How Paternalism Destroys Employee Engagement
Posted: 03/01/2010 3:28:00 PM EST | 8
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Organizations need employees to be more engaged to reap the benefits of their full potential. Even employees who work hard can leave their brains at home, thus not contributing much in the way of new ideas. Businesses can't afford robotic employees just going through the motions. There are also losses associated with poor performance and turnover.
Surely the problem is a felt lack of ownership. Frederick Herzberg got it right when he showed that the same employees who complain about working in a dark, dirty factory have no trouble enduring the same conditions when they work on their cars in their garage. Herzberg explained the difference by pointing to the lack of "motivational factors" in the workplace. What these factors really amount to is ownership. People are more motivated to work for something they own than for something they are merely paid to do.
Employees may feel a sense of ownership for their own job, but how many feel the same ownership for the business as a whole and its future? Empowering employees, giving them interesting challenges and recognizing their efforts fosters ownership over their own work and, to some extent, the broader organization. But having little say in running the business, not being consulted on its future direction and having difficulty answering the "What's in it for me?" question can leave them disengaged.
Paternalism and Employee Engagement
Employee engagement would be easier to achieve if organizations were less paternalistic. Suppose a self-employed consultant sold you a service. You wouldn't worry whether your consultant was engaged; such people engage themselves. Consultants approach you; they are proactive in striving to identify your needs. The fact that managers see it as their responsibility to engage, motivate or inspire employees suggests a paternalistic mindset that may be causing the very problem managers are struggling to solve.
The Paternalistic Language of Leadership
When we ask what traits people want in a leader we get a portrait of the ideal parent. Transactional analysis helps us compare parent-child with adult-adult relationships and distinguish between the nurturing and critical parent. The former is empathetic, considerate and developmental while the latter disciplines and controls us. It is surely no accident that our definitions of leadership and management closely parallel the description of these two parenting styles. We define leadership as inspiring, considerate, empowering and developmental, thus nurturing, while managers are viewed as mechanistic, controlling, unsympathetic and punitive.
Thus, the whole language of leadership is riddled with paternalism. It's up to leaders to motivate people, not up to employees to motivate themselves. Even empowerment means giving employees permission to make decisions they couldn't make previously. Giving permission is paternalistic. Employees with the mindset of entrepreneurial, self-employed business people would try to convince their managers to let them take on more responsibilities. They wouldn't sit back waiting for the manager to invite them. Ironically, the more disengaged employees become, the harder management works to engage them, not realizing that they are digging themselves into a deeper hole because it is the culture that is at fault.
Heroic Leadership and Paternalism
We show our dependency on leaders when we complain that they aren't as competent as they used to be. Another explanation of our dissatisfaction is that our need for them is too strong. As a child you turned to a nurturing parent for comfort and safety when you felt frightened or anxious. Today's rapid pace, pressure to deliver and greater complexity combine to make us more anxious. Because today's leaders, being only human, cannot fully calm our fears, we feel let down by them. Our rising anxieties drive us to want more dependent relationships with leaders to soothe our fears, just when we need to be more empowered. Thus employees collude to drive leaders to be heroic. But the more heroic the leader the more dependent the employee and this gets in the way of engagement. The greater the power gap the more powerless are those at the bottom of the pile.
Leadership is often compared to a journey that takes a group from A to B. It's like going on a bus tour with the leader driving the bus. Without intending it, this perspective can make employees feel like passengers, hence passive when it comes to driving the bus. Attempting to counter these feelings by expecting the leader to do the engaging, developing, cultivating and empowering can compound the problem of employee passivity instead of overcoming it.
Practical Steps for Culture Change
Employees need to be trained to think like business people, self-employed suppliers of services. They need to reframe career management as business development. Everyone has been in a role that has evolved into something else. Employees need to be more proactive in dissecting the needs of their internal customers, especially their boss's, to take on new responsibilities while shedding older ones over time and re-negotiating their pay. As it is, they have the employee mindset that there is nothing they can do to advance their careers other than do a good job as it is totally up to the boss to promote them. Managers at all levels need to develop a more engaging style of interacting with employees, devoting much more time to drawing solutions out of them, even for strategic decisions. This is what level 5 leaders do to foster shared ownership. It is only by cultivating higher levels of ownership that employees will feel fully engaged.
