Tom Peter + Muhammad Yunus = Engaged Working

Tom Peter encourage us to transform our employee engagement into distinct entrepreneurial engagement.

Yunus said at one point, “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed: finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2500+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com

Working Zingers: Too Tense

Too Tense

If you are too tense

at work

you are probably

dwelling in the wrong tense.

Either the future tense of anxiety

or the past tense of guilt and regret.

To be less tense

drop the past,

stop reaching for the future

and live in the present tense.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2500+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com

18 Eclectic Employee Engagement and Engaging Zingers (No. 20)

A potpourri of posts on daily, work, life, and employee engagement

1. Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees. http://bit.ly/c6fOBM
2. A Dying Father’s Lessons on Life for His Teenage Daughter. http://bit.ly/a3qsua
3. David Zinger on 5 Employee Engagement Tips: Inside the Mind of a CEO. http://bit.ly/b3lGxF
4. 7 Hints for Selling Ideas by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. http://bit.ly/chYkKp
5. Employee NON-engagement? The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours! http://bit.ly/bes97z
6. It’s Not a Career Ladder, It’s an Obstacle Course Interview with Barbara J. Krumsiek CEO Calvert Group. http://nyti.ms/c82rXW
7. Employee Engagement Network: Engagement is Not An HR Issue. ~ Judy Mackenzie. http://bit.ly/cXIbuX
8. How To Re-Engage Your Employees Skip Reardon. http://bit.ly/a0vDLU
9. Mastery. Coaching the coaches from APA monitor. http://bit.ly/auqp1H
10. The psychologies of Mark Twain – biting social commentaries have deep roots in http://bit.ly/b37j43
11. Employee Engagement. Historical insight. The rest cure or the work cure. http://bit.ly/c0Gbzr
12. Daniel Shapiro insight into the key negotiation emotions: Appreciation – Affiliation – Autonomy: – Status – Role. http://bit.ly/9QOt84
13. Stumbling on happiness an interview with Daniel Gilbert on APA Monitor. http://bit.ly/agjvyZ
14. Bad beats good 5 to 1. We need to reverse our ratios. http://bit.ly/alYXH0
15. Abracadabra Moments, the Opening Line You Should Never Use, and 10 More Ways to Sell Ideas ~ Sam Harrison http://bit.ly/b48YP4
16. Gen Y Wants Sustainability Front and Center in Their Sleek, Modern Workplaces. http://bit.ly/cYHqcT
17. Drucker: The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said. CMC Site. http://bit.ly/c0va2Y
18. Health engagement – goals, many opportunities, financial accountability – individual choices/actions. http://bit.ly/93ieQ8

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2400+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com

Employee Engagement: Is Work Working (Tony Schwartz)?

Book Review: The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

Tony Schwartz along with Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy recently published The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance.

One of my favorite books of all time relating to personal and work engagement was The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. This new book written by Schwartz and 2 new partners builds, extends, and modifies some of the earlier perspectives.

I encourage anyone interested in enhancing their own employee engagement to read this book and follow the recommendations.

The structure of the books is based on 4 core working needs or sources of energy:

1. Sustainability - Being able to renew and take care of yourself so that you are healthy, fit, and resilient.
2. Security - Feeling appreciated, cared for, valued for who you are and what you do.
3. Self-Expression – Freedom to express your unique skills and talents
4. Significance - A sense of meaning or what you stand for and believe in.

Here are 5 sample nuggets from the book:

Rather than trying to get more out of people, organizations are better served by investing more in them and meeting their multidimensional needs in order to fuel greater engagement and more sustainable high performance.

We must learn to embrace opposites. By celebrating one set of qualities and undervaluing another – courage or prudence, confidence of humility, tenacity or flexibility – we lost access to essential dimensions of ourselves and others.

Research suggests that we have one reservoir of will and discipline and it gets progressively depleted by each act of conscious will.

We can develop the capacity to influence the stories we tell ourselves, so that they empower rather than undermine us.

Most people focus better when they’re given more freedom to choose where and when they do their work and are held accountable only for the value they deliver.

Read the book to learn a lot more about work and working to get work working for you.

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2500+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com

5 Employee Engagement Tips: Inside the Mind of a CEO

Employee Engagement: Think Like a CEO.

Corner Office is a feature by Adam Bryant in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times. His interviews offer highlights from conversations about leadership and management. I believe his interviews offer terrific insight into the CEO’s perspective on leadership, management and employee engagement.

His most recent interview was with Barbara J. Krusiek, CEO of the Calvert Group on Career Ladder? It’s Time for a New Metaphor.

I encourage you to read the article but here are a few of Barbara’s engaging thoughts on building a team, working with peers, obstacle courses, and community focus:

Using a coach and building a team: “Tell me about your job, but now tell me about what you think you do here that is not in that job description that you think is really critical.” Wow, did I learn a lot about them, and it was very informative in shaping the team. I also asked this a lot my first couple years at Calvert: Tell me one thing that’s going on at Calvert that you think I don’t know that you think I should know.

Working with peers. Being able to work with my peers is probably the single most important attribute that helped me along my path or, as I like to call it, my career obstacle course.

Humility and the obstacle course. When you think of an obstacle course, there are a lot of people on the obstacle course at the same time, and my success doesn’t impede your success. And I may be able to take a minute and help you over that next obstacle and still get where I want to get to. I also think you have to be a little humble. You have to be maybe a little bit overly confident to break into new things, but a little bit overly humble about what you don’t know, and admiring of the talents different people bring to the table.

Community. This quality must be evidenced in everyone who comes to Calvert: we need to find out whether they have some attachment in their community. I don’t care if they’re active in their church or did Habitat for Humanity projects. They need to show they care about something outside of themselves. Those people who have that kind of community really understand that there’s a lot more to get from a career than just a paycheck. We give one paid day off a month for volunteering. In our investment process, we’re looking beyond the financials.

Here are 5  points to consider if you are a manager or leader:

1. Are you engaging with coaches to improve your performance?
2. Are you checking behind the scenes to learning what is going on?
3. How well are you working with your peers?
4. Do you blend moxie with humility to get things going, to realize what you don’t know, and to draw out the talents of your team?
5. Are you engaging fully in your community and recognizing your organization is a community too?

Think like a CEO about engagement. I encourage you to read Adam Bryant’s interview with Barbara J. Krusiek and go think like a CEO about employee engagement!

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. David founded and moderates the 2500+ member Employee Engagement Network. His personal website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and reached over 1,000,000 page views in under 4 months in 2010. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Connect with David Zinger today for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com