Webinar presenter Dr. Obed Magny answered a number of your questions after his presentation Job Satisfaction: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving Morale and Reducing Stress with the Employees in Your Organization. Here are just a few of his responses.
Audience Question: Starting off, Rodrigo asked for really good clarification. So, can you give us an example? So, compare and contrast. What’s the difference between an internal or an intrinsic value versus an external value? Can you kind of give us a quick example of both?
Obed Magny: Intrinsic is something… think about it like this. Inside you. Intrinsic, if you look at the definition of, it sounds like it’s everything that has to do with internal. I know what motivates me is, I like being challenged in one respect. If my supervisor, my organization, my leader, those around me, are in a position to help influence them, I’m going for that. External values are the things you can’t touch, so to speak, right? So, company policies, those are the artificial things. You know what I’m saying? When I tell you, I will jump on a table for $500,000. Yeah, that’s internal to a certain extent because at some point. So, the internal factors. It’s, what is it that I want? What is it that I want to achieve? What is it that I want to accomplish? Those are the internal factors. External is like working conditions. Nobody’s tripping over themselves because — Nobody’s doing that. That’s what that is. It has to be met at a baseline level. Once it’s met at the baseline level? I’m happy. If it’s not meeting the baseline level, it goes in the demotivation in the same way as the internal motivation.
Audience Question: So, we wanted to know, where do you draw the line between addressing and healing the trauma of staff and moving on to avoid living in the past and trying to create a more positive work environment? That’s a really delicate balance, isn’t it?
Obed Magny: Oh, no, it’s not. This is another easy question. Let me explain something family. Understand something. About me, right now, California, it’s already warm. In any relationship, I don’t care if you’re married. I don’t care if it’s your best friend, it doesn’t matter if it’s your neighbor. It can be your co-worker, it can be community members, or whatever. Trust and legitimacy are based not only on faith, but it’s based on being vulnerable. If I know you, if I understand your plight, if I understand you’ve been through some things, and I acknowledge that. There’s your building block, there’s your foundation in moving forward. As we’ve talked about some of the protests and everything. In this country. Again, this is about the purpose of this webinar. You know that we only have so much time that we’ve been through slavery, redlining. We can talk about how black folks just been disenfranchised, right? When we acknowledge what and we tell the truth and say, “Hey, we have not been perfect and you’ve been hurt you’ve been slighted. You’ve been disenfranchised.” That’s when we move forward. If you’re in a relationship with the best friend who’s been hurt by something you did when you say, I’m sorry, I —-or maybe I was associated with something that screwed you. Let me do something. Let me be a part of the solution moving forward. That’s when you start to see the revelations related to trust and legitimacy, that’s when you start to see people saying “Okay, you know what, It’s going to take some time. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen a couple of weeks”, but you know what? I see that this person sees me, I see this person hears me, and you know they’re being accountable to me, moving forward that’s what we’re going to start doing. Yeah, this is, this is easy work. It’s easy to address it, hard to make it up, that’s a better way.
Audience Question: If there are any reliable tools that we can use to assess morale, like surveys, survey instruments that kind of thing, in specific areas of concern within our agency. Do you have some good reliable surveys or mechanisms that they can use?
Obed Magny: So, okay, I’m going to do the plug here on Magny Leadership. If that’s something that you guys are interested in, please go to my website, shoot me a message, message section, or send me an e-mail, and I can help you out with that. So that is the short answer. The shorter answer is there are plenty. But here’s the thing. We don’t want to just use any assessment question or assessment answer. We want something that’s based on research. We want questions that we know are not just going to probe but get to the heart of what’s hurting or what’s ailing those employees, okay. And there are a lot of people out there. This is in no way, shape, or form to disrespect them. There’s a lot of people out there was the, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got this first here”, no. Number one, you have to care. And I said this, I was on a new segment yesterday morning on CBS here in local, Sacramento and I talked about this. And I’m going to hammer this again. If you guys don’t remember anything from this presentation? Listen to what I’m going to tell you. If you don’t love the people, this is coming from Dr. Cornel West, if you don’t love the people you can never lead the people, okay? This is not supposed to be a motivational speech, I know this is a presentation. But if your heart’s not in the right place, this conversation was nuked before it even got started, all right? So, that woman’s question, okay. I’m going to go off on the remote side tangent. But get at me at obedmagny@magnyleadership.com, and I will get at you with the, what assessments work, and I can do that for you, or go to my website and shoot me a message. Hit me on the DMs on Twitter and Instagram, I got you, okay.
Click Here to Watch a Recording of Job Satisfaction: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving Morale and Reducing Stress with the Employees in Your Organization.
