0010 | Dear Management (you know who you are)

The case for employee engagement is not in the hundreds of Gallup and Deloitte and Gartner’s polls that tells us with metric tons of data that your business will continue to suffer unless you make connections with your people. You already know that by building trust with the people who work for and with you increases productivity, sales, safety, retention, attractiveness to top talent, and everything else that makes winning 202% more likely. You already know that according to most human capital polls, employee disengagement is the number one issue facing global companies for the last four years running. The numbers are not the case for paying attention to employee engagement. The case for caring about whether or not your employees are engaged is standing right in front of you. Hi, my name is James. Don’t look behind you, because according to all those polls, I am one of the 75% of your people who are either beginning, or have already decided, to stop caring about your business. It’s not that we don’t care about your business. We just don't really care about you anymore. We didn’t start out that way. We started out ready to engage, ready to share ideas, ready to solve problems together.

And then after a few conversations a pattern emerged. When I leave a conversation with you, after being interrupted countless times, I feel as though you have asked few or no questions about what is important to me and you have spent your conversational efforts asserting your own value rather than collaborating to understand how I can help you in ways you may not have already thought of. You enter conversations with assumptions that you make no attempt to dispel, and so you leave conversations no more enriched than when you entered. It seems like a terrible waste of your time. Mine, too. In the time you have spent aggrandizing your own experience, your own expertise, your own credentials, I have been observing that you lack inquisitiveness, imagination, and the ability to connect. 

It is conversations like these that make me not want to work on your team. When I leave your team, it will not be because of the pay, the travel, the career path, the work, or employee satisfactions scores that can be measured or quantified. I will leave because of the gut feeling that my time is better spent working with people who care to understand what is important to me, just as I care about what is important to them. I will leave this job because the conversations I have with you are one-sided and ultimately unfulfilling.

I am enthusiastically engaged right now in spite of you, not because of you. Like most of your best and brightest, I will eventually take my brains, my energy, and my new-found experience elsewhere in search of an organization that is guided the basic business principle that people are almost any company’s greatest resource. No amount of focus on the numbers and metrics—the symptoms of organizational health or sickness—will change the core values and practices that drive those metrics. I will leave your team because I want to be on a winning team, and—among other things—winning teams have great conversations.