The value of a free gift

Words: 295
Reading Time: 0 minute 59 seconds

To be of value a free gift need not cost you very much, or anything at all, but it must have some value to the recipient. If it does not have this quality then it will be seen as worthless – or worse – whatever it may have cost you.

A very knight of this soft and sea-girt isle is seeking to develop some land close to where I live. As part of the “planning gain” he is obliged to offer he proposes donating land to the local primary school. However, the amount of extra land the school gets will still leave it below the minimum area deemed necessary for a school of that size.

From the school’s viewpoint the offer is seen as minimalist and mean-spirited. Moreover, it undermines their case with the local education authority for greater facilities, because their shortfall would be marginally less. If they accepted the gift they would actually be worse off.

This is clearly a case where the giver of the gift has completely failed to see it from the other side of the table. The gift is a poisoned chalice. It neither recognizes, nor solves the school’s problem.

And the giver has also damaged his own image instead of enhancing it. Rather than painting a picture of someone generous, open-handed and willing to contribute to village life, he comes across as a typical Scrooge; self-interested and miserly.

It’s marketing myopia all over again.

Business suggestions, for him as well as others:
1) Find out what the recipients value, do not just assume;
2) Connect the dots by showing how it feeds their dreams;
3) Make it freely available; do not impose pre-conditions;
4) The gift will change the relationship, make sure it’s to your benefit;
5) Go the extra mile; it’s not that far.

Acting from a single purpose

Words: 277 Reading Time: 0 minutes 55 seconds

Recently I was surprised to see an experienced NLP Trainer remark on a lady that spent her time at a dancing class actually talking instead of listening to the music and practising.

He was struck by the fact that even though this lady had been told repeatedly that she should not talk during practice the first thing she did was talk about the not talking instruction!

And when he thought about how this lady behaved in class, he realised she seemed to be talking most of the time.

Well, of course!

The evident mistake is to assume that two people doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place will have the same motive. That doesn’t follow at all. In fact it is highly improbable given the diversity among people.

Those running businesses often fall into the same mode of thinking.

Owners are puzzled that their waged employees do not share their dedication and whole-hearted commitment to the enterprise.

Directors are astonished that the carefully designed, highly remunerative, shiny new incentive package has not had the motivational effect they expected.

And managers are surprised that the disciplinary code ensuring that clerical staff put everything in writing has not cut the error rate one iota.

Blanket policies and uniform procedures are the bluntest of tools. To improve the probability of connecting with an individual we need to know why they are here and what interests them. Only with that information can we hope to tap into their motivationally wellsprings.

I don’t know the talkative lady at the dancing class, but there’s a good chance she was there mainly for the company, not the La Caida.

Knowing What You Want

Words: 1,061 Reading time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Kelly was like a lot of teenagers; poised on the threshold of her future, she couldn’t decide. With so many opportunities open to her, how was she to know which one was the right one? Some of her teachers advised her to seek out more information. It didn’t help her. It multiplied her options without suggesting what her direction might be. Where was she to go from here?

You might expect me to recommend using a coach at this point, but where Kelly was concerned, I hesitated. When it comes to goal-setting most coaches conduct a mental version of the three-card trick. And their sleight of hand starts with the very first words out of their mouths – decide on your goal.

They have used that “D” word - decide. Kelly could now wait with baited breathe for all to be revealed. Alas, she would wait in vain. Nothing more is ever said about deciding. That particular stumbling block is deftly avoided as they move on to explaining how the decision should be worded to best effect; securing necessary resources; identifying obstacles; systemizing effort and … whoa!

The Starting Point
Let’s go back. Tell us about the start. How do we decide? What is it that tells us when we know what we want? Isn’t this is the key to the whole exercise?

If what we decide is decided very well, then the rest is merely mechanism for the most part. If we can decide powerfully, then the force will be with us…to coin a phrase.

When we are asked to name what we want, given a few minutes, most of us can come up with a list. Some of the items will be banal, some wild, some wonderful, some small and personal, some immense and municipal. If given more time we could even extend the list. But, out of all the things listed, how do we decide?

