love my work, and it’s not just because we are so successful,” she says. “I like how we are successful: our CEO actually believes sustainable success needs a smart business model, co-created and implemented by energized employees. Where I used to work, we assessed employee engagement a lot, but it never really improved. Here, we don’t just assess engagement—we cause it.”
Like Pam, Susan is talented, well compensated, and has much of her career ahead of her. And she loves her company.
“You know what else I love?” she asks. “Both my daughters say they would be proud to work here.”
So, the billion-dollar question is, what’s the difference between Pam and Susan’s organizations?
Susan’s organization is achieving more with less time, money, and stress. And that is the story of vitality.
What Is Vitality?
The Vitality Imperative is about how work gets done. From our experiences with more than four hundred organizations on six continents, we are now certain that Susan’s vitality work culture produces more great achievement with less time, money, and stress than Pam’s.
The definition of “vitality” includes “the capacity to live, grow or develop; the presence of intellectual and physical vigor; energy.” What organization wouldn’t want those attributes? We’ve learned that vitality is good for stockholders, for customers, and for employees—yet it is unusual in large enterprises.
And that is to their detriment. Whoever masters vitality as a source of performance has an extraordinary competitive edge and provides a deeply satisfying life for themselves and the people they lead.
What We Promise You
As you read through this book, we make three promises to you.
First, we promise a fast-moving, quickly valuable reading experience that features:
• Principles. Self-evident rules that provoke new thought and action. While the principles come from what we have observed in our work, they are only valid if they fit with how life works. We trust that an introspective look at your life will serve as proof of the validity of what we say.
• Examples. Brief descriptions of the principles in action. We will contrast examples that destroy vitality with those that create it.
• Practices. Personal and team activities to test the principles and cultivate your personal and organizational effectiveness.
Second, we promise immediate, positive impact in your life if you read with a specific challenge in mind—your personal vitality imperative—that shares these characteristics:
• The challenge is important to you and the organization in which you lead.
• It requires resilient, self-supervising performance from people you lead.
• It requires collaboration across organizational boundaries.
• Success or failure is measurable.
• You are not already confident that it will turn out well.
At the end of each chapter, we’ll invite you to stop and ask yourself, “What do I now see about my vitality imperative, and what action will I take?”
Finally, we promise more days when your leadership feels like an energizing privilege and fewer days it feels like a burden. This promise applies wherever you feel responsible for the success of others: at work, with your family, and in your community.
Of course, our promises only matter if they are relevant to you. So, let’s contrast two forms of leadership so that you can decide if The Vitality Imperative is worth your time and attention.
Vitality or Not: Different choices for leaders, different experiences for employees
In her foreword, Anne Murray Allen makes the case for vitality. Anne’s research fits with our experience over the last thirty years. Energized, committed employees—those who would describe their workplace as exhibiting vitality—create superb, enduring performance. However, creating a Vitality culture is not for the faint of heart and begins with an important choice.
Leaders and philosophers have differed for ages on how to best produce results through others. These can be summed up in two models:
1. The Superior Leader: Put superior people in charge and follow their instructions.
2. The Connected Leader: Put the most connected people in charge and count on them to understand challenges, inspire commitment, and coordinate contribution.
The Superior Leader Model
The Superior Leader approach is, at best, benevolent domination. Many leaders have produced significant value doing exactly this. The results, however, are rarely sustainable after the organization grows enough to require self-supervising work. There are exceptions, but they tend to feature unusual competitive advantages like a unique technology, market opportunity, or a creatively disruptive business model—and even those eventually deteriorate.
Riccardo Muti, a world-renowned musician and conductor, serves as a good example. Muti is said to have musical perception so refined that his hearing is insured for millions of dollars. Currently, he is the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has held important posts in Florence, Philadelphia, Salzburg, London, and Milan. “Muti is brilliant,” says a fellow musician. “Not only his instructions are clear, but also the sanction: what will happen if you don’t do what he tells you to do. It works to a certain point.”
Despite Muti’s brilliance, his tenure at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala, known internationally as La Scala, ended badly. In 2005, nearly all of the seven hundred employees of La Scala signed a letter of no confidence to Muti. The letter said, among other things, “You are using us as instruments, not as partners.”
Muti resigned, citing “staff hostility.” He contributed to La Scala with years of musical excellence, and yet, he reached the limits of his way of leading. La Scala was ready to move on without him.
The Connected Leader Model
By contrast, the Connected Leader approach largely depends on leaders with unique gifts in the art of connection. These are women and men who intuitively grasp how to connect people to each other and reality in a way that reveals opportunity and inspires high performance. They tend to spearhead times of surprising achievement that leave people feeling proud and deeply satisfied.
Greg Merten, an influential leader at Hewlett-Packard from 1972–2003, is a great example of a Connected Leader. For much of his time at HP, Greg was a senior vice president responsible for Inkjet supplies. He oversaw operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Greg felt strongly that a large multinational group of employees and supply-chain partners could operate as a community held together by shared purpose, values, and learning. During his tenure, the business results were extraordinary and turnover of high-performing employees was very low. When he retired, the employees of the HP site in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico engraved the following words on a parting gift:
Thanks, Greg:
