In talking this week with Debra, one of my new American friends, about leaders creating ‘Followship’ the subject of ‘Employee Engagement’ (EE) came up. Although EE is widely practiced in projects to bridge a void in the contract between staff and leaders, I had not thought much about what it represents.
Referring to a military example of strong employee buy-in, Debra suggested that it is often better to build employee support for a vision without all the funding in place; than to merely accept a funding stream and then change the direction of teams to follow it. I readily agreed with this emphasis on followship, saying “Right -you can’t buy buy-in.”
What I came away with was a thought that whilst Employee Engagement may be just another fad, it fails to answer an underlying problem; no, not the nuts and bolts of creating buy-in, but asking ‘Why don’t our organisations naturally allow staff pride in work, and grow joy and ownership that render EE unnecessary?’
I’m pretty sure that the problem is the way we run organisations, split along functional lines that do not relate to the real work, as top-down hierarchies with multiple purposes that divide staff, and involving staff downstream of decision-making instead of pulling in their expertise up front.