In Great Company Page 3
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MAXIMIZING THE EC EQUATION
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My professional quest to create emotional connectedness coincides with my personal passion for drumming. I have played drums professionally and continue to play in a band. As is true for all lifelong musicians, music is part of what defines me as a person. I crave the creative outlet and appreciate the way that music inspires people to come together to connect around the art. After 9/11, for example, I was in New York earning my master’s degree in organizational leadership at Columbia University. At the time, it did not require any special insight to understand why so many of us in the city and across the country felt bereft and alone in our grief and loss. As a way to connect with others and exchange emotional support, I created and facilitated a campus drum circle that suddenly became popular around New York City. It was transformative for me to see how creating an emotional connection with other drummers based on shared values and interests can align and motivate people in a very positive way.
I look at drumming as a tool that helps people shed the exterior veneers that get in the way of connecting with each other on an emotional level. Instead of constantly striving or comparing accomplishments (how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, if you own a vacation home, and so on), we are all the same in the context of a drum circle. We all become drummers. Today I also volunteer as a drummer for nonprofit and educational events as a way to connect kids to learning opportunities and inspire them to come together to celebrate their uniqueness. For me, drumming connects me to the audience and my fellow musicians in a way that little else does. And I am always searching for ways to funnel that advantage into organizations as a coach and organizational psychologist. It is no surprise to me, then, that emotional connectedness is the secret sauce that makes In Great Company sustainable as a management model.
EC is effective and enduring because it provides people with innate benefits that they need to feel complete, connected, and uber-motivated to perform at their very best. I will mention these benefits in this chapter, in part to show how they yield equally pertinent payback for individuals and organizations.
As a part of a mutually reinforcing dynamic, it’s important to understand that emotional connectedness is both reciprocal and cumulative. It is reciprocal because organizations receive employee loyalty, intense initiative, and goal alignment in exchange for the effort they invest in the approach. Likewise, it is cumulative because the more EC you create among employees, the better the benefits. For example, the full model has five prescriptive elements (examined in Chapters 3 through 7). Each creates and deepens connections between employees and their workplace and motivates people to succeed. Yet, to achieve the In Great Company ideal, organizations need to pursue the prescriptions that pertain to all five elements of the model.
Benefits of Emotional Connectedness
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With emotional connectedness as the benefit, the payback is well worth the investment in time and effort. Figure 1.1 lists the specific benefits you can expect.
FIGURE 1.1
EC Fulfills Intrinsic Needs
As mentioned, EC surpasses the typical goals for employee engagement that organizations aspire to achieve. In fact, Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs, the theory of psychological health that ranks the innate drivers of self-actualization, mentions a sense of belonging as a basic element that motivates human behavior, just above food, shelter, and safety.1 Numerous recent studies, as well, show that EC is a prerequisite that people need to thrive. It improves physical health, for example, with one study showing that social and emotional connectedness increases longevity.2 Conversely, numerous studies report that the lack of social and emotional support can elevate the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.3
Emotional connectedness has a similarly positive impact on psychological well-being and mental health. For instance, Emma Seppälä of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, and the author of The Happiness Track, wrote, “People who feel more connected to others have lower levels of anxiety and depression. Moreover, studies show they also have higher self-esteem, greater empathy for others, are more trusting and cooperative and, as a consequence, others are more open to trusting and cooperating with them.”4
Dr. Seppälä went on to explain: “Social connectedness generates a positive feedback loop of social, emotional, and physical well-being.”5
While all of this rigorous research is validating, it is arguably easy to believe, based on personal experience, that emotional support and healthy social connections have vital business benefits. Most of us crave emotional connectedness—in part because our lives depend on it. And the rewards for connecting employee health and well-being to emotional connectedness are significant. According to a survey of 361 companies and 3,822 employees, nearly 87.4 percent of respondents said that wellness positively affected work culture, and 88 percent described access to health and wellness programs as an important factor for defining an employer of choice.6
The few organizations today that do manage to factor the intrinsic needs of employees into their value proposition—Barry- Wehmiller and Wegmans are two that we will look at in detail in the chapters that follow—have benefited in numerous ways from employee retention and increased productivity to positive PR with customers and a strong corporate culture. If nothing else, it is important to know that the In Great Company approach offers a way to build basic human experience into business, and it does so in part because without that, success and progress are impossible to achieve.
