by Dan Gregory @DanGregoryCo @TheBehaviourRpt #Culture #Performance #Leadership
A number of years ago I was working with a military consortium on an innovation project. I could tell you what we were working on, but then I’d have to kill you.
Now, to set the scene, a military consortium is usually a group of 20-30 ex-military men (and it’s always just men). As you might imagine, when group of ex-military men get together in a room, there’s a lot of posturing goes on - Who’s the biggest… Who’s the toughest… That kind of thing. (Fortunately, I watched a lot of Jean Claude Van Damme movies as a kid, so I think I held my own!)
As this was going on, a door at the back of the room opened and an older gent in chinos and a polo shirt entered the room, and the posturing stopped. The bragging stopped. The BS stopped.
It was immediately obvious to me that a real leader had entered the room. So, I said to the ex-special forces guy I was talking to, “Who’s that?” He responded, “That’s Maj. Gen. Jim Molan. He’s a legend.”
Before his recent passing, Jim Molan had served as an Australian Senator, but before that, he had been an Allied Commander during the war in Afghanistan working with troops from Australia, Afghanistan, Canada, Great Britain, Poland and the United States.
Later that day, we had a conversation about leadership and I asked him what it was like to lead an organisation of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, values, religions and military disciplines. He praised his team stating that he had led the most highly trained, most well resourced and most disciplined workforce on the planet - and it had been his honour to serve with them.
Then he looked me in the eye and asked, “What kind of people do you command!”
I said, “Creative people.”
He looked and me with eyes that said, “You poor bastard!”
Here’s the thing, Jim Molan knew that if he ever gave any of his people an order, they would snap to attention and say, “Sir. Yes sir.” If I was ever to give my people anything resembling an order, they would tell me to go and do something to myself that might be a little more enjoyable if another participant was involved!
I think we all know what that kind of leadership feels like.
Today, leadership is less about command and control, or hierarchy, or even positional authority, and much more about how we create cultures of the voluntary, of the enthusiastic of the engaged.
What’s more, Cultures of the Willing also outperform those who are not engaged.
Engagement = Performance
If you’ve ever read one of Gallup’s Global Workforce Engagement reports, you’ll know that workforce engagement is pretty dire - roughly half of the global workforce is NOT engaged in the work they do, with a further 20-ish percent ACTIVELY disengaged. And this may even be a false positive, as though many may hate their jobs, they still need them!
However, what is often missed is the fact that organisations with a highly engaged culture are more productive, more profitable and even have customer satisfaction ratings much higher than the norm. In other words, not only does an engaging culture lift performance internally, it also drives market reputation and performance.
The other thing that people often miss is the fact that this is an equation - which means it works both ways. In other words:
Performance also equals Engagement
This means engagement and performance are a virtuous cycle where one feeds the other.
So, how does this work in practice? Allow me to explain through a personal story.
I was raised in a very musical family. My mother was a former child prodigy who won the national eisteddfod (and many others in piano, cello, musicianship and theory). Consequently, she made sure my siblings and I all started piano lessons before we were even old enough for school. Once we had achieved a certain competency in piano, we were then allowed to add another instrument to our repertoire. I chose guitar.
Later at university, I earned some spending money working as a guitar teacher. However, I chose a very different method of teaching to the one I had learned by.
Usually, kids will be taught simple songs like, “Three blind mice,” or “Frère Jacques” that are easy to play but desperately boring and uninspiring. If you’re the parent of a child learning to play, you know how hard it is to love them while they’re playing that crap.
I thought, “Screw that!”
Whenever a young kid came to me to learn, I would ask what their favourite band and song was. For instance, I was teaching in Sydney’s Western suburbs during the early 1990s, and “Westie” kids love metal. One young man told me he was obsessed with Metallica and the song, “Master of puppets.” Now, any guitarist can tell you, this is not an easy piece to play and certainly not a typical place to start your guitar playing career.
However, without teaching him any theory or even what the names of the notes he was playing, I taught him where to put his fingers and which strings to strum - phrase by phrase, note by note - a tiny piece at a time, week by week.
Within a few weeks, his Mother approached me and said, “What are you doing to my child?” Which admittedly looks quite bad in print without context!
She revealed that with his former teacher, she had had to force him to complete even 5 minutes of practice (usually just before his lesson), but now she had to drag him away from his guitar to come to dinner at night.
In other words, his performance increased his engagement and his engagement increased his performance.
He was more likely to practice and more interested in music theory, simply because I had created competence beyond his capability - which then increased his passion for his playing.
So, how might we create performance-lifting engagement in our cultures?
Inspire - Do more than simply telling people what to do. Demonstrate why you want them to do it, but even more importantly, show them who you are helping them to become in the process.
Invite - Allow your team to co-create solutions and strategy with you. When they help to create it, they feel greater ownership of it and they work the strategy harder.
Interest - Make sure that the work you perform is intellectually challenging and talent stretching. This means allowing your people to reach beyond their current beliefs and perceived limits.
Influence - Stack the odds in your favour by creating a behavioural bias towards success, and just as importantly, away from failure. In other words, create systems, contexts and environments that make performance (and therefore engagement), more easily achievable.