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You are here: Home / Archives for book review

Employee Engagement: One Big Idea from One Little Book

March 17, 2015 by David Zinger 2 Comments

Employee Engagement: A Little Book of Big Ideas by Jasmine Gartner (Book Review)

Reading time = 2 minutes and 45 seconds

Susan, my wife, accused me of trying to maim her with tennis balls during our vacation in Punta Cana last week. We played tennis at six o’clock every night. It seemed like the perfect antidote before our evening assault on the all-inclusive buffet line.

Susan played on the side facing the setting sun and was blindly assailed by my lob shots. Finding shelter and solace in relationship she engaged in a dialogue with the couple playing beside us about the stupidity and ineptitude of the resort architect to have the courts face right into the sun, a simple problem that could have been solved by rotating the courts ninety degrees. I did not join them in their castigation of the resort designer because I had just finished reading Jasmine Gartner’s chapter on why companies need to include or inform employees on important strategy and organizational decisions.

How many times have you cursed the decisions of upper management and rallied your peers in bemoaning the blindness of those on top? And if you are a decision maker how many times have you failed to let staff know how decisions were reached and why certain options were rejected while others were accepted?

Jasmine Gartner Employee Engagement Book CoverLike a good chair umpire, Jasmine Gartner, with her education in anthropology, offers excellent insight and judgement on employee engagement with her delightful book, Employee Engagement: A Little Book of Big Ideas. She outlines five spheres of engagement: engaging with the company, the work itself, the team, the network, and society. I will outline how her idea on engaging with the company can save you from employees complaining about what is going on, the perceived ineptitude of leadership and management, and the feeling that senior executives are blindly lobbing tennis ball at employees’ heads.

In discussing the first of five spheres of engagement Gartner admonishes companies who fail to let employee know how they made decisions and the sense of unfairness many employees feel about decisions that affect them. Influenced by her work with Derek Luckhurst, Dr. Gartner encourages companies to engage employees in key strategy decisions either with input, if possible, or a full understanding of how a decision was reached.  She stated: “the key is that everyone needs to understand strategy, or the big picture of why the company works the way it does, and everybody needs to feel that change is fair, rather than a personal attack on staff” (page. 34).

Leaders, mangers, and writers banter abstractly about transparency, understanding, fairness, and trust. I applaud the specific advice of Gartner and how her concrete idea brings meaning and meat to transparency, fairness, trust, and understanding. Staff need to understand the process of important strategies and decisions and that includes all the strategies managers considered before arriving at their preferred option. Staff need to know why other strategies were rejected or they will believe that upper management is blinding them with the tandem of ignorance and ineptitude.

Back to my wife, there may have been a very reasonable explanation of why the tennis court was positioned as it was but she lacked information and the information lacuna quickly generated negative stories and judgements of incompetence towards the resort designer. It is possible the designer was ignorant, but it is also possible drainage, the placement of nearby roads, or the angle of the sun during different seasons played a role in the court placement.

So don’t double fault at work. Ensure employees can engage with important decisions and when they can’t be part of the decision making process because of government regulations or confidentiality issues, engage with them about how the decision was reached, what else was considered, and why other options were rejected.

I encourage you to read Gartner’s 100-page book as she serves up some more big ideas including engagement differences between  small teams and a large organisation, “the lesson here is that the values that work in a small team can ultimately lead to disaster in a large organisation. Large organisations have a different culture to small ones, and they must live by different values and rules” (p. 67).

