A Bulletproof View of Employee Engagement
Sample statement from Jason during our dialogue: Well, the reality of it is we believe that engagement is a choice that the employee makes, and that without personal accountability for that… If the employee has no personal accountability in terms of how they view their own experience, and their own engagement, and the choices they make relative to their work, you cannot engage them. If they’re not willing to engage, it doesn’t matter what you do as a manager, and so I think there’s… You have to be looking at accountability, you have to be coaching people, you have to be getting employees to put some skin in the game with you and recognizing that engagement is a shared responsibility between the employee and the manager in the organization. So, I think fundamentally that’s where it starts. That’s a pretty big shift in mindset is realizing as a manager you cannot take on that burden by yourself.
Employee Engagement Dialogue on Talent: Jason Lauritsen an David Zinger from David Zinger on Vimeo.
David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger and I want to welcome you to the employee engagement dialogues. It’s my pleasure today to have Jason Lauritsen with us today talking about engagement. Jason, I have a slide up with a bit of your background, but why don’t you tell us a few things about yourself? [00:19]
Jason Lauritsen: Sure. The short version is I’m kind of I guess a nontraditional HR guy and that I started my career in sales, and through recruiting executive search found my way ultimately sort of to fall in love with HR, the work of HR, spent almost a decade in corporate HR leading and turning around corporate HR teams, and then about a year ago I did what some of my HR friends called going rogue, and I left corporate HR to kind of return to the vendor side of the business and return to helping other companies do great work, and so today that’s what I do is I speak, write, and consult fulltime. [01:03]
David Zinger: And it seems like you have a special interest in the talent side of it? [01:06]
Jasson Lauritsen: I do. That seems to be… I fell in love when I was in the recruiting business early on. I fell in love with the dynamic that existed between how people and companies sort of come together, and why some of those matches are perfect, and some of them are not, and I got really fascinated in that, and ultimately… At the time I didn’t know that that would be, you know, you call it talent work, but that’s really what it was, and I sort of never turned back once that fire lit inside of me. [01:38]
David Zinger: And so there are a number of places where people can find you online, and in your work, and just it speaks to the variety of interests, and how you move, and one of them is Bulletproof Talent. Can you tell us a little bit about that? [01:52]
Jason Lauritsen: Yeah, Bulletproof Talent is a business, it’s a joint venture that we launched, I guess now about a year ago that I launched with a longtime mentor, and friend, and partner Cy Wakeman. Cy’s been a speaker/consultant for 18 years and she had some really interesting… She talks a lot about leadership and accountability, and she has a motto called reality-based leadership that’s… Early on when I saw it, it was sort of I was drawn like moths to a flame to it; I loved it because I think it resonated with my own sense of values about leadership, and so when I was leaving corporate HR and, you know, looking for an adventure, she and I sat down, and one of the places that kind of threw some sparks is when we were talking about sort of her thoughts about engagement and my experience with employee engagement, and how do we marry those together, and so we came together, built a product, built some things, and launched a company to help organizations or provide I guess an alternative to organizations that maybe were struggling with getting the performance out of their employee engagement and leadership development programs that they had expected when they set down the path. [03:05]
David Zinger: OK, and before we get to a little bit of a provocative idea about employee engagement is broken, I wonder if you can talk to us right now… I mean you have a variety of interests, what’s engaging you the most in your work right now? [03:19]
Jason Lauritsen: You know that’s a great question. I think the thing that I tend to come back to are I’m really fascinated about how there are sort of core elements of talent, you know, sort of talent work in our organizations, and there are some sort of core processes that HR seems to have identified and I think make sense; you know, we’ve got development of talent, so you know, talent management processes, how do we cultivate people’s talent, employee engagement I think is a big area, and performance management. Those three are really fascinating to me for a variety of reasons, one being that we recognize how important they are, and yet we continue to cling on to processes that, you know, when you look back at them might be… You know, we’ve been using the same approaches to these things for sometimes 50-70 years without any major innovation. We know they’re broke, but yet for whatever reason, I’m interested as to why we aren’t bolder in trying, you know, sort of throwing out what doesn’t work and starting over with a different approach, and so that seems to be where I keep coming back to is like, you know, that dynamic and trying to think through solutions, and creating solutions that help us move the needle into, you know, not just an iteration, but I think we need an revolution in those areas in order to really, you know, live up to what our CEOs and leaders expect from us in the HR space. [04:52]
