Leaders Pave the Way for Engagement
A Business Week article by Alaina Love, co-author of The Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results (McGraw-Hill, 2009), caught my eye last month. The article, “You Can Lead. But Can You Inspire?,” offers a quiz on how inspirational you are as a leader. The quiz is a great guide for each of us personally, but also to share with the managers in our companies.
Inspiring leaders and managers are key ingredients of successful employee engagement. They pave the way; without those good leaders, your employees will not be engaged in their work, putting the success of your company at risk.
Among the characteristics Ms. Love suggests are:
- Authentic and reliable. Employees need to know that they can look to their leaders for truthful, consistent decisions and actions. Employees appreciate an environment where the unexpected is not a daily event.
- Connected to the business and culture. Employees will have concerns at work–concerns about the economy, their jobs and more. Leaders may be removed from those concerns, but they need to be sufficiently connected to the business and culture that they can understand and address those concerns.
- Optimistic. Employees need leaders who recognize the negatives but focus on positives and strive for success because obtaining success is challenging, exciting and rewarding.
- Driven by purpose and passion. Employee engagement is all about creating a culture and business purpose that employees can be passionate about. And the greater the engagement, the more successful the company.
- Inclusive. Encouraging employees to share ideas and opinions and listening to those thoughts builds a strong team.
- Respectful. Respect should be one of every company’s core values. It’s top on the list of what employees want at work, and in organizations where respect and kindness is lacking, you will find unhappy and disengaged employees.
- Support of management development. Building “bench strength” for the future by supporting management and employee development encourages employees to give back to the company that supports them and their careers.
The more a company’s leader demonstrates these characteristics, the more engaged the company’s workforce will be.
As employee engagement consultants, we can use this guide to encourage and support the “right” behaviors from our management teams.
