Washington Politics and the Office – Beware the Similarities

I recently had lunch with a Congressman from the US House of Representatives and a friend; it was just the three of us.  And while the Congressman was careful in what he said, the relaxed atmosphere allowed us to explore a wide range of political and personal topics.  He lamented how the current climate in Washington DC is so toxic there is little chance to pass legislation even when members of both parties can agree.  The similarities to office politics are striking.

The party affiliation of the Congressman is irrelevant.  His comments remind me of situations found in companies with polarized positions where people dismiss good ideas coming from someone they dislike or disagree with.  While many of us are disgusted with a broken political system, we should look closer to home – where we work.  How often have you seen seemingly good ideas tossed aside because one group dislikes another or because of personality conflicts between individuals?  Unfortunately, I believe it happens all too often.

Groups within companies can become as polarized as politicians.  When this happens, people loose touch with their common purpose and discard opportunity because they dislike the idea’s originator.  While political issues play out in the open press, entrenched positions in companies often take a more passive-aggressive path.  New ideas are undermined in hallways and offices behind people’s backs.  The focus becomes the individual instead of the idea; people attack the person and question their motivation or reputation.  Who loses when this happens?

Instead of embracing the positive elements in an idea, people focus on why it won’t work.  Rather than being builders, they resort to demolition.  Innovations and new ideas die before being evaluated when people or groups become entrenched in personal politics.  I’ve been in meetings where someone is ignored entirely as if they were invisible simply because they aren’t liked.  You can watch it happen in real time as people roll their eyes, start speaking to someone else, or begin fiddling with their phone.  In the end, everyone loses as the potential is lost and relationships are further damaged.  This negative cycle can persist indefinitely and doom an organization to mediocrity – or worse.

To break the cycle, move beyond personal feelings and character attacks.  When someone suggests a new idea, separate the person from the idea, especially if you dislike the individual.  Evaluate the idea on face value and work to uncover its strengths.  One way to do this is to imagine the idea came from another source.  Resist the temptation to dismiss an idea just because you dislike who offered it.  Acknowledge the potential benefits, and then move to collaborate toward common understanding.  Remember you are all on the same team.  Remind yourself and others why you’re there: to build a better organization where new opportunity lifts everyone.  Be a builder, not the wrecking crew. 

For leaders, don’t allow your team to fall into a destructive cycle.  Stop the cycle before it gets started.  It’s your responsibility to guide your team toward solutions and to pull yourself and others above the fray.  Focus people on the idea regardless of who offered it.  In addition, be humble and encourage people to find ways to improve upon the idea.  In the end, you’ll build bridges and move your organization forward. 

If you dislike Washington politics as much as I do, remember the same thing can happen in your organization.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

The Hoax of Employee Engagement

Why does a Gallup study show “employee engagement” across US industries has been stuck around 30%?   It’s because employers believe they can force engagement to happen.  It’s as if a program or initiative will magically produce better results.  In the hope for a special button companies can push to deliver engaged employees, companies are investing millions in consultants, surveys, and projects that focus on elevating engagement.  What a waste!  Most of what is peddled as employee engagement is nothing more than an elaborate hoax.

Employee engagement has become the latest business trick to increase productivity, retain talent, and grow profits.  An entire industry has emerged offering surveys, tools, and consulting that are focused on improving engagement.  These efforts fail to deliver on their promises and some have the opposite effect.  I suggest the majority of these investments have been misplaced – employee engagement is nothing more than a gimmick designed to give companies a quick fix or boost.

So, what exactly is engagement?  Engagement is an emotional choice, not  something you can do to someone.  While “to engage” someone or something is an action, engagement requires an emotional response.  Can a company “engage” its employees and ultimately expect positive results?  The cliché “happiness is an inside job” is also true for engagement - engagement is an inside job.  At the end of the day, whether an employee feels engaged is a personal choice, not something a company can impose on its people.  It all comes down personal choice.

I suggest that enablement is preferable to engagement.  When you enable someone, you empower them.  It’s not what you “do” to improve engagement, but how you behave.  When you look at companies reporting higher levels of engagement you find culture, policies, and values that encourage individual achievement aligned and synchronized with the company’s strategy.  Employees choose to be more engaged in the success of the organization because they feel connected and valued.  This isn’t a subtle difference in language -- it runs deeper into the soul of the organization and how that organization views its human resources. 

While well intentioned, engagement programs and initiatives miss this vital element.  If employees lack empowerment, they are demotivated from making the effort.  Without enablement, these efforts by the company are hollow.  Employees ultimately feel manipulated instead of valued.  Most of us have seen cases where surveys are used to gauge the level of engagement.  Yet when months pass and no fundamental change is noted, employees conclude it was just another show.  A year passes, another survey, and employees ignore it.  Why waste the time responding when the last survey produced nothing of value? 