David Zinger: And that’s a tough uphill fight; I mean I was watching a fringe play just last week, and part of the person’s play was our reliance on the old cordy keyboard, and there would be a much better design for a keyboard, but we’re not going to see that change none too quick, and so we do have a lot of work to do around engagement. [05:12]
Jason Lauritsen: Indeed. [05:14]
David Zinger: The next slide I’m showing is a video you made on employee engagement is broken, and certainly people can go to YouTube and type that into the search bar and they’ll find it. I wonder if we could talk just a little bit about that, and maybe more specifically with a manager and an organization that’s responsible for some engagement, what would be helpful for them in watching that video and what could they do in their own workplace to try and stop this from being broken? [05:42]
Jason Lauritsen: Well, I think a couple of things. I mean where that came from was really this story, and if they watch the video they’ll see. It’s sort of me telling the story of how I kind of lost my faith in some of the traditional employee engagement approaches, and a lot of that was through just sort of looking at we we’re putting all this effort into engagement, but we weren’t really seeing the results come out the other end, and so there was something missing or something going on in the middle, and so from a practical standpoint really what this, you know, sort of what we talk about here and how we, you know, how we prescribe managers or leaders to approaches is number one, is to realize that I think somewhere along the line we lost our way, because employee engagement started out as an employee opinion survey, and then I think somewhere, I don’t know if it was consultants or who it was, but we turned it into this thing called employee engagement. We created this construct, and then people turned that into a number, and they started chasing whatever number their chosen method was, as opposed to realizing that this whole process was about trying to understand what was going on so that we could do a better job managing and leading; it was about gathering information. So, I think if we return back to the roots, number one, as managers and leaders, and realize that this is about gathering info. It’s not… And I think the other thing that fundamentally… There’s a couple of things that are fundamentally broken, but I think the biggest one is that we’ve become convinced as managers that engagement is our job, like there’s been so much where, you know, we get the… The way these surveys are handled is you get your report on how engaged your team is, they give it to you as a manager, and you look at that, and that becomes like, I like to call it like your “You suck list”; it’s your list of all the things you’re not doing well and that you’re supposed to fix. Well, the reality of it is we believe that engagement is a choice that the employee makes, and that without personal accountability for that… If the employee has no personal accountability in terms of how they view their own experience, and their own engagement, and the choices they make relative to their work, you cannot engage them. If they’re not willing to engage, it doesn’t matter what you do as a manager, and so I think there’s… You have to be looking at accountability, you have to be coaching people, you have to be getting employees to put some skin in the game with you and recognizing that engagement is a shared responsibility between the employee and the manager in the organization. So, I think fundamentally that’s where it starts. That’s a pretty big shift in mindset is realizing as a manager you cannot take on that burden by yourself. [08:29]
David Zinger: I mean I run the Employee Engagement Network. I don’t see us getting away from that term employee engagement, but it certainly is problematic, because it attaches so much to employee, as opposed to work, and organization, and it took a great verb, engage, and turned it into a noun, and as you said, made it a number. [08:47]
Jason Lauritsen: Yeah and there are so many organizations, you know, you’ll talk to… You know, like I’ll talk to… You’ll sit, and I’ll talk with HR, you know, back when I was in HR I talked to my HR colleagues that were leading HR organizations, and they’d talk about their engagement results, and they would say well, we improved our engagement results from, you know, a 3.82 last year to a 3.93 this year, and I mean they were really proud of that, and I always would say so what? Like so what, who cares? I mean like does that really get your CEO excited? I mean I know it doesn’t. The executives roll their eyes when we talk about those kinds of numbers because they don’t mean anything. Show me how that increase in numbers impacted, you know, bottom line results or top line revenue or whatever, now you started to get excited, but I think that linkage is increasingly broken and increasingly missing because of the way that we, you know, we’ve sort of drifted away from what this processes started out being about. [09:44]
