In Pursuit of Excellence

 (whew…I wore myself out thinking about that title)

If this post is of interest to you and you haven’t already discovered David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network, do so! This post was originally added there, modified to be posted here.

Father Jim Roselli is a fellow member of the EEN. His background and interests were intriguing to me, and I noted him: I am looking forward to a dialogue on religion and engagement, and the potential power of engagement as it relates to society and social groups (tribes!).

Copied from a note Fr. Jim sent me: My interest in Sociology/Social Anthropology goes back (‘way back) to when I was in my twenties and read a book entitled “Hunting Bands.” It was an examination of tribal behavior in modern corporations, and it really affected my outlook. The six basic human needs are air, water, food, clothing, shelter and companionship. These are best delivered by, and balanced human beings are best produced and nurtured in, the basic human social group: the nuclear family, consisting of a lifetime-committed husband and wife and their children. The fundamental post-basic social unit is the tribe, or clan: an efficient and effective way for families to share their knowledge, skills and abilities with each other.

Father Jim’s note hit a bit of a button for me.

First, is it a fair statement that the basic social unit (nuclear family) has diminished in stature and importance? Single parent households and dual-income, multiple job households as well. More emphasis on careers and making money than on basic parenting, which is the traditional primary means to “socialize” our children.

These are broad generalizations, but I believe statistics and an army of “experts” have mad it quite clear that the family unit is in trouble, even in “normal” and outwardly successful two-parent households. Nuclear is melting down. Ultra-busy parents abdicating their socializing duties to the outside—schools, youth clubs, soccer coaches (I have been in that role! I am a COACH, not a surrogate parent! Blood boiling at the memory as I type….)

At the same time, the other institution critical to socializing our young is sadly diminishing in stature and importance as well—organized religion. There is a giant void in too many young peoples’ lives where these two powerful influences used to be. And I feel that this is one of the key root causes to all the social problems in the world—seriously! We have lost our ability to instill strong values and social / behavioral expectations in the younger generations, and it is beginning to bite us in the behind big time.

The post-basic social unit for too many youth is gangs, which provide all the basic needs noted by Father Jim. Not to say that gangs are an acceptable alternative, but what happens where there is a void? Something will rush in to fill it. And let’s not be ostriches…this is not just a poverty / inner city issue.

There is an unacceptably high level of social disengagement-we do not have a strong set of shared values or social expectations. Not to mention that too many people simply are not at a high level of “satisfaction” societally.

I have stated elsewhere that…

1. Engagement is contagious. You can catch it from others just as you can “infect” others.

2. Engagement ripples the surface of the pond…it spreads by association. If I am an engaged person at work / in my position, I am probably engaged elsewhere. And it will show, and will trigger #1.

Is engagement important? YES, on many levels—personal, professional, societal.

Other posts you may find of interest, related to the greater good that engagement can help bring about:

America’s Promise, Crisis in Education. From America’s Alliance: “Many students who ultimately drop out of school say they become disengaged during the middle-school years. The choices young people make at this age could set them on a course for active citizenship and engaged learning – or down a path of risky behavior and potential failure.”

Education Goes to School?  …high school kids are disengaged in both their education and in thinking about their future. This hypothesis is well-founded: try Googling “National Survey of Student Engagement.” For many students, 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. Just wanted to throw that in to cause trouble. And it IS a generalization, there are exceptions. So please don’t beat me up too much.

(UPDATE for readers-there is the beginning of a good conversation here. Be sure to visit the related links, check out the comments to this post and add your thoughts!)

While I do have an Education category I don’t post nearly as much about education issues as I’d like. But this caught my eye. You business and industry leaders who frequent this blog, take note if you want to pay more than lip service to Corporate Social Responsibility. Get involved in Education….this is our future workforce that is at risk, and I at least want to do my part to raise the awareness level of the business community. Don’t let the downturn and high unemployment lull you to sleep. There is a real and significant near-term workforce shortage looming ahead. And what there is in the labor pool is woefully unprepared. We need to get serious!

Gen. Colin Powell was just in the news lamenting our poor (US) graduation rate. As this is right up my alley, I dug a little deeper. Powell and his wife are both involved in America’s Promise Alliance. The organization’s statement of purpose:

We are an alliance born of the recognition that when too many children are at risk, we are a nation at risk. With less than one-third of America’s young people receiving the essential resources they need for success, we’re witnessing today an increased risk of substance abuse, crime and school drop outs. We can’t afford this loss of human potential and reversing this tide must be a national priority.

One of the Alliance’s National Action Strategies is Ready for the Real World… Engage every middle school student in service-learning and career exploration by designing “real-world” experiences relevant to them.

Why is this important? From America’s Alliance: “Many students who ultimately drop out of school say they become disengaged during the middle-school years. The choices young people make at this age could set them on a course for active citizenship and engaged learning – or down a path of risky behavior and potential failure.”

