Culture to Engage

Culture Eats Strategy Every Day of the Week

OK. The title should be in quotes and accredited directly to Carleen Haas, VP of Human Resources at Humana, the Kentucky-based health insurance company. (Heck, my health insurance company!)

I'm delighted when a senior manager puts culture and engagement together. In her interview with Talent Management, Haas makes clear that leadership at Humana is expected to create a culture of engagement.

My question is how?

What is expected of leaders when it comes to implementing continually a culture of engagement?

How do we want those leaders to engage those expectations?  (Interesting, isn't it, that expectations and engagement are of concern regarding leaders just as regarding front-line employees.)

Humana offers a one-day orientation for employees that touches cultural expectations, values and mission. That's a good start for any organization.

But what's the leader's role in continuing employees' awareness and appreciation of the specific culture? What's the leader's role in maintaining the culture?

I come back to my four components of building the CORE of an organizational culture. These should be on every leader's List of Responsibilities.

Communication: Every leader, every manager must hold herself accountable for regular communication with employees. This communication should, among other things, (re)vitalize the organization's culture. For quite a few postings about communication, click Communication in Categories to the right. 

Opportunity: Every leader, every manager must ensure that specific opportunities are made available for employees to engage in aspects of the organizational culture. An opportunity, by the way, requires a time and place. For examples of opportunities, check this earlier posting.

Resources: Every leader, every manager must see that the resources employees will use to take on effective engagement are made available. Resources include tools, information, mentoring, training, and more. Here's an earlier posting and here's a downloadable pdf.

Engagement: Every leader, every manager must be certain that every individual who supervises employees does so with an "engagement commitment." The objectives of the organization are more successfully achieved when employees are engaged. Managers/supervisors should give ample attention (and encouragement) to employee engagement.

Carleen, I append to your statement: "Culture eats strategy every day of the week to the CORE."

If You Give a Hand, Why Only 'Lend' an Ear?

I asked my last 10 client organizations what is most instrumental to building and maintaining their business culture. Each answered, communication.

The more we worked on defining and designing their cultures, the more they understood the most important component is listening.

Having been a pretty miserable listener (read that both ways) much of my life, I respect the power listening brings to one's communication skill set. Add my commitment to employee engagement and my certainty that strong communication between manager and employee generates strong engagement levels.

No wonder I want to offer simple listening tips. I encourage you to use them. I encourage you to share them among your staff, your community, your family and friends. Listening is the kind of skill that can be improved continually, no matter how great your listening is right now.

I will be facilitating LISTEN! An Audio Conference Thursday, April 24, 4-5:30 pm EDT. You'll get more of the information below and many more tips, all in greater detail. Click that title if you'd like to know more and to register.

3 Ways to Improve Your Listening

• Make it conscious. Activate your mind to the process of listening. Listening is paying attention to what you hear. Consciously turn the key to that attention. Actually think about listening. There are two ways of doing this. First, remind yourself to think about improving your listening. Just a now-and-again reminder brings listening to the front of your mind. That makes you more aware of ways you might discover to be a better listener. Second, instruct yourself to listen every time you enter into a conversation. I use the two word directive: Just listen! That edict puts me in a conscious mindset to pay better, closer attention to the conversation.

• Put energy on the table. When you listen, someone else is speaking (probably) . That person puts forth her energy and (probably) expects you to exert your energy listening to what's being said. Make your listening energy obvious to the other person and you reinforce your listening. As well, express that energy by your body language, facial expression, verbal responses and you support that other person. This can make the conversation both effective and affective.

• Use visual attractions. We experience lots of distractions from listening because our minds work faster than the other person speaks. You can develop visual attractions to keep your listening attention on track with what's being said. Visual because you "see" them in your mind; attractions because they attract you back to listening. Here are two that I use (but they are only examples; whatever you create for yourself will be much more powerful!): I imagine myself turning up a volume button any time I find my attention wandering; I visualize a thought machine that belongs to the speaker and works hard enough for me to admire...and listen to!

I will appreciate your thoughts. Just click "comments" or fill in the Post a Comment box below. For sure, I will listen to them.

