Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results [Hardcover]

Lee Colan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2008

Employee engagement is the cornerstone of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. In Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees, leadership expert Lee J. Colan delivers the “how to” for inspiring your team so they deliver unparalleled value to your customers.

Proven at Fortune 500 companies across the globe, Colan's simple but powerful formula is this: meet your employees' basic intellectual and emotional needs, and they will perform at peak ability. Their minds and hearts will be fully engaged, they will be energetic and innovative-and they will keep your customers satisfied and loyal. To do this, he equips you with the practical tools to engage employees at all levels, and ignite the fire of “Passionate Performance.”

With clear, concise strategies, Colan reveals how to view employees as human beings, not just workers, in order to fulfill their six basic needs: intellectual (Achievement, Autonomy, and Mastery) and emotional (Purpose, Intimacy, and Appreciation). He gives you concrete action steps to:

• Identify ways to eliminate barriers to achievement
• Define boundaries within which employees have the autonomy to do their jobs
• Create a compelling purpose for your team
• Focus resources and time to best support your purpose
• Answer the Fundamental Four questions that employees are always asking, whether you hear them or not
• Create team rituals that help build intimacy

Packed with proven strategies for meeting your people's needs as well as instructive examples from stellar companies including Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Toyota, and General Electric, Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees is your field guide for conquering your competition…one employee at a time.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Build passion and performance through employee engagement!

Are your people passionate about what they do? Are they on board with your team's real purpose? Do they go the extra mile for your customers?

Colan reveals the practical steps necessary to inspire and engage your employees. He shows you how to meet their most basic intellectual and emotional needs while assessing your own engagement style. By fully engaging your employees, you'll nurture a team that gives their all to deliver service.

“This practical guide delivers the right message at a critical time… engage your people! It’s a swift read and provides fresh, new insights. Passionate Performance is the secret sauce to today’s leading organizations.”
—Jim Thyen, president and CEO, Kimball International

“A quick and actionable read! Colan is true to form with clear insights and practical tools for engaging your team. This book should be read by every leader who wants to conquer the competition.”
—Stephen Mansfield, Ph.D., president and CEO, Methodist Health System

“Packed with tools that you can start using immediately to boost performance, Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees is the pathway to better results.”
-David Cottrell, author, Monday Morning Leadership

About the Author

Lee J. Colan, Ph.D. is a leadership expert, advisor, and an energizing speaker whose cut-through-the-clutter insights appear regularly in a wide range of print and on-line media. Lee has published seven rapid-read books designed for an information-rich, time-poor world. Virtually every Fortune 500 company, as well as many smaller companies, have experienced the positive impact of Lee's practical approach.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (August 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071602151
• ISBN-13: 978-0071602150
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lee J. Colan, Ph.D. is a leadership advisor, author and an energizing speaker. His cut-through-the-clutter insights appear regularly in a wide range of print and on-line media. Lee has written 10 books, with most of them being translated into several languages.

In addition to 25 years of hands-on industry and consulting experience, Lee earned Master's and Doctoral degrees in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from George Washington University after graduating from Florida State University.... Go Noles!

Lee's passion and enthusiasm create turbo-charged presentations and engaging reading. He delivers practical, powerful tools leaders (of self or others) can put to work right away.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually, 3.5 Stars, November 24, 2008

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results (Hardcover)

First of all, the term "engagement" needs to be clarified. Recent research conducted by the Gallup Organization indicates that 29% of the U.S. workforce is engaged (i.e. loyal, enthusiastic, and productive) whereas 55% is passively disengaged. That is, they are going through the motions, doing only what they must, "mailing it in," coasting, etc. What about the other 16%? Are they engaged? Yes. However, they are doing whatever they can to undermine their employer's efforts to succeed. They have a toxic impact on their associates and, in many instances, on customer relations. These are stunning statistics. How to explain them? Reasons vary from one organization to the next. However, most experts agree that no more than 5% of any given workforce consists of "bad apples," trouble-makers, chronic complainers, subversives, etc. The subtitle of Lee Colan's book suggests an important question: "How to ignite passionate performance for better business results?"

