Why is employee engagement important? Why does disengagement matter?

The Gallup organization, in systematically and comprehensively surveying workers across the United States in their State of the American Workplace, discovered an alarming insight: 70% of American employees – almost 70 million people – are disengaged in their work, leading to $319 billion in lost productivity and a $450 billion negative impact to the economy. Even worse, 19% of employees are actively sabotaging their employers. The localization of where the disengagement is happening in our organizations is highly troubling as well. “Engagement levels among service employees — those workers who are often on the front line serving customers — are among the lowest of any occupation Gallup measured and have declined in recent years.” The very workers who are closest to the most important people our organizations are designed to serve – our constituents, our customers, our clients – are at the highest risk of disengagement. This fundamental disconnect at the frontline of our organizations presents direct risks to the core mission of any organization. Think about the lost human potential and the impact of these statistics on the average person’s daily life.

Not surprisingly, Gallup also found that the 25% of workers who are engaged came up with most of the innovative ideas, created most of a company’s new customers, and had the most entrepreneurial energy.1 These organizations created the work conditions to harness the full potential of their employees to adapt to change and succeed in today’s complex work environments. What if more organizations could access this creativity and direct this effort towards their core missions? Beyond profitability and productivity, what kind of impact could another 70 million engaged workers have on our society? What problems that we currently face could be solved with all of this unutilized creativity, energy, and effort? How would it fundamentally change our society?

Most of what passes for leadership and management in today’s work environments are outdated Industrial Age ‘technology’ and is, in many ways, the true source of these is engagement statistics. In this paper, we will explore the root causes of this disengagement and outline how leaders and managers can adopt new insights from the latest research to increase engagement in their organizations. We will look at three strategies for improving engagement through leadership development:

Clearly and consistently communicate the organization’s purpose and how the employee’s work connects to this purpose.
Actively engage leaders through experiential learning and development.
Emphasize managers’ strengths through regular feedback.

In particular, we will demonstrate how strategic use of a new type of leadership development approach at all levels of the organization can improve engagement, productivity, and impact in the world.

Why are 70% of Americans disengaged at work?

To understand this problem, we have to look back at the way work has evolved. For most workers, the major shifts in their personal engagement in work started during the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Before the 19th century, most work was done on the farm, in small shops, and in cottage industries in the home. While the work was difficult and sometimes strenuous, the connection with the work and the end-user of the product or service was direct and personal. Based on the economic theories of specialization of labor, economies of scale, and competitive advantage, industrial work changed this dynamic significantly. As much as possible, complex manufacturing processes, previously done on a small scale by artisans, were separated into smaller, repeatable tasks. The management techniques of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management theory and the assembly line of Henry Ford greatly accelerated this evolution of work and increased the efficiency of the workflow. But it came at a cost for the human workers involved in these repetitive, disconnected tasks. Productivity rates skyrocketed, but employee engagement plummeted. Later, the same automation process was used for white-collar work in corporate offices, the military, and public sector organizations. In large part, all creative, strategic work was elevated to the top of the hierarchy. For most people at the technician level, their work became so separated, segmented, and disconnected from the vision and strategy of the organization that it is no wonder they became disengaged.2 In an age of predictability, limited information, and large-scale production, this model worked—for a time.

Fast forward to our current day. This process of intellectual centralization in the name of efficiency has been exponentially amplified by information technology, complex algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Richard Sennett describes that, “especially in the cutting-edge realms of high finance, advanced technology, and sophisticated services,” genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite in our society.

At the same time as this continued organizational centralization of intellectual work activity in our personal and social lives, we have witnessed an exponential growth of information consumption. We are living in an age of information abundance and complexity. These forces have led to greater unpredictability and a decentralization of communication into social networks based on affinity and interest. Change and the need for personal adaptation have become constant. Yet, our organizations and our centralized leadership styles and approaches to management have not evolved with the pace of information technology. Because the technology of management and our organizations have been built on some outdated science and understanding of human motivations, we see what Jacob Morgan aptly called the “employee engagement divide.” 3 As was seen very clearly in the financial crisis of 2008, the combination of organizational centralization, complex financial transactions, and disengaged workers led to significant systemic leadership and management failures at all levels to make effective decisions for the health of the financial system. Without a new approach to leadership and management for both private and public sectors, this divide will continue to have detrimental impacts on the individual employee, the mission of the organization, the economy, and our society.

How do organizations need to adapt to the Information Age?

Based on Gallup’s State of the American Workplace study, there are three key actions to strengthen managers, employees, and ultimately, organizations.4

1. Clearly and consistently communicate the organization’s purpose and how the employee’s work connects to this purpose.

Beginning with Henry Ford, the traditional approach to addressing disengagement from work has been to “compensate” the employee with more money, perks, and workplace well-being initiatives.5 While research has shown this works to a degree for routine tasks, for any other type of work it can actually become counterproductive.6 Executives, managers, rank-and-file employees – all employees regardless of their title – want to know their contributions and time matter. By clearly communicating where the organization has been and where it is going, employees will have a more intrinsic connection to their work and can better understand how their position directly contributes to the growth of the organization. This knowledge builds purpose and power into all levels of the organization, which in turn, motivates employees with a sense of ownership.

Returning to The Gallup survey, they found that, “at the end of the day, an intrinsic connection to one’s work and one’s company is what truly drives performance, inspires discretionary effort, and improves well-being. If these basic needs are not fulfilled, then even the most extravagant perks will be little more than window dressing.” 7

To develop engaged leaders at all levels of an organization, we have to think about the person beyond the old frameworks of the rational economic actor that is only motivated by compensation and career progression.

The Clearing’s team of leadership and management experts has spent the last 30 years working across the public, private, and non-profit sectors in numerous transformation and change initiatives. We use visual frameworks, called The PRIMES, to identify the primal or universal nature of humans at work solving complex problems.

Central to our understanding of motivation, we utilize the PRIME called STAKE to frame what engages and motivates individuals to action. To communicate what is at stake, the leader and manager have to understand through empathy what motivates their teams and employees at three levels: HEAD (intellectual), HEART (directional, intuitive), and WALLET (monetary, economic). These motivations can be positive (PULL) and negative (PUSH). Without this comprehensive understanding, the leader cannot engage and inspire their teams.

While old industrial models have largely neglected the heart that is motivated by a sense of purpose and vision, we need a leadership that empowers all levels with the big picture, the “why” of the work and integrates this into a person’s daily tasks. This type of leadership communicates to the heart of workers through a process of ENNOBLEMENT, clearly connecting the individual’s work, the organization’s mission, and ultimately, the positive impact the organization will have in the world. It directly addresses the problem of personal disengagement created by the Industrial Age management approaches.

Most traditional leaders may discount the importance of ideas like empathy and purpose as the negotiable ‘soft’ elements of the business. But as we learn more about the future of work, we understand that the heart is the engine of creative aptitudes necessary to adapt to our rapidly changing world. In IBM’s global survey of leaders – the largest survey of executives in the world – the top characteristic 1,500 public and private executives looked for in employees was creativity.8 This is logical, as an organization cannot develop creative employees that can rapidly respond to change and complexity without understanding what motivates them at a heart level.

