be asked to take on anyway for the best interest of the company. They also sat down with the reps and asked about what incentives might make a difference. He reported back that he and the managers were surprised to find that the reps. said that additional time off, a Friday afternoon or trip to one of their kid’s assemblies or going with them to the dentist in combination with some monetary compensation would be a much more attractive plan. As I suspected the majority of the reps. reported that they were probably never going to like the idea but if it was what the company needed they would give it their best as a function of their dedication.

I know, this probably seems like too simple a story or something from another time, not now. Not so fast my sophisticated friends! Do you see that this story was rooted in a lack of respect? I know we tend to think of disrespect as something intentional. In fact it may be something unconscious as in this case. And we continue to make many of the same errors of assumption today, even those companies that have put in place recognition programs.

Respect is not necessarily polite, civil or even courteous. You can be politely, civilly and very courteously disrespectful…as I am sure you have experienced yourself.

Respect calls for knowledge of the other, curiosity for what matters to them, a willingness to frame a conversation in terms that are familiar, safe and meaningful. Do this and I can promise attentive listeners, don’t do this…well you may already know how that goes!

Where may the language you are using with your employees be filled with assumption and offending rather than engaging them?

Revisiting the "Dude": It is Springtime for Engagement

Mike Cook — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:51:32 -0800

What with Springtime clearly upon us here in the Northwest the time feels right for a visit with an old friend. This week I offer a post from just over two years back in hopes it will provide some fresh perspective on employee engagement.

“The Dude!”, “El Duderino”, “His Dudeness”, of course there is only one man who answers to all these titles and he is Jeffrey Lebowski, central character of the Coen brothers film classic of 1998, The Big Lebowski. This week I offer “The Dude” as one of the more unlikely yet profound mentors for those of us involved with the workplace environmental factors that contribute to employee engagement.

I recall a Saturday evening not long ago when as my wife and I sat having dinner in a Mt. Vernon, WA public house the restaurant was suddenly flooded with a cadre of men in blue bathrobes, shorts, flip-flops and dark glasses, and it was January in northern Washington! (The local classic film theatre had just shown The Big Lebowski and in apt homage this crowd had attended in costume) The following morning as I sat in services at my church of preference listening to harrowing stories of women around the world overcoming cultural oppression it occurred to me that what I had received the previous evening was a sign! It is time for a post on authenticity* and there is no one who had a keener sense of the truly authentic than Jeffrey Lebowski aka “The Dude”.

If I had wondered further whether or not this post would be timely I had only to do a quick blog search on that Sunday evening on “The Dude” and was informed that ‘The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski’ was opening that spring off-Broadway in NYC with an initial six week schedule. Yes, the signs favoring a focus on authenticity were many indeed.

When he first came into our lives, “The Dude” was not well received either by critics or at the box office, and even to this day he suffers what might be considered an image problem, he is not a mainstream character. Many of us, upstanding, solid character types might have considerable difficulty admitting our identification with a man who at first exposure seems at best the classic “slacker” our parents raised us not to be. And so this prophet of our times has languished in something of a cinematic obscurity slowly gathering what is known as a cult following that now conducts an annual conclave in Louisville, Kentucky known as Lebowski Fest, currently heading into its11^th annual renewal from austere beginnings in 2002. What stronger endorsement can there be for authenticity and efficacy than sustained reverence and participation?

Jeffrey Lebowski … everything about the man serves as an outright rejection of that in us and our organizations which is not authentic. His personification may be somewhat easier to address if we consider him not literally but as an extreme expression of every employee if they did not fear retribution for their honesty. “The Dude” eliminates the oppression of this fear by staying gainfully unemployed and simply not giving a crap. For many of us this is just too much honesty! Absent his respect “The Dude”, like many of our employees, is not above using us for his own purposes thereby perpetuating the notion that in fact the best we can expect from that relationship called employment is a sort of sad, smirking conspiracy where "I’ll use you and you’ll use me" and mediocre is what we’ll settle for, as long as we make our numbers.

If we cannot take our guidance from a man who shops for milk at midnight in his bathrobe then maybe we’ll listen to legitimate types, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. These are the authors of‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’** (And is it such a big leap to also say further, what employees really want?) Gilmore and Pine go to great pains in their book to expose us to what “The Dude” simply lived as a matter of personal expression. “His Dudeness” stated an unequivocal rejection of the inauthentic as an outright form of violence with the memorable words “This aggression will not stand Man!” As academics and researchers, Gilmore and Pine do provide legitimacy to the conversation as well as taxonomy of the condition under discussion here;

Natural authenticity- raw, of-the-earth, rustic, stripped down and best of all sustainable
Original authenticity- the first of its kind
Exceptional authenticity- stresses uniqueness, the aesthetic appeal, not like anything else
Referential authenticity- evokes an iconic time, person, group or place
Influential authenticity-implies or provokes change

If your place of work does not have the appeal of one or more of these categories you can be sure neither Gilmore, Pine nor “The Dude” would be found there, at least not for very long.

· I you had your employees rate your work place for “authenticity” on a 10 point scale what score do you think they would give?

· How about if they rated your authenticity ?

* Many thanks to Dwight Garner, book critic for the New York Times. His piece on November 29th, 2009 was the original inspiration for this post.

What About Bob? Helping Managers Find and Fix Their Flaws

Mike Cook — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:39:41 -0800

A tip of my hat goes to Mike Brown of Progressive Business Publications for the subject of this week’s post. Mike and I were on the phone Monday doing the preliminaries for a webinar I was delivering for his organization that day. During our call the conversation turned to my relatively slow acceptance of all things technical and Mike suggested that I acknowledge when I made “baby steps” and not worry about whether I might ever become an eager adopter like folks I seem to encounter at every turn.

As you of course know, great minds often laugh at the same jokes and Mike’s reference to “baby steps” led us quickly to a reflection on one of our mutually favorite comedy films, the 1991 ‘What About Bob’ with Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. ‘Baby Steps’ was the title of the book published by the Dreyfuss character, Dr. Marvin, which he of course recommended to his patient Bob who was played by Bill Murray. So Mike and I had our little moment of Zen together that morning.

Later in the day I continued to reflect back on the “baby steps” reference. Being something of a natural lateral thinker it wasn’t long before I started making connections between the notion of “baby steps” and the development of managers.

If your working career has been anything like mine , whether involved as I am in management development or not, you have experience with managers, sometimes very senior managers, who might appear to be like Bill Murray’s “Bob” (video clip) and

Seem to be oblivious to or uncaring about the negative impact they have on those around them
To the average observer appear to do as much damage as they do good; sometimes not even
Have no known “fan club” but plenty of people who see them as damaged goods, yet they are somehow protected by unseen forces and
Display little or no interest in reflecting on their thinking processes or behavior patterns,or receiving any feedback about them.

Here’s the deal on these people, they are not like “Bob.” He was lacking in guile and basically pure of heart. Though he stumbled through the process of life he was willing to look at himself as honestly as possible at any moment and make the little changes that were recommended to him. And when he could see that he had offended he stepped up and tried to make amends.

I trust your judgment, if you think people like those I have just described are “tools” , in one of the several slang senses of that word, they probably are and you should be mindful of the fact that they are being protected by unseen forces and give them a wide birth. You tangle with them at your own risk.

On the other hand there are some “Bob” like characters in every organization. Some of these are very high potential people as well and here we do well to focus our attention.

You may recall that I’ve mentioned ‘Immunity to Change’ here before. The book and the process by the same name both describe and unfold a powerful approach to professional/personal development literally based on “baby steps.”

What’s more uncomfortable than…

Seeing someone with obvious high potential and leadership capability get tangled in their own emotions and rendered ineffective?
Witnessing a manager, senior or otherwise, drive their followers away with an unconscious and obviously harmful habitual behavior?
Seeing a bright talent at any age passed over for advancement because they haven’t been properly mentored about some quirk of personality that puts others off?
Conducting an exit interview with someone you really hate to see go but will anyway because they lack the ability to see how to make fundamental adaptations to their behaviors and no one got to them in time?

