Lately I’ve been hearing a new type of story as I’ve talked with people about compromise at work.  “We could air our dirty laundry all day,” said one director I met with recently. “You see the same dysfunctions over and over.”   “I confess I’ve defaulted to the ‘playing to live’ strategy,[i]” said a manager in another industry. “It is so frustrating to try to really engage and make a difference.”  Heads nodded around the table as she spoke.

What's new is that the stories are revealing the business side of the compromise trap -- the ways businesses are inadvertently undermining their own results and the frustration that causes for employees.

Most professionals I speak with want to engage more actively at work.   They see opportunities to attract and keep customers, cut waste, invent new products, improve safety, reduce risk and so on… and they are ready to commit to helping their companies grow.

Studies show that highly engaged employees exert more "discretionary effort", increasing productivity by up to 25%. Employees’ pride in their work correlates with higher quality, organizational effectiveness and retention. A more recent study shows that highly engaged employees are also more likely to report unethical conduct.[ii] Yet these same sources find that engagement tends to erode over time with an organization, despite the negative side effects on effectiveness, quality, customer relationships, safety and risk standards.

Why does this happen?

Commitment Drift and Compromise

The short answer is it’s risky to engage.

When you engage you become involved. To “engage” means to occupy yourself, to give your attention or effort, to pledge your word, to assume an obligation, to become interlocked ala mechanical gears, or even to step into a conflict.[iii]

It is the organization’s commitments that mobilize us to say “yes”, to commit ourselves to truly join in the enterprise, assuming some share of its promises to customers, employees, shareholders, communities or the environment, its dedication to an inspiring mission or values, or its efforts to sustain the distinctive practices that make it unique.

Yet these organizational commitments naturally tend to “drift” as key players shift, the organization goes through one change after another, or people simply forget. [iv] The contradictions that emerge as commitments drift create mixed messages, leaving employees guessing what is really wanted, and forced to compromise one imperative or another.  “Is this real change or fake change?” One manager asked, noting a disconnect between official communications and how decisions were made.  “Who is weighing the tradeoffs when they change priorities so often?” asked another, worried about the responsibilities he was neglecting.  Mixed messages and contradictions become double-binds if employees worry that speaking up will get them labeled whiners, creating a cycle of distrust where leaders wonder why their teams are uncommitted and followers assume their leaders know what is happening but don’t care.

How Compromise Becomes a Trap… for the Business

Engaged employees feel the weight of unhealthy compromises at a deeper level: it’s more personal. So typically, when there are contradictions, they disengage rather than suffer the “wounds of commitment,” as one financial officer put it.  The dissatisfaction and numbness that go along with that disengagement are among the “costs of compromise” I outline in The Compromise Trap.

But when employees go along with unhealthy pressure to compromise, the business pays an enormous price as well. Here are a few of those costs:

Business Costs of Compromise

• Decreased productivity & engagement – as employees “check out”
• Poor quality & execution – shortcuts reduce reliability and quality
• Increased rework – more staff time goes into fire-drills to recover
• Leadership overload – employees exert less initiative and need more direction
• Lost talent – top performers seek settings where the mission is real
• Lost customers – customers shift from “net promoters” to captives, ready to jump ship
• Increased risks – employees become acclimated to sub-standard approaches
• Missed opportunities to innovate –shortcuts crowd out real innovation
• Brand erosion & damaged trust – stakeholders lose faith as walk splits from talk
• Legal, regulatory & reputational costs – the door is opened for a serious scandal & harm

Just as with individuals, these costs mean that unhealthy compromise can become a trap. If you press employees to take shortcuts while ignoring drifting commitments, you unwittingly undermine the core drivers of your business success and increase the chance that you will fall short of expectations in the future – causing you to resort to still more desperate measures and further disrupting the core dynamics that could drive your success.[v] Businesses tempted by excessive discounting are prime examples of this pattern, driving their brand value into the ground and starving the service and R & D investments that are the foundation for the future, even as their sales numbers are rising in the short run.

The Good News for Leaders

Discouraging as this story may seem on the surface, it hides an enormously positive opportunity for leaders.

Here it is: If engaged employees feel discomfort when a business compromises its commitments, even to stakeholders other than themselves, then they can be part of keeping you strategically focused. Their willingness to stay engaged becomes a barometer of how well you are sustaining the relationships and commitments that drive your ultimate success, a counter-weight to the pressures to “damn the torpedoes” under fire, potentially sinking the ship.  If you want to know how you’re doing on long-term drivers of success, what you are doing to create net promoter customers or detractors, where you are wasting time, money, or effort, where you are playing Russian Roulette with another Gulf oil disaster, pay attention to where your employees feel pressed to compromise.

