Zombie Nation Revisited – Engagement is the Cure!

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Are You in a Zombie Workplace?

Okay, it’s a little dramatic but it also brings to light a growing trend in the business world today.

Crashing economies, cutbacks, layoffs, and uncertainty leads people to become less engaged in the workplace.

Last year, I wrote about a Forbes magazine article that quotes a Gallup survey stating that over 70% of U.S. workers are less engaged in the workplace.

70%!

If that doesn’t shock you, it should! If you are a small business owner with employees, it should also scare you.

Your Business is in Danger

As a business owner, you are especially vulnerable to the consequences of dis-engaged employees. Teams grow divisive; managers treat employees badly; employees treat each other and customers badly; office theft goes up; productivity goes down drastically.

These people come and they go, they do the 9 to 5, they grow through the motions and do the minimum work to get by, and are not fully engaged.

Everyone loses.

LEADERS are to blame.

Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership -John Maxwell

Six Rules of Engagement

If you are a leader in your environment, here’s some things you can do to fix that and help prevent the zombification of yourself or your employees.

KNOW YOUR SELF – Too many times, people don’t realize THEY are the problem. You have probably worked for a leader who blames lazy employees, ethnic, racial, or generational cultures, bad economies, and a myriad of other reasons for why things aren’t going well. If you are a leader and your people aren’t following, YOU are the problem. Fix it.
GROW YOUR SELF – This is how you fix it. You can’t change them, you cannot change things like the economy or anything else beyond your control. What you can do is change YOU. Learn to become more optimistic, learn to develop the characteristics that you are seeking in employees. When I was a manager, I used to brag about how I made a point of hiring people better and smarter than me. That was so wrong. I couldn’t possibly do it. You attract what you are, not what you wish. If YOU grow, you’ll find yourself getting the kind of people you desire.
KNOW YOUR PEOPLE– Connect with them. It’s through relationships that people build trust, respect, and more like they are a part of things when they feel connected with you. When you can answer the three questions everyone asks in virtually ANY kind of relationship, then you can connect and influence them and they will become engaged. The three questions you must answer are:
- Do you CARE for ME?
- Can you HELP ME?
- Can I TRUST YOU?
FOCUS ON THE STRENGTHS – Yours and the people you work with. Focus on how you can best use the strengths they have to compensate for your weaknesses and help accomplish the company’s goals. That’s what a TEAM is all about.
REWARD THE BEHAVIORS YOU WANT – Not a lot of people do this. They spend more time rewarding they don’t like, but you want to spend time rewarding the behaviors you desire. Empower people, trust people, encourage people to accomplish the things you want them to do.
TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION – when necessary; which is not the same as impulsive action. Don’t react impulsively, take the time to think about the appropriate response and then take the action now. People will respect you more for taking considered, decisive immediate action than if you hem and haw or you are impulsive.

What are some ways you have seen organizations engage their employees?

Sing It All You Want, But You Better Show Respect!

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Success Requires People

It’s a fact: no one has achieved any real, lasting success on their own. They have always done it by working with other people.

John Maxwell (Teamwork Makes the Dream Work), Jim Collins (From Good to Great), Ken Blanchard (High Five! The Magic of Working Together) and many others emphasize again and again, both from research and anecdotal evidence, that we are designed to achieve success with and through others. None of us is as smart as all of us.

So if you really want success, you need to work with and through other people.

And that means we need to get along with them.

Respect is the Start to Good Relationships

Respect is crucial to being able to get along with and work effectively with other people.

Herbert Casson once wrote:

“In handling men, there are three feelings that a man must not possess-fear, dislike and contempt. If he is afraid of men he cannot handle them. Neither can he influence them in his favor if he dislikes or scorns them. He must neither cringe nor sneer. He must have both self-respect and respect for others.”

Respect for others means that we truly care for others, we believe in others. We may not always agree with their politics or religion or even their choices, but we care for them and believe in them. Respect means we accept them for what they are now, not as we would hope them to be; even more importantly when they don’t think like we do.

This is the foundation of great marriages, fabulous families, thriving and relevant churches, and productive and effective organizations.

Granting Respect

Many will tell you that respect is earned but it’s not.

[snaptweet]Respect is granted; it is a conscious choice of the respecter to the respected.[/snaptweet]

You can do all the good and positive things in your life you want and there will be some who simply WILL NOT RESPECT YOU.

Does that mean you didn’t earn it?

Not necessarily; they may have simply refused to grant it.

Some will grant respect until you prove unworthy of it, based either on your position or standing or simply because of who they are as opposed to who you are. I tend to fall into this category.

Others require proof that you are worthy of respect and even power, position, or standing or status will not get you their respect until you can demonstrate your worthiness. I have always found this position to be kind of self-serving. I would rather have you prove me wrong for respecting you than spend a lot of time trying to meet an undeclared, usually unreachable, bar to earn my respect.

Self-respect then becomes critical because we can’t possibly respect others unless we respect ourselves. If we don’t measure up, then no one else does either. People who have low self-respect will never really respect others because they see no value in the relationship–because they see no value in themselves. Many who demand you earn their respect fall into this category.

Respect yourself, grant respect to others and you are well on your way to working effectively with others and achieving your dreams.

Keys to apply today:

DEVELOP YOUR SELF-RESPECT – Find the good in yourself. Write a list of what’s good about yourself.
BE A GOOD FINDER – It is easier to like and care for others when you focus on whats good about them.
Pick one person you encounter daily. Write down what you like about that person. Even the most obnoxious have something. If you can’t find anything, then the problem is you need to go back to number 1 because if you can’t find the good in yourself you can’t possibly find the good in others! Call them, write them a note or an email or visit in person and tell them how you appreciate them for those things you like about them.

Three Steps to Creating External Focus

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No Success Without External Focus

Success can be a very elusive thing. It’s daunting, frustrating, it seems to quite often be just out of reach.

We desire success and pursue it, yet somehow success keeps getting away just before we catch it.

mouse seeks a cookie video - success focus

Elusive Success

There is a video on YouTube that was popular for a while and went viral. It shows a mouse attempting to steal a cookie that is twice the size of the mouse and take it back to his hiding place. We can begin to feel like this mouse must have felt as attempt after attempt resulted in failure. This grand prize and yet we can’t bring it home.

Is Success the Focus?

Success can elusive, especially when we focus on success alone.

And that’s the problem.

When we focus simply on being a success, it’s very hard to be a success. Because that’s all it becomes about. Our dreams can make us focus on the inside sometimes, but that’s not what dreams are meant to do.

Our dreams aren’t meant to add value to us, our dreams are meant to add value to other people.

So if you learn to point your dreams and your actions outwardly – if you get an external focus – and learn how to care about other people, learn to focus on other people with your dreams, then you are going to see significantly more success than what you have seen in the past – all by creating an external focus.

When we place our focus on others, we learn to love others. We learn to care for others. We get to know their stories. We get to know their hopes and dreams. We begin to see value in them.

When we see value in people, we are then in a position to add value to them.

By adding value to others, we create value in ourselves. Once that happens, success will follow AS LONG AS WE REMAIN OPEN TO RECEIVING THE VALUE OTHERS WANT TO GIVE US.

But if we focus only on success, it remains out of reach.

Success, you see, is not a goal or a direct result of organized actions. Success is a by-product of our behaviors, attitudes, and actions on behalf of those we have chosen to serve. When we combine the power of our unique gifts and apply them to add value to other people – to create significance in their lives – success is a natural result.

Action Steps

Here’s a few thing to get you started in that direction:

CARE FOR THE PEOPLE YOU ENCOUNTER. Whether you encounter them once in a lifetime or whether you encounter them on a daily basis, learn to care for those people. Learn to connect with them. To find out more about them. To be naturally curious about other people. And from that, you are going to be able to seek to add value to other people to make a difference in their lives.
LISTEN TO PEOPLE. Listen to their concerns, listen to what their dreams are.
SHARE YOUR DREAM WITH THEM. You may be able to build relationships out of that which may seem to be a one-time thing but become lifelong, mutually beneficial relationships. People can’t add value to you unless you open up to them and make yourself vulnerable by sharing your passions and dreams.

If you need help getting started or even continuing your journey, I would love the opportunity to walk along side you. Call me at 321-355-2442 and let’s see how I can help.

How Your Life Gets in the Way of Vision

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Vision and Crisis

It’s a natural thing.

As you go through your daily life, you sometimes lose track of where it is you wanted to go. I do it; highly likely you do too. Also likely that the most successful person you can think of does it as well.

Dreams get lost in the shuffle of daily living. Crises appear, fires need to be put out. People are demanding our immediate attention. Things crowd in and as they say you have trouble seeing the forest through the trees and we just lose track of where it is we wanted to go.

There’s the old joke about the engineers that when you are up to your ears in alligators its hard to remember your initial objective was to drain the swamp.

And so we sometimes let our daily activities get in the way of our goals during the crisis of the moment.

Lead Through Crisis

As I said, it’s only natural and like the saying above, certainly not original. We can easily excuse our lack of focus on our vision away using daily goings-on as a crutch. After all, nobody would blame us, right? You gotta survive, right?

But this is the opportunity for you to step up! The opportunity to come forward and be the leader you were meant to be by bringing that vision back to the forefront!

This is the time to shine!

So here’s a couple of steps you can take to move positively in the direction of keeping your vision in front and getting yourself in place to accomplish those goals.

USE THE UP-DOWN METHOD. Write it down and post it up! Write that vision down on a piece of paper and post it up where you are going to see it on a daily basis. That serves as a daily reminder of what it is you are trying to accomplish.
ASK FOR HELP – FORM A TEAM. Take your strengths and your weaknesses, find people whose strengths compliment your weaknesses. And team together to help accomplish that goal.
SHARE THE VISION OFTEN. If you continually share the vision in words and actions to your team, that helps keep them focused on where it is you want to go.
ADJUST THE PATH AS YOU GO, BUT NOT THE VISION! Things will get in the way and won’t always go the way we want them to go, but we need to keep that vision at the forefront; the final destination of where we want to go.
HELP THE DREAMS OF OTHERS. As you bring team members on, they are going to have dreams of their own. See where your dreams mesh, where there are opportunities to work together for a win-win where everyone accomplishes their dream. You may find it is going on to greater things then you ever imagined possible.

Keeping that vision before you AND your team is critical.

Dissatisfaction and discouragement are not caused by the absence of things but the absence of vision.

Where will you go with your life or career? Anywhere a strong vision takes you.

How Does a Frog Show Discipline?

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Why You Are Stuck

Are you finding that something is holding you back from getting to where you want to go? You know you need to find your place, but don’t seem to be moving any closer to discovering it. Or perhaps you know what you want but can’t seem to make progress towards getting it.

If you are like most people, what you are going to find is holding you back is that you don’t want to do the things that you MUST DO in order to move forward. In addition to doing what we LOVE to do, we also have to do many things we DON’T like to do.

It’s Called Discipline.

The word gets a bad rap. We think discipline and we think of visits to the principal’s office leaning with our hands on the desk while a wooden paddle crossed our hindquarters a few times for errant behavior.

Yeah, I’m aging myself with that one. Not that it ever happened to me or you! (right!).

But the word discipline takes it root in instruction and order. Jesus called his followers disciples, because they received instruction, learned order and self-control. We need that in order to move forward and succeed, because it gets us past the barriers of things we don’t want to do or fear doing.

Let me emphasize here: I am as guilty of this as anybody. I will not tell you that I have mastered this. Like you, I am fighting this battle every day.

No Job is Perfect.

I LOVE what I do!

I love the opportunity to get up and talk before groups of people, to share knowledge with people, to help them improve, to help them grow. But there are parts of the job that I don’t particularly care for.

But I have to do them anyway.

Frog Legs? Yeah. But the Whole Frog?

We are all going to have things that we dislike doing, but we are going to have to do them in order to move ahead. Your success comes from doing it anyway; as Brian Tracy says,

You have to eat the frog!

Identify those things that are particularly distasteful or that you dislike and DO THEM ANYWAY!

Zig Ziglar says when we do the things we need to do when we need to do them, the day will come when we can do the things we want to do when we want to do them.

Actions Steps to Success

DO UNPLEASANT THINGS FIRST. Do them before you do anything else. There is a psychological aspect to this. By doing things you don’t like first and getting them out of the way, it provides a relief factor that allows you to be more effective the rest of the day. In addition, any thing else seems pleasant by comparison. It also gets them done.
DO NOTHING ELSE UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THE MUST-DO TASKS! Even if it means you just sit in your chair and stare. Don’t do anything else until you accomplish the things you don’t like to do. This is a tough one but it’s where we learn discipline. If you are faced with the prospect of doing something you don’t like or just sitting there all day staring into space, which are you going to choose? Even if you initially choose staring into space, you will tire of it quickly and break down and do the unpleasant thing. When I was a kid, like many other kids, I didn’t want to eat my vegetables. My parents made it clear I was not leaving the table until I did. I was faced with the prospect of getting it over with and going to watch Batman on TV or just sitting there. It didn’t take me long to break down and do it.
REWARD YOURSELF FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING. You want to provide a positive impact for making the right choices and doing the right thing. It provides motivation and makes doing the things you don’t like to do that much easier. Some argue you should also provide consequences for not doing it. Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week and other books, shared that if he didn’t get things done during the day, he would intentionally wake himself up at 2 a.m. and force himself to work as a consequence. I think simply not doing anything else is consequence enough.

What about you? What do you do to practice discipline and accomplish things you don’t like to do?