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What if You Played Music and Nobody Listened?

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You’ve heard street buskers, musicians in the subway. Some are pretty good, some not.

Do you stop and listen? Do you give money?

What would you do—honestly—if you encountered a ringer? Say, a truly world-class musician, playing world-class music, using a world-class instrument?

What would you do? How much money would you throw in the violin case? How long would you listen?

Worse yet—would you recognize the quality at all?

Of course you would—after all, you read this blog. But how about the rest of the great unwashed? How would they behave?

That was the experiment, conducted in Washington, DC’s L’Enfant Plaza subway station on January 12 of this year, and brilliantly reported on in the Washington Post. Treat yourself to some great writing at the Post from April 10.

The musician was virtuouso Joshua Bell, playing on his 1713 Stradivarius some of the great classical repertoire of Bach, Schubert, and others. In 43 minutes, 1097 people passed, videotaped, most on their way to mid-level bureaucratic jobs in the Federal Government.

Write down your prediction now: how many will stop? How much money will be left?

Leonard Slatkin, musical director of the National Symphony, braved a prediction: maybe 75 to 100 will stop to listen, and in all contribute about $150.

What do you think the results were?

One person recognized Bell. About half a dozen—including a prescient three-year old—stopped to listen. Total take—$32.16, including a $20 gift by one person.

What if you play the best music there is, and nobody listens? What does it mean?

On reflection, it can mean an awful lot of things.
 

  • It could be about the audience. Maybe bureaucrats are hopelessly mundane. Maybe they’d dig it in Paris; maybe even New York. Yeah, maybe.
  • It could be that classical music is just dead these days—Fifty Cent or Mick Jagger could’ve stopped more than a dozen, don’t you think?
  • It could be that the experts on quality are just full of it—that there clearly is no such thing as innate “quality” in art, that art is only subjectively experienced.
  • It could be we’ve been conditioned by context: several people passed by talking louder in their cellphones, one didn’t even recall hearing the music he’d heart 4-feet away a few minutes later—he had been listening to his iPod. May’be we simply do not notice world-class quality as such if we experience it in a subway.
  • It could be our taste in art has been diminished by the relentless least-common-denominator materialistic blah of our materialistic culture.
  • Or—it could be that our entire sensibility about all kinds of art has been bludgeoned into submission by, fill in your favorite cultural demon.

I really don’t know. But I suspect the answer is kind of important.

So—what do you think?

 

What If You Lead and Nobody Follows?

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall? Have you stopped beating your wife? What if you gave a party and no one came?

These are three conundrums of different types, but they all have one thing in common—they play on the ambiguities of language. They sound simple, but contain multiple references that cause us to do a double-take.

To that list, add “What if you lead, and nobody follows?”

Noonday Ventures writes about Dirty Word #6—Followership:

OK, do a quick scan of your bookshelf, podcasts, and mental catalog of leadership talks. How many have you heard on the art of following well?

After looking through literally hundreds of those artifacts collected over twenty years, I found exactly…. ONE!
(Incidentally, it was a very useful talk given by a leader at a high-growth church known for its strong leadership.)

Why is that? Why is it that when someone quotes the tired saying, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” we really see only one good option – to lead! I’d guess there are a lot of reasons, but our world certainly glorifies heroic leaders whose brilliance single-handedly tilts the earth to the benefit of their grateful followers.

He could have cited this chestnut: “Unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes.” There are leaders, and there are followers; which will you be— a leader, or a butt-watcher? That seems to be the question, as it is usually posed.

But can this be right? Is our mania for leadership just a social phenomenon of glorifying winners and denigrating losers? Or is there some linguistic and conceptual confusion going on here?

In fact, ambiguity abounds:

• One HR friend tells me, “the leadership area is vague; they can’t figure out if it’s a verb or a noun.”

• David Maister says, “I think more rubbish has been written about ‘leadership’ than almost any other business topic. A lot of it is patently false, and even more of it is dangerous.” (But what does David really think?).

• James G. March (Stanford Professor, gurus’ guru, “the Miles Davis of organization theory”) says “I doubt that ‘leadership’ is a useful concept for serious scholarship. The idea of leadership is imposed on our interpretation of history by our human myths, or by the way we think that history is supposed to be described. The fact that we talk about leaders and attribute importance to them is neither surprising nor informative.” [HBR Oct 2006, HBR Interview]

Take that, sled-dog metaphor-slinging consultants!

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

The word “lead” is confusing because it used to refer one thing—but the thing it referred to is changing. Hence the ambiguity.

It used to refer to those at the “top” of vertical, command-and-control, fixed-boundary silos called “companies.” “Companies” used to be the atomic unit of business; they contained fixed groupings of people called “organizations.”

Today—not so much.

Today, the atomic unit of business is the individual, not the company. “Organizations” are fluid, crossing corporate boundaries.

“Companies” still exist, of course, but a more useful idea might be “business”—and businesses are ever-changing, morphing blobs of projects and teams that get together to accomplish projects—then move on.

The primary dimension of interaction is becoming horizontal, not vertical. “Leader” becomes a confusing word because of the past vertical associations.

So what’s a “leader”? It’s a role. A role played at a particular point in time by a particular person with appropriate-for-the-moment behaviors and attitudes. And it all changes.

What about “everyone needs to be a leader”? It’s true. Confusing—because of the linguistic heritage—but true. We all need to be able to influence others, and to be influenced by others. That’s how horizontal relationships work.

But we sure could use a new word for all this.

How about “trust”?
 

Quantum Emotive Therapy

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Quantum physics feels paradoxical to us.

Is it a wave or a particle? Yes.

We’re accustomed to thinking paradoxes are uncommon. But they are not.

• The way out of a rip current is to go with the flow.
• The best way to sell someone is to stop trying to sell them.
• When your ski edges slip, lean downhill, not up.
• What you fear, you empower.

My brother in law Dick, a learned clinical psychologist, provides some paradoxical (or, at least, surprising) findings from the field of psychotherapy. I had asked him for insights about how people are influenced—here’s his (abridged) response:

Meta-analyses of hundreds of psychotherapy outcome studies provide strong evidence that, overall, it works – it’s better than no treatment or placebo. That was big (and encouraging) news when it was first published in my field in the mid-70’s after years of doubt …

The next question is—do some therapies work better than others?

The various therapeutic "schools" (Psychoanalytic, Gestalt, Jungian, Rogerian, Adlerian, Cognitive-Behavioral, Existential, Family Systems, and their myriad offspring) want to prove their "brand" works best. That interest was fueled by the insurance and managed care companies’ desire to apply the medical model to the delivery of psychological services—matching the right "treatment" to specific diagnoses.

Various types of psychotherapy have been compared to each other — and to controls—in an attempt to replicate the medical "clinical trials" method. The complication is consistency of treatment.  In drug tests, a pill is a pill.  But therapists’ “treatments,” however, are humanly applied and therefore vary infinitely.

Nonetheless, the research has resulted in one robust finding—the type of treatment doesn’t significantly create differences in outcome.  Instead, ANY treatment seems better than none.

Can you say, “Hawthorne effect?”

Moreover, the strongest predictor of positive outcomes is—[CHG—hang on, wait for it]—the strength of the therapist-client "alliance"- i.e. the strength of the relationship… it is the therapist’s personality and their ability to make rapid strong connection with clients which is most predictive of success.

So—Cognitive Therapy, or Landmark?  Yes.

There is some evidence that "allegiance" to one or another point of view correlates to positive outcome — i.e. strong belief in a school or model. That makes sense since that may play a part in projecting confidence and charisma. (That, by the way, has always been a challenge for me as a therapist since I am too philosophically inclined and broadly informed to be a true believer in any particular "brand" of therapy.)

(Dick and I both suffer from a predilection to subordinate belief to knowledge).

But back to Trust Matters.