If these last references ring any bells and I hope they do, painfully, I recommend that you read a recent piece from the New York Times on March 17^th titled ‘Helping Managers Find and Fix Their Flaws’ by Natasha Singer.

Back to my own process for a moment…everything I tried to create a link to the Times article by Natasha Singer ended up at the Pay Wall so I am providing the link to the Minds at Work Newsletter where a link to the article is imbedded as their third entry. Like I said, I am something of a lateral thinker, it doesn’t have to be pretty; it just has to work. Baby Steps!

13 Guidelines for Staying Engaged...

Mike Cook — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:24:45 -0800

Using Enlightened Self Interest to Stay Sane, Productive and Amused at Work

"Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."

Mary Oliver

Here are some guidelines I have developed or stolen and used at work for the past 39 years to stay clear headed about what was going on in the places where I have worked. I have published these before but I just re-read them and found myself refreshed. You may enjoy them as well.

# 1 Whoever sees it first gets to do it. This is the principle of Responsibility. There is no truth to the statement "That's not my job." until you say so.
# 2 Nobody likes anybody's ideas better than there own. This is the principle of Participation. Everyone wants to play, they will play your game if they can play their way, let them.
# 3 Organizational life will provide as much nonsense as you can deal with, do not contribute to the confusion. This is the principle of Persistence. There is normally nothing and no one assigned to your success at work. At the same time, there is nothing and no one assigned to make sure you do not succeed. Whining is not a good substitute for performance and it adds to the mess.
# 4 Do not confuse your beliefs with the truth, it makes you stupid and an annoyance to other people. This is the principle of Perspective. Your "point of view" is valid, as "your point of view." As "the point" it makes life at work really crummy for everyone concerned. Behave yourself!
# 5 When you are not going to deliver communicate. When you do not deliver, apologize. When someone fails to deliver or communicate with you, forgive. This is the principle of Traveling Light. The work is hard enough all by itself, don't collect or create baggage.
# 6 If you need to understand, pick up the phone or walk down the hall. This is the principle of Managing Mutual Understanding. Never, never, never leave your motive or your intent up to someone's imagination or the limitations of email. If you do chances are good they’ll think worst. Communication is a process inside a relationship inside a context, not a transaction.
# 7 Give up your right to say, "I told you so!" This is the principle of Partnership. If you don't say it when you first see it, forget it, and get back to work.
# 8 We are all, as individuals, in over our heads. That's just the way it is. The greatest barrier we all face to performance, productivity and satisfaction in our organizations is our unwillingness to ask for help.
# 9 Be ready to walk away today. Given the overall uncertainty of the times in which we live and the general condition of nothing being guaranteed you do yourself enormous honor by being prepared to leave your current employment at a moment’s notice. This means to handle your personal finances and your ego with the primary objectives of protecting your confidence and ensuring the comfort of your family.
# 10 Keep your expectations consistent with only what have been promised. Anything else you get is a bonus and you have no basis for ever expecting to get it again. Everyone, you included, is dealing with multiple commitments and multiple customers. Do yourself a favor, recognize your own intent to meet everyone’s needs and notice how often you say “yes” just so you can get back to work. Then notice that no matter how hard you work someone always ends up disappointed and you end up apologizing. Hopefully you’ll come to realize you’ve been handing out “I’ll do my best” notes, not promises. If you stop it and ask those around you to do the same you’ll see a big change for the better.
# 11 Limit your opinions to only those things to which you are truly committed and prepared to take action on. This is so hard; we really live like we have a right to our opinions about everything. It is hard enough to keep our emotions in check and remain productive and clear headed without constantly stoking the fires of upset by tossing opinion after opinion onto the pile.
# 12 Toughen Up. Life is a contact sport anyway, organizational life is worse! It is not personal and you will get injured no matter how hard you try to be invisible. Be prepared to heal quickly and throw an elbow yourself once in a while just to let others know you are there.
# 13 Remember. . . If you can't laugh at yourself, someone else will always be
happy to do it for you." Embrace the interdependence; it is the path to both success and satisfaction.

What would you add to the list?

Learning is the Objective, How Best to Get There is the Question?

Mike Cook — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:45:46 -0800

The car I was riding in pulled up to the curb in front of my house. It was a chilly Michigan evening in March, 1960. As I was opening the door to get out, my basketball coach who was dropping me off after practice asked an unexpected question: “So Mike, how do you think our teams will do next year?” We had one game left in a season where we were going to win just over half our games, our football team had done about the same and with baseball just around the corner I thought we might do just about as well. But I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, “Are you asking me about next year already, we haven’t even started baseball?” He looked straight ahead into the darkness of the evening through the windshield and without looking at me he said, “I think we are going to win all three championships next year.”

What he was saying was about as realistic to me as if he had said that a man would land on the moon within the next ten years. My middle school had been around since the late 1920’s and as far as anyone new we had never won even a single sports championship, much less all three in one season. I couldn’t get out of the car without asking, “What makes you think we’ll win even one championship, especially when we haven’t even finished the year?” Then he did look at me, “It’s the rate at which the players are learning and the fact that we don’t let the losses get us down. If you could see the season like I do, like the entire progression not just the single games as they are being played you’d be able to see what I mean. Our teams are progressing much faster than the others and even though our records are just about .500 now by the time next year rolls around we’ll be very hard to beat.”

I went in the house that evening and made a note to myself to remember what he had said. Our school did in fact go on to win all three championships the next year, a set of experiences that have stayed with me to this day. And while those memories have been great to have the conversation we had that evening in the car in 1960 is what has really stayed with me. It has become a cornerstone of both the way I managed my company and delivered my consulting services. What he shared with me that evening permanently transformed my relationship to learning and performance.

A lot has been written over the years about organizational learning and especially learning organizations since Peter Senge first coined the term and the theory in The Fifth Discipline back in 1994.Senge’s work has had a telling influence on the conversations about learning in organizations but I am not sure how much his thinking has influenced the value of learning in organizations. In my view organizations are still more focused on training than they are on learning. If you ask me why I’d say because training can be measured in terms of dollars spent and activity generated. Learning is a much tougher substance to measure. In fact I don’t think it can be measured apart from performance.

What I took from the conversation that evening back in 1960 might be expressed in a formula as follows as regards organizational performance

Current Results + Learning = Possibility for Future Performance (If all our coach had looked at or valued was results he would not have been very optimistic that March evening.

Learning occurs in and is measured by future performance and not by testing. If this notion has merit then much of what we have been doing in offering training/development experiences without necessarily noting the performance it was intended to impact.

I’ve come to understand over the years that my coach was not simply referring to the improvement he saw in practices (formal learning); he was talking about the day to day learning that took place between the practices and the games. He was talking about the game performances but also the conversations before and after the games. He was talking about who we were being as much as anything we were doing. He was watching the informal as well as the formal process knowing that they were interdependent and served each other.

How does your organization capitalize on informal learning, is it even recognized and valued?

Marcia Conner (If you don’t know her you should!) offers us five ways to capitalize on informal learning

List all of the informal programs occurring in your organization. Post them for others to consider, review and add suggestions.

Create peer-to-peer sessions where employees informally share experiences in a structured, facilitated roundtable format.

Support informal communities of practice. Create others where you see there are gaps.

Reconsider and review your meetings. What are they really offering? Maybe time would be better spent on informal learning than status updating.

Find more opportunities for accidental learning and make them a topic of conversation.

How does your organization demonstrate regard for informal learning?
How can your organization recognize and promote more informal learning?

There Ain't No Magic Til the Fishmongers Show Up! Who Gives Employees Permission to Engage?