2. Actively engage leaders through experiential learning and development.

A recent study estimated that “direct turnover costs are 50%-60% of an employee’s annual salary, with total costs associated with turnover ranging from 90% to 200% of annual salary.” 9 Some studies have shown this cost to be much greater for executive-level employees. The cost of turnover is not just financial. When a leader or manager leaves an organization, it loses knowledge, intellectual capital, and experience, which leads to a negative impact on morale.

By providing training, mentoring, and coaching opportunities, you show your leadership team that you are invested in them and in their success. According to Gallup’s research, “people who get the opportunity to continually develop are twice as likely as those on the other end of the scale to say they will spend their career with their company.” 10 Based on statistics and our experience, what is needed is a new type of leader that can make these necessary personal connections with employees, while continually growing and developing their own skillsets. Over 70% of the workforce reports to mid-level managers, not the C-Suite. Citing Gallup’s research, “a Leader’s engagement directly affects managers’ engagement and manager engagement, in turn, directly influences employee engagement. Managers who are directly supervised by highly engaged leadership teams are 39% more likely to be engaged than managers who are supervised by actively disengaged leadership teams.” 11 Transformation must occur from the top-down and the bottom-up of our organizations, especially any part of the organization that directly interacts with customers, partners, and outside stakeholders.

If your organization is still designed for the Industrial Age, what can you do to develop leaders and managers as coaches throughout your organization? Today’s leaders must be comfortable with setting direction in the face of ambiguity and learning new insights as they take risks on the field. At The Clearing, we have found that effective leadership development utilizes real-life experimentation. In time-bound challenges, analogous to a sports competition, participants take action “on the court” towards a vision of business outcomes – a “TO-BE” – and they receive training “in the locker room” to gain skills necessary to succeed in the challenge. This approach is depicted in our COURT-LOCKER ROOM PRIME. Most learning and development programs provide employees with the opportunity to get away from their day-to-day role to learn new models, tools, and techniques. The challenge is that while they have experienced a change, their organization still operates in the same way. It is easy to slip back into old habits and ways of doing things. Think of a rubber band that has been stretched then suddenly snaps back to its old shape. Even worse, when leaders do not practice using those new tools and methods, they get rusty.

To build more resiliency in the face of constant change, leaders and managers also need both theory and a critical perspective to succeed at their missions. Continuing the sports analogy, players need time in the “locker room” to learn the plays for future games and to revisit their past performances. Learning and development programs need to push participants to think strategically about the organization from the “10,000” foot level. At The Clearing, we call this approach to learning, IN-ON. Most organizations fall into the trap of getting so focused in the business (IN) that they never take the time to step away from the work and ask the tough questions about how the organization functions from a systemic perspective (ON). What worked? What didn’t work? What should we do next time? To learn and grow, leaders and managers need to spend time working ON the organization. The effective leader knows the appropriate balance between IN-ON and the importance of spending equal time learning and teaching mental models and frameworks that improve the intellectual performance of the team.

3. Emphasize managers’ strengths through regular feedback and coaching.

The old adage, “employees don’t leave organizations, they leave bad bosses” is often true.

Unfortunately, most people have had or will have a bad boss at some point in their career. Is there such a thing as a truly bad boss or is it simply an individual that may not have the necessary tools to handle constant change? It has been our experience that often it is the latter. These individuals don’t realize they are seen as bad bosses. They are usually very involved with their own tasks and may neglect the team they depend on or perhaps they focus too much time and energy on the daily tasks of their team. Both neglect and micromanagement can severely damage productivity, trust, and the team. In today’s world of information abundance and complexity, management has to operate as flexible as possible, respond quickly to changes in the external environment, and empower their team to make appropriate decisions based on best practices. To do this, the leader has to transform from “boss” to “coach.”

In the Information Age, where collaboration with new team members will be a constant challenge, the ability of the coach to quickly build trust among the team members will be critical. In this context, the coach needs to set an example of skill and expertise in the craft of the organization to build instant trust. He or she has to have a history as a top performer in the field of competition. Without this experience of doing the core elements of the work, the leader cannot have the authority to build strangers into a team and guide the group to higher levels of excellence.

Building on this trust between each individual and the coach, the coach needs to transfer that trust into the group and rapidly develop group loyalty. The coach gets the group to see the better qualities of their teammates and to play to each other’s strengths. To build this instant rapport, they create a sense of camaraderie and commitment to each other that transcends the immediate transactions or activities of the moment. The coach sees individual persons for who they truly are and gets the team to see these strengths as well.

While all high performing leaders care about their teams, what sets the coach apart is their genuine interest in the growth and development of the individual members of their team. The coach works to help new team members identify their strengths, weaknesses, and professional goals. In one study of 65,672 employees, The Gallup Organization found that those who received strengths feedback had turnover rates that were 14.9% lower than for employees who received no feedback (controlling for job type and tenure).12 The coach challenges team members by providing them with assignments and tasks in their areas of interest, which stretch them professionally and personally, causing them to grow and develop in the work. All along the way, the coach walks alongside the individual, giving them feedback at the right time for their personal development.

Conclusion

Our world is not standing still. We can either adapt our organizations to the new realities of technology and work or face the consequences of growing disengagement. To rise to the challenge, we need to rethink our perspectives on work and motivation. We need to communicate to the whole person and we need to develop the leaders of tomorrow that can rapidly and flexibly build teams to solve discreet, time-bound problems. We have to go beyond designing new software and applications to solve social and human challenges. The technology of leadership and management needs an upgrade. To do this, we need to redesign our learning and development programs that form our employees and adapt our methods of feedback to encourage creativity and strengths-based development. If we rise to this challenge, a whole generation of leaders and managers can be empowered to tackle the world’s most pressing and complex problems.

Bibliography

1. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, pg. 4. Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

2. Ibid. pg. 4.

3. Crawford, Matthew B. “Shopclass as Soulcraft.” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Summer Edition 2006.

4. Sennett, Richard. The Culture of New Capitalism. Yale University Press. January 31, 2007.

5. Morgan, Jacob. “The Single Greatest Cause of Disengagement.” Forbes Magazine. October 13, 2014.

6. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

7. Crawford, Matthew B. “Shopclass as Soulcraft.” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Summer Edition 2006.

8. Dan Ariely; Uri Gneezy; George Loewenstein & Nina Mazar (2005-07-23). “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, Working Paper” (PDF). Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Working Papers pg: 05-11.

9. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders. Page 27. Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

10. Carr, Austin. “The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEO’s: Creativity.” Fast Company. May 8th, 2010.

11. Cascio, W.F. Managing Human Resources: Productivity, Quality of Work Life, Profits. 2006 (7th ed.).

12. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

13. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

14. Asplund, Jim & Nikki Blacksmith. The Secret to Higher Performance. The Business Journal. May 3rd, 2011.

For anyone transitioning into a leadership position, the first 180 days are critical for your long-term success. I have worked with numerous leaders who have navigated the difficult waters of leadership transition and set their organizations on a path to high performance. In our ebook, High Performance Leadership: Skills You Need to Succeed and Critical Mistakes to Avoid, The Clearing shares steps you should take to be successful and point out pitfalls that even the most seasoned leaders fall victim to.

Leaders need to build a foundation of authority, strengthen their relationships, and create a culture of performance in their organizations. Here are some of the lessons learned I have gathered over the years:

Get clear on the performance expectations of the fewest, most critical stakeholders: the board, customers, employees, etc.

