Hack

Hack: Stop trying to engage your people, give them a chance to engage themselves!

by Phil LeNir - Executive Director at CoachingOurselves

January 19, 2011 at 7:19am

3 Comments

10 Ratings:

Overall 3.8
Innovative 3.7
Detail 3.9

Contribution Summary

Summary

Create the context in which people can learn through reflection from their own experiences and they will engage themselves, become passionate about their work and highly productive.

were not only re-engaged, but passionately interested, and eager to contribute more? How do we transfer our passion to the people we lead? And how do we convert that passion to productivity?

Moonshot(s)

Problem

Problems engaging employees? Then we start with an employee engagement survey.

Almost every self-respecting company does them. And most of these companies (often through their HR departments) deal with the same issue: how to help managers and employees understand and improve the results in a way that is more than mere box ticking and really makes a sustainable difference.

The most used approaches, like setting targets on engagement, putting 'engagement toolkits' on the intranet, or even starting full fledged 'change programmes' to be 'rolled out' in the organisation, have rarely led to measurable change.

This hack offers a way to leverage the engagement survey to really increase employee engagement and so help employees become more engaged, motivated and productive.

Solution

Stop trying to force people to change. Instead, create the context in which the people themselves decide to change (or not!), and enable them to define their own actions for themselves.

In this hack we propose that organizations offer all managers the opportunity to run several "learning" meetings with their direct reports, or team, motivated by the results of an employee engagement survey. The learning meetings use Mintzberg’s model for management learning based on reflection ("Thoughtful reflection on natural experience, in the light of conceptual ideas, is the most powerful tool we have for management learning").

This creates the unique context in which people openly and honestly discuss and reflect on their own day to day working experiences related to engagement issues, and in doing so change themselves and take positive and meaningful action towards improving engagement of themselves and others around them.

This "hack" is now being implemented on a large scale at ING Group, a Dutch based, global financial services company. There, Mireille Jansma of ING Business School and Hendrik Jan Bot of the Performance, Culture & Change department are using CoachingOurselves - which is simply a form of Mintzberg’s management learning by reflection - as part of the engagement survey process, to help managers and employees develop new perspectives on engagement and find new, inspiring ways to work & think together. As a result hundreds of managers and employees at ING are now discovering new insights, new ways of 'doing things', co creating and increasing their own level of engagement by themselves, all for about a third of the cost of sending just one manager on a typical MBA!

In CoachingOurselves small groups of managers get together every couple of weeks for an hour and a half to share experiences and gain insight into themselves, their work, and their organizations in light of the major topics of management. Groups download topics such as "Time to Dialogue", "Models of Engagement", "FeedFORWARD instead of feedBACK" and "The Rewards of Recognition" to guide and stimulate conversation and reflection. These topics are written for CoachingOurselves by authors such as Marshall Goldsmith, Dave Ulrich, Nancy Adler, Philip Kotler, Edgar Schein, Henry Mintzberg, and other leading management thinkers.

There are no facilitators in CoachingOurselves, no trainers or formal coaches, just managers and employees empowering each other to learn from their own practical experiences and pursuing the consequences for change in their organization.

Practical Impact

This hack creates the space in which people talk about, and reflect, on themselves in small groups stimulated by conceptual views of different aspects of engagement, and guided by a simple, semi-structured format. Through these discussions people create a safe learning environment in which they become aware themselves: they discuss what disengages them; what issues they have with themselves, others and the organization.

In the small groups people rapidly decide to take actions to improve things for themselves, their teams and the organizations. In the small group people readily support and motivate one another.

This changes their attitude and results in many small, simple and practical actions.

Challenges

A common challenge to overcome is the negative attitude to something new. This might be expressed in different ways:

"It won't work around here"
"We don't do these kind of things".
"We are too busy, we don't have time"
"People will never be able to run their own learning meetings, we need a facilitator or professional coach, without that it won't go anywhere"

Etc...

In our experience the simplest method to overcoming these challenges is to have people just do try it once. Just one 90 minute meeting, perhaps over a lunch. No preparation or future commitment required.

And that's how it usually starts...

First Steps

Try it.

To provoke a discussion on engagement, find some "conceptual material" related to aspects of engagement with the questions to start self reflection. Then schedule a 90 minute "learning" meeting with your team or direct reports.

Credits

Mireille Jansma and Jurgen Egges of ING Business School
Hendrik Jan Bot and Celine Aladel of Performance, Culture & Change at ING Group
Phil LeNir, CoachingOurselves

Input

Comments

Mireille Jansma

January 20, 2011 at 2:44am

Hi Phil,

:-) Glad you managed to put this up in time to meet the deadline.

Perhaps good to mention is that Hendrik Jan and Celine made a special CO-alike topic on engagement for the HR-community they work with. They tested and improved it by 'going through it' with direct colleagues a couple of times. After two iterations (which a.o. freed the topic of corporate speak) it was ready for use. The topic both fueled good conversations about engagement, and gave people experience with the general CO-approach, so they could explain CO and carry it further into their respective business lines.

Aladel

January 20, 2011 at 3:39am

Indeed what we did is use the format of Coaching Ourselves to discuss the culture within ING with our HR colleagues. This helped them explain to the managers they support in the business how to best use CO. Then the accountability is in the business! We're starting using 5 topics linked to our main challenges: Time to Dialogue, Models of Engagement, Appreciative Inquiry, Feedforward, Rewards of recognition.
I also experienced doing a CO session over the phone with colleagues from Central and Eastern Europe. Of course it takes a bit more time for participants to warm up, but once we start bringing our own experiences and stories, the exchange gets richer. So one tip for virtual team is to keep the group small (max 5/6)!