One of this blog’s themes is that “business” is too often framed in terms like logical, deductive, behavioral, rational, self-serving, and trainable. Whereas people are often perverse, inductive, emotional, irrational (not the same as crazy), altruistic, and independent.

Result: loads of paradoxes.

What’s the best model for:

• Motivation—carrots or sticks?  Caring.
• Alignment—systems or credos?  Attention.
• Change management—people, or rewards?  Relationships.
• Leadership—reflection or inspiration?  Connection.
• Sales—SPIN or consultative?  Trust.

Whether on the therapist’s couch or in the conference room, a lot of apparent choices are just that—apparent.

The real key to personal change—in business as in life—is a matter of personal connection.  When we stand alone, we stay put.  When we touch others, and allow them to touch us, all things become possible.

I like it when commonsense and science coincide.

Make Money by Being Unselfish!

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Sounds ridiculous, right? Except in Sales.

David Hoffmeister, director of DePaul’s Sales Leadership Program, quoted in Management Issues blog
 has this to say about a recent study they conducted:

Most of the firms in the survey use the traditional base salary plus commission formula for compensation, but Hoffmeister argued that profound changes in the attitudes of today’s savvier customers mean that they should consider alternative ways of rewarding sales staff.

"Customers are unhappy with sales people who are motivated by commissions to sell to them rather than serve them," he explained.

"Firms need to think about reshaping their compensation practices so that sales people are rewarded for partnering with customers rather than for sales volume alone."

Right on.

I recently heard of a major US company altering the incentive structure for major account managers.  Historically, the AM role was client-service-oriented.  Now they’ll be evaluated on sales volume.

Hmmm…let’s envision the results.

Anyone guess, more customer dissatisfaction?

How do companies make such seemingly (to me) wrong decisions?

For three reasons, I think.

  1. Some really believe that since their product is the best, the customer is best-served by buying from them. Thus, customer satisfaction is a direct function of share of customer wallet. The potential for circular thinking is apparent.
  2. More typically, the company is revenue-driven, and believes that revenue-based incentives—typically financial incentives—are a no-brainer. They are oblivious to the consequences Hoffman points out. Paying someone for selling you doesn’t make the customer feel cared about.
  3. More deeply, there are a set of au courant beliefs—metrics, line-of-sight thinking, accountability— that link everything to short-term customer profitability. This flies in the face of the simple idea that the greatest short-term profitability comes from long-term customer focus—and precisely not from focusing on tweaking short-term metrics.

Some companies say, “We’re very customer-centric. Incenting our key customer relationship people on sales aligns their interests with the company’s, and they know that the company’s goals are to be customer-focused. It’s all a virtuous circle, and we’re aligning the compensation system to fit with it.”

In my experience, if you hear this, check your wallet.  They’re telling you that they’re paying the salespeople more money if they behave unselfishly.

That’s like paying a boy scout to escort the little old lady across the street.

Offering bribes to obey the ten commandments.

Paying people to go to church.

It’s telling them to be unselfish by appealing to their selfish interests.

Does it work? Sure—it works to create faux unselfishness, fake sincerity, conditional customer service. That’s the trouble with external rewards; they poison intrinsic motivation.

But don’t listen to me. Check out Jeffrey Gitomer, one of the more in-your-face personal sales cold-call sales gurus (who nonetheless gets the trust thing, by the way):

According to Gitomer—and he ought to know—the concept of the money-driven short-term shake-hands-count-your-fingers hustler salesman is not genetically encoded in the salesperson. It’s a direct consequence of the way executive management has treated sales over the years.

They got what they asked for: people who would hustle to move product. The majority of salespeople have never felt comfortable with that self-view, in my experience, and have suffered from not being able to articulate their way out of it.

Hoffmeister is right. Customers have nothing against alignment of rewards—they’d just like to see the alignment based on value to client, not on money extracted from client.

What’s amazing to me is that selling organizations, for the most part, have yet to figure out that this level of customer satisfaction is also in their best interest. 

Gitomer lays the blame at the feet of top management. But there’s plenty to go around.

The Top 5 Posts For March

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These were the five most trafficed posts during March – a couple of which are actually older posts which bounced back to the top during March.  If you didn’t have a chance to read them when they were originally posted, now’s a good time to do so, and to join the conversation.

  1. You Empower What You Fear
  2. Trust and Social Networking
  3. American Secret
  4. Trust, Betrayal and the 9/11 Jumpers
  5. Working and Feeling Good

The Sacred Cow of Retention

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Lets take on a sacred cow. Or at least a venerated goat.

Let’s talk about employee retention.

Employee retention is one of those unexamined “obvious” goods. Here’s an excerpt from a typical article, this one from HR.com’s Trendwatcher newsletter, Issue 353, March 23, 2007.

Retention Before the Fact

By Carol Morrison

“Retention is always important because of the investment you make in people,” observes Gerald Shields, CIO of American Family Life Assurance Co.….experts agree that the costs of losing valued employees can be considerable. That is why some experts encourage companies to begin efforts to retain employees before their employment officially begins.

…the average cost to replace a worker in private industry is $13,996…Other sources have replacement costs ranging from nearly 29% of an employee’s annual wages to several times his/her yearly salary. 83% of HR professionals at U.S. companies express concern about both retention and recruitment

…taking care during the recruitment process can save organizations the far greater costs associated with replacing employees who leave and the resulting losses in productivity and morale of remaining workers.

Sounds reasonable until you look under the hood.

What’s happening with employee retention (I’ll deal with customer retention another time) is what happened with loyalty. A good concept has been doubly perverted, by:

  • a. Justifying the concept solely in terms of profit to the company, and
  • b. Mistaking the indicators for the originally intended object.

It starts with, “Retention is important because of the investment you make.”

Not because it’s good for the people themselves? For the customers? For the society at large?

Nope. Because of the level of company investment.

Not long ago, employee retention was positively correlated with a lot of good things—customer retention, for one thing. Knowledge and familiarity, better judgment, good relationships, motivation. And, yes, lower recruitment costs.

High retention rates meant you were growing and keeping things interesting for employees—an indicator of organizational health. The assumption was what’s good for the organization is what’s good for the employees—and, very much, it was. A virtuous circle.

Fast forward. Good employment advice now is keep your resume updated, keep looking around. Companies outsource and combine. Careers develop across companies. Keep your eyes and options open. Be flexible.

Don’t bemoan the loss of “loyalty” between company and employee—that’s so 20th century. Loyalty still has meaning—but it’s loyalty to teammates, friends, co-professionals, clients and customers, not so much to the one signing your paycheck. This is not bad: it simply means the corporate entity as a permanent source of identity and cohesion is kaput.

But we’re stuck with the ideological residue of still thinking that company and employees both benefit by high retention.

In today’s world, “retention” often looks like “restraint.” Keeping people in cages is the most effective form of retention, but it’s not politically correct.

Instead, we have golden handcuffs. Vesting. Club memberships. Equity. Non-compete agreements. Whispers of disloyalty about those who leave. Signing up search firms to get on their non-raid list.

Is this consistent with “we care about our people?” Not any more. Yet many firms claim to pursue both.

But you can’t have it both ways, not anymore. When careers are developed across companies, then bolting the door is—very simply—not in the interests of your employees. Their interest is to develop. That may or may not happen by staying put.

Great firms don’t mistake restraint for retention. Their people stay because they are free to leave—and choose not to. And those who do choose to leave are celebrated as alumni, not shunned as disloyal.

Paradoxically, the firms who actually do care about their employees—up to and including celebrating them finding a better job outside—will continue to have the highest employee retention rate. By serving employees—not restraining them. By treating them as ends, not as means.

Trust, Privacy and Professionalism

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Carey Bertolet blogs on “Personal Isn’t Private: Advice for New Lawyers in the New Milennium” about increasing opportunities for personal behavior to become public—in the workplace.

