If you're like me, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, officially known as the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, captured your heart and imagination. We witnessed innovation and engagement that took our breath away – both in the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as in the Olympic athletes who were totally engaged in achieving their life-time goals. What can we learn from these record-breaking human achievements that can guide us to creating a more innovative and engaging culture?


A Difficult Road

For years, experts have been searching for a blueprint to build a strong culture of innovation and engagement in the workplace. Two years ago, TowersPerrin conducted a definitive study of 86,000 employees working for large- and medium-sized companies in 16 countries to measure the extent that employees were engaged in their work. The survey confirmed prior studies that only 14% of workers were highly engaged. The rest, a whopping 86% of employees around the world, show up for work, but apparently are sleepwalking on the job. The results reflect a growing organizational concern about how to manage employees to meet their potential.1

Professor Gary Hamel, a leading management expert, believes that employees are born with gifts of initiative, creativity and passion, but elect to use or squander their talents moment-by-moment and day-by-day. In a typical pyramid organization, he writes, “Hierarchies are very good at aggregating effort, at coordinating the activities of many people with widely varying roles. But they’re not very good at mobilizing effort, at inspiring people to go above and beyond. When it comes to mobilizing human capability, communities outperform bureaucracies.” Hamel believes that flatter, thinner management structures produce dedication and commitment in companies where employees share a common vision and goal. He writes that the “more meddlesome the managerial oversight, the more constricting the shackles of policy and process [and] the less passionate people are going to be about their work. You can’t expect automatons to be zealots.”2

As we reflect on the Olympics and other equally successful organizations, four practices permeate their cultures: 1) Coaching; 2) Autonomy and trust; 3) Time for incubation and innovation, and 4) Clear strategies, goals and metrics.


Coaching Relationships

Most of the Olympians had coaches. These coaches knew the sport and knew the athlete. They worked with their athletes to develop the training schedules, practices, nutritional requirements, work-out schedules, series of competitions and game plans for making it to the Olympics and competing successfully. In the case of Michael Phelps (now the most decorated Olympian in history), Bob Bowman spotted him at eleven years old, saw his potential, talked to his mother and has been working with him rigorously since that time. He saw his talents, discipline and competitive spirit, as well as the body type conducive to expert swimming. (A great example of nature and nurture.) Watching them together and listening to their interviews, you can see the bond of friendship, trust and respect that exists between them. This has been forged over many years. They have experienced the kind of coach/prot g relationship we desperately need in large organizations.

Many workers today have no coaches, mentors or managers that really know them, trust them, challenge them, and respect them. Engagement fails when individuals are treated like commodities. Old-fashioned pep talks and rah-rah exhortations may work occasionally at half time in a basketball game when strong coaching relationships and respect exists, but will not sustain a passion for work on a continuous day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis. Referring to first and second tier workers as “Associates” and “Team Members” and giving speeches about “Involvement,” “Empowerment” and “Self-Direction” only work when built on strong coaching relationships between managers and their teams.

Close coaching relationships with the hallmarks of trust, appreciation and respect allow prot g s to learn quickly, experiment, get to know themselves and what makes them unique, and gives them a safe haven for learning and feedback. Trusting employees to do the right thing in their own way may be risky, but it produces commitment. Safe, policy-driven and superficial approaches are doomed to failure. Real engagement requires trust and having coaches around you who appreciate your unique talents and help you achieve your own goals.


Autonomy and Trust

We witnessed autonomy and trust primarily in the team sports, where athletes adjusted strategies, played to the strengths of their teammates and the weaknesses of their competitors. The top rated U.S. women's beach volleyball team of Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor won the gold medal. If you caught their matches, you watched two people who trusted every move of the other and turned that into a first-time victory of back-to-back gold medals in the history of beach volleyball at the Olympics.

Nastia Lukin and Shawn Johnson, two members of the U.S. Olympic Gymnastic Team, adapted their individual floor and balance beam routines to assure top scores and medals in the Olympics. Their knowledge of their body and the new Olympic scoring system produced a self-confidence that spurred their team to great accomplishments. Effective coaches stand back and trust the skill and know-how of their prot g s. Ultimately, every athlete stands alone and makes the second-by-second judgment calls that produce the highest athletic achievements. They are trusted to do so.

Whole Foods is considered a successful model of radical decentralization through shifting decisions from the top of the pyramid to a community. The model is designed to get people energized and engaged. Each store has a handful of departments that operate autonomously, as if separate profit centers, making management decisions that affect their own group, such as planning, staffing, promotions, pricing, and ordering. Monthly bonus incentives based on profits per labor-hour for each team instill competition between teams, a sense of community and common cause. Each autonomous department has its goals and is held accountable for meeting them. The model empowers employees to take control of their careers while producing highly competent leaders and mentors. Gary Hamel writes that “Freedom … matched by a high level of accountability ensures that associates use their discretionary decision-making power in ways that drive the business forward [providing] both the freedom to do the right thing for customers and the incentive to do the right thing for profits.” 3


Time for Incubation and Innovation

The Olympics serve as a natural incubator for innovation. They occur on a regular basis, with differing events every four years. TV producers, photographers, athletic goods manufacturers, architects, and transportation experts have a minimum of four years to bring the next innovations to the Games and the public.

Those of us who viewed the Olympics were aware of a number of innovations that came from the
designers of the Opening Ceremony, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and Chinese choreographer Zhang Jigagn in their use of digital technology, real-time photography and coordination of 15,000 performers into an extraordinary performance. It appeared that every recent breakthrough in technology, fireworks, costuming, high wire stunts, and music were beautifully wrapped into that Ceremony. Seven years have gone into the planning and coordination of the Bejing Olympics. Teams worked together to assure that China came onto the world stage in a memorable way.

Google, the sovereign of cyberspace, is a successful model of a company that’s found a formula to innovate continually. The September 2008 introduction of their new web browser, Chrome, is the latest in an ongoing series of web innovations. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders knew at the outset that any competitive advantage in technology they achieved at a single point in time was far less important than an evolving advantage that would grow over time. Their driving goal was to develop technology as quickly as the Web itself evolved. They needed to change traditional management strategy to achieve their plan.

Operating with a paper-thin hierarchy and in a broad network of lateral electronic communication, Brin and Page filled the workplace with the best and the brightest talent in the world and then challenged them to break with traditional ideas to innovate on their own. Google splits workers into hundreds of groups on average of three or four people, allowing them as much as 30% of their working time for experimentation, innovation and an open line to corporate senior staff. Google found that trust and freedom allowed their employees to test-drive their ideas quickly and inexpensively to see how far they traveled. Dense lateral communication carefully followed the best ideas to their final destinations and success has been heavily rewarded at Google with significant cash prizes. At Google, nearly everything has been decentralized and the company continues to operate in small communities, where individuals control their own destinies.

What does this tell us? The number of engaged workers will skyrocket when everyone is given a voice and the tools of creativity are widely distributed. In such organizations where competency and ability are more important than positions and titles, power comes from below. Authority is dependent on skill and judgment. These companies create an evolving advantage over time and will stay ahead of the curve.


Clear Goals and Metrics

Olympians have clear goals. They know the records they want to beat. They know exactly (within hundredths of a second) how fast they have to move or how high they have to jump. They know how they’re measured in diving and gymnastics. They know each element they have to perform and the subtleties included. They get immediate feedback. Deming said years ago, “You get what you measure.”

Myriads of manufacturers also know these metrics and continually refine their products (swimsuits, running shoes, workout clothes, cameras, measuring devices, nutritional products, etc.) to help assure higher jumps, faster speeds, safer equipment, more adequate measuring devices, technology to enhance judges maintaining the criteria, etc. There is a clear and continual connection between these organizations and the athletes and nations they serve – through design, development, usage and redesign.

With athletes, the strategy is to win, break records, and enhance the sport using all the aids possible. The manufacturers, employees, athletes and coaches have a similar perspective on winning. And having clear goals and strategies and ways to measure success are intrinsically motivating. The more tightly aligned innovation strategy is with business strategy, the greater the level performance, income growth and shareholder returns, while the lower the level of alignment, the smaller the return. Companies are the most innovative:

- when they are committed to understanding their customers’ needs;

- when they are first to bring a novel product or service to the market;

- when they follow their competitors’ moves, and;

- when they focus on breakthrough technologies and swing for the fence more than taking on a piecemeal approach to innovation.


Summary

Some organizations are plagued with an archaic management model invented more than a hundred years ago that produces disengaged employees, hamstrung innovation, and inflexible organizations. Engagement will flourish when coaching relationships honor talent, trust employees and support autonomy of individuals and teams. Innovation is successful when aligned to a business strategy with clear goals and metrics for success. Companies that support customer insight in designing innovation efforts have a higher level of success. Trust your workers by granting them the independence and time to innovate.


References

1. TowersPerrin, Winning Strategies for a Global Workplace, Executive Report, 2006
2. Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, The Future of Management, Harvard Business School Press, 2007, pp 61
3. Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, The Future of Management, Harvard Business School Press, 2007, pp 72




Caela Farren, Ph.D., is President of MasteryWorks, Inc. in Falls Church, VA. She has been a consultant, entrepreneur, and educator for over 30 years, Caela has worked with hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to get them on their mastery path. Caela’s practice and company builds strong links between changing trends in industries, changing strategies of organizations and the talents and aspirations of individuals. People who work with her company discover their passion, their mastery path, and bring renewed contribution and high performance to their organizations.

Caela is known internationally for her expertise in developing talent management products and services. Her solutions are user-friendly systems that serve the needs of both organizations and individuals. She is frequently quoted in the media regarding her thoughts and advice on changing careers and work patterns in the nation. Hundreds of organizations have implemented talent management solutions from MasteryWorks, Inc. — consulting, workshops, assessment instruments and web-based talent management portals.