Flawless Execution and High Engagement

In Barrier Busting One, we looked at minimizing the impacts of Narrow Ownership, Narrow Focus and Poor Alignment, Misguided Intent on management system execution.

Part two examines how to institutionalize the management system into the everyday way of doing business.

BARRIER: Cramming For the Exam

SHIFT TO: The Way Things Get Done Around Here

The management system is the mechanism that ensures requirements are met, company goals are achieved, and customers are satisfied. The system consists of the structure, strategies, policies and procedures, processes, and people involved in producing a product or service, and turning an honest buck along the way.

The big honkin’ goal of the management system is to enhance organizational effectiveness and optimize performance by adding a healthy dose of discipline and consistency to daily operations.

Effective management system execution, ISO or otherwise, requires daily commitment to following documented procedures, not just when it is convenient.

Effectively executing a management system requires long-term support and disciplined commitment from leadership, and total alignment, understanding and involvement from everyone. While the short-term pain can be discouraging, there is significant opportunity for long-term gains.

It all comes down to execution, and execution starts with engagement and alignment.

In the spirit of “don’t complain about problems without offering a solution” here are some thoughts on addressing the first two barriers identified in ISO and Management Systems: Barriers. 

BARRIER: Narrow Ownership, Narrow Focus

SHIFT TO: Broad Ownership, Broad Focus

 Objective: position ISO as a management tool capable of managing all aspects of the business, ensuring that goals are met and desired results are achieved.

One small step…from this point forward, “quality management system” is referenced as management system. This is much bigger than “quality”.

Check out this short passage from the IOS on ISO.  I added the strikethroughs and bolded phrases.

The ISO 9000 family of standards represents an international consensus on good quality management practices. It consists of standards and guidelines relating to quality management systems and related supporting standards.

ISO 9001:2008 is the standard that provides a set of standardized requirements for a quality management system, regardless of what the user organization does, its size, or whether it is in the private, or public sector. It is the only standard in the family against which organizations can be certified – although certification is not a compulsory requirement of the standard.

Simply eliminate the “Q” word three times, and focus on the message of the bolded phrases. What a difference.

Communicate the benefits of integrating ISO into the daily approach to work for each function, each individual. Benefit Selling is a great concept…what hassles, what headaches can be avoided?
“What benefits?” If you can’t find any, then why are you doing this to yourself? 

BARRIER: Poor Alignment, Misguided Intent

SHIFT TO: Mission and Strategy Enabler

This is big enough that it warrants its own chapter. Just a few teasers for starters here.

The ISO standard requires a quality policy which serves as the foundation of the management system. Great, another plaque on the wall…need a bigger facility. Does the management system really need its own mission statement?

The management system is a strategic tool. The company’s strategy and the management system must become seamlessly aligned. ISO requires objectives which support Policy, just like with any strategic plan. All of the documented procedures are nothing more than the tactics that must be executed to achieve the objectives.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) a good source for lots of stuff related to the ISO standard.

International Organization for Standardization (IOS-keepers of the ISO standard. IOS / ISO…don’t ask)  Don’t look for an official free source for the standard!

Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, home page.  Interesting…you can download copies of the Baldrige criteria free.   You pay quite a lot for the ISO standard.

I’ve seen a recent spike in viewers on the topic of “engagement” and thought it might help you find what you’re looking for if you had a roadmap of recent posts on engagement here at In Pursuit of Excellence. The following posts explore engagement in both the academic and business / industry worlds, as they are very much related.

The Business Case for Alignment and Engagement  is a lengthier piece that details a good amount of data and estimates for how engagement impacts execution and productivity. 

What IS Engagement Anyway?  One of the focal points for In Pursuit of Excellence is “engagement”.  So…what IS it anyway? In exploring the blogosphere, I came away even more confused than when I went in. There is huge disparity of experience-based opinion among practitioners. Add all the academic debates, studies and dissertations on “engagement”….forget about it! I made a stab at concocting a working definition for engagement in this three-post series:

1. Engagement Per Commercial Authorities: three heavy hitters weigh in on engagement: Towers-Perrin, Gallup Management, and BlessingWhite.
2. Engagement: the Gap Between Academics and Shop Floor. Framing, for my own clarification, some of the academic language surrounding engagement…. Studies, dissertations and meta-analyses of the previously established constructs of satisfaction, commitment, involvement and motivation… Operations managers need plain talk, centered around results. They don’t live in the world of studies, constructs and dissertations. The quickest route to a manager’s stonewall is to espouse theory without substance.
3. Engagement: Now We’re Getting Personal!  The challenge: come up with a working definition for engagement. Not easy, but I’m going to give it a shot based on four attributes I hold as truths. OK, not “universal truths” but my opinion.

