Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

I recently had a conversation with a brilliant new head of HR that’s a cautionary tale about focusing so much on engagement. She’d been at her new company for eight weeks, and she had already conducted a seriously eye-opening analysis of how employee engagement tracked with performance. She had taken a close look at the company’s heat-mapping survey, which measured how happy and engaged employees were, and compared those results with the performance of teams. The good news, she told me, was that most of the company was green, meaning highly engaged and happy. But the bad news was that the teams with subpar performance were just as green as those that were performing really well. That’s a striking demonstration that there is not such a simple link between engagement and performance. By superimposing business metrics over happiness metrics, she enabled the company to begin to differentiate much more effectively what was going on in the teams that were performing so well versus those that weren’t.