Engagement – Page 11 – The Consulting Artist

I’m worried

I’m involved in a really interesting project that combines HR, engagement and communication for a customer. We’re all learning loads from it, we’re loving it and together we’re helping to make work better. And I’m worried.

Increasingly people are saying to me things like “if anyone can fix this, you can” or “you can sort this, you’ve got clout around here”. I leave here soon, and an over reliance on me could mean that the good work everyone has sponsored and been involved with goes to waste if people wrongly associate my departure with the end of this stuff. If the customer believes that staff engagement and employee communication are worthwhile I think it’s important that they act to formalise and resource this position quickly, and ideally before I go so that I might share my knowledge and findings with whoever wants to pick up the baton.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to sustain will be the sense of independence the board has lent me and the sense of ignorance I’ve brought with me. I’ve used these, and my natural curiosity to ask “dumb questions”, the kind of questions people forget to ask, or even worse, assume someone else is dealing with.

Becoming reliant on people like me sucks. I love putting myself out of one piece of work and on to the next one and I hate the dependency model many consultancy firms (particularly the larger ones in my experience), peddle. What do you think? How can companies benefit from the ignorance and independence of consultants and not become reliant on them? Or am I worrying about nothing?

Disengaged

I may be wrong, I often am.

My heart sank with yesterday’s news that the UK Government has launched a taskforce to boost employee engagement. Read that sentence again and tell me it doesn’t reek of despair. However well meaning this taskforce is I shudder when government, any government, starts fiddling with the concept of making work better. There’s a huge industry chuntering out surveys and magic numbers and other guff purporting to be about discretionary effort (that means working harder for no more money). Kevin Ball has written a storming post on engagement surveys which is well worth a read.

This taskforce is to be headed by David MacLeod, an eminent speaker and writer on this subject. I know he’s an eminent writer because I have a stack of ten copies of Engaging for Success (co authored by MacLeod and Nita Clarke and contributed to by me and doubtless hundreds of others) now doubling up as a footstool in my office. Engagingly supportive. And I know that MacLeod is a highly polished speaker on the subject of employee engagement. I’ve seen him speak several times over the years (including once at a conference I disorganised in April 2010) and he’s good at it. Trouble is it feels stuck. It’s the same story, using the same slides, same jokes, same pleas. I am not yet convinced he has the vigour and rigour to drive this along purposefully. Mind you I’m unsure anyone could drive this in a useful way unless that by useful you mean appeasing government bureaucracy, or driving the whole damn thing off a cliff.

I believe engagement is simple, and that doesn’t mean it is easy.

I think I’ll set up a counter taskforce! I already have an army of HR undead massed at the gates of engagement. War is declared – let battle come down.

engagement ninjas we are ready to fight!

Keen to know what other folks think about this. Are you up for more government sponsored plodding or shall we try a more agile, exciting kick ass way to engage with meaning?

photo c/o carloscappaticci

Drawn to the Moment

Here’s an enjoyable and useful way to spend a few minutes. Grab a sketch pad and a nice soft pencil and spend just a very few minutes drawing someone. In the examples you can see here folks in a workshop last week spent exactly ten minutes drawing me. Before sitting down to draw we had spent a few minutes in a gallery looking at the way artists use different materials to capture their subjects.

There was reasoning behind this drawing exercise. Most importantly it is fun. It is also for most people a chance to experience something a little different and it is another way of helping folks to focus on a particular task. Sometimes you don’t have very long to do the task – can you capture the essence of what you need in a brief period of time? I think these results show you that the answer is yes.

We developed the idea a little further and had another play with the sketching pencils. This time we only had two minutes to complete the task. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind and your pencil to it. What do you do when you need to focus, when you don’t have long to complete a task?