✔💯 How does your business stack up? Do you agree? 🤔🎯
Are these things below ⬇️ simply table stakes?
What would you add to this list?
What would you say isn’t important?
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Crosscutter Enterprises
www.crossctr.com
Have you ever seen this from Disney?
I know this was the first time I saw it!
On the Gallup Q12, Question #8 asks, “Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?”
I’ve studied the Gallup results and looked at many top performing and low performing companies. There are four things that drive engagement in an organization and mission / purpose is the number one.
If Question #8 is a disagree or strongly disagree, the rest of the survey will follow suit.
However, having a strong mission/purpose is only part of the story. Some organizations have done a phenomenal job identifying a very purposeful mission. Then, they fail to effectively communicate it and their leaders fail to live it.
How is your organization’s engagement around its mission and purpose?
Get the book today:
Overcoming Organizational Myopia:
Breaking Through Siloed Organizations https://www.amazon.com/dp/1945151005/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_p7UXCbNQ4RTBH
Almost a year ago I started a PhD program with Walden University specializing in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Since about 2002, I have been actively studying leadership and motivation and in 2005 I did an in depth study in Organizational Commitment.
Since then, employee motivation has evolved into a concept of Employee Engagement, which goes beyond Employee Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment.
Over the last ten years, Gallup has conducted their employee engagement survey (Q12) and what they have discovered is that about 70% of employees are consistently disengaged at work. This is costing U.S. businesses alone, from $450 to $550 billion a year in productivity and revenue losses.
Based on experience, I have seen that organizations that have a strong purpose always seem to drive strong employee engagement or organizational commitment. My work in early 2000s focused on why people in the military and nonprofits tended to be more committed or engaged.
Now, in my PhD, I am focusing on employee engagement and the concept of organizational purpose. I’ll be examining the literature in this area in the coming months for a potential dissertation. If anyone has input on this topic, I would love their input.
Lately I have met several organizations that are at a crossroads in their own evolution. Many companies realize the importance of things like strategy, change management, process improvement, strategic communication, and employee engagement. However, these organizations are making tactical decisions on the direction of these areas versus truly looking at this from a strategic perspectives.
Instead of hiring several different individuals or creating separate teams all focused on doing the same thing, companies today should should focus on bringing all their Operational Excellence activities under one team working directly for the CEO or President of the company. This group should be led by a senior leader that sits at the same table as the companies other leaders.
This Swiss Army Knife professional–SVP/VP, Operational Excellence–should manage things like:
– Strategy development, execution, and change
– Performance optimization through process, product, and functional continuous improvement
– Strategic communication inside and outside the organization
– Strategic human capital management to include education, training, and development and employee satisfaction, commitment, and engagement
– Information and innovation engagement
This team does not need to be big…depending on an organization’s size, it could be as small as three or four people. However, it should leverage other support areas throughout the organization, like Human Resources, Finance, IT, etc. These organizations would not report to the position, but work with the position.
Today, some organizations have some or all of these activities occuring, but they are scattered across the organization and have very little singular direction. By bringing the functions together into a small effective team, an organization is equipped to deal with the challenges of today and the future.
Of course, the leaders of these types of organizations have to have a solid understanding of all these functions at strategic, operatiomal, and tactical levels and not focused on creating some massive sandbox of people with various skills. They need to be highly skilled with a focus on lean and mean.
Yesterday I shot out a blog about being dedicated to what ever you do. It got me thinking about (which I do a lot) employee engagement and organizational commitment.
Several years ago in a self-directed Bachelor’s class, I did a study and research paper on Organizational Commitment. Over the last few years, Employee Engagement seems to be the new buzz word. I think; however, that they are slightly different.
Clearly when we talk about commitment, we’re talking about how dedicated the employee is to the organization and maybe a little of dedication back to the employee. I always like the analogy between the chicken and the pig. The chicken is dedicated to breakfast and the pig is committed.
My paper focused on the level of commitment that military members have to their job (i.e., their country) and how they are willing to sacrifice their lives for that commitment.
