People Potential – 3 Tips on Engagment

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more you are a leader.’ John Quincy Adams

Every individual has a maximum potential for any given task or skill. For most of us, for most of the time it remains just that – potential. Rather like a lump of coal we have a tremendous potential energy but in the absence of the right conditions we can remain just as inert as that lump of coal.

Leadership is about unlocking that potential in the people we lead – done right it means we get the most out of people and that team members get the most out of themselves. But this potential energy is entirely discretionary. You can’t make anyone give more than they want. The art in leadership is to find what it is that inspires people to go the extra mile.

Depressingly A 2014 Global Work Place study by Towers Watson found only 35% of workers in a survey group of 32,000 full time employees described themselves as highly engaged.   Grim reading but look at the potential opportunity in this – imagine the possible gains in performance, retention and competitiveness that can be made by improving engagement. How can we do this?

  • Give people a voice and tell them what is going on. Commitment and buy in require a sense of belonging and purpose. This often stems in the first instance from being valued for your opinion and in being kept informed about what is going on. Leaders who keep the passage of information fast and flat, and who actively seek out and listen to their people make better decisions, have a clearer view of what is actually going on and have the strong support of their teams. Those who are kept in the dark and left without a voice are detached and frequently resentful. The very opposite of engaged.
  • Tell people what to do, why they are doing it but not how. Mission command in military speak. You can’t control everything, so don’t even try. Counter-intuitively the solution to complex decision-making is not to push information to decision makers at the tip of a pyramid but to push authority down to people who have the ground truth but too rarely the authority or encouragement to act as they judge best. The antidote to the day-to-day friction of executing decisions is the initiative and drive of employees who are empowered to take decisions. If they know what it is we’re all trying to achieve let them figure out the best way forward.
  • Encourage, support & sustain. Do your employees know clearly what a good job looks like – what is your defined standard of performance? Are requirements clear and are there clear short-term results that help define this? If we can measure our progress with effective feedback (the mechanism that enables any performance development system) we can rectify mistakes, make improvements and give praise and reward for a job that is well done. The judicious use of public praise is a powerful thing. Don’t debase the currency through overuse, but hard earned it’s golden.

 

Metris Leadership helps businesses build high performance teams, optimized for the challenges of the 21st Century because great teams provide standout competitive advantage.

To find out how we could help you contact us at info@metrisleadership.com


Related Posts

Freedom Inside Constraints

The Legendary Basketball coach John Wooden[1], would begin each new season by sitting down his new players and demonstrating to them how they were to tie the laces on their shoes.  Surely unnecessary? – These athletes had been playing the game for years. Wooden’s point, was that for many things…

Read more
Women obeserving passers by
What Do You Notice?

  ‘Clarity begins with realizing what we do not notice—and don’t notice that we don’t notice’.   Sir Alex Ferguson the legendary former coach of football club Manchester United was quite clear in his leadership philosophy and approach to coaching that the ability to notice what was going on, to…

Read more
Man laying bricks
Good or Bad? Your Choice

‘Attitude is a small thing that makes a big difference.’ Winston Churchill   There is an old story about a little girl walking past a building site. As she walks by, she asks in turn 3-workmen what they are doing? The first replies that he is laying bricks. The second…

Read more
What Do We Remember?

‘…a war begun for no purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was…

Read more