Happiness at Work: 3. A Discussion with iOpener, Oxford, England

Note: this is the third in a series of posts on happiness at work. See #1 here and #2 here. For iOpener’s blog, where you can find a longer version of the discussion, please go here.

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It has been quite a wild week trying to advance the progess of my second book, while fielding some deliciously challenging questions and comments from the people at iOpener, an organization dedicated to Happiness at Work and based in Oxford, England. I have learned a lot about their approach, and I think perhaps they have learned a bit about engagement. In the end we have a lot in common, which is a big point in itself. One of the biggest things I took away from the discussion is that the happiness at work people are filling a very important need which we in employee engagement tend to neglect: helping people to be able to engage. We talk a lot about what we can do to create the environment in which people want to, choose to, engage. But whether they do or not is sort of inside the black box of the human psyche. We know that personality is involved, which doesnt make for a good outcome if we hire the wrong person who is incapable of engaging: good luck on changing a personality, right? But there are also skills, there are mindsets, which iOpener rightly points out we need in order to fully engage. This means that we can increase the chances of engagement by training people to have a particular mindset, and I for one am all in favor of that. Having said that, I do not agree, as you will see below, that happiness is a breakthorugh of the order of sliced bread or color TV. In some ways the happiness people talk as if they have re-invented and replaced engagement and its performance correlates….but have they really? They say a person can be engaged, even fully engaged, but miserable and wanting to leave. That that person needs to be happy as well, to be fully engaged. But my understanding of engagement includes a strong positive emotional connection above all else, to the organization, to one’s boss, to co-workers, to the job itself. Absent that, a person can perform but in a sort of empty, emotionless way which does not, for me, indicate full engagement. Wanting to leave, how engaged can you be? Not very, in my view. I am including my conversation with iOpener’s Dr. Simon Lutterbie below so you can see how we went back and forward and how I countered the idea that engagement is just re-packaged high performance. Anyone who knows me will guess that I did not take that comment lightly!  Here is what we said, with Lutterbie’s comments in italics:
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Simon this conversation gets more and more interesting.  Don’t worry at all about being  “controversial”, I think that is the way that knowledge moves forward, don’t  you?  As long as people listen to each other, of course!  And as I listen I begin to understand what you guys are all about and how it relates to engagement and other things.  Please also refer to what I said yesterday to Jessica on my own blog, which is that I am not an apologist or evangelist for engagement, have teased people in the field  quite a bit, and enjoy doing so (they respond in kind, all part of the fun).  It has more than a few shortcomings….like most approaches do.   There is more than one path to God and more than one path to an  engaged…or happy… workforce!

OK let me go with your format of quoting me then commenting.  Here is what you said:

What we are interested in is the mindset that make employees feel motivated to excel at their jobs,  gives them the energy and enthusiasm to perform at their best, and the resilience to overcome challenges.

 This is very important, and in the employee engagement (EE) field it is often overlooked.   There is a sense among EE practitioners that as long as conditions are right at work, then people will engage, but this is not true.  I have mentioned to you that personality is a big factor, and while I do see some people working on this, there aren’t enough.  Personality is hard or  impossible to change of course, so that has some extreme hiring implications.  So I believe that we need more of what you are doing, to give people the skills they need to be happy at work, to engage, whatever we call it.  My only question here is the age old one of nature vs. nurture:  what % of a person’s ability to engage/be happy at work is nature and what % nurture.  You muddy the waters a bit with your piece on DNA and seem to move the argument back to nature!   But like you, I do think people can change,  even when their DNA points them in one direction.

Component 2 is a feeling state. It occurs when the worker feels good, motivated, energetic, and enthusiastic. Component 2 is none other than happiness at work!  Engagement may be an acting state, but it  requires a feeling state. You can create the conditions for engagement, and you can give an employee all the resources they need to fully engage. But unless  that employee is happy at work, the employee may not choose to engage.

