Why Engagement May be the Best Management Voodoo Ever
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America is not only the land of opportunity. We are the land of the management fad.
In my lifetime we have managed by objectives and by exception. We have budgeted from a zero base. We have managed for a minute and for the long term (a whole quarter). We have upsized, downsized and right-sized the organizations that we re-engineered, re-structured, and re-organized.
More recently, we have lost and found our cheese, balanced our scorecards, and asked the ultimate question. We have executed and we have innovated in the hope that we would rise from good to great or, at least, wind up built to last.
None of that may have helped our companies much, but someone is certainly getting rich from the sale of the books, tapes, DVDs, wristbands, plastic toys and other items that come with each fad. And, of course, there are the speaking fees and consulting gigs.
Well, engagement just could be the perfect management fad. After this one, everything else will come in second at best.
Engagement is a Potter Stewart kind of concept. In Jacobellis v Ohio, Justice Stewart wrote that "hard-core pornography" was hard to define. But, he said: "I know it when I see it." Engagement is like that.
There is no agreed-upon definition of "engagement," but everyone seems to know it when they see it. If you're a consultant, that's grand, because you can make it mean whatever you want.
Not only that, you can make up whatever science-like studies or instruments you want to go with it. Bret Simmons nailed that in a post titled "Engagement Soup" earlier this month..
Dr. Simmons noted that one popular "measurement" of engagement doesn't measure output at all. He compared it to determining the health of a tree by measuring the fertilizer you've applied. I thought fertilizer was a great analogy.
The other great thing about engagement is that it's a universal cure all. Got bad morale? Get yourself some engagement. Low profits? A double dollop of engagement will cure that. Underperforming supply chain? Adult acne? Engagement should clear it right up.
Boss's Bottom Line
When you hear of a concept, any concept, that promises magical results, be skeptical. Ask for proof. Make sure the proof comes from something besides consultant promotional literature or an article by one of the firm's partners.
Always ask: "What will we need to do differently?" and "How will that create results?" and "What results can we expect at what cost and by when?"
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Wally, I really do love this post with one exception; somewhere in all of these management fads are specks of truth. I've read countless management, sales, and marketing books and rarely does one not just "make sense". If you chose to follow any of them, you would probably do well. The trick is, you have to do it. If we view these things as fads, then, by definition, they come and go. Sticking with anything, usually works. What all of these gurus have in common is they lay out a framework and usually a process to get things accomplished. If you can actually do that, define a process, get everybody on board, and stick to it, you are probably going to succeed. So, I would just turn this slightly around and say, its not necessarily the message, but the need to see results NOW. If no results, next message. That's why these things never work AND why its good to be a publisher of management gurus. Everybody's always looking for the next hot fix.
Thanks Wally. Continuously great stuff!
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Thanks for adding your comments, Keith. You're right that there is at least a grain of goodness in all the things I mentioned. From my perspective, what makes them fads isn't that they lack that kernel. It's that they're presented as the ultimate cure for all ills. When you combine that with a tendency to jump from one cure-all to the next, a fad is born.
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Well said. ultimate cure alls, fast buck, little investment, sounds good...sells better.
Thanks again.
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Keith, Wally, great points! The problem (s), the kernel gets lost in all the hype that surrounds it. Too often, it's the same kernel surrounded by some other guru's brand of hype, proclaiming it the next new thing.
Great discussion, as one would expect from the two of you!
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Thanks, Dave. Keith's point about there being value in all those things is worth remembering, but like a good course of medication, you have to give it time to work.
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LOVE this Wally! You have more experience at this than I do, but I must agree that in my career I have never seen anything quite like engagement in terms of scope and hype. Never have I seen so much made of so little. There is always fallout in an organization when the fad of the period fails, but I am very concerned about the fallout from this one because so many are going down this path. Keep up the good work, Wally! Bret
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Thanks for the kind words, Bret. I'm a little more optimistic than you are, I think. The re-engineering frenzy was the most damaging of the fads that I remember. By contrast, I think this is mild.
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Thanks for reminding me about re-engineering. That is one that failed in implementation. I thought the book was and still is rock solid. Got to make the business case for change, and most organizations did NOT need it. Thanks! Bret
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Ironically, I think the original documents/books are often fine. But then people practice Cargo Cult Management and copy the book blindly, or, more commonly, simply pick some of the parts to copy and some to leave out. A lot of damage has been done in the name of Deming by companies that decided to leave "Drive out fear" out of the process.
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This is a great post, pithily observed and wittily written. Thank you.
By the way, one of my favourite business books is Eileen C. Shapiro's Fad Surfing In The Boardroom. And Mick Marchington's paper Fairy Tales And Magic Wands is also recommended. Link is to abstract. Full paper requires membership or purchase.
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Thanks for the kind words and the recommendation.
