An interesting new ebook titled The Engaged Employee states that “Companies with high engagement experience more than 5% in operating margin and more than 3% in net profit margin as compared to those companies with low employee engagement.”

http://www.kaptasystems.com/resources/Employee_Engagement_ebook.pdf

Metaphor Mapping is a great tool for employee engagement in that it provides a easy mechanism for involving employees in strategy setting, where they can efficiently bring their experience and perspectives to bear on matters critical to company success.

Since you need to specialize to be a leader in any area today, you need a team to accomplish just about anything. So, if you don’t work well with others, you’ll finish in the also-ran category. Same for your functional group if it doesn’t work well with other groups. Sounds like kindergarten moralizing but a real issue for highly focused individuals.

Personal characteristics that help.
If getting along with others was a high value during your childhood, your collaboration skills may be well developed. If your empathy for others is very high, that helps too. If you’re not a compulsive direction-setter but are pleased to support the ideas of others, you’re likely a good collaborator. But, if you are just “normal” in these ways, you have to build skills. The same applies if your functional group doesn’t include a super-star collaborator to lead the way.

Core skills, but continuing challenge..
Effective collaboration is based on mutual understanding of views and needs, appreciation of and response to time constraints and aligning objectives of participants. Communication skills aid can be of help. But, much personal and team development literature emphasizes building on your strengths, rather worrying about your weaknesses. So what to do?

Enter Metaphor Mapping …
Try your best to be a good collaborator but give yourself an assist. Always ensure that your functional group and cross-functional teams understand each other and are clearly aligned on goals. Metaphor Mapping is the champion at this. Gather everyone together and in just a few hours you’ll have a common understanding and clear expectation of what each has to do for the others. The visual symbols do it at a gut level and make it memorable.

The Power of Habit

Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg. Random House. 2012 377 pages

Charles Duhigg, a New York Times investigative reporter, has written an easy to read book about a topic most people consider mundane but its core messages are worth serious reflection:

• Habits can be observed everywhere—in personal, social and business environments and we are often unknowingly slaves to them
• They have a profound effect on our lives
• We should learn how to change them when needed to become more effective business people, more aware consumers and more understanding of the broad social forces around us

The author starts by showing small personal habits and how they are formed. He explains how habits give advertisers, such as P&G, an opportunity to influence our buying behaviors at an unconscious level.  He also shows how businesses,  have dramatically improved their bottom lines by changing their habits.   Alcoa, for example dramatically improved its bottom line by focusing on habits related to worker  safety rather than profit.  Readers may react that this is simply analyzing and improving high-leverage areas, but moving away from business term “leverage” to the more personal term “habit” brings with it a useful emphasis on the human perspective and opens up new ways of thinking about improving operations.

Duhigg describes a versatile three part model for habits that can be applied to developing, using and breaking them. It includes a trigger/cue, an “automatic” action or routine and a satisfying result or reward following the action.
The model is easy to remember and helps you see behaviors you never considered habits.  Although Duhigg doesn’t apply the more conventional terms,  organizations would recognize the routine initiated by a cue as a work process. And, that’s the cue for me to describe my view of how Metaphor Mapping helps change organization habits.

Organization processes are initiated by cues, include routines at their core and rewards for successful completion. Metaphor Mapping, a visual systems thinking tool, gives you and a group of collaborators  metaphoric symbols to examine processes through the lens of the three part model. You see relationships among the cues, the steps of the routine and the rewards. The symbols promote open and deep discussion and produce a high impact map of process weaknesses and their relative importance.

Metaphor Mapping helps you quickly and inclusively change organization habits, no matter how in-grained. For example, process participants can come together in as few as two hours to collaboratively identify and evaluate the causes of client dis-satisfaction and create a new flow to correct them. After those changes are put into action and clients’ expectations are exceeded, the new process is validated and becomes  a habit.

The Applications and Offerings sections describe some of the ways Metaphor Mapping is used.  Here is a bit of additional perspective and short hand about when to apply these highly participative visual tools:

• Metaphor Mapping is most useful when the problem is complex and involves several groups.  If there are just a few people involved, if there is no contention or polarization, a workshop is likely not needed.  It may, however, still be useful to build a Village map simply to show the stakeholders and structure of the situation as a communication aid.
• Executives benefit as much from Mapping sessions as do operational staff, but execs often deal with financial and status reporting and evaluation work that is not well suited to map-building.
• If the issue at hand relates to a process, a set of connected activities to achieve an objective, then it most certainly is a candidate for Mapping.  The issue need not be how to fix a problem, it could also be:
  •  “Things are going well, but how might we do better?”, or
  •  “We know competitors may be taking a special action in the future.  How might we operate differently to respond or leapfrog them?”
• Assessing today’s operation, visioning an ideal, planning to achieve it with specific focus on obstacles and possible unanticipated outcomes are the most common uses of Metaphor Mapping.  If you want a solution that engages stakeholders, uses a collaborative approach and results in joint commitment to results, you will be delighted with a Mapping workshop
  •  If you also use the Facecards tool to ensure clear responsibilities, you’ll be pleased with the sense of personal responsibility that continues throughout implementation
  • If you use the Zoo tool to address any mismatched role expectations, you can further energize the group