The war on talent
McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it seemed like a universal problem of scarce talent, and a subsequent call to arms in a battle to acquire it, they skilfully managed to distract the attention from a problem significantly greater: hosting talent. The military analogy (that management loves with narratives such as ‘win-win’, or ‘kill the competition’, for example) implied that talent is ‘outside’ and therefore there is a war to ‘get it’. Undoubtedly true in some occasions, organizations have today a greater problem with retention, engagement, and, as I said, hosting that talent. The war on talent is global, the skills gap is widening and employees are demanding more from their employers.

Organizations need to adopt a strategic approach to talent management. They must create workplaces where employees feel value, challenged and supported. They also need to invest in developing their employee’s skills and knowledge so that they can stay ahead of the curve.

The wrong capital
‘Talent management’ ( a sub-industry in its own rights) focuses too much on Human Capital, with emphasis on skills (and with emphasis on people ‘who have done it before’). However, in today’s world, social and emotional capital are just as important.

• Social Capital refers to the quality and quantity of an individual’s relationships. Employees with strong social capital are better able to collaborate, solve problems, and build consensus.
• Emotional capital refers to an individual’s ability to manage their own emotions and the emotions of others. Employees with high emotional capital are more resilient, adaptable, and effective leaders.

The best talent management programs focus on developing all three types of capital: human, social, and emotional.

Defining Talent
You’ll be surprised how many people can’t seriously articulate what this means to their organization. The narrower the definition, the bigger the problem. Once you have a clear definition of talent, you can develop programs and initiatives to attract, retain, and develop talented employees

It is vital to move beyond conventional boundaries and develop a nuanced understanding of talent management to foster a thriving workplace.

Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon the most solid foundations of behavioural sciences, and yet incredibly forgotten. It is the connection between work (activity) and (personal) impact.

If work is an input to a black box in which a myriad of opaque algorithms may end up enhancing shareholder value, don’t be surprised with a shocking system of employee disengagement.

Producing growth, becoming market leaders, winning prizes and

improving industry rankings are not good enough.

The connection between what I do and the impact that I make, small or big, is fundamental. However we design many jobs that define and craft an input for which the consequence of the output is not clear. There is no clear reinforcement mechanism available and ready. The input is blind.

Producing growth, becoming market leaders, winning prizes and improving industry rankings are not good enough. Granted, some people may have a longer horizon. The Chemist in a pharmaceutical lab may be working to an overall ‘improving health goal’, but, most likely, day to day motivation comes from the relatively close and even intimate visualization of an outcome in the Lab, not ten years later in the market place. I use the pharmaceutical example because it is an extreme case of people working in extraordinarily long development cycles. From initial discovery of a molecule to a medicine in the hospital may be a 10 to 15 year gap. Statistically, in a fast moving skills market, many of those chemists will never see ‘their product’ on the market, whether because of product development attrition or because they have moved to another company.

There is a fault line in any CRM system, for example, that, banking on everybody inputting, does not give close feedback to the person who did the input: ‘thanks for inputting those new customer insights last week; as a result of that, the sales force in X has now created a new segmentation of customers and are considering doing Y’. Not rocket science, zero cost, not done.

Work design needs to include a way for people to see, feel,

visualize, and mentally connect with an impact.

In my long battle to plug in behavioural change management (Viral Change™ ^[1] platform) into failing Customer Relationship Management systems, I have always seen very little of the above. In the old days of Viral Change™ ^[1] we even created a behavioural term for that fault line: blind input. I make the efforts, input data, send stuff and, as a District Sales Manager put to me moons ago, ‘I hope somebody will do something with this; for the time being my motivation is based on faith’.

Work design needs to include a way for people to see, feel, visualize, and mentally connect with an impact. If personal impact, even better. If personal impact in a way that nobody else could have done it, then much much better.

This applies to anything from producing reports, crunching numbers, making project team decisions, hiring, or packaging goods. The longer the distance between personal work and personal, visible impact, the greater the problem with engagement and ownership.

People use expressions such as ‘making a difference’ for a reason. Many frustrated, good employees in large organizations migrate to small ones, not because the work was bad, but because they did not feel they were making any personal impact, and many inputs (ideas, actions, contributions, advise, decisions, steering, deliverables, pieces of management within their teams) were lost in the Bermuda Triangle of ‘the system’. A waste of human imagination.

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The Myths of Management Webinar

Watch on demand ^[9]: We have been running organizations with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars. The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to prepare businesses for the future. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

For me, the most damaging use of the employee engagement framework is the widespread one that states that ‘engagement’ predicts productivity. A poorly engaged workforce (whatever that may mean) will have (pick a score), a 15 or 20 percent, or more, decrease in productivity. So, boosting engagement will boost productivity. And this is good. If productivity is what you are aiming for.

