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Title and subtitle speak of transformation and change, but the abstract only mentions "employee engagement": >It’s a common misconception, both in businesses a

by Isamu 7y ago

Title and subtitle speak of transformation and change, but the abstract only mentions "employee engagement": >It’s a common misconception, both in businesses and in management articles and books, that a sense of purpose is what matters most when it comes to engaging employees. Many leaders concerned with attracting and retaining top talent believe that nothing motivates people as much as the larger good they might be doing or the chance to change the world. Accordingly, they extol the higher virtues of their companies’ missions and the meaning of the work they offer. >But our work with more than 300 companies over the past 20 years, particularly our research using organizational network analysis (ONA) and our interviews with executives, reveals that purpose is only one contributing factor; the level and quality of interpersonal collaboration actually has the greatest impact on employee engagement.

wccrawford 7y ago
It always surprises me when managers think that they can focus on 1 single aspect of the work experience and fix everything. People are complex, and managing is necessarily also complex.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  An effective manager would step in when needed and stay out of the way when not. They would communicate clearly in a high level in an inspiring manner and a low enough level to act upon. They would have to anticipate the direction and needs of the business as well as the employee. They would have to balance the strengths, weaknesses and desires of wholly different individuals in a productively meaningful way. Would I be wrong in saying that almost all people cannot do two of these let alone all at the same time?
  - beetwenty 7y ago
    A lot of the facets of leadership are created from the small details of how the organization "automates" itself. Consider meeting planning, for example. How frequent meetings are, how long they are, how many people are involved, what the meeting venue is, and how the agenda and format is set. There are all sorts of knobs to turn just in saying "what a meeting should look like" that will impact the flow of communication, and different teams in the same organization will tend to have different meeting styles, but at a high level, the planning has to include considerations around how to allow different teams to interact effectively, since those are the bottlenecks where the information tends to get siloed. And then you can turn to hiring, assignments, training and promotions and there's a similar kind of thing, where the same person in a slightly different role may be hugely more or less effective, and defining the problem differently changes the kinds of assignments and skills needed. Who creates those definitions, and how? It's not necessarily the manager those employees report to that's creating them. In fact, there's a whole cascade of effects that come from the macro situation that end up translating into differently defined roles: different legal and regulatory requirements, education and training standards, minimum wages, healthcare coverage, labor organization efforts, etc. The same people in a different country may be happier and more effective. So, while the manager is the biggest factor in the equation, it's not all on them - it can't be. Some ways of doing business and types of company culture will work in some scenarios and others will not, and the marketplace has an evolutionary tendency to just make random permutations of management style until it finds one that doesn't die, even if it creates a toxic environment. In that light, "effective" management is a highly relative thing and can be encouraged or discouraged by the broader shape of the economy.
hinkley 7y ago
Every narrow field has to figure things out that other fields already know. In volunteerism circles, it's not unknown that too intense of a sense of purpose leads to burnout. My first case of burnout came from a job where my biggest complaint about the CEO was that he didn't know the difference between urgency and panic. His "motivational speeches" were a gut punch every. single. time. Here was a group of people smart enough to be three years too early to market but couldn't manage people to save their lives. Hindsight is 20/20 but I insisted this at the time: if we slowed down and worked on quality over quantity, we would have lasted longer. We had no competition. Nobody was eating our lunch. We just couldn't say 'no' to anybody, and so we were constantly writing checks we couldn't cash. Everything was one rung down from Deathmarch, all of the time. I believe this is the company where I first learned the term "The Long Emergency". Just... take a second. Calm down. Go outside for a couple minutes. Sleep on things. The clarity you gain will make up for a lot of your so-called lost time. It'll make you more effective, which is more important than being efficient.

by Isamu 7y ago

wccrawford 7y ago

It always surprises me when managers think that they can focus on 1 single aspect of the work experience and fix everything. People are complex, and managing is necessarily also complex.

swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
An effective manager would step in when needed and stay out of the way when not. They would communicate clearly in a high level in an inspiring manner and a low enough level to act upon. They would have to anticipate the direction and needs of the business as well as the employee. They would have to balance the strengths, weaknesses and desires of wholly different individuals in a productively meaningful way. Would I be wrong in saying that almost all people cannot do two of these let alone all at the same time?
- beetwenty 7y ago
  A lot of the facets of leadership are created from the small details of how the organization "automates" itself. Consider meeting planning, for example. How frequent meetings are, how long they are, how many people are involved, what the meeting venue is, and how the agenda and format is set. There are all sorts of knobs to turn just in saying "what a meeting should look like" that will impact the flow of communication, and different teams in the same organization will tend to have different meeting styles, but at a high level, the planning has to include considerations around how to allow different teams to interact effectively, since those are the bottlenecks where the information tends to get siloed. And then you can turn to hiring, assignments, training and promotions and there's a similar kind of thing, where the same person in a slightly different role may be hugely more or less effective, and defining the problem differently changes the kinds of assignments and skills needed. Who creates those definitions, and how? It's not necessarily the manager those employees report to that's creating them. In fact, there's a whole cascade of effects that come from the macro situation that end up translating into differently defined roles: different legal and regulatory requirements, education and training standards, minimum wages, healthcare coverage, labor organization efforts, etc. The same people in a different country may be happier and more effective. So, while the manager is the biggest factor in the equation, it's not all on them - it can't be. Some ways of doing business and types of company culture will work in some scenarios and others will not, and the marketplace has an evolutionary tendency to just make random permutations of management style until it finds one that doesn't die, even if it creates a toxic environment. In that light, "effective" management is a highly relative thing and can be encouraged or discouraged by the broader shape of the economy.

hinkley 7y ago

Every narrow field has to figure things out that other fields already know. In volunteerism circles, it's not unknown that too intense of a sense of purpose leads to burnout. My first case of burnout came from a job where my biggest complaint about the CEO was that he didn't know the difference between urgency and panic. His "motivational speeches" were a gut punch every. single. time. Here was a group of people smart enough to be three years too early to market but couldn't manage people to save their lives. Hindsight is 20/20 but I insisted this at the time: if we slowed down and worked on quality over quantity, we would have lasted longer. We had no competition. Nobody was eating our lunch. We just couldn't say 'no' to anybody, and so we were constantly writing checks we couldn't cash. Everything was one rung down from Deathmarch, all of the time. I believe this is the company where I first learned the term "The Long Emergency". Just... take a second. Calm down. Go outside for a couple minutes. Sleep on things. The clarity you gain will make up for a lot of your so-called lost time. It'll make you more effective, which is more important than being efficient.