The Should-y Life
Part of the difficulty we face may be because, if we think about it, we rarely ask for what we want. Instead we live a life based on “should” and the “should” is bequeathed to us by others – I should exercise more, I should get a qualification, I should own a bigger house, I should get a better job, I should work fewer hours.

Getting from our shoulds to our authentic wants can be a problem. Recognizing that to be happy, we must live the life that we truly want to live, and that we are the only one who can truly determine what is right, doesn’t really help. How do we know what that is?

Even with an extensive list we may still not know what we want. Perhaps we don’t know all the options and what implications each might hold. Selecting just one want may exclude the possibility of fulfilling some other want, since they could be mutually exclusive.

Like buses, our wants often come in fleets. A person having just a single want is rare. Such a person may not exist at all. So, if we end up with conflicting wants – as seems likely – the question of how we know which one to pick stays with us.

What About Values?
One hypothesis is that values have great strength in determining human goal direction. Through our values we perceive important truths about life. These ideals are then reinforced by our emotions and feelings, and those sentiments create a vital passion that we hope to realize in our lives.

Some great human values include things like tolerance, openness, respect for the individual, and teamwork, which derive in part from some of the higher spiritual values like love, beauty, and truth. At certain points, the human and spiritual values come together in concepts such as selflessness, self-givingness, and gratitude

S.H.Schwartz carried out some extensive research and extracted six “universal” moral values, trustworthiness; respect; responsibility; fairness; caring; and citizenship.

However, I am not convinced that this helps people like Kelly a great deal.

A number of our wants may serve the same value – so how do we choose between them?

And any one of our wants may serve one or more of our values – so how does that help us know what we really want?

And should our wants cause some universal values to compete, how are we to rank them?

Hedonism
Steve Pavlina, often a source of inspiration, advises, “Treat goal-setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. Stay in the present and consider how this goal can improve the quality of your life right now. Not a year from now. Not five years from now. Not even tomorrow. Right now this very minute. Does it give you hope? Does it inspire you? Does it promise solutions to some current problems?”

As seductive as this might sound at first glance, all Steve has done is shift the timeframe. The questions raised earlier about mutually exclusive wants, conflicting wants and competing wants still remain.

Confession Time
Kelly is a person much like the rest of us. Most of us don’t know what we want. We only know what we don’t want, so we spend all our time moving away. And not knowing which path best fits our appetites, abilities, skills and personality doesn’t matter, because away is in any direction from the point of departure.

Once we are in motion, regardless of the drive, our perspectives will change. Whatever we start out wanting, or not wanting, may appear more or less attractive depending on where our journey has taken us.

Not knowing is OK. Pushing yourself to decide more quickly, more rationally, more firmly will result in beating yourself up to no good purpose.

In our task- and success-driven world, much is written about what people need to do and think, but very little about how they ought to be. To be truly fulfilled Kelly first needs to understand herself. Only when she does will she be able to follow Georgia Anne Geyer advice which is, “Follow what you love. Don’t deign to ask what “they” are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests, which change, but what you are and what you love…”

And even when you are sure you know what you want, you will still have no idea of what to cook for dinner.

Average or Amazing?

Words: 971 Reading time: 3 minutes 14 seconds

Under the heading ‘Ordinary or Awesome’ I expressed the view that what is awesome and what is OK is firstly conveyed and then established partly by the customer. If we want awesome and we keep getting ordinary, then customers have to accept part of the blame.

But only part of the blame, because there are at least two parties to every transaction. In one context we are customers; in another context we are the providers. And in the many cases where we are providers, whether that is in a commercial setting or not, we too are in a position to be average or amazing. As someone wrote many centuries ago, “by their fruits you will know them”.

Few people set out to do a deliberately bad job. Even the apocryphal husband, who deliberately drops dishes as a ploy to escape doing the washing-up, is doing the best he can with the resources available to him – his vision of how the world should be.

In the context of employment many workers are made to feel they can go “only so far” in the job that they do. The organisational view is that the value of the transaction in question – or just the implicit gain to the company – allows for only so much resource, no more.

