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I have recently read a research report on some joint work between the London School of Economics, Cambridge and Stanford Universities and McKinsey into the quality of management in UK manufacturing companies relative to other countries and its effects on economic performance. I thought I would share some of the surprising results with you.

Let me outline a common scenario that projects implementations experience in complex organisations. Do you recognise this situation? The company has decided tointroduce a new system for allocating work and has chosen to appoint a project team to design and guide the changes. The team includes a core of three permanent employees and representatives from each of the operational functions who use the system. The team gets together for the first time, and after open discussions with the sponsoring executives, develop clarity about their task.

Innovation is a major driver of the economy. It is not only a change that creates a new dimension, but one which has been successfully exploited. The drive to achieve innovation comes from many sources.

Firstly, there is innovation which stems from invention and subsequent planned investment in process and technology which changes the paradigm within which our product or service is delivered.

As an executive in an organisation, your key responsibility is to provide the leadership that will enable your people to be successful. And that’s often quite a tall order. After all, that kind of leadership frequently has to wait until the numbers have been achieved and all fires have been put out.

We have all observed situations where the executive response to problems is to jump in with both feet and impose ideas and solutions for others to implement, whether workable or not. Opportunities for positive reinforcement are not taken, and everyone feels minimised by the experience.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was another way?

Many organisations have developed sophisticated machinery around the subject of engagement, focused on the HR department surveying employees on a regular basis. A range of questions is asked around how well the company is meeting the employee’s personal need to be well managed and recognised, and how satisfying the experience of working with the organisation is as a whole.

Results tell managers how well they are providing high quality leadership and management and how likely their employees are to stay with the organisation. But is this the whole story? Does this pass the ’so what’ test?

Our intuitive perception is that organisations with engaged employees achieve higher business performance, and a growing body of evidence shows that real engagement adds value to the bottom line. What could this mean for your organisation?

What are the benefits other organisations report they are achieving?

So frequently, a period of change results in severe damage to relationships between the company, its managers and employees rather than the positive, trouble-free experience we envisage at the outset. When asked, people at all levels in the organisation will site the same lack of communication or uncaring attitudes as their reason for dissatisfaction. Frequently, one hears ‘It wasn’t the change itself that I objected to; it was the way it was done.’

One of the stickiest problems in organisations today is ‘How to influence communication and service provision across departmental boundaries so that employees in all departments are engaged with the organisation and each other to achieve high performance and results’.

Well, there isn’t a lot of research currently available to show the relative interactions of different factors, but it is generally accepted that when an employee is highly engaged with the organisation, several factors are in balance. These relate to the psychological contract, the management process and personal value systems.