This model reduces human interaction and the collective action of a company, for example, to a machine with inputs and outputs. More engagement, or more satisfaction here, is not good in itself. It’s only good in so far as it produces more. Years ago, I was struck by the apparent seriousness of a 2012 business book entitled: ‘Contented Cows Give Better Milk: The Plain Truth about Employee Relations and Your Bottom Line’ ^[10]. Unchallenged, and also praised as a bit of fun, it was telling the truth about many corporate approaches and a great deal of the HR and consulting industry. We want a more engaged workforce (pick a definition) because we want more productivity, more milk. Not because it may be good in itself, because we want people to be fulfilled by the job, because we wish that satisfaction to be part of what working here is about. No, It’s the milk stupid. The fact that not many people have shouted, loudly, about this insulting view of human nature, tells us that in the area of management of organizations, we can still get away with murder.

The single indicator, single joystick,
is absolute nonsense

I am not against scores or indicators per se. I understand that, particularly in a large organization, that may be the only way to put some order to complex data. I am against a single indicator when it comes to ‘explaining culture’. The single indicator, single joystick, is absolute nonsense. As I said before, many people may push back and say that this is not how it works, that they always take into account other data. Great. I hope so. But this is not always my experience, having been part of many conversations about the single ‘employee engagement score’ and how good or how dreadful it was or is.

Extract taken from my paper: Corporate Love Affair With A Thermometer: Employee Engagement Surveys  – read and download full paper here ^[11].

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The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is a big one) says that companies with high employee engagement (as measured by some kind of artificial tool) are more successful. And produces ‘studies’ to prove it. Employee engagement is clearly portrayed as the reason for success, so the path is clear: how can we get more of it? My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. If you want high employee engagement, run a successful organization. I know it’s rather inconvenient to think this way.
 

The book The Halo Effect (2014) by Phil Rosenzweig ^[12] opened my eyes to this. I would put this book in the list of obligatory reading to anybody in management. The subtitle of the book is explicit: ‘and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers’. Rosenzweig quotes the case of the UK retailer Marks and Spencer, a company which at some point scored at the top in employee engagement rankings. Then a terrible year in business performance came up and employee engagement scores went down significantly. Not a single iota in benefits, programmes, employee care, or anything had changed. Just abysmal market performance.

Extract taken from my book The Flipping Point- Deprogramming Management. ^[13]

Engagement, retention even activism…Traditional models of employee engagement are getting a bit tired. They are starting to look the same, smell the same, and feel the same.

There was a joke amongst Psychology students many years ago when they asked: ‘What’s intelligence?’ and the answer was: ‘Whatever is measured by tests of intelligence’. We are running the same risk: employee engagement is whatever numbers come from Employee Engagement surveys. It’s a growing industry. Executives of all sorts are asking their HR colleagues, “Can we have one of these?” Or perhaps, “we must have one of these”.

Who could argue against having ‘some numbers’ that tell you how employees feel? Ah! The fascination with numbers! And what do you do with them? Ah!, you try to make sense of them, which is usually translated into lots of presentations to several layers of management. And then? Ah!, you must do something about it. Which is usually translated into more meetings about what to do. And then? Action plans. And then? Follow-up meetings? And then? Then, it will be time for another Employee Engagement Survey.

It’s better to have those numbers than not having a clue about the climate of the company.

The serious question is what to do with those numbers.

Believe me, I am far from cynical. I am describing an organizational ritual. And rituals have a key role in organizations. They tend to do good, glue and align people, make collective sense, provide maps, boost a sense of belonging etc. They are not that good at solving problems, though. It’s better to have those numbers than not having a clue about the climate of the company. The serious question is what to do with those numbers other than ‘try to boost them’.

I wrote an article many years ago: ‘Prisoners of the numbers’. Where I aired my frustration at seeing Boards managing Earnings per Share (EPS) and share prices, not the organization, not the people, not the purpose. Little has changed.

I very much welcome the sub-industry of Employee Engagement providing it’s not about number-management, the discussion of an up and down scale, and the comparison with a neighbour.  Many tools provide excellent, beautiful, sophisticated, expensive answers to the wrong questions. I have yet to know of an organization that defines engagement first and then creates its survey. Most I know ‘use that survey’… because they can. Time to rethink?
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The Shortest Employee Engagement Survey Has One Question

And the question is: ‘Why are you still here?’

