The Workplace Engagement Solution Read online

  Is this outcome attainable? Absolutely.

  I have both inspired and witnessed the human capacity to change and transform more than 40,000 times. These experiences have made me both an optimist and a realist—perhaps not a bad combination as we move forward. So let’s get on with it.

  We begin with the state of the CEO or business owner. If 87 percent of the world’s talent is disengaged, the probability of CEOs also being actively disengaged is pretty high. With a purely democratic solution, the global disengagement problem can only be solved if everyone from the entry-level worker to the CEO/owner is dealing directly with his or her own engagement.

  Engaged CEOs lead their cultures. The very word “engagement” implies connectedness and transparency. As I have already pointed out, the failure of most engagement programs begins when the CEO turns the initiative over to someone else. Make no mistake about it, engagement includes an emotional component, and many CEOs are uncomfortable with the feelings generated by the human side of business. Others are so absorbed in dealing with market and shareholder expectations that they believe they cannot add culture concerns to their crowded plates. Nothing could be more wrongheaded.

  It might still seem counterintuitive for CEOs to feel they should be saddled with culture development, but developing awakened cultures is what makes the job of the CEO much easier. In fact, as I coach and consult with many chief human resources officers while they navigate themselves into new careers, I always ask the question, “Is the CEO leading the culture?” If the answer is no, I tell the client to “keep their bags packed.” I also tell them that it will not be worthwhile to do an engagement program because regardless of the circumstances, the results will be the same: mediocrity or outright failure. Bottom line? Wasted time, effort, and dollars.

  This challenge becomes even clearer when we accept that engagement and personal change are challenging for all of us. The journey from disengagement to engagement requires deep personal change and some new life skills. Unfortunately, too many of us still fear the predictable discomfort of personal change and avoid it at all costs. We do not even understand that we are working against our own best interests. We lack the insight. We don’t know what we don’t know.

  Therefore, it is critically important for the CEO or business owner to “wise up” to this cause-and-effect relationship within a culture. She or he needs to become the first to put their feet to the fire and embrace the life-altering possibility of becoming a deep personal-change role model. Now this is something to get excited about.

  Indeed, we consistently find CEOs of category leaders such as Tesla, Apple, HBO, and Google who live and breathe this commitment. But before we start discussing category leadership, we must understand why fully awakened employees are so hard to find. Perhaps the greatest psychic leap that is in front of us is to move beyond the fixation on equating security with the routine. If we do this, and if we help others to do the same, the great opportunity is to develop lives and cultures filled with an enthusiasm for growth. But getting started requires that we get beneath the surface to understand why there is so much cynicism, contempt, aimlessness, and resignation around the topic of work. In other words, “How the bleep did we get here?”

  For a full answer we need to go back in time. The Industrial Revolution has had an iron grip on our culture for the past three centuries. Clearly this era was over by the end of the 20th century. Even Y2K now seems like distant and quaint memory. The changes in front of us collide with the beliefs about work that our parents, grandparents, and many employers offered up as absolute truths. And though most of us understand this, few of us know how to move beyond these beliefs to become more effective participants in a modern landscape filled with whole new ways of living and working.

  Prior to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, change took place at a far more glacial pace. People spent most of their time and money growing or buying food. Making even one garment by hand took days. Industry resided in cottages. Child mortality was so high that many people had large numbers of children hoping that one or two would survive. Education was reserved for landowners, nobility, and the religious elite. The rich and powerful did not pay taxes while poor people paid rent and taxes.

  The first great turning point in the world of work took place almost three hundred years ago. At that time, the British called the shots for how the rest of our world functioned. It was the most studied country on the face of the earth. In 1733, an English watchmaker named John Kay invented a simple machine called the Flying Shuttle. Its purpose was to improve the productivity of weaving. One person was now able to do the work of three. Fueled by riches, this innovation tipping point quickly turned into a tidal wave. Water and steam power moved the textile industry into high gear. The first inexpensive process for the mass production of steel was invented. We moved from scarcity of food to storehouses of abundant supply. Now producing more goods than any other country, England needed to find ways to get these products to other countries. Roads were built and boats got steam engines. Rails were laid. Landowners became industrialists. The banking industry was invented to grease the skids and the UK developed a world of consumers.

  The Industrial Revolution represented an intoxicating leap forward in the evolution of civilization. The architecture behind this revolution introduced goods and services that were previously available to only the wealthy. In a parallel to today’s work landscape, the Industrial Revolution resulted in the handing out of pink slips to virtually every worker from the previous era, but work didn’t go away, it simply changed. This phenomenon is also taking place today. As old structures and dynamics go away, we need to become more fluent in seeing where new structures and dynamics emerge, because emerge, they always do. The difference? Three hundred years ago, it often took decades to change. Today, it can happen in a matter of days.

