Engagement in the workplace is down. Here are a few ways great managers can turn their talents into practices while inspiring uncommon commitment and productivity along the way.
The average Goldman Sachs employee earns in excess of $350,000 per year, and we’re assured Greg Smith, who most visibly quit his job there last week, was paid substantially more. And, in leaving his long-time employer, Smith didn’t abandon just a fat salary. To regain his career freedom, he knowingly forfeited a considerable sum in deferred compensation as well. Most people in the world, of course, can only dream of being so highly paid for their work, so it’s a good assumption that a very large percentage of the working population has summarily judged Smith’s resignation as an act of complete
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi As those of you who have read Lead From The Heart already know, throughout my entire childhood, I had the perverse experience of routinely being told I would end up a failure
Author Emily Esfahani Smith explains why the pursuit of happiness backfires–and what we can do about it in the jobs we already have. For as long as human beings have existed, they’ve yearned to know what makes life worth living. Plato described man as a “being in search of meaning,” and the first great work of literature, the 4,000 year-old “Epic of Gilgamesh,” is a hero’s quest to live a meaningful life in the face of mortality. “What the research shows is that this pursuit of happiness tends to make people feel unhappy.” Today many of us are no less interested in
Worker happiness has fallen every year for the last 25 years–in good economic times and bad. Today, over half of American workers effectively hate their jobs. Once the economy picks up, that could mean a mass exodus from your ranks, unless you take action now. A friend of mine resigned his long-time bank management job this week to take early retirement. I learned about it on Facebook. As I began reading his announcement, I fully expected it to be an animated recounting of all the new hobbies he planned to pursue and exotic trips he intended to take. But it quickly became
If you think your brain makes you a great leader, you better check your head. According to the Conference Board, job satisfaction in America has been on a steep and steady decline for an entire generation. The century-old research organization reported this summer that more than half of all US employees are unhappy in their jobs today–effectively an all-time low. Recent Gallup studies not only validate that people feel worse about their work, bosses and organizations than ever before, they reveal a remarkable 71 percent of American workers are either not engaged in their jobs–or have become actively disengaged. Clearly, all
In the late 19th Century, British historian, Lord Acton, famously asserted that “power corrupts.” And we surely needn’t look too deeply within business, politics and every day life to find examples that validate this timeless truth. But new research from U.C. Berkeley social scientist, Dacher Keltner, confirms something few of us may ever have personally acknowledged with regard to Lord Acton’s insight: When we ourselves are given positions of power, we’re no less prone to abuse it. In the American workplace today, over half of workers admit to quitting jobs in order to flee a power-abusing boss. And, of course, employee
What’s to become of the traditional work office? Is it possible that communications tools like Skype, Zoom.us and Google Hangouts will have the effect of making communal office spaces obsolete? Is the day coming when organizations will redeploy workers to home offices – where they’ll have no commute, and the freedom to work all day in play clothes? A few years ago, researchers at iconic furniture maker, Herman Miller, began a deep-dive into the future of the global workplace driven by the desire to answer questions like these. Clearly, technology already makes it possible for many people to work away from conventional offices.
When Wharton Business School professor Richard Shell was faced with a life-threatening illness, he was forced to think about the big picture. What was success to him? Since then, Shell has dedicated his life to helping folks find true meaning in their own lives and work. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. —Henry David Thoreau In 2013, Parade magazine and Yahoo! Finance jointly surveyed 26,000 Americans and discovered that nearly 60% of them fully regretted their career choices. That’s an
The Internet turned 27 about 7 months ago, a milepost that commemorates the day Tim Berners-Lee proposed the creation of a new kind of “information management system,” and forever changed how we live and work. That the Internet has enabled profound personal and organizational productivity gains since its launch is patently irrefutable. But at the same time, the Internet, along with its ever-growing progeny of applications, has an often unacknowledged dark side: Many of us have become overwhelmed by it. “Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that, first of all, we have to figure out what they are.”
These authors aren’t fortune-tellers, but their works can shed light on the future of leaders and workplaces. Our long-enduring resistance to bringing the heart into workplace management dates as far back as the industrial revolution. Traditional leadership theory espouses that workers should be treated like any other input: squeeze as much out of them as possible and pay them as little as possible. This idea originated at a time when work was far less complex and people were more easily replaceable. Under a scenario like this, managers were taught to ignore the human aspect of employees—or heart—and to be indifferent to
Introduction: Through a series of fascinating studies, Harvard-trained social scientists, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, have shown that human beings are profoundly influenced by the behavior of the people closest to them in their lives. When we learn a colleague has voted, for example, we’re far more likely to vote ourselves. When someone in our social circle quits smoking, eats too much in a restaurant, or is characteristically studious, we’re unconsciously persuaded to copy those same behaviors. While the research proves something we may long ago have intuitively surmised – that we directly influence our friends and they influence us –
Research reveals that companies consistently choose the wrong people for management roles. Here’s what you can do to avoid the same mistake. Have you ever quit a job just to get away from a bad boss? If you have, it turns out you’re in sizable company. According to a April 2015 Gallup study, one in two U.S. workers have at some point in their career felt compelled to make that same difficult choice. That the business world may be filled with managers who unwittingly drive their people away is at the heart of Gallup’s 50-plus page report “State Of The American Manager:
Early one morning just a few weeks ago, I woke up with the intention of starting my day at the gym. But before I ever made it out of the house, I completely blacked out, fell on a cold travertine floor and broke my ribs. The pain from that fall was excruciating; and it immediately restored me to consciousness. But the sheer terror of the moment instantly grew worse; I thought I was suffocating. Hearing my moans, my wife found me splayed on the ground and largely incoherent. Stunned and petrified, she kept asking me what had happened. But by this
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” ~ John Maynard Keynes Our common and traditional approach to leadership hasn’t significantly evolved since the dawn of the industrial age. When it comes to managing people in a work environment, we’ve always treated workers like any other input: squeeze as much as much out of them as possible and pay them as little as possible. This idea was introduced nearly a century ago when the expansion of the US economy largely was based on industrial machinery. Workers were required to perform relatively unchallenging tasks and
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” ~ Schopenhauer It’s been nearly a year since Gallup announced its stunning finding that engagement in the American workplace had fallen to crisis levels. In what became the shot heard ‘round the world in business, the research firm revealed that 70 percent of the nation’s working population now admits to being disengaged in their jobs (i.e., content with collecting a paycheck while investing little of their hearts in their work) – and that nearly 1 in every 5 workers is so discontent that they’re
Winning Your Employees Over To Stick With The Company Long Term Involves An Array Of Factors—But First Among Those Is Love. What are the real drivers of human engagement in the workplace? What are those things that consistently inspire people to fully commit themselves in their jobs and to willingly scale mountains for their bosses and organizations? For the past two-plus years, I’ve been singularly focused on answering these big questions and to boiling answers down to a true bottom-line. In the service of organizations everywhere, my singular mission has been to identify the few critical leadership practices that affect people
Leaders finally realize the importance of a fully engaged workforce. Now they should learn what practices drive and sustain happy employees. Finally, leaders are now convinced one of their last remaining competitive advantages lies with their people. Businesses have begun to signal to workers that their needs will now be honored on a scale only previously reserved for customers and shareholders. Raising employee engagement has become one of the highest priorities for organizations all around the globe, according to a 2015 Conference Board CEO study. While leaders have come to appreciate the importance of having a fully engaged workforce, they also