You learn about the organization by asking questions to employees when they leave you (exit interviews) but you learn far more when you ask them why they are staying (‘stay’ interviews). It’s not a joke. ‘Why are you still here?’ – with the emphasis on the word still – it’s the best Employee Engagement survey you can have. It’s also very cheap and you don’t need an external agency.

It’s the only question that allows the person to respond with something like ‘I need to pay my mortgage’ (I have never seen an Employee Engagement survey with this kind of answer). Also, possibly, ‘It’s the best place I could dream to work in’, and anything in between. We are so afraid of direct questions that we tend to ask people things in complicated ways. I have practiced this with clients many times and I have always got the richest of answers. Believe me, a one-question questionnaire is a dream.

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‘The best employee engagement programme is one that doesn’t exist because it is not needed. To design an employee engagement programme, think of what the organization that doesn’t need one looks like. Then shape that one. If you can.’

Vignette from my book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[13]

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The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[13]
A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs to be deprogrammed. This book of 200 tweet-sized vignettes looks at the other side of things.  It ask us to apply more rigour and critical thinking in the way we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

In case you missed my first edition ^[14], sent out last week, Daily Thoughts has evolved. Now a new format, rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on key culture change and behavioural science themes. This week I continue with my focus on leadership.

Future issues will cover:

• Behavioural Change – ‘there is no change, unless there is behavioural change’.
• Company Culture – dispelling the myths
• Organizational Design – looking at the future of work

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The Corporate Love Affair with a Thermometer: Employee Engagement Surveys

Here’s a brief snippet of my latest thinking on Employee Engagement and how leadership fits into the conversation. Use the link below to read the full article. 

Company culture has suffered a similar set of problems when a reductionistic approach is used: culture equals employee engagement and employee engagement equals the score in the employee survey (because we have thermometers). Here is a bit of a circular definition which is real (I am not making it up): definition of Engagement is whatever you have decided Engagement is and you have decided to measure via an Employee Engagement Survey. In summary, Employee Engagement is whatever the Survey says. And it says it with a number, which is very handy, but it’s time to abandon this.

It’s surprising how, in many areas of the company business, we are used to using a set of parameters to define what is going on – and it’s pointless to focus on employee survey results only, out of context and in isolation from a wide set of ‘cultural parameters.’ The problem is not that any sensible leader would agree with this, but that the same sensible leaders may spend a lot of time ‘on the scores’ just after agreeing that it does not make a lot of sense. Leaders must reflect on their role in culture change, and understand that when it comes to ‘explaining culture,’ the single indicator and the single ‘employee engagement’ does not make sense anymore.

Read the full article ^[11]

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Leading Culture Change ^[15] – A conversation between Gert De Winter, CEO of Baloise Group, and Dr Leandro Herrero, CEO of The Chalfont Project.

In this video ^[15], I talk to Gert De Winter about the challenges and solutions of Viral Change™ in action. We reflect on the role of leaders in culture change and on how Viral Change™ contributes to culture change in Baloise Group.

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For more on Leadership…..

Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road
A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves.

Find out more and purchase here. ^[16]

1: The ‘annual’ measurement is artificial. It works for budgets and accountants but not for much more. If a project is a 17 month project, why do you need a measure of performance at month 11 or 12? Why not monthly? Weekly? At month 17? [In Safety, if you have a fatality in June and another in August, this does not make it a 2/12 of a problem].

2: Performance appraisal is a constant dialogue. When you do that, the picture is built automatically. If so, performance management is simply management, not an extra ritual.

3: Performance appraisal 2021 version is two ways:  management about employees, employees about management. One way only? 50% of the picture.

4. The best thing you could do, in any case, is to consciously de-couple the process for compensation and bonuses from the one for performance appraisal.  You’ll still have to decide about compensation and reward, but this should be based upon a continuous build up over the year. De-dramatize the annual one off ritual if you insist in keeping one. It should be just another data point.

5. Data by Bersin/Deloitte showed that 89% of managers think that the performance management process ‘is not worth the time put into it’. Yes, you’ve heard, 89%. That is 11% thinking it’s OK. You?

6. Performance appraisal should be focused on (a) understanding success and failure, (b) coaching and (c) action/development. This cannot be done once a year. Not even twice a year. Is your system fit for purpose?

7. Punctuating performance management in particular calendar slots (mid year appraisal in June, end of year is November) paralyses the organization on June and November. Don’t fix times from the top. Managers should dictate their tempo and leaders should keep an eye on it. Again, this should be unbundled, time and process, from pay raises and bonuses.

