Tim Clark and David Zinger in Dialogue on The Employee Engagement Mindset

Responsibility Knocks: The Employee Engagement Mindset

Here is a sample of our dialogue:

Tim: We asked a survey question of 60 different organizations about five years ago. We asked them who is primarily responsible for employee engagement; is it the organization or is it the employee, and we were very surprised at the response that we got to that question. 60% of the employees or/and the leaders that we surveyed said it’s the employee, but 40% said it was the employer or the organization, and so with that divide we said now wait a second; this is a very important question and people are certainly not in agreement about the answer to this question, and so on the basis of that response we said we’ve got to dig into this, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on and why people have such different points of view. So, we went forward and we studied 150 highly engaged employees across 50 different organizations and I guess, David, the thing that stands out the most is that to a person these what we call engagement outliers, these individuals have a point of view that says I own my own engagement, I am primarily responsible for it, the organization has a secondary and a support role to play, but the primarily responsibility is mine. So, that would be the fundamental perspective and point of view of these people that we study, these engagement outliers. I think that’s a significant finding. 

Employee Engagement Mindset: A Dialogue with Tim Clark and David Zinger from David Zinger on Vimeo.

A transcript of the video with time stamps at the end of each section of dialogue.

David Zinger: Hi, my name is David Zinger and I want to welcome you to a brief dialogue with Tim Clark on employee engagement and more particularly the employee engagement mindset. It’s my privilege and honor to have a dialogue with you, Tim. There’s a big of information up on the slide about your background – everything from your degrees, to Academic All-American football, but perhaps you could say a few words about yourself, Tim? [00:30]

Timothy Clark: Well, sure. I think maybe the important thing to understand is that as a consultant and a researcher on the topic of employee engagement it’s sort of accidental, but perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s something that in my experience as a line manager and then as a consultant we kept bumping up against this issue of employee engagement and we’ve realized how absolutely important it is, and so I personally kind of stumbled on it and kind of became an accidental consultant on the topic, and then when I realized that there was a side of this issue that wasn’t being addressed, namely the side of personal responsibility, we decided to dig into it. So, I think maybe perhaps what I bring to the table is a unique combination of academic training and then line experience as a manger and hopefully that will be valuable to our listeners. [01:31]

David Zinger: OK, well Albert Bandura, probably one of the best known social psychologists of all-time often talked about accidents and how our careers and things develop by accidents, but he also says you have to be prepared for an accident, so although you might have accidentally gotten involved in an engagement, I believe based on what I’ve read about you and learned about you over the past while that you’ve been prepared for it. We have the cover of your book up on the slide now. Certainly Marshall Goldsmith has talked about it and how much he likes it. Doug Conant, who wrote the book Touch Points and did such marvelous work in Campbell Soup and the Gallup work around engagement; there’s a bunch of other authors also involved in the book is there not, Tim? [02:20]

Timothy Clark: There is. We have seven other co-authors and that in itself is a unique kind of writing model, but I invited these other co-authors to join me on the project simply because they have so much rich experience to draw from and we wanted to go out and study highly engaged employees and it’s just a massive amount of work to do to interview people and to gather the research, and so we decided to use a little bit of a different model and put a team on it, and so that’s exactly what we did and it took us about four years but I think we were able to cross the finish line with something that’s valuable. [03:03]

David Zinger: Yeah, in this McGraw Hill book and in the back you have profiles on each of the other authors, so if people want to learn more about them they can go back there. Just, you know, what stood out the most for you in working on this book and doing it? What surprised you or what was really confirmed for you? [03:21]

Timothy Clark: Well, we began the research with one simple question. In fact, we didn’t even know we were going to write the book until we had… We asked a survey question of 60 different organizations about five years ago. We asked them who is primarily responsible for employee engagement; is it the organization or is it the employee, and we were very surprised at the response that we got to that question. 60% of the employees or/and the leaders that we surveyed said it’s the employee, but 40% said it was the employer or the organization, and so with that divide we said now wait a second; this is a very important question and people are certainly not in agreement about the answer to this question, and so on the basis of that response we said we’ve got to dig into this, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on and why people have such different points of view. So, we went forward and we studied 150 highly engaged employees across 50 different organizations and I guess, David, the thing that stands out the most is that to a person these what we call engagement outliers, these individuals have a point of view that says I own my own engagement, I am primarily responsible for it, the organization has a secondary and a support role to play, but the primarily responsibility is mine. So, that would be the fundamental perspective and point of view of these people that we study, these engagement outliers. I think that’s a significant finding. [05:10]

David Zinger: Yeah and that’s so much richer than an organization saying we’ll empower you. It sounds to me like these people say hey, this is my work, this is my organization, these are my results, and I really am the person who drives that a lot. In the book you talked about four characteristics of highly engaged employees. Perhaps before we go to the book, what engages you the most in your work, Tim? [05:37]

Timothy Clark: Well, what engages me the most in my work is the nature of the work itself and that is consistent with a lot of the empirical research that’s been done. If the work that I’m doing is challenging, if it’s important, if it’s visible, if it’s complex, then it tends to really drive my level of engagement, and so I don’t think I’m… I’m like anybody else; I think the nature of the work itself is perhaps the most important driver, and then I recognize, you know, and I try to do this in my own life, and that is to take the point of view that I’m responsible and that I’m not going to wait expectantly for the organization to engage me. You know one of the interesting things that we’ve found, David, in our research is that you can have a benevolent organization, you can have an organization that practices what we call fanatical employee support that does all kinds of things to help the employee in terms of resources, and guidance, and direction, and yet that employee can still be disengaged, and so that’s a very important thing to understand. We use the concept or we actually created a name for that – we call it happy dead weight, meaning that employees can be content and yet not engaged at the same time, so clearly it demonstrates that in spite of all that the organization can do, it cannot give you engagement; it’s not something you can give someone. They have to do that on their own, that’s a personal choice. Of course what the employer or the organization does to support you matters very much, but ultimately that’s a personal choice. [07:27]

David Zinger: Because you found people could engage in all kinds of different kinds of work and all kinds of different circumstances, and so if we look at those characteristics of highly engaged employees they tend not to be entitled, they’re engaging with their customers, and they remain highly engaged almost anywhere was one of your statements. [07:47]

Timothy Clark: Yeah, it’s really true. David, what we’ve found is that you could take a highly engaged person that had this point of view and you could parachute them in to about any organization and regardless of conditions they would remain highly engaged almost anywhere, and so what that said to us, what that taught us is that highly engaged people who take responsibility for it, they are incredibly agnostic to context. [08:16]

David Zinger: I like that term – agnostic to context. [08:20]

Timothy Clark: It’s really amazing. Yeah, so what that means is, and they acknowledge it; they say to us well wait a second, during the course of my professional life conditions are going to vary. Sometimes I’m going to have a good boss, sometimes I’m going to have a lousy boss, sometimes I’m going to have all kinds of resources to help me do my job, sometimes I’m not. So, what am I going to do, am I going to mirror the conditions? Is that what my engagement’s going to do, go up and down, because if that’s our point of view, then that’s exactly what’s going to happen to us as employees; we’re going to reflect the conditions around us. But yet when we studied highly engaged employees that’s not what they do. They sustain high engagement regardless of the conditions around this, so it makes them agnostic in many respects to the conditions around them. [09:05]

David Zinger: OK, I’ve never heard that term before in regards to context and I quite love it; I think it’s a delightful and a strong way to talk about the context. One term I have heard that really kind of annoys me around engagement is the old term of getting everybody on the bus, and you know everybody talks about their list of drivers of engagement, and it sounds like someone’s driving you around or you’re a passenger. What I appreciate about your six drivers is you put me into the driver’s seat; you put the employee into the driver’s seat. So, we have six drivers here, Tim, we’ll go through them one at a time, and could we kind of frame this around the idea of let’s say Helen, who’s a manager about 38-years old in a pharmaceutical firm, you know looking at her own engagement or maybe the engagement of her team of about eight people that she’s working with and how each of these six drivers could apply to her. Would that work for you? [10:07]

Timothy Clark: Sure, yeah why don’t we do that? [10:10]

