Untapped people power is the greatest access to competitive advantage we have ever had. Tap into it and you have the greatest uncapped advantage to leverage of all time.
It is completely possible to make a difference to those around you by the way we manage and lead. So, this is a call to action for the people who manage teams at every level. From the front line to the top dogs. We need to change the way we engage – at a very fundamental level – and this means to manage in order to engage. A reality check is long overdue. We need a reminder of the impact of our workplaces on our wellness, our lives. Our work fills our brains so we can't relax or sleep, affects our health, our happiness, our relationships, our friendships, and our financial security. Underengagement costs us emotionally, personally, and financially. Our engagement levels come with a measurable price tag. This is an economic need, a societal necessity, a quality-of-life issue bigger than any problem business faces today. It affects how we restart from pandemics, bounce back from recessions, deliver our improvement programs, and transform our organizations and cultures. It drives the results of our companies as well as our personal welfare and life satisfaction. Addressing this situation is the greatest change project for the twenty-first century. It propels everything from innovation to survival, and it needs to start now.
We must feel engaged in our jobs. We should be enthused, not jaded; fulfilled, not drained. We are truly “in it together.”
How to Engage with This Book
In this book, I zero in on how you can engage your people better, and along the way, I discuss the vital insights that can be applied to your transformation and improvement programs as well.
Here is a summary of the chapters to follow and the tools you might consider taking to your workplace, to better engage.
Chapter 1: People Matter: We Need a Healthier Way of Working
Humanize. Optimize. Digitize. Engagement is the core of all improvement. Billions are being invested by organizations in the name of improving competitive advantage, productivity and profitability, safety, and brand building. Leaders look for ever-expanding budgets for research and development, technology and digitization, plant expansions, and marketing. But, what if you could gain that same level of competitive advantage by how you manage and lead, with little financial cost? Imagine the impact on results. The need to engage your people and teams has never been more crucial. The upside is limitless.
The takeaway: The MI-9 toolkit. The new scorecard. Manage to engage using the 2 Fs and 7 Cs: Fair Trade, Cause, Clean and Meaningful Infrastructure, Confidence, Connection, Collaboration, Community, Capability and Freedom.
Chapter 2: The Ice Age: It's Alive and Well at Work
Engage. Enable. Energize. Three words to warm your world. The world of business has changed at pace, but 2020 saw it change irrevocably. A global crisis unfolded at record speed. For almost everyone. A few months into the pandemic, the UN was estimating almost 200 million jobs could be wiped out. Trust would be erased overnight. Pre–COVID-19, surveys the world over already had people feeling coolly detached from their jobs. As the planet warmed up, an ice age took hold, as their human needs remained underrecognized and unmet in the workplace.
The takeaway: If we don't solve this icy issue now, we will not only have an employee engagement issue, we will have a long-lasting economic issue. It's finally time to solve the problem.
Chapter 3: Manage to Engage: Building Street Cred
To warm up the workforce, managers and leaders must learn to recognize and rapidly adapt to the new world of work. Those businesses who survive will require new operating models (ecosystems) that synchronize the business and allow a new, more robust rhythm to achieve results and engage people in more meaningful ways. And none of this should be hard wired. It should be flexible, agile, calibrated to your needs, creating new management approaches that are relevant and appealing to your evolving workforce, and the individual characters within it.
The takeaway: In this chapter we explore what going HeadsUp really means and how it applies to everyone. We introduce the HeadsUp High Five.
Chapter 4: Fair Trade: An “F” You Should Be Proud Of
Fair trade: allowing people to feel that they exchange a fair day's work for a fair day's return. While much needs to change in the way we manage, one aspect retains its importance: fairness. Being fair to people won't give your organization an advantage: it's a fundamental expectation. It's the cornerstone of a great mindset. Without it, you may as well pack up your toolkit and go home.
The takeaway: Learn how to be fair dinkum, a great Aussie term for authentic. Learn what “color your day” is, and the eight active management behaviors that help you create a fair trade.
Chapter 5: A Common Cause: Collecting Volunteers to Create a Movement
Why don't we feel as good about work as we do about the causes we volunteer for? What would make us jump out of bed each morning and run to work? OK, maybe not run. As leaders, our ambition is to have people feel they have a stake in the success or the outcome of our business, right? Yet we struggle to do that. We know having a purpose creates a whole new meaning around our work. When we feel engaged in a meaningful cause, we're happy to contribute and be more productive. Knowing what is expected of you is a table stake. Knowing how you fit is an engager.
The takeaway: When you break a movement down into its building blocks, you see a theme, a way of engaging people in a cause. In this chapter, you learn the backstory of a movement, a way to create that same feeling of a social movement in your own teams. You learn how to help connect people to a cause.
Chapter 6: Cleaning Up Your Workplace
Taking down silos, removing unnecessary structures, delayering authority matrices that delay decision-making, and eliminating unnecessary work can positively impact engagement – it can address what cheeses people off and it can fix the bad hair days. We must build healthy workplaces that are physically efficient. Like pay and rewards, providing people with a clean infrastructure may not engage us, but if it doesn't work for us, it will certainly disengage. Processes that produce high waste are not just costly, they also impact the environment and create unnecessary frustration at work.
The takeaway: Enterprise aerial mapping allows your team to look for opportunities to clean it up, remove barriers to success, connect better, and build your ecosystem into a high-performing operating model. This includes crowdsourcing ways to build clean workplaces; hacking processes to build work that is fit for people to be productive.
Chapter 7: Out Your Doubt and Boost Confidence
Extraordinary leaders bring certainty to uncertain times in how they show up. Out the doubt! Doubt is a killer of confidence at work. Removing doubt and negativity can build people's confidence – in their managers, the business, each other, and their own future. Confidence helps people engage. In a post–COVID-19 world, confidence builds trust, a requirement to demonstrate we work for the right leaders and the right firm.
The takeaway: Checking in is not about checking up. 1.5.30 Connect encourages you to prioritize people in your day and check in routinely. The ability to build confidence through visibility is vital: your own visibility, information visibility, and being transparent.
Chapter 8: Building Connections: Can You Hear Me?
People are hardwired to be social and form connections; our general well-being