JD's Journal
Everyone we know has experienced their unique journey of life, and along the way they have had their share of success and failure. Each of us have learned important lessons and gathered valuable resources that have allowed us to survive and thrive. This podcast is a place for sharing our stories and our resources for the benefit of others. It's a celebration of the resilience and tenacity of people in all walks of life, our local heroes.
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JD's Journal
Management by Walking Around: Building Trust Through Engagement
What makes a leader truly unforgettable? It's rarely their technical expertise or business acumen—it's how they make us feel seen, valued, and respected as whole people.
Drawing from over four decades of leadership observation and experience, this episode explores the profound impact of authentic employee engagement. Starting with a powerful quote from Maya Angelou—"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"—we journey through compelling real-world examples of leaders who transformed their organizations through genuine connection.
From a factory owner who swept floors daily while chatting with employees, to a Microsoft country manager who remembered personal details about 1,200+ team members, these stories illustrate how seemingly small interactions build the trust that underpins organizational success. We examine the concept of "Management By Walking Around" (MBWA) and how to adapt engagement practices for today's dispersed teams across multiple time zones.
The conversation deepens with insights from Gallup's groundbreaking research showing direct correlations between employee engagement and business outcomes. With employee engagement currently declining globally—down to 21% in 2024—and costing roughly $438 billion in lost productivity, leaders must prioritize meaningful connection more than ever.
Whether you're leading a small team or a multinational corporation, this episode offers practical approaches to foster engagement that benefits both people and profits. Because ultimately, your success as a leader rests on the shoulders of those doing the work—and investing time in authentic engagement might be the most important leadership skill you'll ever develop.
Listen now to discover how you can become the kind of leader people remember not for what you accomplished, but for how you made them feel valued along the way.
Resources referenced in this episode:
Thank you so. So, hi folk, welcome back to the JD's Journal podcast. It's great to have you here. Today's episode.
JD:I'm going to talk about a topic that I feel very passionate about. The topic is employee engagement, and again, it's kind of weird for me right now, given that I'm somewhat semi-retired and not dealing with people, but I've learned a lot over the last 40 odd years in terms of what I've observed here, and I want to start with a fairly bold statement, and that is that the leaders that leave the most lasting impression on us are the ones who are authentically engaged, authentically curious, and that leave people feeling valued and respected as the whole person, not just their contribution to the bottom line. And I want to follow that up with a quote from Maya Angelou, who said I've learned that people will forget what you've said, they'll forget what you did, but people never forget how you made them feel, and I think the sentiment behind this quote is so incredibly relevant to how we act as leaders. The great leaders that had the most lasting impact on me definitely took the time to talk and to actively listen, spend moments of quality time to get to know me beyond the person doing a job and the person, the whole person, the person outside and inside of the company. So going back, you know my first experience.
JD:George morrow, the owner of the factory where I began my career, way back in 1977, I think he demonstrated this perfectly. I used to watch him every day for the eight years that I worked there, as he would routinely end his day by putting on his blue apron, picking up a broom and sweeping the u-shaped corridor of the factory between where the tradesmen and the machinists were working, chatting with every single person as he went. And when I asked him, I challenged him why, george, given the responsibilities that you have to run this business and the fact that you've got many able-bodied people there young apprentices and trainees and so forth there who could do the job why are you taking time away from your business management workload to do such a menial task? And George talked about the insights that he gained every time he did this, the insights in terms of how the factory was operating and how his people were feeling. But in the context of employee engagement, I now realize as well that this task was a powerful trust-building activity. When George talked to his employees, like every one of them, he did it with this authentic curiosity about each person and their lives inside and outside their factory, and he got to know little bits about them.
JD:Later on, I learned the term management by walking around or MBWA. Later on, I learned the term management by walking around or MBWA, and I made it my habit to try to spend time to chat with people. You know, as I was moving around the office spaces on my way to and from meetings or wherever, I deliberately traversed the areas where my employees sat and I would spend time with them, just checking in, sometimes just saying hello and seeing how their day was going or or if I knew something was going on with them, having a deeper conversation, and through this again I got. I got my insights, just like george sweeping the factory, uh. But I also got to build trusting relationships with team members and stakeholders. As I did it, um, and and I kind of found out what, what they were concerned about, what they were thinking about, but also created a pathway where they would feel comfortable to reach out. And I saw an increase, a real increase, in the willingness of the employees to proactively make me aware of concerns or issues that were perhaps getting in the way of them getting their jobs done or maybe putting their projects at risk, putting her projects at risk so many years later, back in 2016, I had the good fortune, when I went back to Microsoft as a contractor, to observe another leader who, I think, demonstrated this so perfectly Pip Marlow, who was the country manager of Microsoft back then, leading an organization of I think 1,200 odd people, or maybe more, across the various functions of the organization, and regularly I would watch Pip arriving in the office in the morning and, as she made her way to her workspace for the day, she'd engage with many of the employees with a general you know, the typical good morning greetings that you would expect.
