Chapter 7
In This Chapter
Differentiating between management and leadership
Identifying leadership‐based engagement drivers
Knowing why top leaders must buy in
Identifying behaviors and traits of engaged leaders
Training engaged leaders
Recognizing the importance of coaching
Identifying leadership best practices
Recent research by Dale Carnegie shows that employees’ engagement levels rise when they believe in their senior leadership. Indeed, they feel most engaged when the company's leadership clearly communicates strategy and plans, connects with employees, and helps everyone feel part of where the organization is going. Leadership, then, is a key engagement driver! To find out how leadership begets engagement, read on.
Often, people confuse the term leader with the term manager. But there's a big difference between them. A manager manages process, programs, and data. Leaders, on the other hand, guide people, build fellowship, and steer organizations to success (read: make money and grow). Leaders set the direction; managers follow the plan to get there. Yes, managers are indispensible when it comes to creating and monitoring policy. But it's leaders who define and uphold an organization's principles. And it's leaders — more specifically, engaged leaders — who really drive engagement in an organization.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not denigrating the essential role that management plays in the stability of a company. In fact, it's critical for leaders to be effective managers as well as effective leaders. But because employee engagement entails a pervasive change in corporate culture, it unfortunately cannot be simply assigned to just any manager or management team.
Before you can get a handle on how leadership drives engagement, it's important to understand the difference between a leader and a manager. For help, see Table 7‐1.
Table 7-1 Management versus Leadership
Management |
Leadership |
Management is about control. |
Leadership is about trust and empowerment. |
Management is about authority and hierarchy. |
Leadership is about alignment and expertise. |
Management involves discrete tasks. |
Leadership's focus is on vision. |
Management involves one-way communication. |
Leadership involves two-way communication. |
Management is characterized by following the plan. |
Leadership is characterized by experimentation. |
Management assumes a dominating perspective. |
Leadership invites multiple perspectives. |
With management, there is often one decision maker. |
With leadership, team input is emphasized. |
Management is about measurement. |
Leadership is about personal accountability. |
Management focuses on quick decision making. |
Leadership focuses on wise decision making. |
Management sticks with the tried and true. |
Leadership seeks innovation. |
Management assumes the role of director. |
Leadership assumes the role of coach and counselor. |
Management seeks to satisfy employees. |
Leadership seeks to engage employees. |
Table 7‐2 offers another way of looking at the difference between managers and leaders.
Table 7-2 Managers versus Leaders
Managers |
Leaders |
Take care of where you are |
Take you to a new place |
Deal with complexity |
Deal with uncertainty |
Are efficient |
Are effective |
Create policies |
Establish principles |
How, exactly, does a strong leader engage employees? One way to answer that question is to mention three things a strong leader doesn't do: spread negativity, cynicism, and skepticism. Instead, strong leaders engage employees by offering the following:
It's not enough for line managers to work to engage employees. When it comes to engagement, leadership must come from the top.
Most CEOs are far more comfortable working their left (analytical, sequential, objective) brains than their right (random, creative, subjective) brains. As a result, many CEOs attempt to delegate the primary responsibility for engagement to HR or some “soft skill” function instead of championing the cause themselves.
Unless you want your employees’ engagement levels to go the way of the dodo, you must do all you can to prevent top leaders from delegating engagement efforts. With all due respect to HR, if it owns engagement, engagement will likely be perceived by employees as just another “flavor of the month” program. Senior leaders must support engagement to prevent employees from assuming it's a touchy-feely, lip-service-only, employee-satisfaction initiative.
If the CEO lacks the time or talent to champion engagement, your firm must identify someone else at the senior level to take up the charge. This person must be senior enough to lend credibility to your engagement efforts, and preferably have the ear and support of the leader. Regardless of personal preferences, all senior leaders must speak the language of engagement and behave in demonstrably committed ways. Top leaders must believe in and be able to articulate engagement.
Although it's critical that senior leaders make the push for engagement, the things that drive engagement (see the preceding section) are largely the province of an organization's visionaries, role models, innovators, and counselors. These leaders may not be the most senior staff, hold the loftiest titles, or pull down the biggest salaries. But they make their mark on the company culture, inviting multiple perspectives and team decisions while retaining — and communicating — a strong sense of personal accountability.
