A quick search for the word engagement yields more than 6 million websites, thousands of books, and myriad articles. Yet, a Gallup poll showed that more than 71% of American employees are disengaged at their jobs, indicating that although most companies recognize employee engagement as important, many still struggle to understand it. Dr. Robert Hogan discusses the concept of engagement, work-life balance, and workaholics in this Q&A.

Q: What is engagement?
A: Engagement refers to how employees perceive their jobs and employers. It is an ideal state rarely fully achieved. It is the opposite of alienation. When employees are engaged, they like their jobs, they work hard at their jobs, they take initiative, and they show loyalty. When employees are alienated, they hate their jobs, they don’t work very hard, they never take initiative or show loyalty. The data are perfectly clear, when employees are engaged, their employers make more money. And engagement is easy to measure.

Q: What are some of the hallmarks of an engaged employee?
A: Positive attitudes, hard work, loyalty, low absenteeism, low turnover, high productivity, and high customer service ratings.

Q: Most people have 24/7 access to their phones and email accounts. Although that gives most people added freedom, it also comes with the expectation of constant availability. Do you think this blurring of the line between work life and family/home life makes people more engaged or less engaged at their job?
A: You have the question backwards. How people react to constant availability depends on how engaged they are. The more engaged an employee, the more he or she will be willing to bring work into their family/home life.

Q: How would you define a workaholic in the typical negative context? Are there certain characteristics or derailers that you would see in a typical workaholic?
A: A workaholic is someone who works constantly to defend him or herself against anxiety and the threat of being criticized or rejected. There is neurotic propulsion to their work efforts – they are driven, rigid, inflexible, and afraid of innovation or change.

Q: What is the difference between a workaholic and an engaged workaholic? What kind of characteristics are you likely to see in an engaged workaholic?
A: For a workaholic, engagement would be therapeutic. Engaged people find their work meaningful. A big problem for workaholics is that they are seeking meaning and purpose and can’t find it. An engaged workaholic would be a terrific employee.

Q: What are the different reasons these two types of people are likely to burn out?
A: A disengaged workaholic is already burnt out. They live in a state of psychological burn out. Workaholics are fragile by definition. An engaged workaholic will burn out by taking on too much work.

Q: How can companies build engagement in their workforce and prevent burnout?
A: First, assess the current level of engagement to identify pockets of alienation. Second, fire the managers who run the operations that are alienated. Third, train the remaining managers on how to be good managers. Fourth, follow up with successive assessments of employee engagement. Fifth, some employees are impossible to engage, so don’t hire any more of them.

Socioanalytic theory draws on key ideas of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and George Herbert Mead to explain why people act as they do. All three writers noted that humans evolved as group living animals; this suggests that the big problems in life concern: 

• Getting along with other people
• Gaining status and power
• Understanding one’s place in the world

In modern life, individual differences in the ability to solve these three problems translate into individual differences in career success. Successful people live longer and healthier lives and are better able to care for their dependents – and that is the definition of fitness in biology.  Thus, Socioanalytic theory is about career success. 

Socioanalytic theory defines personality from two perspectives: Identity and Reputation.  Identity concerns who you think you are; reputation concerns who we think you are.  Research on identity has produced few useful generalizations; in contrast, research on reputation has been highly productive; e.g., the Five-Factor Model – a taxonomy of reputation – is a useful way to organize personality research findings. Past behavior predicts future behavior; reputation is a summary of past behavior; thus reputation is the best possible data source for predicting future behavior. 

Socioanalytic theory focuses research in four broad areas: 

1. Personality and job or occupational performance
2. Personality and leadership effectiveness
3. Personality and managerial incompetence
4. Personality and effective team performance (team research historically ignored effectiveness)

Occupational performance, leadership effectiveness, and managerial incompetence can be predicted with valid personality measures. Team effectiveness depends on putting the right people (defined by personality) in the right positions (defined by team role). 

Socioanalytic theory argues that social skill is the key to career success – because social skill translates identity into reputation. Socioanalytic theory also maintains that feedback from valid personality assessment can create strategic self-awareness which allows ambitious people to maximize their career potential and minimize their issues.

