Olivia Mitchell is one of the best experts on the web when it comes to presentations and public speaking.
She gets it.
I have been following her for over a year now and have been constantly amazed at the quality of her posts and her use of research to back up her statements. In this post, she talks about three myths of public speaking – read it and let me know if you don’t change your mind after reading this.
After reading it, I started to think about how these myths often get in the way of effectively communicating incentive and compensation plans to people as well…
Myth #1: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
Employee engagement health is at its worst levels in decades. Loyalty between employees and organizations has been damaged through this most recent recession as a result of massive workforce reductions, increased stressed on the “survivors” with no prospect of reward post-recovery. We’ve lost perspective of what “engagement” really means, therefore we must remind ourselves of the definition of “Engagement”:
An engagement is a promise to marry, and also the period of time between proposal and marriage – which may be lengthy or trivial. During this period, a couple is said to be affianced,betrothed,engaged to be married, or simply engaged. Future brides and bridegrooms are often referred to as fiancées or fiancés respectively (from the French word fiancé). The duration of the courtship varies vastly.
Source Wikipedia, September 2010
This definition depicts a marital engagement, however it sounds nothing like the employee/employer relationship of today. In years past, young employees would land a job with General Mills, GM or Geritol and remain with those companies until retirement. These companies would hire the formative young workers, instill values and goals consistent with their long-term vision and values which, drove and supported their business strategy. This model has been changing for a long time but the last 3 years has left employers in a precarious position.
Manpower’s Workforce Strategy Survey, released September 27th, shows that many organizations are not thinking strategically about the workforce they’ll need for long-term strategic growth—most are thinking only about the here and now and are not positioned to build the workforce they’ll need to achieve the company’s business strategy in the future. This is quite concerning for Wall Street regarding long-term economic recovery. Investors should focus on employers that have prioritized these 3 key people strategies:
Talent acquisition and alignment with business strategy
“The data reveals that almost a quarter of employers across 36 countries and territories concede that their organizations’ workforce strategy does not support their business strategy, or don’t know if it does. Among those two subsets of respondents, 53 percent admit they are not taking steps to address this issue. With the talent mismatch—the inability to find the right skills in the right place at the right time—becoming more acute as the global economy thaws, companies risk being without the skills they need to execute their business strategy”.
“In addition, among employees surveyed in this study, large sections are still in the dark about how their contributions support the business—one in five employees say either that they don’t understand their company’s business strategy or they don’t know how their role supports it.” (emphasis added)
SOURCE Manpower Inc.
So, what are some engagement drivers that organizations could begin to practice to retain their key talent, re-engage them with business strategy, and invest in their long-term retention and development? Over the next few weeks I’ll explore those themes and make provide some insight. For now, I would like to get your thoughts – leave some ideas in the comment area below.
About Paul; Paul is a successful marketing and business development professional with experience in several industries over more than 20 years. During this period he’s worked for Gage Marketing Group, BI (Business Incentives), Korn/Ferry International as well as founding his own company. He was most recently with Korn/Ferry International as Global Director of Marketing in their talent management consulting division.
I just had to laugh at the second clip in this. Wally should be up for a very large bonus based on his analysis…
What is sad, is that many companies reward programs actually would reward this type of behavior. Not failing is actually seen as a positive and rewarded. This leads to all sorts of behavior that minimize risk and limit exploration. Think about what this means for a company long term? Think the type of culture it breads? Do you think people really want to work in a company that rewards the Wally’s of this world?
We do a lot of work helping improve how teams operate. Some of it is straight old fun team building – you know the type where you go off-site for a day and do different types of games and activities (note – some people love these types of programs and others detest them with a passion). Other programs we do are much more intense and involve really working on specific team issues and developing action plans for greater collaboration, communication, or productivity.
We’ve worked with big teams. We’ve worked with small teams. We’ve done programs for executives and for line-workers. We’ve worked with teams that are working well and just want to get to that next level and teams that really are on their last leg and need immediate urgent care or they will implode.
We have done one hour fun sessions. We’ve created on-going programs that last months and require intensive work by the participants.
Regardless of the type of team development we are doing – it is also part of building a more motivational organization.
First, if you have not watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion – please, please do. It is funny….ha, ha, ha, he, he, ha…. (ok, I need to work on my laugh – you’ll see the connection after watching).
The Spark
Joss Whedan on why he developed Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
We had three very cute baby Raccoons in our yard last Thursday night. They were fearless, lost, adorable and wondering around lost without a mother. Kind of like employees without a good leader…but more on that later.
We went out and watched them as the toddled around the yard and gardens. They were obviously hungry. The smallest one could not keep up with its siblings and kept cooing out to them (that’s the only way I could describe it, like a mix between a cat’s “meow” and and owl’s “who”). The siblings would circle back and rub noses with the smallest one. They would try to get it to climb the rock wall to the garden or move under the table. The smallest Raccoon would waddle slowly after them and try to keep up.
But the siblings were hungry and cold themselves and soon enough – they left the smallest one by itself.
The next morning, the smallest one was almost dead by the side of the garage.
I read “Sales Comp Demands a Deep Sales Dive, Not a Best Practices Quest” by Ann Bares on Compensation Force yesterday – the article really resonated with me. The basic premise of the article is that companies should focus on understanding their sales force and not depend on best practices. Ann states it best when she says, “the problem with the notion of best practices in HR is that it too often leads to a blind search-copy-cut-paste effort whereby we simply lift popular program elements (out of professional journals, books, studies, etc.) and implement them, without sufficient thought as to their fit and strategic applicability.”
It resonated because it is right-on but also because I just completed an assignment for a company where they were looking for “best practices.”
I didn’t give them any (we’ll not really – more on that later…).
I was in South Dakota last week on a family vacation. First off, I forget how beautiful South Dakota is and all that it has to offer. Secondly, there are some really, really humongous carvings there…
Mount Rushmore
The original idea for Mount Rushmore is credited to South Dakota historian Doane Robinson who thought that it would increase tourism (he was a pretty insightful man). His idea was to carve local famous people into some of the granite mountains of the Black Hills. In 1924, after working on Stone Mountain, GA, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was brought in to carve the mountain.
Mt. Rushmore
Borglum expanded on the original idea and wanted it to be a National monument that focused on our presidents. He insisted that his life’s work would not be spent immortalizing regional heroes but insisted that the work demanded a subject national in nature and timeless in its relevance to history.
Borglum started work on Mt. Rushmore in 1927 at the age of 60. He worked the rest of his life on the mountain.
What is it that drives meaning in work? True, real meaning that goes beyond the obvious “completed this project” or “achieved that goal”? I have some ideas, but would love to hear what other people have to say first. I’ll keep a track of the responses we get and put up another post on this with some ideas at a later time.
So please, leave a thought in the comment section!
