In today’s highly competitive and fast-changing business environment, questions of how to motivate and retain talented employees top the list of management concerns. So-called “engagement initiatives” are deployed, surveys are circulated, and yet, nearly half of U.S. employees remain frustrated or demoralized. The reason, according to New York Times bestselling author Rodd Wagner, is that leaders have fallen into destructive strategies, and—intentionally or not—have lost their sense of humanity toward their employees, treating them instead like “assets,” “human capital”—widgets.
In his new book, WIDGETS: The 12 New Rules for Managing Your Employees As If They’re Real People, Wagner makes the compelling case that until organizations regain their sense of humanity toward those they call “human resources,” efforts to lead, motivate, and engage employees will continue to fall flat.
Armed with extensive original research on what employees give based on what they get, Wagner distills 12 imperatives for managing an organization according to a new, unwritten social contract. These new rules—illustrated by examples ranging from the collapse of Good to Great poster company Circuit City to the success of U.S. Navy submarines—address issues of individualization, fearlessness, enjoyment of time on the job, employees’ perceptions of their future, and recognition, among other things. According to Wagner, they are the company investments that create employee intensity. They are:
Rule 1: Get inside their heads
Employee engagement is an individual phenomenon. Every person’s motivations, abilities, and goals are unique, as are each person’s reasons for needing or wanting to work. Therefore, the most important imperative to prevent employees from being treated like widgets is to ensure each is led and managed in a way that fits his or her personality—in a way that recognizes each employee as a category of one.
Rule 2: Make them fearless
Fear is the most primal emotion, and it’s proven to be exceptionally toxic to productivity, health, energy, commitment, and collaboration. While fighting fear has always been an imperative for companies that want to perform at the highest levels, it’s substantially more important in the wake of the Great Recession. Leaders must ensure that employees are not distracted or paralyzed by fear. This means, among other things, ditching fear as a motivation tactic.
Rule 3: Make money a non-issue
To keep money a non-issue, keep it fair. While pay has a surprisingly weak connection to people’s drive to work hard, fairness does not. As pay becomes increasingly public and transparent, companies and their leaders must be able to defend how they decide who is paid what.
Rule 4: Help them thrive
There is no escaping the fact that a person’s job influences his health. Policies, workloads, vacation time, boredom, manager quality, and other aspects of the workplace can either help employees thrive or degrade their health, their psychological well-being, and the performance of the enterprise. Helping employees thrive involves recognizing how these factors impact employees, and taking intentional steps to give people an incredible experience on the job, based on a genuine desire to see employees, live long healthy lives well after they leave the company.
Rule 5: Be cool
In business today, coolness is crucial. Not only is it highly profitable to be cool, people who work for companies they consider to be cool, with cool leaders and coworkers, are substantially more motivated to stay and work harder for the company. Coolness fuels innovation and is largely connected to an employee being proud of her job, wanting and planning to stay, and recommending the company to others.
Rule 6: Be boldly transparent
It has never been more important to run a company so that there is nothing to hide. Apart from simple ethics and the ease with which information can be leaked, transparent firms perform better and have increased levels of internal and external trust. Further, employees who see greater transparency in their companies are far better able to focus on customer needs, feel a greater sense of obligation to work hard, and would recommend their company as a great place to work. Where leading and managing openly was once merely a wise strategy, it is now an imperative.
Rule 7: Don’t kill the meaning
When it comes to daily drive, meaning trumps money. Most people need meaning in their work. They need it so badly that they will take something others find trivial and elevate it to integral. Their identity is intertwined with their career, and often with their current job. Great leaders are respectful of the deep and different reasons people find purpose in their work. They are highly protective of those sentiments and vigilant against anything that would kill the meaning.
Rule 8: See their future
One of the most powerful ways to give someone a bright future is to give her a great past and present. Employees who are more energized by their past at a company are more optimistic about their future there. And while it may not be possible for most companies today to promise a bright future at the organization, leaders and managers must be deliberate in developing their employees and giving them the kinds of credentials that will allow them to build their future somewhere—even if it’s somewhere else.