JD:But what really stood out for me was that Pip seemed to know something personal about every employee, something special that was going on in their lives the names of their children or their pets, the fact that they bought a new car or something that was uniquely about that individual Just a small piece of information that made it clear that she was talking to somebody that she knew and she had a relationship with, and I frankly have no idea how Pip did this. I, frankly, I have trouble remembering people's names, let alone what their, what their personal lives are all about. But I can tell you that the way that she engaged with every single person made them feel seen, made them feel valued as an individual, and I'm confident that it drove an increase in their loyalty to her as a leader and, with that, a loyalty to the organization. I was so surprised the first time I bumped into Pip in the elevator when I came back to Microsoft, despite having left the Australian office 14 years previously and returning only as a contractor. Pip welcomed me back like an old friend, gave me a hug and I can vividly recall just how incredible that made me feel to be welcomed back.
JD:So practicing MBWA has been a relatively easy habit to maintain for me. In the leadership scenarios where my teams have been co-located in the same building, it's fairly easy, if I've got them all sitting in the same office space, even across multiple floors, be able to stay in touch. But as my roles have changed over the years and I've taken on more roles, managing geographically dispersed teams, as I was doing in my most recent role at Amazon I had to think about other ways. How do I kind of replicate this engagement model in that environment where people are distributed across in this case, you know, 14 countries, 19 sites across 11 time zones, and so forth. It's it's a very different challenge, and so my approach while it's not really at the same level of effectiveness as management by walking around in the in the location that, uh, where you're all together, um, I made it my practice to meet in a one-on-one setting with every single member of my team when I visited the sites, and I typically tried to get to each country twice a year and then, between those meetings, I encouraged use of chat systems like slack to stay in touch with people, and I would reach out to people myself, but I always encourage them that they can reach out to me.
JD:I made it very clear in every one-on-one, in every group setting that I'd love hearing from people and I love them to reach out to me, even if it's just to say hello, don't be shy, don't, don't be concerned, don't ever think that I'm too busy, uh, to hear from you. I'd really love to hear from you, and so, and they do. It was a tremendous thing have folks reach out to me to tell me that they've achieved something or that, that they've got an idea, or they've got some feedback, and so forth. I really, I really love that, and so, again, I think that's something that we can, that we can employ in terms of keeping in touch with people and keeping that engagement quality as high as you could possibly do it Something I won't go into deeply in this episode because I'm actually planning to dedicate another episode in the future to the topic but I have a very strong belief that every person has both the desire and the potential to be successful, has both the desire and the potential to be successful.
JD:I honestly don't believe that anyone gets up out of bed in the morning and says you know what? I'm going to be mediocre today or I'm going to underperform today, I'm going to be a failure today. And I certainly you know my experience kind of supports that over the years, some very large organizations that I've worked with over the last 40 years have held onto a belief that to improve the quality of your workforce you need to manage out a percentage of them every year, and I think this probably dates back to the old Jack Welsh bell curve model that, frankly, I'm not a fan of. But I don't subscribe to that belief. I don't believe that's true. My belief is that you need to identify as a leader, you need to work with people to identify the underlying causes for underperformance and work with your employees to make changes that will enable them to be successful. And I will share some stories and some scenarios where I think I've seen that successfully executed, where I've seen people that have been written off by the organization who've made quite remarkable turnarounds and have ended up being very high value employees for the organization. So I will dedicate a podcast episode to that in the future.
