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Tag Archives: E Pluribus Partners
Winning Workplaces’ Article on Connection
Winning Workplaces just featured an article that Jason Pankau and I wrote in its April newsletter and on its website. The article is entitled “To Boost Productivity and Innovation, Fire Up the People You Lead.” Check out the article and the Winning Workplaces website, it has great ideas, many written by one of our favorite bloggers Mark Harbeke. Mark is Winning Workplaces’ Director of Content Development.
Micro-Connections Enhance Energy, Enthusiasm
Years ago when I lived in West Texas and worked for Texas Instruments, I was surprised that frequently when I passed another car on one of the long stretches of highway, the driver would wave at me. People in that part of America typically make eye contact and say hello to passersby on the street. If you did this in most large cities, especially in the Northern parts of America or coasts where I presently live (i.e. Greenwich, Connecticut), people would think you were strange.
Small actions to connect with people around you are called “Micro-Connections.” These actions boost enthusiasm and energy in the work environment. Environments where people are friendly—where they make eye contact and say hello in hallways and elevators even thought they personally know one another well—are healthier and more pleasant environments. Another type of micro-connector is asking questions that are unrelated to work to learn more about an individual. Unrelated questions help us learn other people’s stories. Micro-Connections treat people as human beings rather than human doings. As Atul Gwande wrote in his book Better, asking questions unrelated to work “make the machine feel less like a machine.”
Little things can make a big difference. Start trying these Micro-Connections out and watch what happens.Over time you will be energized and you’ll build trust and esprit de corps in your organization.
Employee Engagement, Connection in the Movie “Departures”
While looking for a video to watch a friend recommended Departures, a film by Yojiro Takita that won an Oscar for best foreign language film. I highly recommend it. The movie touches on issues of employee engagement, connection, identity and human value that I raise in my changethis.com Connection Culture Manifesto. There were moments that this film reminded me of the beautiful book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer.
When you watch the film you’ll see a myriad of situations that relate to connection, including the protagonist Diago’s connection to his father, his wife, his employer, his former occupation and his new one, his clients, and his friends and acquaintances in the community.
Connection and the character values that support it resonate deeply with the Japanese, a topic that I will elaborate on in an upcoming blog post.
Employee Engagement: Zane Safrit Show
On April, 7 at 10:30 AM Eastern, I will join Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program to talk about employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity and innovation.
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.
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.
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.
Duke Men’s Basketball’s Secret Weapon: The “Women K”
Duke men’s basketball team lead by Coach K are in The Final Four again. What’s their secret? According to Coach K, it’s what might be called the “Women K”: his wife Mickie and their three adult daughters. Read all about it in this fabulous article entitled “Follow Me” written by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the February 2006 edition of Play magazine, a supplement of The New York Times. If you read the article and Coach K’s books you’ll see that he clearly describes what we refer to as a Connection Culture, including its three elements: vision, value and voice.
Most leaders are intentional about developing task excellence but they are not intentional about developing relationship excellence. Not Coach K. Here are just a few of the quotes that appear in the article that show Coach K strives to develop relationship excellence via connection:
“Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships”
“When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, ‘We’re developing a relationship here, and if you are not interested, tell me sooner rather than later.’ That word — relationship — os one he uses frequently. [He tells players] ‘If you come here, for however long, you’re going to unpack your suitcase. We’re going to form a bond, and you’re going to be part of this family.”
“Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches. It is a time for interaction.”
“There’s an empathetic part of leadership, and this is what my wife and daughters have taught me.
Google Lives Up to Values
Google just announced it will shut down its China-based search engine over the Chinese government’s censorship activities. Here’s a New York Times article about it. Earlier I wrote in “A Test of Google’s Character” that Google should live up to its values and I described some of the benefits of doing so.