An Open Letter to Senior People Leaders

Are you noticing all of the recent headlines about employee disengagement and burnout? Do they reflect what’s going on inside in your organization? Are your employee engagement or change management efforts generating the kind of results you’d hoped for?

More tellingly, is your culture and company alive with new possibilities, products and market breakthroughs as a result of your people efforts or are you merely maintaining the status quo?

I’m curious, because I see many well intentioned people leaders expending a lot of effort in this area with minimal impact and marginal returns.

What I’ve noticed is that when things aren’t going according to plan, our tendency is to focus our energy, efforts and resources on fixing, avoiding, or reducing the symptoms and problems of the past, rather than on generating the future we actually want to create.

As we direct our efforts and resources towards addressing burnout and disengagement, which are symptoms of our drive to survive at work, we take attention and investment away from generating new possibilities and cultivating greatness in our people, company and markets. We end up feeding the drive to survive and starving the drive to thrive.

Over time, we exhaust ourselves on perpetual problem-solving, which collectively costs us billions in lost productivity, missed revenue targets, untapped people potential, and unrealized investment.

As an employee, I’ve personally experienced what it is to work for an emerging company that ticked all the boxes for me — amazing people, great leadership and a strong culture — and still went from being a highly-engaged contributor to being disengaged or burnt-out in a relatively short period of time.

And as a people leader, I’ve felt the strong sense of urgency that pulls my decision-making and attention towards low leverage problem-solving and away from high-leverage possibilities that cultivate greatness.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to use these rich organizational experiences as a living laboratory to discover what it takes to go from surviving to thriving at work and create the conditions that unleash greatness in others.

What impact would it have for you, if you truly unleashed greatness in your company? If you lived from the possibility that people and culture development were the foundation of your success rather than an addendum to it?

What if your approach to employee engagement didn’t just reduce disengagement or burnout, but instead:

• ignited authenticity, power, co-creation and growth in your people,
• produced measurable results that mattered and
• created a market advantage that couldn’t easily be replicated by competitors?

What if you could cultivate a culture of greatness where people were empowered, engaged and expressed through their work, co-creating new possibilities and products, new market and social innovations, and a new quality of being in relationship? A culture where well-being and work-life fuelled rather than precluded each other, and people thrived at work rather than merely survived at work?

This fall 2018, we’ll be launching the Drive to Thrive — a campaign to unleash greatness in organizations and generate a whole new world of what’s possible at work.

If you’re an entrepreneurial startup, senior people leader, manager or employee who is passionate about unleashing greatness in your organization and would like to get involved, sign up to receive more information.

In the meantime, if your company has the makings of greatness, but you’re not yet rocking your people potential, generating new possibilities or creating breakthrough market results, and would like to be, let’s connect for a 30 minute call to explore your people plan and determine if our agency can be of service.|

To your greatness,

elan