Evolutionary Provocateur

The Simple Nature of Performance

Steve Roesler's simple example over at All Things Workplace illustrates how easy performance is. A couple of things come to mind:
1. People want to contribute. Motivation is not necessary. Inspiration is all that is required.
2. Performance follows joy as Nick Zeniuk my colleague from SoL puts it. When employees are given the freedom to express their talents...they do.
3. Performance is fueled by personal spirit. Personal spirit, as noted in other places in this blog, is made of the state of a person's outlook, initiative and sense of control. Unless repression has been the rule of the day, expression shows up as initiative ... taking charge and making things happen.

In general when people are not clear, the actions need to be done again. In many working environments the value is over being busy. Simple focus on clarity of purpose can clear the path to results by reducing the range of possibility down to what to focus on.

In a world of massive information overload, being clear about what you are trying to achieve and why creates the ground for focused and collective action. Sounds simple enough. To achieve it means giving more trust and letting go of the need to control.

The simple nature of performance cycles back to self mastery. Personal growth and development or personal mastery...call it what you want... is about the capacity to observe oneself in action and insert a decision between the impulse and that action so that the choice to intervene or let go is made as a conscious choice. Trusting in talent is what it is all about.

Passion with a Purpose

Tom Voccola at CEO2 is on a mission. As a CEO of five companies so far, Tom has figured out that the real opportunity lies in being tuned into what matters for you. There are lots of executives who, if they grasped this for themselves, would not be wondering how to engage and keep their employees.

I just spent 3 days in a workshop with Tom working on my purpose and passion statement. Are you ready?

Mastering the Invisible-Connection to the Web of Life

Through compassion, intuitively sensing into all levels of energetic reality and a knack for making connections I help myself and others bring the invisible to the surface and convert it to clarity, creativity and expanded contribution.

Tom's work is incredibly important right now to corporations whose level of self-knowledge is low to non-existent. This is true also for the people in it. Since tacit knowledge is THE strategic asset to corporate achievement, then companies must engage the passion and purpose of themselves to create the culture necessary to nurture.

Tom and his wife Francis can be found at www.ceo2.com. What is your relationship with your passion for work and your purpose in life?

Global Source of Labour- Global Mindset Required

So i am cruising the web googling labour shortage blogs expecting to see news on how the strategies for handling the situation are moving along. What i find is news that is about 2 years old.

Interesting. The problem of filling the shortage of labour is complex i grant you but by now i was expecting to see some progress. This is not news.

So why the delay in action? I think it has something to do with mindset. Case in point, yesterday i attended a labour market forum sponsored by the Burnaby Board of Trade One of the speakers who places disabled employees in jobs interviewed an employer who hired one of his candidates. He had contacted 80 employers before he got to this one, who shockingly hired on merit and character, not on how they looked. Her paralegal employee was hired to type and file all of which she does incredibly well, only she uses her feet where most of us would use our arms. She fits into the workplace perfectly.

Closed mindsets will block out opportunities to hire youth, aboriginal, immigrant and the disabled quite simply because the ability does not look like it always has. Employees coming in with different world views demand a different work place. If you can't provide it, they can leave for one that does.

This makes employers must have an expanded way of seeing the world and an ability to be flexible, as Roslyn Kunin put it. Flexible training, mentoring, age, hours, how work gets done, location. Employers are not the only ones who require a wider mindset. Mature workers who seek to stay in the workplace must also be receptive to fitting into a different way work gets done. With technology the tool and virtual drafting boards the creative platform, the idea of being in control of everything is being replaced by the idea of co-creating with team players.

It will take a conscious effort to explore and dismantle outmoded beliefs to open the workplace to diverse perspectives so it works as a strategic advantage.

Employee Sustainability

Over at BNET on Ben Casnocha's Corner Office blog, news of Walmart's employee sustainability has, as usual, generated an interesting response ranging from outright condemnation to complimentary. Walmart appears to act as a lightening rod for value judgments. This must mean that their intentions are suspect no matter what they do. Deserved or not, once painted with the brush of judgment, there is no flexibility to see the situation in a different way.

But, lets set Walmart's intention's aside for a moment and take a look at the initiative itself. The notion of self-directed sustainability is the key to all forms of sustainability. When people are not in victim mode they do not consume nearly as much as those you operate on a feed me, spare change mode. Taking charge of life and directing your personal growth is an evolving affair but it starts by getting introduced to the idea and then spreads to daily action.

