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Tom Peters, Top Leadership Blogs, and New Friends

Quote of the day: “Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together.”  – Jason Pankau

It’s been a very good week.  This morning I received an email that Tom Peters was following my tweets. In the early 1980s, as I young employee of Texas Instruments I read In Search of Excellence and went through a training program based on Tom’s book and ideas.  I still have the audio tapes from his lectures!  What I found so enthralling was that he described what was possible, a better work culture and an organization where people thrived individually and collectively.  It put a fire in my belly not to settle for the current reality.  For Tom Peters influence in my life, I am sincerely grateful.

Other good things that happened this week:

Jurgen Noop from the Netherlands recognized my blog as one of the top leadership and management blogs.  Many thanks, Jurgen!

This week I thoroughly enjoyed speaking about the Connection Culture, Fired Up or Burned Out, employee engagement, leadership, productivity and innovation with Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program, Nathan Ives on the StrategyDriven Podcast, and Roy Saunderson and S. Max Brown on their Real Recognition Radio program.  What wonderful people to get to know.  I encourage you to check out their work.

Yesterday, I spoke at an organizational development network conference on Long Island.  It was a tremendous group with great energy and intelligence.  I’m still buzzing from the experience.

And finally, I connected via email with Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.  Jason Pankau, my best friend, business partner, and author of the foregoing “quote of the day,” gave me Parker’s book as a gift some years ago.   It had a profound effect on me.  I still revisit it periodically.  It is a small book that’s packed with wisdom.   If you’ve not read it, I highly encourage you to check it out along with everything else Parker writes about on the website for his organization The Center for Courage and Renewal. He is a man of remarkable wisdom and character.

Over the weekend I’m finishing the remarkable book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas and working on an article with Howard Behar, the extraordinary leader who turned around Starbucks.

Have a great weekend!

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Employee Engagement Podcast with StategyDriven

I recently recorded a podcast interview on the topic of employee engagement and how it affects strategic alignment, productivity and innovation with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven, a terrific group out of Atlanta that provides resources to help business leaders.  You can hear the podcast and learn more about StrategyDriven at this link.

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The Conference Board: Employee Engagement = Connections

The Conference Board does excellent research work on employee engagement thanks in part to John Gibbons, a Senior Research Advisor at the organization. After examining the myriad definitions of employee engagement, The Conference Board concluded that employee engagement should be defined as follows:

“Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”

I like this definition.  It is consistent with our research where we heard respondents consistently use the terms “connect” or “feel connected”  to describe the emotions they experience in relation to their organization’s identity, the people they work with and their day-to-day work.

In our book Fired Up or Burned Out and in The Connection Culture Manifesto, we identify and describe the “force of connection” as

“a bond based on shared identity, empathy and understanding that moves self-centered individuals toward group-centered membership.”

After defining connection, we identify the “Connection Culture” as the environment that produces emotional and rational connections that, as The Conference Board’s definition says “influence [people] to apply discretionary effort to [their] work.”  The Connection Culture meets universal human needs. Learn more by reading the manifesto or go even deeper by reading our book.

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Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well

David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select?  He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.

Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago.   We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity.  A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.

My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side.  Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet.  Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.”   In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life.  My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this.  That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion.  It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.

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Organizational Development Network Long Island Conference

On April 8, I’ll be speaking as part of the Organizational Development Network Long Island’s Conference in Plainview, New York.  The title of the conference is “Building a Holistic Approach for Workforce Competitive Advantage.”  For additional details and to receive a discount on admission click on this link: OD Network Long Island E-brochure.

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Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the “Great Recession”

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Jason Pankau and I are delighted to announce we are presenting a webinar for Communitelligence entitled “Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the ‘Great Recession.'” The webinar will occur on May 5 from 2-3 PM Eastern. Here’s an overview:

Conference Board research shows job satisfaction is at its lowest point over the 20 years it has surveyed employees. Corporate Executive Board research shows 90 percent of employees are disengaged or not aligned with organizational goals. In this webinar, Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau describe what must be done to reconnect and reenergize employees.

Topics covered include:

Additional details and registration information can be found at this link.