This can be traced back to management taking a short-term, transaction-by-transaction, view. In the face of a complaint and taking the short-term view, management weighs up the margin on that particular transaction and uses it as the limiting factor in determining how much more they are prepared to do to meet what the customer wants.

That would be fine if the transaction was totally divorced from all subsequent transactions, but it’s not. It’s either one of a stream of potential transactions stretching into the future – the so-called life-time value of the customer, or it contains the advocacy potential of a “raving fan” gained through amazing products and astounding service, even if it’s a one-time deal.

Management that ignores the wider setting of any transaction runs the risk of making the insignificant hugely significant by throwing away a large amount of future business for the sake of “a few dollars more” in the very short-run.

Either that or, they are on a personal ego trip with an unknowable cost.

Amazing helps deliver the future, because ordinary – and certainly less than ordinary – is no longer good enough.

Authors like Jeffrey Gitomer make the point that mere satisfaction is hardly going to light up someone’s life and get them talking about you. Satisfaction is when it’s just OK. Amazing is when it’s in a totally different league.

Do not measure customer satisfaction; it’s taking you in entirely the wrong direction.

And good doesn’t cut the mustard either. As Michael Bungay Stanier points out, many organizations are focused on delivering ‘good’’. And they want to sustain the way things are, so that there's minimum interruption to that ‘good’’.

But good gets in the way of GREAT. To stop at just good misses everything that flows from amazing and it short-changes both parties to the transaction. As Jim Collins found, great is a matter of conscious choice. It’s no coincidence that Good To Great companies first got the right people on the bus and the wrong people off.

If organisations wish to thrive then Presidents, Vice Presidents, Chairmen, Directors and Executives need to recognize that amazing products and astounding service are only delivered by people who are encouraged to exercise the necessary attitude.

Anyone can do it, given the right mindset and appropriate encouragement. As businesses we need to build a sense of pride and place the magnificent ahead of the merely measurable, because measurable places a huge roadblock in the way of being amazing.

This is why.

We are told that we get what we measure. And the unfortunate inference is that we get only what we measure. So, to get something we always have to be able to measure it. Right?

We know that isn’t true. Great art, of whatever hue, cannot be measured; yet it is still produced. Compassion cannot be quantified, yet it is poured out in huge abundance around the world. Not always, but more often and to a greater degree than one would suppose for something that no one has attempted to gauge.

Humour, ambition, grief – all these human qualities are not susceptible to measurement, but still they come forth. And so do their opposites like oppression, cruelty and neglect.

Being amazing, whether in production, in customer service or in life does not mean making a vast and overwhelming effort every minute of every day. Good grief, most of the averages we get are so poor that being even just 1% more remarkable will put you into the area of amazing.

To be amazing is not a call to abandon everything that you do and everything that you are. On the contrary, it a call to deliver your full potential, to be everything you can be, rather than what someone else would keep you from being or doing.

What can you do more of that makes a difference, shifts the balance, has an impact, moves minds, adds beauty, changes the status quo, creates something that’s worth creating, improves life, shows love, moves things forward, stops waste, starts a dialogue and engages people?

Jump right in. There are opportunities all around you and any one of these suggestions will start transforming the average ending into an amazing outcome.

Of course, from time to time the desire to be truly amazing, to settle for nothing less, will go against the flow. But where the broad river of humanity is going is not what we should be aiming at.

“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Don't Get SMART

Words: 662 Reading time: 2 minutes 12 seconds

Read anything on setting goals these days and, sooner or later, you’ll be told that all goals need to be “SMART”. If not, then there is no hope for you. The goal is not well set and you have little chance of achieving it.

Here, at random, are some of those promoting that view:

‘Setting goals…means creating a written plan that includes reasonable and measurable long-term and short-term objectives. It means setting SMART goals.’ Annette Richmond

‘The SMART acronym is used to describe what experts consider to be "good" goal statements’ Rodger Constandse

‘A key determinant of an individual's success or failure in meeting a goal can be summed up with one small word (or, more accurately, acronym): S.M.A.R.T.’ Christina Morfeld

Baloney!

