Lead with Sincerity, Serve from the Heart, Take Pride in Your Work
by Michael Martyn, Shingo Academy Member
Recently, the Shingo Institute held its 34th Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida. The theme of the conference was “Building a Culture of Growing, Enduring Excellence” and the sessions included topics on creating great culture, leading with humility, nourishing employee engagement, meeting people where they are, inspiring people to be their best, and the impact of respect and trust on innovation. My colleague, Eilish Henry, and I presented a workshop on enabling a culture of continuous improvement entitled, Passion for Performance: Aligning Systems and Developing Leaders to Build a Culture of Respect and Humility.
At the outset of the session, we summarized the impact the right leadership behaviors can have on an organization’s results as well as the gap that currently exists between where most organizations are and where they need to be. We referenced a Gallup article that paints a grim picture of the current state of engagement in the United States. Published on April 25, 2022, Jim Harter details the recent trend in U.S. engagement. After trending upward in recent years, employee engagement saw its first decline in a decade from 2020 to 2021, dropping from 36 percent to 34 percent. What is more concerning is the fact that this trend is continuing in 2022, as engagement now sits at 32 percent.
At first glance, organizations may choose to dismiss these results as merely the effect of COVID, but I believe that would be a mistake. First, the average engagement score for the 2021 winners of the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award remained high at 70 percent. If COVID was the sole variable leading to the decline in engagement, we would expect to see a corresponding drop in the award winners, but that did not happen. Second, Harter makes a point of stating that the ratio of engaged employees to actively disengaged employees was dropping prior to COVID. Between 2019 and 2020, the ration dropped from 2.7 to 1 to 2.6 to 1, dropped again to 2.1 to 1 in 2021, and has continued to drop in early 2022 to 1.9 to 1.
What does this latest Gallup update mean for leaders going forward? First, the key to improving engagement is to focus on culture and on the wellbeing of your people. That has not changed in more than 20 years of reporting. Second, while hybrid and remote workers are on average more engaged than on-site workers, engagement is declining across all groups. That should be a major concern to leaders who believe that remote workers are engaged, if not more engaged, than they were prior to COVID. Rather than remote and hybrid environments being a panacea for the engagement gap in the U.S., it appears that working at home may just “suck less” than working in the office.
To address these issues, Eilish and I focused our workshop content on the key behaviors and fundamental systems required to create a culture that respects every individual and is characterized by high levels of engagement and participation in continuous improvement activities. One of the concepts we introduced is the idea of “earned respect” and its importance in creating a culture where people take pride in their work and are passionate about their performance. The idea of two types of respect—owned and earned—was first published by Kristie Rogers in her Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Do Your Employees Feel Respected?”[1] Whereas owed respect is the respect afforded to everyone in an organization and ensures that people are treated with a level of civilly, decency, and professionalism, earned respect is concerned with the valued attributes of a particular person. A focus on earned respect means leading in such a way that leaders provide opportunities for every individual to be unique, standout in a particular way, and be recognized for his or her contribution to the organization and personal achievements.
To create the opportunity for earned respect necessitates the design and implementation of systems that empower and engage each person with the challenge to grow, embrace their role as problem solvers, and take pride in their contribution. On the surface, the concept of empowering people through systems is not new to the Shingo community. In fact, engaging people in continuous improvement and fostering active recognition was a consistent theme at the conference and I myself wrote about the importance of the daily kaizen system and recognition in Own the Gap[2] 10 years ago.
What I believe is still missing from the equation, however, is an understanding of the true purpose of leaders in a continuous improvement culture and the critical link between putting people first in order to improve performance. Even after all these years, I still see the structure and tone of system design aligning more with a top-down roll out than an approach that encourages autonomy and trusts people in co-creating the systems. Until we learn to first lead for passion and pride and, second, channel this energy into improved performance and profits, we will continue to see engagement languish.
When talking about the role of a leader, most organizations we see focus on the tools a leader needs to use (such as gemba walks) and the behaviors they need to exhibit (such as coaching the problem-solving process). What often gets overlooked is the importance of a leader’s tone and the need for a philosophy that aligns the purpose of the organization with the purpose of the management system. Just as saying the purpose of an organization is to make a profit is insufficient to motivate and engage employees, so too is saying the purpose of the management system is to improve processes insufficient to align and develop great leadership behaviors. If we want a world-class culture that is committed to continuous improvement and driven by passionate employees, we must embrace a new vision for what leading for performance means. This requires consistent and effective leadership and the adoption of a philosophy that places the rightful priority on inspiring, engaging, and developing people.
In my new book, Management for Omotenashi: Learning to Lead for Passion, Purpose, and Performance, I introduce readers to a leadership model that creates an environment where the leader and team members work together to create an omotenashi culture where both internal and external customers are treated to an exceptional experience. In an omotenashi culture, team members can find a deeper meaning in their work and the joy of expressing themselves through continuous improvement and personal growth. Leaders learn to embrace a new role and purpose in the development of a daily management system.
In the end, our goal as leaders is to create a “heartwarming” experience for each person in the organization—an experience born out of the design of a management system focused on people and powered by autonomy, co-creation, and daily innovation. It should also be an experience that creates an environment where people want to come to work to be connected with and surrounded by a group of like-minded people who strive to help each other get better every day and have the opportunity to take pride in their work and find purpose in their contribution. If we do these things as leaders, I believe people will want to come back to work, not because they are mandated to, but because work now has meaning. Also, the love people feel for their job will be driven by their desire to be part of a purpose-driven community as opposed to personal convenience. That is our purpose and our challenge as leaders.
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/07/do-your-employees-feel-respected
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