Employee Engagement and are you positive?

Sour lemon. First off a confession, I have not nor will I ever be a positive thinker. When life throws me a lemon I do not make lemonade, I duck. Then I figure out where the lemon came from and what I can do about it.

I sour on the shallowness of much positive thinking. Having said that, I am enthralled with Barbara Fredrickson’s researched and authentic examination of positive psychology presented in her book, Positivity.

Positivity is not Polly Anna stuff.

Positivity does not mean we should follow the axioms “Grin and bear it” or “Don’t worry, be happy.” those are simply superficial wishes. Positivity runs deeper. It consists of the whole range of positive emotions — from appreciation to love, from amusement to joy, from hope to gratitude, and then some…positivity points to vital human moments. (p. 6)

Fredrickson’s book outlines the current research from positive psychology. In a future article I plan to outline the work of Marcial Losoda and his work on teams and interactions.

Take action. I encourage you to read the book and visit www.positivityratio.com right now for more information and to do take the positivity self-test.

Lets take a positivity approach to employee engagement.

Photo Credit: Puzzle by http://www.flickr.com/photos/erix/103919415/

I just discovered this very awesome slide presentation on 10 business lessons learned. It is worth a look as the author/designer did such a fine job on being elegant, simple, and powerful. Kudos to presentations like this.

• What would your 10 lessons be?
• Can you also present them in an elegant way?

Employee Engagement – How do you handle all the things coming your way?

Tetris celebrated 25 years of existence recently.

I think it could be a good model for staying engaged.

Here is a snippet from Georgia tech professor Janet Murray stating it is the,

perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans…constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our ovecrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught.

If you haven’t already seen this human tetris take a look:

Engage 5 is a weekly feature of Employee Engagement Zingers. Engage-5 asks leading thinkers, writers, consultants, and others involved in employee engagement to complete 5 sentences.

Read Adam Hibbert’s 5 sentences on engagement:

1. I define employee engagement as dropping the dead Donkey paradigm of management (stick & carrot)
2. Our biggest challenge in employee engagement is managers who cannot adjust to becoming leaders
3. A powerful way to create greater employee engagement is to permit employees to voice criticisms, and demonstrate prompt, high-level responses
4. I am personally most engaged at work when I see people transcending the processes laid out to ensure minimum standards
5. To learn more about employee engagement I try giving a lead outside of work, in fora where hierarchy is elective

To learn more from Adam or more about Adam click here.

I enjoyed this slideshare presentation on Toe Stepping Up the Corporate Ladder. I think every so often it does us good to see a humorous spoof of how not to do things.

Enjoy the show:

How do you deliver and present your employee engagement data?

Do you create a compelling story?

Do you make your data come alive?

I encourage you to watch this Little Red Riding Hood Infographic story by Tomas Nilsson and think about how you can approach this level of richness in communicating your engagement data to the organization and internal customers or employees. Often we think about turning data into a story it was fun to see a story turned into data:

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Video 1. How well do you stay engaged when you have a crushing deadline. This is a very creative video that shows how easy it is to get quite disengaged when we feel the pressure of a deadline.

If the video fails to appear in your window, click here.

Video 2. Now here is the employee engagement paradox. Watch video 2 that shows how incredibly engaged they were in making this movie with 3 months of planning, 4 days of shooting, and 6000+ Post It Notes.

If this video fails to load in the window, click here.

Leadership plays a key role in employee engagement.  Zenger and Folkman outlined the 10 fatal flaws of bad leaders in the Harvard Business Review. The biggest flaw was lacking energy and enthusiasm which would be the raw material of engagement not only for leaders but for employees.

According to the Harvard Business Reviews newsletter:

After scrutinizing 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders and evaluating the 10% considered the least effective, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found the 10 most common leadership shortcomings. These are ranked according to the size of the difference between successful and unsuccessful leaders’ scores; successful and failed leaders differed most significantly in their energy and enthusiasm.

What links do you see between leadership flaws and disengagement?