by David Harder
“When I considered workplace engagement, I used to think of the actions a company takes to engage its workers. David Harder’s firm Inspired Work has turned my thinking upside down. In his signature program and book, The Workplace Engagement Solution, Harder postulates that yes, a company needs to offer a compelling mission and values. But each worker is responsible for her own personal mission, his unwavering commitment, their ability to fashion support systems. It’s a 1/4 to 3/4 proposition, with 3/4 of the responsibility falling on the shoulders of the employee. After an initial gulp, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, how wonderfully clear this take on workplace engagement is! And how richly empowering to call on a few simple tools to assume full responsibility for how we show up at work, every day!’”
—Achim Nowak, president of Influens, author of The Moment, TedX speaker
“As publisher and executive editor of a dominant, global business digest, I’ve had the opportunity to review over 14,000 essays over the years, covering the entire business spectrum. Rarely do I come upon the level of truly authentic, cutting edge thought leadership as discovered within The Workplace Engagement Solution. This isn’t just a collection of anecdotal musings or rehashed wisdom, as espoused by the current plethora of leadership consultants hawking their latest revelations. What David has expertly crafted and delivered here is a rare and priceless commodity these days—candid, actionable insights based on years of ‘in the trenches’ experience. In doing so, he dares to question timeworn, conventional thinking and theory in a refreshingly disruptive manner. For any forward-looking professional at any level of any organization seeking to truly ‘break the mold’ with intentional engagement, this is the Book (and indeed, the Bible) for you.”
—Dennis J. Pitocco, editor-in-chief, bizcatalyst360.com
The Workplace Engagement Solution
Find a Common Mission, Vision, and Purpose With All of Today’s Employees
David Harder
Copyright © 2017 by David Harder
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
THE WORKPLACE ENGAGEMENT SOLUTION
Edited by Mary Campbell, PhD
Typeset by Diana Ghazzawi
Cover design by Ty Nowicki
Figure illustrations on cover by bloomua/depositphotos
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Dedicated to Patricia Wisne.
Your soul and your heart live on through everyone you touched.
Acknowledgments
Lisa Hagan, you are the proof that a literary agent can be brilliant and loving; Linda Sivertsen, my “book whisperer,” you pushed and cheered me into becoming a very real writer; Paul Archambault, you lighten and brighten my every day; David Philp, your elegant mentorship has opened doors into a better life; Kim Shepherd, force of nature, you make full living my only alternative; Laura Garrett, my sister, friend, and confidante; Mindy Zasloff, house mother, brilliant talent expert, and colleague-for-life, Barbara Chardavoyne, every day you demonstrate love, kindness, respect, and care; Brenda Eddy, my mentor, wise elder, and friend, I am a better human being because of you; Larry Schwartz, an ideal example of all that can come out of this work, brilliant, kind, a role model and friend; Carolyn Soper, you elevate life to art and devote every day to skipping; Michael Beckwith, my spiritual inspiration; Safire Rose, who helped me dismantle anger and righteousness, and flood that void with light; Cherie Carter-Scott, who gave me the courage to jump without a parachute; and Gail Lapins, fearlessness personified, you gave me the foundation to pursue all that I want.
Contents
1. The Great Disengagement
2. A Change of Heart
3. The Art of Change
4. Mission, Vision, and Purpose: Fuel for Change
5. The Visibility Initiative
6. The Support System
7. What Is an Engagement CEO?
8. The Right Fit
9. Mid-Management: Engagement’s Final Frontier
10. Getting Started
Appendix: Question Library
Notes
Index
About the Author
1
The Great Disengagement
According to Gallup’s most recent global engagement survey, only 13 percent of the world’s workers are engaged.1 With numbers like this, how do we get anything done? Well, we do it in a trance.
The truth is that most of us want to be enthused, awake, involved, interested, happy, grateful, and connected with our work. We also want to work in environments that inspire these characteristics. But unfortunately, until we understand how our workers fell into “the trance” and learn how to end it permanently, billions will be needlessly lost in productivity and profit every single day.
This 13-percent work engagement statistic isn’t a business problem; it is a national tragedy that extends far beyond the workplace. The malaise behind these figures impacts every aspect of our culture. The trance kills customer relationships, livelihoods, and personal satisfaction. The trance kills people. The trance shows up in the lab worker who lost the blood work or the receptionist who doesn’t remember your name. The trance shows up in a doctor who mindlessly issues orders to everyone around him as you lay right there in his presence, fighting for your life. He never talks directly to you. I call it the great disengagement.
