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.

In Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes, he says that there are vast opportunities for people to be leaders everywhere and in every environment now.

Think about it, stories throughout history have seeded powerful changes. For example, JFK in 1961 gave a speech that painted a picture in people’s minds, it was a vision of sending a man safely to the moon. By 1969 it happened.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I have a dream…” speech in 1963 used story structure with such sentences as, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” He created a picture in people’s minds of a positive vision of the future, and helped create that possibility within one generation.

Stories are an element like fire

Beware, however, that a well-told story is powerful. Stories are like fire. You can use them with a benevolent or malevolent intention. You can warm up ideas, cook up motivation and empower a vision. You can also burn and destroy through stories. Examples of this are negative gossip, media stories that engender fear and distrust, or the speeches of totalitarian rulers like Hitler.  A Change Artist uses stories with a benevolent intention, to serve a positive vision of the future.

A workplace example – more fun on the job

Here is a simple example of a woman who used the power of story on the job to create more fun at work.  I coached a woman named Mandy who worked in a long term care facility and she was responsible for internal customer service.  She wanted to pitch the idea of a fun at work staff calendar. This was right around the time that calendar-making software programs were a new thing. Mandy’s first attempt was to use fact-based, fear driven concepts. She left a voicemail for her boss.

Hi Carol, I just wanted to run an idea by you. What do you think about a calendar as a gift that’s full of staff pictures from the Christmas party? Morale has been very low. We just got through the downsizing and the merger. It’s low budget and you know how tight things are right now. Let me know. — Mandy

She never heard back from Carol, so Mandy sent an e-mail with the same basic message. Carol replied that they would talk about it at the next staff meeting. They ended up having to drop that item on the agenda due to lack of time. That is when Mandy and I worked on a simple but different pitch.

This is the second way she ended up trying it. She asked if she could see Carol for 10 minutes face-to-face. She agreed. Here is how Mandy tried it this time.

I was over at the house of a friend the other night for dinner and I noticed on her refrigerator was a calendar. For the month of October there was a picture of my friend, Wendy, receiving the Best Coiffed Hair Award. She said that photo was taken at last year’s Christmas party. They had a Fun Awards Event. Each person received the name of another staff person and was asked to give a Fun Award. For example, the Most Perky Morning Person Award recipient got a Starbuck’s gift basket. The Robin Williams on Wheels Award went to a very funny fellow in health records who is in a wheelchair. They took photos of the whole evening then turned it into a calendar and gave two calendars to all the staff members. I have it right here – take a look.

Mandy showed the calendar to her boss and it was full of photos of people laughing outrageously, a picture of Santa Claus juggling giant candy canes, a photo of another group of employees cheering, and one fellow dressed up like a giant exclamation mark.

Mandy continued, Everyone loved this gift better than any gift before or after. My friend bought an extra one for the Fitness facility where she teaches part-time. They had been having trouble recruiting new nursing staff. After a nurse at the Fitness Centre saw the calendar- she applied for a job there. She said it looked like a fun place to work where people seem to care about each other.

Mandy finished her story by starting to explain about the cost involved, but Carol interrupted her and said, “I don’t care what it costs, let’s do it! I love it.”

The calendar was a big hit with all the employees in Mandy’s hospital. Not only did staff buy more at their own expense, even seven years later people still have that particular calendar up on their walls. It also helped them recruit and keep new nursing staff during a time when there was a huge shortage of trained people.

They increased morale among staff also ended up having a powerful effect on the mood of the residents of the facility. After one long time resident died he bequeathed part of his estate to the facility in gratitude to the generous care he received.

1. What’s Good? Ask yourself “What’s Good?” about challenges such as the economic downturn (e.g. It’s a chance to simplify, de-clutter and re-prioritize). This will give you a better mindset. After all, as Einstein said “you cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.”

2. Act as if: Ask yourself, “If I were exceptional… at being financially sustainable in this economy I would…” (e.g. I would download for FREE Seth Godin’s eBook Tribes and read about how to thrive in the coming economy).

3. Take action: Then take one small action today based on your ideas from Step #2.