And feel free to check out the LISTEN! An Audio Conference offering on Thursday, 4/24/08.

Getting to the CORE of Employee Engagement

The most requested area of information concerning employee engagement is how to. Respondents to my management survey in December 07 overwhelmingly want to know

• How to increase engagement
• How to sustain engagement
• How to engage personnel if/when enthusiasm wanes
• How to personalize it for each employee
• How to foster a culture of employee engagement
• and more right along these lines.

I offer you ways to build the CORE of your Employee Engagement Culture. Be sure that acronym and its components excite me so much you'll see recommendations, suggestions, guest writers with an abundance of how-to in each area.

Communication: the responsibility to be present and prepared to share and receive communication continually. Whatever you call it, however you view it, communication is a must-do to build a true Employee Engagement Culture. Think of specific verbs: asking, answering, listening, updating, explaining, inviting. Find ways to plan specific communications in each of those and other modalities. Think of a monthly town meeting or a weekly e-mail news. Include an office walk-around in which you stop and "just talk with people" for 30 minutes (or 60 or 90 or whatever it takes) every week. Make communication a regularly planned action and it will be(come) a successful action that contributes to successful engagement.

Opportunity: the commitment to create, recognize, and endorse situations that give employees reason to engage. Kevin Costner demonstrated that if you "build it...they will come." You may not get 100% success, but you'll certainly have more people engaged if you put the opportunity right in front of them. Consider projects and development incentives. Think of team competitions and publicly celebrated performance goals. How about forums in which people can demonstrate success and accomplishments? Keep in mind: one can engage to the job, personal/professional development, career, network, company, and community. Any and all of these benefit your organization.

Resources: the decision and design to make available resources that expedite an employee's taking on engagement. When one cannot find the tools, information, instruction, assistance, equipment, time, or other resources, she might not get to hot about the assignment or project. Fear of failure combined with fear of the unknown can stop potential engagement dead in its tracks. Make the decision then commit to designing and making available for your people such resources as training and learning, coaching and mentoring, cross-department projects and efforts, championing and sponsoring, and much more. How about this: a "resource development team" whose members have ownership of identifying, locating, recommending resources?  You would have a steady source of resource recommendations/creation and a unique engagement opportunity for members of this team.

Encouragement: the freedom to support an individual's and a team's engagement with your enthusiasm. You can assume your folks will engage in their work, their job, your team, the company. Or you can seize every opportunity to encourage their engagement. Psychology says it is easier to inspire someone already moving thanks to just-experienced success than to motivate someone standing still. (Newton said it, too, in his s First Law of Motion). You may have to practice becoming a cheerleader. It's worth it. The more you offer congratulations, host celebrations, hand out recognition and (deserved) praise, the more often you will have cause to. If it's engagement you encourage, it's engagement you will get.

Take it to the CORE.

Your (Employee) Engagement Guaranteed! Ask and Answer These 4 Questions

I offer you these 4 communication tools to contribute to your organization's Engagement Culture.

The business Master Mind group I belong to spent 90 lively minutes yesterday sharing our answers to these questions. I suggest you use them in either a staff-meeting or as fuel for sessions with individuals.

What are 1,2, or 3 best things that happened to you in 2007.
Since you'll be using this question in a business environment, it's likely your people will answer from their business experiences in 2007. That's fine, but it's just as fine for them to bring in stories from their home, community or other outside interests.

This question and its answers serve several purposes:

• A way for team members to know one another better.
• A chance for individuals to look back with pride and pleasure at their 2007 engagement.
• An increase in open-minded communication among employees.

Encourage participants not to hurry to find their Top Three. They may savor sampling many good memories. Answering this question gives them the opportunity to reflect positively on what has been fun, festive, frivolous, fortuitous, fruitful...even frenetic!

What is the one thing you'd like to do over? (Does not have to be one of your Top Three. It might be something you just want to get more of...or something you want to do better.)
One beauty of this question is focus on what was so much fun, so rewarding, so out-and-out good, you want to do it again (and again and again..). Another beauty is attention to actions or experiences that might be repeated for the purpose of improvement, better results, greater performance.