 I had said that when conditions are right at work, then people can make the choice to engage (“Component  2”).  What I didn’t say there, because I was not attempting to discuss the full blown psychology of engagement, was  that there is an intermediate step, and that is an emotional one, or “feeling  state”.  Cary and I did this is in our book though, where we explained that when the “psycho-social” conditions are right at work (everything from the physical environment to how your boss treats you and much much more), then people experience a sense of high morale (or “well being”) which then translates into the behaviors we now call engagement.  So now you can see the feeling state more clearly in this model, the emotional connection.  One of the most critical conditions we are talking about here, confirmed by much research, is the boss-worker relationship.  This has been tagged at  explaining more than 80% of the variance in the engagement level of workers, an amazing number.  So the emotional connection we feel is in relationship, not just to the job itself but to the people we are with day in and day out and how we are treated by them.  Now here is where we start to disagree:  Component 2 is not just a feeling state, far  from it!  People react to the conditions at work with a feeling state, but the conditions at work are the crucial driver of that feeling state;   those myriad conditions include the boss, but also all those pesky HR things like performance reviews (yuk!) and incentive pay programs, etc.  Morale and EE practitioners and consultants like me are very involved in those conditions at work, sometimes referred to under the useful heading of corporate culture (“the way we do things”).  With 80% plus of an individual’s engagement at work depending on that key boss-worker relationship, we had better see where the good and bad bosses are, and move actively to decrease the number of the latter and increase the former, and this we begin to do through the extraordinarily powerful methodology of surveys.

And when someone works to build engagement, they’re really just working to build high performance.  Which is great. But it implies that  ngagement isn’t a unique approach, it’s  just another name for what people have been doing for years.  

Oh Simon methinks you have just been “hoist with your own petard” as our own Will Shakespeare said.  I am not denying it for engagement, since I have made the same exact comments about it.   In other words,  engagement took the decades-long concept of morale, added some nice flavoring,  microwaved it and served it up as fresh!  But the same could be said for you guys:  your definitions of happiness at work are essentially what people have been saying for a long time represent the engaged worker.  The exact list which you cite for high performance is what you aim for, right?  So you have taken high performance or engagement and re-packaged it as  “happiness at work”.   You are teaching people to be “engaged”…which as I said before is a great thing and very necessary.  Look I am old enough and have been in this business long enough that there is not much new under the sun.  This happens all the time.  Engagement happens to be a word which excites people, they can use it easier than orale (she is “engaged” but not she is “moraled”), they can use it about customers, not just employees etc.  Having said this I will say that I think engagement (like happiness at work, as you describe it) goes beyond performance because it has a strong positive emotional component.   So I would disagree that engagement is simply performance, because for me, engagement means you are emotionally connected in a positive way and that is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, you perform so above and beyond. As you would say, you are happy. As Jessica said on my blog yesterday, she knows CEOs who are “engaged” but are miserable.  I would not really define them as engaged, I would say they perform, that’s ll.  The level of performance I am talking about simply isn’t possible when you have one foot out the door.  OK maybe for a very short time, but this is a burn out situation which I have seen several times.

So, food for thought right?  I returned your controversial (and somewhat correct!) statement with one of my own.  But I like the tone of this conversation Simon, and appreciate it. This is also very useful for a writer and consultant like me, because it sharpens and clarifies the arguments for and against key things in my field.

best to you,  David

LinkedIn profile/contact: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbowlesphd

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10 Things I Want To Hear About on Morale and Engagement at SHRM11

Like a lot of people I am excited to be going to SHRM’s annual conference and exhibition this year in Las Vegas, Nevada and to have a chance to blog from there as I did last year. With so many sessions, I have to focus, which is easy for me with my field of interest and the way the sessions are organized. So I can take in morale and engagement all day long, meet some of the great presenters, take their pictures and blog about their offerings. Having said that I want to make a plea for some breakthroughs this year, in that we need to go beyond the meat and potatoes stuff which has been done so many times. Let’s see if some of the speakers can reach down into their creative psyches to come up with answers to questions which this part of HR and general management needs to answer. Here are some of those which come to mind:

–we think of the US as a very open society in many ways, which is a basic building block for worker engagement; yet we only have average engagement levels according to most who measure this…..why is this?
–the UK is even worse, its engagement levels were recently described by my former employer, HayGroup, as “the worst in Europe”….why is this? Is this a sign that social class issues have a big effect on worker engagement potential in a given society? Do other societal and national cultural factors have a big effect on engagement of workers?
–even if there are societal factors which affect engagement, can universally applicable activities create work environments in which workers choose to engage at high levels, almost no matter the society in which those workers live and work?
–we have heard a lot about “happiness at work” lately; some even say we need that instead of engagement. But is “happiness” enough? Can you prove that it drives performance more than engagement? What happens when the “happy” worker meets the boss from hell?
–executive compensation levels, especially in the US, are back at strastopheric levels. Does your organziation consider this when it approaches worker morale and engagement, like Whole Foods and BMW do? Does your CEO truly get “paid for performance” like the rest of the workforce? What impacts do these things have on engagement levels and if so, what can be/is being done?
–trends in engagement are very tricky to tie down, with big differences between the “big guns” of research and consulting in this field, such as Gallup and TowersWatson. Does this mean that they each define engagement differently, and if so how do we deal with this?
–if we cannot agree on engagement’s definition (see above) how can we convince leaders to go to work enhancing the conditions to bring it about?
–similarly why do organizations still compare themselves with outside morale or engagement “norms”, given the big differences in those norms from one consultant to the next?
–there is a tendency for some people with specific skills in the morale and employee engagement (EE) business to think that they alone have the skill-set to handle things in this field; the internal communications people, the psychologists, the HR specialists, and so on. Is this one reason for all the differences in EE definitions, questionnaires and trend data? What skill or skill mix works best for those who are involved in this field?
–how does individual personality affect engagement? You can create the best work environment in the world…but some still will not engage. This is a personality issue, and we need to know much more about it so that we can avoid hiring such people and deal with the ones we inadvertantly hired.

I’d love to see our SHRM11 morale and engagement presenters cover these and other key questions. They dont have to tell us that engagement goes up when people are treated well at work; that first line managers are the key to engagement; or that morale and EE drive performance, all of which we have known for some time. Let’s go beyond the basics to see some new things, which people can really take home and use. I’ll be there asking these questions and more….and I hope to meet you if these are your interests. Contact me through this blog or on Twitter and add more question topics if you want….I’d love to hear them and can ask them for you if you cant make it to Vegas.

LinkedIn profile/contact: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbowlesphd

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Goldman Sachs: Can Employees be both “Engaged” and Unethical?

This question has been banging around my head since the SEC charged Goldman and one of its star traders with civil fraud.  Can a company have very “engaged” employees who are at the same time highly unethical?  The allegations relate to the mortgage securities business and one particular financial vehicle, so they are very focused;  but they look like a proxy for a lot that happened in the last few years, and Main Street seems to be happy that Wall Street might be…finally…getting its comeuppance for helping bring about the Great Recession. 

As a former active stock trader (for my own account) I am very aware that every trade involves a buyer and a seller, and that shorts have as many rights as longs.  This is not the point.  The point is that the game is meant to be played on a level playing field, with equal access to information for all.  With that in mind one can take the risk and bet on the direction of a stock, mortgage bonds, etc.  So if there is fraud, the game suddenly changes and one side benefits to the detriment of the other.  This is what the SEC is charging. 

So let’s consider the Goldman culture:  don’t you think that people who work in such a successful environment, where the average bonus for 2009 was more than $700,000 and where they are among the best and brightest people in their field, in the world…don’t you think these people have high employee engagement?   Read the e-mails of the trader who is charged, the “Fabulous” Fab, he seems to be having a blast, even though he admits to not understanding what the hell he is selling.  Doesn’t it make sense that this environment would be one in which people would be extremely engaged, partly by the intense nature of the business, by the fact that Goldman can and does hire the most enthusiastic, the most motivated, the most energetic?  By the fact that they can earn what for most of us would be like winning a lottery every year?  I’d love to ask the person who has surveyed this company’s employees but I am sure he is far too ethical to tell anyone about a client, and I would never actually do it anyway.   Perhaps he is a lot more ethical than some of those he is surveying?  Why do I say that?  Because the Goldman e-mails indicate that traders regularly characterized one or more of the financial instruments which they were selling as “shitty”, as famously demonstrated in Congress the other day when the mails were read by the Chairman of the committee which gave Goldman people such a grilling.   Did the traders tell the buyers how “shitty” these were?

