Happy New Year!

I just returned from a week’s vacation with my family in the Dominican Republic.

I loved the Island art and went to a one hour art session at the resort. I decided to do my own thing even though everyone else was trying to copy an Island scene. I was encouraged by a nine year old boy who said, “good job.” We should never overlook the power of encouragement at work even from a nine year old.

It was intriguing to see how engaged I could be painting for an hour. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad — I fully enjoyed the process and was completely engaged in the painting.

It made me realize how important it is that we find or create work that capitalizes on intrinsic engagement.

How much do you enjoy your work and how well does it sustain you?

I trust that you will be fully engaged in your work in 2009 as your work becomes your art (even if in my case, my art will never become my work).

All the best in 2009.

Here are 6 questions about employee engagement for 2009.

I would love to read your responses as I ponder my own responses to these questions.

1. Given the current economic mayhem, what will the challenges for employee engagement be in 2009?
2. Do you think employee engagement will trend upwards or downwards in 2009?
3. What will organizations need to do to foster higher levels of engagement in 2009?
4. What will individuals need to do enhance their own engagement?
5. Leaders and managers will have increasing demands on their time in 2009…how can they find time to ensure that employee engagement gets both the energy and attention it will require in 2009?
6. What do you personally plan to do during 2009 to improve your personal level of engagement for work?

We have had a challenging fall season in 2008. I sincerely hope you will be able and willing to fully celebrate this holiday season as you prepare yourself and others for 2009.

Carry on caring…

Stay engaged…

Take care…

Photo credit: 402_2008 by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmydavao/3090895407/

I have been very moved by Thich Nhat Hanh‘s approach to peace and life. One of his statements that will always stay with me is: there is now way to peace, peace is the way.

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Di Smith wrote an article on engagement: Spending on employee engagement set to rise in 2009. But only a third of workers believe their organization engages them to perform well. I was writing a comment on this post when I found myself paraphrasing Hahn’s approach to peace by stating: There is no way to engagement, engagement is the way.

I believe we are too quick to look for external measures, fixes, tips, techniques, methods, and solutions to engagement. This tends to simultaneously blind us to the engagement that resides within us.

We must change the question from how do we engage employees to how engaged am I and how does my engagement create engagement in others?

Here are 5 invitations on how to engage engagement:

1. Take time each day to be centered, balanced, and mindful.
2. If you are working with someone who is disengaged don’t catch their disengagement contagion.
3. Ensure that you keep renewing your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy.
4. Notice the power and impact on others as you model authentic engagement.
5. Keep engaging others and don’t make your engagement contingent upon their becoming engaged.

What do you think? Are you ready to take full ownership of engagement?

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

David Zinger

Here are some euphemisms for how organizations have disengaged employees (read layoffs) from BusinessWeek:

• synergy-related headcount
• adjustment goal
• actions to simplify our organization
• offboarding
• rationalizing
• surplusing
• de-verticalization
• strategic review of strategies
• in Hong Kong a term used is chao youyu “to have one’s squid cooked”
• French managers contemplate un plan social

I think it would be better to use the term layoff or fired and for the organization to admit they failed their employees. Employee engagement will require honesty on the part of both the organization and employees.

Let’s start talking the real talk so we can begin walking the real walk towards full engagement for all.

I am getting increasingly irritated with our use of language in business. I criticized the use of the phrase “war for talent” back in October. It is interesting with the current plethora of layoffs and corporate shedding of talent that we are not seeing this phrase used very much.

The battle appears to be over and talent in many organizations has been reduced to an expense or cost that needs to be shed. I can’t help but wonder if the very metaphor of war might be a contributing factor to where we are now.

Yesterday, I read the following story title and opening line at a popular business site:

Handling a Crying Employee Dodging Landmines. With talks of layoffs and downturns, an emotional employee could show up in your office at any time.

It is not my intention to attack the author or the site but I do want to voice three initial responses I had to the headline and first line.

1. If I am an employee who is crying, I don’t want to be handled…I want to receive empathy, respect, and caring. If you want to be a handler go work with a boxer.

2. Just because I am emotional does not mean I will explode, let’s limit landmines to war — and it would be good if we didn’t have them there either. And don’t dodge me…listen to me. One of the most disconcerting parts of this story was the video interview began with the titles — DODGING LANDMINES then Landmine: A Crying Employee then an explosion. I felt this was a disrespectful metaphor for our troops who are overseas facing real landmines everyday and a poor analogy for an upset employee.

I showed the story to my wife and she thought I was overreacting. I appreciated her perspective as the interview tips were good while I know I am sensitive to explosive metaphors as 3 Canadian soldiers were just killed just last week by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

3. The story also stated that “an emotional employee could show up in your office at any time.” I have to disagree…emotional employees show up in your office every time and all the time. We are not robots or business Spocks. We are human and that means emotions are always a part of us so lets stop trying to keep emotions and work separate. Emotions are the motion of business and they will range from joy and excitement to anger and sadness. We are all emotional employees.