Make it clear it's the individual's choice. She can pick that one "do over" for whatever reason she wishes.

This question offers benefits such as:

• Appreciation of past engagement in some specific work element.
• Objective recollection (and evaluation) of what can be improved.
• Actualizing positive past experience in present situation.

What are 1, 2, or 3 things you most look forward to in 2008?
Have your folks note the phrase most look forward to. These do not have to be objectives set for the coming year. (Can be, but don't have to be.) These can simply be what the person wants to experience in the coming year. What's neat is the chance to look ahead, to anticipate the good. And if it triggers specific desires one can concentrate on and begin to manifest, all the better!

Benefits from the easy, simple look ahead the answers provide:

• Pre-engagement from anticipation of something desired.
• Automatic planning "how to" realize or manifest desired results.
• An energizing look ahead thanks to its simplicity.

What is the one thing you are committed to achieving or experiencing in 2008?
This question zeros in. It gives the person answering a chance to take ownership of commitment-to-result.

The individual gets to determine if his commitment is to something he wants to achieve or something he has to achieve. Distinguishing this in discussion of the questions and their answers can be eye-opening. Also mind-opening.

What's psychologically true is that a want to commitment has a greater chance of success than the have to sort. A good manager and an engagement culture help employees operate more from the want to.

What's the good from this final Q&A?

• Projection of numerous potentialities, and selecting one.
• Excitement-generation of what can be experienced in 2008.
• Ownership of the commitment to achieve.

Here's wishing you and your people the happiest 2008 possible. I hope you are coming out of the happiest 2007 possible as well. And it will be great if you can use the good-to-great experiences of last year to fuel great-to-greater experiences next year.

PS I admit my title is a takeoff from Cosmopolitan magazine.

Engaging Leadership

Employee engagement that endures does not come from a quick fix by some new management fad.

True engagement comes from the organization's culture. Culture stimulates employees to invest and involve in the work they do, how they do it, and why they do it for this company.

Consciously developed culture starts at the top, with the leader(s). An engaged leader does not have just an attitude of engagement. She demonstrates engaged behavior.

A leader engages in all aspects of their role as leader.
A leader has vision. That ability to see what the organization can/should become distinguishes a leader. The leader can engage imagination and intuition with his knowledge and experience to clarify the components of why, who, where, when, and how.

A leader inspires action. By communicating vision and steps to attain the vision, a leader inspires the actions required. Seeing may be believing. Speaking (clearly, powerfully, and often) leads to realizing.

A leader leads people. That leader, then, engages in interacting with, knowing about, appreciating, and understanding the people who make up the organization. Tom Peters' idea of managing by walking around was all about the manager being visible. A leader engages people in discussion, interaction, Q&A...even disagreement.

A leader identifies and defines "engagement" for the organization.
A leader asks what comprises the entire work identity of an employee. The work identity in which one engages is more than just her job. An individual's total work identity may encompass

• Job as defined.
• Job as performed.
• Career surrounding the job.
• Participation in a team of which the job is an element.
• Organizational role and identity that are more than just the job.

A leader determines if those components contribute to the organization's purpose and values. The effort to answer fully such questions as, If an employee engages in career-development, does that positively affect the organization? can be meaningful leader involvement.

A leader then engages in knowing/learning how to create a culture supporting each employee's attention to total work identity, work identity that has meaning for the employee and benefit to the organization warrants engagement...and a culture that stimulates such engagement.

A leader activates the culture of engagement.
A leader enrolls his managers in realizing an engagement culture. This is conceptual and practical. Managers must understand and buy into the value of engagement. They must also conduct everyday management activities in ways conducive to continuous engagement, theirs and their employees.

A leader ensures constant and concerted appreciation of engagement throughout the company. Please note the complementary meanings of appreciation: 1. Recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of people and things. 2. A rise in value ... especially over time. The leader's commitment to recognition of individuals' engagements causes yet more engagement.

A leader remains engaged in the Vision-Communication-Interaction sequence. The success of an organization's employee engagement is neither a one-time-only effort nor a quick fix.