Building Commitment: A Leader's Guide to Unleashing the Human Potential at Work

by Carl Welte

Overview

Building Commitment is a logical follow-on to the author's Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader (2014). There are two imperatives for building and sustaining a successful organization. The first imperative is architecting a sound strategy. The second imperative is to build a work culture that fosters genuine commitment that inspires the people who can make it happen to strive to achieve shared aspirations.

Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader addressed the first imperative. This book addresses the second imperative. It equips the leader with practical and proven concepts, structures, and tools to foster genuine commitment. It is written for leaders in all business sectors and at all organizational levels. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798886402551
Publisher:	Ewings Publishing LLC
Publication date:	09/30/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	274
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Carl Welte founded Welte Associates in 1993. Welte Associates enables organizational leaders and teams to achieve desired business results by helping them build the organizational capabilities to do so.His more than fifty years of organizational, management, and consulting experience has equipped him with the requisite wisdom and coaching skills to enable leaders and teams to effectively address their organization's opportunities and challenges.He has held senior-level positions in both large and small organizations. Carl has also held leadership positions in a variety of professional, industrial, and educational associations.Carl was a visiting faculty member for 12 years at the University of Idaho, teaching in its executive development program. He has also taught leadership and management programs in the University of California's extension learning system for more than 10 years.He is the author of Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader: A Practical Guide for Formulating and Executing Strategy, Second Edition, The Ewings Publishing, 2022; Building Commitment: A Leader's Guide to Unleashing the Human Potential at Work, Second Edition, The Ewings Publishing, 2022; and, Communicating about Differences: Understanding, Appreciating, and Talking about Divergent Points of View, Second Edition, The Ewings Publishing, 2022.He has an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BS degree in business administration from the University of California. Carl lives in Novato, CA with his wife Dee. They have three children, six Grandchildren, and one great grandchild.

Read an Excerpt

Building Commitment

A Leader's Guide to Unleashing the Human Potential at Work

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By CARL WELTE

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2016 Carl Welte
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6368-6

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CHAPTER 1

The Business Case for Building Commitment

Getting extraordinary things done in organizations is hard work. The climb to the summit is arduous and steep. Leaders encourage others to continue the quest. They inspire others with courage and hope.

–Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge

What Intuition and Research Tell Us

It is probably evident to you, and to most people, that a committed, engaged workforce is a productive workforce and that a productive workforce is critical for an organization to achieve its desired business results.

A growing amount of research backs up intuition and personal experience regarding the importance of motivated people at work. For example, in his book The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, Jeffrey Pfeffer provides impressive evidence, analysis, and real-life examples proving a correlation between good people management and profits. He found out that returns from managing people in ways that build high commitment, involvement, learning, and organizational competence are typically 30 to 50 percent. Such returns are substantial, by any measure.

Based on additional research, in their book Hidden Value:How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People, Pfeffer and coauthor Charles O' Reilly come to several conclusions regarding good people management. They include the following:

• Organizations that manage the human factor well offer their employees more than a job. They offer a sense of community, security, and mutual trust and respect.

• The interest in hiring individual stars is a fad that will pass as companies realize that their success depends on what they do with and to their talent, not just acquiring it.

• Many organizations miss the link between living a set of values and creating the alignment between values and people. They place too much emphasis on strategy and not enough on values and the management practices that produce implementation.

• Decades of research have documented how increased monitoring can undermine motivation and cause previously engaged people to reduce their efforts.

A Competitive Advantage

In his book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Patrick Lencioni argues that to be successful, organizations need to be both smart and healthy. Being smart means doing all the traditional organizational functional specialties, such as strategy, marketing, finance, and technology, well. Being healthy means engaging in good people-management practices.

In his work, Lencioni finds that even well-informed leaders who see the wisdom in having an organization that is both smart and healthy will usually focus most of their attention on the smart side of the equation. Why? Even though wise leaders recognize the importance of the healthy side of the equation, they like the smart side because it is more objective and measurable and they just feel more competent and comfortable in that arena.

Lencioni states that the advantages to be found in the classic areas of business, such as strategy, finance, marketing, and technology, in spite of all the attention they receive, are incremental and fleeting. He sees the greatest opportunity for organizational improvement and competitive advantage in organizational health. An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter.

I take exception with Lencioni placing strategy under the smart side of the equation. The wise leader formulates and executes strategy to develop and organization that is both smart and healthy.

A Significant and Sad Workplace Gap

Research findings reinforce Lencioni's experience regarding the lack of attention being placed on building healthy organizations.

Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace reports:

• Just 30 percent of employees are actively committed to doing a good job;

• 50 percent of employees merely put their time in; while

• 20 percent act out their discontent in counterproductive ways, negatively influencing their coworkers, missing days on the job, and driving customers away through poor service. Gallup estimates that this 20 percent alone costs the U.S. economy around a half trillion dollars each year.