EC Makes Emotional Intelligence More Actionable
Emotional intelligence is arguably one of the most important and transformative leadership ideas in recent history. First introduced into the academic literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s, psychology professors Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the concept as a type of social intelligence, separate from general intelligence. According to them, emotional intelligence (EI) “includes the ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one’s own and others’ emotions and the ability to use this information as a guide to thinking and behavior. That is, individuals high in emotional intelligence pay attention to, use, understand, and manage emotions.”7
In 1990, the American psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized emotional intelligence as part of leadership practice in an article for Harvard Business Review and later in several popular books. In his work, Goleman outlined five domains of EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy, and social skills.8 Work on emotional intelligence by Goleman and others was both relevant to leadership practice and also groundbreaking in the leadership lexicon because it was among the first ideas to integrate and synthesize psychology and cognitive science as part of management theory. The famous and highly respected Jack Welch, who was passionate about developing leaders at GE during his heyday as CEO, has said, “Emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.”9
Yet, emotional intelligence has also been criticized for being a “softer side” management idea (right brain theory) and therefore less relevant in strategy, operations, and analytical or logic-based management areas that are commonly associated with driving business results.
Inasmuch as EI theory is still evolving, I would argue that emotional connectedness takes the landmark idea of emotional intelligence further by using new research to identify tangible takeaways and building additional actionable practices around it. Like EI, emotional connectedness is measurable. But unlike EI, emotional connectedness is in no way fixed as part of one’s natural personality, ability, or intelligence. Emotional intelligence can be honed and practiced, to be sure, but it is arguably as much about nature as nurture. In contrast, emotional connectedness is achieved by putting five specific elements into practice. EC is more specific than emotional intelligence, and it also serves to br
oaden EI’s applications and frameworks for ongoing practice and measurement. In short, the prescriptions in this book provide additional tools for making EI more actionable and beneficial to enlightened organizations.
Some companies consciously include EI as part of their hiring criteria, and many more attempt to measure emotional intelligence in their performance management systems. The benefits are clear—research shows that 90 percent of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions.10 Using a focused, practical approach, the In Great Company model offers a proactive way to weave emotional connectedness across all aspects of the organization and make it a cultural imperative.
EC Creates Psychological Safety
A few years back, I was brought in to observe a privately owned industrial manufacturing firm that had recently hired new managers to accelerate growth. Having survived the Great Recession in better shape than its competitors, the owners saw a window of opportunity to build the business. The new managers were experienced in the industry and comfortable implementing a growth strategy. They pressed ahead aggressively. Less than a year later, the business was going in the wrong direction—sales had slowed and longtime employees were leaving in waves. When I came in to help diagnose the problem, interviews with employees revealed that the issue had nothing to do with the aggressive strategy shift. Instead, the new leaders had created an environment that one employee aptly called “inhospitable.” They were systematically excluding existing employees from key decisions and creating a climate of fear for “old guard” team leaders. The loss of psychological safety had brought collaboration to a halt, and the whole business was suffering as a result.
It became apparent to me, from this experience and others like it, that organizational imperatives like collaboration and experimentation can be effective only when individuals feel secure enough to cocreate, share ideas, and offer advice without fear of reprisal. This elemental observation correlates with a noted two-year study conducted by Google in 2015 that looked at 250 attributes of teams and found that psychological safety was one of several dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. The company found that the safer team members felt with one another, the more likely they were to admit mistakes, partner, and take on new roles.11 Paul Santagata, head of industry at Google, summed it up like this: “There’s no team without trust.”12
Indeed, psychological safety delivers a positive physiological response in humans, neutralizing the fight-or-flight response that may otherwise occur when we feel vulnerable during interpersonal interactions, freeing us up to contribute fully and openly. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term “psychological safety” in a study published in 1999 and who has pioneered the modern theory and practice associated with this idea, has said that psychological safety brings “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”13 With this, psychological safety yields not only trust but also inclusion and diversity, as more of us are willing to be fully present in groups and express diverse perspectives that others can learn from.
In my work as a coach and organizational psychologist, I have seen what creating an atmosphere of psychological safety can do: markedly improve engagement, allow people to learn and grow, drive creativity and innovation, and even turn failing organizations around. It is that powerful and important.
As an essential part of the In Great Company approach, emotional connectedness serves to embed psychological safety into the fabric of an organization’s practices in active ways while also creating a challenging environment that motivates people to perform. This key dynamic of EC affects people and performance in a positive way, and it is one of the most singularly robust levers for innovation that I have experienced in my career.
