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You are here: Home / Archives for employee engagement speaker

Career Zingers #26: What’s Your Currency?

April 25, 2018 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Money often costs too much. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is Only Paper (David Zinger, 2018)

What’s your currency at work? Currency is a medium of exchange. We narrowly think of currency as being money. I am not saying money is unimportant, just that it is not as important as we think. Countless studies have demonstrated that on the list of important motivators and contributors to employee engagement money is lower on the list.

Pause right now, consider what do you truly exchange your time, effort, and self for at work?

Over the years, I have learned my personal currencies for work are:

  • curiosity,
  • connection,
  • creativity,
  • playfulness,
  • stories,
  • learning,
  • expression, and
  • contribution.

When work offers me these currencies I am engaged and motivated. I have said numerous times, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this work.” I forget I am getting paid in the currencies listed above. When you exchange your work for the right currencies, work will make you well.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: #careerdevelopment, #employeeengagement, career advice, career development, career zingers, currencies of work, currency, David Zinger, employee engagement speaker

Career Zingers #18: A Hopeful View of Hopelessness

March 19, 2018 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Hope is in the future, experience resides in where we are right now.

Hilton Head Beach (David Zinger, 2018)

I encourage you to be hopeless. I am not talking about depression, anxiety, or dread about the future. You don’t have to abandon hope but I do encourage you to give more attention and awareness to where you are right now. Hope can pull us through tough times but it can also distract us from what we need to do right now. If you want a bountiful garden make sure you plant the seeds, water the plants, and pull the weeds. I hope this advice was helpful without me relying simply on hope that you would get the message.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: career development, career zingers, David Zinger, employee engagement speaker, hope, hopelessness

A Momentous View of Employee Engagement

February 26, 2018 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Can you give me a moment?

I believe that employee engagement is significant, enriching, enlivening, and real when we distill engagement into moments. The paradox is that moments strung together can create something momentous – very important: having great or lasting importance.  My definition of employee engagement is good work done well with others every day. We must determine the moments to do good, the moments that can go well, the moments we share with others, and key moments of every day. Once we know the moments then we need to instil the actions or behaviors that make these moments so engaging. What are you going to do the moment you finish this post to make your own work or someone else’s work more engaging? Don’t just think your answer, engage the moment with a living behavioral response.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: David Zinger employee engagement, employee engagement speaker, momentous., moments, work

Engaging Zingers #7: Invitational Career Development

January 8, 2018 by David Zinger 1 Comment

Career Zinger #7: Invitational Acceptance 

In Dubai (David Zinger 2017)

In 2018, as you strive to enhance your career I encourage you to avoid being coercive with yourself because when you are coercive you set yourself up for guilt and failure. You can end up transforming part of yourself that is an ally into an adversary. A powerful way to change this is to frame your desired career change as a personal invitation, not a dogmatic imposition. I like receiving invitations. I don’t like feeling I am being pushed into something — even when I am pushing myself. Declining an invitation does not feel fatal nor final. Career development requires a caring and careful approach to embark down a new of different path.  A career goal is not a career gaol – break out of the mental jail of bullying yourself to change yourself.

I’m David Zinger, engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: career development, career development speaker, career gaol, career goal, career zingers, Employee Engagement, employee engagement speaker, engaging zingers, invitation vs coercion

12 Lessons From A Personal Journey Through Burnout and Engagement

August 3, 2017 by David Zinger 21 Comments

From confession to commitment – engagement to burnout and back again.

Engagement is the diamond in the heart of work and wellbeing.

This post is personal. Work is personal. This is not a vague theoretical outline of disengagement. It is also not a quick fix. This post outlines a challenging journey from disengagement to re-engagement. Although it is personal, I believe embedded in the experience are insights and approaches that have universal application.

Overall, my work had been steadily progressing in employee engagement for over a decade but on November 3rd of 2016 I hit a work-related speed bump. It threw the meaning of my work up in the air, jolted me emotionally, and almost brought me to a complete stop.

On November 3rd I was teaching my employee engagement course in Dubai when between 10AM and 3PM, three of the fully engaged participants suffered major economic and career setbacks that were out of their control. Engagement is no guarantee against the consequences of major economic upheaval. That same evening my wife phoned to let me know that she had been let go from the leadership position she loved.  Susan had the highest level of work engagement I know but this was no guarantee of work, organizational appreciation, or career security. These two events on opposite sides of the globe hit me much harder than I first realized. I don’t believe burnout occurs in one day but November 3rd crystallized many other experiences, perceptions, and emotions over the previous year or two into my personal D-Day or Disengagement-Day.

Since that time I have been showing classic signs of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and the belief that my work was not making a difference. I felt that my work on engagement was equivalent to putting lipstick on camels. It isn’t very pretty and the camel is still a camel!