  The old revolution also developed an unquenchable thirst for workers. Industrialists developed a recruitment pitch filled with standards and beliefs that haunt us today:

  “If you come to work for us, we will give you survival and predictability.”

  To most of those working on farms, hunting for food, or dealing with the day-to-day uncertainty of keeping that cobbler shop in business, the pitch sounded really good. Human capital nourished the machine, which took center stage in our work. Parents, schools, organized religion, and governments prepared a new labor force that fit into the assembly lines, plugging bolts into holes. A new economy grew based on making large quantities of stuff. This worked for several hundred years. And, as with all personal or cultural advancements, there was also a price.

  Predictability and survival didn’t just become two in a series of standards. They became the standard. Although these standards made perfect sense at the time, consider how outdated they are now within our modern times. The fixation on predictability and survival dismisses joy, creativity, passion, engagement, full living, and connectedness to others. It often keeps us from new learning. Most profoundly, the old standards obscure the birthright of every man, woman, and child, which is to find and pursue what we were born to do. The growing awareness of this is also one of the seeds fueling today’s discord with work. But, there was another great price we paid.

  In Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller quantified predictions he had been making since the mid-1930s.4 He warned the world that if we did not find ways to either eliminate or remove the poisons generated from fossil fuels and chemicals, the world would become uninhabitable by the turn of the century. Mr. Fuller must have died with a great deal of frustration because very few people listened to him. Most did not think about these issues because repetition produces a trancelike state. Fitting in, tending to our workstations, going through the routine became the mass trance of the Industrial Revolution. Most were happy for progress. Wages were small. Long hours were filled with back-breaking and repetitive work. Safety standards were appalling. In many factories, children were sent in to tend machines because the spaces were so small. If some
one was injured or killed, others were waiting in line to step in and replace them. In fact, some of the laws passed during the early days of the Industrial Revolution indicate just how barbaric many employers were during that era. For example, the Factory Act of 1819 limited the work of children to 12 hours a day. And in 1833, children under the age of 9 were banned from working in the textile industry and 10- to 13-year-olds were limited to a 48-hour workweek.

  Ironically, England’s innovation also led to it losing its grip on the world. In the early days of the revolution, British leadership did its best to protect the country’s manufacturing technology. But that progress opened up channels to the rest of the world. As mass production spread throughout the globe, other countries not only became more powerful, they turned into competitors. It wasn’t long before every developed nation was playing the same game. And for the next 250 years, the Industrial Revolution dictated how we lived, consumed, worked, competed, and got educated. As the promise of predictability and survival evolved, we added various employee benefits: vacation plans, a retirement plan for when we grew old, medical coverage if we got sick, and so on. The most talented embraced it all and worked their way up the proverbial “career ladder.”

  On the shadow side, our ability to build stuff also fueled the bloodiest wars in the history of humankind. We leveraged wars with new technology and powerful capability to snuff life out in dramatic fashion. This led to the most awesome victories, but at a terrible price. But as we returned from world wars, manufacturing supremacy led to jobs for life, a comfortable middle-class living, and what was, for many, a comfortable routine. We worked, we saved, and we retired. The Industrial Revolution had successfully disrupted and transformed a culture that had stayed relatively the same for thousands of prior years.

  In 1943, England dropped its next disruptive bomb on the world of work. A British engineer named Tommy Flowers demonstrated the first programmable computer to a stunned, skeptical room of military leaders. He developed this machine to decrypt German military code. It worked amazingly well. Ten of these “Colossi” were completed and used to gather intelligence. On June 5, 1944, a courier handed Eisenhower a note summarizing a Colossus decrypt. It confirmed that Hitler wanted no additional troops moved to Normandy. Moments later, he announced, “We go in tomorrow.” The rest is history. The first computer may have actually played a bigger role in ending World War II than the first atomic bomb.5

  Surprisingly, British leaders had the Colossi dismantled after the war. But, word of its power had gotten out. By 1946, the Eniac was invented and completed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania. The world’s first digital computer occupied 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed almost 50 tons, and had less than half the power of a smart phone.

  Whereas our first work revolution took hundreds of years, a new one was quietly birthed that day. This innovation would take just 50 years to completely change the way we live, work, think, learn, grow, and transform. The original wave from this technology would grow in ferocity and depth, disrupting virtually every work model we had developed over 300 years. In the mid-1990s, the wave made landfall and started to wipe out all of the promises and ideals of the industrial workplace.

  Wouldn’t it be great if the average human could change their behavior just as quickly? But, let us not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. The 1980s and early 1990s introduced two more revolutions that torpedoed once and for all the promise of predictability and survival. Financial deregulation quickly put the money people in charge of organizations. As companies lost the balance provided by marketing, human resources, and operations, jobs for life were replaced with dispassionate work-force planning sessions. People were moved and dismissed like, well, numbers. Insecurity replaced predictability and survival as our workers developed unprecedented levels of cynicism and contempt.