A big problem with being SMART is finding any agreement on what the acronym stands for. Here are a handful of alternatives for each letter:

S - specific, significant, stretching, systematic, synergistic, simple, self-owned

M - measurable, meaningful, motivational, methodical, memorable, maintainable

A - agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented, ambitious

R - realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented, resonating, responsible, reliable, remarkable

T - time-based, timely, tangible, trackable, thoughtful

If my maths is correct that gives 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3,125 possible combinations. Good luck!

I will look at each of these pompous precepts in a series of later blogs, but for now, let’s look at one example where SMART – whatever its constituent parts – offers no help at all. Indeed, it’ll probably get in the way.

Nic Rixon tells the story of a restaurant owner who was shot twice in the course of a robbery. As he enters A&E the restaurateur can see in the eyes of the staff that they don’t think he will make it. He is asked, over and over again by the medical team, if he is allergic to anything. But he can’t speak due to the trauma. As they wheel him into the Operating Theatre they ask him one last time and he gathers all his strength and yells, “Bullets!!!”

At that point everyone looks round and immediately everything speeds up. In that moment everyone’s belief changed from “he’s gonna die” to “we have a fighter”. The man survived.

Now that man had a goal. His whole existence turned on that one outcome. He did not have to get SMART about it – the goal was too important for that. He had neither the time, nor the inclination to work it all out, write it all down, set milestones and measure progress. Had he done so, he would probably be dead.

None of that was necessary. And, outside of sheer physical and surgical limitations, there was no doubt about the desired outcome.

For me that says a lot about goals, whether we have any hope of achieving them and what that may take.

When nothing else matters in the world other than your goal, then SMART is irrelevant. SMART is unnecessary. SMART may even delay you and make the goal less likely, rather than more likely.

The secret of reaching your goal is picking one that really matters that much to you.

More time would be better spent on finding a goal that, for you, is an all-consuming passion, instead of figuring out how to make some second-rate, minor league, lesser goal come about by using a version of being SMART.

The people who come to mind as being both memorable and remarkable do so because they devoted their life and their spirit towards achieving what we now regard as exceptional. And often, they are only inspirational looking back. At the time they did not plan and did not expect to arrive where they did. They were not SMART.

Some examples include Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa, the Beatles and Beethoven, Alexander the Great and Boudicca, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, Dante and Darwin.

It's the weight of our feelings that lets us know how important something is. We just have to be smart enough to recognize them.

Ordinary or Awesome?

Words: 596 Reading time: 2 minutes 0 seconds

Have you ever wondered how much influence we have over the experiences we enjoy? For example, in your daily interactions with people, what level of response do you get – ordinary or awesome?

Of course, in theory, we would all choose awesome. Reality is sometimes different. While awesome would be…well, awesome…it could take a little longer to deliver. Are we prepared to wait? Is ordinary all we wish to spare the time for, so we grab that and run?

If awesome means stating our demands and creating a bit of a fuss – a very unBritish thing to do – are we predisposed to avoid making a scene? In how many cases do we opt for a quietly dissatisfied existence?

A picture of what is awesome and what is OK is firstly conveyed and then established partly by the customer – you and me. Do we encourage better than average and a tendency to awesome by the praise, thanks and recognition we bestow? Or do we grunt and go when the goods and services obtained for our hard-earned money reach a barely acceptable level?

The service and attention given to customers in major retail outlets provides a useful case study. The move to pre-packaged and self-service has been inexorable ever since I was lad growing up in London.

Now, we can shop in most major chains without ever having to react face-to-face with any of their staff. Not only do we search out the items on the shelves, we even take the goods through an automatic checkout, pay through a slot-machine arrangement, bag all our purchases and take them to the car ourselves.

Oh, and please put the trolley back where you found it, our employees are too busy to be bothered with serving our customers. And our customers are so dazed and distracted by the mindless, windowless warehouses they now shop in, that don’t hardly complain.

A quick aside: have you ever noticed a clock in a supermarket? Thought not. Would you like to guess why?

How did it ever come to this?

