Читать книгу Manage to Engage - Pamela Hackett - Страница 50

MI-9 are the tools to engagement at work; they become the triggers, the fuel for achieving results; when people experience these 2 Fs and 7 Cs, they feel they had a great day at work, achieved what they set out to achieve, learned something new or how to do something better, and laughed a lot. They feel that the discretionary effort they volunteered, the effort they invested, is worth it.

In the business of the future, engagement will grow one person at a time until whole communities of spirit, experience, and accomplishment appear and work in concert with each other. This is a grassroots movement. Everyone will make his or her contribution; companies will engage and succeed because of people who are captivated. The organization of the future will be a living organism fit for people with an engaged state of mind who volunteer their best. What a feeling to aspire to. What a cause for leaders to rise for. What a reason to go all-in and manage to engage.

If you think these MI-9 tools might foster chaos more than engagement, consider this. Engagement need not be monopolized by the nature of a business, nor by its outward appearance of control, because engagement does not come at the expense of control. It comes with the right degree of control for your business to be safe and productive.

And consider Google and what The New York Times dubbed its “Quest to Build a Better Boss.”⁷ In a nutshell, the company's position was that a boss's particular expertise is of little value if their management behavior falls short. And while even they have come under scrutiny, that just reinforces the elusiveness of engagement and the need to continually work for it.

The common thread is that people will invest themselves at work and voluntarily give their best when the right engagement triggers are in place and they feel free to do so.

Engagement should be a priority for all organizations and their leaders: there is nothing to lose, but everything to gain. Prioritizing how you bring engagement to your management is probably the single most effective way to change your organizations outcomes and retention. The more you manage to engage, the more you transition from manager to leader.

This period is the most significant opportunity of our lifetime to reboot the end-to-end way we operate. In short, our total operating model, including the processes, capabilities, management tools, technology, and organization structure we choose, as well as how we manage, lead, decide, and how we engage, enable, and energize our teams to deliver our results. Fit and healthy.

The world changed in 2020. Everything about it changed. The question is, “Did you change?” To recover better and with resilience requires different solutions than any other time in your management career and likely in our history. This time a radical transformation is needed. A people renaissance. But unlocking their potential demands something new of managers, something that needs to be measured differently – something more engaging. We need a management model built for a postpandemic world and focused on nine essential ingredients that spark engagement – pragmatic solutions that not only create engagement but become self-sustaining and create better leaders.

1 Start your engagement journey – whether that's across the organization or in a particular department, area, or team. Convene a team being careful to ensure everyone can participate and present a problem statement you want to solve, then free them up to crowdsource the solution.

2 Assess your own and your teams’ current levels of discretionary effort. How much of themselves are your people giving today? There are no assessment tools for this, just observation and gut feeling. Get out and look, get people to talk about it. Ask them.

3 Using the following page, take each of the MI-9 triggers and decide how well you currently score against each of them. Invite people to write up their own report cards on your business.

4 Select the most critical of the Fs and Cs to your workplace success. Seek a range of opinions about how to address these in your workplace: ideas of how you can better develop a workplace where people can feel the MI-9 engagement triggers at work.

5 Encourage your team to lead this movement. Let them decide if this is worth pursuing and then try to leave the ‘how’ to your people.