Your “full metal jacket” as a leader is being the most informed person in your organization on the interests and expectations of the organization’s most important stakeholders. If you are a business leader, make it a priority to immediately meet with each of your top customers to get their unvarnished opinion about the organization.

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If you are leading a public or social sector organization, get out in the field to listen to your constituents or beneficiaries and balance this with feedback from your donors or funders. If you are new to the organization, you will have the advantage of having no institutional “baggage” and can hear feedback firsthand without any defensive reflex. For your organization, you will bring a fresh perspective on customer feedback.

After you have focused externally to understand the market, then work your way inward to get a deeper understanding of how the organization is delivering against these expectations. Seek to understand your employees’ aspirations, ideas, and perceived challenges in serving your customers and growing the organization. Any barriers to good customer service can become strategic opportunities for leadership in your first 180 days.

Understand how power works in your organization and among your stakeholders

As you spend time with external and internal stakeholders, begin to make a mental map of influencers in your new ecosystem. Some leaders even privately make actual maps of the power flows among influencers of the organization. At The Clearing, we call these tools “power maps”. As you begin to craft your strategy for the organization, you can revisit this map to understand social dynamics and how to engage influencers in the design and implementation of your strategy.

As cultural knowledge is a form of power, successful leaders understand the key cultural aspects of the organization. At The Clearing, we define culture as what a group does and does not tolerate. This can be difficult to initially see, as not all cultural values and standards are explicit. Leaders must adopt the traits of an anthropologist to observe what actions, symbols, and language are important to influential external and internal stakeholders. First, the leader quickly and appropriately needs to begin incorporating this knowledge into their daily actions and the long-term strategy. If there are cultural shifts that need to occur, don’t focus on these first, but rather focus on serving customers and external outcomes. Once you have established authority, it will be important to address cultural barriers to serving customers and achieving outcomes.

Assess the health and performance of the organization

As a leader, data is your friend and will give you authority in the organization. With each organization, there are set of key performance indicators that demonstrate the success and sustainability of an organization at delivering against its mission. Successful leaders think about measuring performance from three levels of perspective: outcomes, outputs, and inputs.

First, understand the organizational outcomes at the mission level. What value has the organization been delivering to the marketplace in the form of objectively measured outcomes? If you are a business leader, you will need the data at your fingertips on how your solution is solving a customer problem better than your competitors. If you are a public sector leader, you will need the hard data on how your organization is performing in uniquely solving a social or economic problem.

Second, look at the output data of the organization. How productive is the organization in delivering products and services to customers? For businesses, the new leader needs to be very intimate with the key financial metrics of the organization – especially profitability, revenue growth, and return on investment.

Finally, for input measures, the new leader needs to have accurate data on how the organization is managing various forms of capital – financial, human, intellectual, and social – that are critical to delivering value to customers or constituents. You need to understand the overarching process of how these inputs are used to deliver value and any opportunities for increased efficiencies. Any waste can be redirected to invest in innovation for customers.

Set clear and realistic expectations for performance

With objective data and subjective insights in hand, a leader can develop a systemic picture of the ‘as-is” health and performance of the organization. Using this realistic understanding, they can provide the organization with a realistic, yet stretching expectation of organizational performance in the marketplace.

It is important to communicate this vision often and in different venues to ensure connection and understanding of expectations. Successful leaders use various types of formats in individual and group settings to have a two-way dialogue about these expectations. For your employees, frame this as an opportunity for mastery in their field, connect performance expectations to a mission, and provide autonomy and creativity in how employees can achieve these outcomes consistent with the values of the organization.

Demonstrate personal integrity and commitment to serving others

Leaders go first. As you communicate performance expectations, it is very important to communicate your own top two to three performance expectations for yourself as a leader. Make sure these are realistic for you to achieve and focus your energy to stay in integrity with these expectations. In everything you do, your most important currency is your integrity. You will grow your integrity in the organization by fulfilling promises, keeping your agreements, and demonstrating integrity in small things – like showing up on time for meetings with your new staff.

In addition, one of the most important things you can do is demonstrate in action your service of others. If the top person in the organization is serving his or her employees, they will be more likely to serve each other and their customers well. This is the “x-factor” in high performance organizations.

Focus on achieving quick wins to build credibility

With this strong foundation built, you will have a short window of time to demonstrate organizational performance to your most important stakeholders, especially if you have a board, investors, or funders expecting a change in performance. Revisit your insights from your interactions with customers and employees, pick three to five strategic opportunities to fix problems, improve customer service, and achieve quick-win outcomes in your first year as a leader. Use any quick-win as an opportunity to celebrate with your team, communicate to your stakeholders, and build energy and momentum for your organization.

Following these six tips, you will have a deep understanding of your organization, credibility in the marketplace, and the loyalty of your employees. This foundation will set you up for long-term success. Transition into a leadership role can be a difficult experience, but using these tactics, you can avoid the typical pitfalls many leaders experience.

In our recent Leadership Development blog series, we’ve touched on a few relevant topics related to developing leaders in the current complex global environment. We have shared how organizations can develop leaders through strategic experiments and how leaders can play the role of coach in today’s workplace. But what if you yourself are going through a transition into leadership? This can be a big jump for someone accustomed to life as an operational manager or as a subject matter expert. If so, you are probably experiencing a gap between the expectations others have of you and what you currently know how to do. Let’s look at how we can make this transition as smooth as possible and “love the gap” as you leap into your new leadership role.

Understanding interpersonal dynamics – For technical experts, you may have been working by yourself on a known technical problem set in an established field of knowledge. Having all of the answers has been your bread and butter. You may even have high expertise in the most complex elements of your field. Your world is a world of objective facts, figures, and bodies of knowledge. Shifting into leadership, you are forced into a world of dealing with the subjective elements of interpersonal dynamics that requires sophisticated relational and political skills. The technical complexity you have mastered has now been further complicated by the social complexity of working with other people and other organizations to solve a problem. Instead of working through a problem on your own, you will have to work through others and help them ask the right questions to find the answer. You now have to “facilitate” group problem solving by aligning diverse individual perspectives into a shared perspective.

If you are a manager, the planning and organizational skills that have brought you success like establishing operational control, optimizing resource efficiencies, etc. will likely not be the skill sets you need to lead in or across the broader organization. Some of your strengths may actually get you in trouble as you try to lead externally with stakeholders you don’t manage. In these situations, there aren’t always common measures of performance or even shared organizational structures. As you shift from manager to leader, you will need to learn how to set direction, how to motivate others to move towards that direction and then align your stakeholders through persuasion to achieve these outcomes.

Creating a vision – Setting direction for a group or organization can be a scary moment. As a manager, your job has been very past, present, and near-term future oriented. You have been focused on managing change: fixing and improving the current state of your project, team, or unit. Leadership, especially in today’s work environment, often requires setting a new vision beyond what the organization currently sees. We call this type of activity transformation. The vision has to touch, move, and inspire the group to create a new set of tasks and do them in a new way.

