What if your next job was not about salary?

Somewhere down the line, we made a mistake. We forgot that work is not about uncomfortable toil in return for tangible financial reward. It used to be so in the industrial age but those days are long gone.

Unfortunately most corporations still create non engaging jobs and most employees keeps accepting them. According to Gallup only 13% of world wide employees are engaged.

So how come companies still think we are motivated by money and most of us still behave like we are?

What if jobs were not only measured against the tangible reward that were offered but by the intangible benefits that the job might involve? Would companies create different jobs and would employees take them rather than high paying jobs?

These are the central questions in this brilliant article by Lynda Gratton of London Business School. Her recommendation is to include the intangibles into the job description:

• How interesting and engaging the job is
• The challenge and growth opportunity of the job both from a personal and skills perspective
• The job being non-routine and in danger of being automated.

I would like to add:

• Is it a job with independence, choice and responsibility
• How meaningful the job is to the corporation.
• The job makes the world a better place by tackling some of the large issues in society.

If you think your next job is about money then you should be ready to accept a routine, boring, controlled, non-developing, meaningless job without responsibility.

Is this your next job? 

Maybe this is your current job?

Are you running your company like an old communist country?

It is generally accepted that the wall fell as a result of the actions of Regan and Gorbachev although it probably would have fallen anyway as a result of the systematic and serious failures that evolved inside the totalitarian system.

You would think that companies most often are managed by principles derived from capitalism and while this might be true there are a large number of companies that have adopted similar vices to those of the former communist countries in the world.

The question is if what is likely to have caused communism to fail is a good foundation for a long term sustainable strategy aimed at creating engagement with both employees and customers.

Test your company against the doctrines below and find out if you are facing obsolescence:

1. Power is concentrated on few hands

A significant issue of the communist countries was the limited number of people that had authority to make real decisions regarding resource allocation in strategic and operational situations. A culture of delegation assumes that the top leadership of the company are better qualified to make all decisions on the corporation’s behalf – in short they know better. This kind of “Politburo” structure fights empowerment like the body attacks a virus – the distribution of power that is at the core of empowerment is a sacrilegious concept that cannot even be discussed. A concentrated power structure isolates the leaders from the organisation and alienates the employees and the customers rather than engaging them. Organisations that successfully engage both employees and customers have 240% better performance according to Gallup.

2. Information access is limited and decision making processes are not transparent

A relic from the industrial age where information was key to competing it is now mainly used by poor managers to cement their power position. Very little information can be considered so proprietary it should be kept from employees. The social revolution is changing the way that information is used inside companies and it is also making it very difficult to keep decision making processes secret when all stakeholders have the possibility to instantly spread uncomfortable secrets immediately.

3. The leadership is not democratically elected.

In principle the board and though them the CEO should be (s)elected by a democratic process that operate by shareholders voting rights. In many companies this process is not as many shareholders don’t exercise their voting rights. The largest stock holders in the world are pension funds managed by professional managers, not by their true owners. This means that rather than owners voting for managers to take care of their best interest, it becomes a case of managers voting for other managers / with that the danger of managers acting in their own best interest rather than the owners. One of the signs of a “Politburo” is a board with members that has not changed for many years and always sides with the CEO.

4. The company has a lack of purpose

If you have a mission of becoming the “Very best company in the x industry” you are probably not the most purpose driven company in the world. Instead you are likely to have a focus on serving “shareholders”, which sounds a lot better that senior management serving themselves. It is important to have a strong purpose that can attract and engage employees, customers and other stakeholders if you don’t want to compete on price alone. If your leadership team are defenders of status quo – they are likely to be a Poliburo:  The society for the preservation of senior management.

5. Doctrine based thinking

The only argument for concentrating power on a few hands is the assumption that they no best and are best equipped to manage the company. When this becomes the case there is no real reason for seeking information or advice outside the power structure. As people are isolated from the real world doctrine based group think starts to kick in. Decisions are based on assumptions that might have been true once but never gets revalidated. It is particularly dangerous if it gets combined with short term financial results that can give the illusion that all is well. Short term results can be made by stealing from long term results.