So it has occurred to me, and not for the first time recently, that engagement, high morale, call it what you will, and ethics…can be quite unrelated.  This goes against what I thought I knew, but life always proves me wrong when I think I am sure about something.   The reason I thought ethics was important in engagement was that there is evidence, which I presented in my book,  that ethical companies are seen as very attractive to some people, and they engage more because the company lives sustainability, fair trade, no- sweatshops, Green values.  This is especially true for younger workers for whom these things seem to be especially important.   Clearly though, as we saw at Enron, some people have values which are quite different and they find a place where those values are being lived, and those values have nothing to do with fair trade and so on;  they have to do with winning at any price, lying and cheating.  Witness the gung-ho Enron energy traders who delighted in getting large areas of California to be “browned out” (lose electricity) by their trading prowess.  They gave names to trades which have been immortalized in books such as “The Smartest People in the Room“.  They actually were thrilled that “Grandma”, three states away from their Houston offices, would have no power.

I know that some of you reading this would say, these people were out of control, they were deranged in some way.  I would say that much of the time they probably exhibited many of the traits of an engaged work force, as we currently define them.  Engagement definitions, as far as I can tell, make no mention of ethics or morals. It’s clear therefore that lack of a moral compass does not have to deny someone the chance to be engaged.  “Values” for one person can mean honesty and fairness, for another (usually unconsciously of course, most would not openly admit such a thing), hiding the truth and greed. Yes, ethics can engage certain people, those for whom this is important.  But there are obviously more than a few people who don’t care about that, who care about making money and doing what they can to advance, and whatever the company wants them to do, and to hell with ethics.  Companies and individuals with these values will, inevitably, find each other.

Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that this never ends well.  There is a form of “corporate karma”.  Enron went bankrupt and its auditor went out of business;  sadly many innocent people who were probably very ethical and might have known nothing of the fraud being conducted on other floors of their Houston tower, lost their jobs and retirement plans.  Many Goldman people are certainly this way too, they are honest and ethical people.  But Goldman’s reputation, especially on Main Street, has been devastated by the activity of some.  How endemic this is in the firm, we may never know.  They have become the poster child for bad behavior, even though many on Wall Street see what they did as “business as usual”, and their alumni who have access to television pulpits (such as the frantic Jim Cramer) defend them, as one would expect.   So what is to be done?   I am not saying that we need to extend the definition of employee engagement to include ethics;   I am saying though that we need to be mindful of this.  We love football teams which win within the rules of the game; we hate those that cheat, those that secretly film another team’s practice to gain advantage against them.   Even Goldman has very recently said it plans to go deep into its culture and make some changes.  I hope they do.  “Engaged” employees who lack the “moral” root of the word “morale”, that’s not a long term strategy for any organization, no matter how successful they are for a while.

Let’s Be Clear: Executive Compensation Excess is Eroding Employee Morale and Engagement

(This is Part 2 of a three part series on executive compensation and morale).

Earth to CEOs:  Come Back Down Here with Us!

First a disclaimer:   this post is about a sub-set of CEOs, not all.  I am a business psychologist trained in social science research and understand full well that samples should not be generalized to the whole unless they are truly representative.   Many CEOs (and I have worked with a lot), are downright great people, generous, caring, and absolutely dedicated to the welfare of their workforce.  They dont have an ounce of greed in their bodies and they make sure they play by the same rules as those who work for them.   Perhaps you work for one of these people, or are one of them yourself.  This post is not about them/you!   This is a about a subset, enough of a group to make a difference in overall averages, and this subset has a mentality which is damaging US competitiveness.

I’ve been watching this new show on TV here in the US:  Undercover Boss.  Its about a CEO or COO going out in disguise and taking on some of the more difficult jobs which his (so far, all male) own people have to do.   In some cases he is so useless and the job so difficult, he gets fired after one day!  The show seems to be popular, partly because the CEOs have been humiliated.   Its also because most have so far reacted to this experience and shock at what people “out there” in the companies actually have to do, with genuine humility, often being really moved by the experience.  They are often moved enough to make changes, to promote lucky ones they come across, give raises, special gifts, etc.  Even to re-think the whole way their company does business.  I was thinking about all of this in the context of what we have been through in the last 2-3 years.  Is this the start of a trend?  Will we start to see a more real, personal CEO whose eyes are more open to what his or her people have to face every day?  Will that start to change the behavior of said CEOs?  Particularly in the area of compensation.  I know some of you are saying, dream on!  But I have a compelling reason for them to change, as you will see.

