Employee Engagement Dialogue with Mike Morrison and David Zinger
Watch the video and follow along with the transcript. Or read the transcript and the timings are posted after each interaction. To visit Mike Morrison’s site go to: www.learnplando.com. Here is a short sample from our conversation:
Mike Morrison: I would encourage people to really look beyond their comfort zone. I do believe that sometimes it’s almost wishful thinking that we could self-identify these special gifts, but I believe people are merging. I don’t think we discover ourselves, that there’s… I think we are continually developing ourselves, so I would just encourage people to use strengths as a catalyst for starting the conversation, but to continue to move beyond it.
Employee Engagement: Mike Morrison and David Zinger from David Zinger on Vimeo.
David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger and I want to welcome you to a conversation with Mike Morrison on leading, work, and engagement, and this is tied in with the Employee Engagement Network. We have about 15 or 20 minutes together and we’re going to explore some of Mike’s thinking on various elements of work and leadership. The big question kind of behind our conversation is how do we rethink our lives together at work, and in community, and to what end. It’s my pleasure to welcome Mike to the webinar. Mike, we have a little bit of a background on you on the screen, but I wonder if you want to say a few words about who you are and what got you to the work you’re doing now? [00:46]
Mike Morrison: Great David. Yeah, I’ve had a wonderful career at Toyota, but I was excited to start kind of a second life, so I took early retirement in 2008 and started a personal practice working and consulting with a whole range of organizations around issues of leadership, and culture, and because of my Toyota background, a little bit of lean thinking in there as well. [01:17]
David Zinger: OK, so quite a background. You know this is focused on employee engagement and I really am fascinated at how people connect to their work or what engages them. What engages you most in your work right now, Mike? [01:29]
Mike Morrison: Well, there’s… I mean the questions that are almost impossible to get out of my head, kind of focus on leadership and how do we set the context for engagement within organizations. It’s been more and more elusive, right, that leadership thing; it’s such a big and vast category we have difficulty getting our arms around it. So, I love the whole dance around defining it, trying to get it into organizations, trying to build it at all levels. It’s my belief that nothing really works, right, without a working leader. [02:11]
David Zinger: Yeah, absolutely, and so the leader sets the tone and their own engagement really influences things. I first really came across you with a delightful book that you wrote a number of years ago called THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CARD, and I think one of your genius elements is your ability to see things that aren’t there or to look at the other side of the card. I wonder if you can take a minute or two and kind of guide us through what you were doing with that book and how it helps people find meaning at work and in leadership. [02:43]
Mike Morrison: Oh, great. Yeah, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CARD is really based on the two paths that you’d want for anyone, you know, what a successful life looks like, and the first path is the path of differentiation, and that’s where we learn to become comfortable in our own skin, we discover our strengths, kind of develop our leadership voice, and then the second path is one where we become integrated into the world, we can become something of, you know, beyond ourselves, right, it’s not just about us, so we become differentiated, and then we become integrated. So, what THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CARD does is explores the different steps to achieving that, right, and it’s what we want most from our leaders; we want them to be differentiated, we want them to have a strong presence, we want them to model that as well, but we also want them to create meaning for us, to create something beyond themselves that we can all participate in. So, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CARD really explores those themes of differentiating and integrating the person into the world. [04:11]
David Zinger: I really loved in that book how you reframed values as promises, as opposed to statements that are on our wall or done at corporate headquarters or whatever to really look upon it as a promise, and just about every workshop I do I refer back to that line in that book because I think it changes people’s view of what a value is. [04:31]
Mike Morrison: Yeah, and one of the things I think THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CARD tried to do is reframe things. We do kind of lose contact with the meaning behind things and particularly in this go-go world we live in we can just blow by things. So, sometimes little subtly reframings can actually get people to think a little differently. One of the exercises I do with people is say, you know I ask them to find seven red things in the room, and they’ll look around, and they’ll find seven things, and then the simple follow-up question is well, what did we just do? Well, we became red-aware, but the interesting thing is that won’t extinguish, you know, they’ll leave the room and they’ll see someone in a red sweater and they’ll go oh, there’s red again, and then they’ll see a red stop sign, and they’ll see red throughout the day and it will keep connecting to them. So, part of what leaders do, right, is they make the red-aware or aware of whatever the things that are important, and just simple cues can start to focus attention in an ADD world. [05:43]