6.  Strategies that benefit few

If a politburo structure enters a company so does entitlement. As the power circle constantly reinforces their own importance the companys strategy turns to serving the few that matters. In strategy creation the interest of other stakeholders will start to be underserved to give to the few. Starving customers and employees can create short term results and with that the illusion of success. When CEO’s make more than 500 times the pay of ordinary workers, it is a sign that the company has started to serve the few. These strategies are rarely sustainable in the long haul.

7. Central planning structure

The Politburo owns all the money and need to concentrate resource allocation and planning to a central point. The focus turns from investing in new equipment, people and in new business opportunities to a focus on efficiency. More effective P&L or Balance sheet control of business units is replaced with a micromanaged central structure where everybody has to make endless request to just get the minimum for the business survival. It is a great way of starving the business at the same time as being able to blame the individual units of not contributing.

8. Policies are designed to limit people, not enable them

The bureaucracy shows its face once the company’s policies turns from guiding the people to starting to control and limit them. Policies will move from enabling everybody to be a mean to only protect the company interest and money. When the health and safety policy that should be designed to protect the employee turns into a 50 page legal document that describes what will happen to an employee that does not follow the rules – then you know you have turned into an old communist country.

9. Staff functions transform into secret police

When policies change to protect the company, a similar change can take place in the staff functions. Originally designed to support the business with financial, people, legal and IS support the staff functions start to control, check and report behaviour that can be deemed dangerous to status quo. They start to resemble the security police in the old communist states. This has a significant impact on employee engagement and instead of seeking new ways of doing things and creating value, employees gets trained into low profile, low risk behaviour. Don’t spend any money, do make any requests and don’t challenge status quo.

10. Lack of engagement kills productivity, initiative and innovation

When employees understand that they are not encouraged or rewarded for taking initiative, learning and experimentation stops. Productivity growth will start to decline compared to high engagement organisations although it can be hidden by the results created though starving the company. With the concentration of information, a focus on low risk behaviour and low employee engagement – innovation will stop. Innovation can only happen if people are allowed to challenge status quo and the doctrines of the corporation – this is one of the key reasons the old communist countries did not survive.

If your company share some of the characteristics of an old communist country it might be a reason to start looking for healthier doctrines that enable employees and engage customers. 

You cannot run a 21^st century company based on 20^th century management principles.

The Fastest and Cheapest leadership step you will ever take.

Have you ever had a leader that had a completely different self-image to what others saw? Leaders like this are normally not very effective as they have no idea of the impact they have on others nor do they seek feedback to verify or try to change this impact. 

A key step in your personal leadership development is to get to know yourself - as in truly know yourself. This is not easy as you might not like what you see or not understand the impact you have on other people. This is however and important step and the foundation of personal growth.

“You cannot learn, what you think you know”

The best and simplest action for creating self-awareness is to ask the people you spend time with for feedback. This is also one of the foundations of the Johari Window.

"Simple does not mean easy."

The Johari Window

The two American psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham developed a tool to help people create self-awareness. Although developed in the 50’s the Johari window is still a very effective tool for leaders and individuals to create self-awareness.

The top of the Johari window illustrates what is known to others can be divided into two areas: What you also know yourself and what others know you don’t know yourself. If you are willing to explore this area and create a frame of “Giving Feedback” you can gain some extremely valuable insight into how your attitudes, feelings and behaviours impact other people. You can then decide what change you want to make to yourself to create a different impact.

Creating a frame of “Feedback”

Normally we stay away from difficult conversations with people as we are concerned with the way it might create trouble for us later. We co create a conspiracy not to touch certain topics, that might create uncomfortable situation. We “hold the fort” or “we do not rock the boat”. The topics we are not willing to deal with stay in the room as huge elephants we pretend to ignore: We have created group think. 
To be able to benefit from feedback, it is first necessary to create a “Frame of feedback”, an environment where it is ok to speak the truth. Rather than just seek feedback yourself, you should do it as a workgroup or as a peer team, where everybody opens up.

