Henry Mintzberg on Creating a Community of Employee Engagement
Community. Organizations must strive towards creating communities of engagement. Henry Mintzberg one of the world’s top management experts advocates communities of engagement in organizations.
Foster relationships and community is a key component of the Zinger Employee Engagement Model.
Foster relationships and community. A strong key of employee engagement is our connection to relationships and community. These relationships and community can be personal and social media. Do we build relationships and results? The essence of work is relationships and community. Organizations that do not transform themselves into communities are in danger of becoming obsolete or ignored.
Stephen Golberg, from the Employee Engagement Network, gave us a heads up about an interview with Henry Mintzberg on Management that appeared in the Montreal Gazette.
Here is the part of the interview that leapt off of the page for me:
Q: You’d like to see organizations as “communities of engagement.” What do you mean?
A: We’ve isolated everybody. We measure performance individually, we hire and fire individually, we don’t give enough attention to how people work together and function together as a community. The companies we admire the most have a sense of community, people are happy to work there.
Are you there yet? Is your orgnization working as a community? Do you have a strong sense of community where you work?
David has a 20/20 vision, even though he is also color blind. He is dedicated to fostering a 20% global increase in employee engagement by the year 2020. Join him in this quest as low levels of engagement are bad for employees, organizations, customers, and the economy.
Mintzberg zeros in on a common issue in North America. We are such strong individualists that we do poorly on the group dimension. In school and elsewhere we concentrate on the individual and individual achievement. It’s no surprise that we do it in business as well.
Wally,
I think you and Mintzberg are right on. I think social media will play a role in helping organizations create more community inside the organization and I think some of the resistance to social media is the fear and unknown of working in and with community.
David