The Power of Employee Well-Being | Book Review

“Most stressed that investors never held CEOs accountable for
engagement because other well-established metrics for evaluating
organizational performance were deemed more important." (p. 2)

Book of the year.

Mark Crowley's timely work is a worthy companion to 2021's Wellbeing at Work by Jim Clifton & Jim Harter. This is no surprise, as Crowley has tracked classical engagement metrics (think Gallup's trademarked Q12) as well as any contemporary author. We should consider Crowley's twelve concise chapter takeaways as updated metrics for any professional concerned about organizational performance.

An intentional pivot toward elevating well-being will help solve two rather significant problems facing businesses today (p. 3):

• Chronic employee burnout
• Not effectively supporting employee's emotional and psychological needs

DeNeve's (Oxford professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve) most unexpected and profound conclusion is that the greatest driver of employee well-being is belonging (p. 5). Crowley's framework addresses employee well-being in terms of ensuring that people feel valued, respected, deeply connected to their colleagues, and empowered in their roles, not in terms of personal health practices such as diet, exercise, or spirituality (p. 8). This review reflects on Crowley's twelve key findings offering supporting evidence his roadmap is vital today.

12 Well-Being Findings

1. Know Thyself

This finding mirrors an Academy Leadership Excellence Course (LEC) day one, where focus is on learning about self. Most leaders don't believe they need to do this work at all. Research shows that 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, while just 10-15 percent (at best) truly are (p. 18).

2. Drop a Pin

What actually proves to differentiate superstar performers, Potterat said, is a mastery of four learned behaviors (pp. 24-25):

• Are highly resilient.
• Commit to making incremental improvements.
• Keep their minds focused on the only three things they can directly control: their attitude, their effort, and their actions.
• Have highly refined value systems and have developed a personal "credo."

We may think of Potterat's findings as a combination of deliberate practice, as defined by Anders Ericsson in Peak along with living one's Personal Leadership Philosophy, or PLP.

3. Emotions Power the Workplace

The rather important leadership takeaway here is that how managers make us feel, and not what they make us think, drives employee commitment, loyalty, productivity, and well-being (p. 30). This is a timeless lesson with roots in classical rhetoric. In a highly technical workplace, it's easy to focus on logos, or the logical argument for your point, rather than pathos, or the ability to connect with others emotionally.

4. Embrace our Shared Humanity

It's always been my experience that when employees are made to feel that they are valued as human beings, they will instinctively reciprocate by taking steps to minimize, as much as possible, any impact the personal challenges they are facing might have on the responsibilities they have at work (p. 37).

In Culture Shock, Team Gallup recommends becoming a leader as coach by having one meaningful conversation per week with each employee. This allows us to connect at an instinctive and motivational level.

5. Curate Connection and Belonging

According to Professor Geoffrey Cohen, belonging is the feeling that we're part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us -- and to which we feel we have something to contribute (p. 43). Identify behaviors that align with your team's values and mission and create unique rituals around those behaviors (p. 45). Put more simply, we should align our PLP with our organization, then live our leadership philosophy daily.

6. Be a Positive Force

The single most important factor that differentiated high-performing teams from low-performing teams was the ratio of positive to negative interactions employees experienced -- between one another, and between themselves and their managers (p. 48).

In Thanks For The Feedback, the authors articulate three forms of feedback:

• Appreciation
• Evaluation
• Coaching

Establishing a high-performing team may be started by greatly reducing the amount of evaluation and increasing the amount of [performance] coaching.

7. Turn Over Every Stone

We're wise to proactively align ourselves to the speed of change by embracing lifelong learning, seeking new information, exploring different perspectives, and questioning the status quo (p. 53). Curious-minded leaders know that they and their people can never stop learning -- and, more importantly, they never should (p. 58).

In From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks reminds us that we may continue gaining fluid knowledge, despite our age, while sharing crystalized knowledge gained over a lifetime (think Leader as Coach).

8. Step Into the Fog                  

Rick Wartzman and Kelly Tang (Bendable Labs): Being comfortable with haziness and reacting with nimbleness ... are the most prominent hallmarks of being an effective leader in our turbulent times (p. 61). Recall in Navy Seal Jeff Boss' Navigating Chaos, subtitled How to Find Certainty in Uncertain Situations, the key trait for navigating such situations is curiosity.

9. Loosen Your Grip

It's a fatal flaw for managers to believe that employees won't work hard or be effective unless their closely monitored or even micromanaged (p. 67). Autonomy, mastery & purpose are the key to motivation in the workplace today. According to Dan Pink (Drive), these are the top three motivators once people believe they are paid enough at work.

10. We Instead of Me

Collaboration, mutual trust, and cooperation are crucial to developing new technologies and to achieving virtually every important organizational goal (p. 73). All great coaches in collegiate and professional sports knowingly create cultures of initiative and achievement, with a special emphasis on collaboration (p. 74). Adapting a performance coaching mindset is a great way to start. In Coaching to Develop People workshops, we define performance coaching as the process of equipping people with the tools, knowledge and opportunities they need to develop themselves and become more successful.

11.Growth Creates Happiness

To be an enlightened leader today is to understand that the limits of human potential are mostly imagined (p. 79). I've strongly believed that workplace leaders should not only self-identify as being more of a coach than a manager, they should dedicate more of their time to coaching than managing (p. 82). The easiest way to begin coaching rather than managing or evaluating is to spend more time asking active questions followed by supportive actions, rather than telling others what to do followed by impersonal evaluation.

12. Care About - Even Love - Your People

Dachner Keltner UC Berkeley social scientist informs us:

We no longer earn power by being self-focused, but by consistently
acting in ways that improve the lives of others. Power is expressed
in advocacy, compassion, respect, attentiveness to human feelings,
and gratitude toward others (p. 86).

Crowley's Lead From the Heart essentially concluded the same.

Summary

Crowley's findings from his Oxford meeting with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve provide final validation (pp. 91-93):

• Employee well-being is mostly on us (as leaders), not them.
• Unlike with engagement, a focus on employee well-being is a true win-win
• Measuring well-being should have little complexity.
• "And, at any given time, we generally want to know two things: how people feel at work, and what may explain those feelings."

How people feel at work and how they feel about their work --
determine employee well-being. (p. 5)

Team Crowley generously provided a copy of the book for review.