WORKFORCE DISENGAGEMENT: A Global Epidemic And Leadership Challenge

HOW BUSINESS LEADERS CAN SOLVE THE CHALLENGE AND INCREASE CORPORATE PRODUCTIVITY WITHOUT INCREASING RESOURCES

Workforce disengagement has been proven to have reached an epidemic state globally. ?This disengagement epidemic has been estimated to cost a hefty $7 trillion in lost productivity – Jim Herter “Dismal Employee Engagement Is a sign of Global Mismanagement".

According to Hubert Joly in his book THE HEART OF BUSINESS, most people around the world feel indifferent –at best- when it comes to the work they do or the company they work for. Their job does not energise them, consequently, they are not driven to give their best efforts, energy, attention, or creativity.

The ADR Research Institute set out to put an exact number on this global epidemic by surveying 19000 workers in 19 countries around the world. They found that only 16% of people are “fully engaged” at work. This means more than 8 out of 10 workers merely show up for work. This is a staggering number though the levels of disengagement vary from country to country and from company to company.

One consequence of this epidemic is the tragedy of unfulfilled personal potential, as workers spend a significant part of their lives at work. So much talent and drive are left untapped.

This is also a tragedy of unfulfilled economic potential ($7 trillion or more), for study after study confirms how engagement positively influences productivity, reduces employee turnover, increases customer satisfaction and profitability, and even reduces workplace injuries.

Given the above, the questions most business leaders attempt to find answers to today are:

• How do I multiply the productivity of my people without additional allocation of resources?
• How can leaders extract the smarts and maximum effort from members of their team, and increase productivity without increasing resources?

Just imagine getting far more accomplished with the same people you have now. In the past that would have meant big investments in equipment, automation and allocation of more resources. But that is not always the case.

Let me ask if you are a leader, what result and productivity level could you, your team and your organisation achieve:

• If you can get your people to see work as the answer to and path to their quest for meaning and fulfilment.
• If you can get them to see work as love made visible, a journey of personal transportation and the only way to do good for others.
• If you can get them to see work as a way to flex their intellect, creativity, and an investment in their pursuit of happiness.
• What if you can get twice as much from your people?
• What if they all offer the best of their thinking, creativity and ideas?
• What if your people give more than their jobs require and volunteer their discretionary effort, energy, and resourcefulness?
• What if they actively search for more valuable ways to contribute? And,
• If they hold themselves to the highest standards and give 100% of their abilities to the work - and then more?

Most leaders may not admit it, but let’s be honest, the quest to achieve results is the primary reason for creating an organisation, particularly a corporate organisation.

As a business leader, your greatest goal must be to see that your organisation progressively creates the results it was established to produce most consistently and sustainably so that key stakeholders can be consistently guaranteed the desired outcomes.

Business leaders would love nothing more than to have the confidence and the safety cushion of having a highly motivated team and workforce that consistently delivers on the goals and objectives of the organisation.

For any corporate organisation, that would be a great career experience for the leaders and their team members. True or true?

However, the problem is that many new leaders have learnt how to create corporate results incorrectly.

In many organisations today, leaders have placed too much emphasis on resource allocation, cost efficiency, process re-engineering, sales drive, Internet marketing and other traditional area of focus.

However, there is ONE proven way that works to dramatically multiply individual, team and organisational effectiveness, results and productivity – Purposeful Leadership

As a business leader, you may have read the story of Dick and Maurice, the McDonald Brothers.

They started their first business organisation operating a theatre and it failed.

Why did it fail you may ask? Was it that the business did not have potential?

They moved on to open another business - a restaurant business. They had the marketing idea to franchise their brand, but they failed in their ultimate goal of turning their enterprise into an institution and global entity. In 5 years they attempted to sell franchises and they sold only 15.

Why couldn’t these men achieve their desired result?

The McDonald brothers lacked the leadership to make a large enterprise effective. They were single restaurant owners. They lacked the leadership for a bigger organisation.

They then partnered with a leader Ray Kroc and in 4 years sold 100 franchises and 500 in another four years. (This is over six times what the McDonald brothers did in 5 years.) Ray Kroc did it in 4 years and today, there are over 31,000 franchises in over 119 countries.

So what made the difference in results?

• Leadership ability or, more correctly, the lack of leadership ability was the lid on the McDonald Brothers’ results.
• Success in life is limited without leadership. Leadership ability is always the lid on personal and organisational results. If a person’s leadership is strong, the organisation's productivity lid is high and so are the results. However, with limited leadership, the organisation is limited in productivity – John C Maxwell.
• For anyone to experience external transformation, the person must first get good and be transformed internally. For you to grow your organisation, you must grow the people.
• The potential for progressively increasing an organisation's results is a function of the type of organisation, the line of business and the positions in the organisation. Right? WRONG!

