Tag Archives | Dave Logan

Employee Engagement: Who Has What at Stake?

By on February 17, 2012 in Business, Employee Engagement, Perspectives, Trust, Values

What is Employee Engagement?   Dave Logan, co-author of one of my leadership favorite books, Tribal Leadership, recently told me the term employee engagement is passé, the desirable state — and the state enjoyed at poster companies such as Zappos — is employee passion.  Well, he probably used a different term that I interpreted as employee passion.

Here’s what I see.  Employee engagement is employees working in an organization in a way that an owner would work, with something at stake in the future success of the organization and a sense of worth that comes from contributing to something greater than their own self-interest.

So when managing the philosophy of human resources in your organization, what are the principles that would garner either engagement or optimally passion for people doing their job?

We are currently putting in new flooring, and two guys are downstairs as I write this blog chatting away in another language as they set the tiles that we will live with for many years to come.  Are they artisans designing my future environment, attending to whether the tiles look good in that configuration?  Or are they talking about their evening, a good steak, their children and just making a dollar?

If you are working from the triple bottom line — profits, people, and planet — your employees’ attitudes matter.  If you want employees to be responsible for the bottom line then they have to have a stake in the results the company produces, and that does not mean your job is to make them HAPPY.  Rick Tate of Impact Achievement Group recently wrote an article pointing out that it is productive employees who have great morale, yet many performance reviews reflect a belief that great morale leads to productivity.   Happy is a result of productivity, not an access to it.

You are responsible for their experience of productivity in many ways, one of them is what you measure.  “A” players like to be measured, and “A” teams like to be measured.  If you are measuring what matters they know it, you know it, and you will have engaged employees.

How do you measure employee engagement (or better yet, passion)?  I welcome your stories!

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100 day interim strategy great for getting off the dime in business or in life

By on February 25, 2010 in Business, Perspectives, strategic planning, Uncategorized

I had the pleasure of introducing Dave Logan as the opening keynote presenter for the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in Pasadena yesterday.

Dave is a USC faculty member, best-selling author, and management consultant. At USC, he teaches in the Executive MBA, Master of Medical Management and Executive Education.  As co-founder and senior partner at CultureSync, a management consulting firm, Dave works with Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations.   He’s written four books, including Tribal Leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication from the Annenberg School at USC.

Although not an alumni of the Marshall School myself (I have a University of San Diego MBA), I first met Dave at a USC MBA Alumni gathering in San Diego several years ago, when his book Tribal Leadership was in pre-publication format.  Tribal Leadership is about leveraging natural groups to build a thriving organization.  Rather than TALK about the 5 stages of an organization’s culture, he DEMONSTRATED the five stages by assigning roles to 5 random individuals from the audience.

Dave was so effective at communicating the essence of Tribal Leadership that I immediately vetted him as a speaker for Vistage, where I was a chair at the time, and engaged him to speak to my CEO group about Tribal Leadership.  Again, Dave was interactive and inventive.  Using polling technology, he asked my CEO clients where they thought we were as a group within the five stages of Tribal Leadership.   The good news for me was, they gave the group very high marks.  Even more importantly, and to Dave’s credit, they were so committed to practicing Tribal Leadership distinctions in their organizations that they requested Dave return, which he did six months later.

I then garnered for myself a front row seat for the unveiling of Dave’s next book at the opening presentation of Landmark Education’s Conference on Global Leadership.   Called Three Laws of Performance, Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, this book was an overnight best-seller.  I highly recommend that you pick it up if you want to read about deep, sustaining transformation in several highlighted organizations.  This book was co-authored with Steve Zaffron.

I could not think of a more dynamic way to begin our conference on strategic planning, with the theme of positioning for long-term success in a short-term world, than to hear Dave’s original thinking.  For me personally, he brings a focus to the BEING aspect of what we are DOING so that we can HAVE the results we seek. Dave embodies an extraordinary way of BEING engaging with content that is fresh, and rich, and delivering it so that the message sticks.

Dave left us with an immediate take-away, a model for devising an interim strategy, which I have pictured here, and which he invites you to use freely (open source)!  Best done as three separate questions in a group setting (for challenging your assumptions), it favors immediate results and in these trying times, who doesn’t want that?  If you have questions or if you want the PDF version please feel free to contact me.  If you find this useful, just please tell me how you used it, and what it did for you — I’ll tell Dave too!  He and I would like to know.






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