8. Substitute ‘your Performance Appraisal’ for ‘Our performance Assessment’. We are together in this. A manager is not a father, or a benign god. Managers are human (most of them), they are not absolute holders of the truth.

9. Focus on tracking success and failure, assessing individual and group contributions, recognition and planning forward for success. The current systems are probably unsuitable. There may be digitally reborn but still mechanistic.

10.  Performance assessment/appraisal needs to be reinvented. A 360 degree feedback plugged in, does not solve the problem. It only creates a pseudo-democratic and pseudo-scientific monster.

If you agree with three or four out of the 10, you need to act. Call time out and re-invent. If you agree with more than three, why are you still doing it the old way? Change now! If you don’t  agree with any, maybe your company is called Annual Performance Management Suppliers, a company founded in 1809 (the year Frederick Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management.”) Just kidding.

I am not advocating scrapping performance management. I am advocating reinventing it and getting rid of the word performance. Then we will be confronted with the real issue: reinventing management.

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What do YOU want to change in your organization’s culture? More accountability, innovation, respect?

Whatever it is, you need the tools to mobilize people at scale. The Chalfont Project Academy ^[17] can provide those tools. Our new online learning platform, enables us to share with you, our resources and insights based on our work as Organization Architects.

Find out more ^[18].

The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours:

1. I expect you to do something but you don’t think you are empowered to do it.
2. I empower you to do something (I have decided it is good to empower you) but you don’t want to be empowered (too much responsibility?)
3. I am told that delegation is good, so I delegate, but call it empowerment. But I am just passing the monkey on to you.
4. I empower you, you think I am abdicating.
5. I don’t have permission to do, or I think I don’t have, I feel I am not empowered, but you never thought you needed to give me permission.
6. You are empowered! Here you are! Take it. What? (Is he ok?)
7. Empowering you means you need to behave as if you were the owner of the business (does it mean I can have your bonus?)
8. We are all empowered, for goodness sake, just take accountability for things!
9. I am empowering you to be empowered, but not too much, because I will lose control.
10. I am told to let it go, so I am empowering you, but you don’t believe me for a second, because you know me. So I may have to do something more than just saying it.
11. You are empowered. Please report to me weekly on the hitting of milestones, number of KPIs and times you took a break.
12. I can’t empower everybody, it would be a disaster.

The above list of 12 contains these keywords, all conveniently used when and as needed contributing to the intrinsic muddle of the territory of empowerment: empowerment, wanted to be, thinking you are, delegation, abdications, monkey traffic, permission, ownership, accountability, control, let it go.

No wonder we can go for days and weeks ‘discussing empowerment’ without reaching anywhere serious. The conceptual discussion is messy and difficult. The only way to unbundle this is to descend to the behavioural side: what do you want to see in the environment (that people do, don’t do) that you can say ‘this is a culture of empowerment’?

The culture is, will be, will feel, completely different if your (collective) view of empowerment is for example delegation, or passing the monkey, or simply accountability taken.

The real, true, unique, powerful, core ingredient underneath this discussion has one word: control. That is, how much you have, need to have, should have, and their mirrors, how much you can lose, want to lose.

If you frame a discussion about empowerment you need to start by acknowledging the conceptual muddle and then peeling the onion until you get to the core. Then, there, at that core, it will be control, will feel control, will smell control. That is the issue. And if it is, your discussion now has a different label. Address control, forget the rest (unless the discussion takes place over a few glasses of wine, in which case, conceptual muddle thrives in such a fertile territory).

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[19], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[20]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[21]

_

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

We can help your business Reboot!  

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[22]

Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format

Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40

Price: POA

For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan ^[22] can support you and your business, please Contact Us ^[7] or email: [email protected] ^[23]

Here is a ‘very novel’ concept. Employee Engagement is needed because… it’s good in and of itself. Because work enhances human nature. Because engaging people with their work is a moral obligation of both, providers and takers of work, as part of human enhancement. In this model, meaningful, enhancement, enrichment from work is a moral imperative. If engagement is morally right, it also means work that matters to the individual beyond the benefit of the organization. Full stop.

This thinking is so alien to business that it’s likely to be dismissed by many. After all, many people sustain that the organization per se, and in particular the business organization, is an amoral entity. It has undergone moral surgery. Its imperative is not to deal with any morality other than the purpose of the firm and the goals of the owners. Shareholder value is shareholder value. If the firm has a value system, it’s up to management to figure out how to increase that shareholder value within the corporate value frame. Employee/people’s enhancement as human beings, in this thinking, is not here nor there, unless expressed specifically in relation to the value system itself.

