“If we really want to build community then we have to show up in an everyday way and build those things that create a sense of intimacy,”  Jim Keene, City Manager of Palo Alto, CA in his interview from the September Ambassador Update.  Keene may have been remarking on building community in regards to the relational infrastructure of neighborhoods within geographical areas, but what happens when you apply this same concept to your organization.  

Are you building community – a sense of belonging—within your organization?

There are a number of books, articles, resources all putting a mark on the why and how of employee engagement.  Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model and Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, both share authors and outline 4 basic human drives; the drives to acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend.  They further show through empirical evidence that organizations which take action to reinforce each of the above mentioned drives have greater employee engagement, which then leads to better corporate performance.

Another book increasing the awareness of basic human motivation, and one that Ambassadors studied this summer is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.  

Pink introduced us to the three nutrients to nourish Motivation 3.0: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.  Motivation 3.0 goes beyond the traditional carrot and stick approach of motivation to what he calls Motivation 3.0, or Type I behavior.  

The research is complementary of one another, so the discussion doesn’t rest with the why and how of employee engagement—understanding the fundamental needs and drives of those who make up our workplace.  The question is how we are building community – this sense of belonging that mobilizes employees within our organizations to build relationships with one another and engage in the issues that help them to answer their ‘why’ question daily.

“There is an organized, useful, knowable, learnable way of doing this that is not dependent on personal style.”  Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies – an India based IT services provided—made this comment in his recent article that discusses his management philosophy when he first took the leadership challenge at HCL.  It’s a culture that he calls Employee First, Customers Second (EFCS).  

Private and public sector leaders alike share the sentiment to answer the questions and fix the problems.  However, as Peter Block and Jim Keene commented in the Building Connected Communities webinar excerpt, “In some ways, the task of leadership is to create structures where citizens will be confronted with their choices and get connected to one another.  Most leadership is about, “how am I doing as a leader,” and treats citizens as if they are consumers and we have to satisfy them.”  Whether your focus is neighborhoods or the organization, creating the structures for employees to confront their realities, connect and design the solutions is what provides that sense of belonging—community.  

How do HCL employees answer
their ‘why’ question?

Nayar’s journey towards building a sense of belonging within HCL began with engaging employees throughout the organization to share Point A – their current situation—and get their ideas of what Point B should be.  

In his own words, he wanted to “turn the organization upside down, so that senior management—the heads of enabling functions such as human resources and finance and even the CEO—could become accountable to employees.”  This premise underlies Nayar’s Employee First, Customers Second philosophy.  As Nayar talked with customers, he realized that they didn’t “talk much about our products, services, or technologies; they spoke mostly about HCL’s employees.  The value the company offered lay in the interface between customers and frontline employees—that was our value zone.”

Developing Strategy Collaboratively
‘Mirror Mirror’ on the wall…this is not another Disney magic moment, but rather the exercise that HCL created to develop strategy collaboratively with the top 100 managers across the organization.  Rather than providing the strategy towards where the company was headed, the CEO laid out a bold idea for the company and engaged his top managers in discussion about their future.  His ideas started the conversation and as Nayar writes, he was looking for the “yes, but” questions that could jump start the collaboration.  He worked to get all the managers involved, and especially address the ‘yes, but’ questions for those with major doubts.   Throughout the meetings, he overcame desires to take control or provide a singular vision or answer, and rather allowed alignment to naturally occur among all the managers.  

 Even now, as the environment continually changes, HCL continues to use ‘Mirror Mirror’ as a way to confront the changing realities and collaboratively develop strategy for the future.  For example, when the economic recession hit, rather than establishing a strategy in the CEO’s office, employees were asked for ways to address the new challenges – employees were mobilized to address the new reality and as a result, HCL business grew 20% in the worst year of the recession.  

Bridging the Gulf
The ‘gulf’ is what Nayar describes as the space between executive management and front line employees.  He wanted to make sure that during this period of change, that all levels of employees were engaged in conversation about what and how the change took place.  Nayar held informal meetings with frontline staff and asked a series of questions including ‘What kind of company did employees want to work for?’ and ‘How they viewed their roles?’  However, to simply hold large meetings with the new CEO proclaiming a new philosophy of Employees First, Customers Second potentially could undermine efforts with the slightest inclination of unauthenticity, so each meeting began with a Bollywood music number followed by Nayar’s dancing.  Nayar writes that ‘those words sounded very different coming from a sweaty man who had just proved in public that he couldn’t dance than they would have coming from the emperor at the podium.  Two hours of purposeful and animated discussions followed.”

Palo Alto, CA serves as an example of how one local government is working to ‘bridge the gulf.’  Last month’s Ambassador Update included an interview with City Manager Jim Keene in which he commented that you have to “go and see if your experiences in the organization are the way you say they are.  Managers have to be authentic and provide lots of points of access and opportunity – and peer to peer, people have to see things are happening.  I invited all employees to a series of town halls (20) and think about and answer the following questions:
What kind of city do I want to live in?
What type of organization do you want be belong to?
What type of boss and co-workers do you want to have?
What is our City like?
What is our organization like?

Then we asked them to look to see what gaps exist between what people want and where we are.  What ideas did they have to close the gap?”

Lastly, HCL created an ‘Employee Passion Indicative Count’ simply because you can’t build community – or that sense of belonging without the passion behind it.  As stated initially, it’s the “things that create the sense of intimacy.”  The ‘Employee Passion Indicative Count’ was created to understand the drivers of passion in the workplace, and from the survey, individual ‘Employee First Councils’ were created to focus on the specific of each of the passions.  Councils range in focus from arts and music to philanthropy and social responsibility.  In essence, the Councils help employees break down the barriers between their personal and professional lives and help to bring meaning to their work.  Nayar notes an unexpected benefit of the Councils—an employee’s personal passion for cloud computing has turned into a company innovation.  It’s through these Employee First Councils that employees are bringing meaning to their work and creating a sense of community with one another.    

How are you building community – a sense of belonging—within your organization?  How do you answer your ‘why’ question for going to work every day?  Go to the Ambassador Group and post your thoughts on the group wall.  Next month we are going to look at scalability and innovative ways that organizations, including HCL Technologies, are starting the momentum towards building community and a sense of belonging.

References
1. Drive! Interview with Jim Keene, Victor Lauria, and Karen Windon.  September Ambassador Update, September 2010.
2. Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model. Nohria, Nitin, Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee. Harvard Business Review, July 2010.
3. How I Did It: A Maverick CEO Explains How He Persuaded His Team to Leap into the Future. Nayar, Vineet. Harvard Business Review, October 2010.