That’s 350 billion dollars.

Deepak Chopra teaches leadership courses to corporations through business schools around the world including one at the Kellogg School of Business in Chicago, Illinois (which is one of the most respected business schools in America).  Let’s apply Deepak’s thinking to that of a large organization, with say, 30,000 employees.  This company will look something like this:

• Emotionally Engaged in What They Do – 11% or 3300 employees

• Disengaged in What They Do – 67% or 20,100 employees

• Actively Disengaged / Come to Work to Make Other People Unhappy - 27% or 8100 employees

That totals 28,200 disengaged employees.  That’s the vast majority of people in this corporation.  28,200 people who are not oriented to what they do.  Think of the impact this phenomenon has on the efficiency of corporations.  According to Wolfgang Haufe, Professor of Business Administration at the Maastricht School of Management in Maastricht, Netherlands, disorientation can cost as much as 25% on your efficiency meter.  “Management by Directives and Management by Exception counteract orientation in organizations. Disorientation leads to collisions and collisions lead to internal conflict, which in turn leads to loss of company internal efficiency."

In a world dominated by volatile economies, pressure for growth on a quarterly basis, and now, as we see above, skeptical employees, one wonders how leaders succeed.  Presenting an engaging future to stakeholders is a leader’s job, but with these factors looming, rallying the troops to fight another battle can be a very daunting task.

Don’t Forget the Customer

This skepticism doesn’t stop at the company’s doorstep.  The numbers above do not include customers and members of general society.  It seems reasonable to assume however that an organization of 30,000 people, using the example above, has an enormous impact on its customers and on general society.

The customer example is obvious.  Take a customer experience with a Telcom.  If someone calls a cell phone carrier to identify an over-charge on a phone bill and a disengaged employee is the one who takes the call, chances are that the disengaged employee won’t care whether the customer is happy or not, and at the end of the call the customer won’t feel as if the company has satisfied the original concern.  In fact, the customer might be left to feel as if the problem was actually the customer’s.

General society is a little less obvious but potentially very real.  Think of general society as people who aren’t customers but customers in the waiting.  Think of the impact bad customer experiences have on the world.  If this is happening with the majority of customers who are interacting with the majority of employees, and the above percentages suggest exactly that, chances are there’s an unhappy person or two, or three, or a thousand, or hundreds of thousands.  They go to work just like everyone else after having a bad customer experience.  Their negative view of the world spreads like a cancer.  You get my point.

Inclusive Means Everybody

Employees are just one part of the equation, and although customers are the reason companies exist, there’s so much more to its stakeholders.  In a typical corporation, stakeholders can include our shareholders, executive and distributors, managers, staff and sub-contractors, and suppliers, customers and general society.  Each of these stakeholder sub-groups has an important perspective of what their world should look like, and their world is part of the corporation’s world.  So the question remains.  With so many challenges facing leaders, and with so many perspectives waiting to challenge a leader’s every move, how can leaders engage, and more importantly, how do leaders keep people engaged?

Create a Belief System

Leaders inspire by showing people a better future.  If people are inspired, they’re engaged.  They trust in their leaders and follow them, but unless people see results, skepticism infiltrates their thinking and they withdraw.

Obama is the classic example of someone who engaged by talking about a future dreamy in nature, and then for some reason known only to him, stopped engaging.  It’s like someone flipped a switch and he disappeared.  Time has passed and every time I see people on TV talk about him there is a disappointment in their eyes, like someone has let them down.

Corporate visions are a natural tool to lead, but given the potentially disparate viewpoints of the stakeholder sub-groups mentioned above, getting everyone to stay engaged in the same vision is not an easy thing to do.  But due to advancements in communication technology, leaders enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to lead all stakeholders to the same place, to truly change the course of a corporation’s future by engaging stakeholders, and continuing to engage them.  They can do so by creating a belief system, one based on three core principles:

1. Show people a better tomorrow by creating a vision for the future WITH them

1. Show people this collectively created future by framing the vision inside stories stakeholders care about

1. Show people their input matters by measuring it, integrating it into strategies, and reporting it regularly

Make Your Vision Something People Can Believe

If an organization is driven solely by capital, its shareholders will be engaged but the rest of its stakeholders won’t be.  Chopra’s numbers support this assertion.  Wolfgang Haufe’s numbers viewed in conjunction with Chopra’s suggest that shareholders are suffering losses given the inefficiencies created by disengaged employees, and according to Dr. Sonia Bookman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba, the impact of this situation can easily affect a company’s lifeline.  “Consumer experience is at the heart of the brand.  Positive experiences are central to establishing an ongoing relationship and building trust between consumers and companies.  It keeps consumers engaged and involved, which is key to brand image and value, which is constituted as much from the company as it is from consumers’ own participation.”

To truly orient people to a company’s vision, the content of its story must include something its stakeholders care about, and no, not just its shareholders, ALL of them - everyone from its shareholders to general society.  Think of the numbers above and understand that orientation brings efficiency, which brings profit, which makes shareholders happy, and ultimately everyone in-between.  According to Haufe, “To combat disorientation in organizations, plans need to be realistic and should come about with the involvement of the entire staff. It is desirable, in addition to the knowledge by everyone in the organization of the background data and the consequential strategic and tactical choices, that plans receive full support by all.”

I first started working on the engagement concept way back in the late 80’s as part of my graduate thesis called “Self Help Housing in Northern Remote Aboriginal Communities”.  Published in 1990, my work examined the potential for Aboriginal people to engage in construction of their homes.  I entered the professional world as a young planner for an engineering firm and quickly realized that my passion for engagement would have to wait, the company’s President blasting me in a meeting for introducing my work to the company.  I learned a lot from that moment.  I learned that innovation has its time and that was not the time.

After a number of years, I ventured out on my own, starting up several professionally managed, high profile hospitality ventures, each managed with the greatest degree of inclusiveness.  The belief in each of these businesses, by management, staff, customers and general society was palpable.  I could see that it worked.  People showed up by the hundreds to line up out the door each night because of belief in what we had created.

I have since applied this approach to our clients through OZZ media corp with similar results.  Belief created a common understanding and respect for the company’s vision.  Belief created efficiencies unimagined before we worked with them.  Belief created a very similar response in sales, event attendance, web hits and editorial responses from several credible media sources.

The world has finally caught up to this concept, in part because of the advancements in communication technology mentioned earlier, in part because of the new economy, which has created the need to look at alternative approaches to doing business, and in part because of a new generation of leaders possessing the insight to make things better.

In the new economy, leaders maximize profit by delivering focused corporate visions stakeholders can believe -  corporate visions that matter to everyone.  Leaders who capitalize on this opportunity will see people line up to be part of their world, and in the not-to-distant future, we’ll all wake up to see that belief systems are just as important to corporate success as computer systems.

Perhaps we’ll also wake up one day to find out that Deepak Chopra has released another book, one that talks about a renaissance, one that sees all leaders engaged with people in a way we never imagined.

I certainly hope so, and I can give you 350 billion reasons why corporations should care.

____________________________________________

John Pineau, MCP is the CEO & Founder of OZZ media corp & the OZZ media network

We bring Collective Genius™ to the world.

www.OZZmediacorp.com