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Wally,
In general I agree that EE is a whole lotta hype with a few of those deeply buried kernels that Keith mentions. And yet....
EE is one of those areas where I keep asking myself 'is this old wine any good?' and 'will the new labels help sell it any better?'. I find myself scanning the Employee Engagement Network and finding more good ideas than bad, and all of them could benefit from some historical and theoretical grounding.
The core arguments are sound, and the execution ranges from flimsy to flack-y to authentic.
What I keep coming back to (case method teacher that I am) is the question: Why does engagement/commitment/whatever *keep coming up* over and over? What do we still need to learn, as managers, consultants and teachers, to address the core issue these old questions raise?
cvh
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Thanks for that thoughtful comment. I was originally attracted to the idea of employee engagement through the work of David Zinger. I still like what he does, in part because it differs from the tack taken by some major consulting firms.
David's posts and other writing is always practical. "Engagement" is his keyword, but you don't need it to understand what he's saying. He's not selling a particular program or package or instrument or even definition. "Engagement" is the basket where he collects his thinking.
With David, the focus is always on "how can we do things better" and not on who's got the theologically correct definition of engagement. For many of the larger firms the issues seems to be more about competitive differentiation than about improving the quality of the workplace.
I've come to the point where I believe that the language of "engaged" and "disengaged" and "actively disengaged" and the studies that show correlation but are touted as showing causation and the dueling instruments have become the game. And it's not the game that I want to play.
My professional goal has been simple. When I hang up my shingle for good, I want to leave behind a world where more people earn their daily bread in human-friendly workplaces where they are productive members of productive groups.
I think that the concept of "engagement" was once a term that helped focus us on things that would help achieve that objective. I think that now it's become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
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Wally,
I love the clarity behind your professional goal.
I'm hoping that the ethos that we create, sustain and share with our web 2.0/social media efforts, with its focus broadening and building rather than claiming, owning and selling, will ultimately help use worry less about proprietary models and instruments, and more about human-friendly workplaces. Which is one of the reasons why I find your blog and links so helpful.
cvh
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Thanks for the kind words. You make a great point about the role of social media in transforming the workplace. Years ago I participated in the WELL, one of the first online discussion groups, founded by Stewart Brand. I was astounded then at the way that communication networks extended our reach and the range of information we were aware of. The social media tools are the WELL with a rocket booster. I am blown away by the increased velocity of information, insight, and influence.
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The post hits the nail re the fuzziness of engagement in management-speak. It is described and measured as a hodge-podge of commitment, enthusiasm, job involvement and anything else that sounds nice.
The earliest use of the term in this general sense I'm aware of in my 1997 book with Christina Maslach, The Truth About Burnout. We defined it specifically as the opposite of burnout. Instead of exhaustion, cynicism, and discouragement, work engagement was energy, involvement, and efficacy. We said it was measured by the positive end of the MBI burnout measure. A group in Utrecht took it as step further by identifying additional items that measured vigor and dedication.
In any case, there is a research world that defines work engagement precisely and is building a foundation of solid knowledge. Later this year or early next Arnold Bakker & I will release our book, Work Engagement: A Handbook of Essential Theory and Research.
I doubt if the management-speakers care, but I thought I'd let you know.
Michael
www.workengagement.com
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Thanks sharing that. What I've liked from your work that I've seen is that you link productivity into the engagement discussion. I also find the idea of engagement being at the other end of the scale from burnout as a fascinating concept. And I appreciate the pointer to more and future resources.
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Silver Bullet Management is the salvation of many managers, without it they would have nothing on which to blame their own errors and failures. This way, they can point to the expert and say, "But I did what s/he said and it didn't work, so it's not my fault."
Gee, the score must be something like
Excuses - 10 gazillion, Accountability 87
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I really like the term "Silver Bullet Management." That pretty much sums it up. I wonder, though, if the Excuses team isn't even farther ahead.
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Wally, super cool one again!
My first reaction was wide smile during reading the beginning of the post, after seeing all the books' titles incorporated into sentences. LOL
@show me the proof:
Yesterday I have taped to the wall Arabic proverb which says: "God judges a tree by its fruits and not by its roots."
No matter how good credentials any theory or methodology have. What matters is whether it will make any difference for us? Preferably positive one
It may take some time for fruits of the one's effort dedicated to the engagement to get ripe and tasty, but certainly the patience will be rewarded
Asking the correct questions like those you have mentioned, f.e. what we need to do differently? , may lead to the unexpected findings and so hated need for change
cheers from Slovakia,
i.
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Thanks for coming by and sharing, Ivana. There's always a bit of a dance between theory and practice, but ultimately, as you say, the results are what matter.
