what engages swedes the most? don't let our heads fool your heart!

Professor Rikard Larsson

Dr Katarina Kling

Anders Häggberg, Responsible for Life and Career Planning, Swedish Armed Forces

Göran Månsson, Senior consultant in leadership and career development

Decision Dynamics AB Ideon Science Park SE-223 70 Lund, Sweden www.decisiondynamics.se

What Engages Swedes the Most?

Don’t Let Our Heads Fool Your Heart!

(2016:2)

* Subject of an interview article in the leading Swedish daily financial newspaper Dagens Industri published April 30, 2016, pp 22-23, by Caroline Åkerlund. ©Copyright 2016 Decision Dynamics AB 1

What Engages Swedes the Most?

Don’t Let Our Heads Fool Your Heart!

Professor Rikard Larsson, Decision Dynamics AB & Lund University

Dr Katarina Kling, Decision Dynamics AB

Anders Häggberg, Responsible for Life & Career Planning, Swedish Armed Forces

Göran Månsson, Senior consultant in Leadership and Career Development

Decision Dynamics Research Report 2016/2 (Eng) *

Executive summary

There can hardly be anything more valuable than being engaged in what you do and engaging others. Research has shown engagement to be positively related to improved innovation, customer loyalty, quality, productivity, retention, and profitability as well as personal health and well-being. Employee engagement has become the number one metric in the HR scorecards of many large organizations.

At the same time, there are alarming reports of only 10-30% of employees being engaged in their work. Why then is something which is so valuable and which receive so much management attention seemingly so hard to achieve and sustain? Why do Gallup find that only 16% of us Swedes are engaged in our work?

In order to answer these key questions, we need to first ask what is it that actually engages us Swedes in our working lives. We recently conducted a study of more than 7000 Swedes’ career orientations. Our study reveals not only what engages us the most, but also indicates important reasons as to why it seems so hard to achieve and sustain engagement. It further provides some fairly clear clues as to how it can be improved.

The good news is that what really engages Swedes is a diverse range of career motives that are needed and useful in different ways. These range from stable security to dynamic development as well as from higher managerial achievement to creativity and breadth of experience.

The bad news, on the other hand, is that most Swedes believe that just one career orientation in particular is ideal for us. This collective focus on what we call the Spiral career concept results in lacking career self-awareness. We tend to fool ourselves into pursuing career development paths that are bound to be less engaging than those that would better suit our primary motives.

The best news is that it is quite easy to increase career self-awareness which also enables us to take greater responsibility for increasing and sustaining our engagement.

This paper will briefly describe the Decision Dynamics Career Model™, followed by some of the main reasons for why so many of us tend to fool ourselves about our engagement potential. We then present the overall Swedish Career profile and self-awareness analysis. Finally, we conclude with some practical suggestions for how we can sustainably enhance engagement.

©Copyright 2016 Decision Dynamics AB 2

There Is Hardly Anything More Valuable than Engagement

During the last decade, research by mostly major consulting firms has found an impressive array of positive relationships1 between employee engagement and key outcomes such as:

discretionary effort innovation customer service and loyalty quality cooperation speed productivity revenues profitability and earnings per share staff retention health and well-being

What other single performance factor can provide as broad set of valuable outcomes? We have yet to find it. It is not surprising that employee engagement now has become the number one metric in large US organization’s HR scorecards, reported even more often than personnel turnover and performance ratings2.

Even though engagement is found to be so valuable and gets so much attention, many consulting reports show engagement as low as only 10-30%.3 Why are organizations not engaging their employees more?

What Are the Barriers to Greater Employee Engagement?

Gallup recently found that only 16% of Swedes are engaged in their work.4 Why are we disengaged to such a large extent? Is it simply that we lack it? Our research shows that this is not the case. On the contrary, we have many engagement drivers as well as killers.5 The problem is that there are several barriers to accessing our engagement drivers including being exposed to factors that kill a lot of our engagement. Three major barriers to greater employee engagement are presented in our previous research6:

The ways employee engagement is presently measured, using annual, anonymous mass-surveys can be disengaging in itself. This lacks personal feedback to the respondents themselves and fails to capture the dynamic and personal essence of engagement.

1 Wellins, Bernthal & Phelps (2005), BlessingWhite (2008), Kenexa Research Institute (2008), Hay Group (2010), Decision Dynamics (2011 & 2012), and Kowske (2012) referring to own and other studies by Bersin/Deloitte, Corporate Executive Board, DDI, Gallup, Hewitt, Manpower, Mercer, SHRM, Towers Watson, etc. 2 Wellins, Bernthal & Phelps (2005), Kowske (2012) 3 Wellins, Bernthal & Phelps (2005), BlessingWhite (2011), and Kowske (2012) 4 Gallup (2013) as reported in, for example, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter 2013‐11‐15 5 Larsson & Kling (2013; 2015) 6 Larsson & Kling (2013), cf. the extensive academic literature review by Macey & Schneider (2008)


Individuals differ greatly in what kills or promotes engagement. This undermines any “bulk” attempt to increase engagement. That which may be a driver for one may be an engagement killer to another.