Bertolet lists funny-as-long-as-it-isn’t me private emails gone public, ranging from dating behavior to employment disagreements. His message: “Everyone is entitled to a personal life, but it’s important to be aware that your personal life isn’t necessarily private…Big Brother isn’t necessarily watching—but he very possibly uses the same dry cleaner.”

Bertolet is certainly right—but it goes further. The personal is becoming less private—and professionalism must become more personal.

20 years ago I had a rolodex. It had maybe 400 names on it, many outdated. Half didn’t hear from me even once a year. I met maybe 200 new people per year as a consultant. I had published one article. I went to a couple association-type meetings per year.

My clients were stable organizations. Their issues were either strategic—competitive battles with other stable organizations—or managerial—the techniques of influencing others within their organization.

Fast-forward. I have 3000 names in my Outlook database, which I cull frequently. I can recall nearly every one. I communicate much more frequently. I send more holiday cards than I used to, and of course massively more emails. I blog. I publish articles on my site, and on others’ sites. I meet thousands of people per year. I now take cell-phone photos of clients to match up with names. At Iguazu Falls, Brazil a few weeks ago, my blackberry’s data reception was as good as in Manhattan.

I am vastly more connected to vastly more people. As, no doubt, are you.

My clients are not stable organizations—they are in flux. People come and go more frequently—and more easily. “Disloyal employee” is becoming an oxymoron. One of my clients sells 95% of its product through partners who are also competitors. Every one of my clients is an outsourcer; several are insourcers of others. Corporations of one (like me) are increasing.

As business processes become more and more discrete, they become more and more plug-compatible (think object-oriented programming for an analogy). Transactions that used to happen internally now happen externally. The internal world of a fixed organization is becoming the outer world of inter-organizational commerce.

The world is becoming less about competitive production, and more about commercial collaboration. Less vertical, more horizontal. Les internal, more external. The atomic unit of business is no longer the corporation: it’s the individual. We move around. Our benefits and pensions are less tied to our employer. Ditto our personal lives.

The idea of “private” behaviors is becoming obsolete.

You can conclude, as Bertolet does, that you’d better watch your private behavior; assume whatever you say will end up on the cover of The Times, that every email will be circulated to everyone. True that, and good advice.

But there are two more conclusions.

I used to smoke. Then it became a private behavior in an increasingly public world. It was too hard to maintain, impossible to keep private. Being cautious is exhausting. It’s difficult to hide the real you in an increasingly public world!
I finally just quit smoking? Analogously, why not live your life in such a way that you’re not concerned about it being public?

What if you always behaved well toward others? Didn’t tell lies. Got over resentments. Lived a grateful and giving life. And so forth. Then you wouldn’t have to worry much about things being revealed.

The second conclusion has to do with professionalism. If private lives conflict with professionalism, then we need to focus on the real core of professionalism, not on outward manifestations.

I used to wear a tie. I stopped after most of my clients did. A tie is the height of symbolism-without-function. Yes, in a way it signifies respect. But a world that demands to be connected needs less symbolism, and more real connection.

Professional codes of conduct need revisiting to ensure they fit with an increasingly connected world. Stock brokers, software manufacturers, real estate agents, financial planners, lawyers, movie makers, book publishers—all these industries, and more, need to re-examine their concepts of professionalism to give greater weight to client and employee relationships. “Caveat emptor” sucks as a standard of professionalism. So does “sustainable competitive advantage.”

The debates about private property and copyrights are going to get resolved—in favor of the commons. In an increasingly interconnected world, we can’t afford to let an insistence on 18th century property rights dominate the collective good the way we did even just 20 years ago.

20 years ago I met a man in Vero Beach selling carved totem poles. He was from Arizona, had a wide-bed 6-wheel pickup, wore a cowboy hat. We talked a bit. I asked him about life in the desert. He swore vehemently no one was going to take away his god-given right to drill as much water as he wanted under whatever sandy piece of the earth’s surface was legally owned by him.

His world is shrinking. The world is increasingly public. We can protest it, or be wary about it—but we’re way better off dealing with it.