David Zinger: Yeah, and speaking of drifting away, it’s an interesting segue is you wrote a great post about your daughter playing soccer, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful framework. I wonder if you can kind of summarize that a little bit for us, Jason? [10:01]
Jason Lauritsen: Well, I was sitting… My daughter started what we call, they call it micro soccer here in the middle of Nebraska, and so she was, you know, four years old, you know, and anybody that’s watching this, you know, four-year olds kind of chase the ball around or whatever, but there are certain four-year olds that are more into understanding what this is about than others. The thing with my daughter is that as I sat and I looked at her, like she is highly engaged in the game of soccer, like she loves going, she loves like… She was never one of the kids that would cry, you know what I mean, we would have kids that would cry and the parents would have to come get them up. She would willingly go in, she willingly listened to the coach, she was very, you know, she was very excited and happy about it; I mean highly engaged in the experience of soccer. The problem was she did not care a lick about actually kicking the ball, or scoring goals, or accomplishing anything; she just liked to run around with people and be part of the experience, and as I was watching that, sort of a reinforcement, a light bulb of, you know, all this work in engagement is that I think you can have highly engaged employees that are entirely ineffective. I mean they’re excited to be there, they’re very willing, they listen, they give you all the right signals, but they’re not actually producing the performance that you pay them for, and so I think that’s part of where we can lose our way if we’re not careful, and you know I’m hoping at some point my daughter will turn the corner on that, but I suspect she may end up being a musician, which is why, you know, or she’s more of a social creature than she is interested in soccer, but I think the same thing happens in our organizations, and I think we’re not careful when it comes to engagement. We’re chasing engagement for the sake of engagement, and if you’re trying to win soccer games and you’ve got a bunch of people just excited to be out on the field that don’t care about scoring goals, you’re going to have a tough time winning many soccer games. [11:52]
David Zinger: Yeah, that’s one of the approaches out of the UK that I quite appreciate is a fair few people have been talking about the locus of engagement, and there’s many different locus’s of engagement, and if we don’t have a locus of engagement on results or performance or whatever, as you say, we can have people that are happy, satisfied, and look like they’re busy doing things, but what does that really mean? [12:16]
Jason Lauritsen: Right. No, that’s exactly right, and I think that’s where this whole discussion about engagement… The only reason we set down this path of employee engagement when we go clear back to why did we initially do this, it was because we wanted some data that would help us do a better job of managing and leading people towards achieving better outcomes. So, and somewhere along the line we stopped thinking about that third thing, we’ve lost focus there, and we started to sort of convince ourselves it’s actually about the engagement, and engagement without the performance doesn’t result in anything, and so like I said, that’s where most of our work has been more about, honestly, is yes we work in engagement, but we use the engagement as a tool to understand and measure, but it’s really about accountability and cultivating accountability, so that’s where we’re kind of an interesting, you know, in terms of how we approach the business we talk about accountability as a tool to drive engagement and performance, as opposed to focusing on the engagement, because we think the linkage between, you know, performance and engagement is tenuous at best. Almost all of the data out there about it is generally correlative in nature; there’s very little data that suggests there’s an actual causation, and on top of that, everybody measures engagement differently, so how in the world… I mean so one organization’s research about engagement and its linkage is completely irrelevant unless you’re using the exact same measurement instrument. So, I mean we’ve made a mess of this concept in the industry. [13:52]
David Zinger: Yeah, you can be a prisoner of a certain consultant company’s measure because you’re trying to benchmark last year and as you say, there’s a lack of operational definitions of engagement at times, and there’s people going off in their own direction, and we don’t… The academics are at least moving in that direction; we’re seeing a few more controlled studies with independent, and dependent variables, and some random assignment to groups, but we’re a long way from some of the magic elixir bandwagon jargon focus that engagement holds out as a promise to people. [14:26]
Jason Lauritsen: Absolutely. [14:28]
David Zinger: And so… [14:29]
