Believe?

Do you believe in employee engagement? What do you believe about employee engagement? Have you taken the time to articulate your beliefs? Are you willing to write down your beliefs and ensure those beliefs are your core beliefs?

Valuable exercise. I believe this is a very valuable exercise. Bob Sutton has taken the thought and time to articulate what he believes about management and organizations. I encourage you to do this for your view of employee engagement, leadership, management, or the workplace.

Bob Sutton. Bob Sutton is a wonderful writer and blogger. His work ranges from The No Asshole Rule (a remarkable book creating a better and more respectful workplace) to The Knowing-Doing Gap. I continue to learn so much from Bob every time I read his books or blog.

Bob site. To follow Bob’s blog, click here or click on the screen shot of his blog below:

Bob Sutton’s 15 Beliefs:

Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!

Indifference is as important as passion.

In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can’t have both at the same time.

Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.

Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.

You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.

Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.

Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.

The best test of a person’s character is how he or she treats those with less power.

The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?

The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.

The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrate

Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.

It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?

Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity

Thanks Bob Sutton for letting me reprint your beliefs at this site.

Your beliefs. To get you started on a framework to articulate your beliefs I encourage you to mull over Bob’s beliefs and visit the website: This I believe.

What about you? What are your beliefs? Within a month, I will be launching an new initiative to articulate and state your beliefs  at the employee engagement network.

My beliefs. Tomorrow, in the next post at this site, I will articulate my beliefs about employee engagement.