1. Feedback as a concept

The first step is to have a conversation around feedback itself as a concept. The following sentences can help the conversation:
- People have the right intent but create the wrong impact. 
- Giving feedback is aimed at helping not criticising. 
- Robust relationships can handle feedback.
- Don’t make loyalty more important than the truth, then you have created a conspiracy
- If your friendship is not strong enough to handle the truth it is not a real friendship.
- Feedback is not true or false – it is an opinion
- Feedback gives clarity

2. The context and commitments

The second step is to discuss the context, common goal and commitments of the team that will open up for feedback. We live with each other not based on the feedback we give but on the commitments we make. The feedback will be given in support of the common commitment.

3. Rules of engagement

3rd step is to set the rules: What is acceptable, confidentiality, care and commitment. It is important to be deliberate of getting permission from everybody. Don’t create a room of criticism, create a room of support, honesty and camaraderie.

4. Rounds of feedback

4th step is do rounds where each participant receives feedback from colleagues, managers or employees as appropriate. It is important not to defend yourself against feedback – it is not about right or wrong, it is an opinion. We are not judging people; we are helping them understanding their impact

Do not respond to the feedback, just receive it and let it sink in – it could take weeks before you are ready to process it. You should thing of the person that gives feedback as somebody that cares about you enough to tell the truth. You have to be willing to interrogate your impact.

5. Use the feedback

Once you have had time to assimilate the feedback it is time to do the work. It is important to remember that it is not about right or wrong, it is about what impact you have on people. If you receive value from the exercise there are two more elements of the Johari window to go explore.

(This article is based on the wonderful work of Hendre D. Coetzee – may he soon write a book to enlighten us all.)

The 11 questions that will tell you if your behaviour is collaborative

From the industrial age of business the concept of coordination has ruled the way people work together. Driven by directive and a singular focus on return to the ownership structure it is not based on trust or on team work, but often focused on a narrow short term cost based goal.

In the more modern knowledge area cooperation started to become more important. Although still a directed mandate it requires a higher degree of personal investment and motivation from the individuals participating. However cooperation still works inside the frames established by the operating logic of the company.

Neither works well when innovation or disruption are needed, which is why collaboration has emerged in the recent years. Collaboration is driven by mulutal self interest and requires a high level of trust and commitment for each party. It requires highly engaged people that are willing to challenge authority and status quo to unlock new value to the benefit of all parties.

These 11 questions will give you an idea if you are currenlty working in a collaborative way:

1. Are you unselfish and do not pull rank
2. Are you Inspirational and positive
3. Are you Committed to the team and the challenge
4. Are you Curios and have an open mind
5. Do you Participate but do not dominate
6. Do You Build trust and create a safe environment
7. Are you adaptable – not Dominant
8. Are you honest but with respect and tact
9. Do you Listen with the aim to understand
10. Do you Respect other persons and their views and ideas
11. Are you focused on Value Creation not value extraction

Are you still involved in skilled based recruitment?

For many years through the industrial and knowledge age, skills have been imperative when recruiting people. Are they capable of operating the right machine or be part of the right department. However work is changing and people are now entering corporations with a job title that are not likely to survive many years – we don’t even know what will be needed a few years from now. Marketing has gone from paper and television to online and mobile at a blistering pace rendering the entire skill base obsolete. The same thing is happening in sales, where customers has access to more information than the salespeople and are capable of identifying the best deal without even calling.

“Companies are running 21st-century businesses with 20th-century workplace practices and programs.” Towers Watson

Need for specific skills are changing at a rapid pace.

If the obsolescence of skills is accelerating, it does not make sense to hire for skills alone anymore. A better way is to combine skills with attitudes and behaviours when recruiting. Define the attitudes you want in your company – they are likely to interact with your values and culture and the basic belief system your company is based on. They should also be the first evaluation process that existing and new people are evaluated against as attitudes are hard to change. A very imortant point is that the attitude of an employee is going to decide if your culture and operating logic is able to create engagement - a key element of motivation.

"Getting an employee with the right skills is not the same as getting a motivated employee"

Secondly it is needed to look defining the behaviours you want. On LinkedIn it is possible to get a good idea of behaviours of a candidate that can be explored through the interview phase. Even though you would like certain behaviours it is more important to look for the potential of behaviour you would like to have in your company as behaviours can be coached.

Skills should really have the last priority and you need to be looking for the potential to acquire the necessary skills and the ability to acquire future skills. Whatever you are looking for right now is going to be obsolete faster than you can believe.

