Alignment comes before engagement

I have always believed that intellect was the servant of sensible action. In the light of this belief, I note that leadership theory has become unbalanced in the past twenty years. There is no end of intellectual theory and very little practical common sense around. This keeps consultants and academics in work but does not seem to be creating better leaders. I suspect this is because leaders need to deal with real problems in a practical world.

‘Engagement’ is a good case in point. This leader-dependent state is an important factor in success but has been poorly developed in most companies; this is despite everyone knowing the theory and spending millions of dollars on surveys to get affirmation that poor engagement is indeed an issue.

I have worked in an organisation where I was totally engaged and another where I was totally disengaged. In most others I was ambivalent. A recent JRA survey showed that 29% of employees were engaged, 50% were ambivalent and 21% were actively disengaged. Apparently, my level of engagement is related to the situation and not personal traits. I am part of the 80% of people who are ‘leader influenced’.

Let me explain that: The 80 – 20 rule always seems to work for me; in the case of individuals, it means that 10% of employees will never engage; 10% will be engaged whatever you do (personal traits) and 80% will be sitting on the fence, waiting to be influenced. The real leadership challenge here is the 80%. If only 70% were engaged (the 10% plus another 60%), the critical mass effect would create a very positive and productive organisation.

I examined the differences between companies I had experienced and concluded that the reasons fall into two clear categories:  Alignment and Leadership Energy.

Alignment must come first. It is the foundation for leaders to build on. It doesn’t matter how many great leaders there are in the organization – without alignment they are lighting fires that will be doused by the rest of the organisation.

There are two parts to alignment: There must be alignment of strategy and of supporting values. Everyone must share these aligned strategies and values in order to feel safe and sure that their contributions are useful. The values must, in turn, be congruent with the strategic priorities. Measurements and acknowledgements should be based on aligned results. These strategies and values must be communicated to everyone by leaders regularly. This enables people to prioritise their day-to-day work knowing that it is contributing to the whole organization. This should be part of a continuous, not a ‘one-off’ system of communication which develops a ‘strategically and values aligned group memory’.

A major reason why engagement levels remain stubbornly unchanged is that often, companies embark upon long term development strategies that could take years. This is fine in organisations where change is absent but cannot succeed where change is constant. Typically, in these organisations, after a few years of improving-work-life balance or running a leadership programme, many of the leaders have moved on (especially executives who originally decided on the programme). In fact, these days, the entire value proposition or business model can have changed (look at Telecom over the past few years).

Engagement cannot be achieved by a person-by-person development in the short term; it needs to be an organisation transformation. Now the word transformation sounds a little dramatic  and even smacks of ‘consultant speak’, but in reality it simply means that the change needs to be shared by all and very fast. Fast changes are achieved at the cultural (not individual) level. I’m not saying that developing individuals is a bad thing – just that alone, it is unlikely to achieve transformation in less than ten years of stable development.

Engagement is a collective concept. An organisation where all employees are individually engaged through their own personal traits is often a bad idea, even if it were possible to find a large group of people who would share a common passion. Individuals who are passionate about their own causes rarely want to work collectively towards a common goal. This is why a single passionate, driven individual can often cause more headaches than benefits within a team. Selfish engagement can be destructive to the whole.

There are some exceptions to this, where shared group values are clearly present. However, these organisations are few and far between, with the most obvious examples being charities and some religious groups running businesses. Other examples include groups that initially form around a shared purpose. Most of the organisations that you and I work in do not fall into this category and need some structure and guidance. Even in the cases above, people join the organisation because it represents their personal values, but find that they need to have aligned strategic priorities to feel that they are contributing as part of an achieving group. I have worked with a number of charities where employees are very aligned in their overall purpose and values, but struggle to deal with alignment of strategic priorities and results measurement.

So, is there an easy guide to Transformation? Yes. There are four easy and practical ways to create and maintain alignment and engagement through leaders. They are far too simple for most consultants to bother with and anyway, they rely on internal development rather than external ownership. All were used 30 years ago in the company where I was totally engaged and have been well tried and tested in reality. New technology has actually made them easier to use today – but in essence, the basics have never changed because we are dealing with people, not computers.

Engagement though Alignment – Four easy Steps to create an ‘Engaged Powerhouse’.

Alignment comes before engagement and leaders are responsible for creating alignment. The Executive Leadership Team must take action first. 

The Executive leadership team is responsible for alignment. They are accountable for far more than the usual leadership role; they develop a strong culture and a framework within the organisation. This enables other leaders to best achieve collective results. They are change leaders who can build a community of leaders to transform an organisation into a collective powerhouse.

The Executive Team should:

1       Clarify the organization ‘DNA’. Identify the common purpose of the organization on one page in simple language.

2       Build a Leadership Framework and Community. Align all leaders with the common purpose. Install aligned systems for communication and measurement to form a discipline within which leaders can lead effectively together.

3       Develop an aligned Culture. Encourage the culture to grow around the organization core of ‘DNA’. There must be alignment between strategy and values; espoused and actual values; values and behaviours. Any dissonance will weaken the culture and in severe cases it will damage performance permanently.

4       Release the collective potential of people. This is achieved through leaders encouraging and synergising the sum of each individual’s knowledge, experience and thinking skills to encourage extraordinary collective performance. This is what I like to call practical wisdom.

Most organisations have worked in one or all of these four areas of focus. It is the alignment and integration of all four in daily work that matters and the unconscious connection between intellectual meaning and ‘gut’ feeling (conscious and unconscious). The process of developing these areas leads to a conscious awareness of the unconscious drivers of the organization.