Templum Consulting Group Blog

Recently, we hosted two women from Germany while they attended a conference and received training. Both are pastors’ wives.

Near the end of their stay, they were commenting on how hard it was to get people saved because of a stronghold of intellectualism that affects Germany and most of Europe for that matter.

The people they dealt with had answers for everything, rational explanations, for acts of God—like present-day miracles, supernatural healing, and the like.

I couldn’t help remembering that I also suffered from that malady until God got my attention.

I wanted to understand God, feeling that if couldn’t understand God I was vulnerable somehow. Perhaps, God is mad at me I thought.
Maybe, God is like some TV evangelists I didn’t like or certain Christians I had met that left me feeling guilty and not up to their “standards.”

If God exists, then I am at His mercy!
(more…)

This morning I was reading about Jack Welsh.  “Integrity” was a driving force behind GE during his tenure there. 

Today, my morning included a post, entitled “The 100% Employee Engagement Mandate,” written by David Zinger.

He and perhaps much of his “Employee Engagement Network” are apparently saying, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” in response to the continual slide in employee engagement statistics.

Reading through the literature on his website it is clear that he and his colleagues are using a worn out HR paradigm, where it is “us versus them.” Improvements in employee engagement are to be obtained by doing something to employees to make them work harder, even if it is to make their managers more accountable.

Rather than getting the most out of employees, I prefer getting the best out of employees. I believe that employees want a place where they can actually do what they are best at most of the time.

However, most places of employment are not designed to use peoples’ strengths, but hopelessly try to “fix” employee weaknesses.
Objective history shows that trying to fix weaknesses is doomed to failure; even though it is continually tried by corporations and their HR departments.

Employee engagement boils down to something very simple: find out what people need at work and give it to them as best you can.
Studies by the national polling agency, Gallup, continually show that employees need the same four things at work to be engaged—Trust, Compassion, Stability, and Hope.

What are you waiting for?

Distribute surveys:

Polling employees on a quarterly basis is an effective and inexpensive strategy for companies to uncover new trends.

Team members may see the organization not succeeding in a certain area and have suggestions on ways to improve the situation.

Implementing surveys where individuals have the option to provide feedback while maintaining their anonymity is preferable and will encourage staff to speak up without being fearful of repercussions.

From: this article.

Seth Godin’s blog contains an article that takes potshots at “senior management.”

He says, “One thing that happens to management when they get senior is that they get stuck.” And concludes by saying, “The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior…”

The belief that it is only the younger people, who know what is really going on, and that elders, management or otherwise, by definition, are out of it and not to be trusted or listened to is not a new idea.

Sutton’s law:

If you think that you have a new idea, you are wrong.
Someone probably already had it. This idea isn’t
original either; I stole it from someone else.

I am surprised by how many “juniors” repeat mistakes that those who have been there before would easily avoid. However, a major mistake that managements make, regardless of age, is to believe that they never need any help from others.

Every organization, whether for-profit, non-profit, or governmental, needs to plan for the future. For the distant future this is sometimes called “strategic planning” to distinguish it from other kinds of planning, e.g. operational, marketing, and other shorter term planning.

All the players involved wish to be realistic throughout the process and not grandiose or out of touch with the facts that present themselves. Sometimes, people are unsure how to approach the process and will bring in a consulting company to assist them with the planning process.

Unfortunately, many times organizations end up being victimized by the latest fad in planning / decision making methodology that the consultancy has picked up.

There are quite a number of such fads—SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Sociology-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL analysis (Environment, Political, Infomatic, Social, Technological, Economic, and Legal)

Each of these acronyms and their corresponding methodologies was developed to solve a particular planning problem in a particular context. The wholesale, blind application of any of these techniques is thoughtless at best and possibly counterproductive at worse. Any decision making methodology needs to be tailored to each individual situation.

No matter what the analysis technique(s), decision-making comes down to the same basic steps. I am partial to Tim Hurson’s book, Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking, which highlights steps some of which are often overlooked.

The steps in his book are outlined below:

1. What’s Going On?
2. What’s Success?
3. What’s the Question?
4. Generate Answers.
5. Forge the Solution.
6. Align Resources.

Notice that it is not until step 3 that the “question” is even asked.  It is extremely important to ask the right question and, more often that not, the first question that jumps to mind is not the correct question to answer. Completing the the first two successfully are essential to asking the correct question.

Step six is frequently crucial. Without that step it implies that the solution(s) can be implemented without any changes or modification of existing budgets, which may be doubtful.

Think about it…

Fast Company recently posted a blog item ( http://www.fastcompany.com/1661130/will-they-stay-or-will-they-go-duex ) by one of their “experts.” The post reports on a worldwide survey of employees by Watson Wyatt.

For anyone paying attention, the survey documents the obvious concerning employee attitudes, “…engagement is down 23% among Core Employees (a Company’s Talent). Conference Board survey: 55% of Employees are dissatisfied and 60% are thinking about leaving their companies as the economy improves.”

I have nothing against employee surveys. I do them myself. However, the article goes on to recommend strategies to be implemented which are stupid, not based upon research of what does work, and may be nothing more than self-serving nonsense that continues to float around as if it were all true.

The recommendations for implementation, in brief, are:

1. Act now and stop Employees from even looking for a new job!
2. Address compensation issues now!
3. Eliminate non-productive Employees!
4. Increase Effective Communication!
5. More Employee Control = More Employee Commitment & Loyalty!
6. Create Career Development Plans!
7. Thank Employees for doing a good job!
8. Celebrate the Company’s successes!

For openers, you can’t stop people from looking for another job. You can only do things which have objectively been shown to reduce turnover. Also, other research has consistently shown that money is no longer the incentive it once was for today’s workers.

Eliminating non-productive workers is easier to say than do. And, it may just be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is a reason people remain non-productive after all the carrot and stick management most companies use. Eliminating those people does not solve the real management problem that made those folks that way in the first place.

Number 4 is interesting. Communication is a good thing. But, many managers are promoted as a reward for good technical work. Then they are ill-equipped to communicate at the level required. Teaching, training, and coaching managers to how to communicate is a good start.

More Employee Control ≠ More Employee Commitment & Loyalty! There are limits to the control employees can have. While it is true that worker control in the job is a key component to job satisfaction and retention, there are many more issues that have been shown to be equally important.

Career plans? What century is this?

Thanking people is just good manners, not strategy or tactics.

Did someone say “Celebration?” That is a good thing too.