There are no secrets.

Here is a short one minute bathroom break for your weekend.

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Fantastic Video on Zander: Creating Shining Eyes for Employee Engagement.

by David Zinger

I love TED talks and I love Benjamin Zander. Combine the two and you will watch one of the most inspiring videos you could ever imagine. Yes, Zander is talking about classical music but just substitute the word employee engagement each time you hear classical music and you will move your employee engagement efforts to a whole new level of connection.

Watch this video at least twice, or better yet, watch this video every Monday morning for the next few months to create employee engagement where you work. I believe the last 5 minutes of the video are very key for those of us involved in eliciting, encouraging, or drawing out the engagement of others.

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Here are a couple of snippets from his talk revised to an employee engagement context:

How would you walk, how would you talk, how would you be if you thought only 17% of your employees could be fully engaged?

versus

How would you walk, how would you talk, how would you be if you thought everyone could be fully engaged, they just haven’t experienced it yet.

Success is how many shining eyes show up at work.

As leaders we don’t do the work for employees, we awaken the possibility in them.

Who am I being that my employee’s eyes are not shining.

Are you creating shining eyes?

Real Magic: Failure, Imagination and Empathy.

by David Zinger

J. K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, gave a terrific graduation address at Harvard this month. Here are a few snippets:

Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

Click here to go the Harvard site to view the video or read the transcript. It is real magic.

This video is hilarious and full of people you will recognize. I never knew that Bill Gates had such a great sense of self-deprecating humor.

There will be a day for each of us when we retire and begin the process of disengagement. Watch this terrific video showing Bill Gates from Microsoft imagining his last day at work.

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Make the employee engagement connection.

by David Zinger

Here is a 16 slide presentation I created on Employee Engagement Is Connection.

Take a minute to connect to the slides to get a picture of the important connections creating employee engagement.

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Anna Farmery wrote about a powerful and free engagement tool: meaning. Engagement is enhanced when people have meaning in their work, lives, and relationships.  Here are 3 of Anna’s 5 suggestions on how to add meaning:

• By linking what they do each day to how they create value to the business…doing it, not just meaning to!
• By recognizing achievement, hard work, solutions….doing it, not just meaning to!
• By defining what is expected of them, how you will support them in succeeding and clear success measurements….doing it, not just meaning to!

Click here to read Anna’s post and I encourage you to read her blog for terrific perspectives on engagement.

I came across the 5 minute video called The Great Office War.

See what can happen from 4:30 to 5:00 when we fail to work together…as I.T. and Sales have an all out battle:

Are you ready for 4:30 at your office?

A Bucket Full of Strengths, Friends, and Positive Strategies: An Interview with Tom Rath

by David Zinger

It is my pleasure and honor to present you with an interview with Tom Rath. Tom’s phenomenal contributions to a great workplace include: How Full is Your Bucket? Vital Friends and StrengthsFinder 2.0. Each of these books was reviewed in the 3 posts before this interview.

Tom is a marvelous author who has the ability to offer practical ideas woven with solid research in an engaging style. He writes his books in a way that makes them easy to read while also being powerful in practice. His books are essential reading in employee engagement. I hope this interview gives you a better understanding of Tom Rath’s personal and professional thoughts and approaches.

Tom, you wrote How Full is Your Bucket? with your Grandfather Donald O. Clifton. Donald is also the Grandfather of Positive Psychology and the Father of Strengths Psychology. I know you could write a book on this, and parts of your books have already done this, but I wondered if you could say in a few sentences what the legacy of your grandfather is for you personally and professionally.

Sure.  On a personal level, Don was always helping me to see my own talents, starting at a very young age.  The book How Full Is Your Bucket?, in itself, was a great example of this later on in my life.  I had always been a “numbers guy” and presumed that I could not write very well.  But after reading a long letter I had written to him, Don apparently spotted something (that I had not seen) and challenged me to write the book with him at that point.  So even in his final months, Don helped me to see a talent that otherwise would have gone untapped for a lifetime.  Don’t get me wrong, it took an inordinate amount of effort (not to mention a couple of brilliant editors) to polish that raw material into a book.  But if not for Don’s encouragement, I would not be comfortable writing a short article today.

Then on a professional level, I would say Don’s greatest legacy has been in helping millions around the world to uncover their strengths.  Don’s work has helped more than 10 million people (in over a hundred countries) to be more engaged in their jobs, which means they have a bit more positive energy to share with their spouse, friends, and children each evening when they go home.  And my hunch is that this legacy will continue to grow even faster as each year goes by.

In StrengthsFinder 2.0 you write about the relationship between a manager, focus, and disengagement. If a manager ignores you there is a 40% chance you are disengaged and if a manager focuses on your strengths there is only a 1% chance of being actively disengaged. What makes this relationship between strength based conversations and lack of disengagement so strong?

To start with, half of it is just that the manager is paying attention.  It actually cuts the active disengagement in half if the manager focuses on an employee’s weaknesses instead.  So once you assume there is open communication, then making the conversation strengths-based weeds out almost all of the disengagement.  As one CEO described to me, focusing on an employee’s strengths simply gives them confidence and boosts their well-being.

From your perspective and vantage point with Gallup do you see any research or anecdotal evidence that would lead you to conclude that the workplace is getting better at using strengths and having strength-based conversations?

