Culture to Engage

Z to A and A at Last!

old Your Horses (as You Hurry). Engagement is an investment of self (emotion, energy, time, ability...) and may not be jumped into without some preparation. No matter how eager you are to manage a team of Champion Engagers, you may want to rein yourself in a bit. Allow the engagement to evolve as it will, with your nurturing encouragement.

uarantee Attention. Whether attention is your listening ear, your good morning smile, your specific job-question, or something else, your people thrive from your attention. Every survey that measures engagement, includes questions about the attention management give employees: the more attention, the more likely the engagement. Guaranteed.

un-da-mental-ize. First, fundamentalize employee engagement as part of your operations. Employee engagement can become a common way of thinking, a second-nature behavior that leads to desired results. Second, fundamentalize employee engagement. Make it something you and your folks enjoy, get a kick out of, and have fun doing/being.

ducate. It's not just two-year olds who want to know "why?!" When your personnel have to do something new, something different, their question--whether spoken aloud or not--is why? If they have clear understanding of the reasons, they more willingly, more quickly, more adeptly tackle the change. You, as manager, own the power to educate why.

ocument. Keep a notebook, journal, log of your employee engagement efforts and successes. You may hand your job over to someone at some point. You may derive new ideas from past successes. You may have to explain or defend engagement actions you've taken with your people. You may just enjoy reading about you've done.

ircumnavigate. A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it's not always fastest or easiest. Be prepared to go around obstacles. As you plan your engagement strategy (see Landscape), keep in mind contingencies that will get you past the situation, the policy, the individual that may hinder.

e Blessing Aware. Too many blessings come our way to ignore them. Along with your people express appreciation that good stuff happens (jobs, work associates, successes, and more). There are a number of good communication choices here: bulletin board, blast e-mail, staff meeting ice breaker, passed around Post-it(tm) notes....

dvertise. Take your good news outside. The more you brag and boast and blow your team's horn, the more good will occur. You'll attract new people more readily. Your team will continually increase its engagement. Your objectives will be met sooner, more easily. Your employee retention rate will increase.

QPONMLKJI ... or What Come Next

uicken..with Questions. The more questions you ask and participate in answering,the more you quicken employees' engagement. The beauty of a direction-setting question is its allowing others to direct themselves with their answers...and to take ownership of their direction.

ersist. Quite often the first effort to light a fire fails. Sometimes second and third tries, too. Persistence encouraging your people to experience engagement pays off. Persistence is often the key. Engagement can/should be with more than just one's job. Think of career, company, network, community, and personal development as engagement arenas also.

pportunize. Offer numerous engagement opportunities. Assuming that the job is where one should engage is natural. The job's why s/he was hired. However, there are many surrounding engagement areas that stimulate job-engagement. Let me repeat: Think of career, company, network, community, and personal development as engagement arenas.

ibble. Sometimes engagement is better experienced in small bites. To attempt an Engagement or Else in the Next 30 Days strategy may bite more than your team can chew or more than they will swallow! Small steps that establish familiarity and build acceptance ultimately produce greater strides.

astermind. Here's the perfect example of synergy. Engage your people in developing their engagement. Invite discussion, ideation, forums that generate ways to engage. You may call it something else, but the truth is this: every time your folks turn on their idea-machines, they engage themselves.

andscape. Make plans. See the blueprint. Design the beauty. Build your own Big Picture. What you want to happen is more likely to happen--and more likely to happen sooner--if you've painted in broad strokes the landscape of the employee engagement you desire.

nit. Truth: well-formed, strongly coached, and frequently energized teams do more than individuals. As a leader you can knit and weave team structure. You can knit it with the yarn of engagement. Just know not to knot things up.

oin in. Your communication with your people should not come from afar. As you participate (don't confuse with "micro-manage"), your credibility and authenticity increase. Join in with just as much concern and care for what goes on as those on the front line have. This means sometimes you may wish to drop your manager's POV.

nfuse. You cannot offer too much communication, encouragement, modeling, or examples of employee engagement. Concentrate on developing ways to let engagement flavor everything you say and do, every example or illustration you share, every compliment and congratulations you offer.

Starting at the End

Kudos and kompliments to David Zinger who not only founded the Employee Engagement Network but also had the good idea of an e-book: The ABCs of Employee Engagement (forthcoming).

And thanks, David, for inviting me to contribute my letters' worth. And I like your suggestion that I offer my 26 alpha-beta-engagementa snippets here first.

26 at one time seems an overload, so I am parceling out my ABCs, one-third at a time. And being a bit of the contrarian, I'm taking the ZXY view.

Here goes:

ig (or Zag). Engagement requires attention. Sudden zigs or zags, changes in approach, demand attention and stimulate engagement. Provide those changes and invite your people to take on change..."change-gagement."

earn. Intense longing for your organization to fulfill its culture via employee engagement gives you (and the organization) a better shot at fulfillment. Continually ask how much you yearn for employee engagement. Be prepared to give yourself shots of vitamin Y if/when necessary.