How do you develop compelling visions? The reality is that you don’t have to have clairvoyance to set vision’s that inspire others. Most leaders can’t see the future in the crystal ball. They have developed their intuition by listening and acting on it and through nurturing their own creative interests. But beyond this, leaders are able to see around the corner because they are effective at understanding what is meaningful. They can distinguish between the signal and noise. What’s the signal? It is what is most important to the most important people inside and outside the organization. This ability to listen and seek out feedback from these critical stakeholders is the leader’s source of power in setting new direction and vision. The better listener you become as a leader, the more attune you become to what is meaningful to your most important stakeholders and what is happening in the outside world. You can help the organization adapt to the new future that is forming. When you seek to motivate these same people to transform themselves and the organization, you understand what they care about and you can speak into these interests to get their buy-in and commitment.

Challenging yourself – Typically, the hardest challenge to overcome as you transition from expert or manager into a leadership role is what I call “the up and out” problem. You have to pull yourself out of your comfort zone in the work and out of the past role as the expert or the manager. You have to create time to be with customers, your staff, and your peers. And you have to create space to think about the future. For some people, this won’t feel like “work.” But the more you get into solving leadership challenges, you will see that building and nurturing your network is hard work. You may get pushback from others that want you to slip back into your old role, but eventually they will experience the value of your network, your insight and the resources you help bring to the organization. This is the leap of leadership. It takes some faith, but it’s worth it on the other side.

If you are interested in learning more about development as a leader, The Clearing has applied the principles outlined above in our Leading with The PRIMES leadership development program.

Why is employee engagement important? Why does disengagement matter?

The Gallup organization, in systematically and comprehensively surveying workers across the United States in their State of the American Workplace, discovered an alarming insight: 70% of American employees – almost 70 million people – are disengaged in their work, leading to $319 billion in lost productivity and a $450 billion negative impact to the economy. Even worse, 19% of employees are actively sabotaging their employers. The localization of where the disengagement is happening in our organizations is highly troubling as well. “Engagement levels among service employees — those workers who are often on the front line serving customers — are among the lowest of any occupation Gallup measured and have declined in recent years.” The very workers who are closest to the most important people our organizations are designed to serve – our constituents, our customers, our clients – are at the highest risk of disengagement. This fundamental disconnect at the frontline of our organizations presents direct risks to the core mission of any organization. Think about the lost human potential and the impact of these statistics on the average person’s daily life.

Not surprisingly, Gallup also found that the 25% of workers who are engaged came up with most of the innovative ideas, created most of a company’s new customers, and had the most entrepreneurial energy.1 These organizations created the work conditions to harness the full potential of their employees to adapt to change and succeed in today’s complex work environments. What if more organizations could access this creativity and direct this effort towards their core missions? Beyond profitability and productivity, what kind of impact could another 70 million engaged workers have on our society? What problems that we currently face could be solved with all of this unutilized creativity, energy, and effort? How would it fundamentally change our society?

Most of what passes for leadership and management in today’s work environments are outdated Industrial Age ‘technology’ and is, in many ways, the true source of these is engagement statistics. In this paper, we will explore the root causes of this disengagement and outline how leaders and managers can adopt new insights from the latest research to increase engagement in their organizations. We will look at three strategies for improving engagement through leadership development:

Clearly and consistently communicate the organization’s purpose and how the employee’s work connects to this purpose.
Actively engage leaders through experiential learning and development.
Emphasize managers’ strengths through regular feedback.

In particular, we will demonstrate how strategic use of a new type of leadership development approach at all levels of the organization can improve engagement, productivity, and impact in the world.

Why are 70% of Americans disengaged at work?

To understand this problem, we have to look back at the way work has evolved. For most workers, the major shifts in their personal engagement in work started during the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Before the 19th century, most work was done on the farm, in small shops, and in cottage industries in the home. While the work was difficult and sometimes strenuous, the connection with the work and the end-user of the product or service was direct and personal. Based on the economic theories of specialization of labor, economies of scale, and competitive advantage, industrial work changed this dynamic significantly. As much as possible, complex manufacturing processes, previously done on a small scale by artisans, were separated into smaller, repeatable tasks. The management techniques of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management theory and the assembly line of Henry Ford greatly accelerated this evolution of work and increased the efficiency of the workflow. But it came at a cost for the human workers involved in these repetitive, disconnected tasks. Productivity rates skyrocketed, but employee engagement plummeted. Later, the same automation process was used for white-collar work in corporate offices, the military, and public sector organizations. In large part, all creative, strategic work was elevated to the top of the hierarchy. For most people at the technician level, their work became so separated, segmented, and disconnected from the vision and strategy of the organization that it is no wonder they became disengaged.2 In an age of predictability, limited information, and large-scale production, this model worked—for a time.

Fast forward to our current day. This process of intellectual centralization in the name of efficiency has been exponentially amplified by information technology, complex algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Richard Sennett describes that, “especially in the cutting-edge realms of high finance, advanced technology, and sophisticated services,” genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite in our society.

At the same time as this continued organizational centralization of intellectual work activity in our personal and social lives, we have witnessed an exponential growth of information consumption. We are living in an age of information abundance and complexity. These forces have led to greater unpredictability and a decentralization of communication into social networks based on affinity and interest. Change and the need for personal adaptation have become constant. Yet, our organizations and our centralized leadership styles and approaches to management have not evolved with the pace of information technology. Because the technology of management and our organizations have been built on some outdated science and understanding of human motivations, we see what Jacob Morgan aptly called the “employee engagement divide.” 3 As was seen very clearly in the financial crisis of 2008, the combination of organizational centralization, complex financial transactions, and disengaged workers led to significant systemic leadership and management failures at all levels to make effective decisions for the health of the financial system. Without a new approach to leadership and management for both private and public sectors, this divide will continue to have detrimental impacts on the individual employee, the mission of the organization, the economy, and our society.

How do organizations need to adapt to the Information Age?

Based on Gallup’s State of the American Workplace study, there are three key actions to strengthen managers, employees, and ultimately, organizations.4

1. Clearly and consistently communicate the organization’s purpose and how the employee’s work connects to this purpose.

Beginning with Henry Ford, the traditional approach to addressing disengagement from work has been to “compensate” the employee with more money, perks, and workplace well-being initiatives.5 While research has shown this works to a degree for routine tasks, for any other type of work it can actually become counterproductive.6 Executives, managers, rank-and-file employees – all employees regardless of their title – want to know their contributions and time matter. By clearly communicating where the organization has been and where it is going, employees will have a more intrinsic connection to their work and can better understand how their position directly contributes to the growth of the organization. This knowledge builds purpose and power into all levels of the organization, which in turn, motivates employees with a sense of ownership.

Returning to The Gallup survey, they found that, “at the end of the day, an intrinsic connection to one’s work and one’s company is what truly drives performance, inspires discretionary effort, and improves well-being. If these basic needs are not fulfilled, then even the most extravagant perks will be little more than window dressing.” 7

To develop engaged leaders at all levels of an organization, we have to think about the person beyond the old frameworks of the rational economic actor that is only motivated by compensation and career progression.

The Clearing’s team of leadership and management experts has spent the last 30 years working across the public, private, and non-profit sectors in numerous transformation and change initiatives. We use visual frameworks, called The PRIMES, to identify the primal or universal nature of humans at work solving complex problems.

Central to our understanding of motivation, we utilize the PRIME called STAKE to frame what engages and motivates individuals to action. To communicate what is at stake, the leader and manager have to understand through empathy what motivates their teams and employees at three levels: HEAD (intellectual), HEART (directional, intuitive), and WALLET (monetary, economic). These motivations can be positive (PULL) and negative (PUSH). Without this comprehensive understanding, the leader cannot engage and inspire their teams.