Pulling it all together will help you identify your high performance A Players that exhibit the desired Attitudes, Behaviours and Skills you are looking for. B Players that have the potential to become A Players and finally C Players that does not have the potential.

Using the 3 Gate process will ensure that you get the right potential people into your organisation but not that they are motivated and engaged. Engagement is an emotional relationship between the employee and the company that the company is responsible for creating. It is not a characteristic of the employee.

"With high levels of engagement, firms can see revenue growth 2.5 times that of their peers and a 40 percent reduction in expensive staff turnover" HayGroup

Interview with Sir Richard Branson Founder of Virgin Group by Christina Lattimer

Interview with Sir Richard Branson Founder of Virgin Group

By Christina Latimer
Full article here: http://peopledevelopmentmagazine.com/2014/09/03/sir-richard-branson/

This is the final interview in this wonderful series about the 6 Challenges identified by CEO’s across the globe, highlighted by the Centre for Creative Leadership in their Report in 2013.  When I turned my attention to who I would want to interview for this important final issue,  the first person who sprang to mind was Sir Richard Branson.  To me Richard epitomises the ultimate combination of brilliant leadership and business skills.  Richard has successfully, transparently and wholeheartedly lived his values which have been demonstrated time and time again both in his unique approach to business and in his attitude to Virgin’s many faceted global success.   So you will no doubt understand how delighted and grateful  I felt when Richard confirmed he was willing to contribute to this month’s magazine.   I hope his wonderful words of wisdom, as always, help you our readers and contributors alike, I think you will,  like me, be delighted!

Here is what Richard had to say:

1) What do you consider is the biggest challenge for CEO’s and leaders in the business world today and what can be done? 

Business leaders and CEO’s have a responsibility to inspire their employees and run their business in a sustainable way.   This is difficult for CEO’s as they are judged on their performance in the short term and any long term initiatives do take time to come through.  Shareholders and stakeholders need to modify their expectations of CEO’s from short-term profits and back the leaders of businesses to create long lasting plans that will grow their businesses and tackle many of the world’s issues at the same time.

2) Can you describe your leadership culture in Virgin and why it works so well? 

When selecting people for leadership roles I believe you should have an open mind and be prepared to look out for talent which others may have over-looked.

It is extremely important to employ business leaders who are passionate about their particular area of expertise and understand that part of being a good leader is having the ability to listen.   Listening to your people and giving them the opportunity to act on any ideas they have helps foster passion in your people and deliver on their ideas, which is beneficial to your business.

3) Given your vast experience in business what is the single biggest piece of advice you would give to leaders and CEO’s reading this? 

If you look back at the most successful businesses of the past 20 years – Microsoft, Google or Apple, they all played a part in shaking up their sector by doing something that hadn’t ever been done and by continually innovating. They are now among the dominant forces.

Not everyone will achieve such great worldwide success but a good start is to create something that everybody who works for you is really proud of. Businesses generally consist of a group of people, and they are your biggest assets.

4) What is the most inspirational event, person or situation you’ve encountered so far in your career?  

I have been fortunate to have had a long and successful career in business, meeting many inspirational people along the way and attending some fantastic events full of fascinating people.

I have long admired Nelson Mandela and was so upset when I heard the news of his passing. He showed amazing courage and conviction overcoming an evil political system. Wherever he went he would make people smile, laugh and feel completely at home. A young friend, Peta-Lynn, found Madiba in the galley on a Virgin plane to New York a while back. He offered to make her a cup of tea. What an extraordinary man.

5) What is the most exciting project you’re involved in you’d like to share? 

Going into space has always been a dream of mine. I could think of nothing more exciting than looking at our planet from space. Virgin Galactic is pioneering the space tourism industry and making great progress. Our spaceship has successfully completed three powered flights, breaking the sound barrier in the process, and our mothership – WhiteKnightTwo – has flown over 150 flights. The project is looking promising and I get so excited every time the Galactic team update me on another milestone the project passes.

6) How can our readers’ best benefit from the work you are doing and how can they best engage with you (and Virgin)? 

