INTRODUCTION
"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do what you want done because he wants to do it."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
This book is about leadership, the defining characteristic of which is the existence of followers. For our purposes, leader can mean a C-level executive or it can mean a frontline supervisor. It can mean a person with explicit positional authority over a business unit of a Fortune 100 company as well as someone called on to head up an eight-person, ad hoc project team who must lead through influence alone.
It's also about Engagement, a concept that's popping up more and more often on leaders' screens these days. And that's for a very good reason. Compelling research done by CEB, Gallup, Hay Group, and others demonstrates the indisputable correlation between high levels of Employee Engagement and substantially improved business results, as measured along such critical dimensions as profitability, productivity, and employee retention rates.
Engagement doesn't happen in a vacuum, though. Focusing on it inevitably means coming face-to-face with such related matters as Empowerment, Trust, Respect, Company Values, and the rest of the so-called soft stuff . . . the people stuff.
Attending to all of this effectively is a non-trivial challenge. But leaders don't become leaders by backing down when faced with such challenges. They take action - the summum bonum of complex organizational life - by launching serious-minded, well-funded initiatives to drive up Engagement levels, appropriately genuflecting along the way to Engagement's first cousins, the other Intangibles. They do their homework, researching the currently accepted tools and techniques, settling not just for any practices, but only for best practices.
It's all very sensible, logical, and rational, and often as not, the results come up short of expectations. So the question becomes: Why?
It's a question I've been trying to help leaders in hundreds of organizations representing scores of industries answer for thirty-plus years now. Over all that time, there have been two incidents that, more than any others, brightly illuminated just what the answer might be. Here's one of them.
I was standing on the stage of a corporate auditorium. The title of the presentation I was about to make was the standard one I used in such instances: "Making the Business Case for The Intangibles." If you were to try to imagine a group of people predisposed to be skeptical about this sort of subject matter, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a better one than the hundred or so people I was facing at that moment: the security team of a business unit of a major technology company. Suffice it to say, these are not people whose day-planners tend to be overfilled with matters pertaining to the soft stuff.
A few days earlier I had told a colleague that this assignment would be a piece of cake: "All I have to do is make a logical, left-brained argument to an overwhelmingly logical, left-brained audience that logical, left-brained arguments aren't enough." I was joking, but I also knew that this pretty well captured the essence of the challenge before me. I believed that what I had to say had the potential to be of considerable value, even to such logical, left-brained folks. That wouldn't be the case, though, unless I could find a way to get past the Starship Enterprise-grade deflector shields that such audiences reflexively deploy - set to eleven - when under threat of bombardment by what they perceived to be such Kumbaya-ish subject matter.
So I took a risk. Instead of beginning my presentation by talking about the Intangibles, I decided to try to get them to vicariously feel one.
I began by telling them the story of what had happened on the evening our son Mike was born some thirty years earlier. I described my wife Gail announcing that the big moment had arrived, the phone calls to the hospital and obstetrician, the gathering up of the go-bags, the short/long three-mile drive to the hospital. I told them of how the song that happened to be playing on the car radio when I turned the ignition key was Billy Joel's "Piano Man," and that by the end of the song we had arrived at the hospital, that by the end of the night mother and baby were doing great.
Here's how I concluded the story: "To this day, whenever I hear 'Piano Man,' I get a powerful emotional jolt. I cannot prove it to you. I cannot show it to you. I cannot put it in front of you so that you can touch it, or taste it, or smell it. But don't you dare try to tell me that this feeling is not real. What's more, everyone in this room has an equivalent story to tell about something that will trigger a deeply rooted bit of sense memory and give you that same kind of emotional jolt. That's what I mean by The Intangibles. That's what we're going to be talking about for the next hour or so."
It worked. I could tell by the body language that their deflector shields had come down. Most of all, I could tell when, at the end of the hour, I thanked them for their time and attention and exited stage left, at which point one of those oh-so-logical/rational security professionals held up his iPhone - volume cranked up to eleven - and serenaded us all with Billy Joel's "Piano Man."
That was one of the most gratifying moments of my professional career. What happened next, however, was not.
A fifteen-minute break was called, and an HR director for the business unit approached me.
"May I offer you some constructive feedback?" she asked.
"Of course!" I replied.
"This is a pretty diverse group," she said. "Not all of them are baby boomers like you and I are. So their tastes in music are likely to be different from ours. I think your story would have been more effective if instead of using a song by Billy Joel you had used one by someone like, say, Katy Perry."