Rule 9: Magnify their success
In a neurobiological sense, dopamine is the fuel of motivation and learning. It is the chemical that surges whenever someone succeeds at just about anything and again when that success is acknowledged. What’s more, our brains are wired to crave dopamine. Because dopamine is such a fundamental psychological need, it’s exceptionally rare for someone receiving minimal recognition on the job to rank his or her workplace satisfaction high. Recognition is an exceptionally powerful tool in the hands of a manager who knows his employee (by getting inside her head) and wants to see her properly acknowledged for her best work.
Rule 10: Unite them
Uniting a group of employees is a matter of creating the conditions under which collaboration naturally develops and increases. It is equally, however, a matter of not repeating the nonsense that so many leaders and managers spout and the missteps many make when trying to build a team. A company is not a tribe or family—but it can be a team, and it needs a strong, capable, and inspiring leader.
Rule 11: Let them lead
There is a large body of research on how important it is for employees to have a say in how their work is done. Further, employees are more motivated in jobs where their opinions matter. Great leaders understand the abilities of their people, and can assess when to give more responsibility, and when too much responsibility would be setting someone up to fail. They spend less time directing, and more time coaching, championing the introverts on their team, and become better at seeing each person’s future.
Rule 12: Take it to the extremes
Each of the proceeding rules lays the groundwork for this one. The ultimate question of an engagement strategy is how well it helps an enterprise and the people who work there reach their potential. There are two reasons why people will deliver the focused intensity most enterprises long for: First—reciprocity. Second—their own sense of accomplishment. Leaders who help employees reach their greatest potential will create employees who are motivated to help the company reach its greatest potential.
“Each rule emerged from in-depth analyses as something important enough to employees’ experience at work that they will reciprocate it with increased commitment to the organization and intensity in their work,” writes Wagner.
Meticulously researched with a healthy dose of humor and pop culture, WIDGETS is a practical and long-overdue playbook for looking out for an organization by looking out for the people who work there. But more than that, it is a call to arms to abandon the misguided practices that have plagued organizations for decades.
Wagner doesn’t sugarcoat. In his signature no-holds-barred approach, he calls into question long-held beliefs surrounding how to motivate employees, disputes the effectiveness and validity of traditional engagement surveys, and argues the established consultants are wrong when they warn their clients to beware of actually making their employees happy.
“People need better,” writes Wagner. “Their companies could do so much better by them and through them if they only stepped back long enough to take stock of an incorrect view of human nature, wrong strategies, and bad habits that worked their way into ‘human resources’ and the executive suite over the course of a century.”
The release of WIDGETS coincides with the launch of a companion website for leaders and managers (widgetsthebook.com) and a parallel site for employees (iamnotawidget.com). Both sites offer a free self-assessment and instantaneous feedback from the same survey fielded around the world in researching the book. According to Wagner, it’s time employees had access to empirical information about how their experience at work stacks up with the benchmarks that have been in the news for a decade-and-a-half.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rodd Wagner is one of the foremost authorities on employee engagement and collaboration. Wagner’s books, speeches, and thought leadership focus on how human nature affects business strategy.
Wagner is a confidential advisor to senior executives on the best ways to increase their personal effectiveness and their organizations’ performance. His work has taken him around the world, to the executive suites of major corporations in nearly every industry, to the Pentagon, and to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
In addition to his latest title, Wagner is lead author of the books 12: The Elements of Great Managing and Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life. His books have been published in 10 languages and his work featured via The Wall Street Journal, ABC News Now, Businessweek, CNBC, and the National Post of Canada, and parodied in Dilbert.
Wagner holds an M.B.A. with honors from the University of Utah Graduate School of Business. He currently serves as vice president of employee engagement strategy at BI Worldwide. He was formerly a principal of Gallup, the research director of the Portland Press Herald and WGME-TV in Maine, a reporter and news editor for The Salt Lake Tribune, and a radio talk show host. When not writing or consulting, he enjoys fly-fishing, snowboarding, and coaching youth lacrosse.
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For review copies, publicity or to arrange interviews, please contact Lynda Walthert, lynda.walthert@mheducation.com or 905-430-5116.
