Some Buddhists believe that there are many paths to enlightenment, as many paths as there are seekers. Business philosophy, however, considers that idea problematic. Business leaders don't want many paths to enlightenment, or in their case, to business results like employee engagement and the benefits it brings. They want one simple, straight, predictable path.

When it comes to employee engagement, though, Buddhist thought is probably closer to the truth. There isn't a perfect path to engagement, a single route that passes from manager to employee to performance to productivity to profit. There are as many effective ways to manage people to attain high performance as there are great managers -- and if you want proof, just ask Jennifer Schulte.

The mysterious managers

Schulte is the global project manager for associate engagement at Mars, Incorporated, the $18 billion food and beverage company. Everything about the process of managing the engagement of 33,000 associates falls under her purview: She works on ways to embed engagement into business processes and coaches managers on best practices in promoting it. She measures employee engagement at Mars using Gallup's 12-item employee engagement survey, the Q¹², and period by period, she analyzes the results. (See "Feedback for Real" in the "See Also" area on this page.)

As Schulte examined the numbers for the past couple of years, it seemed like some of Mars' managers just couldn't fail. These managers came from several departments -- from HR to sales -- yet their results were similarly spectacular. Their teams' engagement levels were near or above the 75^th percentile year after year, making them about or more engaged than three-quarters of the work units Gallup has ever studied. Their team performance was uniformly outstanding, and the teams were highly profitable. On every metric, these managers were exceptional and consistent.

On to something

Schulte started wondering about the magic these managers seemed to have and whether she could replicate it. The data gave no indication of how those managers attained their results, and she knew enough about them to know the key wouldn't be found in lists of numbers.

But they were obviously onto something, and Schulte wanted Mars' other managers to get some of it, too. "Why not harness the power of whatever it is they seem to just naturally do?" she says. "We could use it to show struggling managers that it's not hard; it's all the little things managers do that add up to making sure teams are more engaged."

Schulte called together 20 of the best frontline managers from each of Mars' major global geographical areas. She asked them precisely what they did to get such high and consistent results, and their responses were identical. "They all said, 'It's the team.' None of them think they do anything at all," says Schulte. "All twenty of them said they simply enable the team [members] to do their best."

And that, Schulte soon realized, is exactly what they had in common. Two of those managers, Carlos Ruiz and Jo Newton, are excellent examples of the power Schulte wants to harness.

Carlos' way

Ruiz is a district sales manager in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. He'd been with Mars for 10 years in several positions but only managed salespeople (and only three of those) for two years. Puerto Rico, however, was Mars' largest and oldest market in that part of the world, and the manager he replaced was, as Ruiz puts it, "abusive." So as a green manager, he took over a crucial team of 15 salespeople that had been poorly led, had suffered from high turnover, and had fallen into many bad habits.

"But I'm a quick learner; that's what I told my boss when he hired me from accounting," says Ruiz. It's a good thing he was -- he had a lot to learn, and so did his team. The first lesson was to trust Ruiz. "They had no trust in their direct boss before me, and here I come," he says. "I was new, younger, and of course knew less about sales than they did."

He started by going on calls with every team member, asking each to introduce him as a coworker, not the boss. He put four people on probation for bad behavior, then fired two of them. (One of the salespeople he placed on probation later became salesperson of the year for the district.) He instituted rules that were fair, consistently applied, and tied to performance metrics. He modeled high ethical standards.

"Earning their trust was the only way that I could communicate with them," says Ruiz, "I wasn't all that experienced in sales, so I needed to learn from them. And it wasn't going to happen unless they trusted me."

Copyright Ó 2008 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.  Visit The Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/

Article from The Gallup Management Journal