Category Archives: Employee Engagement

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Why Employee Engagement Efforts Fail

To be successful, employee engagement efforts must educate and inspire then model, mentor and measure.  Most employee engagement efforts educate employees and thereby lay out the rational case but they utterly fail to inspire.  Research has shown that emotional factors are four times as effective as rational factors when it comes to the amount of effort people put into their work. Stories move people’s hearts, capture their imaginations and, as a result, they inspire people to make the effort to change.  When we hear inspiring stories about great leaders and individual contributors who engage the people around them, we inevitably want to emulate them. This gets people started on the right track.

To keep them moving in the right direction and build habits that engage, modeling, mentoring and measuring are all necessary. Most leaders understand they must model the behavior they want to spread.  Mentoring and measuring are also necessary to provide honest feedback, help us see our blind spots and provide the encouragement individuals need to persevere.  Absent these essential elements, any program is unlikely to succeed.   Here are some questions to consider:

1. Do your employee engagement efforts inspire as well as educate?

2. Do your employee engagement efforts mentor to provide encouragement and measure results to provide honest feedback?

If your answer is “no” to either or both of the above, you need to address the gaps.

Update

Here are a few updates related to my work.

Corp! magazine recently published an article on the presentation Jason Pankau and I gave at the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement, an affiliate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  You can read it at this link.

The Boy Scouts of America selected Fired Up or Burned Out as a text for its People Management 3 course for advanced staff leaders.

On Jan. 26-27 I will be chairman of the Human Capital Institute’s Talent Management for Life Sciences conference in Princeton, NJ.

This month, Developing HR Strategy, a journal based in the UK, published an article I wrote about how leaders develop emotional and rational connections with their followers.

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ASTD Webcast Download: Neuroscience Implications for Leadership

ASTD logo







Last week I did a webcast for members of the America Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The webcast covers select research findings from the field of neuroscience and their implications for leadership, productivity, innovation and employee engagement. ASTD is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and development professionals.  The webcast and slides are available at this link. (Note: clicking on the link will begin an automatic download of the webcast and slides.)

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Peter Drucker’s Kind of Leader

I don’t normally post on Sundays, but today I’m making an exception.  Today is Frances Hesselbein’s birthday and in her honor I’m posting a chapter I wrote about her from my book Fired Up or Burned Out.  Mrs. Hesselbein is the chairman of the Leader to Leader Institute.  Recently, she was appointed a Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point.

Mrs. Hesselbein, thank you for your tireless efforts to advance leadership, your passion for inclusiveness, for kids, and for leaders in the social sector.  And thank you for the personal encouragement you’ve given me over the years.

Happy birthday Mrs. Hesselbein!

With respect and admiration,

Michael

Peter Drucker’s Kind of Leader

The preeminent management sage, the late Peter Drucker, knew some of the greatest leaders of our times in business and government. If he had been asked to name who he thought was a model leader, would he have chosen President Dwight D. Eisenhower, General George C. Marshall, the legendary Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors, or one of the many other heads of major companies throughout the world he came to know during his distinguished career? It’s an interesting question, given the reach and influence of Drucker. Periodically in his interviews and writings you will encounter what may be his highest praise for a person who, he once said “could manage any company in America.” Who is she?

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Employee Engagement Conference, Free ASTD Webcast

This week I’m chairing the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston.  During the conference  I promised to share some free resources with conference participants.

Here are links to the Employee Engagement Network, the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement and the New Talent Management Network.

If you like the stories and ideas I shared at the conference, you’ll love the book.  Here is a free pdf download of  Fired Up or Burned Out. The free book download is only available through Friday so hurry!

I’m posting my slides and select published articles so that you can download them for free at Slideshare.

You can participate in a free webcast I’m giving for ASTD (the American Society for Training and Development) at 2:00 PM Eastern on Oct. 29 by signing up at ASTD Michael Lee Stallard Webex.  Nearly 700 individuals have already signed up!  During the webcast I will discuss findings in neuroscience and other research that helps us see what type of work environment is necessary for employees to thrive individually and collectively.  The webcast will address issues such as leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation.

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Virtual Leadership

I just returned from speaking about values-based leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation to students and faculty at Illinois State University.  Here a link to an article on my presentation.  While visiting my alma mater, I had the good fortune of interacting with Dr. Jim Jawahar, the Chair of the Management and Quantitative Methods Department, and several of the department’s outstanding faculty members.  During the discussion, we identified several areas of shared interest.  Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about what I learned.

