Wouldn't it be great if human beings were born with a "users guide?" Then we would know the best way to lead, motivate and engage our employees. My hack attempts to deduce what the missing “user guide” looks like using engineering logic and the latest science.
The range of effective management strategies for the 21st century is constrained by human nature; a fixed feature on the management landscape that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Since we are stuck with this technology, it’s high time that we figure out how it works so we can design our organizations synergistically around human nature rather than brutally on top of it.
The task of 21st Century management would be much easier if human beings came equipped with a user guide. My hack attempts to deduce what the missing “user guide” looks like using engineering logic and the latest science. My goal is not to create just another theory, but to understand the timeless essence of nature’s motivational design and the emotional “physics” that makes us go. I will then introduce a novel management tool based on the theory to help 21st century managers tap into the latent potential and creativity of their workforces.
I dedicate my hack to courageous and principled leaders everywhere who instinctively align their organizations with human nature; people like Ken Iverson at Nucor Steel, Ricardo Semler at Semco, Dennis Bakke at AES Corporation, and Harry Quadracci at Quad Graphics.
The Fallout from Failing Human Nature 101
Modern corporations are emotionally dyslexic and earns failing grades in human-nature 101.
The default solution to employee motivation practiced by corporations everywhere consists of a simplistic combination of money-and-fear: 1) do it because I pay you, and 2) if you don’t do it you are fired. This simplistic, Neanderthal-approach to motivation has created a dysfunctional workplace where only 30% of employees care about their work[i]. Gallup’s economists estimate that this failure-to-engage translates into $300 billion yearly in lost productivity and over $1 trillion if indirect costs are included.[ii] This does not include the cost of replacing the millions of disengaged employees who jump ship annually because their emotional needs are not being met.
Another symptom of motivational dysfunction is the fact that half of us will suffer from some form of mental illness during our lifetimes[iii], and millions will turn to psychoactive drugs to obtain emotional rewards artificially that they should have gotten naturally from their work. The costs of these crippling social problems are upward of $300 billion annually[iv]. We can bump this number to a staggering $800 billion if we include the costs of untreated addictions and mental illnesses.[v]
Bottom line: Our society is emotionally out-of-whack, and desperately needs a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of human nature. Modern management, I will argue, requires an overhaul as opposed to a tweak. We need to start over because we have based our management theories on the false assumption that human beings are primarily rational creatures. The truth is, we are primarily emotional creatures who use our rationality to satisfy our deep emotional needs.
At this point you may be wondering, “How could we have gotten it so wrong.” How could the least important thing, “emotions,” all of a sudden become the most important thing?
The centrality of emotions has been overlooked because nature designed them to operate stealthy on the edge of conscious awareness most of the time. In emergency situations, however, emotions rise up and make their presence known in the form of ballistic emotions like anger, fear, jealousy and rage. These are the obvious, defensive-emotions that we don’t want in the workplace. These are the emotions that give the word “emotion” a bad name. The ballistic emotions are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. There is a much more happening beneath the waterline that the scientific community is just beginning to fathom.
My hack is not about the ballistic emotions, but about the subtle, everyday, productive emotions that get us up in the morning, move us from point A to point B during the day, and put us to bed at night. This is the part of the iceberg we are interested in because this is where the motivational engine lies—the positive feelings that drive high-performing organizations.
By the way, not everybody got emotions wrong. Maslow was on the right track with his “hierarchy of needs” idea (although I don’t think human needs are hierarchical). What Maslow calls “needs,” I will refer to as “biologic and social appetites.” The positive psychologists, like Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, are on the right track as well. Freud got important parts of the emotional mechanism right, but other parts spectacularly wrong (like everything is driven by psychosexual motives). Dan Goleman’s writings on emotional intelligence and Lawrence and Nohria’s book, Driven: How Human Nature Affects our Choices,” are important contributions as well.
[i] Steve Crabtree, “Exacerbating the Fear of Layoffs,” Gallup Management Journal, October, 2010, p 1.
[ii] Jerry Krueger and Emily Killham, “At Work, Feeling Good Matters,” Gallup Management Journal, December, 2005, p 2.
