Employees Experience Your Organization at the Hands of Its Systems
By Michelle Malay Carter on March 23, 2008
Why is Engagement So Low?
The reason employee engagement is so low these days is because organizations keep trying to fix individuals while paying no mind to the dysfunctional systems within which their employees are working.
Were Your Management Systems Thoughtfully Designed or Left to Default?
Systems drive behavior regardless of what is written on your mission statement or your corporate values webpage. Employees experience the organization at the hands of its systems, and your managers, who are accountable to work within those systems, serve as extensions of those systems.
Change is Necessary
Until we design and scrutinize our management and leadership systems with the same level of sophistication that we scrutinize our financials, our purchasing, our inventory systems, etc., we will get more of the same – 21% employee engagement.
I’m OK. You’re OK. Let’s fix the system.
How has the system gotten in the way of your work or your ability to lead?
Filed Under Corporate Values, Employee Engagement, Executive Leadership, Organization Design, Requisite Organization, Strategy
Comments
4 Responses to “Employees Experience Your Organization at the Hands of Its Systems”
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Michelle – you couldn’t be more dead on and your point can be expanded beyond management and leadership systems to include physical systems. Think of an industrial setting where management tries to promote safety. No matter how much behavioral training is done, poor workplace design trumps all.
Hi Keith,
Thanks for stopping by. Your point is valid. Gearry Rumler says: “Pit the most motivated employee against a poor system and my money is on the system every time.” Thank you for your comment.
Michelle
Geary Rummler also is credited for asserting that 90% of performance shortfalls have their root causes in something other than an employee’s lack of necessary skills or knowledge. But what’s the typical manager’s first response to a serious performance problem? Training–which can address only employee skills or knowledge!
Why is this? I’m guessing that there are two factors in play:
* Our culture tends to personalize problems (we focus on people rather than on the circumstances; look at how most news coverage is handled).
* Most people tend to oversimplify issues (making an individual the locus of a performance problem is a lot simpler than addressing the abstract of a “system”; call this “systems blindness,” if you will).
Both factors may have some relationship to capacity for processing complexity, but I suspect that there’s also a good bit of cultural conditioning involved (at least, that’s my hopeful explanation for why the problem is so pervasive!).
Hi Will,
I agree. I’ve written a post that’s in the hopper for next week about training. I’ve made some similar observations.
If we could redeploy the time, energy, and money spent on misguided training into fixing systems, we’d be on to something!
Michelle