Tag Archives: employee retention

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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.

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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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Post-Merger Traps Sabotage Performance

Over the course of my career I’ve had the good fortune to have been involved in several mergers. At first, I was fascinated by the process of identifying a compelling rationale for combining companies, negotiating the deal, planning the integration of people and systems and then executing the plan. The dizzying array of tasks that must be accomplished to complete a merger is challenging to say the least. In time, however, I learned that even greater challenges arose after the investment bankers and lawyers had packed up their briefcases and moved on to the next deal.

Building trust, cooperation and esprit de corps among the members of the newly combined organization is far and away the most underestimated challenge of mergers.  The failure to plan and address cultural differences is why most mergers fail to meet the expectations of the parties going in.   Unless leaders learn how to avoid the inevitable post-merger traps their efforts will be too late to repair the damage that has already been done.

Post-merger traps emerge when behaviors thwart the meeting of universal human needs for people to thrive, individually and collectively. These needs are respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning. When these needs are not met in legitimate ways, people have a tendency to seek illegitimate ways to meet them.  As individuals focus more on self-interest, they lose sight of the organization’s interest.  In time, the downward performance spiral accelerates as individual performance declines, communication is stunted, decisions are made based on incorrect assumptions, financial performance suffers, and so on until survival is threatened.

The good news is that post-merger traps are largely predictable.  Here are a few to be on the lookout for and what leaders can do to avoid them.

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Goldman Sachs’ Inspiring Identity At Risk

A few hours ago, Goldman Sachs acknowledged in an SEC filing that mounting criticism in the press is a risk to the firm.  Goldman should be concerned.  A firm’s reputation affects employer brand, employee engagement and employee retention.  In the past Goldman employees were proud to say they worked for the firm.  Not so today following a long string of articles where Goldman has been referred to as a blood-sucking leech in the economy that cares only about its bottom line.  I cringe when I read such reports because I have several good friends who work or have worked at Goldman and without exception I trust and respect each one.  That said, having worked on Wall Street for most of my career, I know that people get caught up in thinking what they do is a game the score of which is determined by  how much money they make relative to others.  This mindset encourages imprudent risk-taking and behavior that may meet the letter of the law, but not the spirit. (Note: the gamesman profile was first described by Michael Maccoby in his book The Gamesman.)

I advise leaders that they must clearly communicate a set of virtuous values and keep them in front of employees.  The most effective leaders do this by celebrating the stories of individuals who exhibit the right values and getting rid of employees who don’t.  Absent a clear focus on virtuous values, an organization’s members will eventually stray into ethically questionable behavior that can destroy the firm.  And with organizations such as Goldman that are interconnected to many companies and countries via derivative contracts,  they can take the economy down with them.  That’s one reason I agree with Paul Volker and others who support effective regulation of financial services organizations.

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When Truth is Victim of “Nice”

Take a look at this article about Ursula Burns, the new CEO of Xerox, and her efforts to alter Xerox’s culture.  Anne Mulachy, the former CEO did a remarkable job pulling the Xerox family together to save the company when it was on the verge of bankruptcy.  Mulcahy is a tough act to follow but I’m pulling for Ms. Burns to take Xerox to the next level.  One way to look at  Ms. Burns challenge is that she needs to frame Xerox’s success as being rooted in achieving both task excellence and relationship excellence.  When a culture sacrifices truth to being nice (or more accurately to avoiding conflict) a company’s performance eventually suffer.  Ms. Burns is performing a delicate dance.  If she comes off too strong, people wil ear to spaek he truth.  If she does nothing, it seems that the desire to avoid constructive conflict may eventually sabotage the companies performance.

If I were advising Ms. Burns, I would say “make it clear to your Xerox colleagues that we must be intentional about achieving BOTH task excellence AND relationship excellence in order to thrive.  Sacrifice either and we will risk managerial failure for reasons I’ve written about in Fired Up or Burned Out.

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High Fives, Fist Bumps: Touch and Performance are Correlated

In Fired Up or Burned Out I wrote about “high five moments” that are celebrated at Cranium, the games company.  It turns out that new research reported in a New York Times article by Benedict Carey entitled “Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much” shows there is a correlation between touch and performance.  Reading the article immediately made me think of the twin Jensen brothers who dominate men’s doubles in tennis.  They must give each other a hundred fist bumps a set!

Like the Jensen brother in tennis, Craniun is a force to be reckoned with in games.  Here’s what I wrote about them:

Day 19: High-Five Moments

In 1998, with $100,000 of their own money, Richard Tait and Whit Alexander, two former Microsoft employees, decided to create a new board game.1 Tait came up with the idea when he and his wife were playing games at the home of their friends. The couple easily won Pictionary and were trounced at Scrabble. Pondering how he felt as the winner of one game and loser of another, Tait thought it would be ideal to play a game that involved different skills so that everyone had a chance to shine. That type of game would be more fun, and it would bring people together rather than alienate them in a winner-take-all battle. Tait persuaded Alexander to join him, and together they created the game Cranium.

Cranium became the fastest-selling independent board game in history, selling more than either Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit had in its first year. The company (also named Cranium) went on to shatter industry records by creating games that won the Toy Industry Association’s Toy of the Year game award four out of the last five years. It has sold more than 15 million games in 10 languages and 30 countries. In 2005, while the toy industry’s unit sales were down 6 percent, Cranium’s sales were up 50 percent.

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Is Your Corporate Identity Inspiring?

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Jason Pankau and I recently spoke at Vistakon, Johnson & Johnson’s Vision Care group. J&J has an inspiring identity that is expressed in its Credo. Our definition of an inspiring identity is that it exists when everyone in the organization is motivated by the mission, united by the values and proud of the reputation.

Take a look at the J&J Credo by clicking here. As you study the J&J Credo ask yourself if its mission and values are inspiring. After you study the J&J Credo, turn your attention to your organization’s mission and values and ask the following questions:

  • Are your mission and values clearly expressed and widely communicated?
  • Do you have a portfolio of stories that help people understand your organization’s mission and values?
  • Do people in your organization periodically take time to consider their decisions and practices in light of consistency with your organization’s values?
  • Does your organization’s reputation reflect it’s values?
  • Does your organization’s employer brand benefit from its inspiring identity?

J&J does a marvelous job on the Credo section of its website.  Take a look at it by clicking here.  In preparation for a book I’m writing, I’ll be interviewing Kathleen Fitzpatrick, J&J’s Director of Credo and Workplace Engagement, and posting portions of the interview on this blog.

Have you seen expressions of corporate identities (mission, values, supporting stories or practices) that have inspired you?   If so, please post them here or email me at mstallard [at] epluribuspartners [dot] com.

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Refugee Camp to Harvard: Mawi Asgedom, an Inspiring Intentional Connector

mawi.jpg Yesterday I wrote about the incivility and indifference low status workers experience and how it contributes to today’s widespread employee disengagement. Mawi Asgedom is a friend who I admire in part for his passion to connect with people regardless of their status. Mawi graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1999 and was voted by his fellow students to be one of the Harvard’s four commencement speakers.

Standing before an audience of 30,000 Mawi gave a remarkable speech entitled “Of Snakes, Butterfies and Small Acts of Kindness.”