Leadership training is a big industry. It is estimated that businesses spent approximately $60 billion on such training in 2011. This raises two questions.

1. Why is so much money spent on leadership training?
2. Is the money well spent?

Leadership training is more about showing respect to certain employees than it is about improving their leadership performance. Being sent to a leadership training course seems to be more of a perk than a response to a perceived need. As to whether the money is well spent, the answer is, “Who knows?” The literature regarding the evaluation of leadership training is sparse, and that is no accident. 

In the absence of empirical data, the issue of leadership trainability can be analyzed logically. Leadership is typically defined in terms of the people in charge. This is the place holder theory of leadership. Because, in most organizations, people are promoted into leadership positions primarily based on politics and only sometimes based on demonstrated leadership, the lessons learned from a study of leadership concern how to climb a hierarchy, not how to run an organization. Moreover, defining leadership in terms of place holder theories is the reason there is so much variability in leadership training curricula. 

Drawing on the study of human origins, Van Vugt, Hogan, and Kaiser propose that leadership is a resource for a group, not a source of privilege for incumbents; in this view, leadership concerns building and maintaining a team that can outperform the competition. Leadership should be defined and evaluated in terms of the performance of the followers; in business this performance is usually specified in terms of profitability. A person can rapidly climb the hierarchy of an organization while ruining the teams he/she leads—and still be called a leader—but a person who leads a team to victory is, in fact, a leader. 

Leadership is a skilled performance. Leadership performance involves building a team by creating team member engagement. A person must behave so as to be perceived by the team members as having:

• Integrity
• Good judgment
• Competence in the activity in which the team is engaged
• An attractive vision for the future of the team

How do potential leaders persuade their teams that they have integrity, good judgment, competence, and an attractive vision? They do this by putting on a consistent and credible performance that displays probity and astute decision making, demonstrates competence, and explains the vision. However, team members will watch closely for signs that potential leaders lack these characteristics and every lie, bad decision, operational oopsie, and sign of self-serving behavior will undermine their claim to legitimate leadership and alienate the team.

A major factor in the development of any talent concerns coachability – it is the one thing that all professional athletes and good leaders have in common. Coachability can be conceptualized in terms of two components: (1) a desire to improve one’s performance; and (2) being responsive to critical feedback.

Leadership training should follow from one’s theory of leadership. The place holder theory of leadership suggests that we should train people to lie and steal ideas, to bully and humiliate subordinates, or to plunder and bankrupt organizations. In contrast, the team builder theory of leadership suggests we should train people to act with integrity, exercise good judgment, become experts in the business, and be able to persuade the team that their goals are worthy. This analysis also suggests that training money is best spent on people who have talent for leadership and are coachable.

Armies with the best soldiers usually win wars, and sports teams with the best athletes usually win championships. Everyone knows how important it is to pick the right people for a team, yet this is an area where leaders woefully fall short. Far too often team members are selected because of empire building and politics rather than skills and experience. A simple way to determine whether a team or group is staffed properly is for leaders to ask themselves these five right questions:

• Does the team have the right number of people?
• Does the team have the right structure?
• Do team members have the right skills?
• Are team members in the right roles?
• Are people on the team for the right reasons?

Overly inclusive or empire building leaders often make the mistake of having too many people on a team, which has a negative impact on team efficiency and effectiveness. Many leaders also make the mistake of organizing their teams around their favorites rather than letting the nature of the work drive team structure. Sometimes, members do not have the right skills or are not in the right roles, which also has a negative impact on the team’s ability to win. Team performance usually suffers whenever anyone is on the team solely because of favoritism or political expedience.

Although leaders can ask themselves the five right questions at any time, it is best to do this after team context and goals have been determined, as these are critical determinants of team talent. Leaders who answer these questions before team context and goals are set are usually just making rationalizations for their favorites.

By Gordon Curphy
Curphy Consulting Corporation
Guest blogger and co-author of The Rocket Model

Perhaps one of the most overlooked yet most important actions of team functioning is setting team goals. Far too many teams have  poorly defined goals or none at all. The goals of a group or team should determine:

• Size, skill requirements, roles and responsibilities (Talent)
• How often it meets, makes decisions and communicates (Norms)
• The level of engagement needed (Buy-In)
• Resource needs (Power)
• Espirit de corps and conflict resolution (Morale)
• How to win (Results)

Team and group goals define what is to be accomplished, when it needs to be accomplished, and how to know when it is accomplished. Therefore leaders must spend time developing well-defined goals and metrics for their groups and teams if they want to succeed.

Goals also determine whether members operate as a group or a team. If members do not work together, or share common identities or fates, then they need to operate as a group. Conversely, they may need to operate as a team if the members’ fates are tied to the accomplishment of the same goal and collaboration is necessary for success. Having well-defined goals, metrics, and benchmarks will improve both team and group performance because everyone will know what is required. 

There are several other aspects of team goals worth noting. First, team goals drive team behavior; individual goals drive individual behavior. Leaders should not expect direct reports to work collaboratively if all the goals and rewards are based on individual performance. Second, team goals should be measurable and include a mix of leading and lagging indicators. Finally, team goals also need to include both internal and external benchmarks. Teams that only measure themselves against past performance may look like they are winning all the battles but, in fact, may be losing the war with competitors.

By Gordon Curphy
Curphy Consulting Corporation
Guest blogger and co-author of The Rocket Model

Every group and team operates in a specific context. The situation faced by a U.S. Navy SEAL team in Afghanistan is different from that faced by a team drilling for gas in North Dakota. Context is interesting because (a) it is very complicated and (b) existing research is not very helpful in telling us how context affects team success. Yet, contextual factors critically impact the success or failure of a team. The extent to which leaders can control  situational factors affecting their teams and groups varies greatly. Some situational factors can be directly influenced, others can be influenced only indirectly, and many cannot be controlled at all. Because contextual factors have a profound impact on group dynamics, getting team member alignment on these factors is a critical responsibility for leaders. All too often team members have different assumptions about customers, suppliers, or competitors.  Their well-intended, but misaligned, actions can inadvertently destroy team morale and sub-optimize team efficiency and effectiveness.

One noteworthy aspect of team context is the implicit nature of team member assumptions—team members rarely if ever articulate their assumptions about key stakeholders. In order to make the implicit more explicit, team members should work together to identify the key constituencies that affect the team. These entities might include key customers, competitors, other teams, regulatory agencies, vendors, the parent organization, etc. Team members should then discuss and agree on the top three to five assumptions they have for each constituency. Gaining alignment on team context makes it much easier to determine the purpose and key goals for the team;  reviewing team assumptions about key constituencies can also help new members get integrated into the team more quickly. 

By Gordon Curphy
Curphy Consulting Corporation
Guest blogger and co-author of The Rocket Model

Leadership is one of the most important topics in the social, behavioral, and organizational sciences. When good leadership prevails, organizations and people prosper. Bad leadership is almost always accompanied by inevitable bankruptcies, corporate corruption, and business disasters. Yet, according to Dr. Robert Hogan, the keys to effective leadership are still largely misunderstood. In the following interview, Hogan, answers several common questions regarding effective leadership.

What is leadership?
Leadership is not being in charge; many people who are in charge of teams and organizations are either lucky or are good politicians and have no talent for leadership. Leadership should be defined as the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team that bests the competition. In turn, leadership should be evaluated in relation to the performance of the team.

What influences good leadership?
Being able to evaluate the talents of the team members to be sure the right people are on the team, the wrong people are off the team, and the right people are in the right positions. Good leadership also involves developing a good strategy for the team, so that it can outperform the competition.

How can we measure corporate leadership?
The best way to measure leadership in corporations is in terms of the performance of the team or unit of which the leader is in charge. The second best way to measure leadership is to ask the members of the team to evaluate the performance of their leader. Subordinates’ evaluations of leaders are a good proxy or substitute for measures of overall team performance.

How can we identify and grow corporate leaders?
The wrong way to identify leaders is to ask the senior people which junior leaders they like. The typical high potential program is more about politics than talent. The quickest, most cost effective and most objective way to identify and grow leaders is by using a systematic assessment process. Well-validated assessments can be used to identify leadership potential and to give the potential leaders feedback regarding their strengths and developmental needs.

Are men better leaders than women?
Men are not better leaders than women. There are as many incompetent male leaders as there are incompetent female leaders. When women are good, they are just as good as men; when they are bad, they are just as bad as men.

Is there any shift in managing younger leaders? Are their values different from their bosses?
Good values are good for business; bad values are bad for business. Some older people have good values, some have bad values. Some younger people have good values, some have bad values. Working hard and wanting to do a good job is important for young people and older people. Everyone, young and old, needs to understand customer service. Integrity is as important for younger people as it is for older people. Being a good colleague and good team player is as important for younger workers as it is for older workers. The strange haircuts, tattoos, and clothing styles that young people prefer are irrelevant to job performance.

What is leadership failure?
If a leader gets fired, that is failure. If the team performs poorly, that is failure. If the team members hate their leader and refuse to work for him/her, that is failure. If the team has high rates of absenteeism, turnover, and accidents, and low levels of productivity and morale, and poor ratings for customer service, that is failure.

What causes leadership failure?
Leadership failure results from a leader being unable to build and maintain a high performing team. This is usually because the leader: (a) is untrustworthy; (b) makes bad decisions; (c) lacks competence in and knowledge of the business; (d) has no vision for the team. Leaders who lie, steal, cheat, play favorites, bully their subordinates, and are unable to control their emotions are usually seen as untrustworthy, the most important factor contributing to leadership failure.

Can leadership failure be prevented?
The best way to prevent leadership failure is to promote people into leadership positions who have some talent for leadership in the first place. The best way to evaluate leadership potential is to ask people who have worked for the person in question. The most cost-effective, quickest, and most objective way to evaluate leadership potential is with well validated psychological assessments.

From casual Fridays to corporate retreats, companies spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop passionate, committed employees. Yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, more than 71% of employed adults aren’t engaged at work.

In the following Q&A, Dr. Robert Hogan discusses why companies are getting it wrong, and what they can do to improve engagement.

What is engagement?

Employee engagement is a psychological state that is associated with behaviors beneficial to an organization. The psychological opposite of engagement is alienation.

Engagement has four components:
1.    Employees see their job as consistent with their self image – they like themselves when they are at their job;
2.    Employees like the job itself;
3.    Employees work hard at their job;
4.    The job gives employees a sense of meaning and purpose.

Engagement is an ideal state that is rarely ever fully realized.

Why does engagement matter for (a) individuals and (b) companies?

When employees are engaged, they work hard and take pride in their jobs. When they are alienated, they won’t and don’t.

When employees are engaged, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go down, and productivity and customer satisfaction go up. When employees are alienated, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go up, and productivity and customer satisfaction go down.

Measures of engagement are correlated with every important organizational outcome, at both the individual and team level.

A recent Gallup report indicated that 71% of employees in America aren’t engaged at work. How did engagement become such a widespread problem?

Engagement reflects how employees are treated by their immediate bosses. Because 60% to 70% of existing managers don’t understand leadership, they alienate their direct reports and staff.

What is the impact of managers’ derailers on employee engagement?

The term derailer refers to inappropriate interpersonal behavior; managers’ derailers are the principal cause of employee alienation.

Do some derailers have a greater impact on engagement than others?

The 11 derailers identified by the HDS are all associated with different forms of poor leadership, but they all have the effect of destroying employees’ trust in their boss, which then leads to alienation.

How does culture affect engagement?

Cultures that encourage trust in leadership and employee empowerment create engagement; cultures that focus exclusively on the bottom line tend to erode engagement.

What can companies do to drive employee engagement?

There are three steps to driving engagement:
1.    Conduct an engagement survey to determine where things are.
2.    Identify the managers who are killing engagement and give them some training.
3.    Tell the managers who are killing engagement that they will be evaluated in terms of their ability to create engagement.

 

There is an important source of irrationality in organizational life that seems largely to have been overlooked, but is worth considering more carefully. Consider the following examples.

