Strengths Partnership

Employee Engagement: Energetic Strengths

November 22, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement: Strong Energy

The pyramid of employee engagement offers a model of the 10 blocks of employee engagement. Here is a link to a 50 page booklet on the pyramid. There are 10 posts in this series. To learn more with a chance to be interactive on strengths and engagement plan to attend an educational workshop in London on the importance of strengths for employee engagement and a fusion of the pyramid of employee engagement with a strength-based approach to work.

Strong Energy for Engagement

The raw material of engagement is energy. Jane Dutton from the Positive Organizational Scholarship organization has demonstrated that the key to energize organizations is frequent high quality connections between people connected to the organization such as employees, suppliers, and customers. Three of my strengths, empathy, developing others, and leadership all contribute to engaging in these type of connections. My strengths draw me towards these relationships and in turn, these relationships enhance my overall energy for work.

To assess the energy you and others have for work, I encourage you to ask a great energy question posed by Donald Graves in the Energy to Teach: What gives you energy, what takes it away and what for you is a waste of time?

Remember to fuel energy as your renewable resource for engagement.

Here are the links to the other posts in this series on strengths and engagement:

Educational London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00. I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event

An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback

A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”

Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels

An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Pure Strengths

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert. He will be in the UK in late November to support the Go Live event for the UK Employee Engagement Task Force and to co-lead an afternoon on the fusion of employee engagement and strengths for innovation and excellence.

Employee Engagement: Strengthening Wellbeing

November 20, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement: Strengths Make Me Well

Infuse your wellbeing with strengths

Martin Seligman, the former President of the American Psychological Association has made phenomenal contributions to happiness and wellbeing. His recent book, Flourish, is an examination of how we can have a positive impact on wellbeing. I believe that we must find wellbeing inside of work and that it is more integral to who we are and what we do twenty-four hours a day than only something we do after work with a period of meditation, a healthy meal, or a short jog.

Engagement and strengths are vital contributors to wellbeing. Seligman believes that the five contributors to wellbeing are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. These five sources of wellbeing are available to us inside of work. In addition, strengths turbocharge these five factors. Seligman and others in the positive psychology movement have demonstrated that when we know our strengths, use our strengths on a daily basis, and leverage our strengths in the service of others we will enhance our personal wellbeing.

We will get a phenomenal return on our energy invested in well being when we attach our strengths to create positive emotions, experience engagement, participate in relationships, develop meaning, and accomplish desired goals. Seen from a wellbeing perspective, my seven significant strengths of leading, developing others, enthusiasm, self-improvement, creativity, flexibility and empathy are good medicines for me at work.

I encourage you to work towards being well by drawing deep upon your strengths by bringing them to the daily surface of work.

Educational London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00. I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event

An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback

A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”

Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels

An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,400 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Energetic strengths and engagement

Working with Why: Employee Engagement and Meaning

November 15, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement: Putting Strengths on a Weekly Calendar

Add strengths to meaning and engagement

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out… Malcolm Gladwell

When you have a why to work you can bear any how. Are we having enough meaningful conversation about the why and purpose of work as employees engage in efforts that have a greater purpose. We don’t find meaning or purpose so much as create our purpose. My strengths of creativity and flexibility are powerful attributes to help me in creating meaning and being flexible in viewing the purpose of my work. For example, the Employee Engagement Network I founded is a labor of love so that other people will love their labor. This is not some sort of mushy soft feeling about work but the gumption, discipline, concentration, and patience required when we really love something.

Dr. Paul Fairlie from York University stated meaning is: “self-actualizing work (work that enables you to realize your full potential, values, and life goals), social impact (having a positive impact on people and things through your work), feelings of personal accomplishment, and believing that your highest career goals can be achieved within your current organization.”

Some common dimensions of meaning include having a purpose or goals, living according to one’s values and goals, autonomy, control, challenge, achievement, competence, mastery, commitment, engagement, generativity or service to others, self-realization, growth, and fulfillment. My experiences with employees is that most of us value our strengths, strive to use our strengths in the service of others, have a greater sense of accomplishment when we use our strengths for specific tasks, and our strengths used on a daily basis contribute to our wellbeing at work.

As we fuse strengths with meaning and apply this to results and progress we create stronger engagement. To me, strengths function as the link between who I am (identity), how I work (strengths), what I offer (contribution), and why I work (meaning). I hope to see you at the London workshop to further our discussion about the pyramid of engagement, strengths, innovation, and excellence.

Educational London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00. I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event

An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback

A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”

Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels

An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Wellbeing

Employee Engagement: Empathy is not a Soft Skill it is Strong Stuff

November 8, 2012 by David Zinger 3 Comments

Employee Engagement: Empathy take engagement beyond ourselves.