Mike Cook — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:00:38 -0800

When you say you want something that you could have and yet you persist in not getting it, you are either lying to yourself or working on the wrong things to get where you want to go.

The persistence of low levels (by any standards) of employee engagement is in my mind one of these types of issues. We could have higher levels of employee engagement but we are not getting them. At least we have not seen the needle move significantly on these measurements since we began to get serious about it back in the mid- 1990’s.

So which is it then? Are we lying to ourselves or working on the wrong things? In the final analysis it probably ends up being some of both. The larger question is perhaps “When will we have had enough of the way it is?”

Very early one morning back in October of 2010, I was standing in the entrance to the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle waiting to begin my “World Famous” immersion experience alongside the fish mongers who have in fact made themselves world famous. Within a few minutes the team leader had convened us, a small group of outsiders there for the day, with the morning shift of the fish mongers and we were off!

It was indeed a remarkable experience working alongside one of the most engaged group of people I had ever had the pleasure of meeting. We hauled boxes of fish packed in ice from the freezer, we scraped and readied the ice displays for the day and stacked the fish neatly so they would have the most customer appeal. We were all covered in fish juice and would certainly smell like fishmongers for hours. This was indeed glorious!

And then I had a thought. So this is it? Now that the fish were stacked alongside the crab, the specials were noted with handwritten signs and the floor was hosed clean, tomorrow would look pretty much the same as today. At the end of the day, pack up the unsold fish, next morning unpack it, rake the ice displays, stack the fish, etc. Day after day, 363 days a year, year after year. This! This was the place people made training films about; this was the place tourists came to visit as a “must see” when you are in Seattle; this was the place other businesses holding meetings in Seattle had their managers visit to see what engagement looks like.

Whether obvious or not, what has made the Pike Place Fish Market world famous is not the fish, though it is of the highest quality. It is the “show” ~ the interaction of the market staff with each other and the customers ~ that brings people in from thousands of miles away. But it wasn’t always so, and that is the real story and why I recommend reading ‘When Fish Fly…’ by John Yokoyama , the owner of Pike Place Fish Market.

By his own admission, back in 1986 John Yokoyama was facing the pain of impending bankruptcy when he teamed with a business consultant, Jim Bergquist, and began the turnaround that has now become world famous. There is a lot to the process these two began in 1986 and reading about it in John’s own words is much more informative than any of the training films that have been made about the market. (These films all convey the sizzle of the story but leave out the real transformational shift that John had to personally experience in order for the possibility of the current day market to be created).

I am well acquainted with Jim Bergquist and know John Yokoyama through Jim so I am privileged to have knowledge of the background to this story that most people do not. As much as anything, John, through his relationship with Jim, created the possibility for the modern day Pike Place Fish Market by giving Jim and then his staff permission to invent a future to engage with, something worth the time of their lives! Keep in mind, this is a fish market, buy the fish, stack the fish, sell the fish; start over.

You may say to yourself that “giving permission” doesn’t show up in any of the books you’ve read about improving employee engagement. You’d be right, or at least as far as I know it hasn’t specifically shown up. Probably the closest to this notion I have seen recently is in reading Gary Hamel’s newest book, ‘What Matters Now…’

From what I can tell about how most organizations currently work, there is not really room for employee engagement to become an authentic pursuit, unless someone gives permission i. e. relinquishes control at least to some degree.

You may well ask, “Permission for what exactly?” I would say permission to do whatever it takes to make the work engaging and still deliver to management what they have promised … a reasonable return on investment.

Hamel, in his book, says that as managers we have been getting by for years rewarding diligence, obedience and expertise. The future, in his view, will belong to companies that find ways to unleash creativity, passion and initiative.

I’d love to think that some day management will see the light and recognize that a new day has dawned. I am not holding my breath. Rather than hope for enlightenment, I think I’ll put my money on the pain experienced by John Yokoyama.

Where can you give yourself permission or give it in order to create conditions for greater employee engagement?

As the Names Change the Game Stays the Same: Business Success is a Function of Relationship Competence

Mike Cook — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:08:35 -0800

So what’s going on? What’s your game, global, virtual, knowledge, experience or value based? OK, so some of us work at home, some work across the planet but aren’t there some simple truths about people at work (wherever they are) that we have put off accepting for as long as we could. Here, let’s try this…

Anything of benefit to more than one person takes more than one person to accomplish.

Is that really so hard to accept? Apparently!

Or how about these words from a website promoting an on-line collaboration/project management tool they have developed… The post is titled ‘There is Nothing Virtual About On-line Project Management”…

“The most important thing to remember is that in any successful project,success is underpinned by the connection of people, and the influence, input and decision making they forge together. This can only be achieved with productive working relationships, based on trust and the understanding of what each member of the team is bringing to the table.”

Duh!........... Was that too harsh?

Then there are quotes like these, both of which appeared in a recent blog post by Louise Altman…

"Now science teaches me that my actions are constrained by the relationships I find myself in and that I have to account for how others think."

Management Rewired, Charles S. Jacobs, 2010

“Teams of diverse people cannot be thrown together. They must be deliberately put together to minimize the potential for threat responses. Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled. These qualities develop only when people’s brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and social interaction.”

David Rock, ‘Your Brain at Work’, 2009

Wow, it's like we just woke up after two millenia of slumber to realize that it is not simply the people, it is the relationships they forge and sustain that are the key ingredient of organizational success...well some are waking up.

So let’s make an agreement, let’s agree to stop calling the mastery of relationships at work the “soft stuff” and call it what it really is, the “hardest stuff”. There is an art to relationship competence; there is a science to it. The truths about successful relationship construction are more than worthy of study, they are necessary to master, not by once attending a two day workshop on “conflict management” or “how to handle difficult people” but with an approach that is ongoing, regular, with diligence like Geoff Colvin spoke about when he popularized the term Deliberate Practice in ‘Talent is Overrated.

Look, there is even an institute for Social Capital Research where energy and study has been put into defining “Social Capital” and the means for the acquisition of this scarce and transitory resource. An institute for gosh sakes! How much more proof do you need that it is time to invest in relationship mastery?

And of course from think tanks like this we get actionable direction like so…

“Social capital is about the value of social networks, bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity.”

Yikes!

Look…we are not very good at needing each other. I know that word “need” gives you the willies so let me be more specific, we are not very good at authentically, honestly depending on each other. Try this, try saying to a co-worker or manager or direct report sometime soon, “I really need you.” I bet you cannot do it without sweaty palms.

The sweaty palms should be the give away that you have something to learn here.

"I Don't Care What You Look Like, I Care About What You Contribute!"

Mike Cook — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:09:45 -0800

Sunday night I rolled into Gibson’s Bar on South Lamar in Austin, TX around 7:30PM looking for a happy hour function hosted by The Starr Conspiracy and Quantum Workplace. You guessed it! I am attending a conference and these were two of the many vendors participating in the first ever conference hosted by TLNT.com and its parent company ERE Media, Inc.

This is ostensibly an HR conference but unlike any I have ever seen and probably a prototype for similar conferences that you may be getting invited to soon. There is not a lot going on about compliance or process and a lot of conversation about HR producing and being associated directly with business results.

Just to get this off my chest, being here makes me realize my age in a way I have not before. Just last week I had signed up for Medicare but even that did not have the gravitas of being in a room full of vibrant young HR professionals who can’t stop talking about their issues, or products, depending on their role here and have obviously tremendous appetites for whatever can assist them in their quest to build talent driven organizations.

I need to get out more!

So…back to Sunday night, as soon as I arrived I looked around for my friend Ron Thomas, a guy I have known on-line for a couple of years but never met in person. I found him easily enough and true to his nature Ron immediately began introducing me around. First he had me meet David Manaster , CEO and Founder of ERE Media. David I later learned through watching him shoot photographs of most of the presenters in action and also a generous conversation at the conclusion of the first day’s proceedings is a CEO who clearly understands that he is the least important person in the room. He spent all his time making sure the conference was going well for everyone attending and honestly if Ron hadn’t introduced us Sunday evening I would have thought he was part of the logistics team since his dress of plaid shirt and jeans was not taken from the dress for success tradition.

