Category Archives: Employee Engagement

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Best Practice Institute Employee Engagement Webinar

On July 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm EDT, Michael and Jason Pankau will join the Best Practice Institute to present a 45 minute webinar on creating a work environment to maximize employee engagement and strategic alignment.   Following the webinar there will be a 15 minute period for Q&A.

During the session, Michael and Jason will cover:

  • Six universal human needs to thrive at work
  • Three core elements of a culture that motivates employees to give their all
  • Best practices of leaders who energize the people they lead
  • Why task and relationship excellence are necessary to achieve sustainable superior performance.

You can register for the webinar at this link.

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LeaderLab Podcast Interview

Jason Pankau and I were recently guests on LeaderLab’s podcast interviews available online or at iTunes. LeaderLab’s podcasts are hosted by David Burkus. David’s past guests on LeaderLab’s podcasts have included Marshall Goldsmith, Daniel Pink and Steve Farber. Check it out.

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The Need to Respect Legitimate Authority and One’s Colleagues

With the recent firing of General McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan over his insubordination, I thought it would be an ideal time to reproduce here what I wrote in Fired Up or Burned Out about one of the greatest military leaders in history, America’s Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall.

Marshall created a culture that stands in stark contrast to the culture created by General McChrystal as reported in a Rolling Stone magazine article entitled “The Runaway General.” Defenders of McChrystal argue he was speaking truth to power.  General Marshall was known for speaking truth to power but, unlike McChrystal, he recognized the need to respect legitimate authority and to always be respectful in dealing with the people he interacted with whether they were fellow soldiers, diplomats or representatives of foreign governments.

Because Marshall possessed humility of character, he knew that he was not always right and had to defer to the decisions of his superior in the chain-of-command then put extra effort into executing such decisions. As a result, Marshall had the complete confidence of the leaders he reported to such as General John “Blackjack” Pershing and President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt.

Marshall should be one of the role models all leaders strive to emulate. The title of the chapter I wrote about General Marshall was  “Soldier of Peace.”  You can read it below.

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Has Jim Goodnight Cracked the Code of Corporate Culture?

Today, The Economic Times in India published an article I wrote about Jim Goodnight and SAS Institute.  The article is based on an interview I conducted with Goodnight at Giant Impact’s Leadercast conference in Atlanta.  You can read my article at The Economic Times‘ website or below.    

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Creative Conversations: Boosting Creativity in Meetings

How do you boost creativity in meetings?  The key here is to tap the “corporate mind.”

The root work of “corporation” is the Latin word “corpus.”  It means “body.”  The definition of “corporation” is “a body of people acting as a single entity and authorized as such under the law.”  To maximize creativity requires getting a group of people together who in a sense represent the corporate body then helping them feel safe so that they will share their ideas and opinions.

Because individuals have diverse thinking styles, experiences and temperaments, they will naturally have different perspectives and come up with different ideas that contribute to constructing a creative new solution, product, process or new business opportunity.  As such, it is ideal to have a group that is large enough to generate diverse ideas but not so large that it becomes unwieldy.  Eight to ten individuals should be sufficient for most issues.  With issues that are more complex, and/or require broader support and implementation, you may want to have broad participation (an issue I will write about in a later post).

Here are few ways to structure a meeting and create a safe environment so that creativity will be maximized:

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The Role of Business in the Pursuit of Happiness

Delivering Happiness is the rare book that gives us an inside look at one individual’s journey to find happiness and as a leader in business. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has written a thoughtful account of what he has learned from experiences in life, in business and from his studies of the fast growing field of positive psychology.

I highly recommend this book to leaders and others who want to see what an engaging work environment — or “Connection Culture” as I’ve described it in my writings — looks like. Not only will you learn about Hsieh’s thinking, you’ll see how he puts ideas into action.

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John Wooden and the Power of Virtue in Leadership

Many thanks to Michael Hyatt for featuring my guest post entitled “John Wooden and the Power of Virtue in Leadership” on his blog. Michael’s blog was recently recognized and the #1 leadership blog. Not bad considering his day job is CEO of America’s 7th largest trade book publishing company, Thomas Nelson.

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Research: Employee Engagement = Connections

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This month Jason Pankau and I will be speaking to leaders at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Johnson & Johnson, the Internal Revenue Service and to church leaders at LifeSpring Network’s Conference on Connection Culture & Discipleship.

In recent presentations, we’ve emphasized the importance of research from The Conference Board that concluded after studying 30 definitions of employee engagement used by consulting firms, the best definition is 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.”

This definition is consistent with our research at E Pluribus Partners where we frequently heard respondents 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 an environment producing emotional and rational connections that, as The Conference Board’s definition says, “influences [people] to apply discretionary effort to [their] work.”

The Connection Culture meets universal human needs for respect, recognition, belonging, autonomy, personal growth and meaning. When these needs are met, people thrive individually and collectively. The Connection Culture is ultimately grounded in character strengths and virtues.  Learn more by reading the manifesto or go even deeper by reading our book.  For the latest developments and examples about how to boost connection, stay tuned to blog posts here and consider following my tweets on www.twitter.com/michaelstallard.

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John Wooden: What the Obituaries Missed

John Robert Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, died yesterday. He was 99 years old. This morning I read Wooden’s obituaries in The New York Times and the Associated Press and felt they missed important aspects of his story that reflect the essence of the man and his legacy.

I profiled Wooden as a role model who we can all learn from in my book Fired Up or Burned Out.  Wooden’s favorite saying was “a life not lived for others is a life not lived.”  He said his heroes were his father Joshua Wooden, Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa, each of whom lived a life of service to others.  In John Wooden’s honor, I’m posting the following excerpts from my book:

Connection and the Legend

So often in life, good things bloom from the seeds of hardship. The personal character of a young teenager who went on to become a great leader was immeasurably shaped during the Depression when his family lost their farm in Indiana. His father’s reaction to the loss was unusual. He wasn’t bitter about it. Instead, his dad focused on the future and told his children that everything would be all right. And it was.

During those impressionable years in this leader’s life, he learned that, like the Depression, some things in life are not in our control. His father taught him that he should always strive to do his best at anything he chose to do and not worry about the outcome. He would later spread that philosophy to countless other.

Another perspective he gained during those formative years was to value people. By watching his mom and dad and hearing the stories of faith they taught him, he learned the joy that came from making people and relationships his focus in life.

The young boy grew up to be an outstanding high school and college basketball player in a state that was rabid about the game. After college he married Nell, the love of his life and the only woman he had ever dated. He taught high school English and coached basketball until 1943 when he enlisted to serve in the Navy during World War II. When he returned from the war to the high school in South Bend, Indiana, where he previously taught, he was offered his old job. Other returning GIs were not, however, and so he refused the offer because he felt it was wrong for the school to deny veterans the jobs they had left to serve their country. Instead, he accepted an offer to become athletic director and head basketball coach at Indiana State Teachers College.

A Caring Coach

For the 1946-47 season Indiana State received a post-season invitation to the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) national play-offs. After the coach learned that a young African-American, second-string guard on his team, Clarence Walker, would not be allowed to participate in the tournament because of the color of his skin, he declined the offer.