JD:I want to talk a little bit about the impact that we have as leaders that we don't know about as well, and to do this, I'm actually going to share a link to a video in the notes for this. A gentleman by the name of Drew Dudley, a Canadian that I'm incredibly impressed with, and he put a TED Talk together for the Toronto TEDx quite some years ago, and you know what he pointed out was that often as leaders, we're completely oblivious to the positive and negative impact that little kind of micro engagements can have on the people around us, and he brought it together so eloquently in this TED Talk. I won't do it the justice, which is why I'll put the link in there, but he shared a story about an engagement that actually he has no recollection of that inspired a young female student to decide that, who had just decided that they were too uncomfortable to move to this university, that they were visiting and had basically asked their parents to take them home. Um, but he, through an interaction, he convinced that student to not only stay but to to graduate there. And, and as drew was actually moving away from that university, he was in the preparation of leaving and he was, um, giving out lollipops as part of a charity that he was supporting. And again, I'm not going to divest the story, but as he was leaving that university, the young girl came up to him and told him that she, he had had a most profound effect on her because of this activity with the lollipops and it completely changed her. Now, again, the story is kind of cute because he basically had a gentleman who was in the queue, hand this lollipop, this young lady, and they ended up dating and ultimately marrying and and so forth. It's a lovely story, but it would, but the. The heart of it is this notion that, as leaders, a positive interaction, a positive comment that we don't even think about, or a negative comment for that matter, can leave somebody affected, and it can affect them for years or maybe the rest of their lives. And so when I think about employee engagement, I also think we need to be conscious about the power of our words, the power of our language and the impact that we can have on others.
JD:This video I've watched it. I don't know how many times I've watched it. It's a nine minute video. It's quite quick. When I was putting together the leadership development program back at Amazon, I actually made it the first thing that we show these up and coming leaders, and the reason I do that is because this little video, the primary sentiment that Drew introduces here, is that we overthink what leadership is. We make leadership something more than it really is. Um, I actually reached out to drew to tell him one that I love the video and I and that it's had an impact on me. Um, but, um, uh, and just just to kind of get introduced and he was such a generous man he basically offered to come and do a talk to some of my leadership developer participants in the future. I never took him up on it, unfortunately, but anyway, he was such a gracious gentleman. I'm incredibly impressed with him.
JD:The bottom line here is, you know, as I said, as leaders we need to remember how powerful our words and actions can be and never underestimate the magnitude that we can have, the impact that we can have, both positive and negative, on others. I want to kind of wrap this up by going a little bit deeper in terms of employee engagement and I'm going to turn to an engagement report that Gallup released originally in the 90s. I remember when I first saw this report I was quite shocked, quite staggered, by the information that they were presenting here. So they had conducted some very deep studies in the relationship between employee engagement and shareholder value and they'd basically been working with Fortune 500 companies and studying, researching what was happening in those organizations and as they looked at this, what they saw was a direct correlated impact between employee engagement and employee productivity, work quality and consistency and ultimately, oh and customer service, customer satisfaction and ultimately the profitability of these Fortune 500 companies. And the numbers, as I said, were quite staggering, with, as much as I think from memory, a 25% delta in the profitability for organizations where the employees were highly engaged.
JD:Now I want to put some context around this because it's a little bit different than what I've been talking about in my definition or my thinking around employee engagement, and so Gallup defines employee engagement as the extent to which employees are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and their workplace. So it's not just job satisfaction, it's about the emotional investment and active participation in the success of the organization that these employees have, so bringing it forward to 2025,. The report that they released, based on the 12 core questions they used for the assessment, focused on clarity of expectations. So how well does an employee understand what's expected of them at work? Do they understand what success looks like, how they're supposed to act and behave, and so forth? Access to tools and resources. Access to tools and resources. Do they have the materials and equipment and the tools and so forth to be able to do the work the right way with the right level of quality? Are there opportunities for feedback and development and again, this correlates with my own observation. So much is you know. Do we have a positive feedback loop where employees know that if they provide feedback, they can, they it'll be heard and it'll be acted upon? And now there are opportunities for professional development, which I talked about in the previous podcast.
JD:A little bit is criticality for people to feel like they're getting they're getting development, so forth. The next one is connection to co-workers and purpose. So do they feel like they're they're part? So do they feel like they're part of a community? Do they feel like they're part of the organization and the purpose of the organization? And then, finally, is there recognition for and utilization of their strengths.
JD:Now, again, this is quite a more formal structure in terms of engagement than I've been talking about so far. This is quite a more formal structure in terms of engagement than I've been talking about so far, but I do see so many things correlating back to the employee engagement, and an example for that would be if I, as a leader, are engaging and interacting and being authentically curious with my employees, then I am going to know more about their strengths and when I'm thinking about their assignments, I can intelligently make decisions on how I'm going to, what projects or what activities I'm going to assign to that employee, so that you know that understanding. If somebody is particularly strong in numbers or particularly strong in analytics, then I have the ability to then start applying them in that space. And I may learn that because I'm interacting with them and I'm listening to what they're talking about and the language they're using as a, for instance, when I think about clarity of expectations again, if I'm engaging my employees on a regular basis and I'm creating a trust relationship and so forth, if there's ambiguity in terms of what they think they should be doing or what they think I think they should be doing, hopefully those things will surface through that engagement and they won't be afraid to say, hey boss, is this what you're expecting of me? Am I doing what you expect or am I off track? And so forth. So I actually think that there is a lovely correlation that actually happens between what Gallup is measuring kind of, as you know, categories and statistics and so forth with the whole notion of engaging curiously and authentically with your people.