Jason Lauritsen: And I hope… I mean I hope that… I sort of, and this is where I’m cynical, you know, and I believe it’s broken, but I also hold out sort of some hope in the promise of engagement, that if we can find a way to measure it in a, you know, in a real standardized, consistent way, and have the research that shows how that impacts real performance, I think there is a huge upside, but I think right now… I mean today we try to convince… There are a lot of people that believe that we’re in that spot or trying to sell that we’re in that spot and we just aren’t. It’s still an opinion survey, I mean that’s what we’re dealing in right now, and we’ve called it something else, but at the end of the day that’s what it’s about. [15:09]
David Zinger: And I think there is research; I mean Teresa Amabile and others who are doing daily diaries or people who are attaching some engagement measures to your mobile devices or whatever hold out some promise that we move it away from that anonymous biannual survey framework to something else. But to segue from mini soccer, which is anarchy, there’s an irony here in that you’ve written with another person, the Talent Anarchy or Anarchist Manifesto. Can we talk a little bit about that, Jason? [15:41]
Jason Lauritsen: Yeah, so one of my other sort of bodies of work is I’m part of another partnership with Joe Gerstandt, and we call our collective work Talent Anarchy. Most of what we do is it’s either speaking or writing, and we talk about sort of our banner I guess is setting talent free or sort of we’re on a quest to set talent free, and the manifesto really was born out of, you know, as we were trying to clarify kind of what our thinking was or what our belief was about what organizations should be doing and how leadership should look different. We created this sort of list of, this sort of declaration of what we believe organizations should be doing or aspiring to be, and so the language is a little bit… Obviously you would expect the language to be bold coming from guys that call themselves Talent Anarchist, yeah. [16:32]
David Zinger: We hope so. [16:33]
Jason Lauritsen: Yeah, but it’s our way of sharing with the world or sort of, you know… We actually wrote it kind of as a way of inspiring I guess other talents, you know, aspiring talent anarchists; those that were in the machine that saw what was broken, that needed inspiration or needed to know that they weren’t the only one that thought some of these things were ridiculous or that they believed more in the human spirit and they believed more in, you know, true leadership, and authenticity, and all these different things that we talk about, and so that’s what the manifesto is really about is I think, you know, inspiring and supporting those people that are trying to do the good work of changing the organization for the better. [17:16]
David Zinger: It’s well put together and there’s about 29 or 30 declarations on a slide so that people can get a hold of them, I mean they can just download it from one of your sites, and I also appreciate in that perspective is that we’re looking at using the engagement term or engaged term at people who are engaged who can potentially get more engaged, as opposed to how do we turn around the disengaged group. There can be that neglect of population of people who are performing and doing well, but can certainly use some perspective, and inspiration, and ideas about how they can turn their performance into even better engagement for themselves and the organization. [17:57]
Jason Lauritsen: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s an empowerment message for sure. [18:01]
David Zinger: So, if people want to find you, they can find you at a variety of sites, we’ll just show two of them, is once again back to www.BulletproofTalent.com, and there’s about you, and contact us, and some more information there, and then you also have your own site, and as you were telling me just before we started, if you click on the writing button, that’s where you’ll find your most recent blog posts. Any final comments before we bring things to a close, Jason? [18:28]
Jason Lauritsen: I just think that, you know, I guess one of my things, whether its engagement or talent work, I think is that I hope that people… I think fundamentally we just need to as an HR community, as a community of talent professionals need to be asking why, and understanding the science, and the reasoning, and the methodologies behind what we do, because there’s a lot of things we’re doing that were a great idea maybe 50 years ago and we’ve never gone back and really questioned the design and the method behind that, and I think if we just get into asking why are we doing this and how do we know it’s working, that would help us, you know, move the needle enormously on employee engagement and I think all the rest of our talent work. [19:12]
David Zinger: So, with a little dose of Talent Anarchy and some of your work and perspective, perhaps employee engagement won’t be so broken; it needs to go through some changes and shifts along the way. Thanks so much for taking about 20 minutes of your time to join us, and giving us a little bit of perspective, and some ways to get in touch with you to learn more about engagement. Thanks, Jason. [19:35]
Jason Lauritsen: Thanks, David, thanks for having me. [19:36]
David Zinger: Oh, you’re very welcome. [19:37]
David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert. He founded and host the 5200 member Employee Engagement Network. David is currently using the Pyramid of Employee Engagement with organizations and individuals to increase their levels of engagement.
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