She put us in small groups and handed out two mission statements, one to half the groups, the other to the other half. Our task was to read the mission we were given and find connections between it and what we value highly. It turned out that one statement (from Whole Foods) was a lot easier to connect with personally than the other one (from chemical company ICI). My group, unbeknownst to us, had the ICI one. It read as follows:

“Be the industry leader in creating value for customers and shareholders
through market leadership, technological edge, and a world competitive price.”

All four us in my group struggled to find something that made our hearts go “pitty-pat,” some element which genuinely engaged us. We did not succeed. I worked hard with the phrase “creating value” but it was too  fuzzy a concept to engage me. Engagement is an emotional state. It’s feeling positive about something, caring about it, and wanting to be involved with it.

The other mission talked about “making a difference in the lives of team members and the customers we serve and in the communities in which we operate.” This one provides an easier reason to believe in it and contribute my ideas and effort to it. It suggests the why behind the enterprise, in this case high quality grocery retail service (Whole Foods). We are about impacting people’s lives…we happen to do it through groceries.

Here’s what I picked up:

If you want your mission statement to have any impact on the contribution of your employees, if you want the mission to be the idea around which they rally and align their efforts, you must include a compelling why.

Up to now I have said a mission statement answers just three questions:

1. What do we do?
2. How do we do it?
3. For whom do we do it?

But none of these three generate emotional engagement. What’s still missing are the core values of the organization, the reason the enterprise exists at all, the why.

And I’m sorry but “adding to shareholder value,” while absolutely necessary, doesn’t engage the hearts of your staff, at least all of those below C-level.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

• “I want you all to concentrate on our scoring at least three times”, OR
• “I want you to concentrate on our not missing more than two times.”

You first reaction is probably like mine, the first option, of course! It’s a positive message, a positive objective, not fear based. “Not necessarily so,” say Heidi Grant Halvorson and E. Tory Higgins in the March 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review. It depends, on what your players’ motivational focus is. Some may have what the authors call a promotion focus and others a prevention focus.

• Promotion Focus:
  • Motivated by moving toward goals, advancement, rewards, etc.
  • More inclined to take some risks to succeed.
  • Optimistic by nature and open to new opportunities
• Prevention Focus:
  • Concentrate on staying safe
  • Cautious in pursuit of goals
  • More thorough, conventional in approach, and prepared

As with all these psychological traits, you can encounter a mismatch when the manager and the employee are motivated differently. So, a boss who inspires with a story or challenge around achieving great outcomes will not necessarily connect with an employee who is drawn to a tale or strategy that honors caution and certainty in pursuit of the goal.

How do you know which focus an employee has? You listen to him/her. What questions do they ask you about the objectives? Are their queries about rewards, success, great accomplishment, and exceeding expectations? Or, are they about the risk, potential pitfalls or places where we can screw up, and consequences if we fail or fall short?

This schema is a lot like away from & towards motivation from the field of Neuro-linguistic Programming. Nevertheless, I offer it as yet another shorthand way to see if you are on the same wave length with your people.

Now, if you are that soccer coach, take each of your shooters aside, one-by-one, and deliver your message. But you better hurry. The ref is waiting and the fans are getting restless.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

The Center for Creative Leadership set out to learn more. They conducted a study of about 500 managers and reported the results last year in Developing Next-Generation Leaders. What they found was informative and, frankly, affirming of what we at Fulcrum Associates have been emphasizing in our leadership development programs.

From a list of 24 leadership qualities, the top two–by far–that youth entering the workforce today need are self-motivation/discipline and effective communication. These are followed by learning agility, self-awareness, and adaptability/versatility. An interesting aside, twenty years ago the top quality, by a long shot, was technical mastery.

Now, what about leadership qualities needed in ten years time? Will these current needed ones endure, or will new ones take their place? Well, below are the top six and it appears that #’s 1, 2, & 5 endure. All six received fairly close ratings in terms of percentage of responders who included them in their lists.

1. Adaptability/versatility
2. Communicate effectively
3. Learning agility
4. Multi-cultural awareness
5. Self-motivation/discipline
6. Collaboration

The responders to the study felt that, overall, this new cohort brings great potential to the workplace, not the least being strengths in adaptability, multi-cultural awareness, and collaboration. The potential drawbacks they cautioned about, however, include an unrealistic sense of entitlement, an inability to communicate face-to-face (i.e. without a piece of technology placed in between), and lack of sufficient work ethic and drive.

Reading this, I’m pretty optimistic. I don’t think drive is really a problem and adaptability, especially around technology, has been part of their growing up. Any inflated entitlement will be tempered with experience about how things work in modern organizations.