Yes and no.  Certainly in the work we do with our clients we see tremendous gains in the metrics that are most important to their success.  Recently we did a study, which included 90,000 employees in 900 business units from 11 organizations. Teams that were led by managers who received a strengths intervention saw a substantial (12.5%) jump in their actual productivity numbers.

Unfortunately, when we look at our semi-annual study of the nation’s workers, we see no measurable change in the engagement of the average American worker.  Hopefully as more and more organizations learn of the real, measurable advantages of a strengths-based approach this number will decline.

On a personal strength note. You do so much work with strengths. What are your top 2 or 3 strengths and how do you consciously use them in your work?

The one I lead with is probably Futuristic.  I get a lot of energy from thinking about where things will be in five or even fifty years.  Analytical is another one of my top themes, as I am constantly thinking through different scenarios in my mind. Then I am a perpetual Activator, to the extent that my wife has to tell me to sit back and relax a few times a day.

Gallup has received criticism in the past for the question about having a best friend at work. You wrote the book Vital Friends. Just how vital are friends at work?

Trust me, if we were just trying to sell people on an idea, we would not have picked that question in the first place.  But the data led us in that direction as we searched for the key ingredients of a great workplace.  When people have a “best friend” at work, they are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs.  Without one, the odds are an abysmal 1 in 12.

At this point in your career, which of the eight vital roles of friendships stands out the most for you, and why?

I have been fortunate to have a few great Builders in my life, who have invested an inordinate amount of time in my growth and development.  Can’t explain how much I admire people who invest even more in the growth of others than they do in themselves.

If I am a manager how do I try and encourage friendships at work between myself and my reports and between employees themselves?

Obviously you can’t just tell people to have friendships.  I might call that the “creepy manager” approach…or at least it would be an indicator that the person should not be managing others.  Being serious now, it’s really about creating the right environment where people have ample opportunities to form friendships.  I think most people would be surprised by the number of companies that openly discourage close friendships today.

What does it mean for a manager to fill someone’s bucket at work?

While awards can be a form of bucket filling they are not the only way.  It is often the smaller words and interactions that accumulate and have a bigger impact.  The key is that these bucket-filling moments are individualized, specific, and of course deserved.  Without authenticity and sincerity, it is sure to backfire.  But it all starts with those brief, positive interactions.  It is really those moments that matter most.

Thank you so much Tom and all the best on your future work. You have already given so much to us working in the field of employee engagement. Stay strong, engaged, positive and friendly.

Quick Review: How Full is Your Bucket (Book 3 of 3)

by David Zinger

3 Reviews and 1 interview. This is the last book review of three of Tom Rath’s books that can make a very significant contribution to employee engagement.  In conjunction with Donald O. Clifton, Tom wrote How Full is Your Bucket: Positive Strategies for Work and Life. The fourth, and final, post in this series will be an exclusive interview with Tom Rath about his work and the influence of his grandfather, Donald O. Clifton.

The bucket metaphor. In this book, the full bucket is a metaphor for sense of self and emotions. A full bucket gives us a positive outlook and renewed energy and every “drop in that bucket makes us stronger and more optimistic.”

Make a positive moment. The focus of the book is on how to accentuate, increase, and strengthen positive moments and that every moment matters.

Disengagement costs at $1 trillion per year. We have up to 20,000 moments per day. How well do you use them to enhance and develop others? Making the most of moments with others can have a strong positive impace on engagement and the cost of disengagement in the United States is estimated at a possible $1 trillion per year!

Quick stats. 9 out of 10 people say they are more productive when they’re around positive people yet even with school children in Canada up to 83% of parents focus more on their child’s F’s than A’s.

I encourage you to read the book. Here are a few positive impact test questions that I hope you can answer with a resounding YES:

• I have praised someone in the past 24 hours.
• I have developed a knack for making other people feel good.
• I make a point to become acquainted with people wherever I go.
• I notice what my colleagues do at a level of excellence.

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Next article: An exclusive interview with Tom Rath.

Quick Review: Vital Friends (Book 2 of 3)

by David Zinger

3 Reviews and 1 interview. The next 2 posts will review 2 books by Tom Rath that are essential reading for anyone involved in employee engagement. The fourth post in this series will be an exclusive interview with Tom Rath about his work.

Get Friendly. In Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without Tom Rath makes a strong case for the key importance of creating, building, and fostering friendships at work. Employee engagement is greatly enhanced when employees have strong friendships at work.

Friends are more than fluff.  If you have a best friend at work you are more likely to:

• innovate and share ideas
• get more done in less time
• be engaged and engage your customers
• feel informed and blieve that your views count
• have fun on the job and focus on your strengths each day

Yet we have limited friendships at work:

• Only about 30% of employees say they have a best friend at work.
• Only 20% of employees dedicate time to developing friendships at work.
• Under 20% of employees consider their boss to be a close friend.

Quick management action to foster friendships. When managers discuss friendship with employees on a regular basis, it almost triples the chances of employees having a best friend at work.

Not all friends are the same. I encourage you to read the book to learn about the various types of friendships: Builder,  Champion, Collaborator, Companion, Connector, Energizer, Mind Opener, and Navigator.

Take care my friend and take care of your friends.

Next Book Review: How Full is Your Bucket.