Les Landes, President, Landes & Associates, is presenting a Communitelliigence webinar June 13 titled Getting to the Heart of Employee Engagement. The webinar is built around his new book by the same name. To get an idea of what’s in store during the webinar, we posed these questions:
Your book departs from traditional business books by using a fictional narrative to deliver strategic leadership concepts. What led you to take this approach?
It’s more fun … more real … less formulaic … and still provides good guidance. Most people like reading stories more than basic business text. I think stories also help to heighten the human reality of what’s at stake when we’re talking about a workplace environment that allows people to do their very best. Something else makes the story format important. Getting to a high level of employee engagement is not a straight-line process. It’s messy. It’s emotional. And it’s frustrating. And showing the drama of how people work through those challenges gives a better, more palpable sense of what it takes to get to a high-performance culture as much as the solutions themselves.
You also decided not to use the usual formula of constructing a business book around best-practice case studies. Instead, you focused on the roots of human behavior and how these affect employee engagement. Have we been ignoring the basics?
I actually do cite some “best practices” in the book, just not in the format that most authors write them in the typical business text. Rather than citing specific companies and what they’re doing that’s working, my “mysterious mentor” offers some hard-nosed practical direction on how to make certain kinds of systems and processes work more effectively – like communication and continuous improvement. At the end of the book, I lay out a detailed description of what an effective continuous improvement system looks like. We call it the ImaginAction System.
For economic and other reasons, the idea of employees staying with a single organization for more than a few years, let alone a career, has largely evaporated. Is there anything in your free will and imagination equation that can substantially offset this?
People want to work where they can do interesting work, where management demonstrates appreciation for what they do, where they are listened to and where they are in on important information and decisions. Other things matter, too, and they all have implications for those key characteristics of imagination and free will that differentiate human beings from all other living creatures. If you do a great job on those key driving factors for employee engagement, why would people want to leave for other pastures that are unlikely be any greener?
What will makes this employee engagement webinar unique?
What makes this webinar distinctive is the combination of theory and practice. It will explain both the “why” and the “how” of extraordinary employee engagement, blending compelling new insights about human nature in the workplace with practical applications of those insights in key operating systems and processes.
Buy Les’s webinar replay: Getting to the Heart of Employee Engagement
