I started my time with them by asking half the group of 400 to think about a job that they had loved. It could be their current job or a part-time job they had way back in college.  Then list what made it such a great job.

I asked the other half the room to think about a job that they hated. (To illustrate my point, I told them about a good friend who once described his job as, “an acid bath.”)  Then I asked them to list what made the job so bad.

The people who described jobs they hated came up with a ghastly list. No need to depress you, so I won’t list those items here.

But the other group identified things like: the work mattered. I knew what to do. My work was respected. My boss knew when to lead and when to get out of the way.  I worked with great people. I had the tools to do the work.

Perhaps we should alert the media! I can picture cub reporter, Jimmy Olson, running into Perry White’s office yelling, “Boss, I’ve got a story here that will break this town wide open. Here’s what really motivates people.”  OK, so I know this is not late-breaking news. We’ve known that these are the things that motivate and engage people for decades, well before the term employee engagement ever entered our vocabulary.  And yet, that list holds the key, if we only looked down and saw that it had been in our hands all along.

My advice to my client was turn to what you know and use that as a guide. You don’t need a new incentive program, or motivational speakers, slogans, or posters of kittens grasping branches extolling you to “hang in there, baby.”  Let your experience be your guide when it comes to employee engagement

- Rick

They do what most of the books fail to do — they look at the underlying reasons why customer service fails and succeeds. (Too often these books just focus on the poor schlub in the call center and miss the reasons why customer service is so bad.)

Recently I purchased a new horn. I play a valve trombone (an unusual instrument) and its hard to find one that plays like it should. People in some online chat rooms kept recommending Kanstul. I sent e-mails to two dealers who carried Kanstul horns with a couple of technical questions.

BTW, I was ready to buy.  When I didn’t get a response to my e-mails, I called one of the dealers. If they could answer the questions and if they had one in stock I was ready to fly 750 miles to try it out — and then buy it on the spot. (You get the picture. I was the type of customer that salespeople salivate to get.)

Customer service asked, “How do you spell Kanstul?” I knew this was not going to be a good call. The rep pulled up the same page as I was looking at and said, “It looks like  a really good horn.” Sorry, but you can’t tell a Stradivarius from a K-Mart violin based on a photo.  I asked, “Do you have one in stock. I will fly out and try the horn.”

He said, “Sorry, but we are located across the US from the retailer and they don’t give us their phone number.” Really!  They should have read Chip and John’s book.

I called the factory and talked to one of the head people. He answered my questions and then told me about a retailer that had customized their horn for a few people and had actually improved it.  Wow. So I called Steve Ferguson at Horn Guys (I had purchased a few smaller items from him over the years and liked him, although to this day I have never met him.) He told me about what he had done to the horn and offered to send me a prototype to try. I got it. Tried it. And ordered a horn. (It is a great horn, by the way.)

Robery Kegan and Lisa Lahey found this immunity works against our best-efforts to follow through on plans.

Kegan and Lahey’s work dovetails nicely with Pfeffer and Sutton’s knowing-doing gap. In their book, Immunity to Change, they identify hidden commitments that get in the way of our ability to work on our goals. Weight loss is a good example of this. Tabloids give us new diets every week. We know that human physiology hasn’t changed since last Thursday, but we still hope that there might be some new finding that makes losing weight easy. These quick-fix solutions mask a deeper problem and that’s our built-in immunity to change. Even though we say we want to lose X pounds, we have an equally strong commitment to a way of eating and living that works against this goal. Only when we dig deep and find other (maybe unconscious) goals can we even think about losing weight. For example, I don’t want to give up pancakes, beer, sundaes, burgers, and pork rinds (just to pick a hypothetical example).

Same thing applies in organizational change. A leader may say that he wants to get people involved in planning a major new project, but he also wants to keep control over what happens.

Although they found organizations that did turn knowledge into action, more often they found that, “Other organizations composed of intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, nice people, fail to translate their knowledge about organizational performance into action. It is almost as if there were some kind of brain vacuum in those firms that sucks the wisdom and insight out of their people.” The Knowing Doing Gap, page 6).

And they point out they in most cases it is not the people who are at fault.

I just did an Amazon search on “change management” and got 1344 hits. With all this knowledge, why don’t we do better?

We’ve got more theories and four-square consulting models than we need. Somewhere, there is a denuded forest with a placard that reads, “These trees died happily so that millions of pages of books, articles, assessment tools, and printouts of PowerPoint slides on change management could enter large organizations and rest comfortably as shelfware.”

In my own work with clients, many (maybe most) know what it takes to lead change well. And yet, something gets in the way.

It’s like there is a secret society of people who lead change and all members must agree to abide by The Big Book of Rules for Leading Change.  Here are a couple.

Never, but never, allow emotions into meetings. It is a sign of weakness. If people react emotionally to a change something must be wrong with them. As the comedian Emo Philips said, “real men don’t have souls.”

Whatever idea you come up with is good (because you are the leader after all and you grew up in a generation where your parents told you could do no wrong), therefore others better get with the program and find out where you hid that cheese today.

The Mad Hatter got it right when he said, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date. No time to say hello, good-by, I’m late, I’m late.” Translation: no time to get people involved.

And this list could go on. Of course, most leaders would scoff at that list, but when you watch them (and us) in action, those rules sure look like they are alive and well, don’t they?

You can also access their free e-book at the Change Management Open Source Project as well.