large, and as hard as it may be to accept, if you get to know even the most horrible boss you’ve ever met, there’s a good-hearted person in there, someone who cares about the well-being of others. The problem is they have internalized a set of powerful unconscious ideas about: (1) why people don’t do what they ask, and (2) what tools they have at their disposal to change things. I call this pair of ideas the Employee Engagement Fallacy.
Forbes contributor Kevin Kruse defines employee engagement as: the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals.” The abysmal numbers you’ll find in magazines and newspapers demonstrate the effects of the Employee Engagement Fallacy. According to Gallup, seven out of every ten workers is either disengaged or actively undermining the efforts of their organization. Yes, you read that right. You’ve probably also read countless articles, blog posts, and books filled with tactics to change that. But what you haven’t read about—what’s shockingly absent from the discussion—is tracking the other side of the relationship. What about manager engagement?
In other words, the Employee Engagement Fallacy is assuming that the lack of engagement is the employee’s fault. That there’s something missing over there in worker-land. Without taking employees off the hook for personal responsibility, isn’t it odd that we put the onus on the person on the vulnerable side of the power dynamic? The solution lies in turning that around: In order for your employees to engage, they need to have somebody who is engaging with them.
Where did this strange and obviously unproductive fallacy come from? You didn’t learn it in school. It’s not in any corporate training manual I’ve ever seen. It’s a belief that you picked up along the way without ever intending to, an idea that comes from a time before people knew what we now know about meaning, motivation, and what people are looking for from their professional lives. This false belief expresses itself in what I call The Five Employee Engagement Myths, each one of which is well past its expiration date:
1 “I can’t find good people.”
2 “Nobody cares as much as I do.”
3 “I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway.”
4 “I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems.”
5 “We just need better systems and more communication.”
Not only are all these myths untrue, but turning them around is the lynchpin of changing the way you manage, lead, and, in the process, change the lives of the people around you. Let’s relegate these myths to the past so we can embark on the rest of our journey with clarity and purpose.
MYTH #1:
“I can’t find good people.”
You meet good people all the time. You’ve interviewed and hired them. You brought them onto your team, excited and hopeful about the personal qualities and skills you thought they could add. And then something happened after they started working for you. What was it? How did they go from being an exciting new hire to a consistent source of frustration?
What’s probably true—not always but far more than we admit to ourselves—is that you didn’t invest in that good person when they arrived. You didn’t give them the training they needed, or challenge them on the behaviors you noticed that you wished they would change. You didn’t show them what the DNA of your business is through specific examples, so they could get a personal experience of what you mean by care and why they should care in that way too. Most importantly, you didn’t hold them accountable in small increments along the way to give them boundaries around what needed to change and by when.
This doesn’t make you an evil person, and you shouldn’t use it as an opportunity to put this book down and punish yourself for all the mistakes you’ve ever made. Let’s not do that. I invite you instead to be honest and real with how it’s been, so you can change it. You picked this book up to stop managing people the way you’ve been doing. Sobriety is step one.
When it comes to that very personal kind of manager engagement, we are all B players. Every leader I’ve ever met, this author included, has a huge blind spot in this area, and we all have the same one, though it comes in different forms: It’s not being able to see how, by the very act of showing up the way we do, we disempower the people around us. That is, until we learn how to get out of the way.
When you think about it, you start to see that there’s no such thing as an A player. There are certainly people who have more talent than others, an extraordinary skill or specialization. But have you ever met someone like that who didn’t have an equally, if not larger, shadow aspect to working with them that was related to that strength? The first thing we have to do is recognize that we ourselves are not A players. We all have something that we’re working on, something inside of ourselves that makes us feel incompetent, unconfident, insecure, or all of the above. And until we deal with our own internal world—not by fixing it but by being honest with ourselves and others about it—our strength will forever be used to perpetuate the false belief about our own authority that we started with: that other people value us for what we know and how many problems we can solve.
When you start accepting the B player in yourself, you’ll stop looking at employees as being not good enough. You’ll start realizing that, no matter how skilled someone is, when they come in that door, into your unique business, they are a B player. They don’t understand your brand, they don’t know the way you do it there, they don’t know how to play with the people on your team, and they certainly don’t know how to work with you. It’s your job to roll up your sleeves and work with them on whatever in them needs working on. For most people this work will help them do great things. Some people won’t make the pivot and they’ll leave or you’ll have to let them go. But great management and mentoring starts with an open mind and an open heart.
MYTH #2:
“Nobody cares as much as I do.”
It may be true that nobody cares about the things you care about as much as you do. But it’s not true—or fair, or helpful—to think that nobody cares as much as you. They care about different things, things that matter to them, things that inspire and move them. Your job is to get the things you care about and the things they care about to match up in a way where everybody wins.
So what are the things that employees care about? What if, in the larger sense, they are the exact same things you care about: creative freedom, personal meaning, doing work they love, and making enough money to support their families?
As we look across the management/employee divide, it’s easy to see the people on the other side as being made of different stuff than we are. They’re not. They’re just at a different stage, have a different appetite for risk, perhaps. And for whatever reason, they’ve decided to hitch their meaning wagon to yours. It’s your responsibility to discover just how much they care, in ways and about things that you don’t. Talk about a win/win scenario.
MYTH #3:
“I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway.”
Think about the person on your team who’s having the most trouble right now. Okay, now do a little math as to how much time you are already investing in them. Add up all the times you’ve had to finish off their work that wasn’t quite there, or remind them about this, that, or the other thing. Please include the nightly conversations you’re having with your spouse, the complaint sessions you’re having with your colleagues, and the amount of time you lie awake at night in utter frustration that they did that thing again. How many extra hours did you spend with them over the past month? Five? Ten?