As many as 60% or more have ideal career orientations that are different from their primary underlying motivations.

The common denominator of barriers to greater engagement is found in how engagement itself is viewed. The figure below contrasts the traditional view of engagement as a personal attribute (that is, something a person is or is not) with a dynamic view of engagement as dependent on the fit between the person and the situation. Engagement is almost always measured as the former attribute through various indices that classify each respondent as being engaged or not, irrespective of the situation. Gallup’s finding that 16% of the Swedes are engaged is one example of this.

The easiest way to check for yourself which view is most relevant is to ask yourself “am I always engaged to the same extent OR does my engagement vary depending on what I am working on and with whom?” Our research and practical experience favor the dynamic and situational view of engagement. Even during the same normal week, the performance of an individual tends to vary from 40% to 80% depending on whether it is her/his most versus least engaging work hours in the same job.7

We have used the Decision Dynamics Career Model™ in our research because it is designed to study what engages us the most and why we are not more engaged in our work. The Career Model looks at how we differ in terms of our career orientations, how they fit different situations, and how we develop during our working lives. After

7 This can actually be seen as another barrier to engagement since we are doing a lot of disengaging work every day and thereby waste a lot of our engagement potential. We do not really recognize the massive amount of lost engagement that accumulates from all of us being partly disengaged every week (Decision Dynamics, 2011 & 2012; Larsson & Korch, 2012; Larsson & Duval Thomsen, 2013).


describing the model, we will then present the Swedish Career profile based on our study of more than 7000 Swedes. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on what is stopping us from being more engaged and what we can do to improve engagement.

Decision Dynamics Career Model™

The core tool for performing this study of what engages Swedes the most, the Decision Dynamics Career Model™ is one of the world’s leading career tools with more than 30 years of international research and thousands of references. It is used in regular practice by thousands of certified users and has generated millions of respondent profiles globally.

The Career Model differentiates between four basic career concepts held by individuals in terms of two primary conceptual factors: 1) how long one stays in one field of work and 2) the direction of career movement or change. They are listed below from the most stable to the most change-oriented:8

Expert: Career choice is made as a lifetime commitment to an occupation, where the “mastery” of the skills, knowledge and work of the chosen profession defines career success rather than upward advancement.

Linear: Career choice focuses on upward movement to climb the “ladder” of a managerial hierarchy, through frequent upward promotions with relatively infrequent changes in career field.

Spiral: Career choice evolves through a sequence of occupations with moderate, five-to-ten year duration in each, representing lateral related movement where new choices builds on past choices in order to develop new skills.

Transitory: Career choice involves frequent changes of field, organizations, and jobs in one-to-four year intervals, representing unrelated movement in multiple directions with variety of experience being a dominant force.

These four career concepts are related to motivational differences. Expert relates to in-depth competence and security needs, Linear to needs for power and achievement, Spiral to self-development and creativity, and Transitory to needs for novelty and independence.9

This means that people with different career orientations are engaged as well as disengaged in very different, yet identifiable ways.10

As a set of initial basic steps, the Career Model tool enables oneself and others to learn:

a) Which view is my most and least ideal career concept;

8 The Career Model was originally developed by Professor Michael Driver (1979, 1980) followed by Dr Kenneth Brousseau (1984) and it has been related to other career frameworks, such as Schein’s (1978) career anchors and Derr’s (1986) career orientations. Many researchers have over the years contributed to its further development, in such works as Von Glinow, Driver, Brousseau & Prince (1983), Coombs (1989), Brousseau, Driver, Eneroth & Larsson (1996), Larsson, Driver, Holmqvist & Sweet (2001), Larsson, Brousseau, Driver, Holmqvist & Tarnovskaya (2003), Larsson, Brousseau, Kling & Sweet (2007), and Larsson & Kling (2013; 2015). 9 Driver & Coombs (1983), Coombs (1989), and Larsson, Brousseau, Kling & Sweet (2007) 10 Larsson & Kling (2013)


b) Which underlying motives are my most and least engaging; and c) the extent to which my ideal view in “a” corresponds to the career motives in “b”

as representing my career self-awareness.

Discovering One’s Career Self-Awareness with the Career Profile

The CareerView™ questionnaire has 38 questions, which give respondents a career profile with scores on (a) each of the four career concepts displayed by blue front-row bars in the diagrams below; and (b) each of the four underlying career motives as red back-row bars. The higher the blue bar, the more ideal the person views this career concept. The higher the red bar, the more engaged the person is by this set of career motives.

