Strange and Strangers: Employee Engagement Dialogue
Snippet from the dialogue: Yeah, what’s happening right now is that we have to learn how to do group creativity, and until we learn how to do that we’re not going to get the innovation and the competitive advantages that we’d like to get from our organization, and we don’t do that very well; we don’t know how to assemble teams, we don’t know how to facilitate creative discovery, we don’t know how to move through that process, and until we get there we’re going to be waiting for the lone genius to somehow emerge and show us the answer, and frankly I just don’t think that’s going to happen in most organizations.
Strange Engagements from David Zinger on Vimeo.
David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger and welcome to Employee Engagement Dialogues. It’s my privilege and honor to have Mike Wagner with us fromIowa here today. I encountered Mike on a You Tube video on strange, and so we’re going to focus today on strange employee engagement and I’m looking forward to our dialogue. Mike, welcome to Employee Engagement Dialogues. There’s a little bio for you up there, but I think which is much better is just in your own words if you can tell us a little bit about your background? [0:36]
Mike Wagner: David, great to be with you today and looking forward to our conversation for sure. My background I might say is checkered; I’m an accidental businessperson. I actually began my public career, my marketplace career actually as a minister and a pastor starting new churches, and so I studied strange things, I guess that’s only fitting – seven years of classical Greek and four years of ancient Hebrew, and I have a master’s in American church history, and so that’s part of my strange journey, and I started churches and I pastured churches for 17 years before I got into the marketplace. [1:15]
David Zinger: And then you fell down the rabbit hole? [1:18]
Mike Wagner: I fell absolutely down the rabbit hole and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. Actually, you know when I left the ministry I found myself at Saturn in the late 90’s, the car company, and it was a great place; I learned a lot about branding, but I also learned about how to challenge a dysfunctional industry if you will, and how hard that is, and what it takes to do that, and what it takes to actually bring people along with you in that mission and vision of reinventing an industry. [1:50]
David Zinger: So, why White Rabbit Group, Mike, why the name? [1:55]
Mike Wagner: The name is actually intended to get you to ask the question why White Rabbit? [2:02]
David Zinger: I fell for it didn’t I? [2:03]
Mike Wagner: Yeah. About 98% of the time before I give a speech or an address or open up a workshop people say before you go any farther, tell us where did White Rabbit come from, and if I’d called it Wagner Consulting no one would have asked, you know? But in part it’s from Alice in Wonderland and the idea that the people that we want to serve as our clients are like Alice at the beginning of the book; reading a book with too many words and kind of bored and unsure of yourself as far as what comes next, and we want to be the white rabbit that takes our clients down the rabbit hole and brings them to a brand new place of excitement, and enthusiasm, but also challenges status quo for them. [2:44]
David Zinger: OK, and that’s a strange environment when you readAlice in Wonderland and a very enthralling environment. Before we get a little more formal with your definition of engagement and branding, what’s engaging you most in your work right now? [2:58]
Mike Wagner: I’m really intrigued right now by how organizations come together. Some work by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, and then most recently literally just happening right now Dave Gray’s book, The Connected Company, are areas of study and research that I’ve really been interested in; challenging hierarchical models, looking at network models in terms of how we create organizations, and I think it does touch on engagement because it’s going to change the dynamic and address some of the challenges of siloing and other things, so that’s where my area of interest is right now and we’re seeing that as a big challenge for a lot of our client companies as well. [3:44]
David Zinger: OK, and when you join the Employee Engagement Network one of the questions I’ve been asking recently is to have people put engagement in their own words. I know there’s already some people argue too many definitions of engagement, but meaning as in people, not words. Can you tell us how you kind of define or look at engagement? [4:03]
Mike Wagner: You know I look at engagement relationally, and the particular relationship I think that drives engagement, at least it has for me as a person is knowing the connection between what I do every day and the way we deliver remarkable customer experience or branded experience to our customers, clients, members, whoever it might be, and seeing the connection between my contribution and how people are enriched, or transformed, or somehow changed for the better. If I can make that connection, I’m engaged. If it’s not something I can make a connection, if I can’t see those dots coming together, then I’m not engaged, and so that’s how I define employee engagement these days. [4:45]
