This Book is Cooked!

13% global work engagement isn’t a business problem, it is a tragedy that impacts our families, our customers and virtually every aspect of our lives.

The vast majority of employee engagement initiatives produce mediocre results or fail altogether.

In 2008, we began working with University of Southern California in a project to bring employee engagement to intact teams. Here is a little bit of what we discovered:

• Engagement initiatives must be led by the CEO or business owner. If that isn’t happening, we suggest saving your money and your face.
• We cannot expect engagement when we are just treating the managers and leaving everyone else behind.
• Surveys are good for evidence but without organizational transformation, they just make managers feel even more inadequate.
• The vast majority of our talent doesn’t engage because their capacity to change was outstripped long ago. Until we teach our talent how to change, to unlearn, to learn and to relearn, not much is going to happen with engagement. In fact, this one piece is core to organizations building engaged workers. We discovered this by providing our two-day Inspired Work Program to intact teams. People want to change, need to change but don’t know how or are too frightened to make it happen. With ever growing waves of change, how can we possibly expect our employees to engage when they can’t keep up with change?

The Workplace Engagement Solution was just sent to Career Press and will be published this summer. Yes, I’ve breathed a big sigh of relief. But the journey was phenomenal. We deliver one big and unique solution for engagement. But, how do we design an internally-driven and thoroughly sustainable solution to the problem? Designing the solution comes from the contributions of dozens of brilliant professionals. Writing this book was a serendipitous experience capped by several colleagues hand-delivering Adam Miller, the CEO of Cornerstone on Demand. Adam personifies every aspect of what we advocate in the solution. He leads the culture, he drives talent, “walks the talk,” hires and develops active learners and works with complete transparency.

I am excited to share this book with you!

If any of my readers are considering an engagement program or you are deeply involved in a solution, please feel free to reach out. You can access my schedule by clicking here.

Please limit any initial conversations to 15 or 30 minutes.