Right after I shook hands with David I turned and Ron was already pointing me towards another guy I would have sought out, a waiter, so I could order a drink. I found myself standing in front of a guy in his late 30’s, maybe early 40’s spiked hair and goatee, clearly a career musician filling in his income stream by working a second job at Gibson’s. Except that’s not what he was doing. This was Jim Knight, Senior Director of Training for Hard Rock International.

From the program guide I knew that Jim was going to be presenting at the conference but hadn’t imagined he might look anything like this. He is the Hard Rock experience personified.

I don’t know about you but I've had my Hard Rock experiences, twenty years ago, but I came to find in talking with Jim that they are way outdated and today’s Hard Rock, though still true to its rock and roll origins has been completely updated and Jim’s outward experience was simply one expression of the modernization of a well recognized brand. By the time I finished my conversation with Jim on Sunday night I couldn’t wait to see him in front of the crowd and he did not disappoint.

In his presentation Jim told us a lot about they way they do things at Hard Rock to insure that they hire the right people to create the experiences they are looking for in their cafes, casinos and resorts. Things like every new hire going through a minimum of three interviews with three different levels of management and each interview having its own guide that is actually followed by every manager. Whoa! Imagine this level of attention being paid to people that are going to be busing tables? Would that happen in the parallel positions in your organization?

In an hour and a half Jim took us through an inspiring array of training tools that he and his staff have developed for a potential workforce that he says has these characteristics:

Individuality is a priority
They are risk takers
Visual Learners
Short attention spans
Technology savvy
Socially Conscious
Want to do meaningful work

You may recognize this description from your own recruiting efforts…there are the millenials.

His presentation was energetic, fast paced, highly visual, made use of a variety of technology tools, spoke to us at a profound level and in fact was everything he said it takes to recruit, hire and retain a millennial workforce. He knows how to speak to his target audience and it was an object lesson for me.

Oh yes, and one more thing Jim said, that I can’t get out of my head, and he repeated this more than once about looking for the right people to work at Hard Rock…

...“I don’t care what you look like; I care what you have to contribute!”

I loved that, he isn’t looking for a compliant attitude as his first sign of employability.

What is it like to hire people who don’t need to be there? It can't suck to work there.

Compassionate Collaboration May be the New Rugged Individualism

Mike Cook — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:41:07 -0800

Some years back I signed on as a guest speaker on the Vistage circuit. If you don’t know anything about Vistage, it is a worldwide organization made up of CEO’s from smaller sized businesses who meet regularly to advance their business acumen and work with each other on the multitude of thorny issues of owning a business. A requirement of membership is a willingness to be transparent with the other members of your group about what goes on in our business.

The transparency requirement is a really big deal. Small business owners are notorious for being loners. This fact alone may be a significant contributor to the reasonably high failure rate experienced in the small business sector. *

* Depending on whom you ask the rate of failure for new business runs anywhere from 35-50% in the first five years after opening

Let me be clear that this is not a Vistage commercial. However, the fact that this organization has been around for over 50 years, continues to grow, and that it has many imitators makes its principles and practices worthy of examination by those of us who toil in the gardens of the larger organizations.

Surely there are circumstances within larger corporate environments that allow for the application of the successful practices from the realm of the smaller enterprise.

Most of us are familiar with the inefficiencies and seemingly built-in, counterproductive aspects of large organization operating models. “Silos” , a term used with a decidedly negative connotation immediately comes to mind. Consider these words from David Rock, himself a corporate coach...

“...Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled.
These qualities develop only when people’s brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and social interaction.”
from ‘Your Brain at Work’

Hundreds of articles and books have been written on what to do about the limiting effects of silos and many attack the traditional organizational hierarchy as the primary antagonist. After looking at David Rock’s work for some months, recently reading a lengthy article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker, ‘Groupthink: The Science of the Team Effort’ and another much less lengthy piece by Daniel Pink titled ‘Employees Are Faster and More Creative When Solving Other People’s Problems’ I am now of the mind that we have been looking in the wrong place the try to solve the problem.

Maybe the issue has never been the hierarchy, or at least not totally? Maybe, as can be inferred from David Rock's work, hierarchy has been a convenient foil for the inherent mistrust our brains experience when presented with occasions to meet or work with people who are "strange" to us.

What if by not understanding this basic human trait we have failed to sufficiently evolve organizational design to match the types of information flows our organizations need now. Think back…our organizational models were created when almost all product or service design work could be done by a limited number of people requiring larger numbers of people for production purposes only. For those times the simple hierarchy sufficed and to some extent protected us from each other. Today it is often difficult to distinguish design from production as so much of both kinds of work are done simultaneously and in real time.

Interject into this new set of circumstances the creatures we are as described by David Rock and we can see at least some of why the stalemates continually occur.

Recently I have been experimenting in larger organizations with a design for intentional collaboration on day to day issues based on my observations of small business owners working together willingly and compassionately to resolve each other’s issues. This experimental design is intended to counteract the unintentionally limiting consequences of simple hierarchy. In a pilot for this design in a company that offers high technology products and services I have assembled three groups of mid-level managers who are clearly interdependent and we are employing a version of the small business owner collaborative model that has proven so effective.

The initial pilots are designed for six months. Managers were selected to work in groups of nine to twelve based on their observed level of collaborative need for each other. The managers were then allowed to examine their placement and self-adjust into other groups if it made more sense to them. These groups which I am calling “collaboratives” are meeting once each month for four hours for the six month pilot. During the sessions we are covering various elements of basic management development for about two hours and then, more importantly we are having the entire group work together for about two hours to address a real time problem one of the group members is facing.

As David Rock might anticipate, even though these people work alongside each other and have for some time, we are off to something of a slow start when it comes to opening up to colleagues about the challenges they are stuck with.

What I am hoping for are some outcomes that resemble those described in the article by Jonah Lehrer that took place in Building 20 at MIT back in the day, though perhaps not as dramatic. Already after two sessions the small groups are meeting unassigned on their own initiative.

We’ll soon see for sure but almost anything beats the need to live with the limitations experienced by managers hiding behind hierarchy, posing as rugged individuals when they may well be just timid weenies!

Would you be willing to allow your reports to meet regularly with their collaborators in other departments and simply take action as they see it is needed?

Collaborate; that Looks Like it Might Hurt? Can't I Just Cooperate?: Managing for Engagement

Mike Cook — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:41:03 -0800

This past Sunday afternoon I was fortunate enough to be able to have lunch with my good friend Dwight Frindt. I have known Dwight for over twenty years but since we’ve always lived in different parts of the country our times spent in person have usually been organized by our shared commitments to The Hunger Project or The Pachamama Alliance. Since I moved to the west coast six years ago we’ve been able to get together a bit more frequently but still never enough to satisfy me.

Dwight is one of those people with an insatiable curiosity about what it takes to allow both people and organizations to reach their highest potential. Aside from a shared interest in supporting groups with very large social visions this is another interest we share in common. So Sunday when we got onto the topic of “collaboration” in the workplace the conversation consumed two hours and could easily have kept going except Dwight had a plane to catch.

For Dwight the topic was particularly timely. He is one of the elder statesmen in the Vistage International network. Vistage, as you may or may not know, is one of the most successful of the peer coaching networks for small business CEO’s, having been around for over 50 years and Dwight has been around Vistage for over 20 of those years.

