Surviving the Disengaging Workplace

Surviving the Disengaging Workplace

The Disengaging Workplace

According to Gallup, 87% of workers are disengaged. This costs the US economy between $450-550 billion in lost productivity every year. 

But what does this mean? 

According to William Kahn, the father of the employee engagement movement, engagement is:

the simultaneous employment and expression of a person's "preferred self" in task behaviors that promote connections to work and to others, personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional), and active, full role performances.

States that relate to engagement are effort, involvement, flow, mindfulness, and intrinsic motivation. People who are engaged display their real identity, thoughts, and feelings at work via creativity, the use of personal voice, emotional expression, authenticity, nondefensive communication, playfulness, and ethical behavior.

Kahn argues that people in engaged states become 

deeply involved in tasks, whether alone or with others, cognitively vigilant, and empathically connected to others in the service of the work they are doing in ways that display what they think and feel, their creativity, their beliefs and values, and their personal connections to others.

In contrast, disengagement is:

the simultaneous withdrawal and defense of a person's preferred self in behaviors that promote a lack of connections, physical, cognitive, and emotional absence, and passive, incomplete role performances. To withdraw preferred dimensions is to remove personal, internal energies from physical, cognitive, and emotional labors.

States that relate to disengagement are automatic or robotic, burned out, apathetic or detached, or effortless. People defend their preferred self by hiding their true identity, thoughts, and feelings during role performances, becoming defensive, impersonal or emotionally unexpressive, bureaucratic, self-estranged, and closed.

Kahn argues that people in disengaged states become: 

physically uninvolved in tasks, cognitively unvigilant, and emotionally disconnected from others in ways that hide what they think and feel, their creativity, their beliefs and values, and their personal connections to others.

In simple terms, we have a preferred version or understanding of our self. If the environment we work in allows us to present this self, we are productive. If it doesn’t, we spend all our psychic energy defending this self from intrusive, alien and confrontational acts and practices. We become unproductive. 

Many contemporary organisations try to achieve this by measuring one’s personality via psychometric tests to establish “fit”. The idea is that if one’s personality fits the culture, then, by extension, one’s preferred self gets presented and productivity occurs. 

This is quite problematic in a transforming era. If change is the only constant, then adaptability is the only fit. With cultures changing when new CEOs come and go, which is happening at record rates, or as part of strategic shifts and redesigns, hiring people who only fit one culture leads to total dysfunctionality when it transforms. We require people who are adaptable, who can fit into multiple cultures, who are always willing to learn and ever ready to play different roles, and who can offer constructive critique and creative ideas and feedback during the process.

Psychological Safety

How this more fluid and adaptable form of engagement might be operationalised was brought into tight focus in 2014 via the results of Google’s Project Aristotle, a 2-year research investigation across 180 teams and 37,000 employees that attempted to discover the components of high-performing, or perfect, teams. Top of Google’s list of characteristics of the perfect team was a “psychological safety”. Popularised beyond Google by the New York Times in 2016, it pushed the work of Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, into the public domain. 

For Edmondson, psychological safety is "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." In explaining how psychological safety and accountability interact to produce a high-performing team in an environment where there's uncertainty and interdependence, she argues that organisations exist in one of three zones - the learning zone, the anxiety zone, or the comfort zone. 

  • Leaders that allow for questions and discussions and also hold their employees accountable for excellence fall into the "learning zone"
  • Leaders who only hold their employees accountable for excellence without creating psychological safety fall into the "anxiety zone"
  • Leaders who create psychological safety without holding their employees accountable for excellence all into the "comfort zone"

Edmondson’s work on psychological safety was published in 1999. In the two decades that have passed since, the concept of the “comfort zone” has begun to feel a little quaint. The vast majority of our organisations have at least stepped on the disruptive path to the future of work. However, the concept of the “anxiety zone” is extremely resonant for many organisations and executives. With automation, robotics, AI, the War for Talent, disruption, big data, analytics, and VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) flipping the world of work upside down, anxiety is the new black and a constant companion of modern work. 

For Edmondson, this is producing a very specific type of impression management that aligns to Kahn’s concept of disengaged states.

  1. People don’t want to appear ignorant, so they don’t ask questions
  2. People don’t want to look incompetent, so they don’t admit mistakes
  3. People don’t want to be intrusive, so they don’t offer ideas
  4. People don’t want to seem negative, so they don’t question the status quo

The challenge to one's self-image in psychologically unsafe environments is huge. We want to appear intelligent, competent, cooperative and positive in front of our peers and bosses. Rather than risk doing so, we shut down and disengage.

We withdraw and defend our preferred self in behaviors that promote a lack of connections, physical, cognitive, and emotional absence, and passive, incomplete role performances. We remove personal, internal energies from physical, cognitive, and emotional labors. We end up hiding what we think and feel, our creativity, our beliefs and values, and our personal connections to others.

In psychologically unsafe environments, this is what being human looks like.

This is a huge existential threat to the contemporary organisation. As Edmondson clearly illustrates, high-performing teams don’t make less errors than low-performing ones. They just admit them and discuss them. In complex environments, small errors can rapidly amplify into huge problems, impacting the whole operational and strategic environment. 

Edmonson argues that to deliver the high-performance of the “learning zone” today’s leaders are tasked to do three things.

  1. Make explicit that there is enormous uncertainty ahead and enormous interdependence - that we've never been here before; we can't know what will happen; we've got to have everybody's brains and voices in the game.
  2. Encourage peers and subordinates to speak up and ask questions, admit mistakes, offer ideas and challenge conventions.
  3. Stop expecting immediate solutions (and address the dangerous inanity of the “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” meme) and start asking a lot of questions to model curiosity as a vital organisational value
  4. To tackle impression management in their teams, leaders should stop projecting an image themselves (of confidence, competence, authority) and summon the courage to show up vulnerable. If leaders embraced a more authentic stance, faced their fears and uncertainty with courage, admitted their struggles, then their teams would then feel more connected, inspired and more inclined to offer perspectives and experiment.
  5. Summon up the courage and wisdom to turn to the people inside the organisation for the increased capacities required for it to survive and thrive in the future, as opposed to instinctively calling in outside consulting ‘help’ that further disengages your own people by clearly demonstrating that you don’t trust, value or even recognise their potential to step up.

Let’s make no bones about it - this is an exceedingly difficult task in today’s organisations. The gap between culture and complexity means leaders are pulled in contradictory directions, having to measure performance and comply to regulations yet deliver an environment in which immeasurable concepts, such as creativity, play, critical thought, and cognitive flexibility, thrive. Faced with such a challenge, it is no surprise so many flounder, nor that distrust of leadership is increasing and disengagement is becoming a core productivity challenge.

But just because it is difficult doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

How can this work with all the TRANSFORMATION projects on the go ! One can only assume the outcomes are not great if engagement is not there and internal defensiveness

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Diana Wu David

CEO | Top 30 Global Futurist & Future of Work | Author | Speaker | Strategic Advisor and Coach | Board Director | working to help AI amplify our human potential

5y

Youri van Elsland - thought this would be up your alley!

Christopher J. Patten

Story-teller, thinker and creative

5y

Excellent article am planning to cite, Dr. Richard Claydon. My own experience is building guild structures introduces dualistic alternatives to organisational orthodoxy allowing people to escape these shackles

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Susan McKenna Penn, MA

Certified Executive Coach | Leadership Behaviorist | Transformational Life Coach

5y

Thank you for the contribution on this important topic, Richard.  Robert Kegan's work "An Everyone Culture" also tackles the research on some of the points made here, specifically the energy and productivity drain required when image management is the rule of the day. 

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