To improve engagement, start with enabling employees to perform at their best.  Equip them with tools and provide an environment that values contribution, creativity, and connection.  Company-wide, one-size-fits-all initiatives fail to address the fundamental issue of how an individual’s efforts contribute to the greater whole.  Engagement requires a more personal, one-on-one approach that no project or initiative can provide; it is a full contact sport.  Standing up at a company all-hands and espousing how much employees are valued is impersonal, insufficient, and lacks specificity.

If engagement is what you’re looking for, start at the bottom with individuals, not groups.  Work with line-managers and help them connect the dots clearly between what their teams do and how their efforts contributes to and are valued in the greater whole.  This requires a personal level of interaction that is usually absent from organizations. 

Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers.  Improving engagement happens one employee at a time. 

More on employee enablement in the coming weeks.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

Anatomy of a Commitment

What is a commitment?  How serious do you take a commitment?  How do you feel when a commitment is broken or not honored?

Commitments are the bedrock of trust.  As I work with organizations, it is often a lack of commitment at the root cause of issues.  Employees expect their leaders to honor their promises, to respect assurances – to deliver on their commitments

The real test of leadership comes down to how well you keep your word.  Broken promises destroy organizations.  As a leader, your commitments are the working capital that determines if you succeed or fail.  Commitments are a serious matter!  Don’t take them lightly.

 A commitment is a contract.  It represents an assurance to follow through and deliver.  Long before written contracts were used to conduct business, it was a verbal commitment often sealed with a handshake that constituted a warrant to deliver.  When you preface something with “I promise …” you are making a commitment.  If you don’t intend on delivering or believe there may be impediments to following through, don’t state it as a promise.  Broken promises are the high-speed route to failed leadership.

Another aspect of commitment is clarity.  I have found organizations that obfuscate or bury commitments under a cloud of caveats and provisions that create escape paths.  In contracts you can often find so many terms and conditions they nullify commitments to the point of absurdity.  Clarity demands that promises leave little or no wiggle room for interpretation.  It should be obvious what you have committed to and when delivered, closure is assured.

The final component of commitment is accountability.  Broken promises have consequences and you must be prepared to accept responsibility when you don’t deliver.  That doesn’t mean playing the blame game or clouding the situation with excuses.  When you make a commitment, you are taking responsibility for the outcome regardless of what it is.  Step up and lead!

Want to test how solid you are at keeping commitments?

How well do you keep commitments made to yourself?  The real test of how sincere you are about commitments lies within.  Most of us have made personal resolutions at one point or another.  They may have been New Year’s resolutions or just a simple decision to change something.  What’s your personal track record?  If you have broken commitments to yourself, you’re more likely to break them with others.  Sound harsh?  Take a few moments and reflect on this point.  Consider that you can’t give what you don’t already possess.  Your determination to honor promises you’ve made to yourself is the foundation on which you draw strength to do so for others.

The true test of leadership is commitment.  There are many other attributes that contribute to great leadership, but it all rests on one simple thing – are you good for your word?  Trust is built or destroyed on this one element.  You can possess many of the other attributes often associated with leaders, but if you fail the commitment test, you fail as a leader.  Next time you’re called to make a commitment, consider the implications should you break your promise.  When you chose to walk away from a commitment, the effects can be deep and long-lasting.  Take the commitment test. 

• Can and will you deliver?
• Is it clear what you have committed to?
• Are you ready to take complete responsibility for the outcome?

Finally, reflect on the commitments you’ve made to yourself over the last several years.  If you have failed to keep your own promises, has that in any way affected commitments made to others?  Be honest with yourself.  Start by honoring the promises you make to yourself and build commitment muscle.  You’ll find delivering to others becomes easier when you respect yourself enough to do so when no one else is looking.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

You’ve Got a Great Strategy – Now What?

Over the last 12 months, you led your team through a significant revamp of your strategy.  The economy and changing customer habits forced a ground-up review and restructuring.  Buying dynamics shifted substantially, loyal customers started experimenting with other solutions, and years of cost containment measures have taken a toll on employee morale.  You invested nearly $500,000 with a marque consulting firm to guide you through the process.  After all that time and energy, you now have a new strategic plan and you’re ready to launch.  How confident are you it will work and return your company to growth?

You’ve done all the right things along the way.  You involved your leadership team in the strategy formulation process.  After long evenings and weekends, they say they’re 100% committed to the new plan.  You took great pain to develop action plans and establish new performance metrics.  The new strategy requires significant change, some restructuring, and revisions to the tried and trusted culture.  You feel ready to deploy.  Employee meetings have been scheduled and each executive has a communication package to explain the new strategy.  With all this preparation, you feel ready to launch, but are you?

