10 Creds - Management

[Music] a few years ago into a presentation at the national academy of human resources i’m a fellow in the national academy and i listened to an outstanding presentation on the topic of employee engagement three of the top hr leaders in the world were asked to present what they thought about employee engagement and they did a great job they talked about recognition reward programs training empowerment all kinds of great things and it all made sense to me then they said in spite of all previous efforts global employee engagement is near an all-time low well i’m thinking wait a minute if everybody knows these answers why have i been hearing the same lecture for 30 years and no one does it then i realized something 100 of the dialogue on employee engagement was what can the company do to engage you and absolutely zero percent was what can you do to engage yourself well i’m thinking wait a minute you people might be missing about half of an equation everything they said was fantastic it was what they didn’t say that bothered me they didn’t talk about the employees responsibility for their own engagement years ago john kennedy made a very famous speech he said ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country well the employee engagement talk was the opposite of the john kennedy speech well i thought about this and i said there’s two flight attendants on a typical american airlines flight i’m on one’s positive motivated upbeat and enthusiastic one’s negative bitter angry and cynical have you ever been on that plane before same pay same uniform what’s the difference not the outside the differences on the inside well i shared this with my daughter dr kelly goldsmith kelly’s a professor at vanderbilt university and knows a lot more about research than i do and she said daddy almost everything in the area of employee engagement revolves around passive questions what’s a passive question do you have clear goals pass a question do you have meaningful work pass a question do you have a friend at work pass a question kelly said when you ask people a passive question and they have a negative answer they tend to blame the environment do you have clear goals no why not they’re confused they have meaningful work no no they make me do trivia they have a friend at work no they’re a bunch of jerks it’s their fault kelly taught me the value of asking active questions especially questions to begin with the phrase did i do my best to and that led to some amazing research that we’ve been doing today here are my first six active questions that i challenge myself with every day i would suggest you do the same thing the first question is did i do my best to set clear goals not did the company set clear goals for me did i do my best to set my own goals number two did i do my best to make progress toward achieving my own goals number three did i do my best to find meaning rather than saying did the company give me meaning did i do my best to create meaning number four did i do my best to be happy rather than say did someone else make me happy that i do my best to make myself happy number five did i do my best to build positive relationships rather than just asking do you have a friend at work did you try to be that friend and finally the last one number six did i do my best to be fully engaged rather than asking did the company engage me did i do my best to engage myself well our research on this is amazing if you’re interested in a study about it send me an email marshall at marshallgoldsmith.com s2 else i’ll send you the research study here’s what happened we have people for a couple of weeks just fill out these forms and test themselves after two weeks what did we find out we found out that 34 percent of the people said i get better at everything i feel happier i’m more engaged all six item wins up we found out that 67 percent of the people said i got better on at least four of the items 91 percent of people said i got better at least one about nine percent said no change and less than one percent said overall things got worse why these six questions every day get me to focus on the one thing in life i have total control over what is that question did i do my best you see that’s something i cannot blame on the company i can’t blame on my co-workers and i don’t even have to get a high score by achieving results i get a high score if i just try well the learning point on this is if you look at this concept of engagement and our relationship with the organization it’s great that the company is doing whatever they can to engage the employees and i applaud this one new challenge so have every employee including yourself do your best to increase your own engagement at work

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