For people who don’t ascribe to this model, the above statement ‘engaging people with their work is a moral obligation as part of creating human enhancement’ is a leftist fairy tale.

The ‘ethics of work’ (not the same as the ethics of business) is not precisely a new topic. It’s just that business organizations are busy ‘making other plans’ (as in John Lennon’s ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’).

We have three strong pillars in our modern history. (1) Max Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic’. (2) The Catholic Social Teaching, a scattered series of documents with detailed development on seven principles: life and the dignity of the human person; call to family, community and participation; solidarity; dignity of work; rights and responsibilities’; options for the poor and vulnerable; and care for God’s creation. Most of them address ‘work’ one way or another. (3) The Right to Work is treasured within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These three pillars have, both, followers and critics.

Pros. The model brings back some conversation about ‘purpose’, in which people may agree or disagree, but still, the conversation will be in the air. I still use with my clients a 1990 lecture from the great Charles Handy ^[24], with the title ‘What is a company for? ^[25]’, which challenged many assumptions at the time and which continues to be relevant today.

Cons. It’s hard to bring this conversation in the context of ‘busy people making other plans’. But, if we can have a Cow Model (number 2) ^[26] I don’t see why we could not have a moral model.

So what?  Purpose is not the same as this ‘Employee Engagement as moral imperative’, but they are sisters. This model says: when you look at all models, all possibilities, all surveys, all rankings, all happy cows, all air time, could you slot in a possibility that work in itself should be enhancing and (the corollary), if this is the case, then management needs to look at employee engagement also as employee enhancement? What if we added a moral obligation here, in this model? Would the sky fall?

Next, the final model: (Real) Activists on the payroll.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

REBOOT! The Game Plan

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

At The Chalfont Project ^[19], we have crafted a series of short interventions called Accelerators ^[22]:

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[22]

Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.

This high impact, short intervention for senior teams, will:

• challenge ways of thinking
• provide immediate and trackable actions
• drive change
• develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

This is model 4 of the series ^[27].  The concept is simple. Imagine that you, as an employee, are in reality an investor. Not of money, but of another form of capital: your own human (intellectual) capital. The employer pays you for the use of that capital with a promise to grow it. Employers are Intellectual Capital Fund Managers.

Good Fund Managers will deliver good returns. At the end of the year you should expect a return on your (human) capital that has been invested: better skills, personal and professional enhancement, greater ‘market value’ and ‘market-ability’, more knowledge, new experience… You define your expected returns. After all, you are the investor.

Nobody (invests) gives capital to Fund Managers with a poor track record. You should not expect a year-end with no growth (or indeed, loss of capital!). The deal with your employer is that the contract is for the use and growth of your Human Capital. So, the one who is really in charge here is actually you. Novel concept. HR departments become ‘Human Capital Investment Fund Brokers’. The company is a big investment fund.

The idea is old and I have written about this several times before, for example in Disruptive Ideas. ^[28] For various reasons, it has not obtained great visibility.

There is a connection here with ‘The Alliance’, by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. These authors propose an employee-employer form of ‘contract’, with mutually beneficial rules of the game over a period of agreed time (not a forever relationship) that they baptise as ‘Tours of Duty’, which I think is an unfortunate name. But these ‘Tours of Duty’ are not the same as the relationships in the ‘Investors Metaphor’.

Pros. The Investors metaphor model is a smart way to reposition the power of the employee. Engagement is high! How could it be otherwise if you are the investor? Why would you invest in a mediocre way, or half hearted effort?

Cons. It’s highly disruptive in terms of organizational models. Companies may be shouting at you: ‘Investor in what?’. I have seen reactions to this in the past, from my own client work, of the type: ‘Interesting!’ (which is an English expression that translates into  anything from ‘I don’t believe you’ to ‘nonsense’, but never, ever truly ‘interesting’). Proponents of the ‘Build to last’ old school of thinking are restless about models that don’t shoot for long(er) term stability. The ‘Investors Metaphor’ may seem like one of these but it’s not. You’ll invest for as long as (a) you have something to invest (so if you are poor in Human Capital, or becoming poorer, you have a problem) and (b) the return on your investment is worth it.

So what? The ‘Investors Metaphor’ makes you think. A lot. It’s a legitimate model of employee engagement, although hardly referred to. Use it in combination with other ingredients and the cooking looks (and smells) promising. More to come.

Next: a very novel concept. What if Employee Engagement (as opposed to non-engagement) was morally right on its own merits?  Period.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[19], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[20]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[21]

This is model 3 (but the 4^th post, confusing!) ^[27]  ‘The Cause’.

