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Eugenie Bouchard: What a 19 Year Old Rising Tennis Star Can Teach Us About Employee Engagement

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7 Lessons on Employee Engagement from a Teenage Tennis Player

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Eugenie Bouchard (source Wikipedia - Edwin Martinez

Eugenie Bouchard (source Wikipedia – Edwin Martinez

As a Canadian in Winnipeg with the temperature at 42 below, I have caught tennis fever and have enjoyed watching 19 year old Canadian, Eugenie Bouchard, compete in the Australian Open. Her engaged and engaging play, landing her a spot in the semifinals, offers us lessons in engagement.

Here are the 7 engagement lessons I have derived by watching Eugenie play on the other side of the world:

  1. It is always good wherever you work to have a coach. Eugenie has been fortunate to have her coach make the trip with her. Never be afraid of getting lots of coaching to be the best you can be.
  2. Don’t give up, you can infuse inner mental toughness with outer physical composure as you just keep playing your game.
  3. Keep improving performance by making progress while also shaking off setbacks in seconds.
  4. Enjoy your work and embrace your opportunity to be on the center stage.
  5. Know that it takes years of work to become an overnight sensation and when the foundation is laid, expect your success and don’t be surprised by it.
  6. It is always nice to have the support of others (Genie’s army and the country of Canada) behind you, and enjoy and appreciate the love made tangible by the gift of Aussie plush animals they bestow upon you.
  7. At 19, it is okay to say you want to date Justin Bieber. Be poised and assured while never selling out on your youthful moments.

Pyramid Model of Employee Engagement

David Zinger is a Canadian employee engagement expert. He is enjoying the Australian open and honored that his pyramid of engagement has been used by the WTA (Woman’s Tennis Association) in their leadership work.

David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker: Don’t Manage Change (Lesson 4)

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Are you ready to change employee engagement?

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Employee engagement involves change. Virgina Satir, an exceptional family therapist once taught me that people do not resist change. I asked her why people didn’t change and she responded that “the gravity of the familiar keeps pulling us back into its orbit.”

What people resist is being compelled or coerced to change. In the dying days of leadership command and control we still seem to want to make people change and we are very poor at inviting people to change.

I loved (a strong choice or words for a blog post) Daniel Markovitz’s Harvard Business Blog post on May 16:  No One Likes to Be Changed. Here are a few of his pearls of change wisdom:

I propose that we dispense with the concept of “change management” entirely. History shows that’s a recipe guaranteed to foment fear, resistance, and — ultimately —failure.

Research shows that there’s actually a decrease in cognitive function when people feel as though they lack control over their work environment. Moreover, repetitive change initiatives — particularly ones that include layoffs — inevitably lead to cynicism and often to a kind of learned helplessness.

The key is to pose a business problem to the workers actually doing the job and then having them design the change

The real secret to successful change, therefore, is not to change people at all. Let them figure out how to solve their own problems, and they’ll do the rest.

If employee engagement is a problem in your organization are you letting employees be the ones to solve it? As my friends at Juice ask: As a leader or manager, are you a parent or a partner with your employees?

David

David Zinger is an expert  global employee engagement speaker and consultant who brings the engagement  down to earth while striving to enliven the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement and results while also building relationships. David has worked on employee engagement from Winnipeg to Warsaw, Saskatoon to South Africa, and Boston to Barcelona. In 2013, David has spoken in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Toronto. Contact him today at: david@davidzinger.com

Lesson Three from David Zinger Employee Engagement Speaker: 9 Ways to Engage the Audience

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A good employee engagement speaker engages

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I have been to a lot of conferences and witnessed many presentations on employee engagement. I have spoken on employee engagement on at least 200 occasions. The best presentations engage the attendees with each other and with the topic even in a one hour keynote. We don’t need 100 PowerPoint slides and the speaker rattling off statistics about engagement like an auctioneer voicing bids at an auction. We need to ensure that employee engagement sessions transform the noun of engagement into the verb of engage.

Here are 9 things I do to make sure they speech is engaging.

  1. I use just one slide or no slides. This also help me to ensure that I don’t try to cover too much. Many times I tell audience when I show my first slide that this is my first slide and only slide. I have had audiences applaud then they hear it is just one slide. I find that audiences often prefer one slide to no slides because it gives them something to look at. This slide I use most is the Pyramid of Employee Engagement. See this slide at the end of these 9 points.
  2. Within every 15 to 20 minute period I encourage the audience to engage in an exercise to bring the concepts or practices to life.
  3. I never make my audience engage in an exercise or meet with a partner. I invite them to do this and respect their choice not to engage. Real engagement starts with authentic and compelling invitations.
  4. I offer online resources people can use to get more information after the speech/facilitation so that they don’t feel compelled to write everything down.
  5. I rely more on stories than statistics and each statistic should have a story behind it.
  6. I voice tentative statements so that audiences can determine for themselves if the ideas or practices are viable or valuable. We learn in a richer more expansive way when we are given good tentative information.
  7. I honor the experience that many people will learn more by what they say than by what they hear.
  8. My VIA signature strength is humor and playfulness so I ensure my speeches have both humor and playfulness built in to the design and delivery of the session.
  9. By the end of the speech I know I have been successful if I have a hard time getting the audiences’ attention back from an invited exercise because they are so engaged with what they are doing.

Zinger Model of Employee Engagement

David

David Zinger is an expert  global employee engagement speaker and consultant who brings the engagement  down to earth while striving to enliven the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement and results while also building relationships. David has worked on employee engagement from Winnipeg to Warsaw, Saskatoon to South Africa, and Boston to Barcelona. In 2013, David has spoken in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Toronto.

Lesson Two From an Employee Engagement Speaker: Some Things Should Never be Radical!

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It should not be radical to be either honest or transparent

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Employee engagement thrives with honesty and transparency. I trust we don’t have to make the business case for honesty and transparency in the workplace but I am sure someone has set about calculating the return on honesty (ROH) or an even better Dilbert-like acronym, Return on Transparency (ROT).

In recent years, I have increasingly encountered articles and blog posts about radical honesty and radical transparency. Ryan Smith and Golnaz Tabibnia (what a wonderful looking and sounding name) near the end of 2012 wrote a Harvard Business blog post: Why Radical Transparency Is Good Business. They claim radical transparency improves business performance in terms of focus, engagement, and growing and recruiting talent. I guess there already  is a ROT in our workplace. I don’t quibble with their premise or plea for transparency I just hope that we don’t see it as being so radical.

When did it ever become RADICAL to be honest or transparent at work. (Yikes, I think I am starting to almost write like Tom Peters and his tendency to try and shout through his writing with a plethora of BOLD UPPER CASE letters in a variety of colors.

Of course, maybe we do need to shout: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE RADICAL TO BE HONEST OR TRANSPARENT. I yearn for the sound of respectful voices not shouting but rather being honest and transparent in our workplace.

One last thing, please do not ever approach me and ask, “Can I be really honest with you right now?”  I am going to say no. Not because I don’t want you to be honest but because it makes me believe that you have not been honest with me before. Just go ahead all the time and be honest, really! Trust me, you probably will be real more than radical.

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be.

David

David Zinger is an expert  global employee engagement speaker and consultant who brings the topic down to earth while striving to enliven the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement and results while also building relationships.