My hope is that we will indeed look back one day at this Great Recession and say, yes that was the time when we dumped this whole fad of glorifying some CEOs and brought them back down to reality.  Reality is that too many CEOs (usually, but not always men) were not all that their publicity machine puffed them up to be, but were paid as if they were.  I’m not talking about the Steve Jobs and Sergey Brins, the geniuses who founded the now-iconic companies which they lead and who deserve every bit of positive press (and dollar) they get;  I’m not talking about the hundreds of thousands of less well-known entrepreneurs who risk everything for their dream.  I’m talking about a different animal here:   the hired hands brought in as CEO.   They came in with a big blaze of publicity and then often had…mixed results.  I’m thinking of Bob Nardelli at Home Depot, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard and quite a few others.  Their Boards were acquiescent to the point of giving them a contract which no average worker could receive:  a fail-safe golden parachute which translated into “you win, you win; you fail, you win”.   Of course that is exactly what happened in my two examples; under Nardelli,  HD stock went DOWN by 8% in an up market but he made $240 in total compensation from December 2000 until his exit in January 2007.   His exit package was an additional $210 million.  That’s right, two hundred ten million dollars.  Under Fiorina, HP stock also went down, listen to Wikipedia’s summary:

“When Fiorina became CEO in July, 1999, HP’s stock price was $52 per share, and when she left 5 years later in February, 2005, it was $21 per share—a loss of over 60% of the stock’s value.  During this same time period, HP competitor Dell’s stock price increased from $37 to $40 per share.”

For this remarkable performance, a 60% drop in share price, her exit package was $42 million.  At GM, Rick Wagoner’s planned $20 million pension was interrupted by the company’s bankruptcy;  his contribution to GM’s performance resulted in a drop of 96% in the stock price under his tenure.   Even Jack Welch, once untouchable as the glorified CEO of the American giant, GE, totally screwed up his image with his outrageous $8 million/year retirement package which even included flowers in numerous luxury residences.  This was only brought to light by his divorce, and created such an uproar that even the SEC got involved with GE and poor Welch was shamed into giving a big part of it back, mumbling that it was important to “manage perceptions”.  Thats right, perceptions, forget about values, right?  Apparently it wasn’t enough that he left GE with $880 million in stock…..

Now we see the public mood swinging heavily against such excesses:  no longer able to tap rising house values, and more scared of facing unemployment, if not already there, the view from Main Street towards the corporate world’s rigged compensation game is decidedly sour.  Who can blame people, when their taxes are being used to bail out some of those who are the main perpetrators?  Unfortunately, the heavy hand of government is starting to be used to fix things, as in an ominous sounding “special master” for compensation installed by the Obama administration.

If this sounds like I am pessimistic, I do not mean it to: as a result of this orgy of excess, the most recent wave of which perhaps Welch set off as early as 2002 and which culminated in this recession, I have a more optimistic outlook.  Maybe we can celebrate that this era might be coming to a close.  It’s certainly time that it did.  The US cannot continue to be the only country in the world where the CEO pay to average worker is 300-400:1, and where golden parachutes give CEOs advantages which none of their fellow employees receive.  In other countries, including those which are extremely competitive with this one, the averages are closer to 25:1.  It is my opinion, based on quite a bit of research, that CEO pay excesses are eroding morale and engagement in the United States.  Why do I think that? 

–First because its plain old common sense that if you run a company and your pay is so far off that of your co-workers, you have already “disengaged” yourself from them in a major way.  Don’t then pretend that you can have an engaged workforce when you yourself have made that less possible by accepting, even demanding something which none of your co-workers could ever receive.  Play the game on the same field and with the same rules as those you work with:   then you will have a chance to really engage everyone.

