Stay Curious, Stay Engaged!

Well, about two years ago I came across a piece of neuroscience, that just stunned me. As a team lead I wish somebody had told me more about this, but what I leaned is that, there appears to be a part of our brain called, “Ventral Striatum” that’s the technical term, or you also could call it “the seeking system” and this system is urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, it’s urging us to be curious!

And by the way I mean innately, like children 6 months old, if you give them some toy, they love it for a little while and then they get used to it and next your car keys become more interesting!

A curious kid!

It’s the new, and it’s the desire to learn, and probably because of evolutionary reasons this system was developed to help us, to keep us learning.

So when I learned about this seeking system, it really turned me on, because it started to give me some insight into, why disengagement, from boring work, that may not be a bug and might actually be a feature!

In the 2018 Gallup polls, the evidence is that about 70% of the people are not engaged in what they do all they long, and about 13% of people are actively disengaged from what they do!

I think that the reason I see this as a problem, and it could be very well called as an epidemic, is because work is mostly what we do. We spend so much time at work than with our families, and there are these things called hobbies!

So I think the progressiveness of people feeling like, “work is a thing that we have to shut off from”, or “a thing that we can’t be our best selves” or “a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend” and I believe these are a sort of humanistic sickness, and while it is bad for people that’s the humanistic bit, it also is really bad for organizations who get poor performance.

I think it is interesting to think about when all this started to happening and I don’t know about you but I didn’t live back in the 1800’s, but the evidence suggests that you could buy some shoes and those shoes are sold by some cobbler, and maybe there’d be three people in the store, and while that might not have been the best job in the world, but each of the three people would watch the customer walk in, and they they make a shoe for that customer and they sell it.

And around 1890, we thought, well, instead of selling 2 pairs of shoes a day, we need to sell 2 million and this idea of scaling up had certain implication on how work felt, and part of it was, it was decided that they way to scale is to being really efficient and break the work into really small tasks, where most of the people don’t meet the customer, most of the people don’t invent the shoe and most of the people don’t actually see the shoe being built from beginning to the end.

The idea of removing the meaning from the work was intentional.

The idea of removing the curiosity from the job was intentional.

Ford Motor Company — Image from: https://www.whaleoil.co.nz/tag/henry-ford/

For big industry leaders like Henry Ford, employee curiosity was a bug! and it was stamped out by the name of reliability and quality!

Now I am not saying we are still living in the 1900s, but what I can see is that’s when we cut our teeth on leadership and management practices, and the way we use control systems and punishments and extrinsic rewards to kind of call people out into doing really repeated and sometime tedious tasks again and again and again, without having a sense of the bigger picture or who uses the final product!

So a small organisation in any industry, if you are just starting up and you’ve only got 30 or 50 people working there, everybody is curious, and everybody is doing everything and there aren’t any tight role descriptions and the job titles are not tattooed on your body!

And in that situation, employees can take on different roles and responsibility when they feel like it and that change in roles is not only acceptable in these organisations, it is even desirable and the CEO loves you for doing this!

Now when you get to have 50,000 people in an organization, you’re supposed to stay in your lane!

You know the expectation is there are a set of KPIs, and this is the way they measure you and your job and yeah, might be that you have ideas about competitive advantage and what the competitors are doing but, there is no time for that, because we need you to do these things that we’ve already set aside! Again!

So I think level of employee engagement in companies, is a lot less about which industry and a lot more about the culture and the expectations for what different employees can bring to the party!

Cheers!