So despite what would appear to be axiomatic to most leaders and backed by solid research results, the vast majority of entities are not engaging in sound people-management practices to become healthy organizations.

What is causing this sad workplace phenomenon?

A variety of reasons can be cited:

• Despite the large amount of evidence, many organizational leaders refuse to believe the connection between how organizations manage their people and business results.

• Many executives who see the connection take simplistic, faddish approaches in attempting to grow healthy organizations rather than employing the comprehensive and systematic approaches required, including the training and coaching of leaders throughout the organization on an ongoing basis.

• Long-term thinking is the exception rather than the rule, leading executives to focus mainly on short-term financial results and meeting quarterly numbers.

As a Leader, You Can Be a Game Changer

Regardless of your role and level in your organization, you can have a strong influence on your leadership playing field in building a healthy work environment.

Numerous studies over the years validate the important role the local line leader or immediate supervising manager has on building a committed workforce. One recent nationwide study involving 1,500 employees discovered that although multiple factors affect employee engagement, the quality of the relationship between the supervising manger and his or her direct reports is the most influential.

As the supervising manager, you play a pivotal role in your associates' level of commitment. You serve as the primary conduit between your associates and the balance of the organization. You are their voice and echo their needs. They look to you to accurately translate what is going on in the organization as it affects them. They want to have a quality relationship with you as their manager and know that you care about them and their well-being.

Your attitude and actions as a supervising manager are critical for fostering a culture of commitment. What you do, how you behave, what you say, and how you say it greatly affect your associates' attitudes about their work and the organization as a whole, which in turn can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Research findings over the decades consistently report that the number-one reason people choose to stay or opt to leave their organizations is their relationship with their supervising manager. The increasing turnover rates in today's world of work and recruiting costs of approximately 1.5 times annual salary underscore the valuable role you, as the supervising manager, play relative to the health of your organization.

If you are fortunate to be working in a healthy organization, the challenge of fostering a work culture of commitment is going to be a lot easier for you. You have a running head start. But regardless of your organizational context and its health, the concepts, structures, tools, and practices described in my previous book, Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader, and this book, Building Commitment, equip you with the capability to develop a sound strategy and committed people that will help you achieve extraordinary results in your role as a leader: to fulfill the definition of a leader — that is, to mobilize people to struggle for shared aspirations.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding Motivation: Commitment versus Compliance

Perhaps the most promising trend in our thinking about leadership is the conviction that the purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers to develop their own initiative, strengthen the use of their own judgment, and enable them to grow and to become better contributors.

–John W. Gardner

Before exploring the four building blocks for fostering a work culture of commitment, we are well served to review the motivation to work and to perform.

Movement versus Motivation

Let us start with a basic but vitally important principle: motivation is not something you do to someone. That is movement. True motivation comes from within a person. Motivation is goal-directed behavior intended to satisfy individual needs.

In case you were unaware of the above principle, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but this means that you, as a leader, do not motivate anyone. Your role as a leader is to build and sustain a motivational environment so that people can get their individual generators spinning. There are, of course, times you will need to move people — also known as the KITP, or "kick in the pants" approach. But the better the environment you set to get people revved, the less you will need to use movement.

Your goal as a leader should be to build and sustain a work culture of commitment, as contrasted with one of compliance. In a work culture of commitment, people want to perform; in a work culture of compliance, people feel they have to perform.

Theories of Motivation

Let us explore two theories of motivation that have been with us for some time but continue to be critical in helping us understand just what true motivation is.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs goes all the way back to the 1940s. Maslow categorized human needs into five categories and suggested that they could be arranged in a hierarchy, as shown below.

Maslow postulated that once one set of needs is basically fulfilled, although these needs are still important, they no longer serve as a primary motivator. The primary motivator then becomes the next level of needs in the hierarchy. An individual can move down the hierarchy as well as up. Suddenly being out of work, for example, could heighten an individual's need for security.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is based primarily on his clinical experience. But he also drew on observations and experiments. His intent was to formulate a positive, holistic theory of human motivation.

As a result of his research, Maslow believed that self-actualization was reserved for a select few. Further research on positive mental health since Maslow's death in 1970 indicates that this need level was a lot more obtainable for people than Maslow thought. It has become increasingly clear that to become more self-actualized, people need to simply get out of their own ways and overcome their conditioning of who they are expected to be. In addition to what further research has shed on the subject, there is just much more room in today's world of work, with the proliferation of what Peter Drucker calls knowledge work, as contrasted with manual work, for people to find avenues to explore their unique destinies. Drucker states that knowledge workers are mobile because they own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears.

