Synopsis of Peter Stark’s “Engaged!” Presentation at SHRM10
The text below is taken from SHRM’s blog entry, Employee Engagement Marathon – Monday Recap, written by David Bowles
A San Diego local, Peter has an impressive resume and clearly lots of experience. He is also a talented and funny speaker who had a full house in the palm of his hands.
His speech was based on what appears to be his proprietary database of 250 companies employing 100,000 people, and which he leverages to make statements about the top 10 factors which bring about employee engagement. He does this by analyzing the top 25% of his database to see what secrets he can wring out of the data.
He started out by looking at the leader vs. manager question, something which our Wednesday speaker, Marcus Buckingham, has also done. Peter doesn’t take the Buckingham approach of splitting these jobs into quite different categories, he sees leaders as a higher level of manager whose qualities lead people to follow them, that being the crucial difference.
His database yielded a list of engagement factors which is very familiar to those of us who have worked in this business but worth repeating:
- Creating a vision with clear goals. One that comes form the heart, is unique to the organization and is radical and competitive.
- Communication (especially the hard things like goals)
- Seeking the right people for the right jobs
- Cross-department teamwork (not just within department, that’s too easy)
- Recognizing and rewarding excellence
- Making accountability and performance count (the need for honest reviews)
- Making sure very employee can learn and grow
- Problems are no problem! (an attitude that says “we can handle things”)
- Making it “all about the customer”
It’s a good list…and he had an interesting saying from John Maxwell: “if you think your job’s purpose is to make you happy, you should be a clown”. Not sure all the “happiness at work” fans would agree!
Peter was solid in his findings, though, and well worth the time spent.
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Filed Under: In the News, Leadership, Peter's Blog on July 1st, 2010
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