Flat Army

Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization

Dan Pontefract

• Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781773270593
• eBook ISBN: 9781773270609
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Flat Army surfaces five key frameworks that can help you and your organization make the shift, too. How can you become a visible and collaborative leader? How can you empower and energize all teams and units? How can you build a sense of common purpose and celebrate the wins? Learn how with Flat Army.

Chapter One

The Mona Lisa is So Small!

Have you ever been to the Louvre in Paris?

There are those who visit the Louvre to revel in the brilliance of art. There are many, however, whose sole purpose is to rush through the first-floor entrance, plowing past the thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Italian paintings to remark out loud, “Wow, the Mona Lisa is so small.” They then proceed to the next Parisian tourist attraction like the Palais-Royal or the Panthéon, saying afterward to their friends, “Yes, I've been to the Louvre and have seen the Mona Lisa.”

Those who rush to view only the Mona Lisa at the Louvre are myopic and foolish and akin to much of what is going wrong with leadership today. The current state of leadership should make us fearful. We can't merely tick the box that states “Mona Lisa” and suggest that we've covered the art world. So which type are you? Do you visit the Louvre to prove you've seen the Mona Lisa? Or do you savor the experience of being present in the other galleries?

Mike Johnson once said, “The ability to engage employees, to make them work with our business, is going to be one of the greatest organizational battles of the coming ten years.”¹ It's been nearly a decade since he penned those words in his 2004 book New Rules of Engagement: Life-Work Balance and Employee Commitment. They could have been written today—and perhaps in an even more urgent tone. Leadership models—of which there been many of late—have failed people and organizations.

We recognize it's a question of leadership. It's a question of whether we are embracing the desire of employees to actually be treated like adults. It's a question of maturity; leaders cannot fathom the loss of control, yet paradoxically, it's the more creative and less hierarchical leader who is, in fact, empowering his or her team and getting better results.

Organizations realize that success is achieved through effective leadership, but if engaged employees is the primary outcome we desire from effective leadership, then it's a question of whether we are embracing employees’ desires, first and foremost to be treated like responsible adults. Traditional leaders struggle with this concept as it represents a loss of control for them, but creative, less hierarchical-minded leaders who empower their employees are getting better results, and in turn, are empowered and emboldened to reach for greater successes with their cohort.

As I thought through this idea, the notion of Flat Army came to me. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?

This book weaves together my thinking around organizations—that they are at an inflection point, and perhaps even a crisis point. When we hear the word “army,” we typically picture images of war in our heads. I, on the other hand, think of fishing boats. The word “army” is derived from armata, a medieval Latin term used first in 1533 to depict a fleet of things moving together—an armada, if you will. This, to me, is the essence of an army—a group of people striving, leading together to achieve a common goal.

We need to move together again as an organization. Leadership doesn't come from one, it comes from all. This is why the word “flat” comes in front of army. Flat denotes equality and togetherness. In the English language, “flat” can be used in myriad different ways. For purposes of this book—and my central thesis—I use it to define horizontal connectedness.

Flat Army's audacious goal is to give your organization new life. It aims to free you of the bonds of leadership styles and models that continue to exacerbate disengagement levels of employees, worker dissatisfaction and general innovation malaise. It demonstrates how to both flatten and reunite the armada—and thus the fleet of fishing vessels. The elements of social technologies, collaboration, participation, pervasive learning and connected leadership are frameworks to help both the individual and the organization succeed in the years to come.

Flat Army doesn't diss situational hierarchy, but an overarching omnipresent hierarchy across the organization, controlled by principles of command and control, is an illogical and unsuitable model in a time when the employee wants to desperately become part of the fishing boat armada. They no longer want to be left ashore.

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Our people need to move together again, in the armada, as a collective one.

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Concepts like engagement, open leadership, empowerment, new learning paradigms and collaborative behaviors are not inescapable diseases on a boat. There is a cure for those stuck in hierarchical hell. There is hope. But through this observation, I must pose a few questions.

It's time we ask ourselves about the root cause of employee disengagement and vacillation. Is the way in which leaders are leading their teams, organizations and people so antiquated and traditional that employees are being forced to ride a wave for which we might coin the term “the corporate crestfallen”? Why aren't organizations and leaders paying enough attention to whether or not an employee actually wants to be at work? If she does, she makes a meaningful contribution and is productive, whereas if she doesn't, she's merely putting in time and collecting a paycheck. And for those who are paying attention and trying to improve engagement and leadership practices, why have employees plateaued in terms of their level of organizational engagement?

According to Gallup, a global human capital consulting firm, overall employee engagement since 2000 has remained at a paltry 30 percent. More shockingly, levels of active disengagement as well as those simply not engaged in their roles have continued to remain flat at 20 percent and 50 percent respectively.² Gallup's most recent report, however, issued in 2011, entitled State of the Global Workforce, and based on research with over 47,000 employees in 120 countries around the world, tells an even more chilling corporate-engagement tale:

The overall results indicate that 11% of workers worldwide are engaged. In other words, about one in nine employees worldwide is emotionally connected to their workplaces and feels he or she has the resources and support they need to succeed. The majority of workers, 62%, are not engaged—that is, emotionally detached and likely to be doing little more than is necessary to keep their jobs. And 27% are actively disengaged, indicating they view their workplaces negatively and are liable to spread that negativity to others.³

Another human capital consulting firm, BlessingWhite, also found in 2008 that 19 percent of employees were disengaged, 52 percent were only moderately engaged, and 29 percent were fully engaged.⁴

For more than a decade, and however you slice it through whatever external consulting firm's data points, roughly 70 percent to 80 percent of any organization has effectively acted in a practice of workplace ambivalence. The employees would rather not be at work, or worse, they're simply participating in some form of corporate coma—a catatonic catastrophe in the organization if you ask me.

