Breathtaking vision plus strength-based approach ignites employee engagement

Blending the best of today’s management practices, including the strength-based approach, with a huge vision for the future, can have incredible ramifications for employee engagement, Jim Hartzfeld shared at last week’s 2009 World Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal.

A managing director within Interface Inc., a global carpet manufacturer as well as leader in sustainable environmental practices, Hartzfeld presented on elements of the company’s journey to being a profitable, green business.

At the very core of Interface’s success, he said, is the human element, the engagement of people across the company and its stakeholders.

“Change can only happen as a shared journey,” said Hartzfeld, who directs Interface’s sustainability consulting arm, InterfaceRAISE.

Interface has embedded a strength-based approach in its human resource policies, explicitly seeking to help employees discover and maximize their latent strengths, which has had significant results for employee engagement.

But Hartzfeld noted that adding to top management practices “a real, authentic, big sense of purpose — almost so big it takes your breath away” — results in employment engagement “(going) off the charts. Things happen that you would never ever expect.”

Interface is famous for its vision to show the industrial world what sustainability is in all its aspects, and in the process “to be restorative through the power of influence.”

The company’s most recent goal is to be completely oil free by 2020, a vision that is weaving throughout the company culture in the form of a story of founder and chairman Ray Anderson 11 years from now “sitting in his wheelchair,” accepting a vial of the last few drops of oil the company ever uses from the succeeding female CEO.

Interface has already had significant success in reducing its environmental footprint, having shrunk its greenhouse-gas emissions by 71 per cent, as well as sold 83 million yards of carpet certified by a third party as being completely climate neutral throughout its entire life cycle.

The company is also now using 73 per cent less water, 44 per cent less energy and, as of the end of 2008, has saved more than $400 million doing this.

Complex methodologies have contributed to this success, of course, but Hartzfeld also noted that it’s the alignment of the vision — an alignment the company achieves in part through its storytelling culture — throughout every aspect of the company that has been critical to the success as well.

Hartzfeld told a story of a skeptical client who visited an Interface factory and, while trying to find a washroom in the huge warehouse decided she would like to find out if this shared vision was for real. Meeting up with a worker on a fork truck she asked him what his job was.

“My job is to save the planet,” he said.

She was further amazed and convinced when a few minutes into their conversation the worker, becoming anxious, said he had to leave and deliver his supplies on time or speeds would go down along the factory lines, waste and emissions would rise and he would be kept from doing his job, saving the planet.

“That’s what speaks to alignment,” said Hartzfeld. “Being able to tell a story so big it takes your breath away of what you’re trying to accomplish, your dream, and taking that all the way down to practicalities, what do I have to do right now and how does that connect with the big story?”

Hartzfeld presented to about 300 delegates at the fourth annual global AI conference, which was focused this year on creating a positive revolution for sustainable change.

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