Engaged employees feel a strong sense of ownership, not just motivation to do a good job. Frederick Herzberg noted that the same employees who complain about working in a dirty, noisy, poorly lit factory enjoy working on their own cars in precisely the same conditions. His concept of “motivational factors” amount to a feeling of ownership. Some employees own their jobs, but how many feel much ownership for the business as a whole?

Organizations disengage employees because managers hog the lion's share of ownership. They ask employees for information and delegate execution but reserve interesting work for their own attention. Employees are expected to meet their targets, not help do their manager’s job. To address this problem, we need to see how managers define their roles.

The Manager’s Identity

Most employees and managers identify with their ability to analyze, make decisions and generate smart solutions. Being solution generators or goal scorers, they feel a sense of achievement when they contribute valuable content. Their self worth is based on their ability to generate the best possible answers.

All managers have a ready excuse for saying little in meetings: insufficient knowledge of the content or someone else has already said what they thought of saying. They fail to recognize other ways to contribute—by facilitating: asking questions that stimulate others to think. Solution generators ask only factual questions to get information to fuel their own thinking.

Scoring goals gets rewarded because organizational cultures are based on male values that fuel hyper-competition. Businesses need to be competitive to beat their competitors hence the popularity of sports and war metaphors. Unfortunately, internal competition for promotion is as fierce as it is between businesses. Just as the best goal scorers in sports earn the most money, executives with the best ideas to improve the business win the top slots. In this context it is no surprise that so-called "alpha males" often win out.

In the Alpha Male Syndrome, Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson tell us that alpha males ‘’are aggressive, results-driven achievers who insist on top performance from themselves and others.’’1 Michael Eisner, formerly of Disney, is a classic alpha male. Chainsaw Al Dunlap, famous for his ruthless cost-cutting, is another. Importantly, ‘’the alpha male drive for dominance that once assured the survival of the toughest has become increasingly maladaptive.

In an environment where brains count a whole lot more than brawn, a physical pipsqueak can be a giant.’’3 Allowing the need for competitive traits, Ludeman and Erlandson endorse a more feminine style of leadership, noting that ‘’female managers tend to be perceived as more consultative and inclusive, whereas men are more directive and task oriented.’’4

Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There argues that executives need to rid themselves of 20 bad habits such as never apologizing or thanking people,  taking all the credit, interrupting rather than listening and, generally, needing too strongly to be right. As Goldsmith explains: ‘’Winning too much is easily the most common behavioral problem that I observe in successful people,’’6 adding that the need to win is the core issue, because ‘’it underlies nearly every other behavioral problem.’’7

But extreme alpha males are only the tip of the iceberg because even less aggressive types base their identity and self worth on their ability to score goals. When they have little to say it is because they only see value in making statements about content. Operating in facilitative mode  just doesn't occur to them.

In male dominated cultures, too many employees are mere onlookers. With no say in its direction, they feel little commitment to the overall enterprise. They can only observe the battlefield to see who gets to call the shots and bet on the likely winners and casualties.

How Career Advancement Works

Career progression is based on making a visible impact through:
·    Achieving outstanding results
·    Scoring goals in meetings

To achieve outstanding results, managers must be good with people, but real fast-trackers also score goals whenever they interact with key players across the organization. They present solutions that impress anyone willing to listen. This approach to career advancement continues all the way to the top. The smartest, most confident, most vocal and assertive are increasingly competitive as the number of slots gets fewer near the top.

The Facilitative Manager

Managing has always entailed getting work done by delegating tasks. But delegation is a two-edged sword. It can develop employees but it is also used as a means of freeing managers up to do the "more important" work of scoring big goals.  Delegation is used for execution by the "hands" leaving the "head" free to do all the thinking thus keeping employees out of more strategic engagement.

Delegation was appropriate in the industrial age but in a knowledge driven era the focus shifts from tasks to mental work: thinking creatively, solving complex problems and making delicate decisions. But mental work is also a form of doing when managers keep it to themselves. Getting mental work done through people means drawing solutions out of them with questions like "What do you think?"

Here are some examples of facilitative questions for use in meetings:
·    You’ve made a good case for doing X. What do you see as the disadvantages, risks, costs?
·    What other options are worth considering?  Their pros and cons, risks, costs?
·    What evidence do we have that your proposal will work?
·    What are the implications of doing X for other functions, strategies, customers, etc?
·    What potential obstacles do you foresee? How would you propose addressing them?
·    Who else has any ideas on this issue?
·    How can we test your idea to verify that it will work in our context?
·    How can we put your plan into action? Who else needs to be involved?

This form of contribution is not as much fun as generating solutions. Crucially, it doesn’t get rewarded. People get promoted by scoring goals, not by being great facilitators. Scoring goals with smart answers in meetings is infinitely more visible and impactful than facilitation.

The Effective Manager

No manager should only facilitate and never do anything but it is arguable that the balance between the two is seriously out of whack. Management can be likened to investment—striving to get the best return on all resources relative to a set of goals. Managers need to manage themselves too by regularly striving to justify in hard business terms how they allocate their own time and other resources. How much time to spend facilitating is an investment decision that must be made in context. It depends on the likely return: how much value would be added by greater engagement of these particular employees?

Unfortunately, managers see their role as a decision making one. This is self-serving because it is how they want to spend their time regardless of whether it is justifiable on investment grounds. To even raise the question of how much time a manager should devote to facilitation suggests seeing such activity as a diversion from "real work." But it is arguable that facilitation IS their job or at least a much bigger part of it than they recognize.

So, cultures are disengaging because managers do all the thinking and thus feel the strongest ownership for business direction. Managers argue that their team members have little to say about the bigger picture. But with no time invested in fostering their interest and developing their perspective, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Balancing Facilitating and Doing

-    Reward facilitation. The performance of managers in meetings should be rated highly only if they do some facilitating.
·    Train managers on how to facilitate.
·    Revise the managerial role and criteria for advancement.
·    Recognize teams, and those who manage them, for generating the most bottom-up improvement ideas.
·    Reward objective measures of employee engagement such as turnover and the number of good ideas or innovations generated by team members in addition to survey results.

Ironically, managers need to foster goal-scoring in their teams just as they struggle to do less of it themselves. But non-managerial employees can also be trained and rewarded for facilitating so that employees and managers alike achieve the same balance of skills.

As long as organizations confine employees to execution (as "hands"), while allowing managers to do most of the thinking (as "heads"), deep employee engagement won't be achieved.