The Alliance has partnered with Gallup, which conducted the Gallup Student Poll. See the Gallup Student Poll Report. Gallup is a leading proponent of engagement in the workplace, and the design of the study and content of this report shows it.  I’ve posted elsewhere that a key issue in education is disengagement, of both students and teachers. (see Engagement Goes to School) We’re simply not hitting the right student hot buttons.

The issues facing education, and especially pertaining to engagement, are something I can really sink my teeth into as a business person, parent, grandparent, educator and camper who wants to leave this campground in better shape than I found it.

How about you?

Exploring the wonderful world of competency-based employee development, the model of preference in the business world. Possibly scarier yet…this is how our education system thinks and operates too.

This is a segue into strengths-based leadership–be looking for more.

As it is important to be able to perform the job to which a person is assigned, focus is typically on beefing up any areas where a person “Needs Improvement”. Target: an “Acceptable Level of Competency”.  With all that attention devoted to fixing what’s broken, what happens to those competencies where a person “Exceeds Expectations”?

In the world of health care, what does “flatline” mean? (HINT: it ain’t good!)

Moral of the story…Let the Rabbits Run.

 (apologies for any funky layout issues…working on it, but not one of my “strengths”….definitely “needs improvement”.)

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.

(If this is your first time visiting In Pursuit of Excellence, I hope you will take a couple of minutes to read the “ABOUT” page (see link at the top right). “About” describes the way Excellence is organized, mission and intent. It will help you find the topics and posts that are of the most interest to you)

There’s a lesson to be learned here, relative to engagement.

History is a subject to which many high school students fail to make the connection. Who cares what a bunch of dead people did? My take: we need to know where we came from, to appreciate where we are and to understand where we need to go.

I hope I don’t get buried in all kinds of basic genealogy questions for posting this-my roots activity is a few years removed. This is a post about the relevance of history, not a how-to on finding out if g-g-gradaddy was a horse thief (not a stutter-that’s roots shorthand)

Several years back I dove really deep into all the genealogy / roots digging stuff. I can’t even remember why I got started, but the infatuation lasted for a couple of years. I did nail down documentation for several generations of ancestors. But the truly important discovery I made along the way was unexpected.

A disclaimer…I am not a “purist” genealogist who requires indisputable truth like birth certificates, church records, ship manifests etc. I got that covered with enough generations to be happy. But like many other areas in life, business included, there comes a point in genealogy where you have to work with documentation that is somewhat less than indisputable. The older connections that follow are not a matter of record… there are a lot of semi-logical “probably and maybe” trails I followed, and hybrids of historical accounts and mythology. The “connections” that were made on another level are more important to this discussion.

I was thrilled just to get back to the early 1700’s. Then, a breakthrough….one of my lines went back to 1300’s England. Another breakthrough…a different line went through Plymouth circa 1620. The same line went back to for-crying-out-loud Charlemagne and huge chunks of royalty all across Europe fell like dominoes in short order. Back in the day, blue bloods married blue bloods, for alliances more than love. I must have a stake in castles in fifteen different countries….. yeah, right-book a flight.

All kinds of colorful, long-dead cousins began popping up: the guy who is “credited” with actually laying the torch on Joan of Arc’s woodpile-some low-tier British baron who wanted to make a name for himself, and succeeded. (The Trial of Joan of Arc) ; the Bad Guy King John of Robin Hood fame (why couldn’t I be descended from his Good Guy brother King Richard the Lion-Hearted instead??). All you Mel Gibson fans…the Braveheart movie was pretty accurate historically, all the way down to his grisly end. And more Scots–the ill-fated Duncan whose first cousin MacBeth usurped his throne the easy way (not easy for Duncan however…); earls and barons on both sides of the Magna Carta; political activist / tax protestor Godiva who bared all for the cause; slick Willie the Conqueror, descendent of Northmen, who wreaked havoc on England circa 1066, then established an impressive order of his own liking….

Then things started teetering toward the bizarre and myths and legends began blending with historical accounts…is this THE King Arthur??? And Irish monarch Niall who kidnapped St. Patrick and took him to Ireland. (The Death of Niall of the Nine Hostages) Like all Irish monarchs before written history became vogue, Niall had to regularly recite his genealogy around the campfires to validate his claim to the position.  This went all the way back the THE Noah (!).

Then along came Oden / Woden King of Ansgard who was (mythically) descended from Thor. (fascinating reading… the Prose Edda). About the time of Oden / Woden, a Druid high priestess / queen popped up in the family tree. Which explains a lot about why full moons do what they do to me….

Speaking of Noah, why not travel all the way back to THE Adam and Eve??! It depends on whether you prefer the biblical or mythical route- both are a matter of “record”.

And, if you feel like taking a real leap of non-traditional faith, check into the case for Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene having issue which propagates into medieval royalty, thus into my tree. HINT: check out the Merovengian dynasty of Frankish fame. I learned about this DaVinci Code stuff long before the book and movie came around. I’m NOT saying I’m buying it….just that I found it in the course of my roots rooting, and it’s engaging because there’s a lot of mystery and extremely high espionage in the story.