The comparison between the blue front- and red back-rows indicates the degree of career self-awareness of the respondent. The Sandra sample profile to the left has mainly Linear/Spiral career ideals that almost perfectly match her underlying Linear/Spiral motives. However, this kind of very high congruence between the “head”, (that is, blue front-row bars) and “heart” (that is, red back-row bars) is very rare.

The contrasting career profile of Joe to the right has exactly the same Linear/Spiral ideal career concepts as Sandra, but quite different underlying Expert/Spiral career motives. Joe is likely to pursue promotion to higher managerial levels according to his “head”, but even if he would succeed, he is likely to be surprisingly disengaged due to his much lower Linear motives.

If asked when he has had most fun at work, Joe may answer when he was focusing on a specific molecule as a biochemist specialist in accordance with his strong Expert motives, but that he has never time to do this since he became a manager. The good news for Joe is that with the help of his career profile, he can both avoid this Linear misdirection when


the blue bar is clearly higher than the underlying red bar and discover his unrecognized Expert motivation potential when the red bar is clearly higher than the blue front bar.

Fortunately, almost all of us have more motivation potentials than misdirections. This is due to us learning from others that one or two of the career concepts are more ideal, while at least one of them is more of a “nightmare” (that is, the very low blue bar in contrast to the dream that a high blue bar represents). However, our “hearts” are typically broader with several sets of engaging career motives without any really low red bars.

The main problem that we have found in previous studies and practice is that about 60% of us have a primary career concept that we have learned to strive towards that is different from our underlying primary career motives that would have been more engaging to pursue.11 This indicates a gigantic waste of motivation potential and engagement, that can be turned into a goldmine of engagement and mutually benefitting development with the help of the career profile.

National Cultures Can Fool Our Heads to Fool Our Hearts

Both Sandra and Joe’s Linear/Spiral career concepts (ie, their highest blue bars) are quite common in many countries, including the US where different studies have shown about 30-50% have primary Linear concepts.12 Making it to the top is indeed an essential part of the “American dream”. The tragedy is that only about 25% of Americans have primary Linear motives.

There is actually a large portion of the US population that is striving unnecessarily upwards, since only about a third of those who have primary Linear concepts also have primary Linear motives.13 This general lack of career self-awareness results in about two thirds of those who believe that the Linear career is most ideal for them are primarily engaged by Spiral, Expert or Transitory motives.

Given that only about 10% of all jobs are managerial positions, only a small part of the 30-50% striving upwards will actually succeed. Furthermore, out of those few who do break into the managerial ranks, a large percentage like Joe will find surprisingly little engagement there when they have primary career motives elsewhere.

Unfortunately, many of these more or less disengaged Linears are still likely to hold on to their upward ideals due to their beliefs that it will be better at the next level. Non-managers can still go on hoping for that first promotion, while unhappy lower managers can continue to believe that it will get better if they can get another promotion.

Basically, Joe and very many others have been “fooled” by the upward oriented US culture to learn that the ideal career is to climb towards the top. They have bought into the national view of what a successful career is about and are trying to make their careers upwards based in terms of what other people think instead of their own most engaging primary career motives.

11 Larsson, Månsson & Sahlberg (2011) 12 Eg, Brousseau & Driver (1994) and Larsson, Brousseau, Driver, Holmqvist & Tarnovskaya (2003) 13 Brousseau & Driver (1994)


In a previous study of 84000 individuals from 10 countries, we found that all these countries had a more dominant view of what their ideal careers ought to be (that is, more narrow career concepts) than their broader underlying career motives. The countries differed from one another with, for example, France being the most Linear, while Japan was the most Expert, relatively speaking. However, none of the 10 countries we studied matched their most frequent primary career concepts to their most frequent primary career motives.

Hence, different national cultures are shaping how we view successful careers irrespective of what really would engage us the most. This result in that very many of us are squandering a lot of our engagement by following other people’s heads instead of our own hearts.

National Cultures Devalue Much of Our Engaging Career Motives

In addition to many misdirected pursuits of what people think they ought to be striving for, this national culture bias also obscures what really engages us by denigrating the alternative career patterns. When asked about what career orientation is the most ideal, most respondents produce a set of blue bars that resemble a winners podium with one winner, one good second, one not so good third, and one more or less of a nightmare in last place. If the culture tells us that one or possibly two career patterns are the most ideal, the other two or three tend to become less than ideal by their very difference from the ideal one.

Frequently, either the most stable Expert career or the most change-oriented Transitory career that are considered to be the least ideal. People who are more oriented towards the traditional stability of the left hand Expert/Linear side of the career continuum tend to especially look down upon the opposite Transitory career as being their worst case scenario of an irresponsible, indecisive, and vagrant working life.

In contrast, those who are more oriented towards the dynamic Spiral/Transitory right hand side tend to devalue their opposite Expert career as being a nightmare of narrow rigidity. The Sandra and Joe sample profiles actually denigrate both the Expert and Transitory careers as their double nightmares with their low blue bars to the left and right.

