The culture of engagement: 13 core elements

Over the years, I have probably read and then reviewed about 65-70 books in which their authors discuss one or more aspects of organizational culture. A few address employee engagement. Hopefully, a high percentage of those who share a workplace — at all levels and in all areas of operation — are positively and productively engaged. In fact, according to recent research by firms such as Gallup and TowersWatson, the average percentage in U.S. workplaces is less than 30%.

"We are Beryl!"

In my opinion, Beryl Companies offers the single best example of a company that continues to possess, indeed celebrate its culture of engagement. To learn more about Beryl, I highly recommend a book written by its founder and CEO, Paul Spiegelman: Why is Everyone Smiling?: The Secret Behind Passion, Productivity, and Profit.

What follows hardly qualifies as scientific research with definitive analysis. I have selected a baker’s dozen of what seem to be the essential elements, based on what I have learned from dozens of primary sources, including Paul and his company:

1. The power of one: Each person matters. Check that, each person really matters.

2. The power of team: “Together, we know much more and can do much more than any one of us can.”

3. Solution orientation: Each person is empowered to solve problems or obtain the help needed to solve problems.

4. Trust, honesty and transparency: These are the core values by which everyone lives and labors.

5. Celebration of learning: Each failure as well as each success is a precious learning opportunity, with lessons shared.

6. Development and training: These are twin processes by which to achieve personal growth and professional improvement.

7. Clarity of communication: Everyone knows what they need to know; also, the intended meaning of whatever is communicated is identical with what the recipient thinks has been communicated.

8. Embracing all kinds of diversity: The “melting pot” metaphor is all wrong. Think in terms of a salad or a symphony. Each single part is essential but no single part is sufficient.

9. Be customer-driven: Peter Drucker said it best, “Without customers, there is no business.” However, as Southwest Airlines’ retired chairman and CEO, Herb Kelleher, suggests, “If you take great care of your people, they will take great care of your customers, and your customers will then take great care of your shareholders.

10. Networking and connectivity initiatives: The primary objectives are sharing, helping, supporting, giving, encouraging, protecting, etc. those in need, both within and beyond the given enterprise.

11. Time to think, dream, and create: Time is the only resource that is not renewable. Ample time is set aside time to renew mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy, energy that should be committed only to what is most important.

12. Ownership empowerment: Those who have earned the respect and trust of their colleagues are expected to take ownership of questions to be answered, problems to be solved, opportunities to be seized, etc. Over time, others who provide the support needed will also earn the respect and trust of their colleagues. Ideally, all members of an organization are equal owners. In reality, that is a journey rather than a destination.

13. Physical space: Everything in a physical workplace has been eliminated that wastes human energy, discourages interaction between and among people, and creates discomfort and distraction. Here’s a key question: “What can we do to make our physical workplace more appealing in terms of the five senses: what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell?”

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: A book review by Bob Morris

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Richard Rumelt
Crown Business (2011)

How and why a good strategy “acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcome them”

As the title of this review correctly indicates, Richard Rumelt is convinced (and I agree) that a good strategy can provides both a timely head’s up to imminent challenges and guidance when preparing to respond effectively to them.  With surgical skill and (to my delight) a light touch, he explains what a good strategy is. In fact, he also explains what is and isn’t a strategy, good or bad. Moreover, he cites dozens of real-world examples to illustrate which strategies succeed, which fail, and why. Both good and bad strategies are a result of a process so Rumelt correctly examines both good and bad processes, each of which involves a sequence of decisions. Thus a good strategy is the result of a process of correct decisions; a bad strategy is the result of a process of incorrect decisions.

One of Rumelt’s valuable insights suggests that a decision is correct if (huge IF) it is appropriate to the given needs, interests, resources, and objectives.  This is what Peter Drucker had in mind (in 1963) when observing, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Many years later, Michael Porter made essentially the same point when suggesting that  “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Rumelt’s purpose in the book is to awaken his reader “to the dramatic differences between good strategy and bad strategy and to give [his reader] a leg up toward crafting good strategies.” Rumelt nails the “what,” devoting most of his attention to the “how” and “why.”

Here is a partial list of the real-world situations that Rumelt rigorously examines:

•  How Steve Jobs saved Apple
•  General Schwarzkopf’s strategy in Desert Storm
•  Discovering Wal-Mart’s secret
•  How blue-sky objectives miss the mark
•  Pivot points at 7-Eleven and the Brandenburg Gate

Note: More about “pivot points’ later

• Why Kennedy’s goal of landing on the moon was a proximate and strategic objective
•  How Hannibal defeated the Roman army in 216 B.C.
•  What bricklaying teaches us about deepening advantage
•  Deduction is enough only if you know everything worth knowing
•  The worst industry structure imaginable

These and other mini-case studies reveal why strategy is, like a scientific hypothesis, “an educated prediction of how the world works. The ultimate worth of a strategy is determined by its success, not its acceptability to a council of philosophers or a board of editors. Good strategy work is necessarily empirical and pragmatic. Especially in business, whatever grand notions a person may have about the products or services the world might need, or about human behavior, or about how organizations should be managed, what does not actually ‘work’ cannot long endure.” Amen.

With regard to “pivot points,” they magnify impact of an effort. “It is s natural or created imbalance in a situation, a place where a relatively small adjustment can unleash much larger pent-up forces.” For example, in the business world, a strategic thinker “senses such imbalances in pent-up demand that has yet to be fulfilled or in a robust competence developed in one context that can be applied to good effect in another.”  In m y opinion, pivot points seem to be first cousins to Michael Kami’s trigger points, Andy Grove’s inflection points, and Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping points.  Obviously, a good strategy takes full advantage of every opportunity that pivot points offer.

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out Walter Kiechel III’s The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World.

How to Convince Others to Embrace Risk

 

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

The recession caused people to focus on what they had to lose, rather than what they had to gain. But without some risk-taking, there is no innovation or growth for your company.

1. To help others embrace risk, pitch ideas in their terms.

2. Show them the horrible mistake they’ll avoid by seizing your forward-thinking idea.

3. Position it not as getting out in front, but as not being left behind.

People nowadays won’t rock the boat unless you show them it’s going to rock anyway.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Getting Others to Embrace Risk” by Heidi Grant Halvorson.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.