Employee engagement will make the difference
According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development’s recent Employee Outlook report, employee engagement is at an all-time low, in spite of the economy looking as though it may finally be emerging from recession.
Even though the UK’s Office for National Statistics has estimated 1.1% growth in GDP for the second quarter, employee engagement was always going to be a lagging indicator, and so the CIPD’s conclusion is understandable. Having been bombarded during the past 18 months with downbeat media messaging on credit crunch, bankers’ bonuses, redundancies, the national debt, the Eurozone crisis and the upcoming restructuring of our public services, one quarter’s relatively good news on GDP was never likely to see an employee feel-good index rebound to pre-recession levels.
There is still a long way to go, with set-backs guaranteed and much bad news still to be swallowed en route. However, the positive signs are there at every level in the economy, from micro businesses to major PLCs. If you have a finger on the pulse, you can feel it. Having, in relative terms, ‘hunkered down’ for the past 18 months, businesses are sensing the re-emergence of market opportunity. Deals are being done, restructuring is happening, efficiencies are being driven through, focus is being tightened and services are evolving to meet the needs of a new economic reality. At the macro-economic level, life goes on.
Yet, for individual businesses, there is a problem of perception. The longer a business allows a gap to persist between the re-emergence of general economic prosperity and the re-bounding of employee positivism and certainty, the greater the likelihood that the individual business is naturally portrayed as negative in a positively rising marketplace. In a post-recession, cut-throat competitive environment where genuine commercial differentiation is difficult to achieve or sustain, the attitude of your organisation and its people can make the difference between winning and losing the next tender.
It is therefore time for leaders to lead, by looking afresh at how the business and its people are portrayed in the marketplace. Then, positive employee engagement will surely follow.
Capello and the Maverick Potential business personality
To regular readers, my apologies. Illness has meant that posts have been few and far between in recent weeks. During my down-time, the soccer World Cup has provided a thought-provoking source of entertainment. The spectacular rise and fall of the English team made endless front and back-page headlines in the UK, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. The English team was knocked-out by Germany after three unconvincing qualification matches.
As is often the case in competitive situations, whether related to sport or business, the market’s perception of poor performance in a high-profile, public setting casts a spotlight on the ability and commitment of the organisation and the management style of those in charge. In the case of the English football squad, the team Coach, Fabio Capello, has attracted particular rage. Fans, as stakeholders with a vested interest in the team’s success, are hungry for answers and the blame game has begun.
In order to consider what the anecdotal evidence of Capello’s reign as Coach says about the personality of the English football squad, I plugged some assumptions into the Balanced Business Personality monitor model. It is important to make clear that this analysis is based purely upon my interpretation of anecdotal evidence. Under normal conditions, participants would respond to a series of questions and statements designed to offer clues as to the state of the organisation’s personality and, importantly, how that personality may be being perceived in the marketplace. However, in this case, an in-depth analysis has not been performed, so many of the subtleties normally hidden within the data cannot be uncovered or commented upon.
One output from BBPM is a top-level or ‘headline’ definition of organisational personality. The BBPM model assesses an organisation’s attributes, differentiating characteristics and traits against 16 core business personality types. Based upon news and commentary about Capello, the players, the coaching staff and their routines, the BBPM output suggests that the English World Cup squad presents a ‘MAVERICK POTENTIAL’ headline organisational personality. Though the evidence may be purely anecdotal, clear themes run throughout the analysis which provide reasonable substantiation for this conclusion:
A squad of footballing ‘superstars’, many highly rewarded at club level for the rare mix of individual skill, club-level team-orientation and an innate drive to succeed, and most with existing high-profile public personae, are brought together for a finite period to perform a major task. Having been taken out of their normal team-environment and forced together with other high-profile superstars, their propensity to display individualism and act autonomously within the hierarchy of the new team is natural. The management challenge is to focus the innate individualism of all team members on a singular team goal, either by developing a culture of joint responsibility and ‘greater good’ or by putting in place restrictions which are designed to achieve control.
By appearing to have tended towards the latter option, Fabio Capello has been painted by the media as a control freak. Restrictions including no access to wives and girlfriends, no mobile phones, no Playstations and almost no alcohol represented, to the ‘superstar’ team members, a restricted ‘prison-camp’ environment.
Imagine the predicament facing the beleaguered Coach. In an effort to control the team and focus on achieving a key goal, the ‘boss’ appears to have placed severe limitations on many of the squad’s normal routines. So, having already removed each team member from the comfort of club-level team-orientation, the boss imposes upon these professionals what are perceived to be additional controls. If pushed too far, this approach has a high potential to provoke a negative reaction.
Yet, I have some sympathy for Capello in this situation. The BBPM model suggests that if he had failed to put in place stringent controls in order to achieve the desired level of focus, an organisation comprising team members who are primarily motivated by creativity, autonomy and individualism tends to automatically assume the initiative. However, they do so as individuals and are therefore more likely to act to the detriment of achieving team goals. Without controls in place, such an organisation begins to display the characteristics of the FRAGMENTED organisational personality type. The nature of this personality type suggests it is unlikely ever to succeed in achieving a singular team goal.
What else could Capello have done? The one area of pundit commentary which remains under-reported is the degree to which the team came together as a close-knit operating unit. Analysis of cultural integration is often subjective, and so comments can appear unconvincingly ‘touchy feely’. Yet in this case the clues are there. Capello has had innumerable successes at club-level, and is clearly adept at creating a positive team bond or culture over time. However, with limited access to ‘his’ players throughout the year, and coming face-to-face with the Club vs Country dichotomy, it may have been tempting to apply the strength of single-minded executive drive in order to build and motivate the team, rather than invest in developing a team culture.
Capello’s animated antics on the touchline during each game attest to his enduring passion for driving his team relentlessly towards the desired outcome. When John Terry commented publicly about negative feelings within the team camp, he openly questioned Capello’s management style. Capello’s description of the outburst as a ‘big mistake’ was simultaneously menacing and dismissive. In a more culturally-oriented organisational environment, raising the flag of doubt would have been an accepted course of action.
Yet, as most managers know, developing that culture for the longer-term takes time, effort and an ongoing involvement with the team members. This does not appear to be Capello’s style. By driving the team hard from the top as the means to achieving the key goal, the approach may actually have contributed to the poor performance of the team.
In summary, the individualistic nature of the team personality which grew-up around Capello in the England locker room was always going to be tempted to push back against his propensity to control activities and drive endlessly for achievement. In the end, team members appeared to resent, then mock Capello’s single-mindedness, and England’s World Cup aspirations paid the price.
For executives and team leaders in sport and business, the lessons are profound.
SMART, or from the heart?
I find it hard to believe that the world of HR views SMART objectives …… that’s right, objectives which are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic and Timebound ….. as innovative. This latest article from HR Magazine, publicising the move by some professional services firms towards a SMART approach to business development, seems to hark back to a bygone era.
Persuading employees, via the carrot of enhanced remuneration, to perform SMART business development activities will deliver short-term results at best and represents an organisational command & control orientation which has seen better days. The problem with SMART anything is that those on the delivery side of the bargain spend more time gathering evidence as proof of performance than actually believing in the usefulness of the tasks and performing them from the heart.
This is just one of many current examples which appear to show the old models of mechanistic business management crumbling under the weight of their own bureaucracy and outdated thinking as new organisational innovations and more effective routes to market open up. With executives facing unparalleled choice and options for going to market in the future, commentators, advisers and consultants ought to have more to offer than a re-hash of 20th century control-speak. Even if some sectors, such as professional services, are slow to embrace change, those with an interest in progressive HR should be showing the way forward rather than publicising techniques which are well past their sell-by date.
Aligning company values with market expectations
Incompetent? Belligerent? Homophobic? Conniving? In the world of Business-to-Consumer(B2C) branding or, more to the point, in markets where the brand lives or dies by the sword of consumer opinion, having your organisation perceived consistently in such negative terms can wipe billions off of market valuations and ultimately threaten the survival of the business. Just ask the public relations executives at companies making the headlines at the moment such as BP, BA, Punch Taverns and EasyJet, or hark back to Gerald Ratner’s moment of madness in 1991. Once a negative perception has become embedded in the mind of the consumer, it is the devil’s own job to alter that opinion.
Moreover, if a turnaround in brand fortunes is not achieved quickly, then a more insidious turn of events may occur; not only will the carefully crafted brand image have been tainted, but many of the future actions of the business and its employees, whether good, bad or indifferent, will tend to become associated with an overpoweringly negative stereotype. As employees instinctively seek to adapt their actions in the face of negativity, the very personality of the business begins a subtle change in temperament.
Could things be any worse? Well, yes, in fact they could be. The grass is always greener on the other side, isn’t it? Organisations operating in the Business-to-Business(B2B) arena watch with interest and some trepidation as high profile events such as those in B2C unfold before their very eyes. At least their counterparts in B2C have the advantage, yes I said advantage, of being subjected to the glare of publicity as an early warning system. If the brand takes a high-profile knock, then rapid action can often limit the damage. Take the recent Punch Taverns homophobia incident as an example. Twitter feeds and other online social/business networks were abuzz within minutes of the offending words being spoken, enabling the company to gauge reaction and then move quickly in order to contain the problem.
