How Leaders can make a real impact at work…

Harvard Business study has recently found that European employee engagement is startlingly low, with just 15% of workers indicating they are engaged with their work. The news is slightly better in the United States, where more than 30% of workers report feeling engaged.

With nearly 70% of employees not engaged with their work, what does it really take to make an impact on engagement in organizations? How we, as Leaders, can drive engagement and make a real impact at work?

1. Take an Interest in People

From my perspective, Leadership is a definitively key element of culture. You can have the most noble purpose but without leadership you don't have anything.

Lack of leadership is a leading cause of today's high disengagement numbers. Leaders who don't think about how they are influencing others often undertake patterns of behaviour that drive people away from purpose. And that creates disengagement.

What kind of leadership does drive engagement? Increasingly, it's leadership that takes an interest in the personal development of employees. Gallup organization has recently found in their research that 59% of Millennials, 44% of GenXers and 41% of Baby Boomers are seeking opportunities to grow and develop at work.

Leaders that understand this can influence their employees and inspire them to bring their best selves to achieving the organization's purpose, upholding its values and living its habits.

Leadership is a key pillar within your organization- it's how you connect people to the organization and inspire the behaviours you want to see."

2. Make Connections to Purpose

People may not always realize it, but their future is happening now. The future you envision is what empowers you in the present.

From my perspective, employees who see a future for themselves with an organization where they can make a difference and express their talents are more empowered in their day to day activities.

At the end; when your team are connected to a purpose, they are more satisfied and productive.

That sense of connection comes from aligning organizational and individual purpose. You want people to experience their contribution and fulfilment inside the enterprise. Everyone should be working toward the same things, from the CEO to the employees.

Connection also comes from understanding what motivates people. Transformation happens when we empower people to see how they fit into the whole and the difference they make. People's behaviour shifts when they see themselves as being on a journey toward something greater.

3. Give Space to Fail

One of the most crippling challenges in any organization is fear of failure. It can lead to resistance to change and limits an organization's ability to generate and act on ideas, innovate and adapt. This fear can corrupt an entire culture, leading to higher levels of disengagement.

My advice is: make sure that from the very beginning, people understand that their input and ideas are valuable, that they are worth more to the organization than their most recent success. Being valued is what makes people feel more energized and inspired."

As well, creating space to fail allows organizations and individuals to learn from their failures, which can ultimately be empowering. Please remember, failure is a necessary part of growth. As an organization you need to provide space for that, and you need to support people when they are most vulnerable.

Provide the space to be humble and present. It needs to be okay to be vulnerable, to be imperfect. Let’s remember that Perfection does not exist!

4. Don't Forget to Have Fun and Celebrate Key Achievements

In many organizations, people are encouraged to "work hard, play later," as if the two were mutually exclusive. But a recent study by the University of Warwick indicates this is the wrong approach. According to the study, workers who were happy and had fun at work were actually 12% more productive than those who were not.

As a leader, I have always considered Fun and Celebrating Key Milestone as so important due to its critical role in generating engagement. Having fun and Celebration are at the core of a company's success.

If you look at employee engagement, you are asking people to consistently be engaged and give those extra ounces of energy that they might have otherwise given elsewhere in their lives. This takes energy. Having fun and celebrating key achievements - enjoying the work and the people they do it with - helps to create energy and influences people to give more of themselves.

One reason fun and celebrating achievements are so important is the idea of employee choice. Employees are not choosing to stay with employers as long as they did in the past.

A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in US, indicated that median tenure was down in 2016 to 4.2 years, compared to 4.6 years in 2014. Among younger workers the decline was even more stark: tenure among workers between the ages of 25 and 34 sank to 2.8 years.

In today's culture, companies are not just selecting employees. The tribe members are also choosing the company. Fun like respect to employee effort plays a role in that choice.

If you really want to make an impact and transform your organization, begin by taking an interest in what truly influences and motivates your people. Build stronger connections by aligning individual and organizational purpose. Most importantly, remember that people and organizations are more than the sum of past successes and failures, and that fun and celebration are a critical part of creating a more engaged organization.

***** Before you go,

Video of the week: “There's an easy way to test for leadership. Just send someone an email” by Simon Sinek.