As for the title of this book, ignore it. Surely Colan realizes that it is impossible to engage the hearts and minds of "all" employees in today's business world. Most C-level executives would be delighted if they could increase and then sustain positive and productive employee engagement by 20-25%. Colan organizes his material as follows:

Part I (Chapters 1-4) Getting Your Head (and Your Heart) around Engagement
Part II (Chapters 5-7) The Intellectual Side: Engaging the Mind
Part III (Chapters 8-10) The Emotional Side: Engaging the Heart
Part IV (Chapters 11-14) Igniting the Fire

The reader is then provided with five appendices filled with supplementary material that includes a "Leadership Profile," inspirational quotations to help ignite passionate performance, a check-list for planning and then conducting meetings that are "engaging," a nomenclature of words and phrases that are "passionate performance killers," and a work sheet that will facilitate leadership with purpose. There are no head-snapping revelations in this book nor does Colan make any such claim. In fact, there is no indication that he has consulted any primary sources (including several recently published books) that offer much broader as well as much deeper analysis of the issues involved with achieving and then sustaining employee engagement. The material that Colan provides is sound and probably sufficient to the needs of owner/CEOs of most smaller companies (i.e. those with fewer than 20 employees); however, much of the material (especially his "12 practical strategies to ignite Passionate Performance") will be obvious and seem simplistic to C-level executives in organizations that have a significant number of employees who are either passively disengaged or under-cutting the efforts of those who are loyal, enthusiastic, and productive. Corrective action in larger organizations requires more than cheerleading that relies almost entirely on bombarding well-entrenched problems with bromides.

Those in need of more than what Colan offers are urged to check out John Kotter's A Sense of Urgency, Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier, and John C. Maxwell's Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned from a Lifetime of Leading as well as David Croston's Employee Engagement: The People First Approach To Building A Business, John Smythe's The CEO Chief Engagement Officer: Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance, Sarah Cook's The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement: Better Business Performance through Staff Satisfaction, Pat Townsend's The Executive Guide to Understanding and Implementing Employee Engagement Programs: Expand Production Capacity, Increase Revenue, and Save Jobs, and Richard H Axelrod's Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations.

5.0 out of 5 stars Can be applied to real world Mgmt, April 23, 2011

By 

Kevin Usilton (Swiftwater, pa, US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results (Hardcover)

The real beauty of this book is that you can immediately begin applying the teachings to your job or profession. Personally, I work for a company that is both a fortune 500 and an industry leader. FedEx has a very high focus on employee engagement and is geared towards their people. This book uses the Bravo Zulu award that FedEx administers to spontaneously recognize an employees work performance and also gives other examples of how to fully engage your people while working in a fortune 500 company. I've found these teachings to be personally rewarding as well as helping mold a positive, productive work environment. If you're in management you will love it and learn a good deal.

- Kevin Usilton, Swiftwater PA

4.0 out of 5 stars Sound Advice, October 16, 2009

By 

Larry Underwood "Author - St Louis Cardinals ... (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results (Hardcover)

This is one of several books I've recently read on the hot subject of employee engagement; Lee J Colan's effort is worthy, if a bit uninspiring. Igniting the fire of "passionate performance" is promised, but delivering those incindiary results isn't such a slam dunk in the real world of business.

Colan's premise is similar to Paul Herr's Primal Management: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Nature to Drive High Performance, but it lacks the scientific research Herr put into his effort---over 30 years to be precise. Whether the formula for successful employee engagement is derived from Colan's "six basic needs" or Herr's "five social appetites", clearly most of corporate America has been missing the boat in recent years. Most CEOs don't seem to understand the true value of having an inspired and motivated bunch of employees running around, providing great customer service. Their management style typically is abrasive and their ability to engage employees is dismal.

Colan's advice is sound; it takes a dilligent leader of an organization to follow it to the letter and make it work in the real world. The message is straight forward and compelling; happy employees are more productive employees. The strategies contained in this book aren't bad. If nothing else, it keeps the issue of employee engagement in the spotlight; conquering that challenge depends on the personalities involved, and the perceived commitment from an organization's CEO to really make it work.