While old industrial models have largely neglected the heart that is motivated by a sense of purpose and vision, we need a leadership that empowers all levels with the big picture, the “why” of the work and integrates this into a person’s daily tasks. This type of leadership communicates to the heart of workers through a process of ENNOBLEMENT, clearly connecting the individual’s work, the organization’s mission, and ultimately, the positive impact the organization will have in the world. It directly addresses the problem of personal disengagement created by the Industrial Age management approaches.

Most traditional leaders may discount the importance of ideas like empathy and purpose as the negotiable ‘soft’ elements of the business. But as we learn more about the future of work, we understand that the heart is the engine of creative aptitudes necessary to adapt to our rapidly changing world. In IBM’s global survey of leaders – the largest survey of executives in the world – the top characteristic 1,500 public and private executives looked for in employees was creativity.8 This is logical, as an organization cannot develop creative employees that can rapidly respond to change and complexity without understanding what motivates them at a heart level.

2. Actively engage leaders through experiential learning and development.

A recent study estimated that “direct turnover costs are 50%-60% of an employee’s annual salary, with total costs associated with turnover ranging from 90% to 200% of annual salary.” 9 Some studies have shown this cost to be much greater for executive-level employees. The cost of turnover is not just financial. When a leader or manager leaves an organization, it loses knowledge, intellectual capital, and experience, which leads to a negative impact on morale.

By providing training, mentoring, and coaching opportunities, you show your leadership team that you are invested in them and in their success. According to Gallup’s research, “people who get the opportunity to continually develop are twice as likely as those on the other end of the scale to say they will spend their career with their company.” 10 Based on statistics and our experience, what is needed is a new type of leader that can make these necessary personal connections with employees, while continually growing and developing their own skillsets. Over 70% of the workforce reports to mid-level managers, not the C-Suite. Citing Gallup’s research, “a Leader’s engagement directly affects managers’ engagement and manager engagement, in turn, directly influences employee engagement. Managers who are directly supervised by highly engaged leadership teams are 39% more likely to be engaged than managers who are supervised by actively disengaged leadership teams.” 11 Transformation must occur from the top-down and the bottom-up of our organizations, especially any part of the organization that directly interacts with customers, partners, and outside stakeholders.

If your organization is still designed for the Industrial Age, what can you do to develop leaders and managers as coaches throughout your organization? Today’s leaders must be comfortable with setting direction in the face of ambiguity and learning new insights as they take risks on the field. At The Clearing, we have found that effective leadership development utilizes real-life experimentation. In time-bound challenges, analogous to a sports competition, participants take action “on the court” towards a vision of business outcomes – a “TO-BE” – and they receive training “in the locker room” to gain skills necessary to succeed in the challenge. This approach is depicted in our COURT-LOCKER ROOM PRIME. Most learning and development programs provide employees with the opportunity to get away from their day-to-day role to learn new models, tools, and techniques. The challenge is that while they have experienced a change, their organization still operates in the same way. It is easy to slip back into old habits and ways of doing things. Think of a rubber band that has been stretched then suddenly snaps back to its old shape. Even worse, when leaders do not practice using those new tools and methods, they get rusty.

To build more resiliency in the face of constant change, leaders and managers also need both theory and a critical perspective to succeed at their missions. Continuing the sports analogy, players need time in the “locker room” to learn the plays for future games and to revisit their past performances. Learning and development programs need to push participants to think strategically about the organization from the “10,000” foot level. At The Clearing, we call this approach to learning, IN-ON. Most organizations fall into the trap of getting so focused in the business (IN) that they never take the time to step away from the work and ask the tough questions about how the organization functions from a systemic perspective (ON). What worked? What didn’t work? What should we do next time? To learn and grow, leaders and managers need to spend time working ON the organization. The effective leader knows the appropriate balance between IN-ON and the importance of spending equal time learning and teaching mental models and frameworks that improve the intellectual performance of the team.

3. Emphasize managers’ strengths through regular feedback and coaching.

The old adage, “employees don’t leave organizations, they leave bad bosses” is often true.

Unfortunately, most people have had or will have a bad boss at some point in their career. Is there such a thing as a truly bad boss or is it simply an individual that may not have the necessary tools to handle constant change? It has been our experience that often it is the latter. These individuals don’t realize they are seen as bad bosses. They are usually very involved with their own tasks and may neglect the team they depend on or perhaps they focus too much time and energy on the daily tasks of their team. Both neglect and micromanagement can severely damage productivity, trust, and the team. In today’s world of information abundance and complexity, management has to operate as flexible as possible, respond quickly to changes in the external environment, and empower their team to make appropriate decisions based on best practices. To do this, the leader has to transform from “boss” to “coach.”

In the Information Age, where collaboration with new team members will be a constant challenge, the ability of the coach to quickly build trust among the team members will be critical. In this context, the coach needs to set an example of skill and expertise in the craft of the organization to build instant trust. He or she has to have a history as a top performer in the field of competition. Without this experience of doing the core elements of the work, the leader cannot have the authority to build strangers into a team and guide the group to higher levels of excellence.

Building on this trust between each individual and the coach, the coach needs to transfer that trust into the group and rapidly develop group loyalty. The coach gets the group to see the better qualities of their teammates and to play to each other’s strengths. To build this instant rapport, they create a sense of camaraderie and commitment to each other that transcends the immediate transactions or activities of the moment. The coach sees individual persons for who they truly are and gets the team to see these strengths as well.

While all high performing leaders care about their teams, what sets the coach apart is their genuine interest in the growth and development of the individual members of their team. The coach works to help new team members identify their strengths, weaknesses, and professional goals. In one study of 65,672 employees, The Gallup Organization found that those who received strengths feedback had turnover rates that were 14.9% lower than for employees who received no feedback (controlling for job type and tenure).12 The coach challenges team members by providing them with assignments and tasks in their areas of interest, which stretch them professionally and personally, causing them to grow and develop in the work. All along the way, the coach walks alongside the individual, giving them feedback at the right time for their personal development.

Conclusion

Our world is not standing still. We can either adapt our organizations to the new realities of technology and work or face the consequences of growing disengagement. To rise to the challenge, we need to rethink our perspectives on work and motivation. We need to communicate to the whole person and we need to develop the leaders of tomorrow that can rapidly and flexibly build teams to solve discreet, time-bound problems. We have to go beyond designing new software and applications to solve social and human challenges. The technology of leadership and management needs an upgrade. To do this, we need to redesign our learning and development programs that form our employees and adapt our methods of feedback to encourage creativity and strengths-based development. If we rise to this challenge, a whole generation of leaders and managers can be empowered to tackle the world’s most pressing and complex problems.

Bibliography

1. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, pg. 4. Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

2. Ibid. pg. 4.

3. Crawford, Matthew B. “Shopclass as Soulcraft.” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Summer Edition 2006.

4. Sennett, Richard. The Culture of New Capitalism. Yale University Press. January 31, 2007.

5. Morgan, Jacob. “The Single Greatest Cause of Disengagement.” Forbes Magazine. October 13, 2014.

6. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

7. Crawford, Matthew B. “Shopclass as Soulcraft.” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Summer Edition 2006.

