PART I: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we faced the difficult truth that most organizational stated cultures are aspirational at best and often do not reflect the true performance environment that each of us walks into each day. So, it was time to “get real” and identify whether our performance environment actually reflects our stated culture. Trust me, if there is a disconnect then it will be very difficult to enhance and sustain organization-wide employee engagement. This week we are highlighting for you one of our client’s path to enhanced engagement and their efforts to align their culture and their performance environment.
Destination Success – For this organization it was time to CARE!
They are a successful oil and gas organization located in Houston, TX that has been in existence for over 130 years, but like most companies in this industry, it is having to reimagine itself to effectively compete for the future. As part of building a new foundation of success they brought in a new CFO with a new vision for the Finance and Accounting (F&A) function.
“We want to move from completing tasks to creating a meaningful purpose. Evolve from delivering “walls of numbers” to providing great insight and impact from those numbers, and to come in each day with the intent to make each other each other great at what we do.”
The F&A organizations' previous year employee engagement scores lagged behind the rest of the organization and where the signs around the building said "We Are Bold" and “One Team,” this CFO saw an organization resigned to the status quo and would over hear statements like “We have always done it that way.” Instead of “One Team,” he experienced functional silos within the group and rather than strategically partnering with the executive and operations teams they were relegated to a back-office support, executing daily tasks and delivering those walls of numbers! Sound familiar? We find pockets of this in just about every organization!
This CFO reached out and asked us what options were available to change a 130-year-old performance environment. Our answer: You and the organization need to CARE more. You need to provide greater Clarity and Alignment to your F&A vision and the aspirational culture the organization is promoting, then we can focus on the necessary Resources to assist in the evolution, and finally determine what it will take to Enable and sustain this performance environment transformation leading to that ever illusive, greater employee engagement.
We teamed up with the CFO and his leadership team on this CARE journey, currently conducting interactive, functional team workshops designed to define what “Bold” is and is not, as well as what “One Team” means and what it will take to enable that. These sessions layout specific action plans including the formation of employee engagement teams that, from the front-line employee level, own the go forward F&A vision and which partner with leadership to redefine the performance environment. We are creating and communicating with greater Clarity and actively gaining organizational Alignment in a number of ways including the workshops and creating a next generation performance environment where every F&A employee is actively leading where they are.
Next week we will highlight the R (Resources) and E (Enable) in the CARE model and how this organization is redefining the work they do, how they do it, and most importantly, the “why” they do it, tied to a meaningful purpose, not just a task to be completed!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The Evolution of Organizational Performance: Part Four
Part Four: The Future of Organization Performance - Now
We conclude our blog series on the evolution of organizational performance by looking at the future of performance and how we can align our actions, activities, and behaviors to stay ahead of this complicated and complex landscape of organizational performance.
Let’s first quickly recap our journey to date by listing key characteristics and positives takeaways of each era, as well as a future comparative look.
The future is not developing 1-3-5 year plans. It is about connecting and inspiring people to move and think with you, challenging the status quo, and creating an environment for fast cycle, agile, real time performance. As leaders, we can no longer depend on directing and controlling. We must enable and facilitate success and performance and finally, even though your title may not be manager, our role is to develop, cultivate and lead the environments of performance, accountability, personal/team performance, and disruptive, positive change.
Create team learning workshops, teaching them how to set expectations and review their ongoing performance with their leader each month. Cultivate a performance environment that is caustic to negative people, not where negative people make the performance environment caustic to everyone else. And finally, develop your team to lead change, think disruptively, and always challenge the status quo.
You see, the future performance evolution starts with you today….develop the leader in everyone by making a LeaderShift in you.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The Evolution of Organizational Performance: Part Three
Part Three: A Change in Focus - The 2000's to Today
Our journey through the evolution of organizational performance has taken us from WWII command and control top down driven leadership, to the age of management of 70’s, 80’s and 90’s where change management, performance management, management by objectives, KPI’s and dashboards were just a few of the performance drivers. As you can still tell in today's climate, most anything and everything that could be measured and managed was, including people. Both the command and control and scientific management era's created performance environments of employee compliance, not employee commitment and engagement.
However, in the 2000’s, a few organizations started to focus less on productivity measures and more on the consumer and creating a different customer experience. Organizations like Starbucks, Netflix, UBER and many others created unique and differentiated customer experiences and changed the competitive landscapes in their respective markets. While operational excellence and standard operating practices are crucial, the key performance focus is on delivering and enhancing the customer experience.
In addition, it's during this era you have seen organizations develop mission and vision statements and many adopt organizational core values. The challenge to proclaiming mission, vision, and values statements is actually staying true to those. In fact, in your organization's, how many people know what they are, and do they support and drive the daily actions and behaviors of all (or at least most) of the employees?
We've also begun to hear about the importance of “employee engagement” in delivering outstanding customer service. So enter in the annual or bi-annual employee engagement survey and the efforts to enhance employee engagement by most organizations today. The challenge is turning that survey feedback into sustained, year over year, increased employee engagement and commitment. Most organizations, unfortunately, fail to move the mark.
In fact, according to the Gallup Organization’s 2017 American Workplace Study, employee engagement has not moved over 2-3 percentages points in the last 18 years.
Yes, you read that right, the last 18 YEARS!
This leads us to where we find organizational performance today. The foundation is set, but what is the next evolution in organizational performance? Next week we explore the future of purpose-driven, employee engaged, leader supported, organization enabled performance.
