Tag Archives: employee retention

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Human Value Boosts Employee Engagement

Amy Wrzesniewski, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior Yale School of Management, recently sent me a paper she co-authored with Jane Dutton (University of Michigan) and Gelaye Debebe (George Washington University) entitled “Caring in Constrained Contexts.”  Reading it made me realize that for workers in low status positions the indifference and incivility they experience is in part why 90 percent of employees today are either disengaged or not aligning with organizational goals.  Reading the comments of workers provides a technicolor view of their day-today experiences. Here are a few excerpts:

  • “The doctors have a tendency to look at us like we’re not even there, like, you know, we’ll be working in the hallways, and you know, no recognition of what you are doing whatsoever.”
  • “A typical day with the nurses down here would be I come in at about 4:30. I set my cart up in my area. … they do a lot of staring and gawking. I don’t know the purpose of this. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling for me.”
  • “I was called as a favor to my supervisor to come up …and clean a room because the patient’s family was complaining that the room was filthy. It was supposed to be cleaned by the day shift and evidently the day shift has skipped over that particular room…And you have these people shouting, ‘This room is filthy,’ and this, that, and the other, and ‘I want this room cleaned now.’”
  • “Doctors will do things like, you know, they’ll do an exam, take off their gloves and drop them on the floor. You know, just things like that…they don’t even think, you know, they expect housekeeping to do everything…I think there’s a difference between housekeeping and maid service and they get confused”
  • “Some of them [the doctors] feel like they’re next to God. There’s a lot of doctors who feel that way too…Just in their tone and their body language. Every now and then some might, they don’t want to say it, but you know they just feel it. Say, like this. For instance I am cleaning their room or waxing. A doctor will walk right through it. Even if it is not an emergency. You can tell them. Everyone else will go around. You know, I’m saying, he will walk right through here. Now, do you think that’s kind of a sense? Just because he’s a doctor. Nurses will go around housekeepers. So that’s why you get this feeling. Who he just thinks he is….”
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George Washington, Worthy of Praise?

Yesterday was President’s Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington.  Reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in yesterday’s The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be?  I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth.  My journey went as far as contacting and interacting with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington’s generalship.  After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on 20 leaders in a book I wrote entitled Fired Up or Burned Out.

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First in Their Hearts

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, observed the following about George Washington: “It wasn’t his generalship that made him stand out . . . It was the way he attended to and stuck by his men. His soldiers knew that he respected and cared for them, and that he would share their severe hardships.”

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Relational Disconnectors Sabotage Themselves and Their Organizations

Here’s an interview of George Cloutier at American Management Services in The New York Times entitled “Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.” This guy is Howell Raines all over again. One of my favorite case studies of poor leadership is Ken Auletta’s magnificent article about Raines leadership as the executive editor of The New York Times entitled “The Howell Doctrine.”

Leaders like Cloutier always end up destroying their organizations like Raines did (he was eventually fired over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal).  They may be successful at achieving “task excellence” for a time but eventually the failure to achieve “relationship excellence” sabotages task excellence.  As the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.”

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Relationship Failure at Microsoft

An article appearing in The New York Times entitled “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction” makes it clear that the company has big problems stemming from internal rivalries. We teach that organizations that sustainable superior performance = task excellence + relationship experience.  So often organizations die because the failure to achieve relationship excellence sabotages task excellence. Keep that in mind when you read the article and it will become clear that Microsoft is heading down that path.

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Employee Engagement: Beryl Companies


One of my favorite business books is Paul Spiegelman’s Why Is Everyone Smiling?. Spiegelman is the CEO of Beryl Companies, a call center outsource company for the healthcare industry. On March 24-25 I’ll be moderating a session at the Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference in New York City where Paul will be speaking. You can learn more about the conference at this link. And be sure to check out the above webcast I hosted with Paul.

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Leadership Wisdom: Howard Behar


One of my favorite business books is Howard Behar’s It’s Not About the Coffee. Behar is the former president of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America. On March 24-25 I’ll be moderating a session at the Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference in New York City where Howard will be speaking. You can learn more about the conference at this link. And be sure to check out the above webcast I hosted with Howard.

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Jobs, Apple: What’s at their Core?

LiveMint/The Wall Street Journal in India asked me to comment on why Steve Jobs and Apple have been so successful. In an interview entitled “‘Think Different’ is What Makes Apple Stand Out,” I shared that it is more than the beauty and functional excellence of Apple’s products that make the firm so successful. Apple’s inspiring identity plays an important role too. (Above is a video of the original “Think Different” television ad.)

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Hardwiring Talent Management

One way to think of organizations is that they are a bundle of resources, processes and values (referred to as the RPV framework). Leaders need to actively manage all three elements of the RPV mix. In this post I would like to zero in on processes.  Processes are to organizations what hardwiring is to the human brain: it allows the organization (or organism) to complete routine tasks with minimal expenditure of energy and resources while bringing consistency and proven reliability to execution.

Two processes I recently learned about that support talent management are One Page Talent Management and  Online Mentoring.

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Open the Books, Boost Employee Engagement

Employee engagement increases when a business opens its books and invites employees to contribute their opinions about how to improve performance.  Here’s a wonderful story entitled “A Reluctant Retailer Decides to Open Her Book,” by Jack Stack, one of the pioneers of open book management. Jack is a hero in my book.  Years ago he saved a business and many jobs by creating SRC Holdings from a division that was going to be shut down by its parent company.  You can read about it in a book I highly recommend entitled The Great Game of Business.