My left leg is one inch longer than my right.  That caused a number of seemingly unrelated problems for me, including lower back pain, headaches, and a bone spur behind my left big toe. I saw two different general practitioners, four separate orthopedic surgeons, three different physical therapists, an acupuncturist and a chiropractor for my symptoms.  Collectively they rotated, manipulated, massaged, needled and injected me with steroids (epidural).  None of it worked.

The root problem was not my back, head, toe, or even my left leg.  My legs are actually the same length. But my right hip is deformed in such a way that it causes my right leg to hang an inch shorter than my left.  None of these highly qualified specialists caught the real problem because they each had a generic solution they were best at applying, so they only looked for sufficient confirmation that my symptom could benefit from their solution.

There is no formula or prescription for improving employee performance.  Employee performance in your organization will always be contingent on a variety of factors, all of which interact continuously to make it difficult for us to know with certainty what is causing the effects we observe.  Despite the complexity, there will always be something you can do that will provide more leverage than anything else, but you have to deal with the mess of searching to find it.

There are a variety of things you can try to improve performance, all of which will probably work to one degree or another.  But a degree of success with the wrong intervention effort can actually mask the most significant root problems. 

For example, we know that employee satisfaction, commitment, and trust all affect employee performance, and a lot of folks believe that engagement affects performance.  You can invest in a program to increase employee trust, and you should see improvements in trust and probably in performance.  But just because employees trust you does not necessarily mean that they are more satisfied with and committed to your organization.  And it is possible that satisfaction, commitment, or some other variable are stronger drivers of performance in your organization.

But you will never know unless you measure correctly.  If you only measure one thing, and roll out a program to improve that one thing, you should see improvements when you measure that one thing again.  Please understand that your efforts to optimize a part of the system that affects performance can actually sub-optimize the larger system.

Avoid anyone that wants to sell you a specific solution before they have done a multidimensional assessment.  They should be looking for a number of potential root causes to the symptoms you have identified. And before you allow them to assess your organization and employees, find out what kind of tools they have in their bag.  They should be able to present you with a variety of options, including the option that their own measurement might reveal that you need to see someone else to address your root problem.

If all they have is an epidural or surgery, find someone else to assess your symptoms.

Is optimism a competitive advantage? The link between a company’s employee engagement is real: the more engaged the workers, the higher the sales and profits…. Companies don’t directly measure the optimism of their employees. Instead they rely on engagement scores, typically gathered by outside consultants who exhaustively survey the staff. As in: Does your boss support you in getting your job done? Do you have a best friend at work? (Business Week Online, August 13, 2009).

I am dumbfounded.  How can BW claim that optimism is a competitive advantage when they admit the companies they reference are NOT directly measuring optimism?  No worries, these trusted and well compensated consultants are measuring engagement, and that is the same as optimism, right? Wrong!

And I have more bad news – they are NOT measuring engagement either. These are the twelve magic engagement questions referred to in the BW article.

Engagement is an effect, such that someone might be able to say “I am engaged” and we should be able to observe and evaluate the degree to which this attitude is manifest.  Are ANY of these twelve questions able to capture the degree to which someone is engaged?  NO!

Should we believe that BECAUSE you are engaged, you are given the materials and equipment you need to do the work right?  Or is it that because you are given the materials and equipment to do the work right you are engaged?  Does your engagement at work cause people to want to be friends with you, or is it that because you have supportive relationships at work that you might be engaged?  Get the picture?

These questions are NOT effect indicators of engagement.  They are instead causal indicators – of something.  The persuasive consulting company believes these things cause engagement, but they don’t measure psychological engagement so it remains an empirical question! Worse, they say they are measuring engagement when they clearly are not, and companies that should know better don’t.

Here are a few examples of effect indicators of engagement: I am immersed in my work; when I get up in the morning, I feel like going to work; I feel very happy when I am working intensely.  To the extent you answer these in the affirmative we know that you are engaged.  We don’t know what caused you to be engaged, but we have good reason to believe you are because we can measure the effects.

Want to know if a tree is healthy?  Look at the leaves and the fruit.  These are indicators of the health of the tree.  Just because we give our tree lots of fertilizer, water, and sunlight does NOT mean it is healthy.  These are all very smart things to do, but they do not guarantee health, and the only way to evaluate health is to examine the tree and not its environment.

But what about the business results, those higher sales and profits?  If you ever do find that data published in a peer-reviewed format (consultant promotional material does NOT count), remember this simple fact: correlation is not the same as causality.  Establishing the case that an individual level psychological construct (that’s what engagement is) can cause a company level aggregate measure is VERY, VERY, VERY difficult.

I remain extremely skeptical.