Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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.

Lee Colan's latest book is a MUCH NEEDED reminder that, particularly in these tough economic times (and really always), the organizations that consistently perform well are those whose employees understand and buy into the organization's direction. The advice is practical, the stories are entertaining and the author's experience "comes through." It is rare to find organizations that know how to satisfy the six needs outlined...hopefully, after reading this book, there will be more.

Employee engagement makes a lot of sense not only for a company and its customers but for the employees as well. This book provides not only the why bother but more importantly the how to.

I've got 5-6 of Lee's books and this one is certainly his most expansive and useful. In it, he tells us how to energize and retain talented people. It's a message that is easy to understand, easy to implement, and the ideas are relevant to this (and any) economic conditions. Bravo Lee!

With apologies to the author, there are better books out there on this important topic.