What I said in reply was this: "Hmm. Interesting point. I'll be sure to give it some thought."
What I had wanted to say was this: "But that's what actually, you know, happened. 'Piano Man' is the song that was on the radio! An hour ago I stood up in front of these people and opened a vein and shared a deeply personal, deeply emotional story!! One that I had never shared in public before!!! I understand that this is a diverse team and that, Lord knows, they're all the stronger as a result!!!! But 'Piano Man' is what was on the radio that night!!!!! And besides which, Katy Perry is younger than Mike!!!!!!"
All of which goes to prove yet again that attempting to deal with the Intangibles is like trying to lasso a cloud. Don't get me wrong. I am more than prepared to concede that she may have missed the point of the "Piano Man" story because of my shortcomings as a presenter. But the guy who held up the iPhone seemed to get it. So, too, did all of the people who sang along to "Piano Man" when he did. So how was it that an HR director - an HR director! - didn't?
I think it has to do with the fact that leaders have a strong bias toward logical, rational, data-driven solutions to problems. It's a bias that is reinforced by the dynamic push and pull of organizational life. You don't become a leader - or at least you won't be a leader for long - by relying on gut feelings and emotion alone.
For the record, I am not immune to the appeal of such a worldview. Both my undergraduate and graduate training were in aerospace engineering, and I spent the first several years of my career in that profession. I, too, like to be data-driven.
But doesn't the fact that so many well-intentioned initiatives fall short of expectations represent important data? In what sense are you being data-driven when you come up short and think, "We did our best. But, you know, it's the soft stuff that's the hard part, so . . .," thereby shrugging away the possibility that maybe the approach that was taken wasn't so sensible and rational after all?
Which brings us to the root of the problem, and I think it has to do with the fact that security professionals are not the only ones with hair-triggers on their deflector shields. Sad to say, pretty much everybody has them. It's just human nature.
Well-intentioned and sensible though they may be, those rational, well-resourced, best-practice-driven initiatives amount to the application of mechanical, utilitarian prescriptions to what is essentially a problem of the spirit and soul. It's not just that such approaches don't work. It's that they can't work, any more than even the most powerful antibiotic will cure a viral infection.
That's a costly problem for businesses, since they invest a lot in what has come to be called their human capital, and there are enormous benefits to be realized by leaders who are able to get a firmer grip on Engagement and all of its cousins - if, that is, it were possible to get a handle on those Intangibles, which by definition can't be touched.
A paradox that, and it's what we'll be covering over the next 138 pages. Such is the ambiguity of the leader's challenge. Embrace it. You might just as well, since you can't embrace the Intangibles themselves.
* * *
A few words about what you are about to read in "Part One: Getting a Firmer Grip on The Problem."
In it, you'll meet the Wilsons: the father, Matt; the mother, Jennifer; and their children, Matt Jr. and Jessica. You will be given a behind-the-scenes look at what happens when Matt (a high-powered management consultant) and Jen (a small-business owner) strategize about how they can best apply familiar business practices in their household so that: (1) their kids are fully engaged members of the Wilson clan; and (2) they, Matt and Jen, are more effective when it comes to attending to other key family Intangibles, such as Empowerment, Trust, Respect, and Values.
Obviously (or at least I hope it will be obvious), the Wilsons' story is a parable. No parents would ever take such an instrumental, mechanical approach to something as personal and sublime as their relationship with their children.
So why tell their story at all? Because - no surprise here - dealing effectively with the Intangibles is difficult to do well; if it weren't, you wouldn't be reading this book. And one of the things that makes it such a difficult challenge is the breathtaking complexity of modern organizational life. However committed we might be to getting a firmer "grip" on the intangibles, the fact is that we've got a thousand-and-one-things pulling us in this-or-that direction, so our efforts might not be as focused as we would like them to be. And however well-intentioned we might be when making those efforts, some of the things we might wind up doing could actually, sad to say, do harm.
By observing what goes on in such a simple "organization" - four people, all co-located, all in frequent and direct contact with each other - we are better situated to isolate and discover the causal connection between the seemingly sensible techniques employed and the less-than-ideal results attained.
And who knows? You might even feel a pang or two of recognition along the way that makes you think: That sounds uncomfortably familiar. Maybe even: Holy crap! I've been as big a knucklehead as Matt Wilson!
The hope here, too, is that you will find the Wilsons' story entertaining and amusing enough to draw you through some of the abstract argumentation needed to help you get that firmer "grip" on those intangibles.
On to Part One.