If we want awesome and we keep getting ordinary we have to accept part of the blame. We have allowed conditioning and habituation to establish mediocrity as somehow normal. It doesn’t have to be, but nothing will change unless we do so first. If we keep allowing what we’ve always allowed, delight will decline as it’s always declined.

We can actively consent to being offered something more. And companies prepared to offer more will be well placed to capture the market. We observed this phenomenon with the advent of The Japanese TV. The TVs being made here and in the USA at the time were prone to breakdown. That was normal. A whole industry was founded on the need to repair them.

Then the famed reliability and quality of the Japanese offering became available. People voted with their wallets. They wanted awesome as soon as it became available. The TV repair industry was all but wiped out.

The same happened with motorcycles. Much the same has happened with cars.

If we know that accepting awesome is so much better than ordinary, then we need to expand the paradigm to other areas of our lives. Every interaction is an opportunity. The chance for change is never gone; we can begin whenever we wish.

We have a huge influence over the experiences we enjoy – often much more than we realise. Give someone else the opportunity, the room and the permission to be awesome. You may be surprised by the result.

And we can choose to be awesome too.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #9

Words: 702. Reading time: 2 minutes 21 seconds.

Tough times are regulated neither by the state of the economy, nor by the state of society. For an individual, tough times can occur on a much more personal level, such as injury, illness or lay-off, irrespective of the wider context. And while not actively sought by most, tough times can still be turned to advantage when they do show up – as an opportunity to recalibrate.

It strikes me that in tough times we need to separate the essentials from the clutter in our lives. In this setting clutter includes doing too many things, doing things for insufficient reasons and doing less productive things while more productive ways of investing our time are neglected; that’s besides the physical clutter of too much stuff we don’t need and stuff we do need being buried beneath a mess of other stuff.

Tough times give us the chance to be more resourceful, even though we often have fewer resources. We can learn to “live” off less - use fewer resources to live an even richer life.

Exactly what makes for a richer life turn on our beliefs and values. Getting clear on those is at the forefront of making the shift necessary under tough times. What really matters to us? What qualities do we want to have? By what principles would we be happy to live our lives? Who do we love? What do we love doing? The answer will be different for each of us, but that is no reason not to ask the questions.

If we want to make real change then there is a tough question for tough times: “What am I willing to change right now?” This is not another wish list, it’s an action point. It’s not something that might be nice to do in the future; it’s absolutely essential to the process of changing the present and it’s something that we can start work on this minute.

For the transformation to fully take hold might take a while. As the saying goes “Rome was not built in a day”. But it was built, which means that someone had to start by laying one brick on top of another.

We may not even know what the final edifice will look like. It is unlikely that the Roman builders started with a master plan. And even if they did, it is doubtful that what eventually emerged conformed to the initial set of drawings. But they did being and they adapted as they went along. And as any schoolboy will tell you, the rest is history – literally.

To help us get started we can begin talking frankly about the dangers and challenges we see facing us. We can start an honest dialogue that involves authentic give and take about tough topics, rather than engaging solely in social gossip that keeps real issues safely at arm's length.

We can seek greater clarity by asking people to explain what they mean, rather than just assuming we know. We can ask what sources they're using to get their information, check those for ourselves and compare them to others we learn about.

Once people get a taste of honest, good-natured, substantive discussion that doesn't come with an agenda, they tend to find it addictive especially when you don't do all the talking and none of the listening. Good listening leads to good ideas, especially when they come from those who are doing the heavy lifting.

When our world appears to be unravelling the healthiest and most restorative response is an open mind, honest curiosity and bold action. Embrace the unknown. That way, we can make permanent uncertainty a sustainable way of life.

From the dialogue a decision will emerge. That’s the whole point. And once a decision is made, we commit and go for it. If we never commit, all we will ever do is change course. Continual second guess is not allowed.

In time, if we have to change course, then we have to change course. Yet, the secret rule is that when the time for a decision arrives, then we decide quickly and, once the decision is made, we change our mind slowly – not the other way round. That just adds to the uncertainty.

