Foreword

Tom Rath

Most workers are not engaged in their jobs. The vast majority of people Gallup studied (80 percent) can’t even give a strong “yes” when asked “Do you like what you do each day?” (Rath and Harter, 2010).

What’s even more troubling is that organizations, on average, are not helping to improve this situation. Instead, they bring new people in and allow their engagement to decrease substantially as each year goes by. As leaders, we have no choice but to fight this downward spiral toward disengagement. If we do nothing, employees will tune out, give less effort, and eventually leave. Or worse yet, they will stay around for a decade and erode the engagement of their peers and customers.

Finding a solution to this challenge is a central focus of this book. In the chapters that follow, you will hear from the best minds in the field of talent management as they describe how to build stronger organizations. This unique book brings together well-known academics, experts, and practitioners from some of the most admired institutions in the world. While breaking down long-held institutional barriers, these thought leaders reveal how you can engage your people from recruitment to retirement.

Each day when an employee shows up at work, he has the liberty to exhibit as much—or as little—effort as he wants. As we have all witnessed, two different people can walk into an office, spend the exact same number of hours on a task, and achieve dramatically different outcomes and levels of productivity. While each employee has a distinct set of talents that must fit a job role to begin with, once a person has been hired, a great deal of the responsibility for engaging that worker rests within the control of one person: his manager.

Despite the direct return on such investment, employers continue to focus far too little energy on the development of managers and leaders. One of the most important findings from decades of Gallup’s workplace research is that people leave bad managers and local teams—not companies. And the more we explore the relationship between an employee’s engagement and his physical health, the more we realize that the quality of his manager might be as important for his health as the quality of his doctor. Yet the majority of workers do not have a good relationship with their boss.

Time-use studies reveal what people do with their time, who they spend it with, and how they feel at various points throughout the day (Kahneman, et al., 2004). What’s most striking from this research is that the person we least enjoy being around is our boss (Krueger, et al., 2008). Of all the categories people ranked, from friends to relatives to coworkers to children, they rated the time they spent with their manager as being the worst time of the day. Even when compared to a list of specific daily activities, time spent with the boss was rated lower than time spent doing chores and cleaning the house. This may help explain why people who have worked for a bad manager could be at much greater risk for cardiovascular disease (Nyberg et al., 2009). Bad management may literally be as detrimental as bad medicine.

To bring this to life, think back to when you were in grade school sitting through a class in which you had very little interest. More than two-thirds of workers around the world experience a similar feeling by the end of a typical workday. To explore why so many people are disengaged at work, we recruited 168 employees and studied their engagement, heart rate, stress levels, and various emotions throughout the day. Before the study began, we collected data about each employee’s level of engagement (Rath and Harter, 2010).

As part of the experiment, the participants carried a handheld device that alerted them at various points in the day when we would ask them what they were doing, who they were with, and several other questions about their mood. We also asked each participant to wear a small heart rate monitor. We collected saliva samples to gauge stress levels throughout the day (via the stress hormone cortisol). The cortisol levels provided a direct physiological measure of stress levels at various points each day.

After reviewing all of these data, it was clear that when people who are engaged in their jobs show up for work, they have an entirely different experience than those who are disengaged. For those who were engaged, happiness and interest throughout the day were significantly higher. Conversely, stress levels were substantially higher for those who were disengaged. Perhaps most strikingly, disengaged workers’ stress levels decreased and their happiness increased only toward the end of the workday.

It appears that managers who are simply not paying attention create much of this disengagement. If a manager ignores an employee, there is a 40 percent chance that the employee will be actively disengaged. If a manager is at least paying attention—even if he focuses on the employee’s weaknesses—the chances of that employee being actively disengaged go down to 22 percent. But if a manager primarily focuses on an employee’s strengths, the chance of that employee being actively disengaged is just 1 percent, or 1 in 100 (Rath, 2007).

Fortunately, this means that the engagement and productivity of almost any workforce is within our control as we develop strategies to help people learn, lead, manage, and develop talent. Ensuring that our organization’s leadership and talent management initiatives pay attention to and develop people every day should eliminate barriers, silos, and disengagement. As the chapters that follow will detail, one of the central aims of integrated talent management is to create an organization-wide plan to meet these challenges.

Recruiting, compensation, reward, performance management, succession planning, engagement, retention, and leadership development must all be thought of holistically. Each of these components is critical to the ability of an organization to learn, grow, and thrive. Learning professionals are in a unique position to help the organization bring these elements together where it matters most: to all employees as they figure out how to maximize their contribution to the organization’s goals and mission.

However, it is also clear that professionals in learning, HR, organizational development, and talent management cannot go it alone. We need to marshal the resources of local managers and leaders to create real cultural change. As we provide these key leaders with the learning and integration they need, this is how we can have an impact that spans far beyond the number of people our efforts reach directly.

Solving the challenges presented in this book is a high-stakes game. If an organization fails to integrate its approach to talent management, it will experience decreases in productivity, quality, and customer engagement. If an organization takes initiative and confronts these challenges, it will create engagement, profits, and stronger workplaces.

References

Kahneman, D., A.B. Krueger, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz, and A.A. Stone. (2004). “Toward National Well-being Accounts.” The American Economic Review, 94(2), 429–434.

Krueger, A.B., D. Kahneman, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz, and A.A. Stone. (2008). National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life (Working Papers No. 1061). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Nyberg, A., L. Alfredsson, T. Theorell, H. Westerlund, J. Vahtera, and M. Kivimaki. (2009). “Managerial Leadership and Ischaemic Heart Disease among Employees: The Swedish WOLF Study.” Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 66(1), 51–55.

Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press

Rath, T. & Harter, J. (2010). Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. New York: Gallup Press.

About the Author

Tom Rath is a leading business thinker and one of the bestselling authors of the last decade. His first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was a number one New York Times bestseller. Rath’s book, StrengthsFinder 2.0, is a long-running number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. His most recent New York Times bestsellers are Strengths Based Leadership and Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. In total, Rath’s books have sold more than three million copies and have made more than 250 appearances on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Rath currently leads Gallup’s workplace consulting business. In this role, he guides the organization’s practices and research on employee engagement, selection, strengths-based development, leadership, and wellbeing. Rath also serves on the board of VHL.org, an organization dedicated to cancer research and patient support. He earned degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Tom and his wife, Ashley, and their two children, live in Washington, D.C.