Is your workforce cynical and resigned? Do you find yourself carefully orchestrating meetings and communications to share everything positive about the workplace and promote employee enthusiasm and support? Do you feel like you're working too hard to boost morale among your core workers?

If you answered "yes" to the first two questions, you probably are.

Our research shows that most managers think they, the managers, are responsible for controlling worker morale and they go to great lengths to manage it. In fact, a group of employees I met at a workshop constituted the "nice" brigade in their organization. Management charged them with making employees happy. If a supervisor had to deal with an employee problem, the "nice" people had to meet with the supervisor to make the message more appealing to the employee.

There is certainly nothing wrong with being positive. Nobody wants to live in a nay-sayer's paradise of which the Pessimist's Society would be proud. But some managers can't seem to get around to doing what really matters because they are so fixated on building morale. And the harder they try, the worse matters get.

A client once spent months fretting over an all-employee meeting I had encouraged them to hold. Every time I brought it up, the executives said they weren't quite ready. After several months of this, I asked them what was going on. The response was revealing. They felt they had to get the right person to emcee the event and set it up properly to make sure everyone came out of the meeting pumped up. They saw the event as a way to develop morale and totally missed the point of it all. The meeting format was not rocket science. It was simply a mechanism for getting everyone in the room to share, learn, and see new possibilities becoming realized. If it took months to put on such an event, they had to be doing something wrong.

I told them to lose the notion that they are in charge of morale. Every time they tried to improve morale, they engaged in phony behavior and staged activities that core employees saw through and resented. Cynicism increased, not decreased. If executives simply did what they needed to increase core employee understanding about the business, conducted transparent discussions about important issues including products and services, gave employees the freedom and encouragement to make improvements in work processes and customer service, and let employees share with each other what they were doing to make a difference, morale would take care of itself.

Morale is all about enthusiasm and confidence. Lasting enthusiasm and confidence come with purpose, meaningful work and the ability to effect outcomes, not from staged meetings.

When we try to create morale, we tend to do the wrong things. If we do the right things, morale just seems to happen. In other words, instead of trying to make it, enable it.

Trying it on for fit: Here is a good rule of thumb. Before deciding that you need to do something to improve morale, ask yourself if you need someone else to help you with your morale. If you feel you can handle it yourself, others probably feel they can as well.

Instead of focusing on how you can get people to respond positively, try to identify the root causes of what you perceive as morale problems. (You may need to engage an unbiased third party to help with this.) Start with aspects of the environment that seem to negatively impact enthusiasm and confidence. Don't just dismiss what you uncover as due to unmotivated employees. Policies, practices, ineffective processes, frustrations, lack of information and paternalistic management can all lead to a sense of helplessness in core workers.

Don't merely talk about them, but openly acknowledge issues as you uncover them and enlist employee help in addressing them. Look particularly hard at things that limit control by employees. Enthusiasm and confidence correlate strongly with personal sense of control.

Send an e-mail and let me know what you learn from your experiences.  I would love to hear from you!

Kevin Herring is co-author of Practical Guide for Internal Consultants, and President of Ascent Management Consulting.  Ascent specializes in creating business solutions through effective management, workplace cultures and organization systems.

Kevin can be reached at 520-742-7300, kevinh@ascentmgt.com or www.ascentmgt.com. 

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