So, in terms of skill development–either in training or through blended learning experiences on the job–I recommend relentless attention to three areas:

1. Interpersonal communications – face to face, stressing reading the non-verbals and having curiosity about the context, situation, and perceptions that is influencing how the other person is communicating and what they are saying.
2. Self-awareness – what’s going on inside themselves as they communicate, what feelings, perceptions, assumptions, beliefs, and hidden agendae are influencing their end of the communications, and how they suppose they and their message are being interpreted by the other person.
3. Continually clarifying their purpose, career goals, and job performance objectives. In addition, challenging them to identify in what areas they need to develop and grow. Implicit in this is the fact that they have lots to learn before they will receive that recognition and rewards they seek.

If you read pages 13-16 of the study, you will find some worthwhile suggestions for using a mentoring program to (1) close the learning/experience gap more quickly and (2) inject some of that Gen Y enthusiasm and tech savvy into their mentors.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

For government workers, 80% were less than engaged but 60% plan to stay. Not like the private sector, you say? Well, how about 66% not engaged and 56% hanging around? Furthermore, the percentage of employees, public and private, who felt their total compensation package is competitive is in the mid fifties. Not bad, overall.

Of course, unemployment is high and equally good jobs are not exactly dropping into people’s laps. But this doesn’t explain the low engagement levels in their current jobs. Their reasonably good pay doesn’t explain it either.

So, let’s get this straight. Government and private employers are paying well, the grass doesn’t look greener out their in the job market, and still they aren’t getting committed engaged work from a majority of their employees who have no intention of leaving. Sounds to me like someone’s getting short changed here.

Is this situation in anyway the case in your shop? If so, here are several strategies you can pursue to raise the proportion of moderately or fully engaged staff.

1. Executive/Senior leaders:
   • Clearly express your confidence in and excitement about the long term prospects of the enterprise.
   • Explain what this means for all of your employees, why they should care.
   • Communicate clearly the organization’s core values and goals, with special emphasis on why your products or services are important, who in society will benefit from them.
   • In both your statements and your actions, show that you genuinely care about your employees’ well being.
2. Mid-level Managers and Supervisors:
   • Recognize and reward good performance, the kind we expect from highly engaged employees.
   • Bring up the topic of motivators other than compensation and benefits, such as interesting work, opportunities to learn, grow and advance, the satisfaction of making a difference, personal pride in one’s work, etc.
   • Make your poor performers accountable for delivering the performance expected.

These strategies are proven drivers of engagement. If you expect to keep paying and your people to keep staying, it makes sense to build the level of employee engagement to where you receive the results you deserve in return.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

But many of them also want career advancement. They want to get ahead. This is where an interesting article from Talent Management Magazine enters the picture. It reports on a Stanford University study of a massive Chinese travel agency where call center employees who volunteered to work from home:

•  experienced a 13% increase in productivity
• were 50% less likely to be promoted than were their colleagues operating from the central call center

This suggests that if you have staff who work predominantly from home, or in remote geographical locations, for that matter, you need to make sure that their presence, their work and their potential remain on your radar screen, especially when you are looking at succession pipelines and assessment of promotability among  your team members.

Now, if they telework but come into your location most days of the week, this is much less of a problem. If they don’t, however, start finding ways to get face-to-face with them more frequently, in the same space. Skype and fancy, high tech, web-based conference meetings help but they are not enough. You simply will get a better read on employees who work in your location and that’s not fair to the remote folks. It’s also not fair to the organization which might lose the benefit of the best people being advanced to greater responsibility and greater impact on results.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

Are you developing your up-and-coming leaders for where your markets and your environment are going to be? Will your leaders be prepared for the daunting complexity that’s coming? Or are you preparing them for today or maybe just the next year or two?

The Leadership Circle, whose 360 assessment profile and Culture Survey we use with our clients, says that even today’s (forget about tomorrow’s) leaders need to deal with cascading complexity. This calls for a level of adult development and habits of thought that support a clear vision, a strong results orientation, integrity, self-awareness, humility, systems thinking, and the ability to relate and collaborate.

I was therefore intrigued to read Bob Johansen’s book, Leaders Make the Future. He is a futurist who, for this tome, teamed up with the Center for Creative Leadership to identify the leadership skills needed to thrive amidst major external forces that are coming at us from over the horizon but have partly arrived already. Interestingly, I can see the thought patterns from The Leadership Circle weaving through all of Johansen’s skills.

Some of the future forces Johansen identifies are New Commons, Body Innovations, Diasporas, and Neuro-Futures. In the background are game changing trends like the emergence of Cloud-Serving Supercomputing, the growing Rich/Poor Gap, and the emergence of the Digital Natives (millenials, as well as the cohort that follows them). They all come together to create a planetary state that the author calls VUCA, for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

If you are involved with the development of a pipeline of leadership talent in your organization, I recommend you read this book. Johansen says by presenting his ten “leadership skills for the future” he wants to provoke especially you folks to look at what you are currently having your leaders learn and vet it in the context of the convulsive changes that are in process as we speak.

To kick off your vetting, here are are the author’s ten skills:

1. Maker Instinct
2. Clarity
3. Dilemma Flipping
4. Immersive Learning Ability
5. Bio-Empathy
6. Constructive Depolarizing
7. Quiet Transparency
8. Rapid Prototyping
9. Smart-Mob Organizing
10. Commons Creating

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

Engagement – employee commitment, both rational and emotional, to contributing discretionary (i.e. more than mere “satisfactory” performance requires) effort to their job

Enablement –  provision of the tools and resources necessary for employees to be able to perform fully in their job. Along with items such as technology and budgets, this includes skill training, appropriate authority to decide and act, and access to necessary information, etc.

Employee Well-Being – a state of emotional and physical wellness, along with the belief that senior management genuinely cares about them. Some forces that reduce well-being include too high of stress and burnout, psychologically toxic work groups or supervision, and personal habits around exercise, nutrition, and getting enough sleep.

This makes more sense to me than just stopping at engagement. An employee who has the will to perform close to his potential still needs to be properly equipped and be in a positive state to do so. A shortfall in either of these areas will reduce his emotional commitment to the job. As a result, his engagement will drop.

His boss can have an impact on these two additional “E’s.” She can be a gatekeeper for corporate resources support and she can check in periodically on the employee’s state of well being. It’s about monitoring and responding in a timely fashion.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

Dan Pink is always intriguing. Let’s look at a few things his book has to say that apply to managers. In my experience, the higher a manager is in the hierarchy, the more frequently he/she engages in non-sales selling and the higher stakes are.

He presents three strategies that have the most impact on your success moving (convincing) people: attunement, buoyancy, and clarity.

All this said, I don’t think this is one of Dan Pink’s better books. He does have some interesting ideas around the new world of selling where the buyer often has as much or more information than the seller. For managers, however, I suggest you look instead at Influencer (Patterson et al), The New Conceptual Selling (Heiman, et al.) and, for a really deep, cutting edge treatment, Immunity to Change (Kegan & Lahey).

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.

When a new organizational effectiveness ‘truth’ comes along there are two common responses.

The first response is an unreflective jump on to the bandwagon. Managers keen to improve their own and their organization’s performance will often take on faith the validity of the novel approach – only to be disappointed when it doesn’t bear the fruit it promised.

The second response is an unreflective dismissal of the new approach as more “soft-skill psychobabble.” This is understandable, given the number of management fads that turn out to be more hype than help.

So, how should a manager respond to the call to focus on increasing the level of employee engagement in their organization or team? Is this another flash-in-the-pan concept designed to make consultants rich? Or is this a critical strategy for increasing profit and productivity that has substance?

According to the findings of such research firms as Towers Watson, Blessing White, Gallup, and Sirota Survey Intelligence, companies with high levels of employee engagement outperform other organizations in regards to:

• creativity and innovation,
• retention,
• customer focus,
• employee productivity,
• customer satisfaction, and
• profitability.

Different research organizations classify their findings in different ways. David Sirota’s formulation is a simple and useful model. His research suggests that there are three factors that, together, create strong engagement: the employee’s sense of (1) fair treatment, (2) achievement, and (3) camaraderie.[i]

Neuroscience has been making remarkable progress in helping us understand the workings of our mind and illuminating central truths about human nature. In some cases, the findings confirm the validity of existing leadership and organizational practices; in other cases it is turning them upside down. In this case, it confirms that Sirota’s three factors are real, universal, and fundamental in fostering a strong level of engagement in employees.

So, let’s take a look at these three factors through a neuroscience lens.

Fairness

Fairness refers to the employee’s sense of being treated with respect. It includes such things as feeling compensated equitably for one’s labours, having adequate job security, and being treated with dignity. Fairness is embodied both in the organization’s overall policies and practices, and in manner in which the employee’s boss treats him/her.

Brain science has offered some remarkable insights into how fundamental a need fairness is for humans.