The challenge for organizations, and for you as a leader, is to establish and maintain an environment in which individual aspirations and goals can be aligned with organizational identity and direction. That is, individual needs and aspirations are satisfied in pursuit of shared organizational aspirations.

Herzberg's Motivation-Maintenance Theory

Before going into Frederick Herzberg's Motivation-Maintenance Theory, also known as the Two Factor Theory of Motivation, take a few minutes to work through the exercise below.

Exercise: What Turns You On?

What to do

1. Thinking back a year or so at your organizational work experience, answer these two questions:

a. What specifically satisfied you the most (that is, "turned you on the most")?

__________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________

b. What specifically dissatisfied you the most (that is, "turned you off the most")?

__________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________

2. Analyzing your answers to the questions above, was the most satisfying thing for you individual-centered (that is, the work itself — something you specifically did or did not do), or organization-centered (that is, the work context — the world surrounding your work — the workplace, the way you were treated, organizational policies and practices, and so forth)?

3. How about your most dissatisfying thing? Did it come from the work itself or the world surrounding the work (the work context)? Think about it and check your answers below.

(The Work Itself) (The Work Context)

The source or origin of my most
satisfying experience was:
(Check the appropriate box to the right) [] []

The source or origin of my most
dissatisfyingexperience was:
(Check the appropriate box to the right) [] []

Herzberg's seminal findings on work motivation grew out of his and his colleagues' research in the 1950s and 1960s. His findings, as well as Maslow's, are — and this bears repeating — still very much relevant today and provide a foundation for our understanding of the nature of work and worker motivation.

The research prior to Herzberg's important research and findings focused on human relations problems within the organization. Herzberg's The Motivation to Work (1959) summarized his research. The study showed that people are made dissatisfied by a bad environment, the extrinsics of the work. But they are seldom satisfied by a good environment, what Herzberg called hygiene. Worker satisfaction or fulfillment came from achievement and growth derived from the work itself. This was a huge breakthrough.

As the research began to be applied in the years to come, the term maintenance began to be used in lieu of hygiene. This is a good term in that organizations need to continually maintain good working environments if they are going to be able to continue to operate. I will use the term maintenance in lieu of hygiene from here on out. But, as the research tells us, a good working environment does not translate into worker motivation. Instead, satisfaction comes most often from factors intrinsic to the work: achievement; earned recognition; and work that is challenging, interesting, and responsible.

Herzberg's research was based on workers' accounts of real events that made them feel good or bad about their jobs. The findings refuted the previously held belief that worker satisfaction could be measured on a single scale. What emerged was a two-factor theory of motivation. Some factors were dissatisfiers and other were satisfiers.

In subsequent research by others, instead of asking workers to describe a "time they felt very good or very bad on the job," as Herzberg and his researchers did, workers were asked to describe "a time they worked very hard or a time they put forth little effort." These studies lent further support to all the evidence that satisfiers are motivators.

Herzberg's book, Work and the Nature of Man(1966) and the article "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" (1968) summarized the many replications of the original study. This article is the most reprinted article in the history of the Harvard Business Review.

But it took some time for the relevance and the importance of Herzberg's research and findings to catch on. Human relations continued to be the primary worker motivation focus into the 1960s and 1970s.

The chart below helps clarify the Motivation-Maintenance Theory. The key thing to note is that the opposite of being dissatisfied is not satisfied, but not dissatisfied; and the opposite of being satisfied is being dissatisfied, but not satisfied. Got it? Kind of confusing at first. But once you have it, you really have something.

Regarding the money factor, an important thing to understand is that money can be a motivator. But it is not the money itself that motivates, but rather, the translation of what the money might mean to the worker. For example, if the perception of the money received is equated with accomplishment and hard work being duly recognized, it can indeed be a motivator. But even when money is a motivator, its staying power is short-lived.

A correlation can be made between the earlier work done by Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs and Herzberg's Motivation-Maintenance Theory. What have been called the "lower- order needs" in Maslow's hierarchy, that is, the physical, security, and to some extent, the social need level relates to Herzberg's maintenance factors. And what have been called the "higher-order needs" in Maslow's hierarchy — that is, to some extent, the social need level, and most definitely the esteem and self-actualization need levels — relate to Herzberg's motivators.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Building Commitment by CARL WELTE. Copyright © 2016 Carl Welte. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction, ix,
1. The Business Case for Building Commitment, 1,
2. Understanding Motivation: Commitment versus Compliance, 7,
3. Building Block #1 Selection: Choosing the Right People, 25,
4. Building Block #2 Clarity: Developing Shared Expectations, 67,
5. Building Block #3 Performance Coaching: Guiding Success, 127,
6. Building Block #4 Teams: Synergy at Work, 185,
Appendix A: The Alex Reed Case, 251,
Appendix B: Team Assessment, 265,
Endnotes, 271,
About the Author, 277,