Manage to Engage. Pamela Hackett
what they set out to achieve, learned something new or how to do something better, and laughed a lot. They feel that the discretionary effort they volunteered, the effort they invested, is worth it.
In the business of the future, engagement will grow one person at a time until whole communities of spirit, experience, and accomplishment appear and work in concert with each other. This is a grassroots movement. Everyone will make his or her contribution; companies will engage and succeed because of people who are captivated. The organization of the future will be a living organism fit for people with an engaged state of mind who volunteer their best. What a feeling to aspire to. What a cause for leaders to rise for. What a reason to go all-in and manage to engage.
If you think these MI-9 tools might foster chaos more than engagement, consider this. Engagement need not be monopolized by the nature of a business, nor by its outward appearance of control, because engagement does not come at the expense of control. It comes with the right degree of control for your business to be safe and productive.
And consider Google and what The New York Times dubbed its “Quest to Build a Better Boss.”7 In a nutshell, the company's position was that a boss's particular expertise is of little value if their management behavior falls short. And while even they have come under scrutiny, that just reinforces the elusiveness of engagement and the need to continually work for it.
The common thread is that people will invest themselves at work and voluntarily give their best when the right engagement triggers are in place and they feel free to do so.
Engagement should be a priority for all organizations and their leaders: there is nothing to lose, but everything to gain. Prioritizing how you bring engagement to your management is probably the single most effective way to change your organizations outcomes and retention. The more you manage to engage, the more you transition from manager to leader.
This period is the most significant opportunity of our lifetime to reboot the end-to-end way we operate. In short, our total operating model, including the processes, capabilities, management tools, technology, and organization structure we choose, as well as how we manage, lead, decide, and how we engage, enable, and energize our teams to deliver our results. Fit and healthy.
The world changed in 2020. Everything about it changed. The question is, “Did you change?” To recover better and with resilience requires different solutions than any other time in your management career and likely in our history. This time a radical transformation is needed. A people renaissance. But unlocking their potential demands something new of managers, something that needs to be measured differently – something more engaging. We need a management model built for a postpandemic world and focused on nine essential ingredients that spark engagement – pragmatic solutions that not only create engagement but become self-sustaining and create better leaders.
1 Start your engagement journey – whether that's across the organization or in a particular department, area, or team. Convene a team being careful to ensure everyone can participate and present a problem statement you want to solve, then free them up to crowdsource the solution.
2 Assess your own and your teams’ current levels of discretionary effort. How much of themselves are your people giving today? There are no assessment tools for this, just observation and gut feeling. Get out and look, get people to talk about it. Ask them.
3 Using the following page, take each of the MI-9 triggers and decide how well you currently score against each of them. Invite people to write up their own report cards on your business.
4 Select the most critical of the Fs and Cs to your workplace success. Seek a range of opinions about how to address these in your workplace: ideas of how you can better develop a workplace where people can feel the MI-9 engagement triggers at work.
5 Encourage your team to lead this movement. Let them decide if this is worth pursuing and then try to leave the ‘how’ to your people.
Score your workplace:
This can be scored in a way that suits your particular workplace. For example, place the percentage of people who you believe would agree with the statements under each dimension. Alternatively, place a percentage that indicates how close you believe your business is to displaying this characteristic: (e.g., 80 percent of my people would agree with these statements; we are probably 60 percent of the way to running our business with this in mind, ‘running’ being defined as the way we motivate, connect, collaborate, define our strategies, develop our objectives, and make our decisions at work).
Your workplace report card: 2 Fs and 7 Cs
_____ Fair trade: I do a fair day's work for a fair day's return. My return on the discretionary effort I volunteer is rewarded both financially and personally. I know I contribute, I know what I do counts. I am given a fair go!
_____ Freedom: I feel in control of my destiny, I can think, feel and share. I have a voice. I can have an opinion. In my world, I can agree or disagree, but then I commit. I am trusted as a responsible adult.
_____ A Cause: I have a purpose. I know I make a difference. I am working for something bigger than profits, productivity, or production. What I do and how I do it contributes to a cause. I know I must make my world a better place to be – both at and outside work. I know I need to keep my company healthy, to keep myself and my world healthy.
_____ Confidence: I feel my doubts are resolved, my world is transparent, and communication is fluid. I know when things are going well or not, and I know when I've done a great job. I trust the people around me. I trust my managers and leaders. I have one foot in the present and one foot in the future. I feel I am set up for success.
_____ A Clean infrastructure: I feel my workplace works for and not against me. There are clean processes, systems, procedures, and policies to help me. Nothing stops me from doing my job well. I have clarity about what‘s important and what I need to do. I know where to go if I need help. I am supported by an infrastructure that has been built with me in mind. My workplace also fits with the outside world; it is responsible.
_____ Connections: I am in a partnership with my colleagues and peers; we connect. I feel worthy, I have a great relationship with my co-workers and managers, my customers and suppliers. People understand me.
_____ Collaboration – My workplace is a network of alliances working toward a common purpose: to be the best we can be. If one fails, we all fail; together we succeed. We follow the best, not just the boss. We come together naturally to achieve our results.
_____ Community: I feel I have a network of support with a community spirit. We build communities of practice, of expertise, of problem solving, and involvement. We are social and professional. We bring the outside world in and contribute to the world outside.
_____ Capability: I know I am capable of performing my role, my job. I am learning all the time from others, from across the business, and from the outside. I am surrounded by capable people. Because of this, I feel I am growing, and our results show we are growing. I work for a capable organization. I know we are set up for success.
FIGURE 1.1 Things You Need to Do Right Now.
Notes
1 1 Gallup, 2017. State of the Global Workplace Report. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/adrianboucek/state-of-the-global-workplace-gallup-report-2017
2 2 Klaus Schwab, 2019. Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum, 2020). www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/davos-manifesto-2020-the-universal-purpose-of-a-company-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/