It's simple. To increase engagement, just change your culture.
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There are some new findings out from the Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study. Here's a sample.
"Just 21% of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Fully 38% are partly to fully disengaged."
This is not exactly news. The numbers here are similar to what Gallup comes up with. The question is: What do we do about it? In an interview about the study on the Towers Perrin site, Julie Gebauer, a Towers Perrin Managing Director responds this way.
"The most exciting aspect of the study results is that there is a clear path forward. First, companies have an enormous impact on engagement – far more than they think they do. The influence of the organization, especially its senior leadership, far outweighs employees’ personal traits (like ambition or learning orientation) or, say, the role of a person’s manager. What we’ve learned is that driving engagement depends on creating a corporate culture that aligns with the company’s unique strategy, and that emphasizes leadership, learning, empowerment and corporate social responsibility."
This is drivel. Unless I'm reading this wrong it says that all that has to happen is for senior leadership to set about "creating a corporate culture that aligns with the company’s unique strategy and that emphasizes leadership, learning, empowerment and corporate social responsibility."
That's easy to say, especially if you're a consultant who will get paid to advise senior leadership on how to do it. But it's devilishly hard to do.
There's another reason that Ms. Gebauer's statement is nonsense. If you can change the culture, who will be the agent of enforcing the values at ground level? It won't be senior management. As the Chinese say, "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away."
No, it will be "a person's manager." At the end of the day, or the end of the culture change, it's your immediate boss that matters. No amount of consultant nonsense will change that.
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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.
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Hello, Wally,
There is a self-perpetuating body of self-serving "truth" and "research" out there that is unrelated to the way organizations are, how they actually grow, and what constitutes effective management/leadership. You are providing a service by calling it for what it isn't.
I used to consider such articles/findings somewhat amusing. Now I realize that they are dangerous. But I've been pondering how they are allowed to carry the authority that they do. It occurred to me that managers, and those of us who are in the trenches with them every day, don't have the time to generate faux, self-serving survey results. As a result, we don't satisfy the craving for numerical--therefore "scientific"--information. We only have reality.
Yet there must be a way to begin to turn this around.
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I actually don't have any problem with the data. It's the interpretation that drives me nuts, along with the idea that what really matters in the day-to-day life of workers is the CEO's culture change initiative instead of how their boss treats them.
Jeff Immelt did an interview with Fast Company in 2005 where he remembered what it was like to be a kid when his dad was working in a GE factory. He said, ""I always tell our leaders that they're GE to the people in this company. When I would sit around the kitchen table with my dad, I never knew who the CEO of GE was. I knew my dad's boss."
The interviewer asked if Immelt's dad was different at home when he had a bad boss. Immelt's response: "Yeah. He came home in a bad mood, uncertain about the future. And when he had a good boss, he was pumped. The frontline folks are critical to how the company does."
That's much more like my experience of how bosses affect their people. It lines up well with most of the research, too. So, to say that a person's boss doesn't matter is simply nonsense.
I think we're due for some culture change in many companies, but let's not kid ourselves about whether it will be easy or quick. It also won't change the power of a person's direct boss to affect the quality of their life.
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Boy, I saw the title of your post and I thought, "Wally has lost his mind." Easy! snort.
I'm glad I kept reading. Yeah, change at the top--pronouncements from on high--don't do much to change the direct line managers. It's much more complicated.
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Thanks for stopping by, Evil. I'm glad you kept reading, and for commenting.
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I liked the post title - very tongue in cheek! I saw that report and had the same reaction - one of those things that makes you a bit embarrassed to be a consultant. I agree with you, Wally, that the data itself can be interesting - but an interpretation that is so far removed from reality taints the whole study.
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Thanks for the comment and for stopping by, Ann.
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I agree with Steve that reports like these are more than self-serving - they are dangerous.
They are self-serving because they generate data and interpretations of them that support the agenda of the researchers/consultants. I have come to assume that any data/analysis being presented to me with a prescription at the end isn't really research - it's just marketing.
I also agree that it's dangerous for the same reason that you seem to - it proposes a distant, unearthly attitude as the solution to the posited problem, rather than hard, thoughtful work conducted throughout the depth and breadth of the organization. Your continued emphasis on the front-line manager is a key in exposing the fallacy of this trickle-down approach to corporate culture.
And, by the way, how did "corporate social responsibility" emerge from the data?
Thanks for the great work.
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Thanks for stopping by, Jim. I can't help on the question of Corporate Social Responsibility. I was just glad this wasn't called a "Green" solution.
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