A tiny teaser: the last Merovengian ruler was Childeric III [743-752] who was “deposed, shaved, and thrust into the cloister by command of the Roman Pontiff Stephen” (from the Charlemagne link above). Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty picked up where the Merovengians left off. It is about this time that the alleged line of Christ went under deep cover, because Rome was intent upon ending it. Check out this really interesting tidbit on Childeric’s grandad Dagobert II, the last Mervengian to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor. It gets better toward the end…

My favorite place to find information was the Medieval Sourcebook maintained by the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies. A much heftier body of work than my high school history books, no doubt. But it grabbed me just the same and I studied hard.

I embraced history this time around. My digging around in the roots cellar connected me with all that distant, previously meaningless history crap. I have successfully validated where I came from, and where WE come from as well. I have a better understanding of the dynamics that shaped our world. I’ve become a (“gasp!!!) closet historian, because I am now personally connected with all those people and events in the books. I will always have a deep appreciation for history, which totally bored me in school.

There is a lesson to be learned here.

Schools provide young people with a solid academic foundation to build the rest of their lives on. But schools are also supposed to prepare students for the real world. This goes beyond a semester-long effort to form a “Hoagies ‘r’ Us” company and market the product for the semester’s final project (a.k.a sell sandwiches to friends, family and relative strangers….)

GOAL: really, truly prepare kids to enter the Real World, so they can become value-adding contributors to society and business and industry, but also so they can have a good future and be successful, and happy.

What would the ideal curriculum for a truly value-adding Real World Prep School look like? What do young people really need to know to successfully make the transition?

See the categories this blog is built around. They are targeted at real workplace issues and challenges. Which of these can be positioned as relevant in academia? HOW can they be presented to high school kids so they are worth paying attention to? What else?

A related post under the “Education” category addresses engagement in education. A key point from that post is that kids do not see the value of what they are studying—it doesn’t apply to the rest of their lives, and it certainly doesn’t apply to surviving adolescence. Or does it? How can the real adult world they will soon enter be brought into focus and elevated in importance for kids? Or, should we just let them be kids while they can, and let the real world smack them between the eyes when the time comes?

Any educators coming by to visit….what IS working that you‘ve seen, what else needs to be done?

If this is your first time visiting In Pursuit of Excellence, I hope you will take a couple of minutes to read the “ABOUT” page (see link at the top right). “About” describes the way Excellence is organized, and my mission and intent. It will help you find the topics that are of the most interest to you.

No need to go into huge personal detail, but one of my key strategies is to make an impact in young peoples’ lives, by working in the education system-school to career type stuff. I started teaching at the high school, and worked with the local school administrators on some very good school-to-career initiatives that didn’t have a chance to go beyond the concept phase.

It took a couple of years, but I finally came to admit that the education system has more built-in administrivia and roadblocks to innovation than even a poorly run company. That, and the fact that teachers make lousy pay compared to work in business and industry, finally chased me away from the education side of my grand strategy. But the avocation to make a difference in education still burns with me.

The symptoms: the US education system is in trouble. Students in the US are scoring lower than much of the developed work in standard test scores.  Attainment levels (graduating) are falling, and more kids are dropping out of high school. The issues continue into higher education: with rising costs of education and the need for many young people to get right to the real world of earning a paycheck, both college enrollment and degree attainment are falling. No Child Left Behind focuses on bringing substandard performance up to an acceptable level. There is little emphasis on providing a higher order of learning and achievement for those who may want it.

The key stakeholders — those who have a vested interest in the outputs of the education system — are society and business and industry. B&I has complained for years that our education system does not produce qualified, prepared workers. Education counters that B&I won’t actively engage in the education system as partners, so education can better meet their needs. I’ve worked both sides of the fence, and both parties are correct.

The hypothesis: high school kids are disengaged in both their education and in thinking about their future. This hypothesis is well-founded: try Googling “National Survey of Student Engagement.” For many students, 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. Just wanted to throw that in to cause trouble. And it IS a generalization, there are exceptions. So please don’t beat me up too much.

The solution that most of us believers take as truth: the express lane to engagement is for individuals to connect with their values, then for the individual’s values and those of “the organization” to be aligned. In his case, “the organization” is school, and later, society and business and industry.

This is the Holy Grail…does the possibility even exist for kids to connect with their values and truly engage in their education and their future? If it does exist, those who find the Holy Grail will be ‘rich’ beyond their wildest dreams. And society would be all the better in years to come.

Discussion starters just to get things going:

• What are your thoughts on the level of engagement in secondary (high school) academics?
• Your thoughts on the legendary adolescent fixation on short term gratification….is it truly insurmountable? Can teens consider their future beyond the next weekend? What will drive them to expand their mental timeline?
• Generally, how can engagement fit into the academic environment?