In my 17 years’ career experience, I once worked for a boss who led through intimidation. Whenever there was an issue to resolve he would say “Send (name) an email about it and “CC” me”. Don’t you hate it when weak leaders want to be in everyone’s business?

We thought that, just because the boss got copied on the email, it would make the email recipient respond quicker and act on the request right away. But all it did was to tick-off the recipient who would always ask “Why did you copy the boss on that email?”

 This is not leadership; it’s a lack of leadership – and micromanaging too.

To make matters worse, the boss would later complain to many about how much time it took him to read/answer his emails. WHAT, are you kidding me? YOU’RE getting too many emails because YOU asked for them…

Another part of the email fiasco is when another employee would send you an email asking for something – that ALWAYS seemed to be an emergency (maybe an emergency for HIM but not for the email recipient). So, to get what he thought was a quicker response, he would “CC” the boss, and THIS time the “CC” was not requested by the boss.

Whenever I got one of these emails, I would call the sender (by the way, why don’t we use the telephone anymore while at work?) and ask him “What’s so important that you just had to “CC” the boss?”

Usually, the answer was something like…

“This was a really important problem that I needed to fix, and I knew YOU were the only one that would be able to fix it”.

Just as I thought, HIS problem became MY problem. Of course, I was able to fix the issue in no time, but later I put this guy on my “No Christmas Gift for You” list…

Then about a week later, I get another email from the boss asking if I took care of “Jack’s” problem. I told him yes, I did and then the boss asks me, “Why is he “CC’ing” me on this?” Ugh…I give up!

 As Simon Sinek speaks about in this 1-minute video, leaders trust their employees to do their job as intended and don’t have to check in on them every chance they get…

…and they don’t request to be “CC’d” on every email.

They request the exact opposite; to be taken OFF most emails if possible.

I have always trusted my team to do the job as intended and to the best of their ability. I didn’t assume they would get it wrong or put undue pressure on them to get it right. I knew I had the right team and let them do their job.

Sure, I had to check in on them from time to time and maybe correct or refocus their efforts, but happy customers and high productivity usually is an adequate gauge on how well they are doing their job. There was no need for me to spy on them or for someone in another department to send off emails hoping for a better outcome from the team.

Weak leaders want to be in everyone’s business. I don’t need a “CC” and hope you don’t either!

Do you have weak leadership? Can you spot the tell-tale signs of a weak leader? Is your boss a “CC’er”? Tell me about it in the comments below, thanks.

Book of the week: Recently, I read a book on creating organizations that I’m not sure I’ve been so annoyed, called Reinventing organizations written by Frederic Laloux.

Most of books that I could read on organizations are written for people hoping to find the secret key to gaining market share, or increasing profits or even advice on how to better play the game of success within the current management paradigm.

“Reinventing organizations” is written for leaders, coaches and advisors, describing what he considers a newly emergent social organizational model, which in his color-coded developmental model, he refers to as a “Teal”.

He examines 12 organizations that have a remarkable record of success ranging from schools to manufacturing companies, passing by startups, that all share a fundamental set of internal structures. Namely, they are decentralized and adaptive, exhibing a “sense and respond” approach to problems rather than “predict and control” mode common to many modern bureaucracies or hierarchies. They operate on trust rather than fear and encourage people within organizations to be present and authentic.

  If you are after information about how the Teal model works and advice about how to implement it, I recommend only Appendices 3 and 4, as well as Sections 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3. Those are the only sections that I would recommend. The rest of the book, in my estimation, is neither necessary nor enlightening.

I agree with Laloux that we need to take a hard look at the idea of professionalism and revise it for the 21st century. People should feel relaxed enough to be themselves at work; and I fully support his proposed methods for conflict resolution and inclusion.

I, like everyone else, crave work that is meaningful, but I also don’t want my job to be my sole, or even primary, source of meaning. That may seem like a merely semantic distinction, but to me it’s a critical one.

A reading that helps to think about the importance of autonomy and self-management within complex organizations.

What’s on your reading list? I’m feverishly adding titles to my own — probably more than I’ll ever read — Email me yours and I’ll share a selection in an upcoming newsletter.

 Quote of the week: “There are two ways to live your life – one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle” – Albert Einstein

I have therefore chosen the second option. What about you?

***** If you have any feedback or ideas that you would like to see included in my next newsletter; please reach out to me directly at: caugant.alan@gmail.com or please, comment below.