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For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The Evolution of Organizational Performance: Part Two
Part Two: The Golden Age of "Management" - The 70's, 80's, and 90's
As we mentioned last week, the performance environment that people experience and work in every day has a profound impact on both personal and team engagement. We started this blog series exploring when and where “command and control” leadership began and the impact that style of leadership has by creating more of a compliant performance environment than committed and engaged.
Just on the heels of command and control leadership came the era in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s of “scientific management” where everything from time, quality, and yes performance, was managed. There were hundreds of books, tools, and theories on how to “manage” your time. You managed work by creating MBO’s (Management by Objectives), and your personal performance was managed by end of year ratings on a “bell curve” or “forced ranking systems” often referred to by many at G.E. as “rank and yank."
Now don’t get us wrong, measurement is a good thing, but taken too far and not having the right focus tends to create a barrier in today’s complex business climate and becomes a de-motivator, significantly impacting overall employee engagement for the worse. Just ask anyone if they think the performance management process in their organization is effective today at enhancing performance and increasing engagement? I venture a guess of highly unlikely.
According to Reuters, 4 out of 5 U.S. workers are dissatisfied with their job performance reviews and want them to better reflect their work.
With the dynamic and rapid pace of organizational performance today, if you are managing change and not leading it you are behind! If you are a leader still reviewing performance and not enabling and pursuing performance, you are managing not leading. And if you are an individual contributor not proactively leading your own performance discussions and talent development you are left to the mercy of others to review and manage you.
So, we ask once again, are there remnants of the “scientific management” era negatively impacting your organizations performance environment? If so let us know and we can assist in evolving your personal and organization’s performance environment. Remember, no one wants to be managed and if you don’t believe us, just ask them!
Next week, Part Three - The 2000's Through Today.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Performance Environment: The Key to Employee Engagement...or Disengagement
Organizational culture, and more importantly, the prevailing performance environment that defines that culture, is absolutely a key driver to employee engagement. It is that performance environment that each of us walks into and experiences each and every day that has a profound impact on our personal and team’s commitment, engagement, and results.
Every organization has a performance environment that defines the organization either by design or, often, by default. We have found in our client work that often history and legacy play a big part in the shaping of an organization's performance environment. Over the next three weeks we are going to explore the evolution going on in organizational performance and as you read this blog series you can begin to identify what historical or legacy influences might exist and how these influences are impacting your work environment and employee engagement throughout your organization.
The Evolution of Organizational Performance: Part One - “Do What I Say”: The Emergence of Command and Control
Have you ever experienced a top down, command and control, task focused, highly employee compliant work environment? This type of leadership style and performance environment can still be found today in many organizations or departments. This style has its roots back to the WWII and Industrial Age where decisions were made by a select few and the rest of the organization followed management directives which cultivated a performance environment of compliance (not very engaging, to say the least).
Fortunately, most organizations and leaders are evolving past this, finding that command and control, while highly effective in a past era, is becoming a barrier to sustained organizational performance and has a very negative impact on overall employee engagement. It limits productivity and often creates an environment of blame, justification, and “not my job” can be heard throughout.
This environment can be tough to change if the top of the organization doesn't see (or won't see) the detriment it causes. And year over year financial or bottom-line success in this environment can make it even tougher since past results tend to dictate future behaviors. However, with only 33% of employees actively engaged at work, this type of performance environment leaves much to be desired. So start today.
While not everyone can be at the top of an organization to make the change easier, we can all start right where we are. By actively working to engage those around you with questions like "How can I help?" and "Why don't you take the lead on this?", the old plan, direct, control, and manage model can be flipped to inspiring, enabling, facilitating, and developing. In doing so employees move from compliance to committed and engaged. It has been shown time and time again in our clients that, while the old model can still show bottom-line results, an engaged workforce exponentially grows that success!
This next week, we are going to continue exploring the evolution in organizational performance by looking at the impact the Scientific era of Management of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s has on employee engagement today and into the future.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Sustaining Your Engagement Growth
On our path to engaged learning, we were immersed in knowledge and we engaged in action and activities. Finally, to sustain our growth and turn learning into competency and results we must find opportunities to continually reinforce our knowledge, actions, and activities. All Cornerstone Learning experiences have ongoing reinforcement built in! From audio and video blogs, webinars, coaching or monthly tools, depending on the learning experience, you will be continually provided with opportunities to reinforce your learning and new skills and assist in your long-term term growth and development.
We encourage you, for any and all of your development activities, to create ways to reinforce by further immersing and expanding your knowledge in the area of your development focus. Find new videos, articles, white papers, and books that broaden your knowledge and enhance your perspective.
Develop measures of progress for yourself if none exist. Depending on the content area and level of learning, find ways for others to provide you real-time feedback on your efforts. Create tools and visual reminders of your new learnings that trigger your thinking and activities on a daily basis. Bring in your reinforcements! When you do you will see exponential returns on your learning investment.
To recap, engaged learning is getting immersed, actively engaging, and finally, continually reinforcing. Because learning is in our name, and is our passion, we want to ensure your learning investment sets you apart and takes you to a whole new level of growth and impact, both personally and professionally.
Don't wait, get engaged in learning today!
To get engaged in our five core leadership skills, check out our Lead Where You Are Passport! It contains courses and other resources focused on accountability, change, performance, relationships, and leading with purpose. And best of all, we're always adding new content, so the learning never stops!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.