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Russ Laraway - C137 🦅🌎⚓️ (He/Him)

28 Jan, 29 tweets, 22 min read

Hi friends - I need your help. Today is #XMDay, and my company, Qualtrics, is giving us all time off from work to go out and focus on fixing a broken experience in the world. I need your help fixing one of the most broken experiences on earth: The employee experience. A thread.

I’ve been focused on improving the employee experience for most of my career, and I think it’s the only problem I am going to focus on for the rest of my career, and to that end, I not only wrote a book, but I also just recently got a book deal.

I need your help, specifically, Titling and subtitling the book; this is known in the industry as “positioning.”

This thread lays out the logical case for the book - warning it ends abruptly because it's a full 30 tweet thread.

The primary measurement of the employee experience is employee engagement. There are an amazing number of things to measure, to be clear, but engagement is worth focusing most first/most on because it strongly relates to business results.

For the “engagement is a soft measure” crowd: In Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace, they found that companies in the top quartile in employee engagement are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile. That doesn't sound soft to me.

There is a mountain of research to support this idea. Most understand engagement and winning to be a bi-directional relationship - engaged employees produce winning, and then winning teams create more engaged team members. Virtuous cycle.

You're skeptical, but not really.

Think about your customer service interactions and the difference between the rep who doesn’t know what they’re doing and who “accidentally” hangs up on you when the going gets tough and then compare them to...

@QuickBooks

The rep we’ve all had who just makes it clear, “Mr. Laraway, we are going to solve your problem right here and right now,” like Ashonda did for me on a @QuickBooks support call last summer.

The difference between them is clear: the latter is engaged, the former less so. And then your intuition further tells you that Ashonda and those like her make you more loyal than the ones who are disengaged in their work...or your problem.

And of course, it’s way more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain your existing ones. You can see this, right? There are analogous examples in sales, engineering, marketing, finance, HR, and on and on and on. ***Engaged employees are all-in and go to the mats***

Well, here’s the thing. Global engagement is in a sorry state: Engagement is 15% globally, and in the US it’s technically better, but still abysmal at 33%. That’s billions in lost productivity, lost profitability, and lost opportunity.

@ScottAdamsSays

Never mind the fact that this is just sad. This is why Dilbert became and remains one of the most popular cartoons in history. Because That Dilbert guy, @ScottAdamsSays, is right. And so, by the way, is Office Space.

What you may not realize is that the manager - more than any other factor by a long shot - explains most of employee engagement. Some studies have found that the manager is responsible for as much as *70%* of employee engagement.

This means that the impact of everything else you do - *combined* - to affect engagement adds up to be worth less than half of the impact of the manager. Perks, office space, benefits. None of it comes close.

Let’s say you know better than research and want to arbitrarily discount the manager’s impact to merely explaining 50% of engagement. The point still holds.The manager's impact is worth half and literally everything else you think is affecting engagement is the other half.

Dilbert and Office Space are science!

Your managers are holding the keys to your employee experience, and there is no other factor that remotely comes close.

Choose your drivers wisely, and renew their licenses frequently.

Some logic now: managers must be systematically flailing. Think about it. If managers explain 70% of engagement and global engagement is at 15%. By the commutative property and carrying the 1, we can quickly see that managers, systematically, are assclowns.

I am writing a book to put an end to assclown managers everywhere. It’s my personal mission.

This book teases out a shockingly simple 3 part leadership standard that ***measurably*** and reliably leads not only to better engagement, but also better results.

This leads us to positioning the book. The book is inherently differentiated, and now we just need to title and subtitle in a way that elegantly, smartly - and with maybe a little heart and humor - conveys that. THIS IS WHERE I NEED YOUR HELP!

Differentiation source #1: Measurable - measures leadership behaviors and correlates them with engagement and results. Who else holds their leadership standard measurably accountable to these factors?

Differentiation source #2: Resolves confusion with simplicity - researchers keep pumping out research thereby confusing the average manager about what the heck they should be doing. The book aims to resolve confusion for those poor, confused managers everywhere.

Here’s the subtitle that I love: “Putting an end to assclown managers everywhere with 3 simple - and measurable - practices that finally resolve their long-standing managerial confusion.” I bet you can write a better one.

Some title examples: Happiness = Results, Measure Up!, The Leading Indicator, Cracking the Leadership Code, The 3 Things that Matter. 👇 What are your thoughts on titling and subtitling this book given our mission to end assclown managers everywhere?