What business language bothers you? Do specific terms or phrases used in business make you feel uneasy?

I know this short rant will encourage me to watch my language and ensure that I demonstrate respect and care for people and results.

Free 10 Page E-Book: 52 Powerful Sentences of Employee Engagement Advice.

What would be the advice you would give to an organization to improve employee engagement? What if that advice could only be one sentence? Read these eclectic contributions from 52 members of the Employee Engagement Network.

Click on the PDF image below to read or download the free 10 page E-book.

With 52 contributions, you could read a different sentence each week in 2009 and work at applying the advice to your organization each week. Imagine how much stronger employee engagement would be in your organization if you did this each week!

Follow our authors’ suggestions or create a sentence of your own.

Use the sentences to create a strong focus on employee engagement. This free e-book was created out of a forum we created at the Employee Engagement Network.

If you are not already a member of the Employee Engagement Network join us today at www.employeeengagement.ning.com.

Here is a list of the 52 contributors to the forum. The link takes you directly to their discussion page on the network:

• Catherine Harwood
• Terrence Seamon
• Robert Morris
• Skip Reardon
• Karl Edwards
• Ian Buckingham
• Arnold Beekes
• Lisa Forsyth
• Rod Barnett
• Judy McLeish
• David Zinger
• Cheri Baker
• Kris Robinson
• Carol Cole-Lewis
• George Reavis
• Jean Douglas
• Mario Gastaldi
• Varadarajan
• Stephen A. McPherson
• Steve Maffei
• Mike Healy
• Zane Safrit
• Johane Desjardins
• Kevin Burns
• Scot Herrick
• George Reavis
• Krishna Prasad
• Brent Daily
• Samantha Wood
• Dan Brady
• Khalid Ibrahim
• Maryanna Kontaratos
• Graeme Ginsberg
• David Neilly
• Jesse Domingo
• Prem Rao
• Gary Irland
• Bay Jordan
• Eric Fiedler
• James Reece
• John Griffith
• Deri Latimer
• Sandi Krige
• Jeremiah Soucie
• Scott Messer
• Nels Pedersen
• Debbie Moscinski
• Michelle M. Smith
• Kelley Eskridge
• Paul M. Mastrangelo
• Scott Span
• Michael Kanazawa

If you would like to visit the original forum on the network, click here.

Get the book now: Click on the PDF image below to read or download the free 10 page E-book.

What do we do about employee engagement during difficult times or economic mayhem?

Tim Wright asked the following question about engagement during difficult times.

How do you recommend we keep employees engaged and performing optimally in times of crisis (economic, corporate, departmental, market, etc.)?

Here was my response:

I think one perspective that may be helpful is to see employee engagement as a stress reduction strategy. Here is what I mean. When we fully focus on our work it absorbs our attention and energy. Other things (worries, frets, the economy) disappear while we unite with what we do.

We don’t engage out of fear we engage out of caring and connection which will lessen or dissipate fear. Employees need help in realizing that engagement is of benefit to all and engagement is something they have control over. We cannot individually control the economy or a crisis but we can control our connection to our work and to others.

I guess my counseling psychology background is coming out here but in Morita therapy the person is encourage to “forget” about their problem and get busy doing something and preferably doing something for others.

We don’t suck out discretionary effort through engagement rather we work with it as an opportunity to be fully who we are, where we are, with whatever we are doing.

And that’s my Zinger.

Visit Tim’s Culture to Engage to read his insights into engagement and culture.

Photo Credit: Lookin’ Outside My Window by http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlco4/2976836580/

1,000,859 page views. This site uses Urchin software from Google to keep track of statistics on this site. Today the page views on this site went over a million for 2008. This site is narrowly focused on employee engagement and strength based leadership. Thank you for demonstrating to me how important these topics are to you. I plan to give you a million more reasons to keep visiting this site in 2009.

Important memo. I just had a thought shower so at this moment in time here is all of it so we keep our heads up as I want to keep you in the loop to get our ducks in a row by brainstorming and being pro-active about going forward to touch base at the end of the day so that we sing from the same hymn sheet to turn things around with our 360º thinking before the credit crunch has our thinking outside of the box go so high as to become blue sky thinking and we begin pushing the envelope to start downsizing.

