I just read an excellent article by Mark C Crowley entitled ‘Employee engagement isn’t getting any better and Gallup shares the surprising reasons why’.

In this article Mark discusses why employee engagement isn’t getting any better. According to Gallup, growth in engagement has remained flat for most of 2015. Mark goes on to talk about his discussion with Dr Jim Harter, who is Gallup’s engagement expert. According to Dr Harter, organisations may measure different things whilst attempting to quantify engagement, ‘those outcomes range from basics such as absenteeism, employee retention rates, service levels and productivity: and ultimately it all adds up to about a 22 percent difference in profitability when you compare top quartile business units to the bottom quartile’.

Intriguingly the top organisations Gallup work with have only 65% of their workers fully engaged. Imagine what must be being wasted in terms of motivation, innovation and dedication in so many businesses. This point hasn’t been entirely missed however as Dr Harter goes on to say ‘…it’s serious enough that it’s become a check-the-box HR activity, but not serious enough to have a meaningful impact and raise their score…we are now at just 32% engagement…there’s simply no question that managers are one of the top root causes of low and flat-lined engagement’.

That statistic is quite shocking, as is the fact that this appears to have remained for many a check-the-box exercise.

Dr Harter goes on to suggest that high performing managers/leaders have five talents:

1. They are motivators – challenge self and others
2. They are assertive – push past obstacles, make tough decisions
3. They accept accountability – they help their team deliver
4. They are relationship builders – they personalise how they manage
5. They are decision makers – they solve complex issues and plan ahead

He suggests that these are not too common and that not everyone can ‘learn’ them. This is why I have made the point time and time again, that if people are promoted purely because of their skill, we can, and almost certainly will, run into trouble. And so not only does development have a role to play here, but so does the person or people doing the hiring and promoting.

This is also why we need leaders in place who have a good dose of common sense who can read people pretty well, and who promote and hire from a position of insight and emotional robustness, and not from a position of fear or protectionism, where appointments may be made in both a feckless and reckless fashion. If we have leaders who promote individuals because they are blind to the fact that their ‘favourite’ is simply a bise le derrière aficionado, or has all the emotional intelligence of a paperclip, or is a devious little back stabbing weasel who has more faces than a dodecahedron; then the endless cycle of mediocrity and misery will continue. And heaven forfend that the leader actually promotes someone because of those traits!

And yet we see this time and time again. Something is amiss.

Dr Harter suggests, ‘…for companies who are truly committed to employee engagement, they must raise the bar further…there’s another traditionally unappreciated quality that’s been consistently proven to turn managers into talent magnets: they care deeply about their people…they share, teach, coach, support, and appreciate their employees…regardless of what’s on their plate’.

Now those are the qualities that we should all be galloping towards rewarding and emulating.

Let’s look at my interpretation of what each of these might mean, through the lens of Braver Leadership, and just for fun, I’ve arranged them into a nice little acronym for the hard of understanding. TASCS.

Teach: Can you remember the time when you attended a really bad lecture? And did you by any chance compare that experience to the very different experience of being in the class of your favourite teacher. What was the difference? Well, the clue is in the words. Your favourite teacher taught you, that implies that you learned. Lecturing is just that. No learning required. One person can do that in an empty room. Teaching requires an element of vulnerability. If I go down that road, am I good enough to allow you to learn? Most people can learn most things, given time. The only thing that generally stops them learning is not receiving the proper teaching. The braver leader is able to teach, and understands that it may expose their own failings in knowledge (if you want to master it, teach it) and also that they cannot teach by lecturing. Persistent lecturing belongs in the command and control toolbox of the weak leader. The braver leader will be at your side, helping you understand, guiding, willing you to succeed.

Appreciate (their employees): Genuinely appreciating people is the key here. How often have you met someone who displayed false sincerity, kindness, interest etc. etc. Most of us can spot that a mile away. It’s as insulting as it is depressing. The braver leader understands that despite the grade, the salary, the role…that this is a person who has dreams, hopes, aims, aspirations, ambitions and feelings. Just like us, just like everyone else. They are using up some of their time on the planet to do the task at hand. They are not a number.

Share: Now this requires the leader to be very comfortable with themselves. To be comfortable in their own skin. To be able to be challenged. To accept that someone may come up with a better idea. Leaders who do not share are often fearful that their perceived power base will be eroded, that they may be questioned, that they might even be wrong.

And yet if the leader keeps people at ‘arms length’ we know that this can cause a sense of elitism, and that employees can become demotivated when they do not have a sense of ‘being in on things’.

Coach: Receiving coaching from a leader is one of the most positively transformative things that a leader can do for a team member. However, one of the mistakes that a leader can make is to use a coaching session as a vehicle for telling and grandstanding and passing judgement and opinion. Coaching is performer centric not egocentric.

Support: In many ways the supporting leader is already supporting if they do all of the four things mentioned above. Supportive is a mindset. And having a supportive mindset is often connected to having the quality of humility. (Humility is often misunderstood and hugely underrated. I have attached a link to a video below, in which I discuss humility and its importance in leadership).

The findings of Gallup will not come as too much of a surprise for those of us who have been paying attention. Have you ever looked around an organisation or team and wondered whether perhaps the apparent madness of sycophancy and egomaniacal behaviours was actually normal, and that perhaps it was you who was mad after all? Hopefully you came to the (in my opinion very rational conclusion) that you were indeed sane and that something was indeed sadly awry. And yet you are far from alone. Talk to most people in most organisations and they all tend to want similar things. Words like ‘purpose’, ‘camaraderie’, ‘fun’, ‘belonging’, ‘a sense of achievement’, ‘feeling valued’ are commonly used. This madness I would suggest stems from only a few, but they can infect many, and without a different type of leadership the malaise will continue, with more and more people becoming desensitised to what are actually pretty abhorrent behaviours. Engagement can only be nurtured and grown. It cannot be attached to an organisation or an individual using Velcro. We must educate, promote, assist, develop and nurture a different type of leader who can change the resonance of a business. That type of leadership approach can take honesty and endeavour, and of course courage, but that courage is likely to be greatly rewarded.

As I have said for quite some time now, ‘profit by all means, but not by any means’. Perhaps if we concentrated more on getting the people bit right, everything else would fall into place.

If you would like to contact me directly to discuss any of your development needs, please get in touch via this website, email, or by phone.
Seasons greetings
Mike

Link to the article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-engagement-isnt-getting-better-gallup-shares-mark-c-crowley

Video: https://vimeo.com/148804852
Twitter: @braverleaders