Employees join forces to work on a Cause: green agenda, corporate responsibility, a local or global NGO, a civic or societal Cause. The Cause acts as the glue. Cross-collaboration is boosted. An enhanced sense of worth, of noble collective aim, is in the air. Activities take place. The internal (and external) marketing of the Cause is very visible. There may be a collective sense of excitement. Great initiative. Most people approve.

Years ago I, naively, asked a friend who runs a very successful NGO in the anti-pollution (plastics) area, present in many countries, where he got the money from. The answer was straight and given to me with a ‘don’t-you-get-it?’ look. Corporate! I continued to make a fool of myself by asking what on earth ‘Corporate’ could gain from sponsoring (obviously this is not pocket money) a Non Governmental Organization in the anti-plastic area, unless they themselves were in the same area, e.g. they were potential polluters and committed to change, so they asked for his help, or organizations themselves similarly working towards the anti-pollution goals. Surely this is what he meant. He gave me a second ‘you-still-don’t-get-it?’ look and produced a second statement, this time louder:  ‘Employee Engagement!’

Please explain, I begged. ‘Well, having the workforce engaged in my NGO activities, many of which take place inside the firm, boosts employee engagement in the company and the Employee Engagement survey scores go up, by a lot. This is worth a lot of money for them’. I asked for an example of ‘them’. I was expecting (again, still a bit of a fool) a major polluter, or a business with challenging waste management operations. He gave me, however, the name of a Big Consulting Firm whose pollution capacity was only possibly related to the amount of airmiles accumulated by its workforce.

At the time, I did not see the point in continuing the conversation on whether being engaged within the company was or was not the same as being engaged with the company (a distinction provided by my always very perceptive partner and colleague Caroline Tierney). But this distinction is surely key.

Pros. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with employees being engaged within the company on a (external) cause. On the contrary, I think this is great.

Cons. The ‘NGO-inside’ model, mobilizing as it may be, cannot be seen as the same as engagement with the company’s own aims and vision. In the extreme, this is another (more sophisticated) version of previous model 2, ‘Happy Cows’ (Panem et Circenses) ^[26]. It may miss the point completely, although people may become very engaged, indeed, with the anti-pollution idea.

So what? It’s a question of honesty marrying clarity. When you can marry both, societal aims and your own operations, there is clearly a win-win. A good example is the British retailer Marks & Spencer and their ‘Plan A’ (Why Plan A, people ask? Because there is no plan B, they say). The website says: ‘Plan A is a journey towards becoming the world’s most sustainable retailer… and we’re proud of the awards we’re winning along the way’.They have a series of public commitments in the areas of recycling, waste management, carbon trust etc. I am not quoting M&S from a position of authority on these matters (my authority is zero) but as an example of what seems a blend of true employee engagement, ‘The Cause’ model and the company’s operational objectives.

The world is full of companies offering time for voluntary work, sponsoring great causes and expressing big Corporate Social Responsibility aims. These, many people say, are Employee Engagement per se. I suspect, many are engagement of employees with noble activities. I would suspend judgment as to whether all of them are engagement within the company or with the company. I don’t believe for a second that both are always the same.

Next is model 4, ‘The Investors Metaphor’. Back tomorrow?

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[19], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[20]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[21]

This is model 2 in the pack of 6 ^[27] that I have described. There is a book, or two, and its associated speeches/workshops/websites, all under the title ‘Contented Cows still give better milk’. It’s a revised version of the previous book that did not contain the word ‘still’. OK. It’s a book about Employee Engagement. The book has also a place on some book lists on Leadership Development. I don’t imagine it’s about the development of cows, but who knows?

Leaving the amusing concept and the marketing mind of the authors aside, (even leaving the book aside), conceptually, this model is alive and well although many people would prefer to avoid the bovine analogy. Beyond the cows, this is an input and output model. If we feed the cows (sorry) well enough, they will be happy (the reviews emphasise the differences between happy and contented, just in case you wanted to add some philosophical depth) and will deliver better milk. Simple.  Find out what makes the cows happy and off we go. Flexible time, good pay and incentives, table tennis, good cafeteria (cows will deliver seriously worse milk if you keep those vending machines), working from home, dress-down Fridays, company barbeques and points to buy goods online. There are about 1000 other things. You won’t be short of food for ‘happiness’.