8. Dan Ariely; Uri Gneezy; George Loewenstein & Nina Mazar (2005-07-23). “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, Working Paper” (PDF). Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Working Papers pg: 05-11.

9. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders. Page 27. Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

10. Carr, Austin. “The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEO’s: Creativity.” Fast Company. May 8th, 2010.

11. Cascio, W.F. Managing Human Resources: Productivity, Quality of Work Life, Profits. 2006 (7th ed.).

12. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

13. Report: The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders, Gallup Organization. September 22, 2014.

14. Asplund, Jim & Nikki Blacksmith. The Secret to Higher Performance. The Business Journal. May 3rd, 2011.

At The Clearing, we are constantly asked the question, “What makes an effective leader?” Our clients and partners are tackling some of the most complex problems in the world and effective leadership is a fundamental ingredient in the solution to these problems. In our Leadership Development blog series, we have looked at how to effectively design and evaluate leadership development programs, how to use action and experiment to develop leaders and this week we take a look at “The Leader as a Coach.”

Many people have experienced playing a team sport and understand the importance of a coach as leader in that context. What about the reverse in a professional context? What about the leader as a coach? In today’s post, we will look at those leadership qualities that actually match the same characteristics of the best athletic coaches.

A perfect example is the life of Bill Campbell, a successful former football coach for Columbia University who later became an executive and adviser to many of the prominent leaders in Silicon Valley. In his recent obituary, The New Yorker wrote that Bill “was known throughout the Valley as “the Coach,” the experienced executive who added a touch of humanity as he quietly instructed Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, the founders of Twitter, Sheryl Sandberg, and countless other entrepreneurs on the human dimensions of management, on the importance of listening to employees and customers, and of the power of partnering with others.”

Bill was an exemplar of the term “servant leader.” His obituary describes a man who built trust across the hyper-competitive boardrooms of the titanic tech industry by doing some surprisingly simple things. He brought expertise and skill, but he also instilled trust through listening and built relationships of candor with some of the most private leaders in America. He sacrificed his time and energy so that others could be successful. In many cases, he would volunteer his time to solve a problem or mentor a CEO through a difficult season. Most impressively, he got high-performing experts to set aside their egos to work together for a common business objective. After reading about his legacy, wouldn’t we all want that type of obituary? I know I would.

So what does it take to be a leader-coach like Bill Campbell?

Exemplary Skill and Expertise

With any high performing team, a leader-coach needs to set the example of skill and expertise in the craft of the organization. Without this experience doing the core elements of the work, the leader cannot have the authority to guide the group to higher levels of excellence. He or she has to have a history as a top performer in the field of competition. The team will look to the leader to set the standard for skill in their field and push the group towards success and higher levels of performance. This example gives the leader the credibility to provide feedback in the personal development process of the individual team members. The leader coach uses experience and expertise to advise and assist the team.

Genuine Interest in Team Member Growth

While all high performing leaders care about their teams, what sets the leader-coach apart is their genuine interest in the growth and development of the individual members of their team. The leader-coach works to help team members identify their strengths, weaknesses, and professional goals. He or she challenges team members by providing them with assignments and tasks in their areas of interest, that stretch them professionally and personally, causing them to grow and develop in the work. All along the way, the leader-coach walks alongside the individual, encouraging them and celebrating in their success.

Passion and Energy

A great leader knows that teams feed off positive energy and momentum. A ‘leader-coach’ provides a sense of optimism and confidence, while bringing a passion for the game. If the leader is a business executive, he or she needs to be passionate about the business and demonstrate that thirst to know more about the business. This enthusiasm sparks a broader depth of interest and passion for the organization’s mission.

When I was working as part of a social enterprise called Renew, our CEO, Matt Davis, used to conduct these early morning meetings with the team in the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C. We were all struggling with working our day jobs, while managing the launch of this new business. Matt was so passionate and fired up in these meetings that we actually had bystanders ask to join the meeting because they saw how excited we were as a team. This type of energy and optimism attracts followers!

Loyalty and Care 

An excellent leader-coach knows how to build loyalty within the team. The leader-coach gets the group to see the better qualities of their teammates and to play to each other’s strengths. They build a sense of camaraderie and commitment to each other that transcends transactions or activities of the moment. The leader-coach sees individual persons for who they truly are and gets the team to see these strengths as well. The leader-coach creates an environment of fair play and respect for each team member’s dignity. Self-sacrifice and demonstration of effort leads to greater loyalty and team commitment to the mission. In high school, I vividly remember my track coach running the grueling endurance routs with the team. This communicated something special to the team. We knew he felt the pain like we did and that spurred us on.

“A leader who has loyalty is the leader whose team I wish to be a part of. This is true almost everywhere. Most people, the overwhelming majority of us, wish to be in an organization or part of a team whose leadership cares about them, provides fairness and respect, dignity and consideration.”

John Wooden, 10 Time NCAA Championship Coach
UCLA Men’s Basketball

The Frameworks and the Game Plan 

The leader-coach knows that the team needs both theory and practical skills to win against competitors. He or she is always pushing the team to think critically about the game from the “10,000” foot level. At The Clearing, we call this phenomenon, IN-ON. Most organizations fall into the trap of getting so focused in the business (IN) that they never take the time to step away from the game and ask the tough questions about how the business is working (ON). What worked? What didn’t work? What should we do next time? The team needs to spend time ON the business. The leader-coach knows the appropriate balance between IN-ON and the importance of spending equal time learning and teaching mental models and frameworks that improve the intellectual performance of the team. The coach also provides the game plan for the team to be coordinated in their roles and efforts towards common objectives. Without this coordination, the team quickly experiences fragmentation and misalignment.

Humility and Self-Awareness 

If you seek to be a leader-coach, you are engaging in a constant personal development process. You recognize your own need for constant improvement. You want to be at the top of your game and bring others with you. Above all, you care about the development of others more than your self. A great coach wants his or her team and its accomplishments to be the center of attention. At strategic points, the leader will need to focus more on developing others than putting their own ideas and agenda forward. This requires a deep confidence and a strong interior life to know when to step out of the limelight and push others onto the court. The classic basketball film, Hoosiers, demonstrates this perfectly when the Indiana head coach, played by Gene Hackman, takes himself out of the game at the last minute to give the struggling assistant coach, played by Dennis Hopper, the opportunity to lead the team through a difficult moment to victory. This humility is the secret ingredient of developing excellence in others.

If you are interested in developing as a leader-coach and developing other leaders within your organization, you can learn more by emailing, info@dev2021.theclearing.com.

Good luck leaders and keep pursuing excellence with your teams!

“The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.” -Charles F. Kettering

In our last post, Developing leaders in your organization: Start with the end in mind, we discussed the new reality of leadership in an increasingly complex and volatile world and how to evaluate if leadership development programs are actually addressing these realities and driving performance for your organization. As we mentioned, today’s leaders must be comfortable with a certain level of experimentation, setting direction in the face of ambiguity and learning new insights as they take risks on the field.

To form leaders for the challenges of today and tomorrow, you must design programs that teach creative, adaptive approaches to leadership and imbed learning in the context of experience and action.  This approach is known as “Action Learning.” Action Learning was developed in the mid- 20th century in England by Professor Reg Revans, successfully implemented under CEO Jack Welch at General Electric, and is used by several prominent private and public organizations. We believe true leadership development requires taking action towards your vision, your “To-Be,” which is the foundation of our COURT-LOCKER ROOM PRIME. It’s not just getting into action that helps leaders develop – it’s a specific kind of action – strategic experimentation!