We encounter the great disengagement every single day. We run into it at the grocery store where someone tersely answers, “If it isn’t on the shelf, we don’t have it” or having products break just days if not hours after bringing them home. We recognize disengagement when our boss tells us to shut up or he’ll make sure we regret it. We see it in the CEOs who blindly clip away at the bench strength of their organizations for lazy short-term financial gains. We feel it when flight attendants raise the temperature in the cabin of our plane, just so more passengers will sleep through their flights.
If 87 percent of the world is disengaged, the odds are high that we will only meet one person out of 10 who impacts us like an unexpected gift, a singular light that brightens our day. They may look us in the eye and tell us we are valued. We will remember them for sure. That is, unless we are also in a trance. And like an irritating and unwelcome friend, the trance follows us home to disengage our families. We pass the trance on to our children.
Attempts to break the trance have turned into a big business. Employee engagement is the single most popular talent initiative in organizations today. As Josh Bersin states, “CEOs are bending over backwards to make their company a ‘great place to work.’ Free food, unlimited vacation, yoga classes, and lavish educational benefits are becoming common. But as all this attention shifts toward the health and happiness of staff, employee engagement remains surprisingly low.” Bersin cites Gallup, Glassdoor, and Quantum Workplace research; Gallup states one-third of employees are engaged, Glassdoor averages engagement at a C+ (3.1 out of 5), and Quantum Workplace says engagement is at its lowest level in about a decade.2
It takes just a bit of common
sense to define why typical engagement initiatives produce single digit improvements or fail altogether. You will probably recognize the pattern:
1. The CEO or business owner realizes that disengagement is impacting profits and customer satisfaction. He or she walks down the hall to human resources and tells them to fix the problem.
2. The human resources executive launches an employee engagement initiative, but the employees look past his or her shoulder to the CEO for cues and they see “business as usual” or no real commitment.
3. An employee survey is issued. Quite often, employees feel patronized by questions that seem to really be asking, “How can you do more for us?”
4. The feedback is summarized and shared, usually succeeding in making managers feel even more inadequate to solve the problem.
5. We send the managers to a retreat center to become better leaders. They return more “enlightened” to employees who respond, “So what?”
The Workplace Engagement Solution doesn’t mimic this old “top down” approach. What it does is offer a democratic process in which everyone is responsible, everyone participates, and everyone awakens. In my experiences creating engagement within organizations, it has become clear that when we build a great relationship with our work, not only does the organization improve, everyone’s life gets better. Everybody wins.
For most of us, work is the biggest relationship that we have. Why a relationship? When we launched Inspired Work, my work engagement company, the practice of using career assessments was quite popular. But an assessment only measures superficial aspects and truths about a person’s skills and probable best roles. A great relationship towards work, on the other hand, requires a wide variety of characteristics that include the person’s outlook, gifts, beliefs, life skills, and behaviors. Each characteristic influences the other. For example, someone can be on the right path but failing because they are missing the necessary life skills to be successful. Without knowing what those life skills are, the individual may define their career as a failure. But when we discover that those missing life skills are learnable, we immediately have access to the tools for building a highly successful relationship with work. And, we consistently find deep and meaningful value when a person explores each characteristic of their relationship with work versus relying on the limited views of assessments, surveys, and performance reviews.
During the last 25 years, I have helped more than 42,000 professionals transform their relationship with their work. Thousands of them have launched new careers. Thousands have become business owners for the first time. Even more have become far more effective and happier in their existing careers. For many years, we used the program for individual applications and eventually created separate leadership and learning programs for whole organizations. There was some concern that if we got employees to define what they wanted out of life and how to get it, they would leave, but that changed when we began giving the program to intact teams. Instead of leaving, employees experienced an opening up of their minds and hearts to elevate their entire experience of work together. They committed to each other. Employee engagement figures soared, and by introducing a few simple internal rituals, the breakthroughs were not only sustained, they expanded over time.
The bottom line is that we all spend most of our waking hours driving to, being at, coming home from, and recovering from work. When individuals consciously navigate their way into a great relationship with their work, not only does life improve, they become highly engaged and satisfied.
From all of these watershed experiences, I am going to share how to “crack the code” of employee engagement and build cultures that are energized, enthused, fluid, and capable of not only absorbing enormous change, but actually exploiting change to everyone’s benefit. The investment is worthwhile because not only will profit and performance improve, but you will also serve to build tomorrow’s workforce. The Workplace Engagement Solution isn’t an advertisement for another big consulting contract. In fact, all that is required is an internal orientation, a dose of courage, a “book club,” and an organizational change of heart.
It has become clear that full employee engagement is elusive due to two critical missing pieces:
• Engagement only works as a democratic process. It is futile to expect an awakening when we use the old hierarchical model of pushing leaders to become skilled at drawing engagement out of talent. They will not respond to more manipulation. They need and crave personal involvement and individual transformation.