This model is that of a machine. Use good oil and you’ll see how well it works. We can make as much fun as we like (certainly I am very grateful to the authors for their imagination, and for many conversations in the corridor with clients when I mention this and they say: ‘Are you kidding?’ and a wonderful conversation starts. Thanks guys) but there is a whole Employee Engagement sub-industry that, while it may not use the bovine analogy, it uses the same principles. Words such as ‘employee satisfaction’, ‘happiness’ etc, belong here. The whole narrative of ‘going the extra mile’ (when more gas has been added) and ‘discretionary effort’, so intrinsic to traditional HR/Employee Engagement models, belongs here.

Pros. Well, the title is funny and you’ll remember the model.

Cons. Err, small detail, people are not machines, but, hey, we have been using machinery language for a long time.

So what? What is wrong with flexible time, good pay and incentives, table tennis, a good cafeteria, working from home etc? Absolutely nothing. The difference depends on how you treat these. Are they good on their own merit, contributing to the favourable environment, or are they cynical tools to feed the cows? If you knew that your cows (here we go again) are already happy, would you bother to add all these ‘benefits’?

Are you providing flexible time for young mothers because you think that young mothers need flexible time or because you have many young mothers (and fathers) employed and the increase of flexible time correlates with 2 points up in the Employee Engagement Survey?

PS. This model of Employee Engagement was first described as ‘Panem et Circenses’ in 100 A.D by Juvenal. Its translation is ‘Bread and Circuses’ and described how Roman Emperors kept the masses happy (sorry, contented) with entertainment and food. And the Roman masses could go the extra mile and provide discretionary effort. Well, at least until the Visigoths decided to visit.

Next is model 3, or ‘Cause’. And the key issue here is, are we talking about employee engagement with the company or within the company?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[19], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[20]

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company)
I work for X (company), I am in IT

These are not the same. It tells me where the sense of belonging is, where home is, where loyalty may be, or divided. Both are neither good nor bad. They express what they express. They are different.

Change IT for R&D, Commercial, Regulatory etc. if you wish.

But some tribes are particularly good at preserving their belonging. Medical doctors are one. ‘Being a medical doctor’ becomes part of some sort of special form of being that sticks. Lots of pages in social psychology manuals explain why, including one that made me think for many years, when I was briefly teaching Medical Psychosociology in University: the so called ‘access to your body’. The plumber, the engineer, the roof fixer, the driver or your manager do not have (usually) access to your body. They may have access to your time, your money or your emotions but usually not your body. That is an anthropological privilege when looked through those lenses.

In my many years doing time in the pharmaceutical industry, I was always struck by the medics, some reporting to me, who would always put ‘the medic’ bit before the company paying the salary. ‘I am a doctor, I work for X (company) as Medical Director’ was always, always, far more prominent than ‘I work for X (company) as a Medical Director, comma, I am a medical doctor’

Here, the order of factors does change the product.

Similarly, for a company composed of parts or business units or acquired businesses.

I am in Y (part of company Z, or we are just being acquired by Z)
I work for Y, now part of Z
I work for Z, they just bought us, Y

Here, as well, the order of factors does change the product.

Months, even years after an acquisition, some groups or individuals have not made the transition yet. They still belong to the previous entity.

Also, the more de-centralised, devolved, an organization is, the more it is acting as a host, as an umbrella. As such, the overall brand may or may not be stronger than the individual de-centralised branded units. We see this all the time. People are often more loyal to a product-brand or a service-brand, or, indeed a geography-brand, than ‘the firm’.

The issue is not whether the decentralised business units retain high levels of loyalty and belonging for employees (what is wrong with that?) but whether the parent brand makes the whole thing even more attractive. The more decentralised, the greater the need for an overall glue, a neat common home to be. The onus to be a good magnet is on the host/umbrella/mother/father. Not on the children.

Since employee engagement has become an industry in its own right, and is taking over a lot of air time, I want to ‘elevate the confusion to a higher level’. Not really! But I think we all in the Human Capital business should put our cards on the table. A bit risky, though. Some truths may make us uncomfortable. We have so many Emperors With No Clothes who may catch a cold!

Let me focus today on the six frameworks that are around, one way or another, competing with each other. These are the six models that stand out from my research and consulting practice.

1. ‘Air time’: This is a ‘voice model’. Employees are told, also listened to. A dialogue is supposed to be established. What ‘they’ say counts. Management listens to ‘them’. Surveys and rankings dominate this model. The measurement tools tend to take over the narrative. ‘Employee’s voice’ acquires a jargon of its own. ‘Giving voice’ seems to be the aim, more than what to do with that voice. It all looks like surveys and Town Halls.