Many of my colleagues have also noticed an increase in the numbers of people ready to take charge of their lives, shed the drama and move forward. Most of these will ultimately not put up with corporations killing them softly with limiting notions of their talent or repressive authocratic structures.

Meanwhile, whether you like Walmart or not, introducing employees to methods for strengthening their health and habits can only improve on quality of life while also edging humanity toward creating a future with greater hope. Corporations have the capacity and the resources to take a leadership role. It starts one business at a time.

The Difference Between Employee Engagement and Happiness

When listening to Wayne Turmel's podcast over at www.management-issues.com an interesting distinction has surfaced in research done by Jonathan Austin's company: Best Companies. Measures of happiness include travel, office space; measures of engagement are about leadership, faith in management, personal growth, relationship with your manager, giving something back and well being to name a few. You can have engaged and happy but happy does not mean engaged. This makes sense when you look at it as part of a life dynamic. Happy is one of those tranquil, comfortable emotions that can be made of a number of things quite fluid in nature. Engagement is about focus and contribution.

The whole discussion of what engagement is or is not and how to achieve it has gotten quite of bit of attention. i suspect that the temptation to quantify everything means that the common sense nature of achieving engagement has been overlooked.

At the heart of the matter, people want the same things. Their values, outlook, sense of control may differ and drive capacity to achieve what they seek. In the end, when companies wire what their employees want with what they can achieve collectively all the pieces will fall into place. This is the whole intention behind the program to develop human potential on the sidebar of this site. Visionary thinkers will have no trouble making the link; it is too bad there is a shortage of bold vision mixed with the courage to act.

Growth or Protection: Performance by Choice

This is the last of a six part interview between Dawna Jones (moi!) and Dr. Bruce Lipton on the scientific logic behind deep learning to achieve personal and organizational upgrades in achievement and performance. Enjoy!

Employee Disengagement: How did this happen?

“People want to contribute more. But they say their leaders and supervisors put obstacles in their paths” comments Donald Lowman, Towers Perrin HR on a recent survey done on employee engagement (Management Issue News – November, 2005 – www.management-issues.com ).

Put this finding alongside the top ten executive issues sited in a survey done by Accenture (Executive Issues: 2005) and you find:

Strengthening the organization’s human capital:

• attracting and retaining skilled staff,
• changing organizational culture and employee attitudes,
• improving workplace performance and
• developing employees into capable leaders.

It will take a different kind of thinking to get to where the executives say they want to go. The first step requires asking, and being willing to hear the answer: ‘what did we do to disengage them?’

If you aren’t ready for that question, consider these few headlines, (I am a self-confessed clipper which is a problem in an urban apartment!):

• Job satisfaction for women workers in serious decline: June 27, 2005-PersonnelToday.com
• It’s Boring at the top for female executives: May 3^rd, 2005– NY Times

Interestingly, the NY Times article mentions that Proctor and Gamble, ten years before had done a survey asking female high performers why they had left. ‘The answer was that they did not feel valued.’ Similarly, Deloitte surveyed women in the early 1990’s and found that the women who had left were not going home to look after family responsibilities but were working for other companies.

Ten years is a long time for these kinds of signals to be known. To their credit, the companies who dared to ask the questions have since taken action. Still, the current statistics on disengagement suggest that more than women are disengaged and for more than one reason.

To see what is being done invisibly to lose such talent, would mean noticing that employees come to work with their head attached to their body and that in their body is a heart where the passion lies. You would also have to ask (and be ready to hear the answer) whether you are in fact creating an environment where whole brain thinking can be supported. Whole brain thinking, in my brain, includes linear/logical, creative, and lateral thinking. It also includes receptivity for intuitive or ‘gut feel’ guidance.

I have not forgotten a comment made by a professional after I noted, as the facilitator, that the ideas were pretty creative (the topic was related to economics). Her response was that she left her creativity at home.

If you have others in your company, men or women, who leave their creativity at home, it is a pretty safe guess that innovation may be tough to achieve. There is also a relationship to be made between work environments where people are leaving due to burn out. Some judge burn out as people who could not ‘cut’ it. That would assume that those who burnt out did not care. The reality is that their care exceeded what their working environment could support.

We have not talked about the distraction of meeting increasing and competing high demands for caregiving and for working longer and harder. In companies who have not fully grasped the complexity, many who choose to work smarter, leave in order to take charge of the balance they seek.

If there were no limitations and failure was not an option, what would you contribute that you are not currently offering? This question is pertinent to all levels, including the executive suite. Hmmm....how much untapped potential do you think has yet to be released?