David Zinger: OK, well let’s go right to the first driver which is to connect, and let me read right from the book your definition and then open up for you to elaborate, tell a story, or talk to Helen. So, connecting is a process of exchanging emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual value. Can you elaborate? [10:33]

Timothy Clark: That’s right and… Yeah, sure, normally, David, we think of connecting and connecting is something that we intuitively understand, but most of the time we think of it on a social dimension and that’s all we think about; we think about relationships, and that’s extremely important, but what we’ve found in our research, and this is what Helen could do in this situation is that Helen needs to understand herself and the way that she connects, and so although social connection is very important, she may have some tendencies to want to be able to connect on the basis of some other what we call connecting anchors. So, for example she might be very stimulated based on the intellectual challenge of the work, that would be an intellectual connection or there may be a connection based on the mission and the cause of her organization, that would be an aspirational connection, or she might connect based on the environment and the culture of the organization, and so one of the things that Helen and other individuals can do is to really do some self-discovery around the way that they connect to see where their leanings and their tendencies are, and there may be ways to cultivate deeper and stronger connection to the organization and its people, and then once again, you know there’s this basic… Some people say well I’m just going to let things happen organically, right, I’m in the organization and if relationships develop that’s great, if they don’t that’s great. My response to that would be I wouldn’t have very high expectations if you take an organic approach. I think you’re much better off to be very proactive about connecting and enriching the dimensions and the nature and the extent of your connections not just social, but in all of the other areas. [12:44]

David Zinger: So, Helen has different areas that she can connect with and it’s almost plural and not singular, and you know in the UK they often talk about the locus of engagement, so I really appreciated that perspective that you offered there and that it’s not just one connection, there’s a variety. The second driver is shaping and that’s a process of customizing, personalizing, and tailoring your professional experience based on your preferences while pursuing the organizational goals and acknowledging real constraints. Let’s go back to Helen and to engagement there. [13:20]

Timothy Clark: So, then what I would say to Helen here, David, is that the nature of your job, the conditions within which you work; what you do, how you do it, when you do it, with whom you do it, you don’t necessarily need to take all of those as a given. There are things that you can do to customize your professional life and your professional experience to meet your preferences. Now, there are also real constraints, but in almost every case an individual has opportunities to shape that they are not taking advantage of. So, the idea here for Helen is to look around at this professional experience and say how can I shape this to my liking, what opportunities are there? Some of the things that I’d like to do I probably won’t be able to do because there are those real constraints, but what can I do? Chances are there are opportunities to shape that professional experience and thus drive engagement to a higher level. [14:22]

David Zinger: OK, and Bill Jensen wrote a book called Hack Your Work and he was just saying, you know, there’s always ways to work around and to create your own pathways, and Teresa Amabile in the Progress Principle said how important progress is, so when I look at those two things together it’s really saying we can start to determine and shape our own progress so Helen can do that for herself and also for her team. So, the third driver here is learning and that’s the overwhelming informal and infrequently formal, I like how you focused that because it’s not something that just goes on in a training class, process for acquiring knowledge, skills, and experience? [15:00]

Timothy Clark: What we found here David and what I would say to Helen is to look to assess yourself very carefully; what are your learning habits, what is your learning disposition, and then ask yourself the imperative is that you (inaudible) of the speed of change, and highly engaged individuals demonstrate a remarkably consistent pattern in which they are aggressive self-directed learners, and because of that pattern that pattern drives engagement to a higher level. So, I would say Helen, look at yourself, pay attention to your learning habits and your learning disposition; do you demonstrate the pattern of an aggressive, highly directed learner, and if not, what can you do to cultivate that pattern in your life, in your professional life? [15:55]

David Zinger: OK, and Marshall McCluhan back in I think it was 1969 said in the future we will not earn a living, we will learn a living, and certainly that learning is key not only engaging in the learning but learning for our engagement in our work. So, Helen’s connecting, she’s shaping, she’s learning, and the fourth driver is she’s going to start to stretch, and stretching is the process of getting out of your comfort zone. Oh, it’s so comfortable here I don’t want to do that. Passing through your discomfort zone and pushing to your outer limits, that is a stretch for people. [16:26]

