Why Your Leadership Enables Poor Engagement

1950s CEO Clarence Francis uttered those words about employee engagement, and amazingly, engagement is as hot a topic today as it ever has been. Gallup polls consistently show that companies with highly engaged talent compete better on multiple fronts. On top of that, absent employee engagement, as Gallup suggests most of today’s companies are, management’s work can seem like that of Sisyphus, continuously “pushing the Talent” up the proverbial motivation hill with unremarkable results.

So if employee engagement has been on our radar screen for all these years, why are we still talking about it? Here’s the root cause answer and it’s something for you to etch into your memory with an imaginary indelible marker. You ready?

Conventional Management CANNOT Yield Employee Engagement

That’s it. Conventional management is not designed to yield employee engagement and is incapable of engaging employees. While conventional management has given us highly sophisticated, intellectually sound organizations and missions, it is built upon very limited understanding of individual and group behaviors. To be sure, almost all of the engagement, work satisfaction, and typical problems of modern business stem from the divide between our highly complex visions and the nearly non-existent accounting of innate human social needs.

In his quote, Clarence calls out this fundamental flaw of Command & Control management, which is that it presumes “people are interchangeable” and that the only things that are important to any business, are the things he identifies that can be bought. And since this flawed “business fundamental” is built on a foundation that lacks a sophisticated understanding of human behavior, the answer to how to get employee engagement is the old Texas saying: “You can’t get there from here.” Combine the rest of Clarence’s statement about initiative, loyalty and devotion with this primitive behavior structure, and you get anything but engagement; you get just the opposite (and it’s usually laced with an “us vs. them” mentality). 

Command & Control Management Presumes “People Are Interchangeable”

Which prompts a quick story. After talking to his family for hours, a budding executive agrees to add a pool to his newly built home, on the sole condition that his 10 year old son agrees to clean the pool twice a week. Shortly after moving into their new home (with large pool), he has to take a long trip and upon returning, asks his wife immediately if the son has cleaned the pool during his absence. Finding out he has not, the dad brings the boy to the pool, throws him in head-first along with the cleaning equipment, and orders him to clean the pool. Just as soon as the dad is out of sight, the boy pees in pool.

If you want to find out more on how to engage your talent (and keep them from peeing in the pool while you’re not looking), check out the article I wrote on the specifics here: Engaging Employees the Easy Way

But Here's "The Real Question" for Leaders:

The real question to ask here is what kind of leadership has sprung up around a managerial system that relies heavily on people, but is fully incapable of respecting the potential that people have, because of the system's infantile accommodation of human behavior? And once again, as our world becomes more fraught with rapid change, the holes in that managerial system are becoming larger and larger, while allowing worse results to fall through them.

I suggest to you that it is an enabling leadership style, one that Taiichi Ohno, a principal architect of the world’s first learning company, dubbed “mommy management.” And before you take umbrage at the term, please know this is not a statement about mothers, to whom we owe much respect and kudos for providing children with an environment where they can thrive and fulfill their potential, often at great expense to the mother. As the emotional backbone of the family, the incredible importance of mothers cannot be overemphasized, playing the huge, critical role in each of our ability to learn, grow and develop as healthy adults later on.

But it’s "the later on" that Ohno means by mommy management, referring to a leadership style that coddles employees and does not allow them to think at work, because leaders are busy being the only ones', who do the thinking. (Ever heard the saying "I don't pay you to think, I pay you to work"?) And just as children are eventually “nudged” out of the nest, so that they may learn to soar on their own, Ohno suggested that leaders have to nudge employees to soar, if they want them (and the organization) to thrive. Ralph Stayer’s book Flight of the Buffalo, which explores his journey with the Johnsonville Sausage Company doing just that, even has it in the title. 

Soaring to excellence by learning to let employees lead 

If what leaders want is initiative, loyalty and devotion, then managing with a primitive behavior structure that is highly focused on control, plus a “zero mistakes” environment, is a very frustrating combination. Mommy management cannot and will not ever allow you to engage your employees in a way that enables you to perform well in the next decade (or even the next year for that matter). You just can’t get there with that system in place.

