The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer

Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance

John Smythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138456051
• eBook ISBN: 9781351893206
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

You may be a senior executive wondering how to engage hundreds or thousands of employees in your vision, strategy or the transformation of the business; or a specialist in HR, communication and change, tasked with the challenge of 'aligning and mobilising' your people. In either case, you no longer want compliant people, you want individuals who will engage their creativity at work. For their part, engaged employees want a say in their work and in how the business changes. The Chief Engagement Officer explores a management philosophy which recognises the value of opening up decision making to the right groups to improve the quality of decisions and change, accelerate execution and broaden ownership. John Smythe asks what the concept of engagement means for employer and employee; tests whether and how it is different from internal communication and provides a practical framework for those who want to engage colleagues but need advice based on applied experience. The book includes a tapestry of reports from organisations who are engaging their employees to drive performance and change. The author demonstrates how powerful models, developed from his work at SmytheDorwardLambert, his time as an organisational fellow with McKinsey and Company, and his consultancy with Engage for Change, can be used to take this process forward in any organisation. The Chief Engagement Officer is a highly readable guide to the revolution that is needed in employee communication and organisational leadership from one of the most experienced and well-regarded experts on employee communication.

PART I
The End of Employee Coercion; The Beginning of Employee Engagement

1 The CEO: The Chief Engagement Officer: Leaders are Learning to Engage Their People to Drive Sustainable Performance and Change

Have you seen bosses come and go with their manifestos of change flying high one minute and forgotten the next?

Perhaps you are one of those bosses wondering how to engage hundreds or thousands of fellow colleagues in your vision, strategy or plans for your organisation. Maybe all you are sure of is that the organisation which you will temporarily lead has got to change its act.

Or perhaps you are one of the specialists in HR, communication or change who will be asked to ‘align and mobilise’ people with the change.

Either way my intention in this book is to:

• Put a spotlight on the current vogue for employee engagement.
• Ask what the concept means.
• Test whether it is different to internal communication and internal marketing or simply a repackaging of old ideas.
• Tell a few stories about how organisations are experimenting with engaging their employees to drive change and everyday performance, drawing from my temporary term as an Organisational Fellow with McKinsey and Company (where I researched into the phenomenon of employee engagement) and years of consulting in this arena.
• Propose a practical framework for those who want to engage their colleagues but need some advice based on practical experience.
• Reflect on the implications of engaging employees for leaders, internal advisers, sponsors of change and employees themselves, as their relationship in organisations changes from hired hands to citizens who have both rights and new responsibilities to take an active role in the governance of their organisations.

Why Would You Want Engaged Employees?

In the course of the research into employee engagement conducted to inform this book, I interviewed many leaders and staff about the conditions and drivers which engaged them at work. All reported that being trusted with a stretching task within demanding timescales and a clear understanding of the discretion available to them brought the best out in them.

They said that engaged staff:

• are more creative and more productive;
• are constructively critical and challenging of the status quo and seek to initiate change;
• make other people’s change their own;
• will advocate the company, not as robots or brand messengers, but from their own critical perspective;
• in short, enjoy their work and make it enjoyable for colleagues and external parties.

These sound like the sort of people we would all like to have working for us. But is it possible to create the conditions which stimulate these positive outcomes? In this book I hope to show that it is possible to do so. I also hope to address some of these questions:

• Does employee engagement actually result in people feeling good about their work and their organisation? Does it deliver retention of the right people?
• Most crucially, what are the specific causes or drivers of engagement?
• Are these causes or drivers generic to all workplaces?
• Can the causes or drivers of engagement be enhanced to increase engagement? In other words is it actionable?
• Is this enhancement ethical or does this ‘social engineering’ simply achieve greater performance through manipulation?

The concept of employee engagement is still highly fragmented and, as is clear from the final chapter (a review of recent studies of employee engagement by academic Johanna Fawkes), there is little academic underpinning as yet.

But as my research with McKinsey and Company showed – more of which later – there are many exciting experiments being undertaken by managers who sense and believe that the top-down model of decision making by the few imposed on the many must be augmented, if not replaced, by models which open up decision making to those who can add value.

I would venture that there is the beginning of a velvet revolution taking place in business with younger leaders and brave older ones saying: We bosses are no longer gods – who must have or pretend to have all the answers – but guides who need to govern who gets involved in decision making and creating a compelling place to work in the mutual interests of the business.

Employee Engagement Means Opening up Decision Making and Change to Those Who Will Add Value, Not Faster More Persuasive Propaganda

With my temporary colleagues at McKinsey and Company we came to the conclusion that employee engagement is significantly driven by the degree to which people are usefully included in the decision-making process both day-to-day and in big-ticket change, crisis and transformation.

Thus it is about how power is shared and how that process is governed. Most employees no longer enjoy or subscribe to the old psychological contract in which security is exchanged for their compliance and loyalty. The old deal is dying because few employers can, or want, to offer the security end of the old deal. And they no longer want compliant people, they want people who will engage their creativity at work. Fat pensions are no longer deliverable and few employees want to work for the same employer for life.

They want employability and a say in their work and in how the business changes. They also only want to work for companies with ethics, values and a brand promise which they can at least sanction and, at best, approve of, even have affection for.

This book is mostly about giving employees a say in what will add value to the business and create an attractive and creative place to work

For me employee engagement is first and foremost a management philosophy based on the idea of including the right people in the right decisions at the right time in the right way. Inclusion in decision making and change is not a one-way ticket for employees to butt their noses in wherever and however they want. Leadership sets the boundaries and governs the process; and citizens in the process have responsibilities to behave as partners in the process.

Nor is employee engagement a free-for-all democracy or Marxism revisited; the prime outcome is to create more value by engaging the creativity of workers, an aim which will make the job better and thus bring benefits to workers too. Leaders and workers have to take risks to participate to avoid going back to bureaucratic relationships managed by go-betweens like unions and HR departments.

Nor is employee engagement about turbo-charged, more persuasive communication or internal marketing – though good communication can help to set the stage and equip people to participate – it is a management philosophy as this first story illustrates.

Global Freight Carrier Story: What Employee Engagement Looks Like

The first story of the book is about a global freight carrier which in the mid 1990s set out to reform years of rot. It was a part of a much larger global group and several CEOs had tried their hand at modernising the company. Back then it took an average of 6 days to get a piece of freight from A to B. As the latest incoming CEO of this unit said, he could cycle quicker on some routes!

Financial returns on some £700 million turnover was poor and had deteriorated so much that the main board had given the incoming CEO a year to show that the turnaround was possible or the unit would face outsourcing. The threat was real. The platform was ablaze, to borrow a phrase from John Kotter. The new CEO found that the error rate in delivering goods was appalling and worsening with each passing month. Customers were deserting to rival firms.

Still he reckoned that with his background in sales he could rally the troops around a cause.

How wrong he was. On arrival he found workers rest areas were no-go to management, employees pretty much decided rosters, people worked as little as 6 hours of an 8 hour shift. First-line management had been so let down by weak senior management they aligned themselves with those they were supposed to supervise and discipline. And discipline had broken down almost completely.

Theft was common. Manager’s cars would acquire modifications of the undesirable kind in the car park. It was not a pretty sight!

Early attempts by the new CEO to galvanise the people via town halls were met with derision, cat calls and people showing their disdain by turning their backs.

Previous administrations had attempted process re-engineering, each of which had been suffocated by the breakdown in relationships between bosses and staff. The incoming CEO quickly realised that rational plans for re-engineering operations alone would not get off first base. He had to tackle the breakdown in relationships and in workplace discipline.

He also recognised that management was a core part of the problem. The unit was described as a ‘Siberia posting’ and many managers simply bided their time until they could get out. And whilst his team was anything but perfect he could not afford much more top-level churn. He had to show a united front. He got his team to sign up for a minimum period and worked with them to fashion a vision for the business which might compel others to fight for the business. It was important for people to see them coming together around a vision as much as it was to have a vision.

At the same time he instituted a back-to-basics programme on the shop floor designed to wrest control of work rostering and day-to-day disciplines. At first this was very difficult. Workers tested the boundaries of their manager’s resolve and soon it was clear that managers would need crowd-control techniques to impose discipline again. Managers learnt how to manage aggression, sullenness, heckling and dominant voices seeking to drown out those who ventured to cooperate.

So far this must sound like an example of a coercive management style. But it was imposed at the same time that daring inclusive initiatives were tested.

The CEO had surprised workforce and management alike with his determination and sense of purpose. They had not smelt a whiff of conviction like this for years. He surprised them again with a programme called ‘The bad freight journey’. A real piece of freight was filmed in minute detail on a journey from Newark in North America to Verona in Italy via London’s Gatwick airport. Along the way customers, staff, freight forwarders and other airport staff were interviewed seeking honest views as to why it took the freight company an average of 6 days to shift freight.

The lessons and insights were assembled into a half-day learning event in which the 6-day journey from Newark to Verona was presented in painstaking detail featuring 28 typical breakdowns. Every member of staff from around the world attended over 6 months. Word got back to those who had yet to attend the sessions that few managers or staff could put their hands up and say that they had no hand in one or more of the breakdowns. Gradually a collective acceptance crystallised: everyone was culpable for the mess; not just the blue collar and not just management, everyone.

Running in parallel was the most transparent communication process about the change process. The communication team always had a representative from the shop floor. These typically arrived cynical for their 3-month stint, but soon were to be found mucking in and even trying to persuade die-hard friends that this time the management seemed to ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The End of Employee Coercion; The Beginning of Employee Engagement
• Part II Designing and Implementing Effective Employee Engagement
• Part III Engagement as Part of the Culture: Implications of Effective Engagement for Leaders, Employees and Internal Advisers
• Index