An awakened organization requires that everyone is involved. In a democracy, everyone is responsible for the end result. It is a mistake to assume that the leaders are more engaged than the rest of the population. Indeed, I have met line workers who are more engaged than some of the leaders in charge of engagement programs. We all have much to learn from anyone, no matter the level, who shines in the area of self-driven change and engagement with their work.
In a true democracy, everyone is responsible in the process of learning how to change and engage. The leaders and managers can provide the right conditions, but they are not ultimately responsible.
• We need to provide people with the skills to break out of the trance. For years, academics, management consultants, and human resource professionals have discussed the “broken employment contract.” But, as we lost the promises and assurances of the Industrial Revolution, organizations have typically failed in defining what it is that we need to do in order to thrive within the rapid, disruptive, and transformative change we find ourselves in. By extension, much of today’s talent has obsolete work skills and no new life skills. Consequently, they become overwhelmed in simply trying to keep up with change. We need to help them close these gaps.
In 1970, the great futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that technology would accelerate the rate of change to such dizzying levels that by the turn of the century, most people would be in a perpetual state of shock trying to absorb too much change in too short a period of time. This “future shock” directly ties into the going-through-the-motions behavior that typifies today’s trancelike, disengaged worker.3
We are emerging from a 300-year cycle called the Industrial Revolution. During this cycle, we were conditioned to view change as threatening, dangerous, and unsettling. Yet, thriving today requires more than just coping with change. The wisest of us are not only developing the skills for self-change, they are establishing an enthusiasm for growth, because growth is the new game and it offers far greater payoffs than the era of survival and predictability.
How many of us are conscious enough to be excited about trading in a sense of security for perpetual growth? Most of us need to be educated to even realize what the opportunity means on a personal level. For the vast majority, real change is a frightening prospect. For example, when we began our programs in 1990, most of our participants were pursuing one big professional change. After making that transition, many would tell me, “I’m glad that is over.” But it wasn’t over. The world just became faster and faster until now, when many people are too confused to even define what it is that they want. Now, imagine how much the national workplace will improve if we develop a thirst for learning and growth within ourselves and throughout our organizations.
It will require us to reinvent, learn, unlearn, and relearn in shorter periods of time. When we ask or order our employees to “snap out of it” or “get used to it,” how can most of them comprehend how to do that? Yet many leaders continue to display the “do it or else” tactic in a world in which talent pools are filled with experts in going through the motions. Similarly, this idea that people should somehow be skilled at continuous personal change is equally far-fetched. This is why organizations, realistically, must develop their workers to not only understand change, but to learn how to change themselves continuously.
But let’s get real. There isn’t a corporate budget in the world to pay for the consulting fees it would take to do this. Yet, when we move the entire process in-house w
here it belongs, the financial investments are minimal, especially when we factor in the increases in performance and engagement that will ensue. This is much more an investment in time and energy. It is also, simply, what it will take to get beyond these real challenges we are facing.
As we proceed, we will examine why so many workers are still ensnared by the cataclysmic breakdown of the old industrial-based work paradigm and why it is good business to invest in their future. Developing a change program for these individuals is far more valuable than showing them the door and trying to recruit from the small slice of available talent out there that has already mastered the game of engagement.
There is also good news. Personal change is learnable. In The Workplace Engagement Solution, it is equally important to develop the skills of unlearning and identifying beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us, no matter how we might desire to cling to the past. Consequently, skilled self-inquiry represents a vital beginning to this process.
In a world in which many media and political messages pine for the past, we need to be posting a new message: Change is everyone’s responsibility. In front of us is a world filled with more opportunity to craft successful lives than ever before. But in order to fulfill that opportunity, we have to learn how to change on very personal and fundamental levels. We need to embrace continuous education and self-inquiry. Why? Because without a compelling and personalized sense of mission, vision, and purpose to fuel internal motivation, employees will lack the initiative, the “juice,” to go through the challenges inherent in actualizing the personal change that is required.
Welcome to the reality of future shock. During the last 30 years, we progressively removed predictability and survival from the work-place. Then, technology introduced change with such growing ferocity that today’s average college graduate will change careers, not just jobs, an average of four to six times. If we dare to expect the majority of our workers to engage, we need to help them become change experts in ways that are not only valuable for our organization, but personally meaningful as well. Like every other set of skills, when and if our capacity to personally change becomes as natural as other relevant skills—navigating software platforms, mastering social media advertising, and the like—we will become more effective in responding to other organizational, market, and technical changes that are continuously coming at us.
