Tag Archives: employee motivation

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SkillSoft to Film Videos on Employee Engagement, Strategic Alignment

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This summer I will be filming training videos on employee engagement, strategic alignment,  productivity and innovation for SkillSoft, the largest public company in the world that is solely focused on e-learning.  Skillsoft has 10 million licensed users that represent 55 percent of the Fortune 500 and 24 percent of the Global 2000 organizations in business, government, and education. Jason Pankau and I are excited about this opportunity to work with yet another world-class partner to take our work and ideas on The Connection Culture from our book Fired Up or Burned Out to a new audience.

Organizations today are in desperate need of improving employee engagement and strategic alignment. The Conference Board released a report in January 2010 saying its research showed employee engagement is at its lowest point since the organization began surveying. Another well-repected organization, The Corporate Executive Board, released research last year that showed 90 percent of employees are either not engaged and giving their best efforts or they are not aligned with organizational goals.

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Tom Friedman, Dov Seidman: Need For “Sustainable Values”

Check out Tom Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times at this link. Friedman cites Dov Siedman’s belief that in an interconnected world we need “sustainable values” more than ever. I couldn’t agree more.  In past posts I’ve written about Dov, his book entitled How and LRN, the company he founded to promote principled leadership.  

In our work at E Pluribus Partners, we promote universal character values and virtue as essential for people to thrive, individually and collectively.  Our “Character > Connection > Thrive Model” (see below) lays out the rationale.  In a nutshell, individuals who believe and behave in ways that are consistent with Universal Character Values (also known as character strengths), create “Connection Cultures” that meet universal human needs to thrive.   You can learn more about Connection Cultures, Universal Character Strengths and Virtues by reading this free manifesto published by changethis.com entitled The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.

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Has SAS’s Jim Goodnight Cracked the Code On Corporate Culture?

On Friday, I was granted a private interview with Dr. Jim Goodnight, co-founder and CEO of SAS.  We met in Atlanta during the Chick-fil-A Leadercast where 50,000 individuals participated live or via simulcast from locations around the world.

Goodnight, who has a Ph.D in statistics, founded SAS more than 30 years ago with colleagues from North Carolina State University.  Today, SAS is on a roll having achieved an enviable long-term record of revenue and profit growth. The firm was named number 1 on Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” list for 2010.  Harvard Business School named Goodnight as one of the “20th Century’s Great American Business Leaders.”  He was also recently named one of “America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs” by Inc magazine.

During the Leadercast program and prior to my meeting with Goodnight, author Jim Collins interviewed him on stage. Collins has written about the Level 5 leaders who experienced a catalyst in their lives —  death of a loved one, near death experience, religious conversion — that developed humility in their character and made them better leaders.  Collins seemed to be looking for something similar in Goodnight  to explain SAS’s benevolent corporate culture where the average work week is 35 hours and the bucolic SAS campus has nearly every employee perk imaginable.  Despite Collins’ attempts to draw out Goodnight, he hit a dead end. Typical of Goodnight, he answered several of Collins’ questions with a “yes” or “no.”   When Collins asked Goodnight why most SAS employees were given offices rather than the standard cubicles that the typical software company employee has, Goodnight replied tongue in cheek that if an employee were watching porn from the privacy of his office it would not be the problem that it would be if he were in a cubicle out in the open.  The audience responded with tentative laughter.  They weren’t quite sure what to make of Goodnight.

Like Collins, I have known and written about many great leaders who experienced adversity that made them better leaders. Goodnight is a different breed, a leader who by all accounts has not gone through a Level 5-type transformation and yet has at least in some respects cracked the code on corporate culture.  For every job opening, SAS receives 100 or more resumes. Over a business cycle, SAS’s employee turnover in the low single digits is a fraction of the software industry’s that at times reaches into the mid-20 percent plus range.

My interview with Goodnight and some additional research led me to believe that Jim Goodnight is among the most important role models for leaders to emulate today.  This week I’m working on an article that explains why.  If you have thoughts about Jim Goodnight or SAS’s corporate culture that you would like to share, please post them here or email me at mstallard [at] epluribuspartners [dot] com.

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What Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and A.G. Lafley have in common

Jobs, Catmull and Lafley connect with employees of their respective organizations, although they do so in distinctly unique ways. This is the topic of a webinar Jason Pankau and I will be doing for Communitelligence. You can learn more about it at this link. This topic is relevant today because Corporate Executive Board research shows that 90 percent of employees are either not engaged and giving their best efforts or they are not aligned with their organization’s goals. Research by both The Conference Board and the Corporate Executive Board shows that the solution to this problem to develop the emotional and rational connections that employee have with their organization’s mission and values, supervisor, colleagues and day-to-day work tasks. In the webinar, Michael and Jason show how great leaders do this.

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More Evidence: Trust and Connection=Life, Distrust and Isolation=Death

Trust increases when people feel a sense of connection to one another. Strength of connection and trust develop over the time.  This happens as people interact and get to know one another increasing each person’s credibility and reliability in the eyes of the other, and as intimacy develops. Several studies support that this connection that develops trust is the most or among the most significant factors affecting the performance of organizations.

Parker Palmer, the Quaker writer and educational thought leader, told me about the book entitled Trust in Schools by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider. Bryk and Schneider found that far and away the most powerful factor affecting school improvement during the 1990’s in Chicago was “relational trust.” Money, governance, curriculum, etc. were nowhere close to affecting educational outcomes as compared to relational trust (Tony Bryk is now the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.)

I learned about two additional studies related to connection and trust from the writings of Dov Seidman, the founder and CEO of LRN.

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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.

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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.

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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.