Believing Is Seeing

We are so lucky. As consumers we are blessed with so many offers of help and assistance – so many that it’s difficult to choose between them.

· You can’t get better than a Kwik Fit fitter – they’re the ones to trust.

· Halifax will pay you 60 times more than the others could.

· L'Oreal – because you’re worth it.

…and, if all else fails, there’s always the DFS sale.

Aren’t these companies good to us?

In business we are equally fortunate. Wherever you turn there is someone offering to do it cheaper…or faster…or bigger…or easier. Just about anything you might – just possibly – regard as a problem can be instantly fixed by picking up the phone and inviting the Merlins of the market into your business.

Whether it’s finding more clients, getting your invoices paid, dealing with your staff, or optimising the internet there are a plethora of individuals, partnerships and companies ready and waiting with sure-fire panaceas.

How could you go wrong?

Likewise, if it’s your business itself that’s the problem, then never fear. There are any number of know-it-alls prepared to tell you how you should run it. Hell, for the right amount of money paid in advance, they’ll even do it for you.

In the quiet of the wee, small hours I sometimes wonder how we mortals so often get it wrong when gold-plated success is so easy to come by. Were we out of the room when they handed out all of the answers?

I doubt it.

Before those outside our business can even hope to make a contribution two things have to happen:

We have to believe that the suggestion they have to offer will actually work for us, and

We have to believe that particular firm or individual is the right one to work with us.

Whatever the ‘fix’ is, we have to buy into it ourselves, mentally and financially, before opening the door. Unless we first experience that mind-shift the ‘fix’ is likely to be doomed before the project even begins. Hesitancy in accepting the proposed solution is probably behind most of the failed consultancy projects. And most consultancy projects fail.

There is a threat to any business from someone who thinks they know better than you how to run it. Maybe they do know better, but it is still your business. However good their ‘fix’ is on paper, you will modify, undermine, sabotage and destroy it – perhaps subconsciously – if your pattern of beliefs do not shift accordingly.

So crucial are your beliefs and associated values that it would make most sense to start with those first, before you call the Merlins. At the end of the day you will probably find you can do without the outsiders, because you will have much better ideas yourself.

Mining Facts and Missing the Point

Despite appearances bad decisions are rarely made because people don’t have all the facts. In the political sphere the Treasury will have been fully aware of the impact on taxpayers of abandoning the 10% tax band. The Treasury may even have alerted Ministers. Nevertheless, although the facts were noted, plainly they were not given sufficient weight.

In the run-up to the present ‘Credit Crunch’ the financial institutions were fully aware of what they were doing and, one hopes, so were the regulators. But merely knowing the facts proved insufficient. Clearly, they did not understand the facts and the whole unstable structure was allowed to plough on into the crash barriers.

The Burmese Government will be well informed about the consequences of Cyclone Nargis and how badly their population has been affected. However, here facts are equally useless because they are being ignored.

Business is subject to the same purblindness when it comes to facts. Too often when plans go awry Governments call for Royal Commissions or Parliamentary Committees; business calls for internal audits or additional research. More facts will not help them regain the perspective they have lost.

When facts have failed to register, the continued pursuit of yet more facts painfully echoes Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in ‘Hard Times’. Gradgrind worships facts and figures. He puts his faith in abstract theories rather than direct observation of real people and real needs. The asymmetrical approach to human life of early industrial England, the denial of some of the basic needs of human beings, is being repeated in what some are pleased to call our post-industrial age. The structure of the economy may have changed. Too many of the attitudes live on. The cost in human happiness is great.

In Dickens’ Coketown, the needs of the factories dominate everything else. The factory hands work long hours in oppressive conditions, and they live in cramped houses. Their lives are monotonous; every day is exactly like every other day, just as all the houses and streets look alike. In Coketown, there is a strict uniformity in everything. The workers have little time off to relax and enjoy themselves. Does that sound familiar?

Employees and those running their own businesses will recognise the close parallels. Today we still struggle with long hours, astronomic housing costs, poor diets and an existence where evenings and weekends are nothing more than the exercise yard of our own imprisonment.