Does this sound familiar? Mary is an exceptional engineer, so you promote her to be the department manager, and she fails miserably. Or, John is an outstanding nurse, so you promote him to be the nursing supervisor, and all the other nurses hate him. Or, Stephanie is your top salesperson, so you promote her to be the sales manager, and the sales team's quotas drop, big time.
Fact: It is actually quite rare for an outstanding employee in his job to also be an excellent succession candidate (that is, someone who could take over his boss's or his boss's boss's job). Why? Because the traits and behaviors needed to succeed as a engineer, nurse, or salesperson are often quite different from those required to be a successful leader. (You can find out more about key behaviors and traits in Chapter 12.) For example, an engineer probably doesn't need to be empathetic. But the person who manages the engineering department? That person probably does.
Strong people skills transcend technical capability. It's possible to successfully lead engineers, for example, without being one. For me, this point hits close to home. At one point in my career, I was asked to serve as chief operating officer of a global environmental consulting company, overseeing 2,000 engineers and scientists. I resisted, saying, “But I'm not an engineer!” My boss responded, “We have 2,000 engineers and scientists who all think alike. You, on the other hand, possess the behaviors and traits necessary to lead.”
The challenge facing many companies is that salaries and rank increase based on individuals’ ability to leverage others to get things done. That's why upper managers make more money. In part because of this, a lot of people have aspirations to become leaders of people. But that doesn't mean everyone's good at it.
In addition, great people leaders
If you need to assess someone's leadership capabilities — or your own — try using a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning “not at all” and 10 meaning “excels at this,” to rate that person on each of these items.
If you want to be a doctor, you have to attend years of medical school. If your goal is to be a pilot, flight school is likely in your future. Yet, people often receive zero training — zip — when tapped by their firms to start leading people. Incredibly, we act like anyone can do it!
Guess what? They can't. Sure, some people are natural leaders. They just have it. But most people need a little training . . . even if they think they don't. (Unfortunately, the ability to lead others is a trait that almost everyone thinks they possess. For example, someone who would never venture an opinion on a technical issue often has completely misplaced confidence in his or her communication and team-building skills.)
“Sure,” you say. “In a perfect world, we'd provide training for every new manager. But here at XYC Corp., we're too busy trying to get product out the door. We don't have time!”
Wrong. You have to make time. Practically every research study in the history of the world lists people's relationships with their leaders — or, more precisely, their managers, who should be their leaders — as a leading engagement driver (good manager) or disengagement driver (bad manager). (One 2012 study, by Parade magazine, revealed that 35 percent of U.S. workers polled would trade a substantial pay increase for seeing their direct supervisor get fired.) Heck, there's even an adage about it: “People join great companies, but they leave bad managers.” And yet, organizations put scant resources in training these most-valued assets — the people we entrust to lead, motivate, and engage our employees.
The proper development of your firm's people leaders is one of the first “must do” items on your list. This should include supervisory training for first-line people leaders, who are often being asked to manage people for the first time. I've long been baffled by the fact that employees who need the most attention and leadership — entry-level staff — are often entrusted to managers who have, on average, the least experience, and who often lack the communication skills required to establish trust and create alignment.
On the other side of the spectrum, senior leaders, who have honed their communication skills over the years and have loads of practice leading people, are most likely directing executives who are self-sufficient and independently motivated. In other words, those with the highest level of leadership skill and experience are leading people with nominal need, while those who lack leadership skill and experience are leading those with the greatest need. This situation can be a tremendous stumbling block to engagement. Clearly, if your first-line leaders are not in alignment with your company's engagement goals, your chances of success are slim to none.
Compounding this problem is the fact that line managers often achieve their position for the wrong reasons — chiefly tenure, technical ability, and personal ambition, rather than leadership ability. Few organizations consider “people skills” a core competency — let alone a requirement for advancement. But in order for your engagement efforts to work, these “soft” skills must be seen as a job requirement for managers. In addition, managers’ effectiveness in engaging their staff must be measured. Otherwise, they simply won't make engagement a priority. Managers must be trained in, and evaluated on, leading people.