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I have a negative view of Engagement. Engagement is just another politically correct way to get workers to produce more. If you aren't engaged you are not a company man (or woman). Most workers really do not want to be engaged but rather work their jobs and go home to their families. Sorry but we all don't live for the company. It's great if you want to motivate that 5-10% that will always give you the extra effort. The rest just want to make their day and go home. Sorry to be negative about this but it is the real situation at most employers.
At least quality initiatives seem to be more acceptable to me as it gives workers satisfaction that the product or work they produce is valued.
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Thanks for sharing your perspective. I'm sure that some companies use engagement as a way to "get" workers to produce more. Despite my disagreement with much of the language and hype surrounding the concept, most of the initiatives that I've encountered involved companies looking for ways to improve worker morale. In fact, one problem I have with most engagement initiatives is that they don't address productivity at all.
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Wally, thanks for your usual honest, high quality post. You have a great passion for quality leadership. I appreciate your experience and your knowledge about leadership and management.
But so many people agreed with you, I thought it necessary to register the counter argument.
I disagree that engagement is a fad. You see, what people are calling engagement, is something I've wanted as an employee all my life. Who wouldn't want to work where they're appreciated and operating within their areas of strength? Who would turn down the opportunity to enjoy their work and the people they worked with? Who would refuse to work for employers who value your contribution and work to tailor your compensation to fit your dreams and goals? As an employer, which of you seek out people who only want to get their hours in and go home?
Maybe the consultants and the authors (and the critics) are spoiling it for the rest of us. I believe many still long for a chance to work where we can be fully engaged, enthusiastically appreciated, and fairly compensated. Many like me will continue to pursue the dream in spite of the many who will prostitute the concept or butcher its application. I read engagement as enthusiastic win/win between the employer and the employee, and for me that has been and always will be a desirable goal. I'll buy the books and try to apply the concepts because the goal is worth it.
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Thanks for that thoughtful post. My response is both short and simple. If I thought the current wave of engagement concepts, instruments, etc would help use create the workplaces you're describing, I wouldn't have written the original post.
I've spent my life working to help create more human-friendly workplaces where people can be productive parts of a productive team. I don't think the way consulting firms and training companies are lining up with their dueling systems and definitions moves us toward that.
Let me take one small part of one popular system. A major firm uses a survey to measure what they call engagement. Here are two of the things they ask participants to agree or disagree with, followed by my reactions.
"In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work."
When you put this in place, it will become a checklist items for managers. They will assure that they will praise everyone once a week, especially the week before the survey. The praise will be programmatic. It is less likely to be timely, merited and appropriate.
This also sets the bar incredibly low for praise. When I get asked in class about "How often should I praise?" my answer is to think in terms of two or more times per shift, meeting the criteria above. Measuring "once a week" means that once a week is OK.
So the "system" sets us up for situations where we deliver praise of any kind once a week and not to deliver praise frequently that is timely, merited and appropriate.
One more item. The survey asks for agreement with: "I have a best friend at work."
I don't even know what this means. Does it mean, "One of my best friends in the world works with me" or does it mean "I have someone at work I get along with better than others?"
Whichever it is, how is that something that an employer can possibly be accountable for? If it's not, why is it on the list?
One final thing. All of the engagement talk only addresses half of what makes a great workplace. There's no discussion of productivity.
I think I've rambled on enough now. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful perspective.
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Wally -
Great post! I'm grinning ear to ear.
Remember "climate" surveys? Then we had employee morale surveys, satisfaction surveys, and culture surveys. Now they're called employee "engagement" surveys. Sometimes we just have to nod our heads and play along.
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Gosh, Dan, I had forgotten all about the "climate" surveys. I probably sublimated the whole thing. I have to agree that today's "engagement" surveys are the reincarnation of those climate and "employee satisfaction" surveys.
As for "Sometimes we just have to nod our heads and play along." That depends a lot on where you are.
If you're inside an organization you have to ride out things like this, unless you decide that it's the hill you want to die on. If you're outside, though, like me, there seem to be three possible responses.
You can decide that the current craziness will go away in time and keep doing what you do. You may adjust a bit to account for the craziness.
You can see the craziness as a grand opportunity and build your business around it. That's good if it fits your values but not so good if it's just an opportunity to be seized.
Or you can rise up and comment on it. That's part of my role. Since I'm outside the daily wrestling matches, I can bring a different perspective to the party and not put my corporate career at risk by sharing it.
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Wally, I just came across the post on the HR Carnival.
I agree there's a lot of nonsense talked and written about engagement. But a lot of it is also sound - and very useful.
Certainly, no company that's used a survey to link 'engagement' with activities / drivers and business impacts is going to get confused between these and climate surveys, or see them as voodoo!
http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2009/09/hr-carnival-2-september-2009.html
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We'll have to disagree on this one, John. Here's my sense of where we differ.
I think the very fact that there's no agreed-upon definition of "engagement" even while it's being measured in a variety of surveys and commented upon in research findings leads us in the voodoo direction.