Let the Rabbits Run  is a great parable from the book Soar With Your Strengths by Clifton and Nelson. This book is a classic in the strengths-based leadership field pioneered by Gallup Management. The more a person has the opportunity to utilize their strengths, the more they are fully engaged.

Engagement Goes to School. The hypothesis: high school kids are disengaged in both their education and in thinking about their future….education is perceived to be irrelevant to their future. The underlying issue: students are not engaged in any kind of “future thinking” to even know what is, and isn’t relevant to them. An even deeper issue…teachers, and parents too, are also disengaged.

The High Cost of Student Disengagement?   The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, a McKinsey report, predicts that the U.S. GDP would be $1.3-2.3 trillion higher if the achievement gap between the United States and its international peers were closed in 1998.

Meaningful School-to-Career There is a good deal more to be said about this topic, a definite work-in-process. If students saw the connection between what they were doing in school and the rest of their lives, they would become more engaged. In the meantime, the rest of the developed / developing world is kicking US students’ butts in standard achievement scores.

School-to-career requires a real partnership between education and B & I. (pssst…..this is not just an education crisis-this has everything to do with competitiveness in the global economy)

And after all this, I still don’t have a working definition of engagement in twenty words or less…

Reference back to an earlier post, Engagement Goes to School.

The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, a new report from McKinsey & Company, predicts that the U.S. GDP would be $1.3-2.3 trillion higher if the achievement gap between the United States and its international peers were closed in 1998.
Check out the McKinsey report. $$$ is based on overall impact: “Avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences, via lower earnings, poorer health, and higher rates of incarceration.”

If there is even a small degree of merit to McKinsey’s findings, this would indicate that key stakeholders of the education system, business and industry, stand to gain a good deal from pitching in to help right the academic ship. All politics and territorialism aside, and I agree those issues are not insignificant.

Engagement is part of the equation.

(see ACCOUNT (+) ABILITY = RESULTS (?) for Part One)

This is not rocket science! A simple formula in which accountability is just one element:

Clear expectations +

Knowledge, skills and abilities +

Accountability +

Follow-up

= Results.

The Formula In Action

1. Leaders set S.M.AR.T. expectations. Better yet, involve the do-ers in determining what needs to be done. Then, leaders provide the template through modeling, and performance management and coaching helps keeps people on track;
2. Don’t set your people up for failure! Communication, Training and Development must provide knowledge, skills, and abilities people need, to have a realistic chance to deliver on their accountabilities;
3. Accountability is nothing more than making sure people know what they are expected to do, and what the impacts are of their delivering the goods as expected, as well as the consequences of not doing so;
4. Follow-up includes manager / subordinate communication, regular performance management updates, and coaching when necessary to get a person back on the right track;
5. Results are realized in the form of goals being met, and in desired behaviors that have become routine — expectations, or norms;
6. Adjust expectations, repeat process

IF there is involvement in goal setting of those accountable with achieving the goals (engagement), and a clear connection to the top (alignment) then the level of commitment to achieve the goals ramps up.

Effective performance management kicks in, avoiding “fails to meet expectations” at year-end by truly managing performance throughout the year. If there is a performance issue, clarifying expectations and coaching to improve performance comes into play at the time and place of need.

Engage > Align > Execute!

I’ve had good experiences with ISO-certified management systems, and not-so-good too. Straight up: certification does not mean “good system” any more than a college degree means a “smart” person (that sounds like an interesting topic for later…mental note). And certification certainly doesn’t guarantee “good product or service”.

Why can ISO-based management systems be so difficult to develop, implement and execute effectively? My selections for the Gang of Four Hit List of Barriers follows.

Narrow Ownership, Narrow Focus. ISO provides guidelines for the development of a “quality management system” which too often translates into “that’s a Quality Assurance thing….they’ll take care of it”. Management rep, internal auditors = QA staff.

And while there are exceptions, ISO is too often viewed as manufacturing only, targeting product quality only and of no concern to support staff. 

Poor Alignment, Misguided Intent. The Quality Policy is the mission statement of the management system. (again, terminology … “Quality” Policy) As such, it should be an extension of the mission of the company. Objectives are developed that describe how the quality policy is to be achieved. Metrics are identified to gage progress toward achieving objectives. Yet, too many quality policy statements have no clear line of sight to the company’s mission statement. And the objectives are tightly focused on product quality only, and only product attributes are measured.