Interestingly, we have found that our hearts seldom agree with these strong negative value judgments in our heads. We have very seldom any really low career motives, as displayed by very low red bars. Even those with mostly Spiral/Transitory motives can often be partially engaged by gaining some in-depth knowledge and even mastery of a special area that is part of the Expert motives. Similarly, those of us with mostly Expert/Linear motives are frequently also motivated by some variety or independence that are parts of the Transitory motives.

We therefore risk devaluing the career orientations that are not culturally supported in our heads, which further increases the waste of motivation potential. If we would only allow ourselves to recognize more of the broader career motives in our heads, we can act more in accordance with them and gain more engagement.


The Swedish Career Profile

Let’s view what the average Swedish career profile and frequencies of primary career concepts and motives turned out to be in our recent study of 7309 Swedish nationals.14 As indicated in the two diagrams below, the career concept race was clearly won by the Spiral career concepts. The career motives, on the other hand, were so broad that all four sets of Spiral, Linear, Expert, and Transitory motives were within less than one point average score on a 0-7 scale.

The good news from this study is that we Swedes tend to be engaged by a broad spectrum of career motives ranging from stable and secure expertise to managerial power and achievement as well as dynamic personal development, creativity, change orientation, and independence. Most people have high scores on many of these engagement drivers as displayed by the red bars in the left diagram above.

Almost all of us have the potential to be engaged by many different things in our working lives! This finding highlights even more the mystery as to why we apparently are not engaged at work.

Even though our dominant Spiral career concept appears to be focusing correctly on the most frequent Spiral career motives, we can still find a key barrier to our engagement at work because of the overly strong Swedish focus on the Spiral career concept.

While the average Swedish career profile in the left diagram appears to have no collective career “nightmares” (that is, very low blue bars), it should be noted that in 14 The respondents in this sample have answered the CareerView™ questionnaire between 2009‐2013. They represent a broad cross‐section of people having used this career tool for varying purposes. The respondents range from students (3%) and unemployed (6%) to managers (22%) in more than 20 industries with 39% being public sector in governmental/county/municipal organizations and 53% in private sector organizations of sizes varying from 1 to 100 000+ employees. Their ages vary from 15 to 72 with an average of 42, while there is somewhat of gender bias with 62% female respondents.


larger samples there is almost always a range in scores for the average scores not to be very low. Thus, behind the moderate average Expert, Transitory, and even Linear blue concepts bars, there lurk many individual nightmares that are more or less offset by other individuals’ moderate and even high scores on these career concepts.

The Swedish frequency diagram to the right helps clarify which are the most vs least ideal career concepts in our heads compared with what are the most vs least engaging career motives in our hearts by only counting how many have that concept and set of motives as their primary/highest scores. We see here that the Spiral career concept is most dominant in contrast to the broader distribution of primary career motives.

Even this primary frequency diagram actually understates the amount of people who are not following their most engaging career motives. The diagram says that 55% of Swedes that we studied have Spiral as their primary career concept and 40% have Spiral as their primary career motives. This may look on the surface like only 15% that have let their Swedish heads fool their hearts, but this is a gross understatement of the actual lack of career self-awareness.

What is not shown in the primary frequency diagram is how many of those 40% who have a primary Spiral motives actually have primary Expert, Linear or Transitory concepts. We need to take a closer look at all the various ways that our heads can fool our hearts to get a better understanding of the great barrier that lack of career self-awareness is for our engagement at work.

How We Swedes Tend to Let Our Heads Fool Our Hearts

To examine the fit between our heads and our hearts more closely, we can map the results on a career concepts and motives grid. This shows how well or how badly the two distributions of what we think ought to be ideal and what actually would engage us the most intersect (see table below). The diagonal shows four possible perfect matches of career concept with career and motives. About 8% have both primary Expert concept and motives, 5% have both primary Linear concept and motives, 23% have both primary Spiral concept and motives, and 4% who have both primary Transitory concept and motives. In other words, only 40% of us Swedes are career-wise self-aware.


We have not yet completed comparative national studies of career self-awareness. We have, however, often found around 30-35% career self-awareness in various international studies for individual client organizations. So Sweden, we may be somewhat ahead of many other nations in this respect. However, the most important conclusion is that about 60% of us are letting our heads fool our hearts in terms of not primarily aiming for the career development that would be most engaging for us.

We can also see which ways we fool ourselves most often. 15% of us who find the Spiral career as ideal in our head, have our hearts primarily engaged by Expert motives (ie, the Spiral concept row and Expert motive column). This illustrates that the dominant Swedish Spiral career norm has led about half of those that are most engaged by Expert motives astray. The Spiral view devalues Expert careers as being too narrowly focused, static, and even old-fashioned to the extent that the Expert career is often the worst nightmare among Spiral Swedes.

The second most common misconception is that 10% of the sample that also believe that Spiral is the ideal career, but instead would be most engaged by Transitory motives. Here we find a Spiral devaluation of the Transitory orientation as wasting their experience by switching too often to unrelated jobs.

Another 9% view the Linear career as the most ideal, but have primarily Spiral motives. This may be partly due to the traditional negative Swedish view that people explicitly wanting to climb the corporate ladders are politically incorrect careerists. The growing influence of a more international view that a Linear career can be ideal is possibly having an effect on us Swedes. This adoption of more Linear views seems to be based on a some kind of external influence rather than listening to our hearts. Only about a fourth of the 20% with primary Linear concepts, also have primary Linear motives (5%).

One more example of frequent misconceptions is the 7% who adhere to the Swedish Spiral ideal view of careers, while being mainly engaged by Linear motives. This group


seems still to be held back by the dominant cultural norms of not striving upwards to managerial positions to realize that they actually have great Linear motivation potential. It is a double waste of both what would be the most engaging for themselves and also what is well needed in a country where there are only about 5% self-aware Linears aiming for management roles. They also represent half of the relatively rare (14%) with primary Linear motives in this Swedish study.

There are 8 more patterns of misconception which occur less frequently, but still account for 20% of us. While the Swedish Spiral culture should not be blamed for either all of them or all of the more frequent ones discussed above, we can still see a clear overall pattern of how one dominant career view tends to devalue other career orientations. This is illustrated in the following table of how different career “spectacles” affect how we view people with different career orientations.

For example, the first row shows that Experts can view other Experts as serious (but wrong). Experts view Linears as deciding beyond their capability, Spirals as lacking focus when they move sideways, and Transitories as useless “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

This picture is often the source of some hilarity in our career workshops when participants begin to recognize which career spectacles comes closest to their own evaluation. Note that of the total 16 combinations, there are only 2 that are really positive. These are where Spirals discover other Spirals and enjoy telling each other about their respective broadening experiences and Transitories bumping into other Transitories finding each other to be fun and free-spirited souls.

All the other 14 combinations more or less denigrate the others in different ways. The common denominator is that the various career spectacles tend to have different dirt on the lenses that blinds people from appreciating the diverse talents of others. This is helpful in understanding why we tend to misunderstand, devalue, and even distrust one


another. We can also apply it to how national cultures tend to favor one career orientation at the expense of the others.

Given that the Spiral concept is dominant in Sweden, let us look more closely at the pertinent Spiral row. Spirals view Experts as overly specialized, Linears as sacrificing their personal development for the sake of their career, and Transitories as wasting their experience by jumping around too much. These Spiral devaluations of other career orientations contribute to more than half of the total Swedish lack of career self-awareness.

Other countries are likely to have different cultural biases against certain careers, such as the US Linear view of Experts as being management problems that resist change and don’t want to become managers. Linears tend to view Spirals as having faulty compasses striving sideways instead of upwards and Transitories as having hopeless CVs.

Hence, we can also talk about collective career spectacles that are culturally biased in different ways, but mainly in terms of favoring one career concept and devaluating the other three. This study has found support for Swedes primarily adopting the Spiral career as ideal while devaluating the Expert, Transitory, and Linear careers unnecessarily at the great expense of fooling so many of ourselves to not aim for the type of careers that actually would have been more engaging. The table below summarizes our findings of the top Swedish engagement killers as strong reasons for why we are presently realizing so little of our great engagement potentials.

Conclusion 1: How to Improve Your Own Career Self-Awareness

As individuals, the best news from this study is that we can easily improve our career self-awareness and thereby reduce exposure to the Swedish engagement killers we have identified. We can better realize what engages us most in our working lives. This can be simply done by investing just 15 minutes by answering the questionnaire and a couple of


hours learning about the Decision Dynamics Career Model™. You will then be equipped with your own CareerView™ profile and the ability to interpret it.

For more than half of us Swedes, it will show the Spiral career concept to be the most ideal, but the greatest value is what you learn about the underlying career motives indicated by the red bars. They represent your heart calling to your head about what could be more engaging career development and help you to stop devaluing other career orientations or avoid possible misdirections.

People who retake their career questionnaire later show clear patterns of broadening their views of what can be engaging careers through both learning about the whole range of four different career orientations and in particular discovering their own motivation potential and possible misdirections. Merely realizing that one has pursued a career on other people’s terms by adopting what they think ought to be ideal, makes a world of difference to your thinking about your working life and development. Listen to the career motives of your heart and you are likely to find much more of your engagement.

Having learned the most engaging career development for yourself, you are also able to take greater responsibility for your own engagement. You can not rely on your manager to engage you every hour of every day, week in and week out. How can your manager know what really engages you most if you do not know it yourself? Instead, with this better knowledge about what really engages you, it becomes possible for you to help your manager by both sharing it with her/him and acting yourself upon it.

