This week I spoke in Toronto as part of Rotman School of Management’s Leadership Experts Series and Jason Pankau and I spoke at Northwestern University’s Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement in Chicago. The presentations addressed leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. Above is free download of our slides from the Northwestern presentation.
Today I’m speaking at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Washington, DC. The GAO is known as “the investigative arm of Congress” and “the congressional watchdog.” It supports the U.S. Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and helps improve the performance and accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people. (Note: The free download was open for two days which has now expired.)
On October 26-28, I’ll be the chairperson for the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. HCI has lined up some great speakers for the event. I hope you’ll check it out and join us.
As a reminder, another great conference on employee engagement will be held in Chicago on October 14. “Think Tank” is sponsored by the Forum for Performance Management and Measurement, the research center for the Medill Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. At this conference, I’ll be giving a keynote speech on the links between leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. You can learn more about the program by clicking on employee engagement.
Frequently I’m asked if I can produce research that proves employee engagement affects economic profits. My answer: social science research can’t prove it with certainty but the sheer amount of evidence makes it “beyond a reasonable doubt” that some causation exists. The challenge with social science research is that it’s impossible to isolate the effect of one factor. To get a sense for some of the supporting research, take a look at these links to research summaries from Winning Workplaces and DDI (see “Building the Business Case” on pages 5-6).
The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement announced its annual Think Tank. Here is the press release on the event:
Think Tank to Stimulate New Ideas about Human Capital
FORUM’s Oct. 14 ‘Who’s In Charge Now?’ event features
author, CEO Michael Lee Stallard
August 18, 2009 NAPERVILLE, Ill. – Today’s economy requires businesses to pay ever-closer attention to the value that people bring to their organizations and their role in the human value connection that bonds companies to their employees and customers. The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement offers business leaders an opportunity to explore these issues and find solutions at its second Think Tank symposium titled, Who’s in Charge Now? Thriving in an Employee Led Economy, on Wed., Oct. 14, 2009 at the Union League Club of Chicago.
“The 2009 Think Tank is designed to provide education and insight on how people performance strategies can have a positive impact on their organization, and to create a networking opportunity for individuals who have a shared commitment to strategies that support people in the workplace,” said FORUM President Michelle M. Smith, CPIM, CRP. The target audience for this year’s event includes both high-level corporate executives and a broad panel of academic researchers specializing in people performance issues.
Smith noted that the FORUM has signed a dynamic expert in management-employee relations, Michael Lee Stallard, as its “Think Tank” keynote speaker. Stallard is co-founder, president and CEO of E Pluribus Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in helping leaders create “Connection Cultures” to form strong bonds among the management, employees, and customers of an organization. Clients have included Wachovia, Lockheed Martin, and UBS.
In addition, Stallard is the primary author of the book Fired Up or Burned Out, and contributing author of the book What Managers Say, What Employees Hear. Stallard is former chief marketing officer for businesses at Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab. For more on Stallard, visit his web site at http://www.michaelleestallard.com
A key feature of the conference is that participants will have ample opportunity to discuss the topics most important to them with peers, as well as with academic and people performance experts.
The event includes a reception on the evening of Oct. 13. Registration fees are $250 for corporate participants and $150 for academic/student participants. For more information on the FORUM Think Tank, call (630) 369-7780 or visit http://performanceforum.org/Think-Tank.97.0.html
The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement (www.performanceforum.org) is a research center within the Medill Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) graduate program at Northwestern University. A central objective of the Forum is to develop and disseminate knowledge about communications, motivation and management so that businesses can better design, implement and manage people-based initiatives for inside and outside an organization.
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Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement
1601 N. Bond Street, Suite 303
Naperville, IL 60563
630.369.7780
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be speaking for two of the world’s leading organizations in the training and development field. On July 23rd I’ll be speaking about how Connection Cultures relate to leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation in an hour long presentation via Webex to members of ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development). ASTD is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and performance professionals with 80,000 members from more than 100 countries.
On December 10, I will be at the headquarters of Linkage Corporation near Boston to record an 90 minute presentation on Connection Cultures that will be made available on demand to Linkage clients. Linkage is a global organizational development company that specializes in leadership development. More than 200,000 leaders and managers have attended Linkage programs since 1998.
If you aspire to be a successful intrapreneur, seek a healthy work environment. There are organizations with healthy work environments that energize employees and others that suck the life out of them. Unfortunately, the latter dominate. According to research from Gallup, over the last decade, 75 percent of American workers reported that they were not engaged in their jobs.
Here’s what you should be looking for in a work environment that will help you thrive.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about healthcare organizations. I recently spoke in New Haven to nearly 500 managers at Yale-New Haven Hospital and in Philadelphia to a group of CEOs that included several leaders from the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I’ve written from the patient’s perspective about my wife Katie’s battles with breast and advanced ovarian cancer and about Dr. Herb Pardes, head of New York-Presbyterian Health System, and how he is leading his organization to deliver patient-centered care. Recently, I interviewed Bill Shannon, Chief Wisdom Officer, at DaVita, Inc., the leading provider of kidney dialysis services and shortly I’ll be hosting a webcast with Pat Charmel, CEO of Griffin Hospital, a perennial member of Fortune’s best places to work list.
Two books I recently read reminded me again just how critical connection is to health care.
On July 28 I’ll be speaking about leadership, employee engagement and Connection Cultures at Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California as part of it’s Leading@Google program. Google will film my presentation and make it available online before the end of July at Leading@Google on YouTube.
In addition to my recent posts about speaking at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and the interview I did that was just published in the award-winning Rotman magazine, produced by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, here’s a quick update about my recent and upcoming activities.
I’ve been in Washington, DC lately speaking to various groups including Martha Dorris’ Office of Citizen Services and Communications (part of the U.S. Government Services Administration), Kitty Wooley’s Society of Fellows and Friends and Michael Yoka’s Executive Development Exchange Network. I was inspired during my visits to DC by the dedication, energy and intelligence many Federal Government employees have. This may come as a surprise to many but I believe working in government will be one of the most exciting, challenging and rewarding workplaces in the years ahead. Part of this comes from President Obama’s belief that government can be a force for good and his appreciation of people who want to serve a cause greater than self. I’m thrilled to be working more in DC. On June 12 I will be a guest on Federal News Radio’s (AM-1500) book club and on July 1, I will be speaking at the Treasury Executive Institute.
Yale-New Haven Health System just hired me to speak to its 450 managers on June 2 at its Yale-New Haven Hospital Management Symposium. This is one of the world’s great hospitals and I can hardly wait to fire their up their leaders and empower them with tools to create a Connection Culture.
I’ll be presenting at the Wharton Alumni Club of Boston on June 4.
My publisher just informed me that Fired Up or Burned Out is being translated into another language, this time Korean. In the last year alone the book was published in Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam (in Vietnamese, as you can see from the cover to the left). In addition, the book is now available in Kindle and paperback editions. An audio edition is in the works and I’m optimistic it will continue to be published in more languages over the coming years.
The American Management Association just published an article I wrote about Pixar Animation entitled “Case Study: Pixar’s Winning Strategy of Inclusiveness.”
There are some very exciting additional engagements in the works that I hope to announce soon so stay tuned.
P.S. On the personal front, my daughter Sarah was just accepted at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, Texas. A couple weeks back, our whole family flew down to Texas to support Sarah as she tried out to be a cheerleader. So, I’m now the proud father of a TCU Horned Frog cheerleader. Sarah has worked hard and I’m happy and confident that she will thrive at this great school.