– Second, and very tellingly, the US is far, far from top dog in the morale world.  It is average at best (see Mercer’s website for worldwide employee engagement data).  How can this be when almost everyone who lives here says it’s the best place in the world to live?  (Some Norwegians, Dutch and Danes might disagree…but stay with me here).  So yes it might be the best place to live, but…..not the best place to WORK.  Part of the reason for that is…excess, and lets say the G word, Greed at the top.  Anyone who has spent as much time as I have (25 years) interviewing thousands of people at work and surveying hundreds of thousands, will tell you:  excesses at the top infuriate otherwise even-tempered employees.   They cannot understand why they have to play by the rules but top management does not;   they resent special “executive” dining rooms, special parking (GM at its peak had a heated parking garage with special elevator for the poor executives who could not stand the cold Detroit winters); employees  boil over when these individuals then come onto to the Intranet with a special message for the “troops” saying, “we’re all in this together”.  “No we’re not”, they say.  “You are on another planet”, Mr/Ms CEO.

Smart companies with smart and more reasonable CEOs understand this, in the US and elsewhere.  John Mackey of Whole Foods, someone for whom I have a great deal of respect..and not just for his views on compensation…is a good example.   At Whole Foods no one is paid more than 19 times that of the average worker. Munich-based BMW last year also became the first big company in Germany to implement bonuses based on reasonable ratios compared to the average worker’s bonus.  The company spokesman was quoted as saying “We don’t just want to build sustainable cars. We also want to have sustainable personnel politics. We think this is good for the company culture”.  Ahh how refreshing that he places personal, selfish interests lower than that of a sustainable culture for his workforce.   Is this one of the reasons why BMW has, and continues to make, such great cars?  I think so.

Will the intense pressure which comes with such a recession, which we still seem to be in, make diamonds out of coal?  I hope so.  I hope that public opinion, and yes even outrage, will shame those who are greedy into more reasonable behavior.  Lets be clear here:  I am not talking about more government regulation, salary caps, etc!  I hope that increasing understanding of the importance of employee morale/engagement as a performance driver will convince Boards, shareholders and CEOs that it is in the interest of their organizations that these baser instincts of the human spirit are tamed.  Boards especially need some backbone and certain other body parts which I wont mention here.  They need to stand up to these demands, refuse to buy the “arms race argument” that “the other guy is making this much”, and make a stand for something new.  Its 2010, and it’s not “me” any more, it’s “we”.  China, India and Brazil are already going down this road;  their worker morale is far ahead of that of the US or Europe.  Will we let them take away one of the few real advantages remaining to us by not facing up to those who would erode it in our organizations by their own selfishness?  I certainly don’t think we should.  Our future standard of living might depend on it.

Fired Football Coaches and Morale at Work…What Do They Have in Common?

Those of you reading this in the US…and some outside…know the stories of Mike Leach and Jim Leavitt, coaches respectively of the Texas Tech University and the University of South Florida college football teams, who were recently fired from their posts.  Leach was officially let go for “insubordination” but the story behind that was that he was alleged to have sent one of his players into a “dark, locked room” for quite some time after said player suffered a concussion.  Now those of you outside this continent might be asking whether locked confinement in a small dark space, allegedly with a “guard” stationed outside, is the normal treatment for concussion in the US…I can assure you that the medical system here is a bit more advanced than that!   More, how can I say….compassionate?  Levitt allegedly grabbed a player by the throat during a game on November 21st, then hit him twice in the face.  He denies doing such a thing, and Leach is suing Texas Tech for slander. As you would expect the sports blogosphere is abuzz with inside information, commentary and the like.  I find the stories compelling not only from a sports perspective, but from what it teaches us about morale in the workplace, and the management which drives that morale, which it does in nearly all cases.

Football is, after all, a workplace. The question then is: how does the coach get the best from his team (in US college football, all coaches are male)?  Now we don’t know the final story as to what Coaches Leach and Leavitt actually did, and I doubt whether the initial reports about them will turn out to be absolutely true; for example, we have already seen video from inside that “dark space” at Texas Tech which made it look decidedly “light”. Whatever turns out to be “true” in these individual cases, its useful to look them in terms of what happens in the general organizational world, because these as-yet-unproven accusations represent an extreme of the kind of abusive treatment of subordinates regularly dished out by a creature we call the “boss from hell”.