David Zinger - Employee Engagement Speaker

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: #employeeengagement, book review, David Zinger employee engagement speaker and expert, Employee Engagement, Employee Engagement a little book of Big Ideas, Jasmien Gartner, spheres of employee engagement

Mobile Employee Engagement: Meet Like You Mean It

May 29, 2014 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Create Engaging Mobile Meetings

(Reading time = 1 minute 51 seconds)

Turmel, Meet Like You Mean It

Wayne Turmel is a master of mobile meetings and his 100 page book imparts his wisdom to you to help you ensure mobile meeting success. I appreciate his concrete tips and actions and how by applying what he offers you will create a more engaging mobile experience. He offers a guide to increasing your comfort, confidence, and competence in creating painless and productive virtual meetings. I especially enjoyed reading the book as this type of book can often be a dry affair but Wayne spices it up with humor and a conversational tone that is inviting and engaging. He offers specific tips and includes checklists and templates to put the ideas to use right away.

Here are a few tidbits that stood out for me as I read his book:

  • virtual meetings suck
  • managers spend 50% of their time in meetings
  • About 66% of participants say webmeetings are a waste of time yet in the United States,  people spend 66 million person-hours per year engaged with these meetings
  • 75% of people who use presentation tools have no training before beginning
  • set up everyone as a speaker or panelist for your meeting, loosen your control and set the stage for collaboration
  • Let everyone write on the whiteboard
  • Get photos of people when they are introduced
  • use mostly uploaded files
  • get participants engaged with polls and other tools
  • transform passive participants into active attendees

This book should be in the library of anyone holding virtual meetings and I believe the practices Wayne outline will offer a wonderful boost to mobile employee engagement. I am conducting some experiments with Fuze on a manager’s influence on mobile employee engagement and will be following a number of the fine recommendations that Wayne made to improve the design and delivery of these experimental manipulations in engagement.

David Zinger Picture May 22 2013

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert who is quite interested in mobile employee engagement and what we can do to improve engagement for people who spend all or part of their day being connected virtually.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: book review, David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker, Fuze, Meet Like You Mean It, mobile employee engagement, virtual employee engagement, Wayne Turmel, webmeetings

12 Title Tidbits from Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

January 14, 2014 by David Zinger 1 Comment

Is your organization scaling up or just about to lose its grip?

(Reading time: Under 2 Minutes)

Scaling Up Excellence

Two days after Ground Hog day, Febraury 4th, 2014, we will all have the opportunity to come out of our cubicles and offices and either get blinded by looking up at the sun or get enlightened about scaling up excellence by reading Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao’s, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. I believe Bob would tell us to get our head out of whatever and learn to scale excellence. I encourage readers of this blog to determine how they would apply the ideas to scaling up engagement at work.

There are few business authors that I would say that I love their work. Henry Mintzberg, Peter Block, Margaret Wheatley come to mind and I would add Bob Sutton. He had me at asshole with his terrific book, The No Asshole Rule.

I was reading Bob’s blog post on the writing life just before writing this review. He advised writers:

Ask for approval of any title of anything you write.  A lot of publications won’t like that either – but it has your name on it.

The title and subtitles of this book jumped off of the page and into my mind so rather than a review I want to give you 12 titles or subtitles and encourage you to use those to springboard into the book yourself and improve your ability to scale up to excellence:

    1. Getting to more without settling for less
    2. Spread a mindset, not just a footprint
    3. Fear the clusterfug
    4. Do you suffer from delusions of uniqueness?
    5. Going slower to scale faster (and better) later
    6. Will bolstering Buddhism generate crucial understanding, commitment, and innovation?
    7. Hot causes, cool solutions: stoking the scaling engine
    8. Lean on people who can’t leave well enough alone
    9. Bad is stronger than good: Clearing the way for excellence
    10. Did this, not that: Imaging you’ve already succeeded (or failed)
    11. Teach us more, learn less
    12. The seven year conversation

As Robert and Huggy stated in the preface,

uncover pockets of exemplary performance, spread those splendid deeds, and as an organization grows bigger and older – rather than slipping toward mediocrity or worse – recharge it with better ways of doing the work at hand.

Take the 12 title tidbits and scale up excellence by reading the content of these chapters and sections. To learn more about the book and authors, check out the book’s website.

