Hollywood and mainstream media have spent decades pushing images of uprisings and revolutions to our screens. A constant diet of images that blur the lines – and the reality - between The Arab Spring, “Les Miserables”, “Olympus Has Fallen” and the Capitol Building.
It shakes us deeply when we see these images play out in real time. Inevitably the pundits and talking heads ask the same set of questions in some weird intellectual Q&A roundabout.
“How did we get here?”
“How did we miss the signs?”
“How can this group be so frustrated and so angry with the status quo?”
Here’s an unpleasant thought to consider. And blunt question to answer.
Are similar emotions flowing through your organization and through your colleagues?
Granted the collapse of a business is seldom violent and seldom visceral. An armada of Lehman Brothers employees leaving a high-rise with their personal effects in cardboard boxes is filed under the “Metro Business” section. “Going Out of Business” signs hanging on the windows of Blockbuster stores is fodder for MBA talks. Google and Amazon employees staging a silent walk-out or trying to unionize tickles the spidey senses of the CHRO but little more.
To add insult to injury, we use innocuous words like “employee engagement” as a bellweather for the level of satisfaction our colleagues have inside our organizations. And just like your temperature is a blunt diagnostic for your own personal health and well-being, employee engagement is an equally blunt diagnostic of your organization well-being and a really poor measurement of your culture.
The annual Gallup Engagement numbers – and the classic GapingVoid meme below – are a stark reminder that employee engagement is stuck.
That billions of dollars of investment have not moved the dial one iota. Gallup puts the financial impact in the United States alone at $350 billion annually from disengaged employees. That’s before factoring in the percentage of employees who readily acknowledge they’re actively sabotaging their company – 1 in 5 by some estimations.
In business our displeasure is seldom violent, it is deafeningly and alarmingly silent
It appears in a thousand small actions and minute behaviours each day across our organizations.
The layers of approvals and vigorous paper-shuffling we put between ideas and execution.
The mindless meetings, without agenda and without end, that bludgeon our people with Zoom call and endless email trails.
The hoarding of information under the antiquated illusion that knowledge hoarding is a sign of power and stature.
The abdication of accountability that flourishes between role ambiguity and role clarity.
The clarion calls for more diversity, more equality, more inclusion that seldom manifest in more than stirring speeches, inspirational posters and snazzy new T-shirts and coffee mugs.
These are the thousands of small and insidious actions and behaviours that unambiguously communicate to our people – and that they echo right back to us - that our organization is not an environment where they will find meaning, where they will be able to have a demonstrable impact and where the sweat of their brow and the spark of their imagination will ever get more than a cursory acknowledgement.
Ironically, as leaders we desperately seek the full and complete commitment of our people.
Yet we seldom create the environment and nurture a culture where that commitment is possible or even plausible.
And, even more egregiously, we often don’t draw the very straight line of causality between our culture and the deep financial impact it has.
The R&D projects that never get out of the lab and into our products.
The direct costs of hiring, training, rehiring, retraining new employees. Particularly when your Glassdoor scores are as appetizing as day-old stale donuts.
The slow, agonizing pace – and associated cost – of deploying an annual Strategy that is out-dated almost as soon as its distributed.
Here’s the other reality that we, as leaders, are willing to acknowledge everywhere else but in our businesses.
The opposite of love and commitment is not anger. It’s apathy.
Apathy. Disengagement. Disinterest.
As my dear friend Stan Slap points out loudly and repeatedly, the mark of any strong organization and culture is the commitment of their people. That discrete commitment – or Share of Shower I’ve written about previously – where your people are so engaged and so passionate about the business that it becomes a personal crusade.
Where they willingly give the very best of themselves because YOU have created a culture where that commitment is possible, where commitment is deliberately nurtured at every moment, where you foster an environment where everybody matters.
If you’re a business leader and think that a quiet revolution is not already underway inside your organization, then I’d contend you’re either naïve or willfully blind.
The choice you have is whether the revolution in your company is going to be a bright shining example of what can be achieved or the smouldering wreckage of what could’ve been.
It’s time to rise and shine my friends.