Among other things Dwight has a responsibility for the success of newly formed CEO groups in Seattle, WA, Portland, OR and Orange County, CA. He expressed a certain amount of frustration in being able to have the coaches in these new groups understand that the real key to sustaining a successful group was having the members relinquish their myopic obsession with the success of their own business and become open to the concerns and interests of the other group members. “The group coaches continually confuse cooperation with collaboration, like somehow being willing to listen politely to a member report on their business and the issues they were facing was the same as really getting involved with that business owner in resolving their issues.” It seems that letting go of our own agenda for the possibility of something even greater doesn't always look that attractive.

Right about now many of you reading this may already be asking yourself, “Why spend time on this tired topic, haven’t we covered this ground before and maybe to death?” I say no, and here’s why. We are afraid to collaborate and we continually put it off and defend and limit ourselves with cooperative behavior.

Fear is the primary barrier to collaboration in our places of work and mainly because collaboration implies vulnerability and we, all of us, have spent years developing measures to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of our colleagues at work. We are so good at these methods of protection that we cannot ourselves often distinguish between the minimal levels of “cooperation” we have learned to survive with and true collaboration. To make this distinction just a bit clearer, to wipe some of the smudge from the window of recognition, I’d invite you to review David Wedaman’s posting to his own blog on January 12^th this year aptly titled, ‘Liaisons, Collaboration, Cooperation and Soup.’

David Wedaman works in a very different environment than where Dwight and I most frequently find ourselves but his thoughts clearly echo Dwight’s own from his 2010 posting ‘Issues of Collaboration’.

What I find most provocative about attempts to collaborate or promote collaboration is captured in these words from the Wedaman piece…

“Collaboration (and learning in general) is anxiety producing.”

Correspondingly what I find most of us are challenged by when faced with a situation calling for collaboration is captured here in Dwight’s words…

“...to become truly collaborative there are some critical pieces that must be put into place … Participants surrender their own protective barriers and come with a commitment to create an essential atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, and safety…”

So, given the absolute, irrefutable necessity we are all faced with these days to collaborate why do we continue to hesitate? My guess, what we’ve done historically in many cases is engage in cooperation begrudgingly. The time has past when we can make any legitimate argument for anything other than a full embracing of the reality that cooperation and collaboration are inextricably linked and admit to ourselves that we have still a lot to learn and it is high time for the learning to begin.

Where do you see yourself or your own reports settling for cooperation where collaboration is called for?

Work-Cations™ and Mexican Customer Service

Mike Cook — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:13:47 -0800

He said, “Wouldn’t it be great to take off for someplace warm for a while this winter?”

She said, “I think so too. What do you have in mind?”

He said, “I was thinking of Mexico but if we go I want to stay at least two weeks.”

She said, “I can’t be gone that long, I need to be working.”

He said, “Well so do I but what if we could find a place with an internet connection so we’d stay in touch?”

She said, “That’s great but what about phone service?”

He said, “I’ve got us covered with Magic Jack, I can buy international minutes at low rates…

Before this ends up sounding like a commercial for a phone service or a travel agency, let me tell you that I have written my last two posts from La Paz, Mexico, where we have been staying for the last 17 days. We’ve had a great time. Rather than pretend we were on vacation and sneak peeks at our email everyday and feel guilty we just worked each morning from 7AM to noon and then set off for exploration the rest of the day.

I travel a lot for my work with companies around the US and for the past several years our “vacations” have been used to visit our several children and grandchildren around the country. No complaints of course but this trip was something special, something we’d heard that other people do but had never tried for ourselves. It has worked out brilliantly, so brilliantly in fact that we trademarked the name for future adventures. Just kidding about the trademark but it has been an eye opener to see how relatively easy it has been for both of us to stay up on our work and address some leisure action at the same time. “Work-Cation” We really like the sound of that and it captures the last two plus weeks perfectly because now there will not be that pile up of emails to answer or phone calls to return as we’ve stayed right up to date with everything.

And I need to make special mention of the people of La Paz, Mexico and the surrounding area. I think many people in the US have a very slanted view of the Mexican people based on limited to no first hand experience of what the people of Mexico are like when you meet them in their own country.

From the very first evening we arrived, we were the “fish out of water.” Neither my wife nor I speak Spanish beyond the conventions of “Hola!”, “Gracias!”, “Buenas Noches!” and “Yo no hablo Espanol!,” which I used repeatedly throughout our stay. Our experience of the warmth and customer orientation of the average Mexican citizen began upon our arrival in the airport in San Jose del Cabo and continued until the waiter in the beach side restaurant where we watched the Super Bowl gave me a “fist bump” on our way out the door. We found only a limited number of people who spoke fluent English, but everyone we asked for help would not quit until we had what we needed and this included sign language, drawing pictures and sketching out maps. We stopped people on the street, in stores, in the markets and gas stations and once even in a dark alley. No matter, they acted like all they had to do was help us out.

The extreme example of this was Arturo, an assistant manager at the local Mega supermarket. We met him in the produce department on our first trip into the store and he personally escorted us throughout the store, helped us get acquainted with the location of various items and translated for us when we went to the butcher and deli counters. While we were in La Paz, we made five more trips to the store and each time Arturo noticed we were there and made sure we did not leave without finding everything we had come in for and none of this was because we asked. He insisted on helping us.

It may seem trivial to report in this space on an experience that sounds a bit like a travel log but as someone who spends a lot of time focused on how organizations work, I found this town of 200,000+ to be a working wonder. We noted literally thousands of small businesses, retailers of just about anything who would direct us to competitors down the street or around the corner if they did not have what we were looking for. I wish I could count on the type of customer service I experienced here in Mexico at every turn when I am home to the US.

Digital Technology Supports Collaboration in the Workplace: Are We Taking Full Advantage?

Mike Cook — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:33:31 -0800

“The last few months have seen a spate of end of year surveys and forward-looking prediction reports that examine the workplace ‘digital transformation’ to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility.”

David Lavenda, Fast Company, January 2012

As I was reading David Lavenda’s post ‘Surprising Findings About Mobile Worker Collaboration’ this past Thursday in Fast Company I found myself reflecting back to a small conference hosted by the Bionomics Institute that I attended south of San Francisco back in the mid 1990’s.

Among the sessions I attended at that conference was one featuring a panel of then experts on search engine design musing on the true power potential of the technology they were all helping to move forward. It seemed to be the consensus of the panel that day that the major limitation to realizing the full potential of digital technology was more a function of users than developers. In their minds, these experts of the time agreed that people’s communication skills were lagging behind the advancements in technology and that gap was not likely to close anytime soon.

Fast forward to 2012. Honestly, I believe it would have been hard even for those leading experts at the conference that day to have imagined where we would be with technology today. Wow! This is the only term I find that suits what is being daily revealed to us in the technology realm. And it just keeps coming.

But has the workplace ‘digital transformation’ translated to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility; have we advanced our abilities as collaborators and communicators as those experts in the 1990’s said that we must?

David Lavenda offers us excerpts from four different recently conducted surveys on the workplace digital transformation. Among the findings in these surveys you may or may not be surprised to read that,

“The three top reasons why companies are finding it hard to implement tools like analystics, mobile technology, and social media for business are: missing skills (77%), cultural issues (55%), and ineffective IT (50%). It is clear that changing people’s work habits represent the biggest impediment to technology change.”

CapGemini/MIT Survey

Sounds like déjà vu all over again against the backdrop of that conference I mentioned! And yes, I am assuming that among the missing skills cited those involving interpersonal communication are included.

Lavenda offers other studies and factors of course, all of which are worthy of consideration but given my interests I am drawn to consider that “missing skills” continues to play such a prominent role in the digital transformation lag.

In leading up to his conclusion, Lavenda offers these words…

“But, as always, worker reticence to changing work habits is the biggest impediment to adopting new technologies.”

