I attended a breakfast recently and the guest speaker was Susan Scott, the author of “Fierce Conversations” and “Fierce Leadership”, two books I would highly recommend you read if you haven’t already.
She spoke about some of the ways we delude ourselves into thinking that we are good leaders and that our employees are engaged. She believes that we need to come out and be real in our conversations (with ourselves and others) if we want them to make a difference.
Unfortunately this happens all too infrequently in most organizations. There are too many “undiscussables” as she calls them. Issues that we all know exist but no one wants to mention them. The result is we all walk around deluding ourselves, working in a world of illusion, too afraid to face the truth.
Some of the sacred cows of leadership she targeted included 360 degree anonymous feedback (you don’t know who said it or what exactly the problem is so how do you fix it), accountability (which is really code for “who can I blame when this goes wrong”) and, of course, employee engagement programs.
I certainly agree with her take on employee engagement programs. Employee engagement shouldn’t be a program you follow, it should just be. Getting people to participate in surveys, have meetings to discuss what is wrong and make plans to change it don’t work.
You need to live employee engagement every day in everything you do. It’s not a program, it’s a way of being and if the leaders aren’t engaged they can’t engage anyone else!
Her view is that we need to put a “squid eye” to these practices and look for the “tells” . . . in other words, what about these concepts isn’t working, what is an illusion. She uses the example that most organizations pride themselves on being open and honest, wanting good communication with employees and clients but then proceed to do anything but that.
There is an optical illusion that gardeners use to make their patch look larger and more impressive. It’s called a Trompe l’oeil from the French term for “deceive the eye”. It is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions (borrowed that bit from Wikipedia, sure you don’t mind). Gardeners also use strategically placed mirrors to give the illusion that a garden goes on forever.
Whilst these techniques can be fun and fool some people, it quickly becomes obvious that you are being deceived. Now that might be OK in the garden, particularly when space or funds are limited, but I don’t think that a similar form of deception in the workplace is the path to employee engagement.
So what about your organisation or industry? What illusions do you have to work with? How do they prevent you and your people from being fully engaged? What happens when new people realise your culture is all “smoke and mirrors”? Do they see it as harmless fun, like a Trompe l’oeil, or are they disengaged by the realisation that they have been tricked.
Karen Schmidt describes herself as a workplace gardener who is on a mission to grow managers into engaging leaders. The seeds for her role as a speaker, workshop leader and facilitator were planted early in her career when she encountered disengaging managers and colleagues who were performing below their capabilities. In order to help people to not just survive but thrive at work, she made it her goal to grow herself into an employee engagement expert.More information can be found at her website: www.letsgrow.com.au