  Profoundly, most workers craved a return to predictability and survival—to no avail, as this quest worked directly against the growing need to change, reinvent, and transform. Workers that thrived during this upheaval demonstrated high degrees of creativity and adaptability, qualities in short supply 20 to 30 years ago, if not still today. The rest hung on for dear life, hoping the human resources “death angel” wasn’t coming around the corner. Unfortunately, these changes in our economic structure dictated that the angel would be making regular and more dramatic visits.

  In 1976, two famed economists, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published the now-legendary paper, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure.”6 In it, they argue that corporations needed to align the interests of management and shareholders. This new model changed how the corporate world conducts its business. For corporate executives, stock-based compensation became the alignment mechanism of choice. Consequently, their incomes skyrocketed. In the 1970s, CEOs of large, publicly traded companies earned less than $1 million in today’s dollars. Today, that average has grown to $11.4 million. The new model motivates CEOs to focus incessantly on stock value over enhancing the real, longer-term performance of the company.

  Also during the past 30 years, the entire investment market shifted from long-term investment in building organizations and markets to getting as much out of stock value in as short a period of time as possible. Investment banking turned into a multi-trillion-dollar industry. CEOs and hedge fund leaders became the foundation for how we dealt with workers in large organizations. With stock value becoming the number-one pursuit, American businesses and CEOs traded the long view for volatility, thus shifting the dynamic interests between capital and labor. As providers of capital push CEOs for greater and greater returns, cutting back on labor is the easiest way to signal they are addressing corporate financial performance.

  Many workers are quite supportive of the American dream. But during the last 30 years, the average income has stagnated while hourly compensation has dropped. Workers witness venture capitalists taking advantage of financial deregulation to buy companies, take out loans on the assets, and pay huge dividends to themselves. Many of these acquisitions went bankrupt as employees lost their jobs, health insurance, and pensions. These financial barons are often celebrated and admired, but it has also resulted in mass income inequality at an alarming trend.

  America’s workers have watched their job and financial security go up in smoke. Anger, contempt, and cynicism turned into a raging fire as they read stories of greedy CEOs backdating stock options and pushing the envelope to unethical, and sometimes illegal, degrees. But perhaps it was amorality that angered them the most. In many organizations, the underlying message was that when needed, workers mattered. However, the cycles of hiring and laying people off reached such dizzying heights that we now have a labor force that basically understands that work has become more of a temporary assignment.

  In 1990, I found a stronger path to self-realization. At the time, I was a successful executive in the staffing industry. I represented many of the largest film studios, six of the top-10 ad agencies, the Getty Trust, and many others. In economically good times, I was a headhunter with a team. During recessions, I moved over to supporting temporary labor solutions. Early that year, I remember a young woman coming into my office and saying, “You are so successful. How do you do it?” I responded, “In a coma.”

  At the time, it wasn’t a particularly shocking admission. It was funny. I said it for laughs. At the heart of that terrible statement, however, existed the belief that most people didn’t find joy, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and success from work. For most of us, work was just a job.

  Besides, the staffing industry wasn’t what I really wanted to do with my life. As a respected jazz pianist and composer, what I wanted was a recording contract. In 1990, I received a call from a well-known jazz producer. He had inherited a truckload of money and was launching a new label within Warner Brothers Records. Six weeks into our project, he dropped dead of a heart attack.

  For many of us, any
brush with mortality is immediately followed by the timeless question “What is the meaning of life?”

  After that terrible experience, it dawned on me that the only meaning I would ever find would be the meaning I, alone, could bring to my life. My producer’s sudden passing brought home the fact that I was always putting happiness off to somewhere down the road and into the future. I knew little of value in how to be happy in the present, on a day-to-day basis. As I explored how to improve my life, it became clear that my entire relationship towards work would have to change. The enormity of that relationship became vividly important because work, for most of us, occupies most of our waking hours.

  September 15 and 16, 1990 represented the dawn of my professional life as CEO of Inspired Work. I walked into a hotel ballroom and delivered the Inspired Work Program for the first time to 36 participants. The program has the magic of getting people to break with their past and design an ideal relationship with their work. For two days, I watched these remarkable souls dive into the process and emerge with dramatic shifts and new visions. I watched some of them walk in the door with a deep justification for their pain, only to loosen the grip of that pain because a new and personalized vision pulled them forward. I related personally to everything happening with the participants because it was also happening to me. In that first program, all of us found at least the beginnings of the lives we were meant to have. It also became clear to me that once we truly experience the truth, there is no going back.