2. ‘Happy Cows’. I did not invent the term! There is a book with this title. ‘Happy cows (employees) deliver better milk (productivity)’ This is a machine model. Provide good input, you’ll get a good output. Employee Happiness and satisfaction deliver better… results. The machine is oiled with good working conditions and rewards. Cows are happy, milk is good. The whole employee satisfaction and ‘happiness industry’ sits here. This is input/output model. Narrative such as ‘the extra mile’ and ‘discretional effort’ sit here.

3. ‘Cause’. Employees are engaged within the company on noble causes that the company either has or adopts. It’s often a ‘NGO inside’ model. People’s engagement provides meaning, sense of worth and a glue. And this is good for everybody. Bring green and sustainability stuff inside, engage the employees and, alas!, you’ll have ‘employee engagement’. Entire NGO businesses are sponsored by Big Consultancies and Big Companies as a way to ‘bring the cause inside’ and provide an ‘engagement glue’ for employees. It’s a lucrative business

4. ‘The Investors metaphor’. In this model, the employee is an investor of his/her own human capital. At year end, there is either good or bad investment! HR people and management are ‘Human Capital Investment Fund Managers’. This is an underestimated model. It gives power to the employee, as ‘investor’. This model had a timid attempt a few years ago and then it lost steam. A bit of a revolutionary gem in waiting. But the waiting is longer than one may have expected years ago. It tells us that ‘employee power’ is still low.

5. ‘Moral Drive’. Employee engagement is… because it’s morally good, regardless. It has to do with human dignity and the power of work as enhancement of the individual. Don’t look in the MBA manual, but in the Catholic Social Teaching documents, for example, for inspiration. Not many people will identify this as a model of any kind. After all, some people may say, organizations and businesses are ‘amoral’. Darwinian capitalism has a bit of a laugh with this model. Moral what?

6. ‘Activism’. Employees take charge in a progressive, self-managed way. They are active in a peer-to-peer environment. They are engaged with the company not just within the company. Doing is greater than talking or advocating. Activists do. There is an ‘act’ in the word. They figure out what to do and how. They do. Leadership gains control by losing control. This model states that ‘the ultimate goal of employee engagement’ is self-management.

First port of reflection: where are you on this? Which one(s) represent your organization? It’s bound to be a mixture, but, can you recognise the models?

Where is home? Ask this question to an Irishman or Irish woman. Even if they have been living abroad for 20 years, home is Ireland, not New York, not Liverpool, not Chicago, not Paris. If an Irishman tells you ‘I am going home next week’ he does not mean downtown Brooklyn or South Side Chicago. It means an airport heading for Shannon or Dublin.

Maybe it is the Celtic attachment to place and space. An attachment that is in the mind, and the mind comes with you wherever you go. The Celtic imagination, humanity’s greatest, knew.

So, where is home in the global village? Other than for an Irishman, that is. Globalisation, it seems, equalises humanity. Flat, very flat. (As a joke, I think that The World is Flat, a book by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, should have been written by the CEO of Ikea).

Global leadership? What is it? A set of universal principles, behaviours and style that can work across the world? OK, it could be possible to map them and develop them. And indeed there are very good people working in that direction.

But where is home? Is it on the Facebook pages? Wherever my smartphone is? Family! Oh! I forgot! Family. Wait a minute, they are also on Facebook, and now Snapchat, and Instagram.

Perhaps the question is where is the longing? The belonging? A place? A Space? A group? Where some people are? Biblical Ruth said it in moving words: ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God’. That was Facebook-free, pre-globalisation, a definition of love.

Maybe, actually, we have homes, in plural. That is, little homes that may be more or less connected with the Big Belonging Home. These are places of voluntary belonging, of engagement, perhaps of enhancement of the self. They are called organizations, or companies, where we attach ourselves for an enormous amount of time in our lives. Physically, psychologically and to the server.

That ‘attachment to people and place’ does not make the company a family. I think this is a flawed concept. Companies have CEOs and CFOs; families have parents. But if we get this natural human attachment to place and people right, inside an organization, it is likely that the engagement, however you describe it (as long as it is not a score in a survey) will be high. Oh! my ‘ ^[29]company of volunteers’! ^[30]

For me it is a sign of good leadership, global or local, to provide these little homes, to create those ‘home effects’. I have had the privilege of working, indirectly, with some deprived kids in the US who have found ‘home’ in the school, or even in the safety and welcoming of a yellow school bus. Attachment to space, place and people, even on wheels, that is.

Imagine a workforce that says ‘I want to go home’. And, Irishmen aside, they mean my place of work. Imagine that, if you can. And then you can throw into the bin all the manuals on Employee Engagement.

And write your own one.

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