David Zinger: Yeah, and I’m colorblind and I’m looking around at all the red in my house right now as we’re speaking. I don’t want to contribute to the go-go ADD world, and I’m not even sure this is possible, but I’ll extend it as an invitation. I have my business card here. I flipped it around and I’ve got a blank side. Is there something that I could focus on, or write down, or think about to really help me think about the other side of the business card? [06:10]
Mike Morrison: You know my Learn Plan Do website we actually have a bunch of exercises that the key thing is don’t hand out a blank card, I mean one thing I encourage people to do is put their favorite quote on it before they give their card or put a little recognition or acknowledgment of the person you just met; that can be powerful, right, to get a little handwritten note. In our workshops some of the exercises we do that are personal are, you know, listing out our motto, coming up with a title, a self-described title. For example, one of the ones I used to use for myself was Visionator. My assistant’s title was Cruise Director, because she herself, her role was keeping people engaged throughout the organization. So, we use the other side of the card to continue the discussion about what we really bring to the organization, because on the corporate side of it, right, the organizational side I see your title, you’re Senior Analyst II, but I want to know what your work is with the capital W, you know I see all your contact information, but I want to also know on the other side of the card how do I connect with you? There are lots of opportunities to take what’s blank and start to really reveal who we are and to start making connections with others. [07:53]
David Zinger: Well, I take a few modified versions of that exercise with me and I always talk about your book and what you’re doing, and you know it’s interesting how many organizations are allowing so little white space in people’s lives that they don’t even leave the other side of the business card empty. I have to buy blank business cards for many organizations to do some sample exercise because they’re so busy filling everything up, so I really like how you used some of the white space and how important that is in leadership, and before we began the conversation today you told me about another book, and so we quickly edited the slides, but you have a new book that’s just come out, THIS IS NOT WORKING, boy that’s got to be timely for engagement. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Mike? [08:39]
Mike Morrison: Yeah, what I’ve found over the last three or four years is that organizations are increasingly losing their unifying center; their work cultures are becoming more fragmented. A lot of it’s just obviously due to the pressure of the economy. We’ve had a major global correction, right, a tsunami effect within the economy, and just the normal challenges now of a contemporary work culture where we’re virtually connected, you know, and all of the productivity enhancements from our handheld devices have made us even more scattered, but organizations have lost a lot of what makes the workplace meaningful or special, and as a result they’re less purposeful. They’re losing a lot of the meaning that really brings a different level of engagement and commitment to work, so particularly if I work with leadership teams I’m just seeing that there’s, well there’s less leadership, there’s less capacity, and less personal capacity to work on the purpose issues – the things that really do align and motivate an organization. So, THIS IS NOT WORKING, and there are 10 chapters, each chapter features kind of a poem, what I call systems poetry, kind of a right brain attempt at continuing the discussion beyond the traditional pros about work cultures. [10:33]
David Zinger: And once again poetry’s kind of a different medium, and I was at a conference at Tucson, I was sitting at a table with a bunch of people, and they said you know we’ve gone from doing more with less to doing everything with nothing, and you refer to that capacity. It’s hard to carve out that time to be even reflective or just slow down and to read a poem or to dwell upon. I think that’s one of the gifts or one of the contributions you’re really striving to make for leaders in the workplace. Is that a fair assessment, Mike? [11:03]
Mike Morrison: Oh, yeah. What I’ve noticed too is you start off by reading a poem, it kind of slows people down, it kind of engages them in a different way; all of the sudden it kind of shifts the whole tempo of the meeting, because we are so used to leaning forward, and the urgency of trying to get something done, of checking our phones for messages in an almost addictive way. So, a poem or some kind of reflection to start a meeting or a conference can kind of get people to shift a little bit of their energy in a more personal way. [11:53]
David Zinger: And so you’re also structuring your work currently and the site that people can find you at is www.LearnPlanDo.com and you use that to symbol quite strongly. Tell us a little bit about how that’s structured and what people will find there, Mike? [12:12]
Mike Morrison: Yeah, it’s my response to lean thinking on the non-manufacturing side. Plan Do Check Act, was developed by Deming and it’s kind of a learning cycle to close gaps, to remove variants, and it’s very popular, and you know on the supply side of the business where we make things, but Learn Plan Do kind of reverses that and simplifies that and it’s more about the emphasis on learning before we jump in to try to solve something. I think the key is to really grasp what’s going on, to collect some data, to get up on the balcony and see things differently. So, Learn Plan Do is about applying a thinking process to our knowledge work environments, so it’s a much simpler conceptual model, but it reminds us that we always begin with learning and that’s where we end up; once we do something, you know, the environment is now rich for learning something. [13:21]
