Make Meaning

Are you ready to change employee engagement?

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