Of course, for a leader to be able to engage others, she must also be engaged. Indeed, according to a 2009 study by Sirota Survey Intelligence, Inc., disengaged leaders are, on average, three times as likely to have disengaged direct reports. A key first step to building engagement among first-line leaders is to treat them as part of the leadership of the company. That means making sure that even first-line leaders receive critical communication in advance of the general population. They need thorough information on the issue, policy change, or strategic plan in play, including what has already been challenged or debated. They also need the opportunity to ask questions of their own. And they may need time to digest a policy change and to think through how it should be incorporated into their group's work. Most of all, they must appear informed when they pass along the information to their staff. Otherwise, their authority is diminished.
A key aspect of leadership and engagement is coaching. Coaching may be provided by a manager, by a team leader, or by a formal or informal mentor. A coaching session could be an organized meeting or occur during a brief, informal conversation.
What is coaching, exactly? Simply put, coaching is about ongoing change and development. It's about helping others gain knowledge, information, and perspective to improve performance, develop competencies, build better relationships, enhance communication, enable different perspectives and insights, and identify and recognize strengths and potential.
A coach can help others explore new approaches to a problem, challenge them to take a risk, help them think of things differently, assist them as they strive to complete a stretch goal. Coaches regularly provide direction, instruction, feedback, recognition, support, and encouragement to the individuals or groups they lead.
Coaching is a continuous process, consisting of three primary steps:
Countless times in my career, I've been brought in to arbitrate a conflict between a boss and an employee. More often than not, these issues have their roots in a lack of expectations and objectives, and no plan in place to ensure regular follow‐up. Typically, the boss has been vague with instructions, and then becomes upset when the employee interprets the vague instructions incorrectly. Almost always, the manager coaching the employee through the process would have resulted in a productive outcome. Chapter 16 discusses why this practice is so important!
Part of the plan of action should be to build in regular check‐in points to make sure the employee has a go‐to person for questions and input, and to ensure the employee is being developed to succeed. A manager who is willing to provide a stretch assignment can really engage an employee, but ongoing coaching will be required to ensure development.
This step is so critical in coaching. Engaged managers create cultures where it's safe for an employee to ask for help, instructions, clarifications, and insight. People respond to positive recognition; an employee who receives positive reinforcement through coaching is more often than not going to excel.
All three steps apply whether the coaching is formal or informal.
A key to coaching for performance and development is creating dialogue that encourages the “coachee” to self-reflect and disclose information about his or own performance. Honest, two-way discussion about progress toward goals and feedback on specific behaviors is the aim. Effective two-way dialogue involves the following:
Effective coaching requires the following core communication skills:
When planning a coaching session, whether formal or informal, consider using the GROW model. GROW stands for the following:
There are countless leadership best practices and traps to avoid. Indeed, whole libraries are filled with books on how to effectively lead people. Following are just a few practices that can make an immediate difference, are free to implement, and can be used by leaders at all levels with little training or skill. As you work to improve leadership skills, consider the “best practices” in this section.
Know what your employees like — and hate — both inside and outside of work. If you take away nothing else from this book, take away this: A top engagement driver is showing your employees you care about them as people. It takes all of two seconds to ask an employee how his weekend was, or how his daughter's dance recital went, or if his wife recovered from the flu. It's probably no coincidence that my favorite boss ever also happened to know the names of my kids. Obtaining and weaving this knowledge into your daily chit-chat with employees goes a long way toward engaging them.
Make employees feel as though you really care about their careers. Part of your job is to give your employees experiences at your firm that they couldn't have elsewhere — experiences that will make them more valuable. Sure, you hope your employees stay with your firm for a long time, but if the day comes when they need to move on to another company, that's okay. That concept may feel scary. After all, you're basically saying that your employees should feel free to take what they've learned with your organization and move on — maybe even to a competitor. But working to grow your talent, and communicating your efforts, is a great way to foster engagement.
Stop telling employees what to do. Instead, force them to help come up with solutions. Often, when managers spot a performance issue, they simply tell the employee what she needs to do to improve. There's no interaction, no dialogue, nothing. A better approach is to make an observation and then shut your cake hole and let the employee talk. Whatever the solution turns out to be, you'll almost certainly get better buy-in with this approach.
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