Essentially we're saying that this thing makes a difference even though we don't know what it is, can only establish a correlation between survey results and other results, and which we only measure at the firm level is as close to voodoo as we're likely to get. Add that to the fact that some of the surveys measure inputs and not outputs, meaning they're not measuring engagement, even though that's what they claim, and things just get worse.
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Interesting and provocative as always, Wally. I side more with Keith. To me, the lingo around those many management fads was a way to make something complex easy to understand. Granted, this often erred on the side of oversimplification, bordering on kitch in some examples, but...
Engagement may be the exact opposite -- the attempt to make something rather simple complex. It is not about getting people to do/give more. It is about creating an environment in which people WANT to give more because they understand why their work is important/matters. Easy to say, perhaps difficult to do, depending on the corporate culture and leaders behind it. Now we're into the realm of intrinsic rewards and the power in them. Did you see Dan Pink's recent excellent presentation on Ted? http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/09/science-proves-carrots-are-rotten-and.html
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Thanks for those great comments. Let me parse them a bit in order to respond.
The biggest problem that I see with "engagement" is that it means so many different things to the people getting paid to deliver it in organizations. It is being sold as something magical. But it only addresses one aspect of high performance teams (the morale of the members) and not the other aspect, productivity. No study that I've seen measures both "engagement" by any definition and "productivity" by any measure at the team level.
I think we agree on the importance of creating great working environments. I've described what I mean by that in my post on 8 Characteristics of Highly Effective Workplaces. They have both high productivity and high morale. And, yes, they share many of the characteristics with different definitions of engagement.
For me, the Dan Pink piece is more like a political speech than a persuasive presentation reasoned from facts. The facts are carefully selected. Issues are carefully framed to reflect the "stunning insight" of the speech. Assumptions are either not stated or glossed over. Easily recognized but unproven ideas are offered up as support.
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Wally I picked up on your comment: "No study that I've seen measures both "engagement" by any definition and "productivity" by any measure at the team level."
Well I can recommend two books to you: Jeffery Pfeffer wrote one called "The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First". This is packed with such information, a real treasure trove, and never uses the words engagement or morale, so you will be happy there! Then we have a book I just co-wrote called "Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times" (Macmillan, Nov 2009), where we bring together all the best research in the world on the morale-performance connection. I know you have concerns that this research is correlation only, but that is not true; lots of good studies have been done which have proven the morale/engagement-performance causative connection.
By the way we don't stop at productivity: there is also customer satisfaction, profitability and even worker health, all affected by morale.
Finally, agree with you 100% on the definition problems with "engagement"; this may dooom it to fad status over time, we'll see. I'll stick to morale, it works.
best to you
David
www.moraleatwork.com
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Thanks for the comments, David. I agree on the Pfeffer book. It is excellent and it is filled with good things, but, as you note, he doesn't use the terms "morale" or "engagement." It's the term "engagement," with fuzzy definitions and the claims of magical powers unsupported by team level research that I have a problem with.
Great places to work exhibit high productivity and high morale. The productivity is usually measurable in some way. The morale is more often a judgment call. My reading of the research, my own experience, and my work with clients lead me to think that they reinforce each other.
There are workplaces that are productive, but where morale is low. Those are the fast slave ships. And there are workplaces where everyone's happy but nothing important is getting done. And then there are "highly effective" workplaces.
Thanks for coming by. I'd love to consider your book for review.
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Ultimate cure-all for all things? Awareness and the will to move to what works! There's nothing like it anywhere and some of that is in the Management fads. Not bad in themselves, they won't "cure all", especially if leaders do not keep their eyes open and see if the fads are working for them at a given time. It's not rocket science to define engagement, really. If you really do know it when you see it, that should suffice. In Latin America we don't even use a Spanish word for it (so we don't need to define it, I guess), but just borrow the English. The key questions still hold: Are people giving it their best? Do they feel inspired and moved to productive action? Are we reaching our goals? Are we setting new ones? Are we going beyond our confort zones? The answers are probably more in staying with the questions and returning to them than finding a blanket answer to ease our souls! Thanks for raising a good point to ponder, Wally!
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Thanks for those comments, Monica. You're right, it doesn't take rocket science and knowing it when you see it should be enough. But then consulting firms couldn't build a business on it. That's why we've got dueling definitions and instruments.
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Good post and interesting comments. Seems there is a common belief that employee engagement can be increased by turning magic "engagement knobs". Employee engagement is about much more than squeezing every last drop of productivity from your people. Far from being the latest fad, it is a shared responsibility between employee and employer. Both must work together to find the right position for the skills (and passion) the employee brings.
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Thanks for sharing those comments. I like the idea of shared responsibility and I love the phrase "magic engagement knobs." And it's another definition/perspective to add to the many ways we look at and define "engagement."
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