Brotherhood of the Rope Update
This blog’s theme for 2007 is the Brotherhood of the Rope. See the first post of the year.
Employee Engagement for All: MMP #11
Monday Morning Percolator (MMP) #11
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. ~ Albert Einstein.
In the center of the apple is the core, in the centre of an idea made to stick is a simple or core statement.
In the last Monday Morning Percolator, I outlined the 6 principles of stickiness outline in the book, Made to Stick. To be effective an employee engagement idea or approach must have stickiness. Otherwise it is forgotten or lost in the myriad of tasks and relationships that fill an organization and individual’s day.
Simplicity = Core + Compact. Our challenge when we leverage simple stickiness for employee engagement is to find the core and express it in the form of a compact idea that can be enduringly powerful. Simple is not “dumbing down” it is finding and communicating the core.
For example the military encourages officers in combat to ask themselves these two questions:
- If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission we must _______.
- The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _____.
To translate these questions to the field of employee engagement answer these two question at the end of each day to get yourself primed for tomorrow:
- If we do nothing else at work tomorrow about employee engagement we must ______.
- The single, most important thing we must do at work tomorrow for engagement is _______.
To me, the simple core employee engagement idea is: Employee Engagement for All.
We all must benefit from employee engagement – employees, organizations, leaders, customers, families, and other stakeholders. Employee engagement must have mutual purpose – moving engagement from “me to we” as we all see the benefit of engaged employees and we all contribute to employee engagement.
Get Perking:
- Write your own simple statement to lead you and your team into employee engagement.
- Apply the employee engagement KISS: Keep it Sincerely Simple!
- Read Chapter 1 of Make it Stick to determine why “cast member” for Disney staff is sticky and “sandwich artist” for Subway staff leaves you wondering where’s the beef? Is there a job title or role that will fully engage you in your work?
Next Week: Monday Morning Percolator #12: Unexpectedness.
Picture Credit: My personal Thanksgiving by http://flickr.com/photos/riot/289783985/
Zengagement: No Complaints
Complaining, wanting all the conditions to be just the way we’d like them, doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, we’re just distracting ourselves from the task at hand.
Dr. Joseph Parent, Zen Golf.
Hoist the Hostmanship Flag
Service is no longer good enough. Hostmanship has raised the level of how we approach work to a new level of caring, involvement, pride, profit, and engagement.
Are you ready to engage in hostmanship or are you so complacent that you will be left behind?
Hostmanship is the art of making people feel welcome. The concept is outlined in a short book by Jan Gunnarsson and Olle Blohm.
Here is their description of hostmanship from the hostmanship website:
Hostmanship is a beautiful word – a word that embodies both “welcome” and “let me take care of you”. For us hostmanship is the art of creating hospitality. This art can be exercised towards everyone, regardless of your relationship. You may be dealing with a customer, a patient or a visitor, or even a colleague, a citizen or a partner. It makes no difference. In the world of Hostmanship, we see everyone as guests. And where there is a guest, there is also a host – a host that exercises Hostmanship. Therefore, Hostmanship is a way of approaching people. It expresses a wish to serve others by a serving leadership and an insight that all activities strive to serve others. And in that process we develop both our pride and profit.
- Serving others
- Perceiving the whole
- Taking responsibility
- Being caring
- Searching knowledge
- Practicing dialogue
Genuine Hostmanship is pride in practice. Hostmanship without pride is empty and cold. In contrast to service, Hostmanship is focused on practice, on people as hosts, on the cultures of businesses, and on the capacity of organizations to tie it all together. Being a host is much about having the courage to let loose your talents and express your personality – to be brave enough to serve every person as she is and to listen to the needs she expresses. Hostmanship also differs from service in that it’s not about treating others as you yourself want to be treated. Hostmanship is to treat a person as she wants to be treated.
Hostmanship is about the source of loyal customers. It is about the relationship that is established between a business and the people who benefit from that business. Hostmanship is about the kind of care that is exhibited. Hostmanship is about making people feel welcome.
