Early in my career I was a new product development programme manager at HP’s Scientific Instruments Division in the heart of Silicon Valley. The first project I led was a critical product redesign with a demanding schedule.

So, I was dismayed to see this sign hanging at the desk of one of my team members: “15 Years ’til Retirement – Pace Yourself.”

Rather than being passionately committed to our work together, this person was looking forward to escaping his job so he could finally start enjoying his life. Gallup would describe him as “not engaged,” but to me he was yet another risk to our imperiled project.

What is employee engagement? Engaged employees are not merely wage slaves – they feel a positive emotional connection to their organisation and will contribute discretionary effort to their work. Globally nearly 90 per cent of workers are either NOT engaged or are actively disengaged – meaning they are actively working against their own organisations!

In the US, where engagement is highest, it still averages a pathetic 30 per cent! Even in the world-famous Silicon Valley, the birthplace of chip innovations (circuits, not potatoes) for which it was named, employee engagement is often “less than sub-optimal,” with people looking forward to their company’s IPO so they can quit the jobs they’ve been enduring as they “rest and vest.”

You can think of employees who are not engaged as a huge hidden tax on each and every business. Smart people and great technology are not enough! I live just a short drive from companies like Tesla, eBay, Apple, Google, Cisco Systems, Adobe and PayPal. Living and working in Silicon Valley has provided me with tremendous opportunities to witness up close how businesses start, then grow and flourish, or falter and fail.

Interestingly, the old Sun Microsystems sign is still visible on the back of the famous Facebook sign, a living reminder of what can happen to companies that were once wildly successful.

Please don’t assume that failures are the result only of challenges like technology, products, markets or strategy. I’m a physicist by education, and I made that mistake early in my career. To do so is to miss an incredibly important piece of the puzzle. Many threats that businesses face are completely and utterly human.

Organisations here are composed of brilliant, talented, diverse and well-educated people. Nevertheless, they often struggle to achieve results due to what some of my techie friends call “the touchy-feely crap.” Having also worked abroad with people from about 50 different countries in a wide range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, concrete, plastics and whiskey, I can tell you that the human challenges we face in Silicon Valley are shared globally.

While products, technology and market fit are certainly vital aspects of successful businesses, widespread workplace dysfunctionality strikes me as the greatest missed opportunity because it’s entirely predictable and largely preventable.

According to one study published in MIT Sloan’s management journal, over 80 per cent of global teams self-reported as failing to reach their own goals, and the most common causes of failure in these teams were:

● lack of trusting relationships

● failure to overcome communication barriers (and this is not limited to language and culture)

● unclear goals

● misalignment between individual and team priorities

Look at this list once more. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that teams build strong, trusting relationships and work together effectively toward clear, shared goals upon which all team members are aligned? This is entirely a failure of leadership! (Notice that I didn’t say management. There’s a big difference between leadership and management. Both are important, but I’ve never met anyone who liked being managed!)

Toxic talent and lackluster leadership

Sure, there are other contributing factors, but let’s not be so quick to forgive this tragic absence of effective leadership in the global work environment. Even a brief peek into the inner workings of many organisations reveals that they are not teams, but merely groups of people working together.

Their managers are not leaders, and their organisations are dysfunctional by design, thanks to power poisoning and hierarchies that breed what have come to be known as “bossholes.” (Yup, there’s a whole new word for people who suck their employees’ will to live!)

Their cynicism-inducing values may be posted on the wall, but unless they’re willing to fire their best engineer for violating those principles, their values are worthless, even a liability to a healthy organisational culture. The painful consequences of this dysfunction often include high turnover, low productivity, missed opportunities, delayed product launches and less-than-delighted customers.

With only a fraction of workers truly committed to their work, many organisations achieve success through a combination of heroics, diving catches, miracles and luck. Some of these accidental achievers ask me, “Kimberly, if our company is so screwed up, why are we successful?”

Why, indeed! Lucky for them most of their peers are equally mediocre. Surely the people responsible for such wasteful misery would recognise their toxic – and sometimes “talk-sick” – impact on their colleagues and change their behaviour, right?

Unfortunately, often no one feels responsible for this needless suffering. When I work with individual employees, they say, “Sure, Kimberly, we want to make the changes you’re suggesting, but it’s our managers who are really the cause of these problems.”

When I challenge managers on these workplace issues, they often point to their executives as the real cause of their difficulties. Executives then point to the CEO, who – heartbroken to think that they might be to blame for this tragic loss of opportunity – confides that the board, investors, shareholders, or other influences are at the root of these problems.

Or sometimes they blame their people, to which I respond, “Okay, suppose I discover that you are somehow contributing to the dysfunction. How do you want me to tell you?” Their response determines whether I agree to work with them or light my hair on fire and run out the door screaming.

Manage cows, lead people!

What’s preventing business leaders all over Our World from adopting what is clearly common sense, not to mention in the long-term best interests of customers, shareholders and employees? It’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies with higher employee engagement scores also enjoy better customer satisfaction scores, higher quality, lower employee absenteeism and turnover, and increased profitability.

Only a cynic – or someone who’s never worked in a dysfunctional organisation (which is pretty much someone who’s never worked) – will be asking if this is causation or correlation. The research is clear that the biggest contributor to a lack of engagement is a person’s direct manager.

Ms Wiefling is co-founder of Silicon Valley Alliances, and author of Scrappy Project Management; a global business leadership consultant, and a force of nature – the good kind! She specialises in global team effectiveness – helping teams achieve what seems impossible but is merely difficult.