How will strategic experimentation produce results?
Experimentation takes some of the pressure off having to make it “perfect.” There will be some things that work, and some things that do not work. Experiencing and dealing with both the successes and the failures is necessary for a leader’s development. It’s an experiment, so there is an element of testing and trying new things to produce the desired outcome.

Most learning and development programs provide you with the opportunity to get away from your day-to-day role to learn new models, tools, and techniques. The challenge is that while you have experienced a change, your organization still operates in the same way. It is easy to slip back into the old habits and ways of doing things. Think of a rubber band that has been stretched then suddenly snaps back to its old shape. Even worse, when you don’t practice using those new tools and methods, they get rusty.

Instead, strategic experimentation allows your team to work (and learn) together on something real and tangible – versus theoretical. There is a real result! The system actually changes.

What are the principles of experiential learning used in leadership experiments?

The best leadership development experiments utilize four stages of experiential learning, outlined by adult learning expert David A. Kolb:

Concrete experience – Provide the participant a challenge that tests and expands their capabilities.
Observation and reflection – After their success or even failure completing the challenge, provide an opportunity for self-discovery and reflection.
Forming abstract concepts – Based on their reflections, share frameworks and models developed by expert leaders that help the participant form a mental model of how to solve a similar challenge in the future.
Testing in new situations – Immediately provide an opportunity to test these new insights in their work.

How do you set up strategic leadership development experiments to build both the capacity of the group and the individual?

Follow these 5 Steps:

Identify your Team or Cohort – Determine first who needs to participate. A group of experienced leaders ready to take on the next level of leadership at your organization? Emerging leaders from across your organization needing to gain a broader understanding of the organization, develop new skills, and build their network? A team that is taking on a new challenge or looking to create peak performance?
Define the Challenge – Identify a challenge that is important for both the organization and the individuals. Rapidly make a shared mental model of the challenge – What results do we need to achieve? Who are the stakeholders? What data can we collect? What has been done to date? Define the challenge in “bite size” problem sets that the teams can tackle in short experiments.
Engage the Challenge – Work your challenge through continuous engagement on these “bite size” problem sets using obtainable goals with hard deadlines, which we refer to as DATE CERTAIN OUTCOMES. Move to action quickly – avoid the trap of “over planning.” For new managers and up-and coming-leaders, teach them how to pitch for resources and report out effectively to their leaders on risks and results.
Assess Performance & Address Challenges – After engaging the challenge, take a quick step away from the problem to address any social complexities, competing priorities, and external demands. Get the team to help each other address unexpected surprises and challenges such as running out of time. This is where the real innovation and leadership characteristics show up. As the clock ticks toward the deadline, the team will not tolerate non-value added activity.
Celebrate Success – Once the group has achieved the DATE CERTAIN OUTCOMES, recognize the team’s growth and development, acknowledge high performers, and celebrate the success of the group.

What do you get at the end?

You get results for your organization and confident leaders ready to take on challenges. At the end of the leadership experiment, you will achieve multiple layers of success:

Business/Organizational Results – By using an important challenge as the frame for leadership development, you actually achieve objective results that matter to the core business or mission of the organization. At the end of the day, this is what leadership is about and a leadership development program should provide an experience where participants see and experience what it means to be “on the hook” for outcomes.
Individual and Group Confidence – This type of leadership development will build confidence and what Albert Bandura, calls ‘self efficacy,’ a person’s belief about his capabilities to produce effects. This subjective element is critical for facing new and more complex challenges that will likely face the organization or group. As each individual grows in confidence, the group gains in confidence to take on new challenges together.

For further insight, here are some additional excellent resources on using action and experiments to develop leaders and achieve results:

University of Pennsylvania – Wharton School of Business – Adaptive Experimentation
Harvard Business Review – Leadership Development Should Focus on Experiments
Kent Beck – Using Action Oriented Experimentation vs. Using the Waterfall Approach to Leadership & Design

How can The Clearing help you? 

If you are interested in improving your existing leadership development program or designing a leadership experiment to achieve results and build confidence, The Clearing has implemented the principles outlined above in our Leading with The PRIMES leadership development program.

One of the most difficult challenges any leader faces is uniting a group of people to pursue a common objective. Whenever we join an organization or a cause, whenever we sit down in a meeting or dial in to a conference call, we each bring our individual point of view to a conversation. At The Clearing, we call this phenomenon, THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT. Because we are all individuals coming from different reference points, it means that we are primed for misunderstanding: we remember verbal discussions imprecisely; we merely scan important data, or misinterpret the tone of a memo. Leaders often discover that everyone leaves a meeting with different opinions on the discussion, the agreements, and the next steps.

So how does an effective leader cut through the confusion and get a group on board? The answer is simple – by using one of our species’ oldest storytelling techniques: draw a picture. We are hard-wired to understand complex information and abstract ideas through beautiful images. Humans have been using imagery for thousands of years. The art created by Paleolithic man in the Lascaux Cave demonstrates powerfully our innate capacity to describe our experiences and distinguish ideas about reality using visuals.

When tackling difficult problems such as solving a major supply chain issue or turning around a failing organization, begin by establishing a single, shared perspective of the problem or opportunity using visualization. Visualization is the act of conveying a concept through design, and it is a much more powerful leadership tactic than most of us realize.

Below are some best practices for using visuals to solve leadership problems. Before visualizing a problem, ask yourself these four questions:

Who do I want to follow me?

As a leader, you need to first reflect on your audience. In this critical step, you identify the fewest, most important people you think have the influence to solve the problem. It can be an external audience like customers, funders, or partners or an internal audience like your leadership team or your employees. Take the time to understand what they care about and listen to their concerns and their interests as it relates to the problem set.

What problem are we trying to solve? What are the fewest, most important pieces of information I want to communicate about this problem?

Edward Tufte, an expert on designing visuals for complex problem solving, stated “Develop and fine-tune a sense of the relevant, both for identifying the key leverage points in any problem and also for examining large amounts of information to find the rare diamonds in the sand.” For our clients, we typically conduct journalistic style research for the most relevant data and conduct interviews of influential stakeholders. We ask questions to understand the technical system or the business process involved in the problem set and what is blocking that system or process from providing the desired result. We are looking for function, causality, connections, controls, and chokepoints. An added benefit of visualizing the system this way is that in difficult stakeholder negotiations and conversations the system becomes the problem to solve together not the other person or group.

How can I engage my audience at the most strategic level of the problem?

Next, we tackle the information complexity by slicing it into layers of narrative, what we call LEVEL OF CONTENT. In the typical workday, your audience will consume high volumes of data from multiple sources of information and have numerous distractions vying for their attention. To break through the clutter, you need to communicate the most relevant information in an interesting way that captures their attention. Think about the most eye-catching magazine covers that you see while standing in the line at the supermarket. They have compelling graphics, pictures, and pithy text. MIT’s neuroscientists found that the human brain is capable of recognizing images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds!1 That’s the goal of the GLANCE/SCAN level content. When creating this type of content, be sure to leave white space in your visuals to emphasize your key message.

What is the easiest, most efficient way to communicate this story to my audience?