Each business, each day, has the opportunity to step back and take a clear-eyed view of the workplace we have built for ourselves. If it is not as we would wish it, then we can change. If you think it isn’t as easy as that then you will be setting yourself up to fail as a self-fulfilling outcome. Give real change a try. Take action. You may surprise yourself.

It Takes Two to Tango

Employee engagement, in various guises, is among the new buzzwords of recent years. To be more accurate, it’s a repackaging of old ideas by the consulting industry. Under a shiny “NEW” label the consultants have found yet another way of exploiting corporate insecurity and thereby picking its pockets.

There appears to be only circular definitions of what constitutes an engaged employee. The CIPD defines employee engagement as “a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract.”

In short, an engaged employee is any employee who is engaged. It’s a matter of attitude.

Today’s employers are encouraged to recruit for attitude; train for skill when searching for new employees. That approach saves the job of instilling an attitude seen as ‘right’ by the employer in question, but it only goes so far. Whatever attitude is exhibited during the recruitment process it will only be retain if the employee’s circumstances are conducive.

To a large extent that depends on the employer, but it can equally be affected either by changes in the employee’s private life, or by shifts in their personal beliefs and values. Over the employee’s private life and over beliefs and values the employer has little or no control. And rightly so. An employment contract is an exchange of time and skills for money and associated benefits. It is not entry into a closed religious order.

Most of the literature on this subject talks about measuring employee attitudes and conducting regular employee attitude surveys. Any organisation that needs to do that has to raise an immediate red flag in its own mind. If concern for the attitude and mindset of employees is not part of the daily interaction in the company, if senior management has actually lost touch with how employees think and feel, then there is an immediate problem.

Organisations that have a high proportion of employees who are unengaged or disengaged are offered various approaches to reverse that situation. These include:
• giving the opportunity to feed views and opinions upwards
• keeping employees informed about what is going on
• seeing that managers are committed
• having fair and just management processes for dealing with problems.

Perhaps more telling – and rarely mentioned – is the sobering process of the organisation examining its own value as expressed in its formal and informal manner of doing things. What message is the organisation really giving to its employees (and its customers)? Can people be reasonably expected to sign up enthusiastically to such a message?

This search for paragons of virtue among employees has an interesting parallel in the education sector. In England, when a pupil truants from school, we ask what is wrong with the child. In France, they ask what is wrong with the school. If you are an employer looking for greater engagement then be prepared. If it is absent then the cause may lay uncomfortably close to home.

Clinging to the Wreckage

UBS, Switzerland's largest banking group, has just written off $37bn (£18.7bn) of its sub-prime investments.

Following an internal investigation demanded by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, the Swiss version of our own dear FSA, it admitted a series of mistakes including inadequate supervision, poor risk management and a failure to react quickly enough when the sub-prime market started crumbling.

UBS was so focused on racking up ever larger profits that it “forgot” every silver lining has a cloud.

This is its first full-year loss (Sfr4.38bn for 2007) since its came into being 10 years ago following the merger of Swiss Banking Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland. Planned job cuts are rumoured to run to more than 3,000 people.

As one might expect of the Swiss, those in charge have shouldered their full share of the responsibility and suffered the inevitable consequences. The Chief Executive, Peter Wuffli, was ousted in July last year, followed by the CFO, Clive Standish and the Head of Investment Banking Huw Jenkins. This month it was announced that the Chairman, Marcel Ospel, would not seek re-election.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, RBS came up with a further £5.9bn of write-offs on bad debts yesterday having already declared a £1.7bn write-down of sub-prime investments in December. However, you would search in vain for any admissions of abject personal failure by top management, let alone a principled resignation. In any industrial company the chairman and chief executive would both have been fired and forgotten by now. Not so with RBS.

Apparently RBS's has two excuses: (1) things have changed, and (2) it didn't foresee quite how bad things would become. Well, isn’t that what leaders are paid to do? Doesn’t leadership imply vision – the ability to see and foresee, rather than stumbling over the truth, picking themselves up and hurrying off as if nothing had happened (Churchill). And if they fail to uphold their end of the contract should that contract not be properly terminated?