According to work in Great Britain these were the 20 most despised words of business jargon:

1. Thinking outside of the box
2. Touch base
3. At the end of the day
4. Going forward
5. All of it
6. Blue sky thinking
7. Out of the box
8. Credit crunch
9. Heads up
10. Singing from the same hymn sheet
11. Pro-active
12. Downsizing
13. Ducks in a row
14. Brainstorming
15. Thought shower
16. 360º thinking
17. Flag it up
18. Pushing the envelope
19. At this moment in time
20. In the loop

How about writing some jargon in a comment to my memo. We can keep everyone disengaged or at least completely bamboozled.

Here are 15 Management Provocations for you to contemplate as we approach 2009:

1. Manage Fear and Find Happiness – Have an ear for fear and an eye for anxiety in yourself and the people you manage. What role does fear play in management and how do you manage fear? What is the impact of fear on performance and performance feedback? Can we lessen fear with the new currency of authentic happiness and positive psychology? (Resource: www.authentichappiness.org)

2. Weave Paradox and Improvisation with Strategy and Planning into Management – Can you embrace positive uncertainty and work with ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity? Can you slide between strategy and improvisation? Keep asking yourself…What comes next?(Resources: H.B. Gelatt, Positive Uncertainty and Patricia Madson, Improv Wisdom)

3. Connect community while creating conversation - Have you succeeded in ensuring your organization is a community? What is the role of community and how does it change the role of managers? Overcome distance and disconnection through community. What is your comfort and competence level with a co-created workplace? (Resource: James Cherkoff & Johnnie Moore, Change This Manifesto, Co-Creation Rules)

4. Achieve brand new management by wedding strength with value to others – Quickly what are your top 5 strengths? When was the last specific time you used each as a manager? Who knows about your strengths? How do they know this? What is your personal management brand – the strengths you have that create value for others? (Resources; Marcus Buckingham, Go Put Your Strengths to Work and Dave Ulrich & Norm Smallwood, Leadership Brand)

5. Embrace your ignorance – What don’t you know? How often do you feel compelled to use an expert model when an ignorant model might work better? Ignorance simply means not knowing. Stupidity on the other hand, is thinking you know when you don’t. It is okay to be ignorant, just don’t be stupid about it. In the 1960′s Marshall McLuhan said in the future we would learn a living versus earn a living – what living are you learning now? Ignorance is where we start, we don’t have to stay there. Are you comfortable dwelling in the Age of Ask? (Resource: Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety 2)

6. Leverage social media within the new workplace – How do we work with social media (blogs, wikis, instant video, etc.) and work with employees who have embraced social media? What are the potentials and pitfalls? How have the social media tools shaped our offline work and our ways of working? (Resource: Clay Shirky,: Here Comes Everybody)

7. Engage yourself and others – How engaged are you at work? How do you work with disengaged workers? What are the benefits and practices of engagement? Is engagement just a new term for motivational carrots and sticks? (Resource: David Zinger, Employee Engagement Zingers, www.davidzinger.com)

8. Tell stories more than once upon a time – How do we understand and use story in our workplaces from a six word management story to a 50 word case study? Do we overlook facts because of stories? What metaphors are you using and the people you manage using to explain and understand work? (Resource: Jim Loehr, The Power of Story)

9. Dwell in permeable categories - What categories do you use to understand others and how do they serve or not serve you? Do you focus on generations, psychological types, or leaders versus managers? If we need to categorize how do we make if helpful and healthy? (Resource: Wikipedia, Conceptual metaphor)

10. Rethink IT – We often refer to IT as information technology but the bigger IT faced by managers and organizations is Integrity and Trust. How do we maintain the bedrocks of management…authentic integrity and trust? (Resource: Tracy Heibeck, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World)

11. Expand, enhance, and renew energy – How do you gather the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy for work? How do you consciously elevate the energy of the people you lead? How do we contribute to organizational energy? (Resource: Jane Dutton, Energize Your Workplace)

12. Live your legacy – Spiritual focus as a manager is not limited to religion. It means something greater than yourself. How comfortable and confident are you with the spiritual elements of work? Do you see it as some fluffy extra or a central component of meaningful work? When your work is done, what will you leave behind? (Resource: You and beyond…)

13. Weld brains through social intelligence – How do our brains impact the people we lead? What do neurons – mirror neurons, spindle cells, and oscillators have to do with management? Does social neurobiology really have something to teach managers? (Resource: Daniel Goleman, The Biology of Leadership, HBR September 2008)

14. Infuse influence – When command and control withered away how do we still get or “let” people do the work required? How can we be accountable when we are not responsible? What are your influence tools? Are you checking in with people or checking up on people? (Resource: Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, & Andrew Shimberg, How to Have Influence, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2008).

15. What comes next?….

I voiced these management provocations at Lisa Haneberg’s Developing Great Managers course in Washington DC this week. This was a wonderful 2 day course sponsored at the American Society for Training and Development on how managers can develop power hours of training. I want to thank both Lisa and ASTD for inviting me to be a part of such a timely and helpful course.