JD:So back in the 90s, gallup was just starting to highlight how the employee engagement could boost productivity. But if you fast forward to now, as I said, the research is way more sophisticated. The data shows a much stronger correlation between engagement and the outcomes, like innovation and financial performance and so forth. And the current report and current report and I'm not trying to advertise Gallup, there are other reports out there as well but the current report provides a very rich set of information for anybody wanting to understand better there.
JD:In terms of where we are today compared to where we were in the 90s and even in the last few years, it's a pretty mixed trend at the moment. There's been some periods of improvement over this period and as companies did start to embrace engagement strategies, but there's still some challenges, and the COVID pandemic was a nightmare from an employee engagement perspective. It added a level of a complexity, with remote work and people being distracted by the concerns, and so it's a little bit all over the place. So, if you look at where we are right now, as a summary from what Gallup is reporting at the moment is that there is a general decline in employee engagement. It dropped to 21% in 2024, which was down from 23% in the previous year, and it's been a trend. Actually, since the pandemic began, it's actually continued to trend in a downwards direction, and so there's a lot of work to do there in terms of the state of employee and workplace morale.
JD:We've got a big problem there, frankly, and some of you may have heard of the great resignation or people who are are quietly resigning, quiet quitting. Those people are still turning up for work every day or they're still logging on every day, but the level of commitment to the job and so forth, has been diminished significantly because of the attitude towards the company. The impact impact on economy is that they believe. The Gallup report believes that there's about $438 billion lost in productivity as a result of this, and they project that you could add $9.6 trillion to the world economy if we could drive a significant improvement in employee engagement. I mean, they're big dollars. I mean, I'm not going to vouch for it. From a management engagement perspective, engagement fell from 30% to 27%, with the steepest drops, interestingly, on female managers and managers under 35. And so there's a troubling trend there and I think it'd be interesting to dig deeper into that. From a wellbeing and life satisfaction perspective, 33 percent of global workers reported that they were thriving in life, and manager well-being also declined. You know which, which is driving an increase in disengagement across the teams. And so look the.
JD:The trends around employee engagement are troubling and it's not just a nice to have. As I said throughout this. There's very real impacts on both the people, but also on the business and the success of businesses. So it's an important topic, it's a valuable topic for us to be looking at. You know there are recommendations from Gallup. They recommend that train to train managers, with intention to really formally train managers on how to engage and make that an important part of your expectations of them as leaders, to teach them coaching skills and give them the resources to do that. As a coach myself, I've got to say I think that there's merit in that and then support ongoing development. Make sure that both the individual contributors and the managers have the resources and the support to provide structure and content and the time to be able to support ongoing development. People feel valued when they are feeling like they're developed. So, rounding this out, you know again, I think it's an incredibly important topic. It's certainly one that's near and dear to me.
JD:I think it doesn't take a lot of effort or investment as a leader to take the time to engage with people. You know you should, you know if you should never think you're too important or too busy. It's the people that work for you, who are doing the work, who will ultimately make you successful. Um, you know, I've always said that any success I've had has been on the shoulder, on the shoulders of great people, and so these are the resources that will ultimately make you successful as a leader in any size organization, in any association, in any community. If you happen to be one of those leaders, it'll be the people who are doing the work that support the cause who will make you ultimately successful, and so taking the time to be genuinely interested in your people and engaging with your people is a critical element to supporting your success and, frankly, it's very enjoyable, you know I would say that selfishly.
JD:I love the opportunity to sit down with people. I love the opportunity to learn things about people that perhaps I don't know so much about, and particularly in my case, again from my recent period, doing it in cultures that I'm less familiar with, doing it in environments I'm less familiar with, where I can learn something new. I think it's a really great opportunity. So I encourage you, in whatever you're doing, where you're working with people, take the time to engage, learn the techniques to engage, and with that I'll wrap this up. Um and uh, and with that I'll wrap this up. I'd love to hear from anybody who's got thoughts, even if they're disagreeing with what I've just said. I'm happy, happy to hear some other perspectives or other opinions. In terms of engagement. Um, any cool resources that you've got, by all means share them as well, and, as I said, I will share the drew dudley video that I love so much from 10x toronto. With that, I will wish you all the best. Make sure you're living your best life and please be good to each other out there. Thank you.