David Zinger: Well, thanks for that, and I’m looking forward to when we weave that together with some of your concepts on strange, because I think that just somehow that video just resonated with me in looking at the workplace, but before we do, and it’s connected nonetheless. One of your areas is in branding and sometimes people see branding as clever slogans or a logo on a cereal box or something like that, but I think you have a much richer view of branding. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about branding or personal branding? [5:17]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, I look at this from a behavioral point of view rather than from a projection of an image. You know, again, we have grown up in an era where brands were about logos and taglines and we were in a broadcast world, but I think our world has shifted to this network marketplace and we like to say that you behave your way to a great brand, you don’t talk your way to a great brand, that branding is not as much a graphic art as a performance art, and it’s something I learned at Saturn where we had to behave our way to a positive brand experience for our clients, and it’s something that is going to touch the entire organization, so it’s not just marketing then; it’s operations, it’s everything, it touches on every element of the work world, and our approach to branding is about performance – it’s the doing, and designing the experience for customers and delivering that experience. That’s what we feel branding is all about in this current world that we’re in. [6:20]
David Zinger: And then also we’re looking at it from an employee or a person working in an organization; it’s we could be tying some of the branding into their performance management if you will? [6:30]
Mike Wagner: Totally. In fact, at Saturn we had a thing called brand critical standards, and literally every employee had brand critical standards, and they could see what they were doing each day as a contribution to hitting certain standards that rolled up into a branded experience for our customers, and so it was actually part of our training, how we were hired, how we were encouraged and trained along the way. You’re right, there’s this connectivity, and I like to see that connectivity. Again, I think that when it’s disconnected then it’s just work; it’s not contributing to something bigger. [7:09]
David Zinger: And that sense of meaning and purpose is certainly one of those drivers or factors of engagement and takes things beyond just work. [7:19]
Mike Wagner: Exactly, exactly, and it’s fun too, because it’s the same kind of fun that people have when they put on a party for someone. When you do a birthday party for someone you like, it’s that same kind of energy of how are we going to make this special, and memorable, and what’s going to happen when they see what we’ve got planned for them? So, there’s a design element, there’s a creativity element in it as well that all employees are participating in. [7:46]
David Zinger: So, it takes that workplace and enriches it. I don’t know if you’ve been over to theUK. Certainly one of the phrases that, you know, as you ride the tubes and look around, you see all the places called mind the gap, and the gap they’re talking about there is the gap between the subway car and the platform or whatever, but I think you brought a whole sense of mindfulness to the gap, to the differences between people. Can we get strange for a while? [8:17]
Mike Wagner: I hope so. I’m glad that you liked that TEDx talk. [8:21]
David Zinger: I don’t like it, I love that TEDx talk. As I said to you before we started, I watched it twice, and given the amount of time I have, I usually don’t have time to do things twice, and got more out of it even the second time. What do you mean by strange? [8:39]
Mike Wagner: Well, strange really is just different than me. So, and most everyone else feels that; they feel somewhat unique, or different, or they have a point of view that is not shared by 100% of the people around them; we’re all strange, and being able to embrace that and have a fresh way to attack that. I suppose in the workplace people talk about it as diversity, but I thought maybe strange would be a more fun way and maybe a fresh way to enter into that conversation, and so that’s why I put together this talk for the TEDx Des Moines presentation. [9:15]
David Zinger: In the talk you quote one of your favorite authors and you say the brain must be shocked into paying attention, and when I hear workplace diversity I go ho-hum; when I see strange, all of the sudden my brain is engaged. [9:29]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, well that’s back to why we called our company White Rabbit – we wanted to shock you into paying attention, and yes Gregory Berns in Iconoclast, a great book, it says that we’ve got to wake people up by doing the unexpected, the non-conventional. We can do conventional things in an unconventional way, and that’s engagement again, so being strange and welcome the stranger into our workplace so that we can do things that we couldn’t do without your strange contribution I think is part of what has intrigued me about how businesses can run and how organizations can succeed. [10:05]
David Zinger: Well, and it seems to me, and you used a word that we’ve living in an echo chamber at times, and I think sometimes for some organizations when I talk to the executive or whatever, their feedback seems to come in an echo chamber, and the best they do at listening to employees at times is to monitor the employee engagement survey, and I think you’re asking them to do something much more than that. [10:30]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, in fact I was wondering, David, why does strange resonate for you as you look at this world of engagement that you are immersed in? Is it because people are kind of homogenous, you know, kind of flat in terms of the differences in many organizations at some point? [10:52]
David Zinger: Well, you know I’ve been a little concerned about how, for lack of a better term, straight-laced many people played in the workplace, so we can’t go beyond that. You know one of my pet peeves if you will, and I’ll try not to stay on this for very long, is I would like to see employee engagement surveys where employees would be safe enough to put their name on it. The disengagement wouldn’t be a punishable offense, it would be a trigger to a conversation, and that I think in some workplaces we don’t have an engagement problem, we have a safety problem, that it’s not safe to be strange, it’s not safe to be different and to let people know what you’re experiencing, but if we can’t start there, how do we move from there? [11:35]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, in fact you’re really harkening back even to some of my work as a pastor, and that is the job of ministry many times is to create a safe place where you can have unsafe conversations, and until that I can’t bring all of me, I can’t bring all of me to the workplace, and so how can I be fully engaged if parts of me have to be left somewhere else and not brought to the workplace? I’m with you on that. In fact, I’ll tell you one of the things that really struck me when I began to speak in the marketplace and have more employee conversations and presentations was people would say your presentation’s different. I would say what’s different about it? They say well, it’s like you’re exited about stuff, and I said aren’t you guys excited about stuff? Well, you know, we don’t express it very much, you know, and that was a surprising thing to me; I thought well, this is exciting, you spend a lot of your life at work, why wouldn’t you allow yourself to be passionate about it, but that was a whole piece of their life that was left somewhere else. [12:40]
David Zinger: Yeah, and you know one of the expressions in our field of employee engagement is, and I don’t care for it much, is get everybody on the bus and I like to think people can drive themselves, but you talk about getting on a bus and seeking out the strange person, and I’m not talking about a bus; I’m talking about the organization, but you have a delightful example on the bus that I think if you listen to carefully it really is seeing the strange people and the employees in our organization and what they have to offer and to give us. I wonder if you can give us the abridged version of Alice Moore’s piano and kind of encourage people to watch the You Tube video after? [13:22]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, Alice Moore, I was riding the bus at one point in my career down to work everyday, and as a bookish fellow I was carrying a book and always reading. I set aside the book, I began to look around at my fellow travelers, and I found what I thought was probably the most different or strange person – this 95-year old woman that would get on the bus every Tuesday and it turns out her name was Alice Moore, and all I did was begin to ask her questions, and she told me her life story, and over a few weeks I got to know her very, very well, and then she surprised me one day and said Mike, I’ve decided to move to San Francisco and live the rest of my days with my twin sister, and I knew about her twin sister and I knew their story, and then she said Mike, I’m going to give you and your family my upright piano, and I began to weep literally, because in getting to know this person that was so different from me and really from a different world… She was giving me the piano that her father, the railroader that worked so hard to buy a piano for his twin daughters, she was going to give that to me, and the only thing that she asked is that when your kids are done with it, pass it on to another family. So, my kids learned to play the piano on Alice Moore’s piano and this is that reaching out to the person different than you and looking for the magical discoveries that come when you do that, and it’s enriching, and why we don’t… David, don’t you find it’s amazing that people can work a few feet from each other and not know each other very well at all? [15:00]
David Zinger: What do you mean? You just email the person. [15:02]
Mike Wagner: I sent them a memo, what are you talking about? [15:06]
David Zinger: You know, we got very intimate – I texted once. [15:09]
Mike Wagner: But yeah, and so I’ll do like retreats and things like that, and people the first thing I’ll do is I’ll have them tell me about a moment in their life when they felt they were the best team experience of their life, and people share amazing stories, and as they share these stories people find out things about each other that they never knew, and I’m saying you’ve worked with each other for 7, 8, 10 years, and you didn’t know this about this person, and they have so much more to bring than just their resume, and their educational certificate, and maybe their expertise in subject matter; there’s bigger things going on and there’s more enrichment that can take place, and more innovation and creativity frankly compared to… [15:54]
David Zinger: Yeah, you talk about, you know, solo authors and publications, and when you bring a group of people together with differences or whatever, and I think what was the factor, about 6x the amount? [16:08]
Mike Wagner: Yes. Yeah, what’s happening right now is that we have to learn how to do group creativity, and until we learn how to do that we’re not going to get the innovation and the competitive advantages that we’d like to get from our organization, and we don’t do that very well; we don’t know how to assemble teams, we don’t know how to facilitate creative discovery, we don’t know how to move through that process, and until we get there we’re going to be waiting for the lone genius to somehow emerge and show us the answer, and frankly I just don’t think that’s going to happen in most organizations. [16:44]
David Zinger: And things are so connected, I mean going back to say, the survey methodology that’s frequently used in organizations, how many organizations go to the employees and ask them what questions should we be asking you, and I thought who would be better qualified to determine some of the questions to ask about engagement than employees themselves, but no we got to a consultant company and pay huge fees to have someone manage this process, and not that data isn’t important or the data isn’t relevant, and that we do want to understand if we’re making progress, but I think we need to really supplement that by minding the gap, by lessening the space in-between. [17:24]
Mike Wagner: I’ll tell you one of the best questions I ever heard came from Peter Block, I’m sure you’ve probably read some of his work. [17:31]
David Zinger: Yes. [17:32]
Mike Wagner: And Block in The Answer to How is Yes has a series of questions that he says he would ask employees, and one that is really stunning is this question: what do you want to create? I recommend all my clients ask every employee they hire, you’re coming to work here, what are you hoping to be able to create while you’re employed at this place? I think that opens up a wonderful conversation. [18:00]
David Zinger: And I think it’s kind of sad that a lot of people don’t even realize that that’s an option for themselves. [18:06]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, true. No, they have gotten to a place where really they have allowed themselves to be just employee and minimizing their contribution, and so it’s time for a revolution, and let’s make it a strange revolution, OK, let’s open the door to a brand new way of collecting employees, gathering them, assembling them, and setting them on fire to do something really meaningful in the world. [18:35]
David Zinger: Well and whenAlice goes down the rabbit hole she has some just incredible experiences, and sees the world in such different ways, and you’ve got to believe when she comes back up she’s transformed for the rest of her life. [18:50]
Mike Wagner: Exactly, and so it’s about making the marketplace not less than transactions, but certainly more than transactions; making it a transformative place, not just a transactional world. [19:03]
David Zinger: And yet with White Rabbit Group, I mean we’re kind of over the map a little bit with some of the strangeness, is one of the focuses you have is really making things simple, objective, and easily communicated so that it becomes at the center of everything you do. [19:18]
Mike Wagner: Yeah, yeah, and one of the things that we do that’s very, very simple is we personify the right customer and the right customer experience, usually giving a name. One of our clients, for example, named their right customer Jack, and so their question is what would Jack want, and it’s personified, it’s simple. Senior leaders say is this something that Jack would want us to do. If it happens to be a woman, it’s Jackie, what would Jackie want us to do? It’s a foreign sale, it’s what would Jacque want us to do, but it’s in that organization it’s simple, it’s objective, it’s easily remembered and communicated, and everyone knows it’s all about Jack here. [20:00]
David Zinger: And to get to Jack we’ve got to work with Jill, and Jill’s the person who’s going to deliver the services, and it seems to me with that branding we need to ask those internal questions around engagement about Jill and who is our Jill, and how does she work, and what does she want. That’s so well said. [20:17]
Mike Wagner: Yeah. Well, you know, so that’s our approach, and once we have an opportunity to serve clients that way, the leaders are really setting up their employees to succeed and that’s our goal. I think the thing that really motivated me deep in my heart is when I began to see how many wonderful people weren’t fully contributing inside an organization because it wasn’t simple and it wasn’t easy to understand, it wasn’t objective, and so a lot of the contribution was being left on the table when it could be brought to the workplace. [20:50]
David Zinger: Well said, very well said. Mike thanks so much for taking 20 minutes of your time to help us look at the world from a little bit of a stranger perspective and to mind that gap. You’re part of the Employee Engagement Network and it’s wonderful to see 5,100 and about 50 people now kind of coming together and looking at work, and how we connect, and how we do things, so thanks for joining us today. [21:16]
Mike Wagner: I’m honored David, and thank you for such a lively conversation; my mind is racing. [21:20]
David Zinger: My pleasure. [21:21]
David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert. He founded and host the 5300 member Employee Engagement Network. David is currently using the Pyramid of Employee Engagement with organizations and individuals to increase their levels of engagement.