Employee Engagement, Leadership
In the past, business success was all about size. Today, it’s all about speed. But with speed, comes change, and change, as we know, creates fear. People don’t like change because it’s disruptive. Employees begin to disengage as they struggle to define where they fit in or fear that they may become obsolete.
Disengagement doesn’t come cheap. Each year, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to improve an estimated $550 billion annual impact to the U.S. economy in lost productivity. The latest research by Gallup shows that nearly 68% of American workers are disengaged. Clearly, the dollars being thrown at this issue are making a paltry impact at best.
From productivity to profitability, from safety to shrinkage, employee engagement is not a philosophical exercise. It has bottom line implications.
Employee engagement is both potential and kinetic in nature. You likely recall potential and kinetic energy demonstrated by Wile E. Coyote in his thwarted attempts to capture the elusive roadrunner. Potential energy is stored by an object – perhaps a giant spring or over-sized mousetrap. The object is loaded and ready for action. Kinetic energy is related to the object’s motion – like a coyote arrow launched by a bow.
The same is true of employees. Engaged employees have both stored and activated energy. Stored energy comes from having both meaningful work and aligned goals. Activated energy is an employee’s ability to tap into his or her strengths and the learning and growth afforded on the job. Together, they make up four pieces of the engagement puzzle. Here’s a breakdown of each piece:
1. Meaningful work. Do your employees know the value your organization brings? Regardless of whether you are a non-profit or for profit enterprise, everyone in your organization should be passionate about your why. As Simon Sinek argues in his popular TED Talk, people want more than a paycheck. They want to be a part of something greater than themselves.
2. Aligned goals. Next, employees need to move from the why to the what. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning your strategic plan from theory into reality. Help employees see how their daily jobs impact goals such as profit margins or market share.
3. Strengths-focused. At this point, your employees are spring loaded and ready to move onto the how. Depending on whether you focus on improving employees’ weaknesses or leveraging their strengths, you can either thwart their enthusiasm or thrust them into action. Gallup research shows that the best way for employees to grow and develop is to leverage their natural talents to perform at their highest potential.
4. Learning and Growth. Employees under the age of 25 rate professional development as their number one driver of engagement, and workers up to age 35 rate it as the number two priority. As employees get older, their focus on development shifts away from mobility in favor of aligning a job with long-term career goals. Create an environment that gets people engaged and keeps them engaged by providing opportunities to grow and advance.
While 90% of executives understand the importance of employee engagement, fewer than 50% understand how to address this issue. Design an organization that thrives on turning potential energy into kinetic energy by focusing on the four pieces of the engagement puzzle.
Question: In which of the four pieces of the engagement puzzle does your organization excel? Where could you use improvement?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
“On the morning of April 7, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep.” Those are the opening words of Thrive, the 2014 New York Times Bestseller written by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of HuffPost.
That fall was her wakeup call. It caused her to re-think her definition of success and to seriously consider the impact of stress on her life.
Stress. It’s become such a prevalent part of our workdays that we’ve come to accept it as an occupational necessity. Yet, the long-term effects of stress can be lethal. Stress is a factor in 75% to 90% of all medical visits, and a factor in the six leading causes of death.
If you consider yourself a leader who thrives under pressure – if you work best under a deadline – you may be addicted to stress. According to Heidi Hanna, author of Stressaholic, “stress is a drug.” When we’re under the gun, stress releases dopamine and feeds endorphins to our brains which temporarily boosts performance.
As a leader, you have a responsibility to create a culture of performance. Over time, your time-crunched lifestyle can not only have serious health implications for you, but can have a debilitating impact on your organization. Here are two practices that will help you navigate the path between stress and success:
Be Mindful. Our response to stress is something we inherited from our ancestors. It was a fight or flight response that triggered an ‘all systems go’ reaction in the body. When faced with a sabre-toothed tiger, that reaction was designed to improve our chances for survival by releasing a burst of cortisol to mobilize the body for action.
