TribeCo.

The morning comes, and with that excited feeling in your stomach you turn up to your new job. You are truly ‘engaged’.. you’ve seen your new employers marketing literature, you’ve bought into the story they tell their customers about their fast moving, innovative, go-getting team, and you are ready to become a part of that; one of the shiny happy faces staring out from the cover of the “new joiners” information pack. One of the high achievers, part of the family… ready to make a difference!

Unfortunately, figures from Gallop suggest that within six months of starting only 38% of employees are still engaged… after 10 years of employment that figure drops to 20%! and worse still…

… if you take Gallop’s figures about ‘engagement’ across an average organization you’ll find that :-

30% of employees are engaged in what they are doing
54% of employees are not engaged in what they are doing
16% of employees are actively dis-engaged in what they are doing

Think about that, statistically 70% of your employees are not engaged in what they are doing. 70% of the people representing your organization, talking to customers, and running your operations, don’t really care. Welcome to FacadeCo. – motto : We look shiny from the outside, but what goes on inside, stays inside

It’s the great modern corporate divide: outside the corporate walls, we market, we sell, we lead our customers to believe in us by telling our story, we even get outside agencies to tell us how we should look, communicate, act, and be with our clients! A fabricated personality designed to appeal and inspire! Inside the walls, we don’t have time for that marketing rubbish, people are paid well to work here. Manage the organization, fit in with the system, and don’t make too many mistakes. Business is business, there isn’t room for wasting money on engaging employees… how will we measure that!? How will that effect my bottom line? Increased efficiency is the key, a finely tuned machine is the metaphor.

FacadeCo. is a vestigial organizational type, a throwback to the industrial mechanistic era… and in many markets it’s about to be knocked out of the ring by a new type of organization, an adapted evolution of the knowledge era : TribeCo. – motto : Authentic and inspired.

TribeCo.’s have discovered that turning around the staff engagement figures makes a spectacular difference to the bottom line. They understand that excellence in management is necessary but not sufficient in making an organization work. You have to inspire and engage investors, employees, partners, and customers with stories that are authentic, with experiences that pervade the organization.

FacadeCo. looks at TribeCo. and sees tools, and techniques. It thinks that Forums, Wiki’s, and Blogs might be a good idea, social networking, and communities of practice could work for us too…. but FacadeCo. is getting severely burnt using tools that don’t fit with it’s culture, and it doesn’t understand why! Empty Wiki’s, forums filled with luke warm customers, and Blogs that you have to force employees to write, it’s really not working, and in some cases it’s making things worse by exposing the inauthenticity within.

I think that it was 1995 when I first read Charles Handy’s “The Empty Raincoat”. Unfortunately for many companies that raincoat is still empty. It’s kind of an emperors new clothes in reverse… There are fine clothes, but no emperor! ;o) Welcome to the world of the TribeCo.

— Jason Bates

Tags:  Handy, Leadership, engagement