Does this story sound familiar? 

Across the business world, companies facing significant disruption are engaged in this kind of exhaustive strategy renewal process.  Most will fail to achieve the rates of growth and change envisioned in the plan.  In fact, the investment in strategy consulting, market analysis, and change initiatives will likely yield disappointing returns.  Why does this happen?  Great executives and leadership teams exercising sound business logic and measured decision-making routinely face a litany of disappointing results.  What are they missing?

Great strategies absent exceptional execution will fail to deliver every time.  Instead of achieving the planned high rates of return and accelerated growth, most settle for marginal growth and continued disruption from competitors.  But the key to strategic execution doesn’t rest in the executive team or the plan.  Execution happens when an organization gets into alignment from the bottom to the top.  Alignment requires that employees have a clear line-of-sight between the work they do and the strategy.  Alignment doesn’t occur by briefing employees on the strategy or change program.  If that’s the extent of your plan, you’re on the path to failure. 

Employees must not only understand the “what” of the strategy in practical and relevant terms, they must also embrace the “why” and “how”.  And when it comes to “how” in particular, you can accelerate change by actively engaging employees.  When employees are involved in shaping how change is implemented, they accept and implement it at a faster rate.  Engagement at all levels is critical; don’t just rely on your leadership team to cascade the strategy through layers of the organization. Use as many means as possible to communicate and keep it concise.  Simplicity enables the key elements of the strategy to be clearly communicated on a consistent basis leaving no room for interpretation.  This means boiling down your detailed strategy into imperatives to which employees can relate

If you’re committed to your strategy's success, the best investment you can make is to focus on alignment.  To start, you need to understand the current state of alignment in your organization and then routinely reevaluate as its execution unfolds.  There are numerous tools available that measure engagement and alignment.  I use the PBLine-of-Sight™ developed by Prana Business.  I’ve used many tools over 25 years leading strategic development and employee engagement initiatives.  I prefer this tool because it provides rapid results in a simple form.  Spotting misalignment early will keep the plan on the right track.  Measuring progress enables you to anticipate and predict future performance.  Regardless of which evaluation tool you use, it’s imperative that you not only have an alignment baseline, but have ongoing progress measurements and make adjustments based on quantifiable outcomes.

To learn more about successful strategic alignment, contact me or visit the Connect2Action Assessment page.

Duane Grove is the founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

The Water Cooler is Empty - Revisited

Companies continue to not “get it” when it comes to social media.  Most view social media as a direct threat, forgetting its origins in the “water cooler” talk that fomented effective organizational communication.  Social media is our new water cooler, with a twist.

Before the advent of social media, employees used hallway talk to air issues, complaints, and opinions.  This talk allowed for frank discussion about management’s shortcomings, creating an authentic organizational communication foundation.  While much of this talk was hidden, occasionally management would get a whiff, but not enough to understand it.  The water cooler whispers were the communication currency of those not plugged into management.  And management was perplexed by that rumor, partially because pinning down its source was nigh impossible.  The “employee channel” was a closely guarded, subscription-only service that management was not qualified to receive.

Enter social media.  Initially used largely for people to connect with friends and stay in touch, it quickly evolved into an outlet of frustrations, opinions, and observations regarding the work organization, a consequence of our inability to easily separate our lives into “personal” and “work” compartments.  While hallway talk continues, this new outlet offers another voice.  This trend will accelerate as younger workers fill company desks.  These employees live in a social media world and social media is their method of communication.

Here’s where companies miss the boat: we’ve seen companies and organizations scour employee social media accounts to learn what those employees are saying about the company, and then use that information to discipline the employee should they step out of bounds.  Water cooler discussions have been happening since the advent of teams.  The difference now is that there is a record of the conversation with attribution, where in the past, employees had plausible deniability.   Companies should welcome social media chatter instead of squelching it by punishing the perpetrators.  Social media is a direct means of pinpointing issues -- without which these issues will remain hidden, only to surface later with higher consequences and more dire remedies.

Social media is an opportunity for enlightened organizations to understand employee communication.  Finally companies have a window into water cooler talk!   Knowing the chatter allows management to understand and preempt potential issues.  Social raises the volume on the hallway whispers while eliminating guesswork.  Bad managers and organizational decisions have deep negative consequences to organizational success, but complaints about those managers and decisions surface too late in the world of hallway talk.  Social media accelerates the problem identification.

Instead of companies using social media monitoring to control employees, they should view it as an essential part of a healthy organization.  Savvy companies will go so far as to sponsor such a resource internally, giving employees an anonymous outlet to let off steam. 

Social media is not going away.  Ignore it at your peril.  The sooner social media is embraced as a positive, creative, and supportive resource, the sooner it will benefit your company. 

Duane Grove is the founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.