Today I’m attending day 2 of the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall in NYC at the invitation of HSM, the forum’s sponsor. I’ve joined a list of leading bloggers (see below) who are covering the forum. I’m a big fan of this event because it exposes me to a broad diversity of people and ideas. The speakers are certainly interesting. Every bit as thought-provoking are the conversations I’ve had with fellow bloggers and forum attendees. These individuals are mostly from the U.S. although I’ve met several who came from abroad. They come with differing interests, experiences, perspectives, thinking styles and temperaments. Reading the bloggers posts and interacting with them inevitably helps me see new perspectives. I encourage you to check out their blogs at the links below.
Category Archives: Employee Engagement
Innovative Thinking at Rotman
Next Tuesday I’ll be speaking about connection cultures, leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Before my presentation I’m meeting with Roger Martin, Rotman’s dean who also happens to be the author of an excellent book I read entitled The Opposable Mind and an upcoming release I look forward to reading entitled The Design of Business. Rotman is bringing fresh thinking to business and I’m eager to share my work with members of the Rotman community as well as learn more about new ideas emerging from this center of innovative thinking. If you have not already, I encourage you to check out the award-winning Rotman magazine.
WBF Emerging Theme: Corporation or Corpse?
Today and tomorrow I’m in NYC as one of the bloggers invited by HSM to cover its World Business Forum.
What has struck me about the emerging theme here this morning is that more individuals in the business community are recognizing the importance of factors beyond the obvious tasks of business. A model we use in our book Fired Up or Burned Out is Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence = Sustainable Superior Performance. At this conference, I hear a steady drumbeat of speakers who say that our organizations desperately need to develop Relationship Excellence. By Relationship Excellence I mean the relationship employees have with their organization’s identity, the relationship employees have with each other and the relationship employees have with their day-to-day jobs. Consider, for example, the following quotes:
Strategic Alignment and Engagement
Motivating employees to align their behavior with the organization’s strategy (strategic alignment) and give their best efforts (employee engagement) is one of the challenges of senior leadership. Typically, leaders and stars feel connected to the organization but research shows that 75 percent or more of the employees do not. Because they don’t feel connected, over time they gradually stop caring, they stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, they stop giving their best efforts and they stop fully communicating. One serious consequence of the break-down in communications is that decision makers don’t get the information they need to make optimal decisions. These conditions lead to underperformance at both individual and corporate levels.
Free Download for GAO
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.)
Employee Engagement Conferences
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.
Employee Engagement: Assessing the Evidence
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).
Speaking at NASA and the GAO
Next month, my colleague Jason Pankau and I will speak about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Exploring Leadership Colloquium. We’re excited about this in part because, as several NASA employees I recently spoke with said, “we do cool work.” We also believe our work is very relevant to NASA. In our book, Fired Up or Burned Out, we wrote about how knowledge traps contributed to the Challenger and Columbia accidents. I wrote a blog post about it entitled “When Failure is Not an Option.” If you are interested in this topic, take a look at the outstanding National Geographic video special entitled “Challenger: The Untold Story.”
Next month I will also be speaking at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in DC. I’m thrilled to be speaking there too. First of all, I’m a former auditor (at Texas Instruments). I also know how critical the GAO’s work is to our country. Checks and balances, including a strong audit function, are required to keep people honest, a topic that Montesquieu wrote about in his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws.
Health Care Employee and Patient Satisfaction Linked
The Forum for Performance Management and Measurement, part of the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, recently released a research report that shows a positive link between the level of employee satisfaction among health care workers and the level of patient satisfaction. You can download the report here.
On October 14, I’ll be giving the keynote address on leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the Forum for Performance Management and Measurement’s annual Think Tank held at the Union League Club of Chicago.
Change by Legitimate or Illegitimate Means
Change in organizations can be brought about by legitimate or illegitimate means, with understandably different results. Take a look at this Fast Company article on the methods of consultant Fernando Flores for an example of change by illegitimate means. Typically, coercion, degradation and intimidation are the methods of choice by people I refer to as “Intentional Disconnectors,” individuals who tear others apart for the sake of an unhealthy need for ego gratification. Bob Sutton describes them well in his book The No Asshole Rule.