What people are really saying
The top reasons we hear are: low pay, too much stress, or the boss from hell. These reasons came from a random survey of employees at a few of those organizations that won the coveted title of Best Company to Work For. Almost everyone we surveyed said they didn’t consider their company to be such a great place to work. Why the incongruence?

Why the Gallup Q12 may now be an exercise in futility
For the key to employee engagement, all you need to do these days is to look to the Gallup Organization, right? They conducted hundreds of focus groups and thousands of interviews with employees in a variety of industries, and came up with the Q12. This is a 12-question survey that identifies strong feelings of employee engagement.

You can see a list of the 12 questions here.

But what if you can’t live up to standards of the Q12? Certainly managers who care about you, encourage you, mark your progress, value your opinions and allow you to learn and grow—all contribute to employee engagement. But, for many that is a radical new approach to management. What if you can’t find or train those kinds of people overnight? Plus, many people don’t know what is expected of them at work because the economy keeps changing, or the industry keeps changing. Employees may not have the materials and equipment they need for the same reasons. Maybe you can’t do “what you do best” at work every day, because “what you do best” has now become obsolete. Or, you can’t do quality work, because the market turn around time has significantly decreased. In short, trying to keep up with the Q 12 may now be an exercise in futility.

So you can’t feel engaged until the rate of change slows down?
If so, you might as well drop out of the rat race now and live in a cave. The only way out of this dilemma is to adopt new habits to deal with change. Due to profound economic, sociological, and demographic changes, we must evolve at a core level. In Seth Godin’s bestseller, “Survival Is Not Enough”, he states that “Most of us view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. The first step to help yourself and your organization thrive in the coming economy is to eliminate the anti-change reflex that’s genetically coded into all of us. Once a company learns to zoom (embrace change without pain), it’s much more likely to evolve.”

Creativity as the key to employee engagement
What Seth Godin is referring to when he says “zooming” is a form of creative thinking that is available to everyone. It is bundled with our bio-computer hard drive. We just need to learn how to use it more often. The problem with the Q12 is that the burden of employee engagement mostly lies on the shoulders of management. The truth is, many managers are even less engaged than their employees. How are they possibly going to inspire their workforce? The antidote to almost all Q12 is to teach people how to zoom, at all levels of an organization. The lowest level of creativity inspires far more vitality in a person than the highest level of consuming. In other words, if you can create a workplace full of creative thinkers who share enough of the same core values, the engagement happens all on its own.

Dissolving negativity at work
Countless times, we have seen office politics dissolve; complainers become supportive; toxic emotions unexpectedly evaporate, and unethical people suddenly have integrity when an organization gets back in the creative flow. In other words, it learns how to zoom. Yet, we’d like to take it one step further. It needs to be creativity tied in to core organizational values; otherwise you can end up like Enron (innovation run amok because it lacks integrity). What we’re talking about here is zooming with integrity, or what I call being a Change Artist. To build a Change Artist organization is to create clear values and then teach enough people key habits that naturally unlock the creative thinking necessary to live those values. Once there is a high enough “vibe” of creativity, the permission for it, and the responsible demonstration of it, the Change Artist virus spreads. Others can pick it up by osmosis.

Do you have a comment?
Feel free to add your opinion to this post. For more tips, or to learn about Carla Rieger’s organizational programs, consulting and other resources go to www.artistryofchange.com.

Highly creative people who feel “stuck” can create problems for themselves. Beliefs about what we can and cannot do, unconscious fears inherited from our families or societies, anxiety about leaving behind the familiar can all contribute to feeling “stuck”. If highly creative people don’t constantly create, the natural force of creativity can turn into “destructivity”. It can manifest as financial problems, an addiction, on-going conflict and drama, a health problem or a host of other problems.

If you would like to explore your creative potential in a highly inspiring, safe and beautiful environment, come to our annual Artistry of Change retreat at Hollyhock Oct. 1-4, 2009

In this program you will discover:

* habits that will allow you to continually re-invent yourself and keep your creative fire alive
* a 10-step self-coaching process you can use the rest of your life
* how to see past limited beliefs to find your real truth
* how to create a results-based action plan to manifest this next phase of your life

Watch this video of Carla talking about how to overcome the obstacles to embodying your vision or life purpose

Carla Rieger’s Artistry of Change® model allows you to burn away the dross and find the gold that’s been waiting for you. Through interactive, creative, playful, fun activities, Carla shows you the steps necessary to inspire your best creative work while effectively handling resistance, uncertainty and self-doubt. This approach blends the best of the world of artistry with the human potential movement in exciting new ways.

Benefits of taking this program include:

* tools to overcome your natural resistance to change
* how to harness negativity in your life for creativity
* getting crystal clear on what you want to manifest
* a specific action plan that you can implement immediately
* on-going support and accountability to take action in the world

Modalities for working will be:

* interactive creativity exercises
* slide show and entertaining videos
* group work and debriefing
* solo work

Come with a specific outcome you’d like to manifest such as a career, health, relationship or personal goal. This workshop is for people who have sensed that they are stuck in life and that the “stuckness” is costly them.

Carla Rieger is a creativity and innovation catalyst. As an author, educator, coach and entertainer, she works with individuals and organizations internationally to help them stay on their creative edge. Her books on innovation, communication and change plus her novels and plays are all designed to ignite people’s creative fire.

The Artistry of Change Retreat is coming up October 1-4, 2009, at Hollyhock on beautiful Cortes Island. Join us for a rare opportunity to get clear on what is next in your life. There are still some scholarships available. Check out the Hollyhock website for more info on scholarships or email Scholarship for application information.

To register click here.

Having fun at one of Carla’s retreat:

Why do words like “artistry, innovation and creativity” sometimes make people uncomfortable? Here are three of the most popular causes.

1. Because creativity often means burning down the existing status quo or your old way of being. Humans are genetically programmed to resist change, even if the change looks like it will be good for you. It’s a default mechanism to ensure stability and it’s there for good reason. But eventually all things need to be reinvented, upgraded, or let go of whether it’s an idea, a piece of clothing, a business or a way of being. Knowing when and how to bring about the change can seem like a daunting task.

2. There are other more nefarious reasons, as well, why creativity gets a bad rap. Sometimes people use creativity or innovation for low integrity ends, as we witnessed in the story or Enron or the Nazi regime. History is full of stories of innovative ideas that caused untold amounts of grief and destruction.

3. A third reason creativity has a bad rap is that some people use creativity for creativity’s sake. They choose to do something different without thinking about its’ relevancy in the bigger picture. This, too, can cause destruction, loss of productivity and frustration

Learning when and where to use creativity and innovation takes wisdom and courage.

Here an interview with Carla Rieger on the Fanny Kiefer show talking about her latest novel, The Change Artist, in which she explores the themes of creativity, change and integrity in a compelling story form.

Carla Rieger will be doing a free event open to the public on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 (7:30 pm) at the Vancouver Public Library. It is an author reading on her new book, The Change Artist.