In previous posts, I have outlined how all 7 of my strengths can be applied to one of the ten building blocks of employee engagement. In this post I will outline how one strength, empathy, can enrich recognition. Empathy is a deep and communicated understanding of another person’s perspective and world. We leave our agenda and view behind to move fully into the the world of another. Empathy is a powerful way of demonstrating caring and caring can also be made tangible through recognition.

Empathy add strengths to recognition when we listen to how others want to be recognized and respond accordingly. Some people prefer more personal recognition and shy away from public displays of recognition. When we are empathetic in our recognition we do not give donuts to dieters or parking spots to people who ride the subway to work. I sometimes believe that the failure of not having more frequent and robust recognition stems from a lack of demonstrated empathy. Every day that people work they should be recognized at work. I believe anonymity is an engagement killer while empathy invites us out of disengagement.

When the intent of recognition is to communicate that you care about another person at work and that you are paying attention to them, your recognition can also be about gaps and variances in their performance. As you have an engaging conversation about their deficient performance many employees will tell you that it was a good experience to be seen and cared for with tangible help to improve because positive or negative conversations are less about the content of a conversation and more about the intent of the conversation. Empathy gives you good intent!

My strength of empathy defines much of my focus, approach, and method of working. In counselling psychology, I was schooled in the approach of Carl Rogers. I both practiced and taught with the strength of empathy:

“When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good. . . . When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. “ Carl Rogers

London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership – November 28

Plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event

An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback

A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”

Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels

An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Working with the Moments of Strength.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert. He will be in the UK in late November to support the Go Live event for the UK Employee Engagement Task Force and to co-lead an afternoon workshop on the fusion of employee engagement and strengths for innovation and excellence.

Employee Engagement and the Game of Strong Progress

October 31, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Employee Engagement: Making Progress with Strengths

The pyramid of employee engagement is a 10 block model of employee engagement. Here is a link to a 50 page booklet on the pyramid. After completing the strengths inventory, Strengthscope, from Strengths Partnership in the UK, I embarked on a systematic application of my 7 significant strengths to each of the 10 blocks of the pyramid. This will make my engagement work more robust while also enhancing personal wellbeing through the application of strengths in the service of others. There are 10 posts in this series. To learn more, take the strengthscope yourself, and to be interactive on strengths and engagement plan to attend an educational workshop in London on the importance of strengths for innovation and excellence with a fusion of the pyramid of employee engagement.

Making Progress and Creativity

Making progress is a significant contributor to engagement for knowledge workers. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer did some ground breaking work on progress and motivation in their research for the book, The Progress Principle. We must guard against setbacks and achieve progress, even small wins.

To turbocharge progress for myself I have been applying my creativity strength from my significant 7 strengths to progress and created a work and wellbeing game for 2012. The game platform is a PowerPoint deck and the purpose of the game is to achieve greater work output while also enhancing wellbeing. To see an outline of what I have done so far, click here.

I have enjoyed applying creativity to the construction of a personal and meaningful way to plan and monitor progress. I divided my work into 24 minute time periods and I strive to achieve 6 of these periods most days at work. I have worked hard to ensure that progress is achieved on a daily basis and that setbacks are temporary. I have given myself 100 bonus points every week to accelerate progress. To minimize setbacks, if I fail to achieve the 24 minute periods for more than 3 days in a row I scale back the time to 18 minutes.

The game is simple, yet meaningful to me, and has helped me to achieve results through a playful combination of progress and creativity. Here is a slide I used for one of my days of work and wellbeing:

To learn more about your 7 strengths and how they can be applied to work, wellbeing, innovation, and excellence plan to attend the London UK Strength and Engagement Workshop Wednesday November 28 from 13:00 to 18:00:

London Workshop on Strength Based Approaches to Leadership

I invite you to attend an afternoon workshop sponsored by Strengths Partnership on The Leaders Role in Optimising Strengths and Engagement to Achieve Innovation and Excellence. I will be presenting/facilitating on the Pyramid of Employee Engagement and Michael Farry, HR Director for PhotoBox, will also be presenting on how to build a culture of positive leadership, collaboration and innovation through a systematic, practical and integrated change and development programme.

For a modest fee of £75 plus VAT, you will receive:

Entrance to the conference and networking over drinks after the event

An opportunity to take the Strengthscope360™ profiler and receive feedback

A free leadership book entitled “Stretch – Leading Beyond Boundaries”

Delegate pack containing proven and practical tools to help optimise workforce strengths and engagement at the individual, team and organisational levels

An invitation to join the Strengths HR Forum (over 1,300 members) and the Employee Engagement Network (over 5,000 members)

To register click here.

Next Post in the Series: Employee Engagement: Strengthening Relationships

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert. He will be in the UK in late November to support the Go Live event for the UK Employee Engagement Task Force and to co-lead an afternoon workshop on the fusion of employee engagement and strengths for innovation and excellence.