Although the sabre-tooth is extinct, our flight or flight mechanism is alive and well. Any time we face a threat – a deadline, a conflict with a colleague, a financial struggle – our body goes into stress mode. It releases cortisol causing our blood pressure to rise and our heart to beat faster. But, without a physical release of fighting or fleeing, the cortisol builds up in our system. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we can train our brains to recognize these sensations in the moment, and learn to react calmly instead of letting out our inner caveman. It’s a practice known as mindfulness.
As defined by Dr. Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.” The next time you’re in a stressful meeting, try the ABC method of mindfulness. Become Aware of the stress rising in your body. Breathe deeply and consider your options. Then Choose thoughtfully.
Build Margins. Today’s leaders are incredibly busy. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of you. And no one seems to appreciate the fact that you are a finite resource. Perhaps you don’t even realize this yourself. You can’t be an effective leader if your calendar is crammed with back-to-back meetings and your inbox is full of unread messages.
“To be truly effective,” says leadership expert Dr. Tony Baron, “you need to make time for margins your life.” You need to create white space, or times of reflection so that information can be turned into knowledge, and that knowledge into insight. Sometimes, you just have to stop and let the information catch up with you.
Building margins in our lives helps us get over our feeling of scarcity that leads to stress. We start by stressing that we never have enough time, that we cannot make time to truly connect with our employees, that there is only so much to go around.
Margin is not something that just happens. You have to fight for it. You can start by creating a time budget like this one from Michael Hyatt to help you focus on what matters most.
Stress is not going away, but you don’t have to be addicted to it. Make the choice today to be mindful and build margins in your life to build the resilience you need to manage it effectively.
Question: How does stress impact your ability to lead effectively?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![My Top 6 Takeaways from the 2018 San Diego Women’s Week Leadership Conference]()
Leadership
Last week, I attended the Women’s Week Leadership Conference in San Diego. The annual conference caps off a week of events sponsored by the North San Diego Business Chamber designed to inspire, empower and connect women of all ages and professions in honor of Women’s History Month.
Over the weekend, I reviewed my notes and selected a few quotes or concepts to share with you.
1. Kim Coles, Comedian, Author, and Actress:
Instead of looking at your life as if things are happening to you, look at it as if things are happening for you.
2. Captain Corrie Mays, Blue Angel #8 USMC:
Don’t be the first person to tell yourself “no”
3. Lesia Cartelli, Founder, Angel Faces, People’s Hero of the Week.
The next time you think, “How in the hell am I going to get through ______?”, think about the gift that will come with the loss.
4. Janice Freeman, Singer, Top 11 Contestant on NCB’s The Voice:
When your questions go unanswered by those in power, be an “askhole”.
5. Mariel Hemingway, Actress and Author:
You can’t be conscious and aware in the present if you are burdened by the past.
6. Summer Stephan, San Diego County District Attorney:
Follow the fear instinct in your gut over your socialization to be nice.
Women’s Week Leadership Conference 2018 was the largest in the event’s 8-year history. With humor, compassion, power, and grit, these women shared stories of strength and the promise of a future of women who change the world.
Question: If you attended an event honoring Women’s History Month this year, what messages resonated with you?
Sheri Nasim is President and CEO of Center for Executive Excellence, a leadership consulting firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. She is the author of Work On Purpose: How to Connect Who You Are With What You Do.
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
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Leadership
In 2012, American lawyer and politician Reshma Saujani started a nonprofit called Girls Who Code. “Coding,” explains Saujani in her 2016 TED Talk, is “an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure.
Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you’re trying to build comes to life.
It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection. We immediately see in our program our girls’ fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect.
Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she’ll say, ‘I don’t know what code to write.’ The teacher will look at her screen, and she’ll see a blank text editor. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen.
But if she presses undo a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn’t get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she’d rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust.”
If you are a woman born in the 20th century, you can probably relate to the phrase – perfection or bust. Three years ago, I was asked to participate in the inaugural year of SUE Talks. These TED-like talks were designed to inspire women to embrace their inner SUE by sharing stories of how they were Successful, Unstoppable, and Empowering. Since the launch in 2015, dozens of women have shared their SUE Talk on stage. Several of those talks, like two of the examples below, are examples from women who struggled for years to break the code that was written about how women leaders should behave. The third is from a woman who defied social stereotypes at an early age, and took code-breaking risks that paid off.
1. Surfing for Business, by Cheryl Goodman. In the summer of 2012, Cheryl Goodman nearly drowned. But in the moments after a set of rogue waves separated Goodman from her surfboard and threw her repeatedly to the ocean floor, her fear was not of dying – but of embarrassment.
2. There Once Was a Good Little Girl, by Michelle Bergquist. In this warm and witty recount, Bergquist shares her struggle to outgrow the childhood poem that shaped her self-image, even as her young husband recovered from a severe stroke.
3. Shooting for the Moon, by Kathy David. One month before her 16th birthday, Kathy David had a nervous breakdown. After a 3-week hospital recovery, she went home and demanded emancipation. David changed the trajectory of her life starting with a risky interview for a banking job for which she had no experience.
As we prepare the next generations of women to become our future leaders, what codes are we writing for them about what it means to be a woman, and which must they break in order to make progress?
QUESTION: What self-limiting barriers have you had to break to become the best version of yourself?
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Leadership
Are you a member of this club? The one where you spend 2-3 mind-numbing days in an over air-conditioned conference room with no natural light trying to creatively solve your organization’s most challenging problems?
By the end of the last day, your brain is fried from wading through your corporate muck. You have nothing to show for your collective effort but 18 flip chart pages covered in mostly illegible scrawl. You walk out of the room blinking against the late afternoon sunlight as someone collects and folds the flip chart pages that you know may never be unfolded again.
Leadership retreats like these are not only exhausting for the participants. They can also be frustrating for the team that holds down the fort while you’re away. Leadership coach Paul Batz noted, “A mid-level employee recently told me, “There must be a big vault somewhere that holds all of the flip charts from fancy leadership retreats because we never see any change when the big shots come back from Florida.”
When my firm started offering retreats to help our clients work on their leadership and culture issues, we resolved to change the game. We’ve distilled some best practices from our experience that help our clients make the most of their leadership retreats.
1. Send mixed signals. In the seminal book Frames of Mind, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner proposed that people possess not one but several varieties of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Unfortunately, most meeting facilitators use only two or three learning modalities that connect with less than half of the room. Don’t limit your material to lecture, read, and discuss. Instead, share the key lessons through a variety of delivery methods such as simulations, illustrations, and small group discussions. Want to know which learning styles suit you best? Take this short assessment.
2. Get mixed messages. Thinking creatively in real time is hard. If the senior leader in the room shares his or her thoughts first, creative thinking usually grinds to a halt. No one wants to challenge or embarrass the leader. The group silently watches their opportunity for real change meet death by HiPPO (highest paid person in the office). Instead, break the room into small groups and challenge each group to work on the same problem. Then, ask each small group to present their results to the larger group. The group with the HiPPO goes neither first nor last. This creates space for divergence of thought, and a safe space for people to challenge the leader’s perspective.
3. Be pushy. Don’t let your retreat wrap without pushing for insights and breakthroughs. Listen for openings to challenge assumptions and hidden questions in what people are saying. If it’s not obvious which idea is ripe for dissection, look to the whiteboard or clusters of sticky notes posted. Is there a root-level assumption that could be challenged? Or if not challenged, clarified? Asking “How do we know that?” or “What if it weren’t that way?” will do one of two things: crack open more space for new ideas, or confirm and deepen the group’s understanding of the idea in question. Either way, you’ve gained something much more valuable than a collection of folded flipchart pages.
If your leadership team spends three days a year rafting down rivers together, you’ll eventually get good at rafting down rivers. Instead, spend three days a year working from well-designed material that offers each person a voice and guides the team toward shared growth. Your mid-level managers will gladly hold down the fort.
Question: What tips have you learned to help your team advance from a retreat?
Our team enjoys creating an environment where leadership development meets strategy execution. Allow one of our skilled facilitators to lead your team on a culture refresh: https://execexcellence.wpengine.com/corporate-retreats-and-workshops
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Leadership
Taking you from what is to what is possible. That has been our core purpose since Center for Executive Excellence was founded on this day in 2013.