One example comes via the Ultimatum Game. This activity is used to demonstrate the fact that feeling treated unfairly overrules acting in what is rationally a person’s own best interests. In the Ultimatum Game, there are two players. One player is given a certain amount of money. The person with the money must decide how much of it to offer the other individual, knowing that if the other player accepts the offer, they will both keep the amount of money each now has, but if the other person rejects the offer, neither player receives anything.

If you were playing, and the amount of money the other player had been given was $10, what would be the minimum amount you would accept? Rationally, you ought to accept any amount, since you would still be walking away with more money than you had prior to the game.

But that’s not how it works.

On average, using the $10 example, the receiver will decline the offer if they are offered less than $3. It’s as if they want to punish the other person for treating them unfairly, even when it makes no rational sense: “If you are going to disrespect me with your offer, I’ll make sure you don’t get anything.”

Feeling treated unfairly is a powerful emotion.

What brain research has demonstrated is that there is a specific area of the brain that processes “fairness issues”.  A 2008 study at the California Institute of Technology pinpointed the insular cortex, a region of the brain that is the seat of emotional responses, as the location where issues concerning equity are processed. Steven Quartz, an Associate Professor and one of the authors of the study, notes, “The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity.”[ii]

Feeling treated fairly is not sufficient for an employee to feel highly engaged, but it is foundational. Feeling treated unfairly destroys a person’s emotional connection to their organization and/or manager. It may even lead to “punishing” behaviours as their “emotional brain” takes over.

You may as well accept this and use it to your advantage.

A sense of fairness is the foundation of employee engagement. It’s a brain thing.

Achievement

George Costanza, of Seinfeld fame, may have plotted and schemed to finds ways to avoid doing any work while still claiming a pay check, but he is definitely the exception, not the norm.

Most individuals want to do work they are proud of. They want to achieve something worthwhile through their time and effort. And they want to know that others, especially their bosses, recognize their contributions.

Many of us know this instinctively. Brain science is confirming that a sense of achievement is a crucial component of an individual’s ongoing motivation. In this article, I will highlight just one of the ways brain science demonstrates this, namely, the way that dopamine affects someone’s ongoing motivation to achieve.

Dopamine is one of the primary chemicals that our brains produce that impacts positively upon our mood. It is central to the brain network that governs motivation and a sense of reward and pleasure.[iii]

Creating environments and conditions for our employees such that their brains regularly release dopamine at work is thus a key element for ongoing employee engagement.

This has three implications for managers.

The first of these is that the work employees are doing must involve tasks in which they are naturally interested. Dopamine is released when a person anticipates achieving a goal. If they have little or no interest in their assigned tasks, there will be little anticipation of achieving specific goals. So, managers need to be in conversation with their staff and get to know them well enough to know what kinds of tasks, projects, and assignments are of natural interest to them.

The second implication is that employees need to be able to see clearly what they have achieved and understand how these achievements contribute to the team, department, or organization accomplishing its goals. When a person knows that what they are doing truly matters, they are more likely to want to do their part, creating the environment for dopamine release. This sets up a virtuous cycle of intrinsic motivation and ongoing engagement.

The third implication concerns the relationship between dopamine (and in this case serotonin – another “feel good” neurochemical) and social status – the degree of honor or prestige attached to someone’s position in the group.

Studies of primate communities (primate is the “order” of which we humans are one species) reveal that higher status members have increased levels of dopamine and serotonin, both of which increase positive mood.[iv] Research also demonstrates that humans are highly sensitive to their perceived status within the group. We are are keenly alert to anything that might lower our social status and motivated by those things that increase it.

This suggests that managers must be very careful when giving feedback to an employee not to do so in a manner that lowers the individual’s sense of their status (in other words, avoid judgmental language and focusing on the employees mistakes; focus instead on the employee’s development). It also suggests that actions taken by a manager that increase the employee’s sense of status will tap into his/her neural reward system, boosting their positive mood and increasing their engagement. Thus, genuine praise, recognition, and reward are important tools for a manager to use with employees.

To summarize, the powerful impact that activating the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system has on an employee’s motivation is just one way that neuroscience is confirming the importance of a sense of achievement for ongoing high levels of engagement.

The importance of achievement in creating high levels of engagement is central. It’s a brain thing.

Camaraderie

The third component of Sirota’s employee engagement framework concerns camaraderie – the sense of belonging to a group that is characterized by warm, cooperative relationships.

Humans are social animals.

Even convicted gangsters dread the thought of being locked in solitary confinement. It is one of the most painful punishments that can be administered.

We flourish when connected meaningfully with others and flounder when we aren’t. Why is that?

The story of our species’ evolution provides the answer.

