Natural Law is a Key to Employee Engagement

We are creating our own problems in our organizations. Our biggest problems occur and persist because of a lack of alignment with natural laws. Natural law is a complex subject and can be easily made more complex when we bring in the factors of God or religion to explain their existence. With the intention of avoiding the complex and the discussion of the origin of natural laws, let’s just agree that there are certain natural laws that exist and that our lack of alignment with these principles (or laws) can make our lives more difficult and can damage the performance in organizations.
Aristotle is often given the credit for best describing the concept of natural law and the assertion that certain principles, if not followed, will lead to unwanted consequences. Our American Founding Fathers embraced this concept and we can see it expressed in our Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Our founders acknowledged the existence of Natural Law. You may believe in a Creator or not but it doesn’t matter for our purposes here because it is only important to acknowledge the existence of universal principles. We don’t need to agree on their source. The belief in natural law rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness gave rise to a Constitution that changed the world. The list of accomplishments of the USA are too numerous to mention. These accomplishments are not because we as Americans are such extraordinary human beings but instead because we were fortunate to be in a system that was aligned with natural laws and universal principles. The United States of America is the primary exhibit for proof that alignment with natural law creates success.
Three Reasons Why Natural Law Creates Success
There are three major reasons why aligning to natural law will help organizations. First, alignment helps avoid problems. Most organizations are very good at solving problems once they appear but they are very poor at knowing how to avoid them in the first place. We are good at arresting criminals for drug charges but poor at solving the root causes of drug dependencies. We fill our prisons with poorly educated youth yet we cannot fix our schools.
Second, natural laws enable us to adapt to change. One of our greatest strengths as human beings is our ability to adapt to change. Think about how much change we have accepted just in the past 20 years. We have cell phones, the internet, iPhones, IPads, and the war on terror. Our ability to respond to these mammoth changes is impressive and yet research shows only 10% of strategic initiatives in organizations are successfully implemented and are completed on time. How can we be so adaptable in the larger economy yet so resistant in organizations?
Third, following natural law enables organizations to innovate faster than their un-aligned competitors. Few organizations truly make innovation a strategy. Google is a good example of an innovative organization. Google holds frequent innovation meetings and provides freedom to their employees to experiment.
What are the basic natural laws?
Integrity and respect come before performance. A leader’s number one job is to demonstrate integrity to set an example for everyone. Without integrity everything eventually fails. Buckminster Fuller once said, “Integrity is the essence of everything successful.” Zig Ziglar said: "The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.” A proper demonstration of integrity must include basic behaviors from leaders and employees. These behaviors include::
· Doing what you say you will do, i.e. making and keeping agreements.
· Admitting mistakes openly and honestly
· Speaking openly and honestly
Unless leaders can demonstrate these basic behaviors their ability to lead and to improve performance will suffer. That is just the way it is. There is no avoiding it. It is a natural law. Those who try to side step this law will pay a heavy price. And, if a leader allows behavior inconsistent with integrity it is just as damaging as if they did it themselves. We teach what we allow. Leaders who want success must be willing to behave with integrity and hold others accountable to that standard without exception.
Respect is another necessary component of every interaction to optimize long-term performance. Treating everyone with respect regardless of the circumstances or the individual performance is another part of this first natural law. Even when an employee makes a mistake they need to be treated with total respect. Any sign of disrespect will damage an employee’s ability to hear what they can learn from that mistake. A leader must demonstrate respect with certain behaviors such as treating people the way they would like to be treated. Every major religion has a statement consistent with “treat others as we would like to be treated.” It is a natural law.
Learning is the best motivator
People need an environment within which to learn from their own mistakes and to make their own improvements. The need to learn is a natural law. Taking away an employee’s ability to learn and improve will lead to severe motivation and performance decline. Empowering employees to make small experiments to improve their work will enable natural motivation and continuous improvement.
Freedom is needed to innovate
The combination of free-market capitalism and our Constitution created the greatest growth miracle that changed the entire world. The need to provide freedom to employees (just as our founding fathers acknowledged the need for liberty for all people) is a natural law. It is essential for innovation and to create a competitive advantage. Those organizations that allow innovation, and in fact plan for it by setting an encouraging environment, are the ones that will be market leaders.
What are we doing instead?
Instead of aligning policies and procedures to these natural laws many organizations have created organizational environments that undermine them. Our performance appraisal processes are a joke. We use ranking and rating of employees which undermine the natural laws of respect (people who are ranked or rated unfairly feel disrespected) and integrity. We have rating scales that are inconsistent and unfair. This seemingly allows poor behavior and performance with some employees while coming down hard on others. These policies also encourage cheating to meet performance goals (80 percent of high-achieving high school students and 75 percent of college students admit to cheating, a percentage that has been rising the past 50 years).
Our performance pay polices create similar damage by rewarding individual employees even though they could not have accomplished any of their goals without at least some support of the rest of their team. Even Tiger Woods’ performance is improved through the positive interaction with his caddie during rounds of tournament golf.
Often our leaders play by a different set of rules than employees. Have you ever seen a leader demonstrate inappropriate behaviors while at the same time criticizing or rating employees poorly for similar behaviors? This undermines performance in ways that are impossible to measure.
Finally, we are creating stagnant bureaucracies. Every time a mistake is made new rules or policies are added that inadvertently stifle innovation, risk taking, and improvements. Bureaucracies cannot innovate.
What can we do instead?
It is time we aligned with natural laws. It is time we examine our policies, procedures, and leadership behaviors to assure alignment with our natural laws and principles. A good metaphor for this type of natural law model is a flock of birds in flight. As a group, they have no ONE leader to tell them when to turn left or right, or when to slow down or to speed up; yet as a group, they change direction as effortlessly as a single organism. How is this possible? It is possible because, flocking birds naturally follow three basic principles (or natural laws): first, they fly in the same general direction as their closest neighbors; second, they fly at the same average speed as their closest neighbors; third, they fly at the same average distance from their closest neighbor and avoid colliding with them at all costs. Following these three basic principles, they are able, as a group, to respond to their fast-changing environment with rapid, precise adjustments.
Flocking birds are a “self-organizing system”. Organizations can achieve the same agile capabilities if the leader clarifies the vision and the organizational objectives, teaches clear effective principles that align with natural laws, and sets policies and procedures that reinforce those laws. In doing so the leader establishes trust and increases his/her influence, while empowering each individual to make the right decisions at the right time with total freedom.
When leaders align their policies and beliefs with natural law, like the birds, people will respond quickly, appropriately and in the best interests of the team (flock) without needing a controlling authority to tell them what to do at every turn. Freedom, integrity, respect, and learning are brought to life and success is sure to follow.