 

1. I-O psychologists know how to select personnel – they know how to distinguish between people with talent for certain jobs and people who are sure to fail. Hugo Munsterberg first outlined the principles of selection in studies of Boston street car conductors and ferry boat captains at Harvard before WWI. These selection principles are valid for predicting performance in every job we have studied, from janitor to CEO. Moreover, the financial consequences of good selection are both significant and well understood – these consequences are nicely described in Dave Jones’ marvelous book, Million Dollar Hire. Nonetheless, those of us in the selection business know that it is hard, even impossible, to persuade organizations to accept our recommendations regarding hiring decisions. As a friend who consults with major professional athletic teams noted, “They won’t listen to us because there is so much money and ego involved.”
2. Since WWII, the United States has built up a huge intelligence capability. The actual size, staffing, and cost of this intelligence apparatus are unknown but almost certainly beyond comprehension. Vast antennae scoop up the world’s internet traffic; satellites circle the earth, photographing secret locations in the most remote locations; real human spies prowl the major cites of the world and report their clandestine discoveries constantly. Nonetheless, to the consternation of intelligence professionals, no significant foreign policy decision or intervention has ever been made on the basis of verified intelligence. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had nothing to do with intelligence; a former chief counter terrorism advisor to the National Security Council believes that when George Bush came into office in 2000, he had already decided to invade Iraq. His administration selectively used intelligence data to support their already formed decision. This is not an unusual example.
3. Herman Kahn invented modern, scenario-based strategic planning for the military while he was at the Rand Corporation in the 1950s. Pierre Wack, an imaginative French oil industrialist, introduced scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell in London in the 1970s. Shell is widely regarded as having invented strategic planning for business, and believed to have had the most sophisticated strategic planning department in business for years. However, external reviewers conclude that senior management at Shell never used the input from this group to make a significant business decision. Senior managers at Shell from that period report that the planning group was “too academic.” Other business analysts suggest that the suggestions from the planning group were indeed state of the art, but the senior leadership team at Shell refused to implement them.
4. Among well regarded economists at the best universities in the world, there is virtually unanimous consensus regarding the measures needed to revive a modern industrial economy that has fallen into a recession. Economists know how to fix broken economies. Nonetheless, across North America and Europe today, we see politicians making economic policy based primarily on their needs for re-election. North American and European politicians refuse to pay attention to the hard earned lessons of serious researchers.

Here we have four examples of an important theme in organizational life. It concerns the fact that the people who run organizations refuse to attend to the knowledge of competent researchers. I can think of many more examples of this trend, but the point should be clear. The next question concerns how to interpret the trend. In principle, this topic belongs to organizational researchers. Organizational theory is largely derived from structural sociology, where the most important causal or explanatory variables exist “out there” in the environment – variables like culture, climate, social class, etc. – and these unseen forces somehow determine the behavior of organizational actors.

I have long proposed a reductionist view which maintains that every important generalization one can make about organizational life – for example, silos are inevitable – can be reduced to, or explained in terms of, personality psychology or “human nature.” And the trends I described above are another example.

John Holland developed a theory of vocational types – the so-called RIASEC model – which he used to study vocational choice. It is a theory of personality types, and it maintains that there are a finite number of types of people (6 really) who think about and solve problems in characteristic and distinctive ways. They also have characteristic interests and values, such that opposite types don’t understand or much like one another. And therein lays the explanation for the theme described above. Enterprising (E) types are politicians – aggressive, action oriented, extraverted, impulsive, risk-seeking, and blame avoiding. These are the people found at the tops of organizations. Investigative (I) types are researchers – reflective, ruminative, risk averse, slow acting, and analytical. These are the people who are attracted to careers in research. E types need I types for ideas; I types need E types for funding. Successful organizations need E types for political leadership, they need I types for leadership in matters of innovation and intellectual property leadership. 

The two types don’t like one another, don’t understand one another, and communicate poorly. The result is that I types are usually unable to sell their research to the E types, and E types prefer to make intuitive rather than data-based decisions. Unless organizations recognize this problem and self-consciously try to deal with it, anti-intellectual decision making will continue to dominate public and business life. Organizations that recognize the problem are usually organizations founded by scientists and engineers (Google) and it becomes a source of competitive advantage.