Leaders Role: It’s OK to demand high performance

I suppose it was only a matter of time until my musical talent was discovered. Perhaps a more realistic telling of the tale was that I’d blagged my way into a paying gig (€200) for an afternoon session in the Hollybrook Hotel in Clontarf. Brian Kennedy (a real musician) would be my sidekick. The problem: Brian was arriving from Portugal on Friday, lunchtime. Playing on Sunday, gave us a day and a half for rehearsal. We went into overdrive.

Music Stuff: Here’s the science. We had to figure out how the hotel’s Public Address system worked (and integrate our own gear). A 3-hour ‘gig’ translates as about 40 songs which had to be agreed and then individually worked out. When you play solo – you can do what you want. But playing alongside someone else requires being in sync. Introductions, chord sequences, riffs and endings have to be bang on. Because we had no real idea who’d be in the audience, we needed a range of material (blues, pop, ballads). Then we had to ‘transpose’ (change the musical key) of several songs – to suit either Brian’s or my voice. Alongside this, I was trying to figure out the correct harmonica keys (my latest obsession) to accompany Brian’s blues stuff. Are you getting tired already? It took hours and hours and hours and hours. By the time we’d divvied up that €200, we were probably paid about €4 an hour, half the rate earned in Burger King.

Strong Deadline: Brian is normally busy and ‘hard to get.’ I was feeling a bit guilty as this gig was eating up a huge chunk of time. When I asked if he resented the hours, he replied: “People are paying to listen. It’s their night out. We give this 120%.” We were certainly engaged – putting huge effort into getting it right – for less than the minimum wage. Some of this was probably driven by a common fear e.g. ‘avoiding screwing up in public and looking like a prat.’  For sure, that was part of it. We were definitely alive during the preparation and performance. Good news: the night went well and the preparation (broadly speaking) paid off.

High Versus Low Engagement: Professional managers are paid to secure high output performance from others. The currently fashionable way to do this (and management trends are a ‘fashion item’) is to secure employee engagement. On face value what’s not to like about this idea? We are bombarded with the idea that ‘high engagement’ delivers happy staff who, in turn, ‘mind’ customers. It’s a win: win. But how then do we explain ‘high productivity’ in environments that are typically low engagement? The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a legendary tough leader. One of his quotes: “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” In 2017, first quarter revenues for Amazon rose 23% to $35.7 billion. Amazon ranks as Number 2 on Fortune’s list of most admired organizations and on LinkedIn’s US Top Companies list. So, is there a disconnect between niceness and financial performance? I’m constrained here in telling the full story, but the highest performing multi-national I’ve ever worked with probably had the lowest employee engagement scores ever measured. While this is sometimes explained away as ‘bullying people’ into short-term performance, the link is not as straightforward as you might think.

Answer Driven: Some of this confusion is consultant driven. Consultant’s are great at coming up with solutions, sometimes to problems that don’t exist. The usual way to describe this is ‘selling.’ Who doesn’t want their company to be a ‘great place to work?’ Lets have a quick show of hands. Who wants a competitor company to be winning ‘engagement awards’ with Black-Tie photo opportunities?  Who doesn’t love odd-shaped pieces of Galway Crystal displayed prominently in the reception area? But is lack of engagement a real problem? Well, it’s hard to argue against this because no one knows what it really means. One report (MacLeod) came up with more than 50 definitions of engagement. So, lets’ spin the question a different way. Does high-engagement actually lead to high-performance? The answer is: it depends. Some elite organizations that are difficult to get into (e.g. Goldman Sachs) are extremely difficult to work for. On the Investment Banking side, new recruits regularly work 80+ hours each week (my nephew often slept under his desk or in a conference room in New York). If you were using a ‘typical’ engagement instrument to measure these practices, the scores would fall through the floor. The disconnect is that, at the same time, the Goldman Sachs performance was going through the roof! So, it’s difficult to talk about ‘Engagement’ as a concept – when most people can’t agree what this term means. Employee engagement has become a sort-of ‘snake oil’ (a formula which supposedly cures all organization ills). Engagement is used as a proxy for productivity – as if the two terms were interchangeable.  They aren’t!  Consider the following story….

Attitude Adjustment: When I worked with GE, a new Site Leader was appointed to a factory in Coolock. He was ex-military (US Airforce) and ‘donned the garb’, wearing leather boots and an aviators jacket. Most days he started work at 4:30am and left at 15:00. So, he was somewhat eccentric in both dress code and working hours. Every month he held management meetings to check progress on a complex plant start-up. The official title of those meetings were the ‘Attitude Adjustment Sessions.’ There was no quarter, taken or given. You ponied up, detailed your performance in the previous month and (hopefully) survived until the next month. Somewhat brutal, it was perhaps the most authentic performance review sessions I’ve even witnessed. Contrast that with some of the ‘high engagement’ organizations that I’ve worked in. Arguably, the not-for-profit sector, is the worst offender here. Many times I’ve seen the process (“everyone has to have an input”) getting elevated above outputs (‘results pay the bills’). In other words, it’s possible to have very high levels of engagement and very low levels of organisation performance.

High Performance:  So lets go back to some basics. In developing any high performance organization, there are two fundamental questions  (1) What is the mission/purpose of this organization? Is this clear? Can this be described in an emotionally compelling way? (2) How well are we performing against this mission? Techniques (like employee engagement) are subsidiary to these BIG questions i.e. everything else is noise.

Employee engagement is a means to an end – not an end in itself. Some low-performance organisations should skip engagement and start running ‘attitude adjustment’ sessions to drive performance.  Perhaps start with yourself by asking: “Am I over-delivering in this job? Am I giving this ‘gig’ 120%? And, as a leader, am I making this same demand on others?”

Like skinny jeans, the engagement fashion trend will eventually move on. Perhaps we are already seeing the signs of this in the emergence of the ‘healthy organisation’ (with a focus on fitness and food).  Here’s an idea. Forget the ‘trends’. Focus on performance.

Have a good one.

Paul

PS Lighter Notes (this week Menu is fairly ‘mild’).

 Last week, I went to see my Doctor. He wasn’t well.

My father was a comedian. I was his first joke.

Q: What was the first thing Adam said to Eve?

A: Stand back -I don’t know how big this thing is going to get!

WHO DREAMS THESE UP?   Why, a Lexophile of course!

• How does Moses make tea? Hebrews it.
• Venison for dinner again?   Oh deer!
• A cartoonist was found dead in his home.  Details are sketchy.
• Haunted French pancakes give me the crêpes.
• England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
• They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a Typo.
• I changed my iPhone’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.
• Jokes about German sausage are the Wurst.
• I know a guy who’s addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.
• I did a theatrical performance about puns.  It was a play on words.
• Why were the Indians in America first?  They had reservations.
• I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.
• Velcro – what a rip off!
• Don’t worry about old age; it doesn’t last.

Waiter, Waiter: I was in a cafe and I ordered the beef burger. The waiter came back and told me there’s no beef burger. So I ordered the steak burger. He came back. No steak. I tried the corned beef hash. He was clearly getting frustration from the kitchen because he shouted at me:

“There’s no F in beef” (that’s how it sounded).

Q: How can a waiter not know how to spell beef?

Check our website http://www.tandemconsulting.ie or call 087 2439019 for an informal discussion about executive or organization development.