- Hostmanship – A Serial Review #1 – An Ethic of Personal Responsibility
- Hostmanship – A Serial Review #2 – Personal Hostmanship
- Hostmanship – A Serial Review #3 – Functional Hostmanship
We yearn for a world where people feel expected and welcome. A world where children, friends, strangers, guests, customers, and coworkers dare to meet each other without thinking of religion, color, sex, or age. We believe that this is something fundamental for lasting and true success for us as persons, for our companies, our places, and finally for our common home, the Earth. ~ Hostmanship Development Group 2004
Technorati Tags : strength based leadership, hostmanship, leadership, David Zinger
ZENgagement: Inspire Yourself
Inspire yourself. A major inspiration for employee engagement comes from within. Are you relaxed enough to perform at your best?
Dr. Saul Miller wrote a wonderful little book in 1990. I encourage you to read it if you want to feel freer, lighter, more alive and at ease.
Each of us has a personal connection to an unlimited supply of energy.
With each breath relax and breath in some of that energy.
Focus on drawing in power.
The outbreath will look after itself.
From: Dr. Saul Miller - A Little Relaxation: on being more alive & at ease.
A Cautionary Rant: Praise Craze Ahead
We have gone praise crazy.
How do we genuinely demonstrate caring for each other in ways that are real, authentic, and robust? How can we do this even better?
Photo Credit: Unicorn Playing by http://flickr.com/photos/kt/
Tie into employee engagement: Monday Morning Percolator #10
Are you holding employee engagement together with duct tape?
Don’t let engagment die with all the other projects, initiatives, and work screaming for your attention. Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, offers 6 powerful principles to give engagement gumption, tenacity, and longevity.
Make your approach simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and use stories. The next 6 Monday Morning Percolators will profile each of these principles applied to employee engagement.
The Heaths offer the acronym SUCCESs to remember the principles. Here is a quick outline of the SUCCESsfull principles you will learn to make employee engagement stick:
- Simplicity. Strip employee engagement to the core and make sure you focus on the most robust method.
- Unexpectedness. Capture your employee’s attention…and hold it by making an element of employee engagement unexpected.
- Concreteness. Make engagement concrete so employees understand it and remember it.
- Credibility. Make sure employee engagement is credible for all involved.
- Emotional. Remember that emotions will influence motions so employee engagment must become a positive emotional approach.
- Stories. Leverage stories to inspire employees to work with full engagement.
The authors practice what they preach with a stickey cover - a picture of duct tape stretched across the book jacket. The duct tape is raised from the cover to feel like real duct tape. You will be tempted to try and pull it off but what you really want to pull off is applying the principles to employee engagement.
Get Engaged:
Next Monday: Employee Engagement Made Simple.
Photo Credit: Duct Tape Neck Tie by http://flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/
Grieving an employee engagement sunset…
Can employee engagement lead to employee disengagement?
I felt sad reading how the Saskatchewan labour relations board put a halt to employee engagement activities for SGI, an insurance company in Saskatchewan. The sadness was that the very concept that could enrich the workplace for all had become a source of dispute between the organization’s management and union.
Here are a few snippets from the Regina Leader-Post article on the halting of SGI’s president’s employee engagement team (PEET):
The Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board (LRB) had ordered a temporary halt to all activities conducted by SGI’s president’s employee engagement team (PEET), including handing out bonuses under its employee recognition program.
The Saskatchewan Insurance Office and Professional Employees’ Union (COPE) Local 397 filed a complaint with the LRB in January alleging SGI had committed unfair labour practices by negotiating directly with employees through the establishment of an employee engagement committee in April 2006, which was composed of in-scope and out-of-scope employees.
The union claimed the committee gathered employee-related information, made recommendations and took steps to implement changes which related to the terms and conditions of employment of in-scope employees.
The union also complained that the employer had undermined the collective bargaining process by promoting the initiatives of the committee, by unilaterally paying bonuses to employees without the involvement or knowledge of the union and by failing or refusing to bargain these matters with the union.
SGI denied that it had committed an unfair labour practice through negotiating directly with in-scope employees by way of the president’s employee engagement team, the primary objective of which was to increase employee job satisfaction and engagement in the workplace.
I am not close enough to this situation to understand the full extent of the issues involved. In addition, it is not my intention to judge either party in the dispute, I imagine there is validity to both sides on this issue. Rather, I want to express my dismay and grief that employee engagement - something I see so positively -became an issue that probably contributed to employee disengagement.
Engagement must be for all!
