Employee Engagement: Improving Performance Through Strengths

Employee Engagement: From Performance Management to Performance Mastery

The pyramid of employee engagement is a 10 block model of employee engagement. Here is a link to a 50 page booklet on the pyramid. After completing the strengths inventory, Strengthscope, from Strengths Partnership in the UK,  I embarked on a systematic application of my 7 significant strengths to each of the 10 blocks of the pyramid. This will make my engagement work more robust while also enhancing personal wellbeing through the application of strengths in the service of others.

There are 10 posts in this series. To learn more, take the strengthscope yourself, and to be interactive on strengths and engagement plan to attend an educational workshop in London on the importance of strengths for innovation and excellence with a fusion of the pyramid of employee engagement. Here is the information about the workshop followed by an outline of strengths applied to performance mastery.

London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00.  I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

•  Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event
•  An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback
•  A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”
•  Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels
•  An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Transforming Performance Management Into Strong Performance Mastery

Here is a short discussion of the fusion of strengths and engaged performance mastery

My favorite definition of performance is anything worthy of our attention.  When we focus on performance we enhance our own improvement and make a behavioral contribution to developing others. The very act of focusing and working on performance of self and other capitalizes on the first two of my strengths symbolized above. Perhaps this is why I have a bias towards action and performance in employee engagement as opposed to merely attitude or emotion. In my mind, good action trumps good feelings or good attitudes.

Creativity and flexibility in performance is the willingness to be open to different ways of working and achieving results. We need to continually ask ourselves what is worthy of the attention of the people we work with.  We develop creative and flexible methods of enhancing performance or perhaps finding exceptional performance in places we did not even know existed. I was moved by a presentation on Cirque du Soleil and talent management a few weeks ago in Regina. Lyn Heward, Cirque’s current Director of Creation, and the former President and COO of the Creative Content Division, told us stories of how Cirque du Soleil builds performance mastery in conjunction with their employees and how they have found hidden talents within the performers they are already working with. Cirque du Soleil offers a brilliant role model for my strengths of creativity, flexibility, and and enthusiasm.

Jane Dutton and others from the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship have demonstrated the power of creativity and flexibility fused in an approach to work called job crafting. Job crafting helps employees and organizations make changes to job design in ways that can bring about numerous benefits, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.

Enthusiasm and empathy are generated through conversation. We need more conversation surrounding performance and less ticking people off with ritualistic tick boxes rating our work on a scale of 1 to 5. Performance offers specificity for conversations that can be fused with my strengths of  enthusiasm and empathy.

The symbol I created for my leadership strength was a mountain. Even though I have lived my life on the Canadian prairies I have a great fondness for mountains and working as a team to reach a summit. We climb mountains and reach summits by taking all the necessary steps. Leading for performance mastery is not based on mindless motivation. Leading for performance is the mindful approach and connection with others to achieve results step by step. Leading is not getting work done through people, leading is getting work done with people by unleashing their best performance.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Progress Improves Engagement

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert. He will be in the UK in late November to support the Go Live event for the UK Employee Engagement Task Force and to co-lead an afternoon workshop on the fusion of employee engagement and strengths for innovation and excellence.