The Swedish Armed Forces is a large organization that has certified more than 100 career advisors during the 10 years they have used Decision Dynamics Career Model™ for life and career planning purposes. The Swedish Armed Forces has more of a mix between the traditionally Linear military view with hierarchical ranks and the Swedish Spiral culture than many other Swedish organizations. The Swedish Armed Forces have experienced great value in discovering more of their motivation potentials and thereby improved their career self-awareness through the use of the Career profiles. This has contributed to life and career planning becoming a central and highly appreciated HR building block for this organization.

Conclusion 2: How Managers Can Become More Engaging Leaders

What is stopping you as a manager from becoming a more engaging leader? A first step based on this study is to identify what really engages you the most in the same way as we recommend all individuals to do above. In previous studies, we have found that managers tend to have somewhat higher career self-awareness than non-managers, but there still tends to be more than 50% of managers having a view of their ideal careers that differs from what engages them most.

Becoming more engaged yourself will also help you to radiate engagement to others in your organization. In contrast, few things disengage people more than a disengaged manager.

Furthermore, you can support your direct reports to learn more about what really engages them in the same way. This will enable them to take greater responsibility for their own engagement, which will relieve you of some of the responsibility of engaging all


of your co-workers all of the time. Many employee surveys of engagement specifically pinpoint problems with specific managers. How can the managers be solely responsible for engaging others who don’t even know themselves what engages them?

In addition, your co-workers can share with you their greater self-awareness about what engages them. By learning the different things that engage you team members the most, you will be able to lead them in much more engaging ways. The table below shows how we can view each other in more appreciative and inspiring ways instead of the devaluation of each other because the talent blind spots of our dirty career spectacles described in the previous table.

Nordea, the largest bank in the Nordic countries, has used the Career Model to improve the career self-awareness of its managers and employees for more than a decade. It has been used with very good results in leadership development, such as greater personal responsibility for own development, better communication including developmental dialogues, identification of more motivated candidates for key positions, less personnel turnover, more attractive employer ratings, and an “all time high” improvement of Nordea’s internal motivation index. This latter was from a specific coaching and energizing initiative aimed at mainly managers in a specific unit.15

Conclusion 3: How Groups Can Develop More Engaging Teamwork

As well as improving engagement as an individual or manager, the same approach can used for whole teams. All members of a team can benefit from an understanding of what engages or disengages their fellow team members. Since the Career Model™ can be presented and learned in a workshop setting, it is time- and cost-effective as well as

15 Nordea’s use of the Career Model™ is further described by Horgby (2005a; 2005b) in two Swedish articles in the same issue of PersonalAktuellt that can be requested from Decision Dynamics AB.


delivering a highly engaging teamworkshops. Team members answer the CareerView™ questionnaire prior to a half day workshop where the model is presented. They receive their individual career reports, see their joint team career profile, and discuss its strengths and weaknesses. From this the team can identify what improvement they can make.

This will also help all team members learn how to view one another in more understanding, appreciative, and trusting ways. Just like leaders can become more engaging by following the recommendations in the “Engaging leaders …” table above, all team members can help reduce common misunderstandings and the devaluing and distrusting behaviors of many teams.

Conclusion 4: Organizations can offer effective career-e-coaching

Unionen, Sweden’s largest white collar union, has during almost 15 years offered its members the possibility to develop their career self-awareness through using a career e-coach as a member service on its website. Unionen has also supplemented this career coach online with certified career coaches that run workshops and have individual career development dialogues.

Another of Sweden’s largest banks, Swedbank recently demonstrated that it is possible to reach and improve career self-awareness of about a thousand employees in just a couple of weeks through self-service career development online. Given the time- and cost-pressure many organizations are under today, this type of scalable self-service career development can be expected to increase. It has been shown to be a practical way for organizations to effectively engage more employees without adding workload for already pressured managers and HR.

We anticipate that organizations will build career portals or ”talent gateways” as ways to engage both employees and managers in taking greater own responsibility for their development, internal mobility, leadership, and performance. They can also attract and recruit suitable new talents that can also prepare themselves for onboarding. For example, Uppsala and many of its neighboring municipalities have begun to cooperate to provide their employees and managers more engaging career development and leadership this way.

Sony has developed a program for “Emerging Talents” in collaboration with Decision Dynamics to create engagement and reflection. This is a process that is mainly based on a set of e-learning modules as well as physical meetings with HR and their own manager. The purpose is to give self-nominated people the tools, reflection support, and enablement to take greater responsibility for their own career development within Sony. The Career profile is a central part of this global program for building one’s individual developmental plan in engaging ways. Sony’s program also shows how e-coaching can provide greater self-awareness to more people in time- and cost-effective ways.