There is no potential in any line of business, position or organisation. Businesses, positions, and organisations are merely opportunities. The true potential is in the people behind the organisation, the leaders in those positions and the collective potential of the people that make up the organisation, especially the leaders.

Competitive advantage and great results in today’s marketplace are gained through resource allocation, cost efficiency, sales drive, Internet marketing efforts or any other traditional areas of focus. Right? WRONG!

Though, all these are very important. From over 40 years of experience in developing purposeful leadership for various organisations globally, The Maxwell Leadership Certified Team has been able to demonstrate that competitive advantage in today’s marketplace is gained through tapping the discretionary goodwill of the workforce by getting them to VOLUNTARILY bring to the table more of their potential through purposeful leadership.

Hubert Joly, the former Chairman and CEO of Best Buy from his experience leading the company turnaround, asserted that there are purposeful leadership principles for the next era of capitalism to enhance workforce engagement and productivity.

How Leaders Can Solve the Disengagement Epidemic in their Organisations and Increase Productivity Without Additional Resources.

According to the work done by Liz Wiseman and her team, and the data collected from leaders 360 assessment and utilisation index, after assessing hundreds of executives, they found out that managers were utilising just 66% of their people capability on average. In other words, by their analysis, the managers are paying a dollar for their resources, extracting only 66% in capability – a 34% waste.

Here is a simple model that can be deployed to eliminate this waste forever in your organisation, increase productivity and save your organisation loads of money.

The work of Liz Wiseman and the team attributed organisation productivity to two categories of leadership:?What I called the wrong leadership culture (or no leadership) and right or purposeful leadership culture.

Right leadership culture extracts all of the capability from people.

In the interviews done in this work, people said that the right leadership culture got more out of them than the wrong or no leadership culture.

When each person was asked to identify the percentage of their capability that the wrong or no leadership culture received or extracted from them, the number typically ranged between 20 and 50%.

Also, when the workforce was asked to identify the percentage of their capability that the right leadership culture extracted, the number typically fell between 70 and 100%.

When the two data sets were compared, it was amazing to discover that the right leadership culture got 1.97 times more.

That represents an almost twofold increase - a 2x effect.

Questions then for you as an organisation leader or executive:

• What result and productivity level could you achieve if you could get twice as much from your people?
• What if they all offer the (very) best of their thinking, creativity and ideas, what result and productivity level could you achieve?
• What result and productivity level is possible if your people give more than their jobs require and volunteer their discretionary effort, energy, and resourcefulness?
• What if they actively search for more valuable ways to contribute, what result and productivity level could you achieve?
• What result and productivity level could you achieve if they hold themselves to the highest standards and give 100% of their abilities to the work - and then some?

Extending intelligence, capability, growth and productivity without additional headcount

Not only does the right leadership culture extract capability and intelligence from people, but they do it in a way that extends and grows that capacity and intelligence.?

People often say the right leadership culture extracts higher than 100% of their capability.

The tendency to push back exists when somebody says “Oh they got 120% from me” because getting more than 100% is mathematically impossible.

Why would people insist that a type of leadership culture got more out of them than they had?

Research confirmed that the right type of leadership culture not only accesses people’s current capabilities but also stretches their capabilities.

They get more from people than they knew they had to give. The research implies that intelligence itself can grow.

What if you got 2X more from your team – everything they had to give – but also a 5 to 10% growth bonus because they were getting smarter and more capable while working for you?

That will be growth without additional headcount!

And if leaders of organisations can do this effectively, they’ll get outstanding results.?It’s as simple as that.

For Instance…

Purposeful leadership for the next era of capitalism comes with the understanding that the traditional view that the primary purpose of business is profit and shareholder value maximisation is not only wrong but dangerous and ill-suited to today’s environment.

The purpose of a business organisation is not to make money but to contribute to the common good and serve ALL stakeholders. Money is the outcome or result of pursuing stakeholders’ (not shareholders) value maximisation. Corporations are not soulless entities, but human organisations with people at their centre, working together to achieve a noble purpose. The new approach to business does not apply just when everything is going well; it is particularly relevant in challenging times.

Companies exist for a purpose. The purpose is the positive impact the company is out to make on people’s lives and, by extension, its contribution to the common good. Every purposeful human organisation has at their heart Purpose, People and Relationships.

Employees sit at the centre of the purposeful human organisation. The secret of business is to have great people do great work for customers in a way that delivers great results. Employees and the work they are engaged in cannot and should not be considered merely inputs. No one wants to be an input.

Doing great work starts when people feel treated like individuals – not human capital – in a work environment where they can thrive. Doing great work for customers happens when employees relate to these customers as human beings, not walking wallets.

Employees pursuing a noble purpose are the heart of human organisation and relationships are the blood that flows through the entire system, making it thrive.

Purposeful leadership understand that the goal of Purposeful Organization is Stakeholders Value Maximization:

Employee: Rewarding and well-paying work for employees.

Customers: Products and Services that enhance and improve the lives of customers

Shareholders: Sustainable returns for investors.