David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and consultant who refuses to be blinded by looking at the sun and put his head into this book with thoughts for scaling up excellence in employee engagement thanks to Bob and Huggy.

 

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: book review, clusterfug, David Zinger, Employee Engagement, Huggy Rao, Robert I. Sutton, Scaling Up Excellence

5 Zingers for The Laws of Subtraction (Matthew E. May)

August 8, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Zing5 b

Matthew E. May wrote The Laws of Subtraction: Six Simple Rules of Winning in the Age of Excess Everything. Given that we have gone from doing more with less to trying to do everything with nothing I find May’s ideas quite compelling. The book is laced with great and detailed examples and woven together with 50 one page contributions from others on applications, implications, and extensions of May’s ideas.

Cover Laws of Subtraction

Here are 5  zingers (5 of the 6 laws) from the book:

  1. What isn’t there can often trump what is
  2. The simplest rules create the most effective experience
  3. Limiting information engages the imagination
  4. Break is the important part of breakthrough
  5. Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert who in 2013 has worked on engagement in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, Prague and New York. He has been working on what needs to be subtracted from employee engagement to make it work for all. To access Mr. Zinger’s services email him: david@davidzinger.com.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: book review, Canada, David Zinger, Employee Engagement, employee engagement speaker, matthew c. may, the laws of subtraction

5 Zingers on Trust Works! (Ken Blanchard)

May 13, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

This is a biased review of the book, Trust Works! by Ken Blancard, Cynthia Olmstead and Martha Lawrence

Zing5 b

This is a biased review of Trust Works! It is biased because I had the opportunity in San Diego to meet and spend time with Ken Blanchard and the Blanchard Company two weeks ago. I was impressed by how down-to-earth and open Ken, his wife Margie, and the Blanchard Companies are. Ken signed my book with my special request to put in a line that he and Norman Vincent Peale wrote in The Power of Ethical Management: there is no right way to do a wrong thing.

The Blanchard family has been to Churchill Manitoba which is in my home province. Not only were they enthralled by the polar bears they demonstrated a willingness to go anywhere for an enriching experience.

Trust is fundamental for employee engagement.

Book cover Trust Works

Here are 5 zingers from the book:

  1. Cats and Dogs. This book goes to the cats and dogs. An easy story to read about trust based on a fighting, backbiting, and a sabotaging cat and dog. Please know that trust does not have to go to the dog house and there are specific steps we can take to build trust for lasting relationships.
  2. Assessment. There is a short and practical assessment we can complete on our own trust level and have others do a similar form to assess our trust.  Trust me, if you do this it will help you understand and assess trust at a personal and interpersoanl level.
  3. The ABCD’s of Trust. Trust is based on the four dimensions of Able, Believable, Connected, and Dependable. Trust in organizations starts with the first four letters of the alphabet.
  4. Trust is in the eye of the beholder. Memorize this quotation: “Trust is a delicate thing. It takes a long time to build, yet you can blow it in a matter of minutes. All it takes is one incident of behaving inconsistently with what someone considers trustworthy behavior for that person to pull away from you.”
  5. The Defining Competency. “Smart organizations are increasingly taking proactive steps to build high-trust cultures, because they’ve seen clear evidence that it helps improve the bottom line. With trust, creativity flourishes, productivity rises, barriers are overcome, and relationships deepen.” Remember, trust works.

I encourage you to buy the book, it will make for a short and trusty companion on your next flight or afternoon read at the beach.

David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert who in 2013 has worked on engagement in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, Prague and New York. He builds and sustains his own engagement in tight 24-minute periods. He has pioneered a number of significant approaches to engagement. To access Mr. Zinger’s services email him: david@davidzinger.com.

Filed Under: Employee Engagement Tagged With: 5 zingers, book review, David Zinger, employee engagement speaker, Ken Blanchard, Trust works!

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David Zinger

Email: david@davidzinger.com
Phone 204 254 2130

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