Moving from Permission to Production requires employee engagement. Engagement encourages ownership, enjoyment, and teamwork. Ownership creates an atmosphere of responsibility, creativity to improve the process, and a focus on organizational success not personal. Teamwork couples individual strengths with organizational objectives establishing unlimited potential. Enjoyment produces a superior work ethic and self-motivation. I hate to date myself too much but Loverboy recorded a song in the 80s, Working for the Weekend. If that is the environment in your organization, your employees are not engaged and you are limiting your organizations potential.
How do we get employees engaged? Tom Rath and Barry Conchie in their book Strengths Based Leadership discuss a survey that asked two questions:
· What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life?
· List three words that best describes what this person contributes to your life.
The top four answers were (leadership ladder equivalent in parentheses)
· Trust (Trust)
· Compassion (Employee Engagement)
· Stability (Consistent Results)
· Hope (Effective Communication)
These four things are what we have been discussing on this blog. We said moving from Position to Permission requires Effective Communication (Hope) and Trust. People want to believe in something ; to hope the future will be better than the present and they want to place their trust in those they follow. Moving from Permission to Production requires Consistent Results (Stability) and Employee Engagement (Compassion). Stability comes when communication and action consistently align and compassion requires engaging those you lead on a daily basis. I don’t have the statistics that the John Maxwell, Jim Collins, or Tom Rath have, but I can take their research and apply it nearly verbatim to the leadership ladder. It is a proven process, backed by experience and statistics!
Brian - I like your post. I would add one thing to communication though. In addition to Hope and Trust, I would add Knowledge. Too often people ar ein the dark when it comes to the forces/trends/opportunities/challenges facing their organization. When leaders open the books and let people in on what's going on, it can be a strong catalyst for Trust. And, if the leaders ask for input and engagement they often see Hope rise as well.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading more of your posts.
Rick