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Contributor: Mitch McCrimmon |
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The concept of "paternalistic" leadership must be tempered by the realization that certain HR functions/environments must be more adult-adult related. For example, when HR becomes an advocate of one particular employee group it may be seen in one light as "empowering" and "nurturing", and in another as being unfair to others. In this setting seeing HR as "mechanistic" and "unsympathetic" can be comforting. Having said that I do not wish to overlook the main point of McCrimmon's piece. In a global context he is spot-on. I would like to see some discourse on the ethical consequences of HR becoming special interest advocates within the larger organization. |
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Excellent post. The way I look at this is scrapping the mid 19th century paternalist management style of "command and control" in favor of one that encourages innovation, excitement and passion -- "trust and track." The power of such an approach is evident in this years #1 best company to work for: SAS. More on this approach and how SAS lives it and benefits from it here: http://bit.ly/bNMgVE |
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Our research shows that fostering shared ownership boils down to three things: (1) Goal-setting - rather than impose objectives on employees, managers should facilitate their employees to set goals and provide incentives to set stretch goals; (2) emotional engagement - managers need to get away from the purely left-brained transactional employee contract and get employees to tap into their right-brains and become emotionally engaged in their work (this requires a high EQ on the part of management); and (3) Focus - managers need to help employees break their goals into short-term objectives that they can coach their employees on. |
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Thanks for the nice comments on my article so far. I was coaching a male executive one time and trying to get him to take a more facilitative approach. He could see the value of drawing solutions out of others but said it wouldn't feel like "real work". Another executive who had an engaging style got a big job in a new company and when he went around asking his new team what they saw as the issues and potential solutions, one old timer asked him "Do you want me to tell you how to do your job?" So, he was simply expressing the prevailing organizational culture that says managers should know what to do, they should have the answers. Until organizations stop rewarding goal scoring and start rewarding more engaging ways of behaving, not much will change I fear. Regards, Mitch McCrimmon |
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Very nice article. Your depiction of managers is right on. How do we, as HR professionals, get them to see the value of coaching employees and how do we give them the tools to become coaches. The policy and work standards police role will always be there for them because that's part of their job. The real challenge is to get the managers out of this paradigm and open their minds to become coaches. Some get it and some just do not. |
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The BEST resource to learn how to give "them more say in running the business and leading in a less paternalistic way" is The Leadership Challenge by Kousez & Posner. Their 5 Practices of Exemplary Leadership are based on decades of research vs. "Dad's way or the highway." Brilliant. 5 Practices are outlined here: http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-131055.html
Another "how to" is to engage employees in doing what they do best. By this I mean put them to work using their natural strengths and innate instincts IN ADDITION to their learned skills. Recognize them when they "do what they do best" vs. working against their grain, so to speak. Think of a time when you were complimented for doing something you really hated, knew you weren't "wired" to excel in, etc. The verbal reward fell on deaf ears OR made you feel inadequate. When we put employees to work using their STRENGTHS vs. the old school management "development philosophy" of working on weaknesses the rate of return in productivity, efficiency and more effective outcomes will amaze. Kolbe is, in my opinion THE number one tool for helping organizations connect the right people in the right roles for best business outcomes. Read more here www.Kolbe.com and http://www.mpower-consulting.net/team-development/ |
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thanks Mitch for a terrific statement! Every professional woman I know (including me) has suffered through work situations where telling the boss-man of a problem, a developing issue, yellow status on a project task or even just giving a project status has to be very carefully framed to avoid his automatic assumption that the real message is that we can't handle it and require "Dad's" help/intervention to fix things. But there's another issue that compounds the problem. . . the "sibling rivalry" that comes from our reward system which encourages people to claim the whole credit (even when the team helped), to steal ideas and credit that rightly belongs to colleagues and sometime subordinates. All this mis-placed family stuff can be a major trial for those of us who prefer our working relationships to be adult-adult ones. |
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Other than "giving them more say in running the business and leading in a less paternalistic way", what are some ideas for fostering shared ownership? |
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