For the past decade, I had focused all my work on employee engagement from founding and hosting the 7400 member Employee Engagement Network to education and speeches around the world, and writing four books on work. Imagine my befuddlement as I found myself disengaged from my own work. I felt even worse because I had comprehensive knowledge and methods to engage yet I was stuck. I believe work can make us well but I was not well at this time. In addition, I have a 30-year background as an employee assistance counselor and university counselor educator. I was naively arrogant believing this knowledge and expertise would make me immune from disengagement.

My sense of being engaged in meaningful work was blurred and my vigor, dedication, and absorption to both initiate and complete tasks were depleted.  I did most of my work but not at the level I expected of myself, and a number of tasks languished on the proverbial back burner.

At 62, I contemplated retiring from work yet I know in my heart that there was much I still feel called to do and I am stubborn enough not to give up.

A month ago, I encountered and fully resonated with a new word: “inanition.” Inanition means being empty, lacking in enthusiasm, vitality, and vigor. It is a spiritual emptiness, loss of purpose, and exhaustion caused by a lack of nourishment. My work failed to nourish me — my energy was dwindling, and I was a living example of inanition.

My experience is personal but it also seems to have a sense of universality to it. Your causes of disengagement, burnout or inanition may be quite different than mine, ranging from job loss and unfair practices at work to a lack of psychological safety or major career setback, but the pathway out of inanition to full engagement may have commonalities.

Here are 12 points of navigational guidance if you should encounter burnout or inanition during your career journey:

  1. Know that your career is a hero’s journey. In every hero’s journey there will be dragons (challenges and setbacks) and that’s what makes the journey so engaging, challenging, and rewarding. Of course you might also get scorched.
  2. Be patient, kind and accepting. The road back to engagement may be longer than you think. It may ask you not to be so tough on yourself. It may demand acceptance without giving up or sinking into despondent acquiescence or depression.
  3. Being resilient doesn’t mean you are a rubber ball that can instantly bounce back after being thrown to the ground. Infuse gentle tenacity and personal stubbornness based on your career purpose or calling into your human and fallible resilience. Embrace human resilience and authentic unfolding during your career quest.
  4. Acknowledge that setbacks are inevitable and they do not signal the end of the journey.
  5. When you are on fire because of burnout it is time to stop, drop, and roll. Determine what you may need to stop doing and what you may need to drop from your work and expectations. Once you have determined what you need to stop don’t freeze — determine how you will roll into re-engagement and healthy wellbeing.
  6. Take personal responsibility for your own engagement without sinking into self-blame or guilt when things are not moving as fast as you hope or think they should.
  7. Embrace impermanence. Nothing lasts. Know that change can, and will, occur. As one Zen statement declares: spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Authentic optimists know that setbacks are seldom permanent, pervasive, and personal.
  8. Let others know what you are going through and ask for help. Depending upon the severity, duration and intensity of the experience consult with a career coach or employee assistance counselor. Every hero needs a mentor or Yoda.
  9. Know that meaning at work and in life is not something we find, it is something we create and at times need to re-create. I will no longer put lipstick on camels but I can offer many contributions to make work better for individuals and organizations.
  10. Overall in overcoming inanition, look more for trending than transformation. I wanted to wake up the next morning and have it all be gone and for me to be my old self but I now focus more on positive trending in a more engaged direction than magic cures or effortless engagement elixirs.
  11. There are always lessons embedded in every experience. Inanition may not be the most welcome of work teachers but the lessons learned may be invaluable for the rest of your career. I am still very much in the process of determining what I have learned and how that learning will shape the remainder of my career.
  12. Embrace life and work. Work is not a problem to be solved; it is an experience to be lived. Don’t miss it because you imagine or believe it should be something other than it is in the present moment.

Pregnancy and Rebirth. I trace back my challenges with burnout and engagement to November 3, 2016. Today is August 3, 2017. If November 3rd was D-Day than I consider August 3rd E-Day, the day of full re-engagement. This time frame of nine months seems very symbolic to me. I have gone through a very challenging pregnant pause in my work on engagement but it has given birth to a rebirth in engagement and burnout made stronger by the challenges and setbacks. I would be delighted to work with you and your organization to help you give rebirth to engagement while also preventing or alleviating burnout by focusing on everyday employee engagement.

I often offer a line in the conclusion of my writing and after writing this post, I know that this is as much a message to myself as to my readers: Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

David Zinger is a human and fallible expert on employee engagement and believes that work can make us well, even if sometimes it doesn’t. He designed and delivers a powerful daily behavioural approach to preventing and overcoming burnout and installing authentic and powerful engagement. This education is offered in keynotes, workshops, courses, and masterclasses. David believes in the power of everyday employee engagement to make work better and to make us better.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: #employeeengagement, burnout, courses, David Zinger Canadian employee engagement expert, Employee Engagement, employee engagement speaker, keynotes, masterclasses, work, workshops

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David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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