I loved this posting and welcomed the information on research that Lavenda provides; however, I am inclined to go in a different direction when it comes to assigning cause for the findings of these surveys. "Worker reticence" may be more a symptom than a cause in this instance. If we look more closely, we may see that the lag is reflective of factors both inside organizations as well as within the larger society. Here are several questions that immediately came to my mind:

As we educate future generations of workers, will we continue to emphasize individualistic behavior patterns and measurement and dis-incent collaboration?
How much does a continued reliance on the sovereignty of hierarchy within organizations retard the development of collaborative practices?
Why do we continue to use compensation practices that incent the attainment of functional objectives as much or more than organizational objectives certainly de-motivate cross functional initiative?
What is the source of continued reluctance in many places of work to support worker requests for remote (at home) work settings?

And of course there are more.

There is no doubt some merit to David Lavenda’s claim of worker reticence but it may originate in sources more accessible than only the workers themselves

You might want to pilot some trials in your own organization to see what you can do to promote collaboration. Take sort of a “what have we got to lose” point of view and focus on what you may have to gain.

I suggest starting by addressing some of the questions mentioned just above…but do not undertake educational reform as a first step!

Ease constraints on work at home arrangements, including what approvals are necessary
Establish cross functional operational opportunities where hierarchical input is limited to setting direction and specifying specific deliverables, removing barriers and providing missing resources.
Design developmental offerings to leverage day to day working community relationships.
Examine compensation practices for evidence that they may constrain collaboration

Finally, as a manager you can refrain from resolving interpersonal/interdepartmental issues for those reporting to you.

And I am sure you have a couple of your own to contribute as well.

What Does it Matter? Is There Any Real Value to Employee Engagement in a Global Economy?

Mike Cook — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:07:26 -0800

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…”

Peter Drucker

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice. That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor Department

If you are someone who is concerned about employee engagement yet also appreciates the complexity of the global economy and the challenges and benefits it offers, you will probably find the article ‘Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class’ to be compelling reading, I certainly did. The article, authored by David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampbell, appeared on both January 21 and 22 in the New York Times

It is a common axiom these days among those of us involved in workforce development or talent management to accept that more employee engagement is better than less. If he was here to offer his opinion, Peter Drucker, as seen in the above, might offer his provisional agreement so long as employee engagement supports the creation of customers.

The quote above from Betsey Stevenson begs a different question which has long lingered in the mythology of the American psyche. Do American companies have some sort of obligation to the American worker to maintain jobs in America? It is still both popular and comfortable to believe that they do yet the macro level of corporate behavior over time would suggest that if there ever was any truth to the myth, it is rapidly crumbling. I say this, there was a time, and it was now a while ago, when American companies could convince themselves and us that they were in fact benevolent to the degree we all wanted to believe. That was because they could afford to put forth that appearance and “afford” is the operative word. That time, as you will hear from an anonymous Apple executive whose words appear below and in the article mentioned, has apparently passed.Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment yet the American psyche still clings to the myth as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries; we don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment (most anonymously) yet the American psyche still clings to the mythology of corporate benevolence as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

The words from Peter Drucker I opened with here are often used in an abbreviated form as a matter of convenience and I think for benign reasons…

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise”

What Drucker was foreshadowing for us is that the “chickens of capitalism” will eventually come home to roost. I am not sure however that even Peter Drucker imagined a society in which an overwhelming percentage of the wealth producing resources were concentrated in the hands of a small segment of citizens to the degree that has become the case in America. At over $400/share, the average citizen will have a hard time managing to have much Apple in their stock portfolio.

So what then is there to be said for our pursuit of increased employee engagement? I think it safe to say that at Apple if employee engagement allows the company to make the best product possible…with the highest return to investors… then the employees will probably have their jobs for another day. When the day comes, and it did at Apple, that a lower cost, faster moving, more flexible and efficient workforce becomes available elsewhere, you can expect the jobs to follow, regardless of how engaged the incumbent workforce may be.

Henry Ford priced his product, the iconic Model T, so that the workforce that built them could be the customer…he saw the growth of the U. S. middle class as the marketplace of the future…

"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

Ford’s words were uttered at a time when the only viable market for his product would be the American consumer. I wonder what he would say now if he was facing global competition.

American corporate leadership has faced this reality of the global economy; it is well past time for the American workforce to do the same. Engagement is an absolute must but it is not a magic pill that guarantees employment.

What are you doing to make sure your workforce knows the game we are really playing these days?

The Blessed Peace of Doing What is Needed

Mike Cook — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:41:26 -0800

Stuart Burke died last Friday in Rochester, New York at around 12:30AM after a prolonged struggle with cancer. As best I can tell his life ended peacefully and without pain thanks to the wonderful people in the hospice where he spent his last three days. He died in the presence of his two sisters and his wife, Janice, who held him close until the very end and even beyond. Stuart’s passing came as no great surprise. There had been hope, of course, that the regimen of chemotherapy treatments would turn the tide but in our heart of hearts those of us with any experience knew what to expect, after the conclusive diagnosis it was just a matter of when.

Stuart is one of my step-husbands; I have two, having been married now three times to three remarkable women. Stuart’s wife Janice was my second wife; we were married for over 20 years. We are all very close, my step-husbands and their wives, me, my wife and all the other relatives. It’s just a different way to develop an extended family and it works for us.

What took place in the final days before Stuart left us and in the immediate aftermath is worth noting. Among other things, I believe it provides an insight into engagement as a human phenomenon that is not well understood or even recognized. That element I am referring to here is CHOICE.

A while back, maybe eight years ago, in one of my older versions of a Webster’s, I found a definition of engagement that has become a standard for me in my work.

Engagement: the condition of being associated with any activity as a matter of choice.

Where I find power in this definition is in the perspective it provides; from there the level of engagement is always a function of the engager as much or more than the surrounding events or environment.

Sunday morning January 8^th: As I am preparing for my trip from the San Juan Islands in Washington State to Rochester the following day, I check my email and see a notice from CaringBridge.org that informs us all that Stuart’s condition has declined rapidly and he will be moving to a hospice facility on Monday or Tuesday. (Pam, our close friend of 30 years has CHOSEN spontaneously taken over the notifications so Janice can focus all her attention on Stuart.) It is apparent to me then that I will be directly involved somehow in Stuart’s final days. I have a role to play and am just not yet clear of the expectations.

I can CHOOSE what is in front of me or RESIST, I cannot change what is happening.

I continue my preparations, originally planned around a two day client workshop they will now include the last days of Stuart’s life.

Sunday afternoon January 8^th: I receive a phone call from my youngest son Jake; he is 24 and lives in Brooklyn. He too has been informed of Stuart’s decline. He is going to take off work for a couple of days, head home, and do what he can for his mother. He asks if I can help with a train ticket to Rochester since he has no internet service yet in his new apartment and cannot make the reservation for the following morning. I CHOOSE to accept his request. I look up the schedules and give him the options, we agree on the best time and I complete the ticket purchase on line.

Sunday evening January 8^th: It occurs to me that I have not notified Janice that I will be in town and I know it will make a difference to her in some way. When I call Stuart and Janice’s number, a voice I immediately recognize answers. It is Betsy and we have not spoken in about ten years. Betsy lives in Orinda, CA and is in the area coincidently to visit her elderly father in Buffalo. She has read the Caring Bridge notification as well and CHOSEN to drive to Rochester to see how she can help. She is now managing the incoming phone calls so Janice can get some sleep. She will pick Jake up at the train the following day before heading back to Buffalo on Tuesday morning.

Monday January 9^th: I fly to Rochester. When I land, I find an email has arrived from Janice. She is glad I am going to be in town at this important time. She also let’s me know that Jake was planning to gather his furniture while in Rochester, rent a truck and drive it all to Brooklyn when he leaves. Upon hearing this I CHOOSE my role and it is to work with Jake, modify my plans and travel back home from New York City after driving with him to Brooklyn.

