Michael Lee Stallard

Motivating employees to align their behavior with the organization’s strategy (strategic alignment) and give their best efforts (employee engagement) is one of the challenges of senior leadership. Typically, leaders and stars feel connected to the organization but research shows that 75 percent or more of the employees do not. Because they don’t feel connected, over time they gradually stop caring, they stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, they stop giving their best efforts and they stop fully communicating. One serious consequence of the break-down in communications is that decision makers don’t get the information they need to make optimal decisions. These conditions lead to underperformance at both individual and corporate levels. Read more »

Today I’m speaking at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Washington, DC.  The GAO is known as “the investigative arm of Congress” and “the congressional watchdog.” It supports the U.S. Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and helps improve the performance and accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people.  (Note: The free download was open for two days which has now expired.)

On October 26-28, I’ll be the chairperson for the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.  HCI has lined up some great speakers for the event. I hope you’ll check it out and join us.

As a reminder, another great conference on employee engagement will be held in Chicago on October 14. “Think Tank” is sponsored by the Forum for Performance Management and Measurement, the research center for the Medill Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. At this conference, I’ll be giving a keynote speech on the links between leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. You can learn more about the program by clicking on employee engagement.

Frequently I’m asked if I can produce research that proves employee engagement affects economic profits.  My answer: social science research can’t prove it with certainty but the sheer amount of evidence makes it “beyond a reasonable doubt” that some causation exists.  The challenge with social science research is that it’s impossible to isolate the effect of one factor.  To get a sense for some of the supporting research, take a look at these links to research summaries from Winning Workplaces and DDI (see “Building the Business Case” on pages 5-6).