And the downside of mommy management is a pretty steep precipice. In addition to creating an environment where employees are constantly “peeing in the pool,” you are also hurting your customers, your suppliers, the company itself, your leaders, the community at large and ultimately even the investors. It's an all-around lose-lose situation.

1. Your customers are hurt because the inevitable result of suboptimal work is bad quality, bad delivery times (usually to your promise date and not to their requested date), and even with your own promised date, missed deliveries.
2. Your suppliers are hurt because chaos begets chaos, which means they have to jump through hoops to accommodate frequent changes, penny-pinching purchasing policies and dysfunctional silo'd thinking.
3. On the employee side, the fear and chronic stress associated with doing something wrong, being blamed, fired or eventually laid off, can lead to an eroded work environment, physical and mental health issues at work and at home, divorce, depression and even suicide.
4. And for the leaders who are pressured to make the entire system work, they get to have all of the above, plus the very real threat of burn-out. Obviously these results are the opposite of a thriving environment where people are engaged and expected to bring their “A Game.”

Here's the thing though. The opposite of "doing everything" is not "doing nothing." Eagles don't actually nudge their young out of the nest. That's folklore. Instead, they gradiently teach them to fly in several different ways, ultimately culminating in a scenario that is designed to challenge their offspring into making that final "leap of growth." The adult eagle flies to the highest nearby perch and calls repeatedly, for the young eagles to come. It is in responding to that call, that they take their final test before graduating to adulthood. And then they fly as valiant eagles, forever after. 

Gradient learning, combined with more and more challenge, is the pathway to being able to fly on their own, albeit something that birds are obviously innately wired to do. And what are human beings innately wired to do? Problem solve. The people who work for you are innately wired to solve problems, and your job as the leader is to build their problem solving muscles. 

The opposite of "doing everything" is not doing nothing. Your role is just different . . . and more noble

Can you guess which muscles atrophy when they are not put to use? Hell, for that matter, can you recall any time in our lives were we ever challenged to think, that would our problem solving muscles to atrophy? (I wrote about this here) But never mind that. By actively and gradiently providing a platform for employees to solve more and more difficult problems, you can ultimately reach that holy grail of managerial prowess, the ability to not have to be there and still have everything run smoothly.

If you know a mommy manager who actively wants high employee engagement, then tell them this. Despite most people's belief that change is hard, it IS possible, and even easier "to change" than you might think. The reality is that usually change is just uncomfortable, not necessarily hard. There are things that involve change that are hard, but for the most part, it's just our unwillingness to be uncomfortable for a short period - like wearing a watch on the other hand, or folding you arms "the other way."

But all that is gone now -- shifting away from this managerial system when it no longer serves us well, is not even uncomfortable anymore. It’s entirely possible to move a leader away from mommy manager mode, into systems manager mode in a way that is smooth and almost invisible. You can actually change an entire C-Suite in one fell swoop. Check it out here.

About the Author:

Want to become known as an invisible change expert by facilitating leadership transformation in under 2 days? Check it out at https://bit.ly/JimPresents.

I'm Jim Hudson, founder of the Lean Expert Academy and former partner in the Lean Leadership Institute with Jeff Liker (The Toyota Way), Paul Akers (Two Second Lean) and the recently departed, but hugely influential Norm Bodek (Productivity Press Founder). I've worked with some of the earliest Lean thinkers including Mark DeLuzio, the principal architect of the Danaher Business System and Mike George, founder of the George Group (now part of Accenture).

I'm also the CEO of a Lean consulting company which trains Lean leaders to implement the exact methodology and techniques that you can learn right here. If you want to learn how to get out of the tactical loop that Lean management has become, and charge ahead with a highly strategic approach to transformational change, click on https://bit.ly/JimPresents