In the distant past when our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, cooperation between members of a tribe provided a strategic advantage for survival. The development of our cognitive capacities thus took place within the context of living in tribal societies. Humans have evolved to be a highly social species. Our brains reveal this history in numerous ways – many of which have a direct impact on the conditions that create and sustain strong engagement.

One of the more fascinating recent discoveries is the fact that physical pain and social pain (the pain we experience when relationships are threatened, broken or ended) share the same neural alarm system.[v] This system is designed to detect the presence or possibility of physical or social harm and to focus one’s attention on fixing it when something has gone wrong. The fact that evolution utilized the brain’s pre-existent physical pain network to sound the alarm when social relationships are damaged underscores how important relationships were for our survival.

Thus it is literally true that social connection is a fundamental human need. When isolated, rejected, or betrayed we feel significant pain. And so we speak of broken hearts, hurt feelings, wounded souls, and crushed emotions.

Turning to the positive side of relationships, researchers have discovered that when people relate to each other with warmth and trust, our brains release a hormone called oxytocin. This neurochemical lowers anxiety and stress and increases one’s sense of identification with one’s group.[vi]

That nature has equipped us with a hormone that promotes close relationships and identification with the group indicates that managers would do well to foster open, trust-based relationships between themselves and their direct reports and within their team as a whole.

It feels wretched to be dismissed, distrusted, or disliked by those with whom we work. Conversely, it feels good to be part of a team that experiences camaraderie. And when people feel good about their work relationships, when they identify with a group, they contribute wholeheartedly to that group’s success. And that’s good for business.

We’re wired for camaraderie. It’s a brain thing.

Conclusion

Many business leaders are not as comfortable with the “softer” side of management, the people side. But brain science reveals that leaders ignore these elements at their own perils, because the soft stuff is actually hard wired. And leaders who accept and use these findings stand to gain the benefits of a fully engaged work force. It’s a brainy thing to do.

[i] Sirota, David, Louis A. Mishkind, Michael Irwin Meltzer. The Enthusiastic Employee. Wharton School Publishing, 2005.

[ii] Science Daily, May 29, 2008.

[iii] Scientific American, September 15, 2008.

[iv] Grant, K.A., C. A. Shively, M. N. Nader, R. L., Ehrenkaufer, S.W. Line, T. E. Morton, H. D. Gage, and R. H. Mach. “Effect of socials status on striatal dopamine D2 receptor binding characteristics in dynomolgus monkeys assessed with positron emission tomography.” Synapse 29, no. 1 (1998): 80-83.

[v] Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman. “Why It Hurts to Be Left Out: The neurocognitive overlap between physical and social pain.” In K. D. Williams, J. P. Forgas, & W. von Hippel (Eds.), The Social Outcast: Ostracism, Social Exclusion, Rejection, and Bullying (pp. 109-127). New York: Cambridge University Press.

[vi] New York Times, D1, January 10, 2011.

© 2013, admin. All rights reserved.

In the short audio, Bezos makes three points that I think are worth CEO’s and managers hearing about.

1. He sees the DNA of Amazon as that of an explorer, vs. a conqueror. They invent things and consider new opportunities that will differentiate Amazon from its competitors. Hence the Kindle. Hence their taking a look at a brick-and-morter presence for Amazon. He guesses that the culture there would probably be boring for an employee who is looking for a more overtly competitive company in which to operate.
2. You must focus on long-term results. He shares two wonderful characterizations of the stock market. “In the short term, the market is a voting machine. In the longer term, it is a weighing machine. We want to be weighed, not voted upon.” This calls for courage from your C-suite players. But longer term is the only time frame, according to Bezos, in which you can create and bring to market anything of consequence.
3. Inventing and pioneering (i.e. being, strategically, an explorer) requires “a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” For example, people have often asked him, incredulously, why Amazon allows disgruntled customers to post negative comments next to a product. His reply, “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” Part of the challenge of a pioneering leader is to get your employees to continue to have faith that providing a new seemingly counterintuitive product or service will, in fact, prove to be a good decision.

Sometimes as a CEO you have to “sit in the fire” while people confront you with established wisdom that says you are wrong. For this it takes a thick skin but, more to the point, it takes a deep, strong and abiding confidence in your own ability to envision something different.

This jibes with my leadership development roadmap of choice, the Leadership Circle (LCP). According to this model, three competencies found in more advanced, outcome-creating leaders are Purposeful & Visionary, Courageous Authenticity, and Composure. Does that sound at all like Mr. Bezos? I think so.

© 2013, Ian Cook. All rights reserved.