At first, it may be difficult to listen, because it may sound to you like just whining. In fact, there are important skills for employees in surfacing issues and proposals in ways that can be heard (which I’ll cover in another post). But it is to your benefit as a leader if you can listen underneath the complaint for what is being compromised and examine at least for a moment whether you have just received a valuable opportunity to get better results.

Here are several examples of compromises employees wanted to bring to their leaders, but hesitated because they had been accused of whining:

• If we accommodate these budget cuts as directed, our department will be the cause of delayed product launches in another division
• If I override my priorities to move this emergency to the top, we may not meet that deliverable you promised the CEO
• If you do not help me work with the legal department, we will lose the single biggest national account this company has ever had
• If I respond to all home office requests as you expect, I will be left with less than 10% of my time for on-site work with staff, the single biggest driver of results

Getting Practical: The Engagement Opportunity Scan

It can be hard to know how unhealthy compromise is hurting your business and your employees’ engagement, especially if employees hesitate to speak up.  A periodic “opportunity scan” can help you identify the ways you may be unintentionally undermining profitability or eroding the assets needed for growth.

Opportunity Scan Questions[vi]

• When have you been most proud to work here? What made you proud?
• Where do you find yourself disappointed or scrambling to keep organizational promises?
• Do you ever feel guilty or uncomfortable towards customers or other stakeholders?
• Is there anything we are doing that does not make sense?
• Where might we be compromising in ways that could come back to bite us?
• What actions could I take to increase your willingness to speak frankly with me?
• What do we need to renegotiate or clarify based on these realities?
• Where do we need to invent new solutions to do better?

Engaging in a dialogue around these questions allows you to accomplish two important goals: 1) You are making full use of your staff’s ability to recognize opportunities and head off challenges, and 2) You are addressing commitment drift early enough and proactively enough that you will be building employee engagement in the exact same process. The beauty of that is the outcome is not an “employee engagement action plan”, but simply a recalibration of your existing strategies and action priorities.

The result of an opportunity scan is not necessarily action. It may be that you simply need to clarify commitments and expectations to ensure alignment. It may be that you need to renegotiate expectations after taking a hard look at the tradeoffs involved in saying yes to everything. And when you do decide that action is required, you can target your improvement and innovation efforts to the areas that matter most – to your employees and ultimately, to the other stakeholders you depend on and serve.

A word of caution: a candid dialogue is a process of bootstrapping trust. You need a minimum amount of trust to start, and you need the skills and capacity to leverage difficult conversations into greater trust and engagement as you proceed. If you are not sure you have either of these, you may want to bring in a skilled facilitator to help the team navigate and coach you on leading the conversation effectively.

Periodic opportunity scans can unleash a whole new level of competence and initiative on your team – without working harder. Energy spent decoding conflicting messages or tap dancing to make numbers look good can be turned toward the innovations that give you a sustainable advantage as we navigate into this unfamiliar and turbulent global economy.

An Invitation

WorkLore is experimenting with an online Opportunity Scan diagnostic to foster a rich and effective conversation. We would welcome your feedback and a chance to pilot the diagnostic with your team if you have an upcoming need. To learn more, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , post a comment below, or see an overview in the Decision-point Tools section of our site. Or... if you're in San Francisco, join us on July 30 to explore this topic with the Bay Area Society for Organizational Learning (please RSVP).

Thank you and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please feel free to add a comment below, or contact me separately if you would like to talk further.

Elizabeth Doty, Co-founder

WorkLore.com

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888-967-5567

[i] Playing to live is one of the five strategies for dealing with potential unhealthy compromise at work, identified in The Compromise Trap. It basically involves doing the minimum and getting your real satisfaction away from the job.

[ii] See Sirota Consulting http://www.sirota.com/pdfs/Pride_The_Hidden_Corporate_Asset.pdf, Pride - The Hidden Corporate Asset, p 3 and Ethics Resource Council http://www.ethics.org/files/u5/NBESResearchBrief2.pdf, Ethics and Employee Engagement, p 9

[iii] engage. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/engage (accessed: July 09, 2010).

[iv] Special thanks to Hanley Brite (authenticconnections.com) for the term “commitment drift”

[v] Systems thinkers will recognize this dynamic as the “Fixes That Fail” archetype.

[vi] Please see http://www.worklore.com/Decision-point-Tools/decision-point-tools.html for a more detailed overview of the Opportunity Scan process.

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