According to Sir Tom McKillop, the RBS chairman, the board is unanimous: the current team is the one to take the bank forward. On what logical basis should that be the case? Those that have engineered dramatic expansion are rarely adept at managing either a holding operation, or retrenchment. Those call for very different skills. Endangering the ship when it’s in stormy seas, based solely on your capacity in calm waters, constitutes reckless conduct in anybody’s book.

Marianne Jennings, Professor of Legal & Ethical Studies at Arizona State University has identified the belief by management that they are so brilliant and innovative that the mundane rules of accounting, corporate governance and even basic economics do not apply to them as one of the seven signs of ethical collapse. RBS fits the bill.

Of the five leadership traits identified by Kouzes and Posner’s research that was done for the book ‘The Leadership Challenge’ namely:

~ Honesty
~ Forward-Looking
~ Competency
~ Inspirational
~ Intelligence

RBS seems to fall short on the first three.

If the Swiss banking fraternity have the principled leadership qualities needed to do the right thing then those privileged individuals on this side of the Channel should exhibit the same qualities.

Your Credibility is Fragile

The spectre of a major employer saying one thing and doing another rises again as Shell prepares to cut 3,200 jobs.

In the past Shell have explicitly recognised how important their employees are to the continued success of the enterprise. In May 1997 Cor Herkstroter, President of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, delivered a speech highlighting the need to “safeguard the interests of shareholders, our staff and others who work with us around the world”.

He went on to declare “our most important asset is our people.”

One wonders why a company would consciously and deliberately choose to dispose of such a key resource.

Any professional stands or falls, not by their technical proficiency, but by their credibility. If the President of a company states publicly and unequivocally that, “we are linked by our shared values - integrity, honesty and respect for people - and our belief in the importance of trust, team working, professionalism and pride in what we do,” then all stakeholders, including the employees, are being invited to accept it as a fact.

It serves nobody, least of all the business community in general, to have those values cynically cast aside in pursuit of ephemeral profits.

Important assets and core values persist over time. Cor Herkstroter recognised that too: “I believe that one of the Group's greatest strengths has been our ability to take the long view - even when this has been unfashionable.”

May 1997 was over ten years ago. Things do move on. But these were not passing sentiments of the moment for Shell. The Shell Report 2001, a detailed and glossy exercise in CSR, affirmed: “our achievements depend on the efforts of Shell people all around the world. Their expectations drive our commitments.”

The section boldly headed ‘Business Principles’ continued the theme with the assertion that “It is recognised that commercial success depends on the full commitment of all employees.”

Credibility is hard to accrue and easily damaged. Not having credibility is tough, but professionals can earn it, painstakingly, over a period of time. However, having once had it and then lost it puts the professional in a much worse position. The loss tends to be permanent as staff, suppliers and customers adopt the understandable habit of taking everything you say with an appropriate amount of salt. As Alfred Adler recognised: “Life happens at the level of events, not of words,” or, as the Chinese have it: ‘Talk doesn't cook rice’.

One can point to the performance of Shell over the years and argue whether it represents success or failure and whether that gives them commercial credibility. That is not the point. Shell have shed staff before this latest proposed trance, yet there is no way of knowing what the outcome would have been had they refrained from offloading people. However, if one accepts their own evaluation of the basis of their success, their staff are clearly and plainly a crucial ingredient. Therefore it follows – as night follows day – that sacrificing any of this valuable resource has to be detrimental to their outcomes.

Shifting those staff to outsource partners does not secure for Shell the same benefits it once had. The staff in question will be expected to identify with the interests of their new employer, not Shell. There will no longer be that “full commitment” to Shell that it once published and promulgated as a determinant of commercial success. Sorry boys, you really cannot have your cake and eat it.

While I believe that people are an indispensable part of any organisation’s success – simply because without people there is no functioning organisation – it is not necessary for you to share that view. What is essential is to survey your past declarations, examine your own values, assess what will deliver success and act in accordance with those tenets at all times. As a professional your principles are not expensive, they’re priceless.

“If your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.” ~Henry J. Kaiser