The sandbox hasn’t grown. But many more of us are playing in it, all day long, 24-7.

Getting along is the new getting ahead.

Trust in the Hotel Biz

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Leo Bottary, author of blog Client Service Insights, has a great interview with Jonathan Tisch, the current generation CEO and Chairman of Loews Hotels. 

CSI: How do you build a team and create a culture that cares about great service as much as you do?

JT: At Loews we have a people skills training program called Living Loews. It’s vital that leaders get their teams to focus their attention on their guests. Once all your employees have a customer-centric mindset, all the other pieces of the business will fall into place. We find our employees enjoy their jobs more when they understand that their role is to help and please others.

CSI: If there’s one takeaway you’d like people to grasp after reading your book, what would it be? Is there an over-arching aha?

JT: Absolutely. Too often we think of business as the sale. But no customer wants to be sold to. They want great experiences. The more we think of giving our customers experiences that feel special, the more customer loyalty and profits will follow.

Tisch gets it. I can’t speak to how well his tens of thousands of employees have yet gotten it, but with that message coming from the top, the odds are good.

It’s not easy to achieve escape velocity from the gravitational pull of self-serving corporate beliefs.  We live in a business culture that celebrates short-term metrics and behaviors all centered around improving financial performance—of the corporation.  The purpose of business, we have been taught, is to create profits and beat other businesses.  Never mind whether you agree about the goal—it’s becoming so 20th century. 

Not too many leaders have the discipline and the savvy to remember that a heavy hand on client service and a light hand on company profitability has a paradoxical result—heavy profitability for both company and customer.

The world simply works better when companies, and people, focus on serving their clients and customers, rather than focusing on competing with each other, or on seeing their clients as sources of profitability for their own ends.

No one wants to be treated as means to another’s ends.  Yet that is the dogma most of us have been taught, where “loyalty” means spiff programs, and “customer-centricity” is code for “profit-for-us.”

If you do well by your customer, your customer will do well by you.

What a concept.

Here’s to Tisch.

Paradoxes, Selling and Trust

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One great thing about paradoxes is that they keep on teaching.

Looking at a paradox, you’re first struck about the confusing, “wrong” nature of it. And you must rediscover how to get out of it.
Think of an optical illusion—the old lady young lady vase, an Escher print. Think of the Cretan Epimenedes’ paradox, “all Cretans lie.”

Or, think of Trust-based Selling®.

How can you trust someone if they’re trying to sell you? If I get you to trust me in order to sell you, aren’t I being untrustworthy? How can you trust someone who says ‘trust me?’ If you’re getting paid a commission or a quota for selling me, aren’t your interests in conflict with mine? How can trust exist between two parties, one of whose job it is to convince the other to give him his money?

What I do for a living is explain that and similar paradoxes to others—and, to teach it, I must rediscover it for myself every time. Paradoxes are slippery.

The “answer” to the trust-based selling paradox is to accept it as paradoxical—like the apparent paradox of quantum physics. Is it a wave, or a particle?

Yes.

The best way to sell is to stop selling. The best way to influence others is to stop trying to influence them. The best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want.

Put that way, it’s not hard to “get.” The Beatles got it (“the love you take is equal to the love you make”). Henry Ford got it (“the secret of success lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle”). Dale Carnegie got it (“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”)

But the majority of businesspeople, I think, don’t get it. Even many in salespeople don’t get it. Here, in part, is why.

Consider some of the accepted-wisdom mantras of today’s business gurus, magazines, exec ed programs, and business schools.

• Define people development in terms of behaviors, not motives or feelings.

• Define measurable skills gaps, develop programs to augment skills, and measure their behavioral impact.

• Claim that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

• Align rewards and goals—particularly with extrinsic, financial rewards.

• Pay for performance—defined as financial contribution to the firm.

• Examine all processes to maximize efficiency, effectiveness and profit.

• Examine customer acquisition, loyalty, retention and customer profitability, through highly detailed metrics. The aim is to improve your profitability. Then refer to it as “customer-centricity.”

