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Structuring rewards and engaging people No, Im not going to reinvent the wheel, yet again.

I suspect youd disappear faster than a Krispy Kreme at a weightwatchers meeting. However I would like briefly explore what brain science has to say about the age-old problem of keeping people happy at work. Engagement is a term that has lost its currency, a notion cheapened by recurrent efforts to intensively farm it in big companies. It strikes me that there are as many and varied definitions and interpretations of engagement as there are organisations and industries and the individuals who inhibit them. Measuring engagement is also fraught with difficulty. Rather than answering the what and how questions, I think we need to look at the why. Most of the folk I have seen in a career coaching context have testified to bad relationships with managers or colleagues as a primary driver of career dissatisfaction, as opposed to problems with their functional roles. The Social Brain Emotions are everything. In the first of this series of short notes, I highlighted the point that the limbic brain assesses events in terms of threat and reward, or more succinctly, avoids or attaches emotionally to events as they happen. What happens next seems to follow a mysterious process as this diagram, adapted by Professor Paul Brown, illustrates so well:

You can get an idea from this of how events are processed. The profoundly social and emotional nature of the brain indicates that performance will be foundationally affected by emotional processing of any event and state of relationship between

people involved. These feelings (step 5) are what create behaviours and it is these behaviours which drive our performance at work. Efforts to engage are missing the target We want engaged workforces because it has some commercial benefit, right? But efforts to improve cultures, whether through leadership programmes, talent strategies, training, communications, new rules, bonuses, EVPs or off-sites, are nothing if the relationship between person A and person B on the ground does not improve. And relationships improve only if behaviour changes. But behavioural change requires physical change to the brain by creating neural growth that supports new behaviours and neglecting neural pathways that entrench unwanted behaviours such that they start to wither away. This is a different proposition to much HR intervention now that overly focuses on fostering engagement through process to try to get people to play nice at work. Relationship difficulties occur at the individual level because we are not great at seeing the world through someone elses eyes. The brain will do all it can to resist change to existing neural patterning and make this process well-nigh impossible, unless the person feels safe to try out different ways of interacting with others. It explains why so many well-meant change initiatives fail. If done well, a coaching culture works so much better by allowing someone to bring to awareness the nonconscious habitual emotions driving their existing behaviours, model different ones and practice new ways of interacting that over time hardwire and become normal. As I mentioned last time, people dont want to be managed, they want to be unleashed. Gen X and Y think differently. They want freedom and independence, to feel a belonging at work and to enjoy themselves. Giving people ownership is key; telling them what to do just doesnt seem to work anymore. When people solve things themselves, the brain makes patterns and emits a rush of dopamine. The reward response from real ownership of tasks can be stronger than a bonus. In these cashstrapped times, that should be of serious interest. You first Leadership styles must move from command and control to collaboration. Your people will give of their best under optimal conditions of each domain of SCARF (Rock, 2007), a model for collaborating with and influencing others. These 5 domains either activate reward or threat responses in the limbic system and determine neural circuitry that drives behaviour. Provided you help maintain an individuals balance of SCARF, such approaches deliver higher performance from staff and help find this elusive thing called engagement. It requires trust to flow from the top down, so if leaders arent engaged with engaging, the whole thing wont get off the ground.

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