Employee engagement the Ferguson Way

The news has been full of plaudits for Sir Alex Ferguson since he announced his retirement yesterday.
The man who created unprecedented footballing success at Manchester United and built a global brand has long had a reputation for inspiring fear and terror among his team. The sight of an angry David Beckham with stitches in his eyebrow after a run in with Sir Alex and a football boot did nothing to dispel such rumours.
On the face of it it, his approach goes against all employee engagement theory. How can such a reign of terror have created such success? Well, this article in The Daily Telegraph sheds some light on the mystery.
It turns out that Sir Alex is actually a master of employee engagement. He highlights the need to praise the people who work for him, give his players confidence and to explain his decisions so that the team can remain focussed on working hard.
But the most important point he makes is that to achieve employee engagement managers need to provide absolute clarity. Too often people misunderstand employee engagement, thinking it's about being soft. They also confuse it with a choice between being soft or scary but actually being clear with people is far more important. If you are clear - your people understand the organisation's motives and direction and they believe in the shared goals - they will feel engaged and valued. When you have truly engaged them, they will do whatever it takes to achieve the shared vision.

Brand management is not about spin

Too often people make the mistake of misunderstanding PR and brand management. They think that the way to build a good reputation is to spin stories, put on flashy events or create PR stunts. But if those techniques ever worked to cover up shoddy service and poor products (I'm not convinced they did), they definitely don't now.
Organisations are more visible and transparent than ever. Customers will have their say in public through social media and if your business is offering a sub-standard product or service, people will soon find out about it or worse, your customers will celebrate and turn to your competitors and ignore you.
Now, to have a great reputation, your organisation actually has to be great.
This is a view that management guru Tom Peters shares. When talking about managing personal brands, he tweeted:

I think this approach is equally relevant for organisations. But it does beg the question, what is the role of PR in making an organisation great?
For me it comes down to two things.
1. I think it is our role to help the business understand the link between the decisions and actions it takes and the impact on reputation. If the PR function is in the room when decisions are taken and those decisions will be smarter and more robust as a result.
2. PR practitioners need to trace back through the organisation to find out what is influencing the success (or lack of) of the business and then seek to have a positive impact on that area. My view is that area is always how engaged employees feel in the purpose and direction of the business. The levels of employee engagement in an organisation are intrinsic to its success.
Brand management is not about spin; at its core it's about employee engagement.

Book Review: Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

While I was on honeymoon I read a great book: Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

It's an easy read; I tore through it in a day but its simplicity belies its genius. It really gets to the core of how people can work together effectively. Lencioni describes a situation where a new CEO is seeking to enable her top team to work effectively. Through the fable of her experience, we learn the five dysfunctions of a team which are:

1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results

This really resonated with my experience of when teams are working well, especially the emphasis on trust and healthy conflict. Unless people feel free to express their opinion and participate, the team will be living a kind of fake reality and not having the necessary rigorous debate to put ideas and issues to the test. I can see there's a strong connection between being able to express your views positively and feeling engaged with work.

The importance of accountability was also really eye opening for me. It made me recognise that in teams I've managed I have taken ownership for calling out unacceptable behaviour rather than encouraging the team to do it themselves but this actually disempowers the team. So there's something for me to work on there.

It also made me think about saying my marriage vows (forgive me for having weddings on the brain at the moment!) and how a marriage is a team of two. Lencioni talks about successful teams where people aren't protectionist and share resources happily because it's for the good of the team. Admittedly at just three weeks of marriage so far I do not consider myself an expert in this area!

At the back the book has a helpful assessment that you could run through with your team and then a series of exercises to take them through. I think as well as going through these it would also be a good idea for all team members to read the book too and spend some time discussing the thoughts it prompts. I really recommend this book if you're looking to give employee engagement a boost and get your teams working more effectively. You can buy it from Amazon here.

I didn't use the Internet for two weeks...and I survived

I've just got back from my honeymoon in Cuba. The resort we stayed at didn't have wifi but it did have an internet cafe...that didn't work for most of the time we were there.
As a result, I didn't use the internet for two weeks. For a web addict like me this was a shock to the system and I can't remember the last time I was offline for so long.
Of course, I missed social media and my emails, but the site I missed the most was Wikipedia. It was strangely frustrating to wonder something and not being able to instantly find the answer.

Some of the things I wondered were:

• Are there any poisonous frogs or toads in Cuba? (And do they look like the one who took up residence on the top of our suite's front door? The answer is yes - gulp - but possibly the one on our door was too small to cause us trouble.)
• How can I make a mojito at home as good as the ones in Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana?
• Was Che Guevara Mexican? Why were his remains found in Bolivia? If he's Mexican, why do Cubans love him so? (Thanks to wonderful Wikipedia, I now know he was Argentinian and roamed south and central America leading revolutions against US imperialism. The CIA killed him in Bolivia.)
• What does a tocororo bird look like?
• How does communism work in practice?

Just 20 years ago I'd have wondered these things and had to come home and go to a library to find out the answers. Thank goodness for the internet!

How changing my Twitter name showed me how small the world is

I remember when I first joined Twitter. It was the summer of 2008 and I'd read about this micro-blogging social media platform and thought I'd bagsy my username even if I wasn't going to use it. In fact, when I signed up I was quite surprised that @katehughes was still free but I was happy to claim it. Nearly five years, 3,500 followers and a Twitter obsession later, I've just got married and have become Kate Reynolds. So of course, after choosing the dress, the next big decision was what to do about my Twitter username!
As Kate Hughes is quite a common name (there's three of us at my work and two of us at my doctors'), there's plenty of other Kate Hughes' on Twitter. Among others, there's a playboy model, for whom I have previously received quite unsavoury tweets, and there's also a cool, Aussie social media expert. Who do you think I picked?

By a weird twist of fate, a few months ago I saw in my Facebook timeline a picture of a party on a Melbourne rooftop that one of my pals Adam Vincenzini was at. He's a communications whizz who does lots of cool stuff with social media and I've known him for years online. A few minutes later I flicked onto Twitter and I saw a pic from Kate Hughes who was also at a party on a Melbourne rooftop. This was the exchange that happened:

The world is an increasing small place eh?