David Zinger: Yeah, and I think Marshall McLuhan back in the 1960’s once said in the future we will not earn a living, we will learn a living, and really you’re putting that with a real high priority not only in the workplace, but certainly for leaders too. One of the areas that has fascinated me about what you’ve been writing recently… I really am quite fond of leveraging and using our strengths, but I think at times we can have some blind spots around that. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of your recent writing on the strength movement and something that people might not be seeing if they embrace it so fully. [14:03]
Mike Morrison: Yeah, what I’ve noticed, David, and I’m a big advocate of strengths; that’s the way I always like to start the discussion, it’s a great catalyst for getting things going in a positive way, to lean into our strengths, to acknowledge them, but unfortunately a lot of organizations the whole strengths development process has become oversimplified and it kind of stops there. People start using it as an over-generalized identity of who they are, and you’re much, much more than your strengths, and we have to be careful not to let them keep us from being more to the world. One of the examples I use in the writings is the demand of leaders at all levels of an organization continue to increase and we need to have a much, much broader repertoire of skills, but we’ve got to be careful not to get too comfortable with kind of our own self-reported strengths and not venture out and develop capacities because they may feel a little bit foreign to us at first. [15:19]
David Zinger: Yeah, it seems to me we have all these strength inventories, and you’re taught five strengths, and some people feel they’re in touch with their strengths just by doing an inventory, but it’s a pretty anemic approach to a strong workplace that also embraces where your weaknesses are or where your challenges are and how you can even bleed your strengths together with your weaknesses or whatever, so I think you did a really nice job in those last few email posts, and they’re also at your site at www.LearnPlanDo.com about a little bit of our myopia around strengths, anything you’d like to add to that? [15:57]
Mike Morrison: Yeah, exactly. No, just I would encourage people to really look beyond their comfort zone. I do believe that sometimes it’s almost wishful thinking that we could self-identify these special gifts, but I believe people are merging. I don’t think we discover ourselves, that there’s… I think we are continually developing ourselves, so I would just encourage people to use strengths as a catalyst for starting the conversation, but to continue to move beyond it. [16:39]
David Zinger: OK, now if people go to your site they can see a number of poems that you’ve created. This one reminded me of R.D. Laing, who wrote a book called Knots many, many years ago, and it’s only a part of the poem, but as we get close to ending, I’d like to invite you just to read that little part of the poem for us, Mike, would you be willing to do that? [17:02]
Mike Morrison: Sure. Yeah, and this poem is, you know, it’s what we all, we just don’t see each other right, and it’s that us versus them cultures that often get built up, but this one is the short phrases here are:
I don’t see YOU
That is because YOU are part of THEM
THEM are THEY
We don’t like THEM
Shhhhh . . . THEY might hear you
And it goes on to kind of show that tension of the us versus them and we actually kind of like the drama of it. [17:37]
David Zinger: Well, it seems to me in the field of employee engagement that frequently leaders villainize their staff, and staff villainizes leaders, and they do very much get into that us-them and we’re separate somehow, and if we don’t unite we’re going to be struggling for a long time to make work meaningful. [17:57]
Mike Morrison: Exactly. [18:00]
David Zinger: If people want to find you there’s a variety of places certainly. The Other Side of the Business Card there’s a site there, and I guess www.LearnPlanDo.com would be the primary site to find you, but you’re also on Facebook too, Mike? [18:13]
Mike Morrison: Correct, yeah, and it’s The Mike Morrison Company and I’m also on Facebook, so my company’s on Facebook and I’m on Facebook personally. [18:27]
David Zinger: And you’re quite generous with your resources at www.LearnPlanDo.com and you’ll find you on Facebook, and the company on Facebook that you refer to the resources as you’re writing them, and I encourage people quite strongly to seek out that and learn from you, and you just have a really rich background and a lot to offer people, any concluding thoughts, Mike? [18:51]
Mike Morrison: No, but I’d just like to thank you, David, for inviting me into this conversation. I really enjoyed it and I hope everyone has a wonderful day. [19:01]
David Zinger: Thank you very much, and this is David Zinger and on behalf of Mike Morrison we really appreciate you being with us for a short period of time. [19:09]
David Zinger is an employee engagement expert working at connecting employee engagement researchers and practitioners from around the globe at his 4900 member Employee Engagement Network. Hire David to speak at your organization or conference.
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