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Michael Cannon

What separates the best leaders from the rest when it comes to employee engagement?Our research shows the best leaders communicate an inspiring vision. They live it, value people, and give them a voice. Here are seven of the more than 100 best practices that leaders can use to engage people.Set your top five high–level, annual priorities. Many leaders today are overwhelming their teams by trying to do too much. Both individually and as a team, set no more than five high–level, challenging but achievable, annual priorities that are aligned with your vision and mission. If you go beyond five high–level, annual priorities, it will diminish focus and effective execution by tending to overwhelm those responsible for implementation. One day each week, review your weekly plans to see that they are aligned with your top five.Know their stories. Take time to get to know the people you work with, especially your direct reports. Have coffee or a meal with them. Ask questions to learn about their lives and what’s important to them. Questions unrelated to work might include: “So you were born and then what happened?”; “What are your interests outside of work?”; and “Where did you grow up?” These questions typically open the door for you to ask follow-up questions. This will give you insight into how the people you work with are wired, including what they value at work and in their lives outside of work.Help people get into the right role. Help your direct reports get into the right role that fits their interests and strengths, and provides the right degree of challenge. If you are not able to get them a role that is a good fit, consider responsibilities or projects you can assign them that fit well with their wiring.Develop the habit of emphasizing positives. The psychologist Barbara Frederickson found that individuals in the workplace were healthier at higher ratios of positive to negative emotions. Leaders boost positive emotions by providing affirmation and recognition. They should develop the habit of looking out for ways to affirm and serve the people they lead.Do this by looking for task strengths and character strengths. Task strengths reflect the excellence of someone’s work. Character strengths reflect the way someone goes about her work. For example, a leader might affirm an individual by saying, “Nancy, that was an outstanding website you created. The navigation design was easy to use, the writing was easy to understand, and the color scheme was beautiful.” She might affirm Nancy’s character strengths by saying, “Nancy, I appreciate the way you persevered to make our new website happen. You showed wisdom and humility in seeking the ideas of others and applying the best ideas to the design of our new website. Very nicely done!”Provide constructive feedback in a constructive way. When providing feedback to help someone improve, always communicate it in private, be respectful in your tone of voice and volume, and begin with three positive things you like about his work or character. After sharing the three positives say, “I believe you would be even better if. . . \[insert what you want them to do or stop doing\].” Kindness matters and the approach you take will affect how the person receives the feedback.Provide autonomy in execution. Monitor progress and be available to help your direct reports, but refrain from micro managing unless they ask for specific help. Favor guidelines rather than rules and controls, and let people know that you are available if they have questions or would like you to be a sounding board. This meets the human need for autonomy and allows people to experience personal growth.Hold in-person meetings and regularly check in. Good relationships are maintained by staying in touch. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood this. Historians have found more than 1,700 letters, notes, and telegrams that Churchill wrote to his wife so that they would remain connected. Take a page from Churchill’s playbook. With your direct reports, stay connected with weekly in-person meetings, if at all possible. If you cannot meet weekly, check in with phone calls, emails, or text messages to help keep you connected. To stay connected with people who work remotely, regularly call or Skype them. Remote work can be lonely and people should feel you are on their team and want to help them achieve their potential. Besides work issues, inquire about how they are doing personally, too.For more best practices to engage employees and to get a deeper look at the topic, join me online on September 2 for ATD’s Essentials of Driving Results Through Employee Engagement workshop.Additionally, if you are aware of an innovative practice that boosts employee engagement, email a description to me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.com and I may use it (with reference to you) in a future article and in my next book.Listen to Michael Stallard's podcast on driving results through employee engagement.

Seven Best Practices to Boost Employee Engagement

An "engaged employee" is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. --WikipediaAt a recent ASTD meeting, a peer and I were discussing employee engagement and the trends that come and go. It seems like two to three years ago “engaged employees” were all the rage of conferences and consultants and organizations. But it seems to have fallen off the radar in favor of such topics as complexity and change plus innovation.Employee engagement is one of those topics that will consistently remain a needed focus of managers everywhere, whatever we call it.To be sure, work that managers and employees are doing is increasing in complexity due to the perception of globalization, less time, and the instability in economic and political parties. And even as innovation and transient workforces come and go, while employees are working (whether contract, part-, or full time) you want them to be engaged in the work they are doing. If they handle the complexity of factors thrown at them, an engaged employee by default will innovate and improve ways of doing the work.There are five levers of employee engagement:competent managerbroad goals that are established within the proper contextobjective measures of progress and regressthe necessary resources to get the job donesufficient autonomy to do their best work.Competent    Manager   +Contextual Goals       +Objective Metrics     +Resources  +Autonomy  =Engaged      Contextual Goals       +Objective Metrics     +Resources  +Autonomy  =Under-PerformanceCompetent    Manager   + Objective Metrics     +Resources  +Autonomy  =Confused & false starts, missed deadlinesCompetent    Manager   +Contextual Goals       + Resources  +Autonomy  =Angry and / or ScaredCompetent    Manager   +Contextual Goals       +Objective Metrics     + Autonomy  =FrustratedCompetent    Manager   +Contextual Goals       +Objective Metrics     +Resources  +                 = Micromanaged                                                                                                                                                                                                   ©2012 www.create-learning.comLever 1: a competent managerThe idea of management is well understood, and the necessity of a competent manager is someone everyone wants and is not felt until you don’t have it.A competent manager is one who is able to add value to employees’ work and enhance their decision making and judgment of the work. A competent manager is one who is able to illustrate that they know the work, have an understanding of employees’ work, and lets employees know that ultimately they (the manager) is accountable for the output of the team. A competent manager is able to judge work and enable workers to do their best work. They are able to move a team along in collaboration enthusiastically engaged with each other and the work.In order for the manager to be competent they must be able to understand the goals of the organization, how those goals affect their manager, and how those goals will affect the work of employees. Then, they need to be able to supply workers with sufficient information to enable them to do their best.Without a competent manager employee engagement will never happen, and underperformance will plague the organization and team.Lever 2: contextual goalsGoals drive everything an organization, manager, and employee does. Without the goal, there is no work.Thinking of contextual goals it is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears; the goal must be “just right” for each person. Goals cannot be so broad in scope that an employee is drifting aimlessly like a plastic bag in the wind, and they cannot be so narrow in scope that they feel constrained and cannot “be themselves” and do their best work.Setting goals in the proper timeframe with the adequate quality and quantity requirements will also complement the competent manager—because a competent manager knows how to set goals within the frame of the employee’s work.Without the contextual goal, employee engagement is impossible and frustration along with false starts and late/early finishes will disengage anyone from the organization and team.**Lever 3: objective metrics**Employees must be able to objectively—and on their own—measure progress and regress on work that is meaningful to them. This is accomplished by the competent manager setting contextual goals, and by the employee working to determine the needed small steps, how to accomplish those small steps, and knowing what progress looks like.Metrics that are based on the “feeling of the manager” will achieve misery, anger, and fear, which is mutually exclusive of engagement. Metrics must be in reference to the contextual goals.  And metrics should be co-developed by the employee and manager, but the employee has the final say over how to complete their own work.If the objective metric (a standard for progress and regress) is not known and established by the employee, anger and fear will freeze them in disengagement. Developing metrics that are based on tasks and work that is completed will work to further engage the employee in the work to be done.Lever 4: resourcesTo complete work the employee must have the necessary resources. To quickly disengage your staff, delegate goals and then take away their resources. This does not mean that a manager must supply the employee all the resources they desire, but it does mean that the manager has to supply the employee the resources they need.Resources may be materials, consultants, training, staff, and so forth.  Some questions to consider with resources include:What resources does the employee currently have?Can the contextual goal be completed in the time frame required with the resources available?Does this contextual goal warrant the resources required by this employee?Limited resources can drive innovation, but in order for innovation and engagement to occur, adequate resources are required.Lever 5: autonomyAutonomy is synonymous with self-directed behavior. It can be a lever that drives employee engagement into full implementation. But autonomy must be tied to the other areas mentioned: competent manager, contextual goals, objective metrics, resources.  Only then can the autonomy happen.Within work an autonomous employee understands that there are choices, and ultimately they feel responsible for the choices made. They are able to do their best work, and gain wisdom on how to make decisions and solve problems while doing their work.There will come a time when an autonomous, engaged employee will hit an obstacle that they cannot navigate around. This is when the manager can increase engagement by coaching and developing this employee to improve their problem-solving skills, therefore reinforcing autonomy and engagement.If employees feel that they are being micro-managed, all the engagement will be sucked out like a rapidly deflating balloon. This creates the “I just do what I’m told, if it goes wrong…not my fault” behavior.  Using all the leversThese five levers of engagement build on each other to drive the innovative and successful work of organizations and staff. Often managers are mistaken in their belief that a person’s psychology or personality drives engagement. Rather, it is the system that drives behaviors, and the work system must be developed to keep people engaged in work that is meaningful and they can make progress on.By understanding that the manager controls the process and works to set the system, the behaviors will adjust to engagement. Everyone wants to do their best work, and feel connected and engaged with their organization, work, manager, and co-workers. By focusing on these five levers you will create a work environment that drives engagement and innovation.