[iii] Ronald C. Kessler; Wai Tat Chiu; Olga Demler; Ellen E. Walters Prevalence, Severity, and Comorbidity of 12-Month DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Arch Gen Psychiatry, Jun 2005; 62: 617 - 627.
[iv] National Institutes of mental health, 2002 statistical data, Source: NIMH website at the following URL, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/4COST_TOTAN.shtml
[v] Kathleen Kingsbury, Tallying Mental Illness' Costs, Source: Time website, Friday, May 9, 2008, URL: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1738804,00.html
It’s Time to Reverse Engineer Human Nature
I began thinking about human nature from the perspective of an engineer 30 years ago. I had always been impressed by the designs found in nature, like the corrugated shell of a mollusk that provides high strength and stiffness with minimal material. Nature’s designs are “rational” and make engineering sense.
The human body is also elegantly designed. The human hand, for example, obeys the laws of mechanics and human engineers have yet to duplicate its dexterity and precision. The human eye obeys the laws of optics, and human engineers have thus far failed to create machine vision that can duplicate what the human eye can do. The human heart obeys the laws of fluid mechanics and human engineers have failed miserably to create a reliable and safe artificial heart. What about human emotions, shouldn’t this system be just as elegantly designed as the rest of us?
I felt certain that it was, so I set out to prove it. My goal was to reverse engineer what nature had in mind when it incorporated emotions into human nature. If you’d like to see my vision of the human engine, please click on the following link. Click Here to View Part 2 of my Solution
Note: The MIX has given me permission to split my solution into two parts for copyright reasons. After you read Part 2 of my solution, please come back to the MIX and finish reading the "practical impact," "challenges," and "first steps" sections of my hack.
CASE STUDY: THIS HACK IN ACTION
Since most companies do a crummy job of motivating their employees, large financial gains are possible with relatively little effort.
The motivational engine is not complicated once we understand its basic architecture. Managers just need to get a few things right to see significant benefits. These basics are simple in concept but rather challenging in practice because managers need to unlearn some bad habits and commit more effort and attention to their employees. Here is a short case study that illustrates the natural-management approach in action.
Challenge—Weak Leadership and Interpersonal Conflict: The largest designer and builder of hospitals and clinics in the US, Marshall Erdman and Associates, began to struggle soon after the founder’s death due to inconsistent leadership and interpersonal conflict. The board convinced family members to sell controlling interest to an investor group and to promote Scott Ransom, a former Price Waterhouse accountant, into the CEO position.
Application of the Horsepower System: Paul Herr, the author of Primal Management and inventor of The Horsepower SystemTM, coached Scott Ransom throughout his tenure and got him started in the right direction. Ransom had superb people skills, but he wasn’t planning to use them. His first instinct was to fall back on his Price-Waterhouse training and start hammering people about the numbers.
Herr suggested a different strategy. He told the CEO, “You are not an accountant anymore. You are a leader who needs to capture the hearts and minds of your employees. Why don’t you tell them something like this; ‘My primary job as CEO is not to improve profits or increase market share. My primary job as CEO is to create a workplace that is so exciting and rewarding that you look forward to coming to work. In other words, if I take care of you, and you take care of the customer, then the numbers will more-or-less take care of themselves.’”
Results, Benefits and Savings: Ransom followed Herr’s advice and used his people skills and Herr’s approach to achieve a spectacular financial success. After four years of coaching (2004 to 2008), revenue increased by 200%, profits increased by 300%, employee engagement went from the bottom quartile to the top quartile, and a company that was purchased for $25 million in 2004 was sold for $250 million in 2008. The improved performance resulted in generous bonuses, 15 percent annual retirement funding, and a sparkling new headquarters complete with an employee health club and Internet cafe´.
One of the investors, a global private equity firm, said it was one of the best returns on investment in its 23-year history and Ransom was featured in the company’s annual report. Scott Ransom credits Herr’s methods and ideas as an important factor in the turnaround. Additional case studies are provided in the "materials" section of this hack.
Summary
This brief case study illustrates the win-win outcome that can occur when enlightened management is combined with a deep understanding of the human engine. I am in the process of creating a turn-around service based upon this approach. This service will specialize in creating people-plays: companies that succeed spectacularly by getting the people part right. If I can hit home-runs every time out of the box, then perhaps Wall Street will sit up and take notice of the financial benefits that accrue to companies that align business behavior with human nature.
- An advanced theory of human motivation based on the latest science,
- An intrinsic-reward survey based on the theory to monitor the state-of-repair of the human engine, and
- A leadership methodology to get the motivational horsepower to go up.
- Dr. Antonio Damasio (world-renowned neuroscientist who's concept of "social homeostasis" resonates with the social appetite theory described in my hack),
- Dr. William Frederick (father of American business ethics, anthropologist, natural-management theorist and friend),
- Dr. Gary Hamel (author and management thought-leader who thinks it's time to flip dispassionate management upside down),
- Dr. Nitin Nohria and Dr. Paul Lawrence (Lawrence is a business professor at Harvard and Nohria is Dean of the Harvard Business School. They co-authored Driven, How Human Nature Affects our Choices. Lawrence and Nohria's "drives" are similar to my "social appetites.").
Einstein urged: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler".
Unfortunately, employee engagement is just not this simple (easy).
A seven-question, anonymous, monthly survey that rolls up to needles on a dashboard of dials may have commercial appeal, but it cannot possibly deliver the employee engagement results that enterprises must achieve in order to compound knowledge worker productivity gains throughout the 21st century.
While we still have more to learn, we do know a great deal about what it takes to measure and manage employee engagement, superbly. As a next step, we must make all of our subject matter expertise available to, and actionable by, people managers at the points of maximum leverage – i.e. each individual manager's relationships with their direct reports.
That will not be a "simple" deployment, but collectively we do know how to do it. We know what will work, superbly; and we know that the results will be more than worth our efforts. We also know that we have no choice if we want to raise (maintain) standards of living in developed economies.
Richard Melrose
r.melrose@vision21.us
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Paul, you seem to have an easy time reading what is not there and not reading what is there. Take the time to re-read the two statements that you italicized. Both are true. Neither characterized your ‘approach’ or your ‘survey’ as “simplistic”, let alone “unrealistically simplistic”, as you alleged throughout your February 7th response.
In the context of necessity and sufficiency logic, “insufficient” or “not sufficient” to engendering employee engagement, would be more apt commentary on your Horsepower Survey, as well as on the Gallup Q12 and all the other short employee engagement surveys (e.g. HR Solutions, DDI, Coffman, etc.), for that matter.
If Q12 surveys were “sufficient”, then all of The Gallup Organization’s Q12 clients would have high levels of engagement. They don’t. At best, Q12 can track trends in Gallup’s own proprietary employee engagement definition(s), across aggregated reporting populations, with validity no better than the inherent reliability of the Q12 measurement instrument, as confounded by aggregation. The “necessity” of an employee engagement survey is another matter – one with which I concur.
In your January 31st reply, you wrote: “The specific causes are determined later when managers and employee sit down to openly and honestly discuss the pain-points detected by the survey.” Accordingly, without belaboring the point, your Horsepower Survey does not surface the “specific causes” of “pain-points”. So, on what basis do you attack the veracity of the two statements that you italicized?
When improvements (i.e. increases in employee engagement levels or bigger emotional paychecks) depend on making changes for the better, based upon subsequent management/employee (perhaps other) interactions, we have a much more complex and situation-specific process than just a monthly survey.
Your hypothesis (dictionary definition: ‘a tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation; something taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation; an assumption’) may, indeed, make “perfect sense” to many. Hypotheses should, however, be tested, before treating them as theories or laws, or as you assert: the “crystalline essence” of “human motivation”.
The online reviews of “Primal Management” at (http://www.amazon.com/Primal-Management-Unraveling-Secrets-Performance/dp/081441396X) include several “helpful” contributions – e.g. 12 out of 12 people found Todd I. Stark’s review helpful. So did I.
The Conference Board definition of employee engagement relates to the state of individual employees – i.e. “an employee”, “his/her” and “him/her”, rather than “employees”, “their” or “them”. Engagement happens individually.
Authoritative empirical research, sponsored by twenty-four major corporations concluded that there are six distinct employee segments, whose members differ by who they are, why they work and what they want in return. Within those segments, each representing between 14% and 20% of U.S. population, the cognitive, behavioral and occupational interest dimensions of the individual members vary in general accordance with a normal probability distribution function. Moreover, the individuals in those groups differ in their knowledge, skills, abilities and much, much more. That's what makes them individuals.
OK, so if an employee’s level of engagement rises in response to individually conducive conditions regarding job, organization, manager, or coworkers (note: these exogenous factors add many/varied considerations to the array of personal dimensions cited above), then to create individually conducive conditions, manager and employee need to know a whole lot more than what can be fathomed by asking the same seven questions, once a month, and then reviewing aggregated respondent data. That’s why managing employee engagement proves much more challenging than measuring it.
To really move the needle on employee engagement, individual people managers and their individual direct reports need significantly more actionable information from assessments and surveys, together with an organizational support system that includes: (i) a clear and compelling enterprise purpose, (ii) authentic leadership, (iii) evident deep caring for employee well being, (iv) pervasive omni-directional trust and (v) sufficient business stability and security, as well as ample in-house subject matter expertise (not outside consultants) to capably drive essential facilitation and mentoring activities. None of those things are hard to understand or particularly difficult to implement. So, building employee engagement requires leadership commitment and certain process knowledge. As Peter Drucker wrote: "What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter."
Richard Melrose
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Paul,
My toes are fine. You are entitled to your convictions. No need to go ad hominem.
In your reply, you note: “the level of engagement has remained miserably low since Gallup began measuring it 25 years ago”.
Does any of that poor performance (lack of progress) belong to The Gallup Organization or their imitators?
Should the business world perhaps reconsider the efficacy of brief (e.g. 20-, 16-, 12-, 9- and 7-question) employee engagement surveys? Did Gallup’s follow-on observation and consulting engagements prove ineffective? Were both survey and consulting regimens lacking? Or should we just be more patient in waiting for significant and enduring results?
Maybe, it’s just not that simple. That was my point. Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe the traditional approach served The Gallup Organization’s interests, more than the clients’ interests or the clients’ employees’ interests.
The Conference Board’s full definition reads: “Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”
The Conference Board definition aptly describes a ‘connection’ that ‘influences’ the ‘effort’ of ‘an employee’. Indeed, engagement (connection) only happens at the level of individual employees, if, when, to the extent that, and for as long as, individually conducive conditions exist. Aggregations of anonymous, company-wide data from annual short surveys cannot reveal those individually conducive conditions. A brief anonymous survey of direct reports likewise blurs distinctions among respondents and cannot inform more than it asks. It generally takes quite a few well conceived and carefully refined questions directed at one clear construct to achieve the levels of reliability and validity that allows a test publisher to sustain a claim that their instrument "measures what it purports to measure". Meanwhile, as you have pointed out, engagement is not one clear construct; even the very thoughtful and concise definition provided by The Conference Board raises several degrees of freedom.
To boost employee engagement levels, and reap all the rewards, people managers must learn about and understand their direct reports’ engagement precursors and drivers and then act responsively (to both direct report and enterprise) in creating, monitoring and maintaining conducive conditions for each individual employee. That’s not a simple prescription, but do we have the requisite knowledge, tools and techniques to deal with those challenges, systematically.
Peter Drucker wrote that the manager’s “goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual”. In this context, employee engagement is already the manager’s responsibility. Individual people managers also represent the points of maximum leverage, due to regular contact with a manageable span of direct reports. Your approach seems to recognze this. With more actionable information, better processes and daily effort, most people managers develop the proficiency necessary to compound increases in engagement-driven performance. Those who, despite capable mentoring, do not become proficient, ought not to have the responsibility of managing people.
With employee engagement constituting the biggest productivity and retention lever available to business, today, why wait? Why continue to underperform? We know a lot and we have work to do.
Richard Melrose
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What's more important to the success of our organizations than our people, and to their emotional state with respect to our organizations? I think Paul Herr has found a way to communicate this to managers (the big first step), to monitor our peoples' emotional health, and to take action.
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Ive been a horsepower user for ONE year now. This is an excellent tool geared for executive and line management to tap into the motivational engine of their organization.
The tool is very useful, I look forward to track the results and utilize the tools all the time.
Give it a test drive !
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