Who is the boss from hell?  He or she (unlike US college football coaches, bosses from hell have no gender preference) are flashbacks to an earlier era: in the old days, like the 19th century, people at work were seen almost as beasts needing to be coerced, beaten and threatened into any kind of productive contribution.  Theoretically nowadays management is more enlightened, but is that universally true or do remnants of 19th century management style live on, whether on the football field or in organizations everywhere?  The boss from hell is high on the list of the people that others tell me about as soon as I tell them that I work in the area of morale at work.  I’m not talking about occasionally, I am saying that each and every time I let that information be known, it happens.  They say “ohhhh, you should come to my place!”.  No, not because it is so fabulous, so wonderful…but because there is so much work to be done there to create an environment which is healthy, productive, functional as opposed to dysfunctional, and which has all the performance benefits of high morale. If you are wondering what those are, then please let me direct you to my book because I wont have the space to list them here;  lets just say they are numerous and there is compelling evidence for them.

We therefore have to ask ourselves, how do these dysfunctional bosses, who will end up corroding the morale in an organization, get to occupy positions of power?  One way that happens is that a technically talented person is promoted into the spot where they manage the people whose specialty they share:  the best accountant becomes chief accountant, etc.  No thought is given as to whether this person will be the best “people person” for that group of accountants.  Another way is that an organizational culture which is based on a (unstated and often unconscious) dysfunctional philosophy makes the promotion of such people inevitable.  What I mean is that a culture which is driven by those who are themselves “bosses from hell” will pick those like themselves.  Of course no organization brags in its annual report that “we put people last in our order of priorities and drive them to the wall in the interest of profit”;  but some do it, even while they say the opposite.

One important point to make about the Coach Leach situation is that, as we have seen in the last two weeks, many of the fans are shouting out that Leach was a “winner” and are finding reasons to justify his alleged behavior.  In their minds, winning is therefore grounds for any type of behavior, even what might be abusive. In the organization world, there are exact correlates:  “but John always makes his numbers!!“  My reply to that is, “yes but at what cost?”   Is the cost that John’s work group suffers constant turnover?  Is it that psychological stress occurs, people become ill?  And if that isn’t enough, how do we know that John’s numbers might not have been far superior if he had treated his people as his most important asset?

Texas Tech University is located in Lubbock, Texas.  We don’t even have to leave that state to know that good treatment of football players is not the “soft” way to go, not the “losing strategy” which is feared by some of the fans:  just 400 miles away in Austin, Coach Mack Brown of the University of Texas football team went further in the 2009 college football championships than Texas Tech, and has a far better winning percentage at Texas than Leach has at Texas Tech (0.831 versus 0.661).  Brown is known as a friendly, congenial man who treats his players, staff, the alumni and complete strangers who come up to him in the street, like gold. Maybe organizations everywhere can take note of that fact and its implications; if they did, consultants like me might find less people telling us about their “boss from hell”.

Welcome to the Morale/Engagement and Performance Blog

Hello I’m David Bowles and I want to welcome you to my blog on morale/engagement and performance, the theme of a book published worldwide by Palgrave-Macmillan (see tabs above and picture below), which I co-authored with Professor Cary Cooper.  Instead of just focusing in the book on “what to do on Monday morning” to improve morale and engagement, Cary and I have looked in depth at the performance connections with morale…the things which are the answer to the question: “why should I care about this touchy-feely stuff”?  As we say in the book, performance is the reason why you should care and why organizations large and small are making morale and engagement “mission critical”.  I look forward to sharing with you here the research-based data we feature in the book and discussing your reactions to, and experience with, what I have to say.  Whether you are interested in productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, worker health or innovation…all are affected by, and our data show, driven by, high morale and engagement.  Coming at a time of unprecedented stress and upheaval in organizational life, the drive towards high morale and the workforce engagement which results from it, can be our way towards success in the tough, globalized world which is our future.  I look forward to sharing this journey with you and hope you will contribute your ideas and thoughts.

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