Cramming for the exam. Few events can cause panic and trigger furious levels of activity like an “audit coming” announcement. Crews working like mad to sweep dust bunnies under the rug, hoping the white-gloved auditors won’t find any dirt (sorry folks, but that’s what records are for…to verify that the system is operating as it should over time).

Good auditors can spot a good system from miles away….send me the records

Failure to Take “Culture” Into Account. I wanted to hold this down to three issues for starters, but this one snuck in the back door. People are the gatekeepers of process and execution. Adopting a management system is at least as much of a culture shift as it is a shift in tasks.

Change Management stuff applies here, in buckets.

Engagement-Now We’re Getting Personal!

The challenge: come up with a working definition for engagement. Not easy, but I’m going to give it a shot based on four attributes I hold as truths. OK, not “universal truths” but my opinion. I feel these truths are pretty indisputable, but if you want to challenge any of them we can have some fun with this.

In Post Three, I promised to take a stab at defining engagement. So here comes my personal take on engagement, with examples of what my engagement journey has looked like. What’s your personal take on engagement, and what has your journey been like?

First installment of this “In Search Of” mini series was What IS Engagement Anyway?

Second installment: Engagement Per Commercial Authorities

Third in the series: Engagement: the Gap Between Academics and Shop Floor

ONE, engagement is highly personal, as it is based on an individual’s core values and how fully you are enabled to living those values. My core values did not formally present themselves to me until the middle 1990’s. But these have been with me since early grade school: creativity, learning new and different things; freedom from constraints. Based on the next three attributes and these core values, I can easily track my engagement journey going back many years.

TWO, engagement is not just touchy-feely as it is also based on a person’s level of contribution. BlessingWhite spoke very clearly to me in their definition of engagement as the apex of maximum satisfaction and maximum contribution level. Which again becomes very personal, as contribution is driven by how fully a person is utilizing their unique strengths.

THREE, strengths are more than just “talent” or being good at something. Strengths are talents that are aligned with the person’s core values…when I get a huge amount of satisfaction out of utilizing a skill because that particular skill means a good deal to me.

FOUR: a person’s level of engagement, even in one specific position or career, is not a carousel, it is a roller coaster.

Putting all this together, here are a couple examples of my own engagement roller coaster ride.

I didn’t like school-boring classes, boring assignments. Disengaged. I learned very early how to give myself a believable temperature with tap water. But I didn’t read comic books or watch TV. I studied what I wanted to and the extra credit for projects I turned, and a God-given talent for BS’ing through most tests carried me. Note-this strategy did NOT work in college.

I played music professionally for a lot of years. A great match for my core values, and I was quite good at it. There were some musical endeavors that were extremely creative and the other musicians were great friends. But as my career digressed I discovered I was doing more for money rather than for the love of it. In the most dynamic phase of my music career I had my fully engaging creative band, but also signed on as a mercenary with a couple other bands for the steady money. The wrong music, the wrong juke joints, the wrong personnel, but good money and I was still a maximum contributor. Just disengaged.

When the “disengaging” assignments began to more and more outweigh the engaging, I knew it was time to give it up. That was over twenty years ago. I still hold my love for music, have still played but not in bands until fairly recently. I found a couple of other people who liked the same kind of music, were good to be with, and didn’t need to play for money. Engaged again. We’re even thinking about trying out the next time “American Has-Been” auditions come to Iowa.

I could have just as easily tracked my engagement journey through my post-rock-star professional career. It probably would have been too revealing, and you never know who reads these things.

But I can assure you the four “truths” and my core values have played out at least as much in my second life.

First installment of this “In Search Of” mini series was What IS Engagement Anyway?

Second installment: Engagement Per Commercial Authorities

Source for some of the thoughts that follow, a post from the Employee Engagement Network  titled Academic view vs. practitioners’ view on EEngagement: how do YOU not get confused by this blurry concept?    

Framing, for my own clarification, some of the academic language surrounding engagement…. studies and meta-analyses of the previously established constructs of satisfaction, commitment, involvement and motivation lead to the question of whether “engagement” brings anything new to the table. This is apparently a very hot topic for many practitioners-to-be doing a dissertation thesis.

Ana-Maria, one of the lucky souls doing her thesis on this plate of spaghetti and the creator of this post, wrote “…’buzz’ words like engagement need substance to work.” And Dr. (Scott) J added a little later “I am not fond of “construct proliferation” but realize that engagement is now “the phrase” in the practitioner world.” I think these two comments come as close as we’ll get to hitting one of the key issues head-on.