No such luxury for those operating in the B2B arena. The unfortunate words and actions of employees can remain hidden for years, ultimately subverting the good intent of brand messaging and having the potential to become embedded within the organisation as pseudo ‘standard operating procedure’. So standard, in fact, that prospective customers and clients assume the offending actions are by design, part of the brand, and ‘just the way that that company does business’.
In many ways, the public flogging of businesses operating in the B2C arena, whilst unpleasant at the time, may in fact be a Godsend. After all, forewarned is forearmed, and only the most blinkered of executives would fail to act. However, for many players in B2B, the first sign that the market’s perception of the business, its people and its brand has ‘gone negative’ is when the customer fails to renew the contract. Only with hindsight, when it is often too late, does it become clear that the market’s expectations and the organisation’s values had gradually moved out of alignment.
Structured assessment of business personality
Before looking in detail at each aspect of the Surveying, Assessing and Reporting process, it is important to once again recall the rationale behind understanding more about your organisation’s personality. The goal of an organisational personality assessment is to enable an organisation to portray itself in the marketplace as a uniquely differentiated entity which brings value to the marketplace not just through its products and services, but also through the way in which the entire organisation interfaces with the marketplace. It is this latter aspect of value delivery which has, until now, remained a difficult area of investigation and understanding.
We take a structured approach to assessing and shaping an organisation’s personality, as this best enables us to gather & interpret data and assure executives that the decisions they take regarding the future market portrayal of their business have been substantiated in fact. This is an important aspect of the assessment process because, when we talk of organisational personality, we are dealing with intangibles and opinions. By its very nature, organisational personality is a subjective concept. As such, the thoughts, opinions and emotions which, in part, help to determine the profile of the organisation, can be open to interpretation. Thus, a structured and quantified approach to assessment and analysis provides a far more reliable basis upon which to reach shaping decisions than gut instinct alone.
The Balanced Business Personality monitor relies upon a number of interlinking models and constructs which enable the assessment of personality to be performed. From the outset, it is important to recognise the multi-dimensional nature of the analytical process. We gather and analyse personality data from 3 contributing user perspectives:
- Executive View: How the Executive team views the organisation’s personality today.
- Executive Aspiration: How the Executive team would wish the organisation to be portrayed in the future.
- Organisational Reality: How the employees view the organisation’s personality today.
This approach to comparing and contrasting the interpretation of opinion data provides a multi-dimensional perspective:
- A comparison of Executive View versus Executive Aspiration delivers a Board-level perspective on how the portrayal of the organisation’s personality ought to be evolving over time to achieve longer-term aspirations. This perspective provides the lynchpin linking the overall strategic goals of the organisation as a market-facing business with how the executive leadership of the business perceives the organisation today. By making this comparison, executives gain an initial insight into the extent of the work which may be involved in moving the portrayal of the business from today’s status quo towards the achievement of a market portrayal which is naturally promoted by all staff and is readily sustained.
- By contrasting Executive View and Organisational Reality, the resulting gap analysis highlights the degree to which the executive leadership and the employees have differing opinions regarding the organisation’s public persona which warrant further investigation. It almost goes without saying that executives, managers and staff members each have the potential to view the values, ethos and competences of the organisation from differing, and sometimes opposing angles. Whereas the executive strives to take an all-encompassing strategic view of a specific discipline or function, the staff member as functional specialist typically has a more short-term and functional perspective. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that opinions differ. This comparison often represents a wake-up call to management as, not only will it highlight minor discrepancies, it may also help the executive leadership to understand how the market’s perception of the organisation may be hindering the achievement of key strategic goals.
- Finally, a comparison of Executive Aspiration with Organisational Reality allows the project team to begin to consider what actions will be necessary to shape the organisation’s personality for the future. After all, by comparing the executives’ ideal future model of portrayal and market perception with how employees view the organisation as it stands today, obvious differences are highlighted and the goals of the shaping process are immediately brought into focus. This comparison therefore ensures that, where employee opinion appears to be at odds with the longer-term positioning goals of the executive group, specific actions can be deployed during the personality shaping process to bring the contradictory views into alignment.
The analytical framework described above provides the foundation for the entire process of organisational personality assessment and shaping. It describes a core set of opinion data which has been gathered from across the business and is predicated on the involvement of employees at all levels.
By taking this approach, the organisation’s leadership is able to:
a) identify and quantify any major disconnects between employee opinions and executive opinions,
b) set executive-level aspirations for the future portrayal of the organisation’s personality, and
c) approve an organisation-wide action plan to move forward the marketing portrayal of the organisation as a uniquely differentiated, service-delivering entity.
The next articles in this category will discuss the Organisational Balance construct, the Core Process construct and data gathering for Dichotomy Analysis.
DropDown Theme