I contribute to discussions on LinkedIn. A recent discussion asked for opinions on the best strategy to develop engaged staff. Opinions poured in on successful practices so I thought I would add mine.
My management style is one of pointing the way, not taking you blindfolded to the destination. I hope my words make you think and form your own questions rather than lay down a heavy tome of “facts”. I want to point you to learning. It’s a coaching style in the main.
If I have learnt one thing, in my scientific research of people’s behaviour at work and 46 years of honing that knowledge, it is that what is obvious, is always more subtle and layered where people are concerned.
I pitched into the discussion and described a successful action that helped to build the momentum of behaviour change and added to the excitement that something different was happening.
The action I described was a small fifteen-minute celebration of the first time the team had smashed through a daily target. We did a thousand! My action was to buy a sponge cake and we eat our thin slice during an afternoon break where I congratulated them on their achievement.
I was unprepared for the wrath of some of my LinkedIn colleagues.
Accusations flew. I was treating my people like fools: driving them to incredible performance with only a sponge cake as reward: my comeuppance was assured when people saw through my ploy.
Shocked at first, I rapidly became angry. How dare they think the people I managed were fools! Why is it that some people with degrees, doctorates, money or the right accent (leaving aside all the usual discriminatory bigotry) believe those without their special “quality” are inferior? Absolute nonsense.
When allowed I speak of “the divine spark in a human being” and the need to treat people accordingly.
The reasons my accusers misconstrued my words are clear to me, they come from my experience and research of management.
Let me explain and make you think.
When you ask someone to do a task, they don’t just remember the last task. They recall everything that has happened to them in work, in school, at home – the sum of their life’s experiences. Their behaviour in the task depends on the sum of those experiences including, thankfully, the last time you asked.
People’s lives are a journey. Not along a simple path but up a spiral staircase. As time goes on, we come to the same point but higher relative to the ground. Each loop of the spiral gives us new experiences to add to our sum total which makes us see the ground from the same angle but with fresh insight.
It is this position, up the spiral staircase, that my accusers do not understand. Perhaps they have not had the experiences themselves and are looking at a 2D diagram in a book.
Much of the engagement industry seems to be shallow and two dimensional. No wonder it has a bad reputation among hard-nosed leaders. If it doesn’t impact the bottom line it isn’t working, so don’t do it!
What is needed is a new psychological contract between the managed and the manager: a contract where each party promises to do their best for the other, in a business setting.