I also receive an email from my work partner Laurie telling me that her daughter’s water has broken and she is going into labor with her first child two weeks early. It looks like a C-section is in the offing, Laurie has made a CHOICE and is already on her way to New York City to be with her daughter. It now seems I’ll be doing the workshop by myself, having never led this one before. I make a CHOICE, this can all work and I’ll need to do some intense preparation with Laurie over the phone.

Tuesday January 10^th: I have a buffer day before the workshop begins, (Lynn, another friend of twenty years calls and says she has heard I am in town and wants me to know that she and her partner Barb, another long time friend would welcome me if I was looking for a place for dinner that evening. She and Barb and a group of others have been running meals daily to Janice and Stuart for the past two weeks. I CHOOSE to decline the offer but let her know that it means a lot). Laurie calls in the afternoon and tells me the baby has arrived in the middle of the night, Mom and baby are doing well and she has decided the work we are doing is too important to linger in NYC. She and her husband have CHOSEN to make the seven hour drive home that night, following a similar drive the night before.

I finish a dinner meeting that evening with a special client/friend and CHOOSE to drive to Janice’s home to see Jake. He is so sick he cannot get off the couch. I suspect a strong emotional response to seeing his step-father in an extremely emaciated condition. Janice later confirms that she shares my suspicion. He’ll be fine in time.

Wednesday January 11^th: Laurie and I successfully conduct the first workshop with our new client. She is brilliant and acknowledges around 2PM that she is fading. I CHOOSE to lead the last three hours of the workshop.

That evening I drop by to see Jake after having dinner with one of my former partners. He tells me that Lynn and Barb CHOSE to come by and took him out to dinner. He was grateful and feeling better.

Thursday January 12^th: The previous day Laurie and I had been notified by our client/sponsor that his mother was in intensive care and he would not attend the morning of second day of our workshop. We had planned to meet with him after the session to look forward to plan the balance of the process. We CHOSE to tell him to let go of the workshop, do what was needed for his mother and we’d catch up this week. That’s what he CHOSE. We have a call set with him for Wednesday afternoon.

After the workshop and some follow up debriefing with Laurie, I head over to help Jake move furniture in preparation for an early morning Friday departure. When I arrived, it was obvious that the house had been thoroughly cleaned. Jake said that Lynn and a couple of other friends had CHOSEN to deal with the house and the aftermath of Stuart’s declining health that had piled up for several weeks.

We packed and went off to dinner. We invited our friend Keating who was arriving back in town from a week of work in Arlington, VA. She CHOSE to accept; she arrived at 8PM and drove from the airport to meet us at a restaurant. Jake had always been a favorite of hers and she hadn’t seen him in over a year. We had a great time; Jake started to unwind a bit by the time we were done.

Friday January 13^th: Upon awaking it was immediately apparent that the expected 2-4 inches of new snow would be much more. I had previously planned to meet Jake at the airport and drop off my rental car. We proceeded with that part of the plan but as the snow continued to fall, I could see that driving to Brooklyn with a truckload of furniture was out of the question. As I waited for, Jake I CHOSE to create a new plan, send Jake back to New York by train so he could work Saturday as was expected and to wait until Saturday morning and to drive the truck myself to Brooklyn. He CHOSE immediately, I didn’t have to ask him twice, he saw the same thing I did and was grateful for the opportunity to return to New York on Friday.

Saturday January 14^th: I drove the truck to Brooklyn and arrived without incident. We unloaded the truck and we CHOSE to order pizza delivered.I also insisted on wings!

Sunday January 15^th: Jake needed to be at work so I walked with him to his subway station. I told him I would get a cab to La Guardia from there. He CHOSE to leave me standing on the corner but not without making me promise to send him a text when I arrived safely at the airport, which I later did.

In retrospect it was a peaceful week, blessedly peaceful. It had its moments but what day, week or month doesn’t? Lot of opportunities to CHOSE or RESIST and little chance of changing anything that was happening; CHOICES made by myself and others, many not mentioned here, to do what was needed when it was needed.

We have Stuart to thank for giving us most of these opportunities. Laurie's new granddaughter gets the rest of the credit Nice gifts I’d say.

Abuse of Position Power is Not Limited to Bullies: Beware the Fear Factor

Mike Cook — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:25:18 -0800

Last week while working with a group of mid-level managers the topic of “What’s OK to say in the workplace?” came up as it frequently does these days when managers get into conversations about interacting with their reports. After a few minutes of dialogue we reached a consensus that despite much of the counsel provided in harassment training you can still probably say just about anything to anybody depending on whether or not the relationship you have provides sufficient context to hold the comment. I recognize that saying this may raise the hair on some HR professionals’ necks but I am not a big fan of making policy that punishes or constrains the many because of the indiscretions of the few.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to addressing the issue of workplace harassment. Despite all the policies, harassment training, etc. I believe we still step over the most fundamental and powerful aspect of the employee/manager relationship, that it is based on an implicit power imbalance. This fact has a costly (immeasurable) and invisible impact on employee engagement and it is frequently ignored, especially when it is in the manager’s interest to do so.

Are there bullies (harassers) in the workplace? You bet there are and they should be dealt with in decisive, not tentative fashion. As I was reading a piece by Chris Iliades titled ‘How to Deal with Adult Bullies’ I noted my own blood begin to simmer with recollections of experiences I had as a youth with “the big kids” who thought that being big meant they could get away with tormenting the smaller younger children. Perhaps like you I have been disappointed to find similar behavior taking place in the workplace, often on the part of people who know they have the advantage of position power. Unfortunately this is life in the workplace and I am hopeful that as companies become more enlightened as well as sensitive to public embarrassment many of these folks will find their way out of our lives.

But even as we work to eliminate the bullies and the sexual harassers a certain level of unconsciousness continues to pervade the ranks of managers. When it comes to the negative impact simple position power yielded thoughtlessly can have I find many managers don’t want to be held to account.

‘Office Space’ may be the quintessential motion picture depiction of the negative impact of the unchecked boss/employee power imbalance. The boss,Bill Lumbergh, shown here at right is addressing Peter Gibbons on the left, the story’s protagonist. Lumbergh is obvious in his understanding that his position allows him a certain amount of leverage when it comes to infringing on his report’s personal time, he’s big on last minute requests for Peter and others to work weekends. Eventually this and other unchecked abuses of managerial power and simple disrespect catch up with Lumbergh in the form of an epiphany Peter has about the choice he has to simply not return to work. The events that follow this realization are what have made “Office Space’ a cult classic right down to the bobble head dolls of several of the film’s main characters that can frequently be found in employee’s cubicles.

Employees find ways to deal with the Bill Lumberghs in their workplaces, eventually sabotage of one form or another will take these characters down. Lumbergh knowingly abused his power, we might even say he was a soft spoken bully. What concerns me most are the unconscious actions of managers who otherwise have the respect of their reports. In these instances the manager has created a line of credit with the reports based on mutual understanding and mutual respect. However, and this is what makes the behavior so insidious, from time to time requests are made by these same managers that are an imposition on the personal time or commitments of their reports and the assent that occurs often reflects a passive conceding, without expressed doubts or objections rather than an engaged acceptance. I see these occurrences as costly in the long run and one of the contributing behaviors that are not reflected in the separation interviews.

Where do you suspect you may have been getting “yes’s” to requests when what you really been getting are an acquiescence to your position power. Maybe it’s time to have some of those conversations before the costs become prohibitive.