Personally, I’m comfortable with engagement being an old wine in a new bottle. Maybe we need to market the same wine, for two different audiences, in two unique bottles? Image drives perception, determines acceptance.

Operations managers need plain talk, centered around results. They don’t live in the world of studies, constructs and dissertations. The quickest route to a manager’s stonewall is to espouse theory without substance. Managers have grown up with motivation theory et al, and for most managers even the basic stuff remains nothing but theory to them. As it is, when an organization development practitioner comes at an operations manager with talk of engagement, more often than not the whole thing comes off as nothing more than blue-sky, touchy-feely voodoo for which the manager has no interest.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been playing around with blogging my thoughts on engagement and other stuff, just to try to get my own hands around it (ouch! Thorny bugger…). I am having a hard time agreeing with myself on this.

Ana-Maria’s post and the responses expose the core issue, and from what I’m gathering from ‘old-timer’ comments on the Employee Engagement Network this is a repeat discussion, a never-ending quest. What is desperately needed, I think, is a common-sense interpretation of engagement that appeals to those people we practitioners serve. A meta operational definition of the word, but also broken down into a context that makes sense to the specific organization. Then, what specifically engagement is capable of delivering to the bottom line, and how you go about “engaging” people. That’s our Holy Grail.

Coming soon (maybe) ….My Working Definition of Engagement. What’s yours?

Unless otherwise indicated, the following excerpts are taken directly from the sources noted. This post is part of “In Search Of Engagement”…what IS it, how do you DO it? First installment of this “In Search Of” mini series was What IS Engagement Anyway?

Towers Perrin

…our (Global Workforce Study) study paints a picture of a workforce that is energetic, ambitious and committed to working hard and giving its best. Engagement measures the level of connection employees feel with their employer, as demonstrated by their willingness and ability to help their company succeed, largely by providing discretionary effort on a sustained basis.

But turning people’s energy and ambition into engagement – and ultimately into significant performance lift – demands attention, focus and some very different behaviors from senior leaders.

“Head, hands, and heart” …the sum total of these three elements is what we used to measure overall employee engagement levels.

1.      “Head” refers to the rational part of the engagement equation, how employees connect with their company’s goals and values.

2.      “Hands” refer to the employee’s willingness to put in a great deal of extra effort to help the company succeed.

3.      “Heart” is the emotional connection between employee and employer, such as the employee’s pride in the organization.

…engagement is not just part of someone’s DNA from birth. It is definitely possible to increase employee engagement levels among existing workers.

GALLUP MANAGEMENT   

The Three Types of Employees

Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

Not-engaged employees are essentially “checked out”. They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time – but not energy or passion – into their work.

Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

(a side, but critical, thought…what about new people coming into a company? Which way will they lean; what are the influencers? What can be done to tip new people toward engaged?)

BlessingWhite

(Excerpts from The State of Employee Engagement 2008 – short registration required)

Engaged employees are not just committed. They are not just passionate or proud. They have a line-of-sight on their own future and on the organization’s mission and goals. They are enthused and in gear, using their talents and discretionary effort to make a difference in their employer’s quest for sustainable business success.

Employee engagement is a complex equation that reflects each individual’s unique, personal relationship with work. As such, there are limits to what organizations can do with broad-brush workforce processes or communication programs (it’s up to leadership and individual relationships).

The term “employee engagement” means different things to different organizations. Some equate it with job satisfaction, which unfortunately can reflect a transactional relationship that is only as good as the org’s last round of perks or bonuses. Others measure engagement by gauging employees’ emotional commitment to their organization. Although commitment is an important ingredient, it is only a piece of the engagement puzzle.

While organizations are keen to maximize the contributions of each individual toward corporate imperatives and metrics, individual employees need to find purpose and satisfaction in their work. BW’s model focuses on

·         Contribution to the company’s success

·         Personal satisfaction in their role.

We believe that aligning employees’ values, goals and aspirations with those of the organization is the best method for achieving the sustainable employee engagement required for an organization to reach its goals.

Full engagement represents an alignment of maximum job satisfaction (“I like my work and do it well”) with maximum job contribution (“I help achieve the goals of the organization”)

Engagement has been hailed as the secret ingredient to competitive advantage and organizational success. It is an intuitive concept: committed, aligned, and passionate employees are good for the business.

Coming… Engagement: the gap between academics and the shop floor