Since launching our firm five years ago, we have served more than 300 clients, built a social media following of over 20,400, posted 155 blogs, and published 30 articles in Forbes and Huffington Post. If you’ve been part of our journey over the years, thank you. We have been honored to provide you with information and insights along the way to help you grow yourself and your team.
While our firm’s numbers are impressive, it’s the numbers that I have logged in the role as CEO of Center for Executive Excellence that I want to share. As I reflect over the past five years, here are some nuggets that I have collected in my role:
1. Partner with an accelerator. You can hang your shingle out and go completely solo, or partner with someone who’s built a reputation as a trusted consultant in your industry. I chose the latter. I have been honored to know our Co-Founder, Dr. Tony Baron, for over ten years. With a double doctorate in psychology and theology and decades of executive coaching experience with Fortune 100 companies, Tony has been my mentor, trusted advisor, door opener, accountability partner and friend. The first two clients we signed were a direct result of Tony’s stellar reputation in the field. Liftoff.
2. Upgrade your operating system. If I teach what I knew about leadership and culture from 2013, I would be working from an outdated playbook. I do two things to upgrade my professional operating system every day. The first thing I do is read. Before I open my Inbox, I scan Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Atlantic, and The Economist for trends, research, case studies, and theories about leadership, culture, and organizational purpose. I share an article that I find most interesting with my online community. The second thing I do is work closely with our Director of Marketing, Danielle Aguas — nearly 25 years my junior — to learn about trends, technologies, and perspectives from her generation. Working by her side helps me upgrade my operating system in real time as she discretely mentions things like, “Indeed is the preferred job search site over Monster.” Check. Thanks for the update.
3. Know what you don’t know (and find someone who does). In one of my favorite TED Talks of all time, ”If you want to help someone, shut up and listen”, Ernesto Sirolli suggested that he has never met an entrepreneur in the world who could “make it, sell it, and look after the money.” In Year 3, we realized that we knew how to “make it” and how to “look after the money”, but we didn’t know how to “sell it” at a scalable level. We brought in a consultant, Pat Valentino, who believed in what we were doing and who could help us define and capture a target market. Thanks to Pat’s expertise, we built a process to attract and retain clients that have resulted in exponential growth. Even coaches need coaches.
4. Take your own medicine. One of our core beliefs as a leadership consultancy and culture alignment firm is that we don’t ask our clients to go through something that we have not gone through ourselves. We recommend that our clients get clear about their organizational purpose because we know that purpose is a performance multiplier. We are inspired every day because of ours: Taking you from what is to what is possible. When our clients ask if we can help with strategic planning, we say, “yes and no.” We can help with strategic planning only if we can help with strategy execution. We use a balanced scorecard every year to determine our organizational goals, then align employee goals and track them quarterly to ensure that we know how what we do each day impacts our strategic goals. These are just two examples that help us directly relate to what we ask our clients to go through in their own leadership and culture alignment process. We’ve been there. We do that.
5. Celebrate your wins. Part of the work we do with clients includes StrengthsFinder training and coaching. Gallup’s strengths-based science is based on 5 decades of research and development. They’ve studied more than 1 million work teams, conducted tens of thousands of individual interviews, and coached more than 12 million people to discover their strengths and leverage what they do best. One of my top five strengths is Achiever. People with Achiever in their top five feel as if every day starts at zero. By the end of the day, we must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about ourselves. And by “every day” we mean every single day — workdays, weekends, vacations. While being an Achiever has certainly helped me lead the growth of our firm, it can be overapplied to the point of burnout for myself and my team. “Celebrate our victories” is actually written into our balance scorecard to remind us to stop, reflect, and appreciate our accomplishments as a team.
We can look ahead tomorrow. Today, we celebrate.
Question: What have you learned in the last five years that has helped you grow as a leader?
TODAY ONLY – To celebrate 5 years, we’re extending a promotional Re:Imagine Leadership Summit rate of $500! (that’s $185 off the regular rate). To register, click here or on the image below. Learn more about this one-day leadership event of the year.
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