Engagement is much more a two-way street and doesn’t even sound like dedication to me. If the pig is committed and the chicken is dedicated, then the orange tree is engaged. Engagement seems more about involvement and choice versus an expectation to come to work and give it your all.
Have we sold out our expectations to employee engagement over organizational commitment? I want heroes at work who will work hard and dedicate themselves to the company and the mission. I’m not looking for the ultimate sacrifice, but clearly I would more desire employees that are willing to invest in their jobs versus ones that are simply more involved.
Just a little consideration on a thoughtful Thursday about the bar we seem to be lowering when it comes to employee expectation.
Engagement is the buzzword of the day; employee engagement, leadership engagement, stakeholder engagement…the list goes on.
So, what is the secret to “engagement?” How do you become successful at engaging anyone?
Engage, the root of the word, can essentially be done by someone or done to someone. If you are soliciting someone’s engagement it starts with you and ends with them. So let’s look at what it means to engage someone:
Engage: to occupy, attract, or involve (someone’s interest or attention).
If you want someone’s interest or attention, what is the first and most important thing you have to do? Let’s try communication.
Have you ever gone to a party and stood in the corner or sat in a chair all alone? How many people come up to you to talk to you? You can walk into a room full of people and mentally think to yourself, “Ok people, engage me, I dare you,” but that seldom works.
Yea, perhaps the extremely extroverted might come over to bang you out of your shell, and they might already be wearing the lamp shade for the evening, but in most cases you’ll probably go home disappointed. You’ll consider the party an entire waste of time and probably would think twice about going again.
The number, based on the first stratified random sample by the Myers-Briggs organization in 1998, showed Introverts 50.7% and Extroverts 49.3% of the United States of America.
http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/extraversion-or-introversion.asp
If 50% or more of the population–half of the room–isn’t the engaging type, the. It’s up to us to make the first move. Even if you are an introvert.
If you desire engagement, then you probably are going to have to initiate and continue to initiate the conversation. Your leadership staff, your employees, your stakeholders, your audience, your customers, etc. all need to be engaged in conversation constantly to feel engaged. Otherwise they’ll leave your little party possibly vowing never to go back again.
So, engagement of anyone starts with communication. Small talk it is…
That won’t work…it has to be engaging conversation…”How’s the weather Bill,” isn’t going to work!
The rules of engaging conversation are simple:
1. It has to be purposeful–you are communicating for the purpose of engaging the audience.
2. It has to be consistent–one and done or fire and forget styles of communication (very prevalent in our email age) do not work. The message must be the same and repeated often (but not like repeating a phone number three times on a radio ad–that’s annoying)
3. The message must be understood. This means a lot of things. You must communicate clearly and this includes the channel you use. Kids today tend toward text message talk over long conversation. Speak to the differently than they like to receive, the message isn’t as clear. The language and jargon you use is just as important. Talk to your audience in a manner that they understand otherwise you’ll sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher. That’s an example of a message that only some of you will get.
4. Mean it. Be sincere when you communicate. Honest and open communication is a key to engagement. If it’s a one way conversation that you’re doing based on some checklist mentality that tells you that you have to communicate at 9 am every morning, then it isn’t real. Yes, you can plan communication, but don’t let your plan dictate when you will communicate.
This is the startup engaging anyone. Also, this is the number one thing that people don’t do. If you’re A boss, make a point to get up from your desk once a week–plan it, don’t let the plan tell you–and talk to people. Encourage open and honest communication in the office and in your staff meetings. Make communication your number one goal for the year for your organization.
It all starts there.
Two years ago I started a journey with my new job and with my boss as his strategic business advisor. Recently I’ve been reading Start With Why; it’s one of my resolutions to read one business book a month, and I had already started this one in December. The book talks about how you need a Why and a How person to be really effective.
Well, I’ve been the How guy to his Why for the past two years. See, he was looking for organizational effectiveness and he was used to the normal approach to hire someone to provide it through process improvement. The thing is there never is enough of one person to go around, so you end up prioritizing your process prove kent to a point where it’s not effective.
Breaking that approach, we instead focused on building process improvement skills in the employees starting with his leadership. Now we’re driving those skills deeper to the employees.