Moreover, why aren't leaders actually doing something about the data that haunts their every move? In a report entitled Global Leadership Forecast conducted by Development Dimensions International (DDI) with over 14,000 global leaders, DDI's research indicates that

organizations with the highest quality leaders [are] thirteen times more likely to outperform their competition in key bottom-line metrics such as financial performance, quality of products and services, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.⁵

DDI further asserts that “organizations with higher quality leadership [are] up to three times more likely to retain more employees than their competition; they also [have] more than five times the number of highly engaged leaders.”⁶

Maybe it's time leaders started reading the fine print of those internal employee satisfaction surveys.

The disconsolate must be helped. I intend to do this by building a framework for the book around the following points in order to help you and me create some common ground.

• Common engagement at work (the concept of feeling good, included, valued and willing to go above and beyond the call of duty in effort and praise) is a key link to workplace productivity.
• Organizational attachment can be thought of as the emotional, connected and intellectual commitment to an employee's place of work.
• Approximately 70 percent of employees aren't as engaged as they should be at their place of work.
• If an employee is engaged, he is more productive, and by being more productive, business results improve and customers are happier. (The employees tell their friends about how much they love going to work and thus are good ambassadors to the brand, products, services and so on.)
• Leaders are using leadership design models (and engagement methods) incongruent to today's workplace needs.
• Learning is an integral part of engagement, yet, moronically, we continue to stuff employees into a classroom and posit that's where the learning takes place.
• Society has become more technologically connected and in many places more open and collaborative, but the workplace is stuck in a form of organizational ambivalence.

My Fears

Why do I care? I care because I fear, but the only power I carry is the power of observation. My observations, ergo, are fearful.

I fear for my children, currently aged 9, 7 and 5, who will be joining the employment ranks in a few short years. I want them to join (or start) a workforce and an organization that espouses heterarchy and situational hierarchy versus a continuous command-and-control mode of operating. I want them not to fear their place of work, but to be raving fans and thus highly engaged, happy and productive employees. I want their careers to be culturally prosperous. I want them to feel as though there is no delineation between the way in which their homes are run (presumably, open, happy and engaging) and their place of work.

I fear for the so-called Millennials—those born between 1982 and 2004—who currently sit at the bottom of the management food chain, if they are employed at all. Theirs is a DNA of curiosity, community and creativity. How long will it be until their frustration level boils over from the ineptness of today's corporate culture and leadership misfits?

I, as someone born in 1971 and thus termed a member of Generation X by fellow Canadian Douglas Coupland, am also fearful for my own generation. In a 2011 press release, the Center for Talent Innovation reports that 37 percent of Gen X employees are looking to leave their current employers within three years.⁷ If two out of every five 30- to 45-year-olds want to jump ship, I fear somewhere along the way we've written a story line that has the next generation of potential leaders tuning out.

This brings us to the baby-boomer generation—the cohort also colloquially known as the Woodstock generation. An interesting study published in 2001 suggests that baby boomers are more affected by perceptions of office politics than is the case for Gen X workers, for example, and such perceptions have a negative effect on their job performance.⁸ Boomers are known to have a focus on individual achievement; thus, I fear the natural tendency of any baby-boomer–aged leader is to lead through the demonstration of power and will. Excluding an open culture, coupled with a sense of individualism, is perhaps a primary factor in the lack of overall organizational engagement in today's workplace. Granted, the boomers are hitting retirement age, but there is a legacy left behind that is going to handcuff organizations for years to come if we don't do something about it now. The eradication of past bad practice, one could argue, is at the hands of this generation.

Add it all up, and I'm fearful for the current and future state of organizations that don't react positively to this information.

Whose Job is Leadership, Anyway?

I have more questions.

Regardless of my musings on my kids’ future and a mild swipe at the generations in the workplace, how does this current state of leadership actually affect employee engagement? What is the effect of both good and bad leadership as it pertains to organizational health and engagement? Have we reached a point where employees are forced to mutely scream from the hilltops—out of exasperation—indicating current modes of leadership are obsolete for today's world?

From a leadership perspective, who actually is responsible for employee engagement? Who is responsible for the act of leadership? According to Hay Group, another global management consulting firm, 63 percent of CEOs and other memb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: The Mona Lisa is So Small!
• Chapter 2: How'd We Get So Rigid?
• Chapter 3: The Connected Leader
• Chapter 4: Becoming a Connected Leader
• Chapter 5: Being a Connected Leader
• Chapter 6: Beyond the Connected Leader
• Chapter 7: The Participative Leader Framework
• Chapter 8 : The Collaborative Leader Action Model
• Chapter 9: Learning at the Speed of Need
• Chapter 10: Tools, Rules and Jewels of Being a Flat Army Leader
• Chapter 11: Flat Army in Action
• Chapter 12: The Culture Quest of Flat Army
• Afterword: In Collaborative Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright