Getting under the skin of ‘engagement’

What does it say about a concept when there’s little or no consensus on what it means – even among the folks who are supposedly at the forefront of fostering it? So it is with ‘engagement’…

• For some, in reality, engagement is little or nothing more than a sexy new wrapper for the same old activity – a slightly more outcomes-focused badge for internal communication.
• For some it’s more of a process – the alignment of the organisation’s vision, strategy and goals with those of the individuals who make it up.
• For some it’s a philosophy – a synonym for ‘involvement’ and the desire to bring greater democracy to decision-making in organisations.
• For others still, it’s pure outcome – an individual psychological state, the sum total of one’s gut feelings about one’s relationship with an organisation (effectively a slightly less crass way of referring to people’s level of intrinsic motivation).

Taking succour from the ambiguity, rather than decrying it, I tend to lean towards the latter definition – not least because seeing engagement as subjective and context-specific serves as an important reminder to ask questions, rather than leap to prescribing solutions (e.g. What does engagement mean to your organisation? What would more of it look like in terms of the business outcomes you seek? What, from the wide range of tools and approaches we could pluck from our arsenal, should we be deploying to support delivery of that outcome?).

Engagement shouldn’t be seen as a one-size-fits-all deal – either in definition or in practice. As anyone with the most rudimentary grasp of behavioural economics or complex adaptive systems will tell you, the chance that human beings (you know – real people with a heartbeat and free will) will respond predictably, en masse, to any given intervention, in the way you intend, is slim to anorexic*.

And yet…

An entire industry has been spawned by the false premise that engagement is a universal ‘thing’ that can be objectively and quantitatively measured – no concessions to context or cultural differences; nor to the fact that, while there is an obvious positive correlation between well-motivated people and corporate performance, the relationship between communication and engagement is far from being directly causative.

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and go so far as to say that communication has little or no direct influence over engagement. The latter, IMHO, is far more shaped by the messages implicit in strategy, systems and culture – the opportunities, as Dan Pink would put it, to build a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose – than it is in any messages explicitly communicated.

When you think about it, this should be obvious. An employee doesn’t start a new employment relationship disengaged; and the extent to which they remain engaged (or become disengaged) over time will never be the product of communication alone. It will be the extent to which those communications are congruent or incongruent with their day-to-day experiences of life in the organisation – the extent to which the promise that Company X will be a great place to realise one’s career aspirations (whatever those may be) is actually matched by reality.

Unpalatable though this appears to be to some died-in-the-wool comms pros, this dictates that you can’t separate comms management from good business management period – having the nous and the chutzpah to get involved in (and, dare I say it, even seek to shape) conversations about strategy, systems, processes, visible leadership behaviours etc. as ‘surface manifestations’ of organisational culture. For, if you don’t, you’ve more or less guaranteed that your beautifully written prose will fly in the face of said reality and, rather than being seen as an authentic reflection of an organisation’s purpose, proposition and positioning, it will instead appear as vacuous rhetoric.

My learned fellow 55-minute guide author, Geoff Barbaro, sums it up thus in a conversation over on the CommScrum LinkedIn group:

“Technology is showing us that networks of individuals hold the power of communication, and networks are no respecters of the employee/customer/stakeholder distinctions. When we talk about [internal comms] or [employee engagement] or whatever, what we are really talking about should be organisational management (or leadership), not stuff that happens within bounded walls.”

Amen to that, Geoff!

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* If you doubt the difference between how we think we make decisions and how we actually make them (and you’re based in the UK) check out last night’s Horizon programme on BBC2, featuring two brilliant Daniels – Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning author of ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ and Dan Ariely, author of ‘Predictably Irrational’ (both fabulous reads if you can find the time).

CXOs: Have you discovered the 55-minute guide series yet?

It’s official. Short is the new long (unlike this post perhaps!).

A few years ago, Kevin Keohane and I had the heretical notion that the answer to getting c-suite types to open their minds to the business value of brand and business communications was to merrily swim in the opposite direction to most of our brethren.

Where they tried to persuade people with pseudo-academic tomes full of detailed case studies and examples, we decided to take the path less travelled – short, unapologetically opinionated and no-holds barred synopses of critical insights and what to do about them.

So the 55-Minute Guide series was born, and a long-overdue scan of the books’ pages on Amazon would seem to suggest we were bang on.

If there’s a golden rule of branding, it’s to be authentic – to ensure that the gap between what you promise and what you deliver is as small as humanly possible.

So, even more than the recognition our authors have rightly received for the quality of their insights, what’s really great to see from customer reviews is that we’ve also clearly lived up to the challenging promise of delivering them in a way that people can consume the lot in under an hour – not through dumbing down, mind you, but through ruthlessly weeding out tangential and superfluous elements and focusing on what really matters.

Both are no doubt to thank for 34 amazing customer reviews across the series on Amazon US and UK sites, more than three-quarters of which are 5-star (the rest all 4-star). Here are just a few…

On Indy Neogy’s 55-Minute Guide to better cross-cultural communications:

“True to its title, it’s a brisk one-hour read. Neogy’s new book is a treasure of clarity, brevity, and useful tools to bridge the cultural communication divide. This should be required reading for any Chief Marketing Officer.”

On Mike Klein’s 55-Minute Guide to social communication:

“Mike neatly and cleverly combines some astute systems thinking, with provocative behavioural theory in this very digestible book… The highest accolade I can pay him is that he practices what he preaches. It will take you less than 55 mins to read [and] I bet you’ll keep coming back to it.”

On Geoff Barbaro’s 55-Minute guide to leadership communication:

“The Leader’s Beacon goes a long way to filling an ever widening gap of knowledge. It is easy to read, easy to understand and makes sense. The best bit is that you don’t need to wade through pages of heavy theory… I’ve been able to share it with clients during leadership coaching sessions without any concern about egos. Their response to it was also fantastic.”

On Ro Gorell’s 55-Minute guide to talent management:

“This is a book that can be read in one sitting, and it’s got a good deal of practical information that you can implement right away… If you’re a manager tasked with coming up with a policy to retain valuable specialists in your organisation, you could do a lot worse than spend a Saturday evening reading this from cover to cover.”

On Kevin Keohane’s 55-Minute guide to employee communication:

“The cover of this book is deceptively simple, and it is obviously a short read. But don’t be fooled – this book is chock-full of information. Not a single page is wasted. Anyone in human resources, management, communications, marketing… heck, anyone from any department of a business with more than one employee could benefit from the information in this concise little volume.”

And lastly on my own 55-minute guide to building sustainable brands:

“Distil down all the critical points you might hear from a well-informed sustainable business consultant, using everyday language grounded in practical business fundamentals rather than emotive arguments, and deliver it in a form that even a slow reader can squeeze into an hour (with time left over to make a cup of tea), and you’ll end up with something like this.”

All in all, not a bad body of work. And if you haven’t yet picked up your copies, well then maybe it’s time you should (see the links on the right-hand side of this page). They could well be the most insightful 55-minutes you ever spend.

Frei nach Konrad Lorenz (as they say in Germany!)

Here’s another wonderfully soundbitable snippet from Stephen Bungay’s book, The Art of Action, generally attributed to Austrian psychologist, Konrad Lorenz.

We’ve all seen the stats on how often change efforts fail as a result of poor communication, and I think the sequence of statements below is potentially a very valuable lens for pinpointing why.

As you read them, I’d ask you to pause and reflect on your own experiences – whether at the helm, or on the receiving end, of change communication.

Where, for you, do the wheels tend to fall off?

And given that anything beyond item 2 is not in the exclusive gift of the change folks (NB my oft-cited mantra about how the messages implicit in organisational design and culture will always trump those explicit in formal communications), how and with whom do you think the most effective partnerships can be forged to make this stuff happen?

What is seen is not yet heard…

What is heard is not yet understood…

What is understood is not yet believed…

What is believed is not yet advocated…

What is advocated is not yet acted on…

What is acted on is not yet completed.

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Amy Williams, Jeremy Clarkson and the Assimilation-Contrast Effect

Ever heard of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect?

Kevin Keohane introduced me to this fascinating idea earlier in the year, which is grounded in Social Judgement Theory, developed by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland in the ‘60s.

Basically, the idea is that, when confronted by potential conflict, individuals or groups will tend to approach it with either a ‘latitude of acceptance’ or a ‘latitude of rejection’.

What fascinates me about this – and what is particularly relevant in the sphere of change communications – is what it says about the importance of the way information is communicated and by whom.

Rub people up the wrong way – e.g. by being too partisan or aggressive – and the receiver finds the information objectionable, even if it’s fairly close to what they believe themselves. (Mike Klein’s observation in his upcoming 55-Minute Guide about the tendency for organisations to send in someone they trust to deliver messages to sceptical audiences, rather than someone the audience trusts, certainly speaks to this.)

This is the so-called contrast effect, and I suspect we may have seen a classic example of it last night with voting for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year.

As a keen and highly competitive sportsman myself, my own personal view is that recognising outstanding sporting achievement requires meeting three critical criteria:

• Winning. Decidedly un-British, I know, but to those who say ‘It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part’, I say ‘Bollocks!’ If you haven’t actually won anything then you don’t even deserve to be on the shortlist.
• Something that displays unbelievable mental and physical fortitude. Sorry, Phil Taylor, but impressive as 15 world darts titles is, chucking a few arrows at a board isn’t even in the same league as the tests that the likes of Mark Cavendish and Jessica Ennis put themselves through.
• Genuine rarity. The achievement has to be put in some sort of comparative context that indicates just how mind-bogglingly brilliant it is.

For these three reasons – plus the fact that she actually has a personality (the clue’s in the title of the award, folks!) – I cast my vote for the utterly fantastic Amy Williams.

Winning? Check. And as winning goes, an Olympic gold medal is about as good as it gets.

Tackling something properly big and hairy? Check. Hurtling head-first down a bobsleigh run on a glorified tea-tray at 90mph, with your nose just an inch or two off the ice certainly qualifies!

Genuine rarity? Double-check. The first British woman to win individual gold at a Winter Olympics in nearly 60 years, and someone who can’t even train on the ice beating folks who were born on the stuff!

And yet…

Amy didn’t even make the top three.

Why?

Judging from the chatter on Twitter, I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that her celebrity champion was Jeremy Clarkson – a man with the intellectual sophistication of a boiled potato, the sporting credibility of a Teletubby, and a well-established track record of pissing people off.

If I was going there, I wouldn’t be starting from here

One of the agencies I work for occasionally as a freelancer essentially employs me as a copywriter. It pays well for what it is, and it’s good to flex my linguistic muscles now and again to keep that side of my game sharp.

At the same time, though, it can throw into sharp relief the limited ability to create value for a client if your mindset as a communicator is limited to downstream tactical execution – of simply tarting up a fait accompli.

A case in point yesterday…

I was asked to review a document a client had produced, with the aim of accentuating its key points of differentiation from competitors, each point with a set of messages tailored to each of its key stakeholder groups – employees, consumers, clients and suppliers.

Quite apart from specific issues of tone and language, my immediate gut reaction was to question the whole premise of the piece – whether the six points of differentiation highlighted by the client were even relevant in the first place.

Why? Because the client was pushing what it felt to be relevant, with no apparent thought given to what its audiences might actually value. That’s an approach that’s fundamentally flawed in my book and, by definition, incapable of delivering the same impact as one driven by audience insight (NB Marty Neumeier’s line about a brand being what they say it is, not you).

And so to what I suppose is the point at the heart of this post…

When I raised these issues with the agency, who had pencilled in two days of writing for the job, their initial response was, “So what are you saying, Dan? Do you want to do this or not?”

My answer? If all the client really wants is two days of writing to finesse their existing approach, then I’ll happily do that. But…

As professional advisors, don’t we have a duty to raise questions first, to challenge assumptions, and to highlight the possibilities of other (potentially better) approaches?

Surely they’ll appreciate that and, if they agree, we’ll work together to scope something different. If, on the other hand, we have that conversation and their views don’t change, then that’s fine too – at least they’ll have made a more informed decision.

(A call with the client was duly scheduled for next week.)