• Make sure all behaviors, expenditures, human “capital” development and processes are continually monitored to maximize their return on shareholder investment, and their contribution to sustainable competitive advantage.

Consider the collective impact of that set of beliefs when they come up against a concept like “do the right thing for the customer.”

“Do the right thing” has a snowball’s chance in hell.

Here’s what usually comes back:

“OK, but we need to make sure it’s working.”

“The right thing can’t be code for charity.”

“If the right thing is profitable, then let’s incent it.”

“We need to be careful about how we define “right.”

“We need 2nd and 3rd order metrics for ‘the right thing’.”

“You can’t let them take advantage of you.”

“That’s OK when times are good…”

“Great, but you still need to up the closing rate for this quarter.”

So: should you do the right thing? Or should you close the sale?

Yes.

The paradox is—if you truly do the right thing, you will close more sales, be more profitable, get higher loyalty. But only if you do the right thing for the customer.

If you do the right thing in order to close the sale, etc.—it’ll blow up on you.

A Wall Street broker once told me, “Trusted Advisor? Sounds good. Anything that’ll give me greater share of wallet, I’m all for it.” You can pervert anything with bad intentions.

If a boss yells "quarterly quota" in your ear, remember: the best short-term results come from long-term customer focus—not from forced closing.

If you are a boss yelling quarterly quota in your salepeople’s ears, try retuning the message—“I want you all to do the right thing by your customer. If your numbers are bad, I’ll assume you’re doing the wrong thing by your customer; and that hurts us too.”

The best sales come from trust. It helps to rediscover that paradox every time.

Working and Feeling Good

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The Gallup people have done some interesting research on the idea of employee engagement. In fact, I think they initiated the idea in 1999.

They have defined three groupings of employees—those who are engaged, those who are not-engaged, and those who are actively disengaged—and analyzed correlated statistics.

Their research and that of others has shown correlation with intrinsic motivation, and with profitable performance.

A good example is their article Feeling Good Matters in the Workplace, from 2006.

It’s the kind of research that I sometimes find eye-glazing at first blush. But it has some interesting data.

For one thing, the biggest single factor affecting engagement appears to the degree to which the direct supervisor focuses on their strengths or positive characteristics. In other words, appreciation expressed by one’s boss.

That provides an interesting corollary with John Gottman’s work on marriage, which also suggests, if I recall, that the ratio of positive to negative comments to each other is correlated with the success of a relationship.

Gee.  Maybe it is kind of common sense.  But uncommon enough that it still caught my eye.

The other strong correlation in the Gallup article is that between happiness and happiness derived from work. 45% of engaged workers say they get “a great deal” of their overall happiness from work, vs. only 19% and 8% of the other two categories.  Though in a way that’s surprising—if less than half the happy people get most of their happiness from work, then work must not be very happiness-inducing.

Some would say, again, duh. But I found it interesting.

Gallup is careful not to attribute causality. In these matters, it’s easy to fall victim to confusing cause and effect, when causality is inherently unprovable, and often messy.

So, let’s review. Happy people are engaged people.  Or engaged people are happy people.  I suspect it’s hardly one-way causal, but more of a virtuous circle; happy people attract more happiness, disengaged people suck the air out of the room and alienate others, etc.

What I find really interesting is that this sounds very commonsensical.  Yet, it contradicts some received wisdom in business.  Particularly the idea that people are primarily motivated by rewards.

The matching up of extrinsic rewards is virtually an article of faith among compensation consultants, sales organizations, change management theorists, and anyone doing anything with the word “implementation” in it. “You get what you measure,” they say.

No you don’t.

You get what you value people for. You get what you praise in them. You get out of people what you see in them intrinsically—not what you extract from them in work effort for incentive comp.

Want great organizations?  Get happy people. Want happy people? Don’t “align their rewards with their goals and behaviors”—talk to them, challenge them, praise them. Above all, value them.  And not as human capital—as human.