Follow this Path

Author:Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina PhD

The subtitle of this book is almost a chapter in itself: how the world's greatest organisations drive growth by unleashing human potential. A powerful approach based on the Gallup Organisation's study of over 10 million customers, 3 million employees and 200,000 managers.

With such a database to go at, it's a wonder they've managed to condense everything down into just 284 pages!

You might have heard of Curt Coffman as the author of First, Break all the Rules. Coffman took the idea for that book, no doubt from Louis Patler's If it ain't broke ... BREAK IT! Unless Coffman wrote his book first, then switch that, as Willy Wonka says!

This book's foreword starts wiht a graph taken from The Economist newspaper that became the subject of a discussion I had with various colleagues from around the world. The foreword is written by James K Clifton, Chairman and CEO of The Gallup Organisation in January 2002 ... firstly, chairman AND CEO ... what ever happened to corporate governance that frowns on the combining of these two roles?

Anyway, I thought Clifton's arguments were so weak and flawed that I felt compelled to discuss them in an online discussion forum: go here to see what came out of that discussion.

The Gallup Path to which this book relates is this one:

As with the other business and management books I review, let me give you an overview of teh book by listing its contents:

• The path to take

1. Welcome to the emotional economy
2. Discover the talents of each employee
3. The route that never goes astray
4. Steering toward engagement
5. Directions fro enhancing the management employee engagement
6. Emotional economics part 1
7. The open highway
8. The four emotional states that drive customer engagement
9. Directions for enhancing and managing customer engagement
10. Ecotional economics part 2
11. Managing the emotional economy

• Epilogue: a new vision for a new century
• Appendix A: managerial talent, employee engagement and business unit performance
• Appendix B: employee engagement, satisfaction and business unit level outcomes, a meta analysis

This is an intense book in lots of ways as there is a lot to consider: not surprising given the database of people and responses that are supposed to have gone into drawing it up. It's impossible therefore to do anything other than pick out a few key ideas to whet your appetite.

Q¹² is a check list that Gallup has devised and this is at the core of this book. What is Q¹²? Appendix B is where you will find Q¹² described in detail; and they say that it's based on over 30 years if accumulated quantitative and qualitative research.

1. I know what is expected of me at work
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right
3. At work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
4. In the last seven days I have received recognition or praise for doing good work
5. My supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development
7. At work my opinions seem to count
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work
10. I have a best friend at work
11. In the last six months someone at work has talked to me about my progress
12. This last year I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow

Chapter 5 spells out the Q¹² ideas in some detail too.

Engagement is a key phrases that you will find throughout this book: don't just employ someone, don't just manage someone, get them involved, get them engaged. For example, from chapter 9, page 207:

Do what great managers do, and engage your customers by:

• Identifying and using employee talent themes so that they generate emotional engagement by doing what they do best
• Initiating, sustaining or restoring their emotional states
• Intensifying emotional states by making sure that employee-customer engagement is consistent.

That should give you a few clues as to what they mean by engagement; but let's turn to chapter 6 for even more insights:

In Great Britain 17% are engaged, 63% are not engaged and 20% are actively disengaged. (page 138 and the terms engaged etc are defined on pages 129 - 135) To put some value on what this means, the equivalent figures for the USA are:

In the USA 30% are engaged, 54% are not engaged and 16% are actively disengaged ... Gallup has calculated that the cost to the US economy of actively disengaged employees is in the range of $254 to $363 billion annually. This amount is larger than the US budget for either education or national defense. See pages 137 - 138

We then learn of the benefits of using Q¹²: Here's a sample of amazing success stories:

• a major US retailer saw the proportion of its engaged employees triple in the course of five years
• a manufacturing firm notices its proportion of engaged employees rise almost twofold in one year.

See pages 140 - 141 for more.

Moreover, they report, pages 127 - 128, chapter 6: 

Business units in the top half of employee engagement ... show on average:

• 86% higher success rate on customer metrics
• 70% higher success in lowering turnover
• 70% higher success rate in productivity
• 44% higher success rate in profitability
• 78% higher success rate in safety figures

You might also have spotted that they use the word and idea of emotion quite a bit and it might come as no surprise that emotion and engagement go hand in hand. In their discussions of the emotional economy, they rarely mention the word emotion! See chapters 6, 10 and 11 for much more.

I hope I have given you something of a flavour for what is in this book. For managers it contains some really useful insights and you would need to think really carefully about moving from a situation in which there is little engagement to one where engagement is the norm: the benefits, however, could be enormous.

If you are a sceptic, read this book and think about it carefully. In the area of budgeting and budgetary control, such aspects as emotional intelligence, engagement and participation have been known and discussed for decades so this present discussion is neither new nor wrong.

If you are a teacher/student, there are many insights here to keep you busy for a long time: whatever your business related topic, this book could well be useful for you. I should say, however, that it's probably better aimed at undergraduates and professional level students rather than anyone who is still in their pre university phase although a well read and mature pre university student could benefit a great deal from this book.

A recommended text!

Reviewed by Duncan Williamson - attend Duncan's courses here