Not every situation requires a complex info-graphic or graphically designed model. Sometimes, all you need to do is draw a symbol or a chart on the back of a napkin or on a whiteboard. In other cases, having the visual in a more transferable, permanent format is necessary to brief an executive or an external audience. Whatever the format, be ready to incorporate your audience’s ideas into your model. Do not get attached to your model. Mark it up and change it with your audience. This co-creation with your audience greatly increases your chance of engagement and buy-in.

To ground this in a real-life scenario, the following is a practical example from one of our clients of how you can use visualization to enroll others.

One of the biggest users of our visual approach to complex problem solving is the FedRamp Program. The U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer created the FedRamp Program in 2011 to increase the adoption of secure cloud computing services. In 2015, to meet a rapidly growing demand for these services, the FedRAMP Program needed to innovate their processes, improve interagency communications, and strengthen their value proposition. As part of our consulting support of FedRAMP leadership, The Clearing created two infographics (Part 1 – Dec. 2014 – Jun. 2015; Part 2 – Jun. 2015 – Dec. 2015) to visually communicate the value of their complex but important mission. The FedRAMP Program is using visual tools like this to powerfully navigate this growth period, enroll followers in the necessary changes to Federal IT systems and raise the program to its next level of performance.

To give you a deeper understanding of how to use visualization to solve complex problems, our team at The Clearing developed The PRIMES Leadership Development Tutorials below.

LEVELS OF PERSPECTIVE– How can you lead a group through multiple levels of a perspective of a complex problem?
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT– How can you help a group see multiple views of a problem set?
FACTS, STORIES, & BELIEFS– How can you lead a group to distinguish the facts from their stories and their beliefs?

For additional outfitting, here are some excellent resources on visualization as a problem-solving tool:

David McCandless: The Beauty of Visualization
Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Dan Roam: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Finally, let us know through your comments on our LinkedIn or Facebook pages how you are solving these types of problems and what techniques you are using. What are you learning about visualization that you can share with our community of problem solvers?

When it comes to the task of developing leaders, the one constant we have seen in our work at The Clearing has been change. Or should we call it “VUCA”? “VUCA” is a term coined by US military planners in the 1990s to describe the four qualities of an increasingly complex world: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. These qualities apply to the marketplace just as well as the battlefield. The expectations for our leaders are changing. In the past, we wanted our leaders to steer a steady course for a point on the horizon. Now, we expect our leaders to adapt and respond to a host of challenges and changes in near-real time. How do we prepare our management teams for such an incredibly complicated, demanding task? At The Clearing, we have learned to combat the complexity and challenges that persist with simplicity, strategy, and flexibility. To aid this, we have distilled lessons from big thinkers, impactful leaders, and decades of experiments into consumable leadership distinctions to be deployed contextually. We call these distinctions PRIMES.

In our upcoming series on Leadership Development, we will dive into a number of PRIMES related to preparing today’s leaders and explore the following topics:

Using Action and Experimentation to Develop Leaders
The Leader as Coach: How the Best Leaders Develop Others
Loving the Leap: Making the Transition to a New Leadership Opportunity

This week, we will start with what most organizations consider the end of the process: evaluating leadership development programs. In our work as strategists, we often tell our clients to start with the end in mind. Focus first on the outcomes they hope to achieve. The same is true when investing in a leadership development program. To be successful, you must start with a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish through the program.

This is a key insight that often gets lost in the discussions about leadership development. Often, organizations think that a training event is enough to solve the problem. This gives individuals the chance to step away from their “day job” to learn new skills and grow. The challenge is, while a few may learn new skills, the organization still operates the same way, so it is easy for the group to slip back into the old habits and ways of doing things. Think of a rubber band that has been stretched then suddenly snaps back to its old shape. Or, when it comes to leadership development, individuals involved focus on vague, personal goals without a concrete plan to apply what they have learned to the realities of their organization. The training becomes something interesting versus something that leads to tangible outcomes. We call this phenomenon CHASE-LOSE. If you chase vague notions of leadership, innovation, or team unity you lose performance. However, if you chase outcomes together, you build these attributes in the process.

Therefore, the objective of any leadership development program is to increase the capability and capacity of its leaders so that the organization achieves its outcomes.

Some of the symptoms of a systemic deficit of leadership capability include:

Inertia: The organization has set a goal but is not making progress toward it. Your leaders know what they want, but not how to get there.
Cultural Incongruence: A difference exists between the culture that you promote and the culture that your employees and customers experience.
Tenure and Turnover: You are having trouble attracting and retaining top talent.
Succession Planning Risk: A leadership change is looming and you lack the next generation of leaders.
Low Performance: Results from the organization’s initiatives are not living up to what you have experienced in the past.
Paralysis: The organization is stuck in the face of thorny, seemingly intractable problems.

If you need to solve these types of problems for your organization, here is a helpful framework we use at The Clearing to design leadership development programs that actually improve performance. We call this PRIME COURT-LOCKER ROOM. Every winning team knows that a lot goes into preparing you for the game and it is ultimately what happens on the court that determines your fate. The same is true for you and your team. To move from where you are (AS IS) to where you need or want to be (TO BE) requires action and getting “On the Court.” Our bias is toward action, outfitting the team to execute, experiment, and course-correct as you go. But creating a space to plan the plays and ready the team is critical, which is why we always recommend adding the training “In Locker Room” and individualized time “With the Coach” as components to our Leadership Development framework:

On the Court: Use Action & Experimentation to Spur Learning
Form a team to achieve specific organizational outcomes. Augment the team with experts and outfit them with the necessary insight to achieve their goals. Coach them as they apply these lessons to pressing business challenges. When a new constraint or opportunity comes up, use this as an opportunity to teach the team in the moment to problem solve as they work together. Think of the rescue scene in the movie The Matrix. The heroine, Trinity, must fly a helicopter to rescue her teammate and downloads the ability to fly the aircraft right as she is about to do just that. You want to provide just-in-time insight for immediate action.
In the Locker Room: Equip Your Teams with Insight and Distinctions to Build Confidence 
At certain points, you will need traditional classroom based training to ground your team with leadership fundamentals. Equip your team with best practices grounded in research and the experience of successful leaders to build confidence, depth of knowledge, and mastery of leadership insights. We use The PRIMES to do this quickly and effectively.
With the Coach: Use Coaching to Personalize Insight and Personal Transformation
Design intensive one-on-one coaching for specific members of the organization to boost transformation. Use this high-touch developmental relationship to give executives, key leadership staff, and emerging leaders personalized feedback to optimize learning done “On the Court” and “In the Locker Room.”
Keep Score: Measure the Performance of the LD Program based on Organizational Performance 
Ultimately, you need to build a link between organization targets and those participating in the program. If you are trying to increase revenue generated by your business development function, you may want to implement leadership development programs that focus on sales negotiations and personal networking. Subsequently, your pipeline and revenue figures will tell you if the training has been successful or not. The same method would apply for coaching and training delivered to managers of high-turnover departments: if retention increases, the leadership development program has succeeded. This kind of hard tethering of leadership development to company goals does not come easily, and it may not feel natural when working to build the so-called “soft skills.” But in an environment where we’re all facing “VUCA,” it is the only way to ensure you are making progress when developing your leaders.

If you are interested in improving your existing leadership development program or designing a new one, The Clearing has applied the principles outlined above in our Leading with The PRIMES leadership development program.