I’m Getting Engaged!!!

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Getting Engaged: A Marriage of a Different Kind

Competencies: employee involvement, empowering others, engenders trust, collaboration and team building

Who benefits: all levels of management

Consultant Usage: organizational consultants, executive coaches, management trainers

What’s it about? There is a lot of talk these days about employee engagement.  Of course, much of it is rehash.  The importance of employees vis-à-vis productivity has been known at least since the early writings of Peter Drucker.

The real questions from this observer are (1) is the magnitude of employee involvement really understood and embraced and (2) do supervisors and managers really understand how do it?

There is an additional corollary to consider.  Even enlightened supervisors and managers of the dark ages (the dark ages being defined as any time proceeding this morning) may have the knowledge, the skill and the desire to engage employees in a useful way but are blocked or prevented from using their abilities due to archaic systems, quarterly economic living, or just plain unenlightened senior management.

There is a new book that promises to address the above two questions, providing both knowledge and “how-to” guidelines.  The book is Engaged: Unleashing Your Organization’s Potential Through Employee Engagement, published by Jossey-Bass.  Regular readers of this Blog know that I have a strong bias toward J-B.  They have never let me down and I believe this book lives up to my expectation as relates to this specific topic.

What impresses me most is the care the authors take to precisely define what employee engagement is.  A critical part of the answer is their use of the term “key stakeholder”.  I have used the term stakeholder in terms of employees for most of my career.  I have recognized and championed employees.  But it is doubtful that I ever embraced and in turn behaved as if a group of workers were the critical determinant of productivity outcomes.  I was considered fairly progressive, but was there more I could have accomplished if I were as fully committed as this book suggests.

There are several chapters of particular interest.  Chapter 4 is all about knowing how engaged your people are right now.  Chapter 7 struck a chord with me by addressing the roadblocks to creating an engaged workforce.  I liked Chapter 10 about engagement in tough times because that’s when pressures from above are greatest and our old habits are most likely to return.

This website supports competencies that are likely to help individuals and organizations grow and thrive.  A sampling of those competencies would include employee involvement, empowering others, engenders trust, collaboration and team building.  If those are competencies you are working on or are relevant and in need of development in your organization, then you may find this book quite useful.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.