List
Print This Post Print This Post

This is model 3 (but the 4th post, confusing!)  ‘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). 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?

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project, an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™, 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 or email: [email protected].

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau

 

Keep up with the Daily Thoughts

Twitter Email

Would you like to comment?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]