EC Drives Discretionary Effort
The fourth positive dynamic created by emotional connectedness is affective commitment. This is where the rubber meets the road, and EC creates meaningful engagement, improves retention, and drives voluntary discretionary effort. In other words, it creates value and drives results.
Defined as an employee’s positive emotional attachment to the organization,14 affective commitment creates a sense of belonging that increases our desire to have an impact, enhances our willingness to pursue shared goals, and elevates our desire to remain with the organization.15 Driven in part by reciprocity, affective commitment is created and elevated when employees believe that the company is committed to their success and well-being. In essence, affective commitment is itself an emotional bond.
The most notable part of affective commitment is what it nurtures. First, it creates an ownership dynamic where employees feel responsible for the success of the business. According to research, having a sense of psychological ownership makes employees more willing to work harder and work on behalf of the organization and its employees. It improves job satisfaction, initiative, and ultimately work performance as well.16 Affective commitment also leads employees to contribute greater “voluntary discretionary effort” and to be willing to go above and beyond what is required or expected. Studies show that the “we are in this together” element of affective commitment makes people “work better, longer and enjoy it more.”17
As an emotional attachment, affective commitment is a result of EC, but it also helps to create it. Because the In Great Company dynamic is about mutual commitment by employees and the organization, it is the reciprocity factor that makes it so powerful and sustainable.
Barriers to Creating a Connection
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With four core benefits hanging in the balance, there must also be corresponding challenges to achieving EC, or (let’s face it) every organization would already be In Great Company.
I will mention how to overcome common challenges in each of the prescriptive chapters that follow. More generally, the big three speed bumps are the same ones that come up again and again in organizational change and transformation efforts: leadership, culture, and structure.
Leadership
Emotional connectedness is an all-in endeavor. The five elements of EC create a type of roadmap for implementation, and every employee needs to be a believer. Yet, it is leaders who are the make-or-break protagonists. Top-down support, sponsorship, and participation can either accelerate or obliterate attempts to make this cultural shift succeed in a sustainable way.
Resistance or simple apathy can come from any level of leadership. Line managers may have competing priorities. Middle managers may set a poor example. C-suite executives might withhold their support, thereby stopping EC in its tracks. The simple solution? Emotional connectedness needs to be a leadership priority.
Culture
As the aphorism goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.18 In other words, EC as part of the In Great Company approach looks amazing on paper, but proper implementation calls for cultural readiness. As mentioned, supportive leadership is a part of this readiness. In addition, the norms and attitudes that define an organization must be open to emotional connectedness or able to change.
Cultural compatibility is a sticky wicket because EC always requires some degree of change—and not all organizations are prepared for it. The most common reason companies engage in the difficult work of culture change is because a turnaround is called for—but a better path is to remain ahead of the curve and start before the transformation is necessary.
Structure
The five elements of EC— systemic collaboration, positive future, alignment of values, respect, and killer achievement—are easier to implement when an organization’s structure is open and flexible. While a big part of the In Great Company approach is aimed at incremental changes that deliver adaptability and transparency, the reality is that bureaucratic structures make it more difficult to implement this or any new management approach. Conversely, efficient, flexible organizational structures that are open to empowering people dramatically accelerate implementation efforts.
A New Competitive Advantage
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Managing the emotional culture within your organization may seem novel if not outright unexpected. That is exactly why this practice offers a competitive advantage—because it is innovative and disruptive. With typically grim statistics on “engagement” coming from Gallup and SHRM,19 creating emotional connectedness is an opportunity to think differently and have a positive impact on employee commitment, happiness, and performance.
You will likely see yourself and your colleagues reflected in the dozens of anecdotes and examples contained in this book. These are large organizations and small companies; they are global multinationals and local nonprofits. The common denominator between them all? The human factor. Thanks to advancements in technology and digital infrastructure, we can all connect to each other easily all the time. Yet, that connection is superficial and largely pragmatic. Emotional connectedness puts people In Great Company because it taps into a deeper, more meaningful way of working together and motivating people to perform. It is more effective because it allows people to put their inner selves into their work. In doing so, it leverages the human experiences—something powerful that frequently gets hidden away within organizations. Focusing on EC is a dramatically different way to approach the workplace, and you can expect dramatically better results—results that objectively elevate engagement and make companies more competitive, customer centric, and successful.