Category Archives: Employee Engagement

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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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Tom Peters, Top Leadership Blogs, and New Friends

Quote of the day: “Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together.”  – Jason Pankau

It’s been a very good week.  This morning I received an email that Tom Peters was following my tweets. In the early 1980s, as I young employee of Texas Instruments I read In Search of Excellence and went through a training program based on Tom’s book and ideas.  I still have the audio tapes from his lectures!  What I found so enthralling was that he described what was possible, a better work culture and an organization where people thrived individually and collectively.  It put a fire in my belly not to settle for the current reality.  For Tom Peters influence in my life, I am sincerely grateful.

Other good things that happened this week:

Jurgen Noop from the Netherlands recognized my blog as one of the top leadership and management blogs.  Many thanks, Jurgen!

This week I thoroughly enjoyed speaking about the Connection Culture, Fired Up or Burned Out, employee engagement, leadership, productivity and innovation with Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program, Nathan Ives on the StrategyDriven Podcast, and Roy Saunderson and S. Max Brown on their Real Recognition Radio program.  What wonderful people to get to know.  I encourage you to check out their work.

Yesterday, I spoke at an organizational development network conference on Long Island.  It was a tremendous group with great energy and intelligence.  I’m still buzzing from the experience.

And finally, I connected via email with Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.  Jason Pankau, my best friend, business partner, and author of the foregoing “quote of the day,” gave me Parker’s book as a gift some years ago.   It had a profound effect on me.  I still revisit it periodically.  It is a small book that’s packed with wisdom.   If you’ve not read it, I highly encourage you to check it out along with everything else Parker writes about on the website for his organization The Center for Courage and Renewal. He is a man of remarkable wisdom and character.

Over the weekend I’m finishing the remarkable book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas and working on an article with Howard Behar, the extraordinary leader who turned around Starbucks.

Have a great weekend!

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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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Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well

David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select?  He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.

Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago.   We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity.  A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.

My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side.  Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet.  Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.”   In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life.  My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this.  That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion.  It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.

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Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the “Great Recession”

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Jason Pankau and I are delighted to announce we are presenting a webinar for Communitelligence entitled “Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the ‘Great Recession.'” The webinar will occur on May 5 from 2-3 PM Eastern. Here’s an overview:

Conference Board research shows job satisfaction is at its lowest point over the 20 years it has surveyed employees. Corporate Executive Board research shows 90 percent of employees are disengaged or not aligned with organizational goals. In this webinar, Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau describe what must be done to reconnect and reenergize employees.

Topics covered include:

Additional details and registration information can be found at this link.

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Duke Men’s Basketball’s Secret Weapon: The “Women K”

Duke men’s basketball team lead by Coach K are in The Final Four again.   What’s their secret?  According to Coach K, it’s what might be called the “Women K”: his wife Mickie and their three adult daughters.  Read all about it in this fabulous article entitled “Follow Me” written by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the February 2006 edition of Play magazine, a supplement of The New York Times.  If you read the article and Coach K’s books you’ll see that he clearly describes what we refer to as a Connection Culture, including its three elements: vision, value and voice.

Most leaders are intentional about developing task excellence but they are not intentional about developing relationship excellence.  Not Coach K.  Here are just a few of the quotes that appear in the article that show Coach K strives to develop relationship excellence via connection:

“Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships”

“When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, ‘We’re developing a relationship here, and if you are not interested, tell me sooner rather than later.’  That word — relationship — os one he uses frequently.  [He tells players] ‘If you come here, for however long, you’re going to unpack your suitcase.  We’re going to form a bond, and you’re going to be part of this family.”

“Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches.  It is a time for interaction.”

“There’s an empathetic part of leadership, and this is what my wife and daughters have taught me.

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Google Lives Up to Values

Google just announced it will shut down its China-based search engine over the Chinese government’s censorship activities.  Here’s a New York Times article about it.  Earlier I wrote in “A Test of Google’s Character” that Google should live up to its values and I described some of the benefits of doing so.

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Chain of Connection: Leaders -> Employees -> Customers

On Wednesday I’ll be leading a panel at The Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference.  One of my panel participants is Vince Burks, a Senior Vice President at Amica Mutual Insurance Company.  With Vince’s permission, here is an piece he wrote about what I describe in my work as the “Chain of Connection” that runs from the CEO to Customers.  It is necessary to maximize strategic alignment, employee engagement and achieve sustainable superior performance in every organization, especially now when according to Gallup Research only 18 percent of people trust business leaders.

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Lagniappe.

Its origin is Spanish. Its meaning is special.  And for companies striving to make a difference – or merely to survive – its value is enormous. As Mark Twain explained during his travels to New Orleans, “It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen’ … something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.”

In other words, lagniappe (pronounced “LAN– yap”) is about making an extra effort … about going the extra mile … about doing something extra special. It is a gift. It is a courtesy. It is a way to stand out in a positive way.

And for companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Zales, Starbucks and Sodexho … it is a way of life.

Successful companies know how to run successful businesses. They know how to win over and keep customers. They know how to hire and inspire their workforces. They know the importance of giving 110 percent. They know lagniappe.

For their clients, this means an added emphasis on customer service. Extra courteous. Extra responsive. Always available. They proactively reach out to our clients. They listen to them carefully, patiently, and thoroughly. They treat them well. They build trust.

Like all successful companies, they place a premium on customer relations and recognize that it is not just about the extra “roll” but also the extra call, the extra time, the extra attention.

But that’s not the full story.

At companies like the ones above – as well as my own, Amica Insurance – the concept of lagniappe is not just a part of our brand ethos; it is ingrained in everything we do. It therefore extends to our most valued resource – our employees. In fact, that is the secret to our success.