New Year's Resolutions: Ten Things You Already Know and Why They'll Make No Difference

Mike Cook — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:05:47 -0800

The next six weeks at the gym are going to be a pain in the butt and you know why! Every year, thousands of us who have known for some time … maybe years … that we need to lose weight or get in shape will once again resolve that this is the year when we finally, finally do it, lose the pounds. Or we’re going to establish the fitness routine that returns our body (and hairline) to the 25 year old image of ourselves that we still carry in our minds like a worn photo of an old lover in our wallet. For many after a few weeks our trips to the gym will taper off to a trickle and then simply stop. Our resolve will wither and we will once again settle for disappointment in ourselves in place of the weight loss or the fitness we had promised ourselves. We will conclude (again)* that … we have some defect of character we have not the strength to overcome, we are too busy, or some such baloney, none of which will be true, and we will eat pizza and make mental notes about getting our fitness routine back on track soon. For me the net effect of all this false resolve will be that from early January to late March my Body Pump and Step classes will be uncomfortably crowded.

Knowing that we need to change, knowing what we need to do to affect change, knowing where we need to go to bring about a needed change … none of these has even close to enough power to bring about desired or needed change. If we cannot tell the difference between a reaction/wish and a creation/commitment we’ll be doomed to repeat our cycles of failure and disappointment.

Companies, maybe yours as well, are a lot like people in many ways and very like people when it comes to making resolutions to bring about needed changes. In companies, resolutions for change are made anytime something unpredicted occurs, especially something like losing a highly talented employee. But are these events really so unpredictable and is there any real resolve in these resolutions?

Eric Jackson is a venture capitalist. Among other things, he is also is a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine. Back in mid-December he took the time to tell us the ‘Top Ten Reasons Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent.’ This piece, which appeared on December 14^th has received well over one million views.

You can read Eric’s blog post if you’d like, in fact I encourage you to. Then, after you finish, ask yourself if there was truly any information there that you didn’t already know. I bet you won’t find much new there and you’ll also find that many people in your organization know his top ten reasons, have known them for a while, have resolved to make the necessary changes every time the company loses a key employee…and it has made no difference. We know what needs to be done yet we repeatedly don’t follow through with the necessary changes. So someone else will dust off Eric Jackson’s article around this time next year, cite a couple of new sources, publish someplace other than Forbes and get another million readers to check in because we know the answer lies in the “knowing what to do.”

Robert Kegan of Harvard might offer that companies for the most part lack a “developmental stance” or commitment to being a continuing home for the transformation of talent. It’s not that companies don’t know what to do or that they cannot see what Eric Jackson has seen. They lack the collective will to address themselves to talent development and retention in a generative rather than reactive manner. Along with his partner Lisa Laskow Lahey, Kegan has identified the attributes of a culture that would be the antithesis of that described in the Jackson article.

Attributes of a Developmental Culture

It recognizes that there is “life after adolescence,” that adulthood, too, must be a time for ongoing growth and development.
It honors the distinction between technical (simple) and adaptive (complex) learning agendas.
It recognizes and cultivates the individual’s intrinsic motivation to grow.
It assumes that a change in mindset takes time and is not evenly paced.
It recognizes that mindsets shape thinking and feeling, so changing mindsets needs to involve the head and the heart.
It recognizes that neither change in mind set nor change in behavior alone leads to transformation, but that each must be employed to bring about the other.
It provides safety for people to take the kinds of risks inherent in changing their minds.

I’d invite you to review these attributes against the background of both Eric Jackson’s blog post and what you see taking place in your own company. Rather than wait to read the next version of Top Ten Reasons large Companies Fail to Keep There Best Talent commit yourself to seeing what you can do to bring about a development stance in your environment.

*This past year I had a personal breakthrough in the habitual pattern I describe here. No medals will be awarded I assure you since I waited until I was 64 and had knowingly tolerated an overweight condition for at least 24 years. That’s a story for another day and I have already told it in a previous post.

Lessons in Engagement: A Taste of Your Own Medicine Can Be a Bittersweet Experience

Mike Cook — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:27:27 -0800

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Dale Carnegie

Lately I have had the feeling that someone backed a dump truck full of lemons onto my lawn. The past couple of weeks in my life have been what you might call…a long story! But first, a little context.

For quite some time I have believed that those of us in the “employee engagement” field, profession, obsession, infatuation, call it what you will, etc., were “tilting at windmills” in our pursuit of factors to adjust, tweak, fluff up, incent and track in pursuit of some evidence of an ability to elevate the level of engagement of our workforce. As each cycle of surveys rolls around we know that “world class” is just around the next corner. No it’s not!

Even if our scores get better, even if we get into the upper echelons of scores in our industry, businesses our size, in our part of the country or whatever other way we choose to measure ourselves. “World Class” engagement is not just beyond our reach. In my view until we can recognize that we have yet to truly determine what it is we need to measure we have no lever into reliably influencing levels of engagement.

This is not to say that what we have been measuring is meaningless. I would submit that what we have been measuring is very meaningful and useful; it just hasn’t been a measure of engagement, more likely we’ve been measuring the offspring of employee satisfaction or employee satisfaction 2.0

From my unscientific perch, observing employees at work for the past twenty five years I am prepared to assert that employees are always engaged, the question is which phase they are operating in….

Fully and Freely – Characterized by Choice, frequently exceeding expectations
Compliant – Characterized by Need, barely meeting expectations
Resistant – Characterized by Fear, failing to meet expectations

In my world engagement is a moving target and has more to do with resilience than any of the current popular factors being measured. By resilience I mean the ability to embrace whatever circumstances are being faced without regard to any concern for effectiveness or need to have things be any other way than they are, and the discomfort that accompanies such ambiguity is not paralyzing.

Life is frequently ambiguous, the workplace also frequently introduces us to ambiguity and we do not get to vote, we get to deal with it.

We do not like ambiguity and we are highly likely to become less than fully effective in the face of the ensuing discomfort. Call it confrontation if you like; say that many people are conflict averse if that seems nobler. What’s true is that we don’t like being in ambiguous circumstances and therefore uncomfortable for any length of time and will go out of our way to minimize discomfort, in fact we are so nuts about the discomfort brought on by ambiguity that we can become overcome traumatized by it, profoundly fearful in its presence.

Based on my experience I’d be prepared to wager something worthwhile that somewhere around 80-85% of every workforce is highly ineffective in the face of the discomfort that accompanies ambiguity. Tough times where outcomes look highly unpredictable and filled with perceived negative consequences have a devastating impact on productivity.

So now what about life handing us lemons and making lemonade? There is a big assumption there that needs to be talked about. What if you don’t have the sugar necessary? Can you just let the lemons be lemons and take effective action?

As a coach and developer of managers for many years I will frequently have the ambiguity/discomfort conversation with whomever I am working with. It has always seemed so fundamental to me and yet it has always looked so difficult to grasp by the people I was working with.

Earlier I mentioned a dump truck full of lemons and the last couple of weeks of my life. There are lots of details but they all boil down to an 88 year old father who had a stroke about three weeks back, an 87 year old mother who has severe back problems and a 59 year old brother with an active drug addiction all living under one roof.

The events of the past two weeks in particular drew me directly into the center of the unworkability in my family. I arrived in my home town for what I imagined was going to be a recon trip to determine what we might take as best actions on behalf of my parents. What I ended up doing was tending to my brother’s issues; taking a trip to the emergency room, making a visit to a courtroom and having my very first meeting with a probation officer were just some of the fun features of my visit home. Suddenly and without planning to be I was daily facing situations I didn’t know how to deal with and in each instance I found myself needing to make a choice, stay and play or run away. I stayed. I can’t say I liked it, that I was eventually victorious (if you’ve ever dealt with addiction even a draw seems like a win), or that I was courageous, brave or whatever. I certainly did not feel that way.

What I can say is that I had an object lesson in what I have believed was true about engagement, it has more to do with maintaining a clear sense of what needs to be accomplished in the face of ambiguity than it does any external rightness or wrongness with the circumstances. I made some progress, I didn’t declare victory, I met the enemy and it was me and my sensitivity to discomfort. I stayed engaged, there is no lemonade at the end of this story, just lemons and they are sour.

We need to find ways to improve the resilience of the workforce, increased engagement will naturally follow.