How can you tell if your organization is teetering toward disengagement?
Here are four common warning signs. None of them will surprise you, but perhaps you should remind yourself just how ominous they are.
If you notice even one, you should take action. If you don’t act, you will soon notice another one, and then another, and eventually all four.
Not in My Silo. Companies consist of divisions and departments. In the best organizations, these divisions and departments work together. There are lots of cross-functional efforts to resolve issues and develop new products and services. The “enemy” is understood to be the competition, not another part of the same company. In the worst organizations, the various divisions and departments keep to themselves and scorn one another. They never exchange best practices or collaborate on common challenges. The executives in one division or department may not trust or even know their counterparts elsewhere in the organization. So you hear blame and recrimination when you should hear camaraderie and collective good will. Most organizations are somewhere between the extremes. Which way you’re trending is an important indicator. When in doubt, ask the smokers who take breaks outside with smokers from other departments. They have the inside scoop.
The Proverbial Gorilla. Let’s say you are planning the agenda for an important management meeting. Everyone knows that a particular issue needs to be addressed. But no one is willing to say so. The planning proceeds apace, and the agenda gains final approval—without any mention of the critical issue. What you have here is fear and cynicism. No one wants to risk censure for speaking up, and no one expects anything to change anyway. So everyone just goes along. You can bet the issue will come up at the important management meeting. It just won’t be on the agenda, and it won’t have a microphone. It will be in the hallways, in whispers.
The Three Monkeys. Japanese folklore offers a wonderful metaphor for this common problem: the three wise monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Similar to the Proverbial Gorilla, this phenomenon instead describes the reluctance of employees, supervisors, and middle managers to alert senior management to imminent delays and problems, until it is too late to do anything about them. Research shows that almost everyone is aware of a pending issue of some sort, but few people have the courage and confidence to speak up. Management that “shoots the messenger” is usually why.
The Naked Emperor. We all remember the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor who buys new clothes from swindlers who sell him such fancy silk that only the smartest and wisest people can see it. Of course the emperor is embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that he cannot see the fabric. So he proceeds to dress in his new “suit,” and he goes out in public stark naked. No one dares tell him he is naked, save a little boy who is too innocent to know better. If, as a manager at any level, you do not have relationships of candor and honesty, you risk walking naked in public. At the very least, you need someone to tell you the truth about your leadership. If you have no one, get a coach and listen to her or him. Above all, don’t shoot the messenger!
There are others, but in most organizations with engagement issues, these four are the most common. The good news is you can see them plainly. The tough part is turning things around.
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Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.