We’ve done many things like reorganize to match the process, create the key process on how we do work, focus on employee engagement daily, work on constant development, and reinforce the culture.
In two years, the effort has been very successful and I think the model is exactly what organizations need over large process improvement teams “doing process improvement” and prioritizing projects.
I’ve been working in some way or fashion in the field of quality consulting since about 1990 when I attended one of my first Total Quality Management courses at Carswell AFB in Ft Worth TX. Since then I have worked in the areas of strategic planning, strategic communication, performance management, process management, human capital planning, resource management, and education and training. I’ve been in the lowest tactical to the highest CEO positions of military, non-profits, and companies and seen many things both doing and consulting in these areas.
So what?
Over the last several years I’ve been really thinking about what makes companies successful. My upcoming book, Overcoming Organizational Myopia is based on a lot of that thought. What I see too much of is organizations looking for that silver bullet. I was in a recent meeting, where a leader said he was looking for that one single metric that when tugged upon it unravelled everything else going on in the organization. My answer would be really simple, that doesn’t exist. Being a top performing (you fill in the blank) takes a lot of work and it’s constant work.
The group I work for now has been extremely successful over the last two years. My boss is even going to be interviewed by Gallup because of their employee engagement success in their last UCount survey. One of the managers in the team commented that now we have to sustain it. My response was, no, now we have to make it better next year. In today’s day and age, sustaining is the death of a company. You have to get better. When I started with them in January of 2012, they had just won The Keepers of Quality award for their major organization. That was great, but there was a lot more they could do. This month, we share part of our two-year continuous improvement story with that sMe audience to discuss how we are building and encouraging an environment of continuous improvement–quality.
What is all this mean?
High performing organizations don’t just “happen.” It takes. Lot of hard work and it’s a constant journey. If you read business books like I do, you probably heard many ways to become that high performing organization. They tell you what it is, they tell you what you should do, and they tell you why. They fill your head with fantastic stores of Apple and Dell, turn arounds like IBM and Harley Davidson, etc. trust me, I have read them all–well a lot of them. The thing they don’t tell you is HOW.
Funny, there are so many How To and Self Help books on the shelf, but none give away the secrets to becoming a great organization. How To books sell too–my speech writing instructor and mentor, Joan Detz taught me that in 2005.
So, how does an organization really improve? That’s the thoughts that have been on my mind of late. My soon to be released book focuses on part of the story, overcoming the “silo effect” that plagues every business in the world. You know what I’m talking about…sand boxes, camps, teams…the way we organize and the way we group as human beings lead us to form silos–we become myopic in business. They problem is that it will ALWAYS happen–you can’t avoid it. Leaders and managers alike might recognize it and try to break it down, but it happens to all of us. Overcoming Organizational Myopia is a true how to book focused on the nine things that suffer in siloed organizations and how to overcome it–not solve it, but to overcome it.
But the key, I think is the “Golden Egg,” as James Farhat would say. That is how does any organization that wants to be high performing make it happen? If they were a car, how do they get their engine firing on all cylinders? That is my journey this year. My effort in 2014 is to not only define it, but to lay out the roadmap and provide holistic training to all, at whatever level they are at, to help them become better and grow.
A guy I worked with in Booz Allen used to comment about how the different teams in our office would fight over the pieces of the “pie.” He was talking about this perceived limited amount of money that was available to all of Booz Allen that we would fight to get a piece of. He believed that believing that the pie was a certain size was limiting our ability to go for more and this we had to take more of someone else’s pie to grow our own silo–back to the myopia view again.
In America today, I think many business look at the perceived pie and think they have to take from others to get a bigger share. That leads us to disruptive innovation, aggressive marketing, and like tactics to win over the market share pie. What if I told you that the pie doesn’t exist. The better you are as a high performing organization, the more people will buy your whatever? I believe that doing good work gets more work–it’s not about pies, but about becoming the best at what you do. This is true both of an organization and as an individual.
So, I leave you with these thoughts on this Tuesday morning. Myopia, pies, and high performing organizations. Let me know what you think. Tell me it can’t be done…that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I look forward to the debate.
For those interested, what does a high performing organization mean to you?