In summary, there are several ways in which individuals, managers, teams, and organizations can greatly improve the awareness of what really engages different people and thereby also improve their performance. The table below summarizes how people with different career orientations are best engaged through various developmental and leadership activities that suit their respective career motives (shown in the middle


column). It also shows the different valuable contributions that these various career segments provide to the organization when they are engaged in suitable ways.

Typically, an average manager is able to engage just one of these career segments. A good manager engages two segments and a poor manager none. Truly engaging leadership aims at inspiring all four career segments since most organizations need all four sets of contributions to achieve great performance. This requires, though, awareness of who are most engaged by which career motives and co-workers, leaders, teams, and organizations can achieve this through the sharing of career profiles.

An earlier study of more than 2000 Swedes that we did together with TEMO (one of the leading Swedish survey firms, now part of Synovate) found that more engaging leadership that suited different individuals’ motives reduced work pressures, stress, worry, as well as both short- and long-term sick leaves.16

Decision Dynamics offers the CareerView™ tool as part of our research- and best practice-based engagement methodologies. The key elements of these methodologies are summarized in what we call the Engagement Compass™.

16 The study was made with a representative, random sample of the Swedish population in 2002 and was published by Larsson, Fritz, Svärd, and Goteman (2005) in a report that focused on municipalities’ increasingly difficult mission, where the municipal and regional employees experienced more work pressures, stress, worry, and sick leaves that private sector and governmental employees.


The Engagement Compass™ places each person in the center and identifies our various engagement drivers and killers in relation to our self-awareness, managers, job/roles, teams, and organizational culture. Basically, it helps us find and move in the right direction from our engagement killers towards more of our engagement drivers.

The Engagement Compass™ is a central model in a “how to” booklet called the Engagement Guide™ (Larsson & Kling, 2015). It combines engaging leadership from one side and engaging career development from the other as two essential components that can increase one’s own and others’ engagement. Both these sections use the five steps of the Engagement Compass™ to improve awareness of employees and managers as to what engages themselves and others, as well as how to develop more engaging work tasks, teams, and organizational cultures.

Nordea is one of the organizations that have begun using the Engagement Guide™. One of their leading Talent Management programs, ”Nordea Graduate Program” supplement the participants’ career and culture workshop, profiles, and feedforward with giving both them and their respective managers each a copy of the guide. In this way, the participants and their managers get mutually engaging support to discuss further.

This is one of many examples of training & development, leadership, assessment, selection, team-building, and organizational solutions that can unleash much of the great but presently mostly wasted engagement potential in many organizations.


List of References

BlessingWhite (2008) State of employee engagement 2008. Princeton, NJ: BlessingWhite Research.

BlessingWhite (2011) Employee engagement report 2011. Princeton, NJ: BlessingWhite Research.

Brousseau, K. (1984) “Job-person dynamics and career development”, in Rowland, K. and Ferris, G. (Eds.) Research in Personnel and Human Resources, JAI Press, Greenwich, Vol 2, pp. 125-154.

Brousseau, K and Driver, M. (1994) “Enhancing Informed Choice: A Career-Concepts Approach to Career Advisement”, Selections, Spring, pp. 24-31.

Brousseau, K., Driver, M., Eneroth, K. and Larsson, R. (1996) “Career Pandemonium: Realigning organisations and individuals”, Academy of Management Executive, Vol 10 No 4, pp. 52-66.

Coombs, M. (1989) Measuring Career Concepts: An examination of the concepts, constructs, and validity of the Career Concept Questionnaire, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Decision Dynamics AB (2011) Everyday engagement: Discover the great potential of everyday work engagement. Decision Dynamics Research Nuggets 2011:1. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics

Decision Dynamics AB (2012) Turn the downside of our weekly engagement curve into results. Decision Dynamics Research Nuggets 2012:2. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics

Derr, B. (1986) Managing the new careerists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Driver M. (1979) Career concepts and career management in organizations, in Cooper, C. (Ed.) Behavioral problems in organizations, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, pp. 5-17.

Driver, M. (1980) Career concepts and organizational change, in Derr, B. (Ed.) Work, Family and the Career. New York: Praeger, pp. 31-41.

Driver, M. and Coombs, M. (1983) Fit between career concepts, corporate culture and engineering productivity and morale, IEEE Conference on Careers.

Gallup (2013) State of the global workplace: Employee engagement insights for business leaders worldwide. www.gallup.com

Hay Group (2010) Employee engagement and enablement critical. Philadelphia: Hay Group.

Horgby, A-C. (2005a) Många karriärvägar motiverar medarbetarna (“Many career paths motivate the employees”). PersonalAktuellt, September, p. 13.

Horgby, A-C. (2005b) Katarina har nått sitt första karriärmål (“Katarina has reached her first career goal”). PersonalAktuellt, September, p. 14.

