Perhaps one of life’s biggest frustrations can be something that seems obvious to us may not always be obvious to someone else. Maybe that is why toddlers go through the “terrible twos” – they are simply the manifestation of their frustration with adults who do not understand what they are trying to communicate.
That is why I so appreciated the words of Edward Morrow I came across recently: “The obscure we always see sooner or later; the obvious always seems to take a little longer.” They are an amusing witticism that – upon deeper thought – demonstrates the wisdom of the old adage that “many a true word is spoken in jest.” Let’s take a moment to explore how relevant they are.
You certainly could argue that they apply to HR and the manner in which we manage people in organisations. Here the whole issue of employee engagement could possibly be the profession attempting to get to grips with the obscure without seeing the obvious. A practical example from the book “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution” helps make the point.
“An engineer cannot design an optimum fan except as an integral part of its surrounding cooling system, nor an optimal cooling system without integration into the building around it, nor as an optimum building without integration into its site, neighbourhood, climate & culture.” The lesson is that a sub-optimum fan is either inadequate and fails to meet the objective or too powerful and therefore wasteful. So, even when you make each component part more efficient, if you don’t properly link those components you actually make a system less efficient.
Now, your company or organisation is effectively a system. And the major component of that system – the one that keeps it operating effectively and efficiently – is your people. Consequently aligning your people properly is the only way that you will ever come close to optimising your organisational efficiency.
Yet while employee engagement appears to recognise that, it is only at the “obscure” level. Employee disengagement may well be the adult equivalent of a two-year-old’s tantrum! Your efforts to engage your employees are an attempt to address a problem that you have not fully understood. No matter how sophisticated your organisation is, you have to provide your customers – who are ultimately people – with what they need, and that requires people. You cannot implement any strategy effectively without aligning your people. This makes strategic alignment a people skill.
For any executive success derives from delivering a strategy – not simply conceiving it. Success depends on results. And that means you depend on your people. Consequently the most important aspect of your role is to manage your people effectively. Unless you are doing this you are failing to deliver the results that you ought to be getting.
This is the obvious that you are in danger of overlooking. So do not let yourself be side-tracked by the obscure. You need to focus all your efforts on the obvious. Everything else will then take care of itself.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”