-trapolate. This means inferring the unknown from what is known. Guess-taking but your guess is based upon well-founded, well-grounded engagement. It's how you and your people take safe strides to move to the next level of engagement.

ager. Safe and sane x-trapolating gives you confidence to place a bet. You can wager on a new opportunity to encourage your people's engagement. Or bet on a communication plan to enliven your team's engagement. if you always think from the basis of organization's culture, you almost always have the odds in your favor.

isualize. Seeing engagement before it happens is almost as much fun as seeing it live and in person. Practice visualizing specific attributes of an engaged employee, an engaged team. When you have a clear picture, share it with your team. Then invite them to turn on their visualizers and share what they see. The visualizations need not be identical; but it sure helps when everyone looks in the same direction.

pset the cart
As long as the purpose is meaningful to your business (I/O/W, not just for the sake of "doing it"),  a little chaos can have good results. The sudden change demands engagement. The opportunities to witness, enjoy, and learn from the engagement experience can be great. HINT: Not a bad idea to involve the team itself in planning the cart-upset.

empt
Can you make a chance to engage seem like a sandbox your people can play in? Tempt them...not necessarily with a get-this-done-and-you-get-a-reward message. Instead work/play at making the engagement temptation meaningful and valuable of its own sake.

cintillate
Emit sparks. Be animated, witty, sparkling as you promote and model and celebrate employee engagement. The beauty of engagement is that it is a means to an end that makes the journey fun. You can exemplify that by your exciting engagement.

econnoiter
It always helps to know what lies ahead. The reasons for engagement will change as your business, its marketplace, the economy, your personnel population, and many more factors change. Pay attention to what's coming and your engagement can be proactive.

I Can't Find One Anywhere!

Workshop participants tell me they want to tell stories.

Workshop participants tell me they know they have stories to tell.

Workshop participants shrug their shoulders and say, "I just don't know where to find them!"

In quite a few of my recent postings, I've explored these "truths":

1. Organizational culture contributes to success.
2. Leaders (managers included) build cultures by their actions and communications.
3. Stories are pivotal elements of that culture-building communication.

So, WHERE do you go for stories. Three places that add up to...everywhere and anywhere.

• Long Ago and (Not So) Far Away. The longer one's life, the shorter his memory. Situations you experienced a long time ago are hard(er) to recollect. All you need is the method to recall them.

• Just Beneath Your Surface. You have stories just beneath the surface of your memory. How often does a song, a scent, a sight, a taste flicker across your memory. You wonder, "What made me think of that?!" Something surrounds that subconscious memory, something that just may be story-worthy.

• Waiting to Happen. Stories are happening all the time. Stories are waiting to happen. All that's missing are a trained eye to notice the occurrence and a skilled consciousness to see the story-potential.

And so, here's your HOW. As in how do you milk that long-ago memory? How do you tickle the subconscious for what is waiting to be storified? How do you become consciously aware of the possible stories surrounding you?

• Carry a notebook with you all the time. That's all the time. Carry a pen, too.

• Don't wait for the story to appear. Anytime you see or hear or any-other-sense something that catches your attention, make a note of it. Anytime anything crosses your memory and catches even an instant of your attention, make a note of it. No matter how fleeting the sense or the memory, don't wait, write it down.

• Do wait for the story to appear. Be patient with that notebook. Be friendly with that notebook. Don't try to force stories from the notes you've taken, but do keep your eye (and mind) on those notes. Review your notebook every week or so.

So much more will be included in Make Magic with Stories - a 90-minute audio conference, Thursday, 5/22/2008.

A Story of Culture, A Story with Culture

I work with organizations that seek to design and/or refine their culture. That work offers me amazing amounts of new learning. (At the age of 59, I experience a lot of re-learning, as well!).

Lately I've learned more and more how the story has power regarding an organization's culture. Whether the story tells of the organization's heritage or legacy, heroes or history, tribulations or triumphs--or all of the above--the story becomes instrumental to the culture by

• Illustrating
• Emphasizing
• Explaining
• Vitalizing
• Exciting
• Modeling

That's just to name a few reasons management should identify its story or stories and hone them as employee engagement tools. [Remember the CORE of Engagement; consider how story-sharing can be a part of any of those four components!]

OK. Let me give you more substantive explanations of the power of a story to your organization's culture.

Pictures and drama connect with employees' hearts. Articulate your company's values, commitments, and purpose as often as you want. However, you will more quickly get to employees' hearts by telling the the company story. When you repeat the drama of the company's beginnings in explicit, visible language, your story hits home. Actually, it hits heart; the heart hosts inspiration. The excitement of the company's early success (and failure?) generates emotional appreciation. Emotional appreciation packs more clout than intellectual awareness of goals and objectives.

Stories underscore the culture. You can share stories share of the company's building successes. They validly represent the culture. The concrete images represent what the company stands for, what it believes, and how it behaves. That makes up its culture. Culture has such a vital impact upon a company--either its success or its lack thereof--that every manager is responsible for the conscious effort to keep the culture a top of mind concept among employees. Story-sharing does that.

Stories propel the culture. Markets, politics, leadership, personnel, and more change (constantly). The organization's culture must be kept moving in the right direction, in light of those changes. Story sharing can keep the culture in alignment with both changing situations and basic values and commitments. Not every story must be from company heritage. Contemporary stories demonstrate success in the face of (and because of) change. These are stories whose participants you invite to share, as often as you can.

I hope you're interested in the story as a viable, valuable management tool. My Make Magic with Stories audio conference (Thursday, 5/22/08) offers 90 minutes of what, how, why, when and where of story-sharing in the workplace.