Community: Sustainability - The organisation becoming a force for good needed to transform the society.

But there’s a problem...

Most leaders, team leads and their workforce today don’t understand the concept of purposeful organisation and don’t know how to multiply their productivity and those of others. They don’t know how to help solve the kind of nagging workers' disengagement problems that come up in their teams and organisations, over and over again.

Many organisations today are struggling to make better use of their human resources.

Most of these organisations had developed their leadership skills during times of growth.

However, in a more austere business climate, they found themselves attempting to solve problems by simply throwing more resources at the problems.

They needed to find ways to boost the productivity of people they already had.

The questions most Leaders attempt to find answers to today in their organisation:

• How do I multiply the productivity of my people without additional allocation of resources?
• How can organisations extract the smarts and maximum effort from each member of their teams?
• Are our people proudly saying they got 100% from me or are they saying he only got from me about 50% of what I got to offer?

The old and no longer effective logic of the addition of more resources

This was the dominant logic in corporate planning: that resource will be added when new requests are made.

Senior executives ask for more output and the next layer of operational leaders request more headcount.

The negotiation goes back and forth until everyone settles on a scenario such as 20% more output with 5% more resources. Neither the senior executive nor the operational leaders are satisfied.

Three deadly arguments of operational leaders entrenched in the logic of resource allocation and addition that keep organisations ineffective and unproductive

1.????Our people are overworked.

2.????Our best people are the most maxed out.

3.????Therefore, accomplishing a bigger task requires adding more resources.

That is the logic of addition.

It seems persuasive but, importantly, it ignores the opportunity to leverage deeply existing resources.

The logic of addition creates a scenario in which people become overworked and underutilised.

To argue for allocation without giving attention to resource leverage is an expensive corporate norm.

According to business school professors and strategy gurus Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad:

“The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage…. If top management devotes more effort to assessing the strategic feasibility of projects in its allocation role than it does to the task of multiplying resources effectiveness, its value-added will be modest indeed”.

The Buffet Picture

Picture children at a buffet line, they load up on food, but a lot of it is left on the plate uneaten. The food gets picked at and pushed around, but it is left to go to waste.

Like the children, organisations without the culture of leveraging existing resources are eager to load up on resources, and they might even get the job done, however, many people are left unused, their capability grossly wasted.

The new growth and cost-conscious logic of multiplying existing resources

Better leverage and utilisation of resources at the organisational level require adopting a new logic, based on multiplication.

Instead of achieving linear growth by adding new resources, organisations soundly rooted in the logic of multiplication believe that you can more effectively extract the capability of your people and watch growth skyrocket by multiplying the power of the resources you have.

Three counterintuitive logic behind multiplication - that achieve year-over-year growth in double digits with virtually flat resource

1.????Most people in organisations are underutilised.

2.??All capabilities can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership

3.????Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment.

The Imperative for the New Way:

Under a booming economy, organisations enjoyed decades of outstanding growth using the old idea of throwing resources at problems.

They have addressed new customers and demands for new results by hiring the best technical and business talents and deploying them to the challenges.

However, a strained market environment created a new imperative for organisations' leadership culture: get more productivity from currently available resources.

Organisations can no longer afford the luxury of continued operation of outdated notions of resource utilisation.

There is an urgent need to develop a workforce that could multiply the intelligence and capability of people around them and increase the brain power of the organisation to meet their growth demand.

Resource leverage is a far richer concept than merely “accomplishing more with less”.

The organisations rooted in the new logic don’t get more with less; they get more by using more: using more of people's intelligence and capability, enthusiasm and trust.

As one CEO put it:

“Eighty people can either operate with the productivity of fifty or operate as though they were five hundred”.

Organisations with the multiplication logic mindset, achieve better resource efficiency, they enjoy a strengthened competitive position against companies entrenched in the logic of addition.

Multiply Productivity Without Multiplying Resources

Let’s face the facts.

You will agree that if more people within your organisation knew how to make this happen… well, your organisation’s results and productivity will be outstanding.

That’s why it’s so important for leaders to learn how to connect with the heart to request the hand for that voluntary extra contribution that makes all the difference - multiplying corporate productivity with the same resource.

The Ultimate Partnership

This is why our organisation VALOR CREADOR LTD in Partnership with the MAXWELL LEADERSHIP CERTIFIED TEAM has put together this most comprehensive program yet, - a 3-day 21-module program that will completely transform the way business leaders look at organisational effectiveness to create massive results through people without the pains and frustration of doing it the hard way with ineffective, disengaged and unproductive workforce. Thus achieving year-over-year productivity and growth with virtually flat resources.

For Details of the CORPORATE PRODUCTIVITY PROGRAM See the Link Below

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/corporate-productivity-multiplier-hyacinth-aneke/?trackingId=G2J%2Fa9UMQZCZH6wXKRofbg%3D%3D