"Our people are our greatest asset."

It is the strangest line in business today. No one knows who first uttered it, but it proved to be so contagious that nearly every CEO says it at some point. It's a nice sentiment to work into a speech. It's comforting. It makes the executive seem more in touch, more humane.

But the statement has become a joke. Hearing the line from a company leader who had no such personal convictions, one mid-level manager turned to his friend and said it reminded him of the apocryphal story of a children's radio show host who finished the broadcast and, not realizing the microphone was still on, said, "That oughta hold the little bastards!"

The same detachment showed up several years ago at the executive presentation of 12 Elements results for a Fortune 500 financial company. "Watch out for the CEO," a colleague warned the presenter. "He's going to go after you."

The presentation proceeded without incident until it reached a slide highlighting the huge spread of engagement levels within the company. "You have at the same time some of the most engaged and least engaged workgroups in the entire Gallup database," the presenter said.

At that, the chief executive pounced. "What you just said means nothing!" he asserted. "Having some of the best and some of the worst has to be true of just about every company in the world."

The CEO was right. It is, in fact, not unusual for a large company to have its least engaged team at the 2^nd or 3^rd percentile, worse than all but a few percent of the worldwide scores. Nor is it unusual that a big organization's most committed team is more engaged than 99 out of 100 in that repository.

The presenter conceded the point and countered: "You're absolutely right. It happens all the time. But if I were to come in here and say you have some of the most profitable groups we'd ever seen and some of the biggest money losers, would you say that's meaningless just because that also happens at other firms?"

"I get your point," said the business leader.

Cost of lost productivity

Somehow that point gets lost on many executives. Too often, the title of manager is doled out as a reward for tenure and connections, for solid performance that demonstrates no particular ability to deal with people, or as the sole path of progress in a company that does not know how to create highly valued non-managerial positions. Enterprises that wouldn't think of letting an accounting school dropout run its finances, a Luddite run IT, or a klutz supervise safety routinely let dislikable, insincere, or aloof men and women assume stewardship for a crew of the company's ostensibly greatest assets.

In a seminar Gallup conducted for a regional bank, the middle managers in attendance were asked to write a speech to a hypothetical group of honor students extolling the virtues of the company in hopes of attracting them to join. The speeches were what one would expect: boilerplate language about the prominence of the company, chances for advancement, and the generous benefits package. After the managers had delivered these addresses to their classmates, they were challenged with a question one of these honor students might ask: "If I join your bank, can you assure me I'll have a really good manager?" The room fell silent. They looked around and shrugged. For all the grand oration they just completed, these leaders had to admit they could not guarantee this most basic benefit to a new recruit. (See "Job Seekers Ask: Who's the Boss?" in the "See Also" area on this page.)

Casually ask "Who's ripping off the company?" at an evening reception, and you will get puzzled stares. "No one that I know of," they respond. Ask "Who in this company is a lousy manager?" and the stories just keep coming. Just as people will admit to being bad with math more than they will admit illiteracy, business tolerates interpersonal incompetence where it would never allow financial malfeasance. And yet, barring a few headline-making examples of high-level fraud, companies lose far more to employee disengagement than they lose to theft.

Money left on the table

This relative negligence is the reason that while those companies actively working on employee engagement see appreciable increases, the overall trend in quality of work experience is flat. The proportion of engaged workers in the United States has ranged from 26% in 2000, to 31% in 2002, to 28% percent in 2005, to 30% in 2008. Levels of engagement appear to change dramatically not with macroeconomic swings, but only through better managers -- and the aggregate quality of managers isn't improving. The same can be said for managers in other countries Gallup has randomly sampled over the years.

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Article from The Gallup Management Journal