Engagement is a contact sport

Grant Leboff: Brian, in the book you talk about high performance and the importance of engagement in a high performance organization. Engagement's one of those things, I always find everyone talks about the importance of it but very few business do it really well. How do you engage in a meaningful way to make it really work.

Brian MacNeice: We have a phrase that we use which is that engagement is a contact sport. We're very clear that real engagement is about really getting down, deep and dirty with people and creating the relationships where you can do that. I'm quite cynical about some of the engagement initiatives that I see, particularly in large corporates. You get a lot of people who invest and awful lot of time in carrying out engagement surveys with their staff and even the concept of that is interesting to me. If I want to know if my staff are engaged why don't I just go and talk to them and ask them. The remoteness of doing it in an online survey just almost, for me, seems paradoxical. The examples that we've seen in some of the organizations that we've studied is where engagement is treated as something that is ... It starts at the very top with leadership, but it's a real genuine conversation that happens at multiple levels across the organization: Leaders, managers with staff. Staff with customers. The organization with its suppliers.

There's a story that we tell in the book about the St Louis Cardinals for example, where they have an usher meeting at the start of every game. The ushers get together for 15 minutes. I assumed they would talk about health and safety requirements in the stadium and, "How do we make sure people are safe and secure in the stadium?" What they actually talk about is, "Who're we playing tonight," and, "How do we think we're gonna go?" I was intrigued and I asked them, "Why do you include that in your briefing for the ushers?" When I followed some of the ushers when the stadium opened I saw the types of conversations that the ushers were then having with the fans as they came into the stadium. "Hey, we're playing the Brewer's tonight and their pitcher isn't going very well. We're gonna get on his back a bit and ramp up the pressure."

Then I got it. That's real engagement. It's facilitated by making sure that people are enabled to have those genuine types of conversation. It's not because they filled out a survey or that they said, "We're going to engagement better." It's because they actually started engaging in those conversations. For me for the currency of engagement is contact. The closer contact you have with people the more likely it is that you'll be engagement.

Grant Leboff: What's interesting, you say it starts at the top, it starts with the leaders.

Brian MacNeice: Yeah.

Grant Leboff: What that says in a high performance organization, leaders don't just stay in their offices and send out memorandums and messages. They get down. They get speaking to staff. They get walking around. They get engaging. It fosters from there. Is that behavior that you witnessed?

Brian MacNeice: Yeah, absolutely, 100%. The best leaders for me are the most authentic leaders. The authentic leaders are people who really know their staff and who invest time in getting to know them, getting to know what they're doing, show a real interest in the roles that they're playing, and are very visible within the organization. Again if I go back to the St Louis Cardinals, they extend that way beyond the organization itself. To run the operation that they run, they rely on suppliers. For example in Busch Stadium, they've got a company that manage all the food and beverage. The last time they won the World Series, they have a ring ceremony for the staff that work for the Cardinals. The people from the third party service providers that manage the food and beverages, they were included in the ring ceremony as well. Why? Because you're an extension of our organization. That's another example of how really good organizations engage in a very different way to many organizations that you see.

The other key thing for me about engagement is, you must link engagement to performance, not just keeping people happy. It's not about keeping people happy. It's about enabling them to be able to perform in the role that you're asking them to perform. The more that you link engagement efforts to enabling performance, the more likely it is that you will find you have strongly engaged staff. Strongly engaged staff perform better. It's a virtuous circle. It helps itself. The investment that leaders make in engagement pays off in multiples but don't do it in a remote way, do it in a very real authentic way.

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