Right Management recently conducted a survey of more than 650 senior leaders and human resource professionals to identify the most important leadership practice fundamental to achieving business goals during tough times. More than half (51%) of respondents cited “engaging employees to ensure organizational alignment and commitment” as being the most important leadership practice.

So how do you engage employees, or re-engage them? Lessons from the field of positive psychology indicate the importance of paying attention to how people feel before you focus on what you want them to do.  In her book, Exuberance, John Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison writes, “In times of adversity, inspired leadership offers energy and hope where little or none exist.”

In our book, Change at the Core, Myron Radio and I discuss a concept we call “internal energy.”  Internal energy is the force at the core of each one of us. This powerful force drives the decisions we make – from the careers we choose, to which specific tasks we complete and which we tend to procrastinate on.

Internal energy is made up of many factors.  The three we discuss in our book are:

• Style: HOW we do what we do (Driving, Influencing, Steady, Careful)

• Passion: WHY we do what we do (Results, People, Creativity, Knowledge, Leading, Tradition)

• Mindset: WHAT we focus on (People, Processes, or Systems)

A few days ago I published a post about communicating with people, not to them.  Just today I came across a terrific video slideshow from Les Landes that reinforces this point.  Landes is an expert in marketing communications, employee engagement and alignment.  Check out his video: Closing the Distance below.

Corporate communicators have been using video to share messages for decades.  But in just the past year or two, more and more companies are recognizing that employees are more actively engaged when they create the video themselves.  Here is a great example of this approach.

Hospital Video Contest: Washing Hands

Rather than creating a corporate Wash Your Hands campaign, one hospital asked employees to create and submit their own videos.  Here’s a compilation of results:

Consider inviting your people to create your next important message themselves!

I recently had a prospective client ask me how I would create a communication plan that would convince people to support a change.  My response was that any communication plan should focus on communicating with people, not to them.

As Peter Bregman writes in his book, Point B: A Short Guide to Leading Big Change, providing information is important in any change.  But, he writes,  “tell & sell” isn’t enough.  Real change happens when every person impacted is actively engaged in the process of change – to the point where they become owners  – not targets of the change.

Just last week, Melissa Dutmers of RiverFork Consulting posted 9 questions to ask when leading a change:

Earlier this week I posted about a successful workshop I and several colleagues ran for 800 managers as part of a major transition.  My previous post was about senior leader involvement.  Today, I will address the topic of training.

For this particular transformation effort, our client recognized that mid- and frontline managers would play a pivotal roll in communicating the details of the change to employees. Therefore, the client hired my colleagues and I to facilitate over forty 4-hour workshops for managers.  The response to the workshops was overwhelmingly positive – which surprised a lot of people because the change the organization is introducing is highly sensitive and counter to the way things have been done in this organization for more than 30 years.

After running 19 workshops myself, I reflected on what made the sessions work well.  Here are my thoughts:

I disappeared from this blog for most of the month of January.  No, I wasn’t on vacation.  I was working with several colleagues on a large change communication project.  Our client is in the middle of transforming their compensation structure. Our job was to lead 800 managers (20 at a time) through a 4-hour workshop. The workshop covered the purpose for the transition and the specifics of how the new compensation program would work. The overall objective of the workshop was to equip managers with information that they would need to communicate the change to their employees.  Of course, before that could happen, the managers themselves needed to understand, accept and support the change personally.  

Because the response to our workshops was overwhelmingly positive, I decided to take time to reflect on what worked.  Over the next few posts, I’ll explore what we learned from this rollout and the lessons that it illustrates for all change communicators.

Topic #1:  Senior Leader Support

For this organization, the rollout of the new compensation system has been a multi-year process.  The internal HR/Comp/OD team worked closely with each division’s top leader and his/her direct reports on every aspect of the transition.  This was not simply a process of getting surface-level “buy-in.”  The division leaders personally made critical decisions at each point of the transition.  

The involvement of the senior leaders ended up being incredibly powerful when it came time to introduce the new system to managers and employees.  We ran most of the workshops with managers in intact teams.  Each team heard from their division’s most senior leader at the start (and sometimes also the end) of the class. The next-level leaders who had been involved in the decision-making participated in the sessions along with managers who were hearing the details for the first time.    

In every session that we ran, it quickly became evident that the involvement of senior leaders at every stage (decision making, planning, and communication) was the most powerful factor in getting front-line and mid-level manager support for the change.  You could visibly see resistance levels being reduced at three points in the workshop:

I’ve been told (more than once) that I can be hard to take.  While that’s hard feedback to hear, over the years I’ve learned what it means and am starting to learn what to do about it.  You see, my energy level is usually pretty high.  It’s more than just being extraverted – essentially I am happy, upbeat and expressive.  While these characteristics are things most people like about me, I’ve come to realize that my energy level can also turn people off.  People that I am meeting for the first time sometimes think, “Wow – what a phony.  Nobody can be this positive.”  Over time many people realize that it really is me and that I am not faking it.

Happy New Year!

As you may have seen from my home page, I am refining the focus of my work and this blog.  I took advantage of the quiet time of the holidays to reflect on my own true purpose and passions.  I realized that the aspect of leading and communicating change that interests me most is the concept of energy.  I believe (and McKinsey’s research supports) that energy is key to any successful change effort – whether it is organizational change or personal change.  When we feel energized we approach our life and work with the feeling that we can do things, can make a difference, can be successful.

Energy comes from several places.  First, energy comes from within.  When we are fulfilling our purpose we feel energized.  Energy also comes from our interactions with other people. When I have conversations with certain friends and colleagues, I walk away feeling energized and uplifted – like anything is possible.  What is it about these people and my interactions with them?  In the coming months, I plan to explore this question along with others such as:

Last month I posted a video about making behavior change fun.  Today I learned that Volkswagen has another in the series.

Are you leveraging fun and curiosity to interest people in your change effort?