Owning and Engaging

Being committed to continuous improvement, human potential and full engagement to optimise performance.

The lack of genuine engagement in teams and organisations literally costs billions of pounds sterling (Gallop 2018) in lost productivity and turnover. A major contributor is people who transition to management roles without opportunities to develop basic leadership skills. Research shows that less than 30% of people are engaged at work. 20% are disengaged and the rest indifferent.

What are poor levels of engagement costing your organisation?

Leaders often fail to see where their strongly held beliefs prevent them from having more enlightened views of how they could lead more effectively. The impact of this blindness is often seen in poor results and an inability to deliver strategic objectives. It can affect career prospects, waste valuable time/resources and disrupt a healthy work-life balance with high levels of stress and hassle.

Perhaps you would value support to explore the value of solving these problems? Maybe I can help you increase your productivity and learn how to thrive in a VUCA World.

As a Life Leadership Coach in a corporate setting, I focus on the individual skill gaps that are resulting in less training time and lost revenue. The ever-changing and increasing demand makes leadership coaching invaluable, as it helps to maintain high performance and emotional stability for employees under the pressure of constant change.

I offer coaching packages to support strategic change initiatives in teams by improving employee engagement, manager performance and leadership skills. The trigger for my contribution could be disappointing results from an employee engagement survey. This might suggest a need to setup :

• A Coaching Programme for a selection of managers who need to improve employee engagement and performance.
• An Evaluation Process that measures the outcomes from coaching and mentoring interventions that can be assessed and their impact measured.

Outcome Measures

• Higher productivity
• Better teamwork
• Increased comfort and confidence leading
• Improved impact and leadership presence
• Increase morale and decrease turnover
• Development of internal talent to assume greater responsibility and make continuous improvements
• Ability to spend time on fewer hassles and fires, and focus on more strategic issues

I have extensive experience of working with newer professional managers who could excel in a front-line role and are struggling. Maybe they have received little training for a management position. If so, they can struggle to get full commitment from their staff or the confidence to hold them accountable, especially if they were peers or friends in the past.

Online surveys have limitations and are in no way a substitute for an ongoing dialogue between employee and employer –  customer and company. As well as face-to-face performance assessments, it can be helpful to engage whole departments in dialogue to get at deeper relationship around issues of concern and sources of mistrust.  This is a way of harnessing collective wisdom to identify and explore future development, as well as any barriers to achieving the “Output Measures”. Continuous feedback provides meaningful and actionable insights which can increase an individual’s control and influence in how they work and the actions they priorise. In other words, are they empowered? 

Operating systems can place practical and cultural constraints on cooperative working. To secure engagement it is important to create an atmosphere of openness and trust in the assessment and consultation process. I have experience of using techniques such as Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe or Open Space for this purpose. When staff see the reality and relationships in their context, they become more open to the need for engagement, to secure the best of others, share what they care about and be more honest with each other. Without quality conversations, they will reveal less, assume the worst, communicate with suspicion and commit with caution.

Making an Assessment

When assessing attitudes, skills and know-how, it is important to judge against best practice and the dominant culture. For example, to:

• Understand and be able to implement best practices in engaging employees.
• Be able to connect an engagement strategy with actions by individual employees.
• Become more focused on understanding specific employee needs and how to respond to them for optimal performance.
• Know when to direct vs. when to coach direct reports.
• Become aware of whether or not they have earned the right to lead, and how to take steps to be the leader they need to be.
• Improve the ability to set the proper tone for high standards and expectations.
• Properly acknowledge and praise employees appropriately.
• Assess employees for long-term development.

The stance taken here is that engaging employees must happen one employee at a time, to fully explore their commitments, aspirations, and personal style. This makes it easier to understand how to best engage and motivate each employee.  There are a variety of different ways to engage employees, but most managers tend to emphasize a few of them.

By gathering feedback on an ongoing basis, there is more opportunity to intervene and prioritise interventions to truly engage staff.

Senior managers need to know how to set clear expectations and get quality feedback so that every employee knows how he or she is doing and how to improve as a person and a   professional. This can be linked to an existing or improved performance management process. Different employees will require different approaches at different times. Bear in mind that uncertainty can trigger fear and insecurity. Actions will be needed to foster trust through conversation and example that promote inclusion and interaction to harvest people’s innate wisdom and insights.

When employees are given the opportunity to practice how to engage in meaningful conversations they begin to understand and empathise with the reality that others are experiencing. They learn from each other’s mistakes and see gaps and opportunities for collaboration and improvement that were avoided previously. 

The success of these assessments relies on managers being able to have meaningful conversations with their direct reports both individually and in teams. Assessing the impact of beliefs and actions on performance must be married up with the declared intention to commit to specific goals.

Seeing commitments as promises requires managers to create relationships of trust, agree desired outcomes, coordinate tasks andYou need the alignment of intentions with performance objectives. For example, using questions that explore how existing patterns of behaviour could enhance personal and professional life and leadership capability.

Notes for Senior Managers

To gain the trust of employees, managers must be open and willing to get connected at a personal level. Obviously, people need to know where they stand in a particular context as this obviates fear and uncertainty. Honesty is vital at all times. You need to be aware of your own fear, power, concerns and the need to be right, so you can be more humble and transparent in your assessments to build strong relationships and a desire to seek truth by showing empathy. It raises questions such as:

• Why are issues around engagement a source of concern for you?
• What would it look like if you were more satisfied with how your employees are engaged?
• What specific situations work well at the moment?
• What are specific situations continuously frustrate you?
• Which specific employees or teams do you need to focus on?
• How do specific employees perform where engagement is in place, and why?
• What specific event alerted you to become concerned about this issue?
• What have you tried to improve employee engagement that is working, and that you can build on?
• What are your ideas for improving engagement beyond what you have already tried?
• What talents do you have that you can bring to bear on better engaging and mobilizing employees?
• What other ideas or experiences do you want to share on how to engage employees more effectively?

Assessing Leader Competence.

NOTE: Senior Team Leaders will need to pre-define the criteria for assessment that fits their context.