I have been fortunate that over the years we have developed an incredibly strong management team to run the Virgin companies. This has allowed me to dedicate the majority of my time to Virgin Unite – the not-for-profit arm of the Virgin Group. Virgin Unite have incubated a number of organisations dedicated to tackling specific issues such as conflict resolution (The Elders), climate change (The Carbon War Room), ocean protection (Ocean Elders) and sustainability (The B Team). I would encourage anyone to try to engage with these organisations and be inspired by what they are trying to achieve. Go out and start something yourself that reflects what they stand for.   Virgin Unite, and Virgin.com, has a very strong digital presence and I update my blog daily at www.virgin.com/richard.

More about Sir Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson is the Founder of Virgin.  Virgin is one of the world’s most intriquing brands and has a well known diverse and unique portfolio of companies.   There are now more than 100 Virgin companies worldwide, employing approximately 60,000 people in over 50 countries.  Sir Richard’s hallmark has been one of innovation, challenge and bravery.  Click here to read Richard’s full and inspiring biography on Virgin.com

The Virgin Way by Sir Richard Branson

Even though I asked Richard’s team if he wanted to promote or mention anything within the interview, Richard didn’t feel the need to mention or advertise his new book , which  doesn’t surprise me.  But because it looks so fantastic, I wanted to mention it here anyway, so readers were aware of it.  ” The Virgin Way”  is due to be published on the 8th September and you can find out more details by clicking on the image:

Shareholder focus kills employee engagement.

Corporate view of motivation

The modern era of HR is predominantly dominated by a Maslowian view of motivation: The individual is driven by a motivation to ffulfill increasingly higher needs depending on the completion of a lower level of motivation. Although still useful, the Maslow Hierarchy, used in an organisational setting, creates a division between the employee and the company. The company has to deliver a lot of elements to the employee or risk the employee leaving. This creates thinking where every dollar that is given to the employee is seen to come out of the shareholders pockets - a zero sum game. This has become evident in the pre Financial Crisis age where companies relentlessly have reduced headcount to meet cost targets, completely ignoring that the same employees had a positive impact on revenue. If the logic of employees only affecting cost was true, corporations should have no people at all.

Purpose driven motivation

A more useful model for human motivation is what is known as the 3^rd Viennese school of psychology based on Viktor Frankls work on Logotheraphy.  In opposition to the first two – Freud’s view of human motivation as search for pleasure and Adler’s search for power, Frankl work points towards humans being motivated by a search for meaning. Rather than seeing people’s motivation as a result of external stimuli he believes that motivation comes from within and is based on your subjective view of what meaning is. Despite meaning being subjective and situation bound, Frankl suggests that meaning is often associated with doing good for others, with love and with the freedom to choose your attitude in any given situation – even in hopeless situations.

A survivor of the Holocaust, Frankl got plenty of experience of humans in hopeless situations and found that the people surviving rarely where the physically strongest but more often somebody that had a strong purpose and a reason to survive. He captured it in the phrase:

It is not what you expect of life that is important; it is what life expects of you.

Frankl’s motivational model is becoming increasingly more relevant as corporations are starting to understand that employee engagement is crucial to the creation of sustainable competitive advantage. The traditional employee satisfaction surveys show the same and predictable results independent of it is conducted in successful companies or the opposite. Employee engagement is strongly impacted by purpose – both the purpose of the individual’s contribution to the corporate purpose and to the corporate purpose itself. And a good purpose isn't about making money!

Corporate purpose is important

The financial crisis killed the real and initial purpose of many corporations – a purpose often focused on bringing value to one or more of the company’s stakeholders. Instead a relentless shareholder focus took over in a way that would have made Milton Friedman proud. Making bosses and owners wealthier is not a noble purpose that engages employees and unlocks productivity. Jack Welsh ex Ceo of GE calls shareholder focus the dumbest concept he has ever heard of and Kip Tindell of Container Store says that shareholder focus alienates all other stakeholder groups including employees and customers.

A new and engaging way of creating value

Leading companies have found that creating strategies that serves the needs of many stakeholder groups simultaneously in what Tom Gardner, CEO of Moetly Fool calls super-alignment creates a strong purpose that engages stakeholders to support the company in a way that creates competitive advantage. The beauty of stakeholder alignment is that it also increases the value for the shareholders – a company loved by its customers and employees will not fail completely.