Kenexa Research Institute (2008) Engaging the employee: A Kenexa Research Institute Work Trends Report.


Kowske, B. (2012) Employee engagement: Market review, buyer’s guide, and provider profiles. Oakland, CA: Bersin & Associates Industry Study.

Larsson, R, Brousseau, K, Driver, M, Holmqvist, M and Tarnovskaya, V (2003) International growth through cooperation: Brand-driven strategies, leadership, and career development in Sweden, Academy of Management Executive, Vol 17 No 1, pp. 7-24.

Larsson, R, Brousseau, K, Kling, K & Sweet, P (2007) Building motivational capital through Career concept and culture fit: The strategic value of developing motivation and retention, Career Development International, Vol 12, No 4, pp. 361-381.

Larsson, R, Driver, M, Holmqvist, M and Sweet, P (2001) Career disintegration and reintegration in mergers and acquisitions: Managing competence and motivational intangibles, European Management Journal, Vol 19, No 6, pp. 609-618.

Larsson, R & Duval Thomsen, Y (2013) Decision styles, leadership, and engagement: Managing our different talents towards greater performance. Decision Dynamics Research Report 2013:2 on CfL’s Leadership Festival.

Larsson, R, Fritz, A, Svärd, C & Goteman, I (2005) Allt mer omöjliga kommunala uppdrag? Hur offentliga organisationer kan bryta onda kostnads-, förändrings- och ohälsocirklar. KEFU Skriftserie 2005:2, Institutet för ekonomisk forskning, Lunds universitet (Translation: Increasinly impossible missions of municipalities? How public sector organizations can break viscious cost, change, and illness circles).

Larsson, R & Kling, K (2013) How training & development can engage more people to learn and perform better while staying longer. Decision Dynamics Research Report 2013:1.

Larsson, R & Kling, K (2015) The Engagement Guide™: Engaging ways to leadership and career development. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics.

Larsson, R & Korch (2012) Mer engagemang kan öka kvalitet, effektivitet, samverkan och snabbhet med 65-90%! Resultat från deltagarundersökningen med Engagemangskompassen på KvalitetsMagasinet Live (Translation: More engagement can increase quality, efficiency, cooperation, and speed with 65-90%! Results from the participant survey with The Engagement Compass KvalitetsMagasinet Live conference). Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics.

Larsson, R, Månsson, A & Sahlberg, S (2011) Breakthrough in Lundian business student career development: Pilot project in discovering one’s most engaging employers, jobs, development, and rewards. Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University.

Macey W & Schneider B (2008) The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol 1, pp 3-30.

Schein, E. (1978) Career dynamics: Matching individual and organizational needs, Addison-Wesley, Reading.


Von Glinow, M., Driver, M., Brousseau, K. and Prince, B (1983) The design of a career oriented human resource system, Academy of Management Review, Vol 8 No 1, pp. 23-32.

Wellins, R, Bernthal, P & Phelps, M (2005) Employee engagement: The key to realizing competitive advantage. DDI Development Dimensions International Inc.

About the Co-authors

Rikard Larsson is Professor in Business Administration at School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden and co-founding partner of the research-based consulting firm Decision Dynamics AB. He has two doctorates from University of Southern California and Lund University and is one of the internationally leading researchers in the areas of career development, decision-making, human resource management, leadership, and strategic change with publications in such journals as Academy of Management Executive, Harvard Business Review, and Human Relations. His consulting clients include ABB, H&M, IKEA, Nordea, Sony, Swedish Armed Forces, Tetra Pak, and Volvo.

Katarina Kling is the CEO and co-founding partner of Decision Dynamics AB, a research-based provider of tools and solutions for assessing, selecting, and developing people in more engaging ways, including two of the internationally leading career and decision style tools. She has a doctorate in business administration from Lund University and has published in such journals as Academy of Management Executive, British Journal of Management, and International Studies of Management & Organization. Her consulting clients include Albéa, Airbus, Barilla, Korn/Ferry International, Nordea, SAP, Unionen, and Zurich Financial Services.

Anders Häggberg is responsible for the career and life planning area in the Swedish Armed Forces. His experience includes company and battalion commander, competence development manager, HR strategist and generalist, and HR specialist in the areas of career and life planning and local outplacement. He has seven years of various studies at Military Academies and is a certified practitioner in Decision Dynamics Career Model™ and other HR tools.

Göran Månsson is a senior consultant in leadership and career development. He has worked in these areas for almost 20 years in Scandinavia’s leading bank Nordea before he recently became an independent consultant. During his extensive experience in developing leaders and their co-workers in mainly the banking industry, he has been certified in and used Decision Dynamics Career Model™ for more than 15 years to improve managers’ and co-workers’ awareness of their own and other’ career motives and how this knowledge can be used to develop more engaging leadership, teamwork, organizational culture, and so forth.

what engages swedes the most? don't let our heads fool your heart!

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