This article points out the need to ensure that there is mutual purpose for everyone involved with employee engagement initiatives. For PEET’s sake and the employee’s experience of work, I hope this does not set the sun on engagement for management, union, and the employees in this company. I wish them well as they sort this out and I hope the sun will rise again on employee engagement – making the workplace a better place for all.
Get Engaged:
- How do your employee engagement initiatives fit within the wider context of the organization?
- How would you avoid having something similar occur at your workplace?
Photo Credit: Crescent Moon Sunset by http://flickr.com/photos/fortphoto/
Strengths: What you do with what you’ve got
Eddi Reader performs a powerful song questioning untapped strength on the TED website.
I have chosen this song as the theme song for this strength based leadership blog. Her powerful voice weaves with the lyrics to create a song of strength, energy, and caring. Click here to watch and listen to this very powerful and inspiring song.
Here are a few powerful questions embedded in the lyrics:
…what’s the use in strength and muscle if you only push and shove?
…its not what you’ve been given its what you do with what you’ve got
…its not how big your share is it is what you share
…what’s the use of two good ears if you can’t hear those you love?
I love the TED (Technology Education Design) website. I would rank it in the top 3 sites on the Internet. I encourage you to visit the site as it has an eclectic array of presentations from previous TED conferences.
Go catch the sun.
The sense and cents of employee engagement
According to Shepell-fgi research group: Money not only isn’t everything – it isn’t the main thing when it comes to motivating employees.
How people are treated and how they view their managers have almost twice the impact on motivation and results compared to pay and benefits. Money does not appear to enhance productivity.
Rob Phillips, CEO of Shepell-fgi stated:
We all like some parts of our job more than others. But when overall engagement is low and when your staff prefer to not come in to work or aren’t performing at their full capacity, it costs the organization money – up to an average cost of $1.80 million for a company of 1,000 employees.
Employees want to have trust in senior management, be asked for their input, and have a clear say in decisions that affect their work.
Money is the employee engagement paradox: money is not a key driver of employee engagement for the employee yet it costs an organization great deals of money to have disengaged employees.
Get Engaged:
- Ensure you spend time not just money with employees. Work is as much about making sense as it is about making cents.
Photo Credit: The snail and the coin (Economy goes slow) by http://flickr.com/photos/mclau/
Listen to David Zinger talking with Lisa Haneberg
We discuss leadership, discovering and using strengths, and employee engagement. Learn what David thinks is a leader’s greatest lever for success and about high quality interactions (you could have 20,000 in a day). I talk about butterfly flaps, David talks bees – tomato tomato, potato potato – it’s all good stuff. David shares one thing we can do to lower the odds of employee disengagement to just 1% – and it’s a simple thing.
Photo Credit: Campfire Blackhole by Aaron Wagner: http://flickr.com/photos/copilot/
ZENgagement: Monday Morning Percolator #9
Zen is a practice, psychology, religion, and way of life. I have read Zen books and articles for over 30 years ranging from the poetic and peaceful insights of Thich Nhat Hahn to the raw zen of Chuck Norris.
To practice Zen is to be engaged.
Here is a short excerpt from Thich Nhat Hahn’s, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. I have reread this book a number of times over the years and it remains a classic on how to live mindfully. When we are more mindful we are more engaged. I loved his statement that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.
Perhaps there is no way to engagement, engagement is the way.
From Peace is Every Step:
Twenty-Four Brand-New Hours
Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.
Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.
We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.
In future percolators I will offer you some more percolated cups of Zengagement.
Perk Ups
- Wake up with engagement. Can you see your life and your work as a gift?
- How engaged are you in reading this article or has your mind wandered off to the next task, link, or thought? Spend more moments not just mere moments in being exactly where you are and nowhere else.
Photo Credit: Random Zen-Like Art by http://flickr.com/photos/cameradawktor/222328905/
Technorati Tags : employee engagement, zen, Thich Nhat Hahn, David Zinger
- This blog was number 5 on the Top Business Blogs:
Online MBA Rankings -
- If you only had one sentence... Read or download the Free E-Book on Employee Engagement! Click on the cover for this terrific 44 page PDF resource.
- Visit and join the over 2500 member Employee Engagement Network by clicking on the network symbol:
-
David Zinger Posts