Talking against shareholder value is often seen as an attack on capitalism and the free market and a defense of totalitarian systems. Reality is that no company became great because they wanted to make money – they became great because they created value for others. Somewhere down the line it was forgotten that capitalism is a social experiment focused on value creation for others and not ugly exploitation of often powerless stakeholder groups to satisfy the greed of a few.

Innovation requires employee engagement

The concept of innovation is often associated with companies and products – successful companies like Apple, Google and similar are coined to be innovative or to have innovative products. Nobody has yet found a good way of measuring how innovative a product or an organisation is although number of patents is used by some. This did not help Kodak, Nokia or Motorola much even though each of them had many patents.

The reality is that innovation is a cognitive process that often is team based, especially in a corporate frame and as such not an organisational or product characteristic – it is a way of thinking about new methods of using the present resources.

“Innovation is not an organisational characteristic – it is a human activity”

The role of the organisation is to allow, encourage and enable innovation though their people and their collaborative thinking processes. That means innovation is closely related to motivation, purpose and employee engagement and not just something that happens in a laboratory.

The way that organisations chose (or is forced by tradition) to shape innovation can be divided into 4 different categories:

The two lower categories are typically in well-defined markets, the two left categories are typically larger corporations and the two top categories are the most disruptive.

History has traditionally protected the larger corporations and their access to capital, technology and scale of economy manufacturing. Large corporate super tankers are built to fight similar entities in a competitive battle with well-defined market rules. It was almost impossible for a new company to enter an established market and get access to customers through an exclusive sales network.

The start of the internet century has changed that completely. Foxes – small innovative companies have easy and scale able access to capital, technology, prototyping, knowledge and customers and are not bound by the rules of any markets. The list is growing rapidly lead by companies Uber, Nest, AirBnB, Tesla and similar.

They follow a blue ocean strategy where they redefine the rules of the market and look for joint value creation with customers and collaboration with potential competitors - Google sees Apple not only as a competitor in certain business areas but also as a partner in other.

The established companies have a hard time competing as they are locked in the logic of their market and a zero sum product price battle with similar companies.

Maybe Tesla is still a small company compared to the automotive giants, but they have certainly captured the agenda – so much so that OPEC had to comment that they did not believe Tesla would become successful. The reason Tesla scares the established community is that they are innovative in 4 different areas – all of them disruptive.

Not only are the Tesla cars innovative as a product with a great sustainability message, they also incorporate new innovative technology in storage, drive and information displays. At the same time Tesla uses a business model alien to the industry with ownership of the technology development and the sales channel and finally they think completely different to the incumbents:

”Tesla is not a car company, we are an clean energy storage company”

Elon Musk                             

With this in mind it is of vital importance that companies not only upgrade their labs, their scientists and their people to be able to innovate but also create an environment where innovative thinking is possible. Not just innovative thinking about products but also about business models and how the corporation is organised. Finally it is important to motivate employees to innovate – employee engagement is vital for innovation.

"Great innovation does not come from satisfied employees, 

it comes from fired up engaged employees"

A company as human as the people in it

Most companies operating in mature markets have similar value chains with limited sources of competitiveness – in these markets the employees become the key differentiating factor. Unfortunately many companies are experiencing that traditional models of motivation, such as financial reward and personal achievement is suffering in the post financial crisis era. The misalignment between the organisational goals of corporations and the individual aspirations is increasing. Business performance, risk management, efficiency, cost control, uniformity, lean is colliding with greater autonomy, variety, meaning, challenge and growth.

“Management is undoubtedly one of humankind’s biggest inventions“  Gary Hamel

A large group of employees are satisfied and stay with the corporation but they are not inspired to go the extra mile and create productivity gains. Gallup and other organisations have demonstrated a significant performance gap between engaged and disengaged employees. This is now making corporations increasingly interested in Employee Engagement.

As Employee Engagement is often seen as tactical task, is becomes the ownership of the HR department that has to fix the issue with Compensation & Benefits, Training and Recruitment peppered with some leadership training of middle managers. This is ignoring that most people, be it customers, employees and other stakeholders distrust and are demotivated by the current mainstream management philosophy.