Timothy Clark: It is a stretch, but you know the interesting thing about it, David, and I would say this to Helen – Helen, when have you had a peak engagement experience in your professional life, and chances are she’ll come back and say you know what, it was when I was stretching because although the stretching created discomfort and perhaps even some pain, it was also exhilarating, and it’s that combination of discomfort and exhilaration that characterizes stretching. But it’s interesting, the only place that we build capacity in professional life is outside of our comfort zones; we don’t build it inside of our comfort zones, and so we have to go outside, and chances are that’s where our engagement goes to much higher levels. [17:16]

David Zinger: So, for elaboration and for understanding we have the six drivers, but as you start to talk about them and as people read about them in your book you realize that they start to really connect with each other, because if I’m learning I may be stretching and that may be contributing to achievement which is the process of focusing and sustaining efforts to accomplish something meaningful. [17:38]

Timothy Clark: That’s really true. If you are unwilling to stretch in the first place, chances are you won’t achieve, but once you jump into an achievement cycle, achievement creates its own rewards. It creates a whole set of intrinsic rewards that cause you to say hey, I want to do this again, and so back to our example with Helen. Sometimes when we aren’t achieving or perhaps our confidence is not very high, then we back off and we stop trying, and we look to other forms of satisfaction instead of being able to jump in, and so one of the keys here is to be able to… Well, you’ve got to be able to set a goal, then you’ve got to be able to break it down into pieces and then sort of create stepping stones and a path to achievement, but every time you accomplish even something small it replenishes energy and gives you motivation to keep trying and move forward. [18:49]

David Zinger: Yeah, the term I’ve been using lately for the last couple of years is because so many people are taxed to the max, and as one person once said at a conference, we’ve gone from doing more with less to doing everything with nothing, that small is that new significant and being able to accomplish something small is bigger than we sometimes think. So, we’ve kind of looked at Helen and we’re at the sixth driver here. Helen can also use these drivers to be looking at her team and how she can be supporting them and achieving that, so contributing this effort directed beyond self towards a meaningful purpose. [19:23]

Timothy Clark: And the question that I would ask Helen at this point, David, is Helen someday you’re going to leave this organization and on that final day if you come in and talk to us and we have an exit interview, and I ask you what is it that you value the most from the experience that you’ve had in this organization, what are you going to tell me? We already know the answer to that question because we have surveyed a couple of thousand employees to find out, and what they said is that there are two things that they value at the end of an experience with an organization. #1 is their relationships and #2 is their personal contribution, and so we call contributing this final driver. We consider it the culminating driver because it brings all of the others together (inaudible) higher meaning and purpose, and that’s why we define it this way – it’s effort directed beyond self, and we find that it’s the highest form of compensation that you can have in professional life. [20:30]

David Zinger: So, that also comes back to spiritual value because often spiritual is simply defined as something greater than yourself, so it’s not just a religious element; it’s a spiritual element for managers really focusing in on the contributions of the people who report to you and being able to contribute to their engagement while recognizing their own responsibility. [20:52]

Timothy Clark: I totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree and it does become perhaps the highest and most powerful driver of engagement. [21:01]

David Zinger: And speaking of engagement, you have a very engaging website. We’ve got three of your books on there, certainly in the employee engagement mindset, and I stopped at the one slide with engagement with the bee on the flower, but there are other elements of there. So, if people want to visit you they can find you at www.TRClark.net. Any final comments, Tim? [21:26]

Timothy Clark: Well, I’d just like to say thank you to you, David, and the opportunity to be on the Employee Engagement Network. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk to you. [21:37]

David Zinger: Well, I appreciate you taking the time because I think you’ve really made a nice contribution in 2012 along with the other authors who also contributed on your book, and the Employee Engagement Network is getting close to 5,000, so it’s wonderful to see how interest and development is growing in this topic. Thanks very much for being a guest and all the best in all your work and I assume you’ll be in great demand this year as engagement seems to be getting increasingly more popular in 2012. [22:07]

Timothy Clark: Well, thank you, David, it’s a pleasure to be with you. [22:10]

…..

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert who offers speeches, workshops, and education to improve employee engagement for the benefit of all.