5 Levers of Employee Engagement

In Part 1 of this two-part blog, I examined the parallels between how advances in the hard sciences unfold, based on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and how advances in the so-called management sciences take place and exhibit similar pathologies of acceptance and rejection. In Part 2, I would like to take a hard look at some forward-thinking areas of management theory (not due to their validity but owing to their advocates), as well as a way that game theory may be used to detect and thwart such chicanery.Case in point: risk managementTake my favorite pseudo-scientific pursuit: risk management. There is a core truth about risk management that is vehemently opposed by its advocates, but it is undeniably true: unless a given project risk analysis materially alters the response of the project team to an unanticipated event, all risk management analysis is a waste of time and energy. It’s essentially institutional worry, tripped out in statistical jargon.Some intrepid project management writers have gone so far as to assert that there is no major project that can point to its risk management efforts as having any material impact on the project being completed on-time or under-budget. In fact, Nassim Taleb (from The Black Swan) posits that the use of Gaussian Curves in the development of business strategies is one of the greatest intellectual frauds of the 20th century.Yet, risk management training is big. A Google® search on the term “risk management training” returned some 163,000,000 hits on May 25, 2013. PMI®’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge has risk management as one of its nine main sections, so it is reasonable to assume that a number of the people reading this blog have been involved in teaching the subject.I certainly understand the appeal; to know how the future will unfold in an economic setting is obviously valuable in the extreme. But the simple fact of the matter is that the future cannot be quantified, and no attempt to do so should ever be considered intellectually valid. All of those analyses producing the 80 percent confidence interval in the cost baseline, or allowing a precise number of days to use when placing your schedule contingency milestone on your critical path network, are all irrelevant.This very irrelevancy may be the reason that risk management advocates tend to be aggressive in their communications with those with whom they disagree—at least in my experience. Like our theoretical Ptolemy-teaching cosmology trainers post-Copernicus, all 163,000,000 people who can provide risk management training have a vested interest in making sure ideas from naysayers never become commonly held. It’s actually to their benefit that managers outside the insurance industry continue wasting their money on risk management and analysis techniques—and those who can teach them.Enter game theoryAll of which brings us to game theory. Game theory consists of a series of games, or situations involving participants in structured interactions, in which various strategies or tactics can be evaluated for their efficacy. One such game that can offer insights into the selection of advance-or-defeat-valid-management-techniques situations is the Hawk-Dove game. Imagine two generic birds, who can elect to either passively forage for food by themselves (the “dove” strategy), or aggressively try to either take the other bird’s food away or prevent it from foraging on its own (the “hawk” strategy). Interestingly, the bird population’s payoff is maximized when all of them engage in dove strategy.Now consider a 100-bird population, each of which can elect to behave as a hawk or a dove. Again, the overall population’s payoff is maximized when the all select the dove strategy. However, if even one bird selects the hawk strategy, then the overall population will have to change its selection of strategies, or else face starvation, even if there is enough food to feed them all if they had all selected the dove strategy.This change in strategies will continue until a point of predictable stability, known as a Nash Equilibrium, is established. In the 100-bird population Hawk-Dove game, this point is around 75 percent (dove) to 25 percent (hawk).Similarly, in a given population of training organizations (let’s just pick a population 163,000,000, shall we?), the field of management science is best served when they all conduct intellectually honest research and scholarship and develop their curriculum based on the best possible understanding of the dynamics of the macroeconomic environment. However, allow just one of these organizations to realize that it’s a concept contagion, and not its validity, that leads to its widespread acceptance, and this organization has suddenly swerved into advocacy.This organization could capitalize on the not-necessarily valid management strategy, and seek to downplay or eliminate those strategies that represented the superior technical approach. Depending on the strength of the analogy to the Hawk-Dove game, the other organizations would tend towards a Nash Equilibrium of continuing to conduct legitimate research and scholarship 75 percent of the time, and engaging in advocacy or the condemnation of those with whom they disagree 25 percent of the time, or else risk economic reversals.As the given invalid management science theory’s perception of efficacy erodes, its advocates will have to become more vociferous in their attempts to tamp down its critics. In other words, they will have to engage in advocacy more often, pushing the new Nash equilibrium further and further away from legitimate research and scholarship, and closer to pure advocacy.This, ladies and gentlemen, does not bode well for the furtherance of management “science”—nor the instruction thereof.Moving forwardIs there a solution? Not to the larger problem, I believe. Both Taleb and Kuhn were right: the widespread acceptance of an idea is almost never about its validity, and almost always about its contagion. The advancement of science—even management science—unfolds in a predictable pattern that will invariably allow for a period of time for the advocates of certain invalid business strategies to profit from the slowing or prevention of newer, more valid strategies to overturn the commonly-held versions. However, there is a solution at the microeconomic level: a portfolio management structure by which any claim of the efficacy of a given business strategy or management science theory can be evaluated with respect to its effect on asset, project, or strategic management performance. I offer such a structure in my previously mentioned book, and believe it can be used to root out much charlatanisms in the management science realm.And, above all, remember that, if a management science theory needs armies of advocates, there’s probably a reason why.

Michael Cannon

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