To begin, Assistant Professor Dr. Laura Erskine has done some fascinating research on leading employees via online, virtual interactions.  In a thought-provoking article published by my friends at the Center for Creative Leadership Dr. Erskine wrote: “Although physical separation and communication channels may be what the news media and organizations are focused on, the real driver [in virtual leadership] is the degree of psychological distance between leaders and followers.  Followers who felt that their leader trusted them, would back them in difficult situations, and give them autonomy were both more successful and more satisfied.”

The full article is available online at this link.

Next week, I’ll be chairing the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Boston.  It’s not to late to sign up and attend.  You can find out more about the program at this link.

In the coming weeks I’ll be working on an article for The Economic Times in India, a guest editorial I was invited to write for Talent Management magazine, speaking along with my colleague Jason Pankau to the leaders of a hospital system in Chicago and completing a book proposal for a book I’m coauthoring with Stephen Paletta, winner of Oprah Winfrey’s Big Give television program and founder of The International Education Exchange.

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Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence, Both Are Essential

I recently attended a meeting where it seemed that everyone was focused on the people or relationships in a business and believed that doing so would bring success.  Don’t believe it.  Great leaders focus on achieving BOTH task excellence and relationship excellence.   This dual focus produces sustainable superior performance.   Managers who are solely task focused eventually burn people out.  Managers who are solely relationship focused don’t set sufficiently high performance standards and challenge the team to accomplish them.   Managers who focus on task and relationship excellence inspire their teams to work together to reach their goal and when they do the sense of pride inspires, engages and energizes the team to keep performing at the top of their game.

You’ll find a passion for task excellence in all the great leaders.  In John Eisenberg’s new book That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory, Fuzzy Thurston, an All-Pro guard who played for the great coach said, “We realized in his first season that we were going to be a very good team…Lombardi wasn’t going to stand for anything less.”  That’s the attitude it takes to be great.  It’s the relationship excellence that keeps people feeling connected to their leader and makes task excellence sustainable.

Most people don’t know that side of Vince Lombardi’s character.  They’ve heard the quote attributed to Lombardi that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  The quote was actually from a movie entitled Trouble Along the Way. What Lombardi taught was that winning isn’t everything, but making the effort to win is.  It’s similar to basketball coach John Wooden’s philosophy that a winner achieves competitive greatness by giving their very best effort all the time and thus receives a sense of satisfaction from knowing they’ve given their all.

Vince Lombardi had a passion for relationship excellence too.  He loved his players.  He told them they must love one another and said love made the difference on their team.  In addition, he abhored cheating or taking cheap shots at an opposing player.  He viewed it as unethical and illegitimate behavior that was inconsistent with being a winner.  Winning the right way, with character and virtue rather than vice, was what Lombardi believed and taught.  He learned it from the renowned and demanding Jesuit teacher Ignatius Wiley Cox who taught ethics at Fordham University (Lombardi received a “A” in Cox’s ethics class).  This is the side of the great coach that David Maraniss brought out in his outstanding book on Lombardi entitled When Pride Still Mattered.

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Free Slide Presentation Download

Northwestern Univ. Human Capital Conference

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.

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Free Teleseminar Playback

Yesterday, I joined author-consultant Kevin Eikenberry on a teleseminar to discuss accountability and employee engagement.  As soon as I receive the link that will allow you to access the recording of the FREE teleseminar, I will post it here.

During the call, I cited two research studies.  Here are links below to information on each of them:

3-to-1 Positivity Ratio

Local culture more important than global culture (See the parts of the article entitled “It All Depends on Which Store You’re In” and “The Encounter Must Be Measured Locally.”)

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Gary Hamel: Three Challenges Facing Organizations

Last week I was invited to attend the World Business Forum in NYC with 50 other leading bloggers.  The presentation that resonated the most with me was Gary Hamel’s.  In it, he outlined three challenges facing today’s organizations:

  1. How do we build an organization that can change as fast as change itself? Change is accelerating at this time in history and organizations need to act faster to deal with opportunities and threats.  Consider the changes in the last century including in healthcare, microprocesssors, transportation, computing power, the internet, telephony, gene sequencing, biotech, etc.
  2. How do we build an organization where innovation is everyone’s job? The accelerated pace of change makes this a necessity.  Do employees understand their organizations innovation insights?  Is every employee’s contribution to innovation measured?
  3. How do we build an organization that actually inspires extraordinary accomplishment?  This is the most important of the three challenges facing today’s organizations.  On average, seventy-five percent of employees are not engaged in their jobs.  We need employees who regard their jobs as the way to bring their passion in the world. Our job as managers is to build a work climate, a sense of purpose that inspires initiative because obedience, diligence and intellect are mere table stakes in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace.

These ideas are from Hamel’s book, The Future of Management.  In upcoming blog posts, I’ll comment on the challenges Hamel identified.  Do you think he identified the top challenges? If so, why?  If not, what did he miss?