Gary Hamel together with other prominent thinkers and business leaders has outlined 25 points that needs to be addressed in order for corporations to evolve to management 2.0:

Management 2.0

1: Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2: Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3: Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, political science, and theology.

4: Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5: Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6: Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.

7: Redefine the work of leadership.  The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

8: Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9: Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10: De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11: Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12: Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process in which share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13: Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14: Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. We need to discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15: Create a democracy of information. Companies need information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16: Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than the past.

17: Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18: Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19: Depoliticize decision making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization and beyond.

20: Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or-choices. What’s  needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21: Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22: Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.

23: Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective.
New management tools are needed for building and shaping complex ecosystems.

24: Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25: Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

This is undoubtedly a significant challenge for most corporations. However it is becoming obvious that the old models are not sustainable anymore. A new management model that creates engagement in all stakeholder groups can significantly disrupt existing large companies and markets.

Who dares to start?

What engages employees is not the same that attracts and retains them

The view of humans as resource often leads corporations to think that people are motivated in a uniform way and motivate the same in all circumstances. This leads to a narrow people and policy strategy centered on the classical functional areas of HR, ignoring that people are motivated differently according to their situation, their age, their tenure and what company they are working for.

The Gebauer Attraction, Retention and Engagement Model serves as a reminder to tailor people processes to the task at hand

It is also a reminder that the creation of Employee Engagement is not a low level process that can be automated in the HR department. Engagement needs to be designed into the fabric of the corporation, it purpose, the way it believes in people, the way the corporation plans, strategizes and communicates.

“Employee engagement is not about changing people, it is about changing corporations”

Employee engagement is not the responsibility of HR – it is the responsibility of the Corporation

Most companies intuitively know that satisfied employees, create satisfied customers and the result is a positive impact on financial performance. In management theory this is known as the service profit chain and starts with how the corporation treats its employees. This also used to be a key competitive differentiator – but not anymore. As all companies now have satisfaction ratings above 80%, satisfaction has become a qualifier for being able to compete – not an order winner.

Some companies have found out that engaged employees outperform non engaged employees significantly and have started to measure employee engagement.  That Employee Engagement matters was demonstrated in recent McKinsey study. It revealed that engaged white collar workers had: 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to their organisation and had 46% more satisfaction. Interestingly engagement also had a significant impact on blue collar workers: 27% overall better performance and 53% higher likelihood of positive career progression.

“More than 25% of US workforce is actively disengaged”

Often the results of measuring Employee Engagement are quit depressing as Gallup has found: In the US less than one third of employees are engaged and more than one quarter is actively disengaged. Senior management teams can choose to ignore the results or they can make it the responsibility of the HR function to go fix.

“31% of companies do not see Employee Engagement as an issue”

That management sees engagement as the role of HR was seen in the McKinsey study: 69% of companies surveyed identified Employee Engagement as a top priority for HR although only 43% had activities to measure and impact Employee Engagement. 31% of the companies did not see Employee Engagement as an issue.

 “Only 50% of HR’s activity is seen as value add by leaders”

Unfortunately employee engagement is not only the responsibility of an HR department, often designed to deal with operational and transactional issues rather than strategic. In the McKinsey study leaders only found half of HR’s activity to create value for the business. It is easy for the senior managers to blame HR forgetting that they themselves have created the boundaries and the rules for HR to operate under.

38% of HR professionals believe that their current Engagement actions will succeed

The view of management is shared by HR professionals themselves. Only 38% believed that their current actions in Employee Engagement would be successful.

A lot of HR activities have been designed to ensure a flow of people through the organisation with a focus on Analysis, Recruitment, Compensation, Training and Organisational Design. People seen as uniform objects responding to the same kind of motivational or demotivational activity is not something that creates engagement. Engagement is a very individual state for each employee. Engagement is also a state that connects to the corporation’s or department’s purpose and finally engagement is not only about what you do, but also how and why you do it.

The single most important driver of employee engagement has been identified as the behaviour and leadership skills of the Line Manager – not something that is fully within HR’s area of responsibility.

"Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox"

To significantly impact Employee Engagement it is necessary to either elevate it to top management level or to enable HR to participate at a strategic level. Employee Engagement cannot be fixed with the current HR toolbox.