Chapter 7

People Who Lead People: Engaging Employees through Leadership

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.

Vice Versus: Management Versus Leadership

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

Table 7‐2 offers another way of looking at the difference between managers and leaders.

Table 7-2 Managers versus Leaders

The Big 12: Identifying 12 Leadership-Based Engagement Drivers

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:

• Trust: You don't get trust unless you give trust. Strong leaders trust their employees. When employees feel trusted by their leaders, they're more likely to trust their leaders and be engaged. If employees don't feel trusted, they won't trust in return — and engagement will take a dive.
• Authority: For employees, feeling confident that someone is in charge can lay the foundation for engagement. If employees are worried that no one's at the helm of the ship, engagement will suffer.
• Security: Especially when the economy is suffering, security is key to engagement. Strong leaders leave their employees feeling like things will turn out okay, and in doing so, they boost engagement.
• Direction: A key part of leading is knowing where you're going — you can't expect people to follow you if you lack direction. Engagement suffers when leaders lack direction.
• Vision: Employees will be more engaged when their leaders have and convey a clear vision — one that inspires them to follow.
• Structure: The organization's structure must be such that everybody knows the organizations’ boundaries. A lack of structure will quickly result in false assumptions, leading to disengagement.
• Clarity: Employees must understand what's expected of them.
• A role model: Employees need someone to look up to. Role models enable employees to pinpoint — and then emulate — behaviors that result in success.
• Reassurance: All employees seek reassurance. They want to feel as if someone is looking out for them. Failure to provide this can lead to a reduction in both confidence and engagement.
• Cohesion: Think of your team as a symphony. Although each person has her own part to play, everyone must be playing from the same musical score. This cohesion plays a big part in employee engagement.
• Inspiration: Chapter 6 discusses the importance of a sense of purpose. Giving people a sense of purpose inspires them, enabling them to feel good about what they're doing.
• Recognition: All employees want to feel that what they do matters. That's where recognition comes in. Chapter 17 covers recognition and rewards, and how they can help foster engagement.

Top It Off: Leadership Starts at the Top

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.

Holding leaders accountable for engagement levels in your firm is critical. Measurement is an important driver. Unless a CEO's board measures the CEO on engagement, the CEO may not have an impetus to lead any differently. Only when senior management is regularly measured and judged on engagement criteria (by reporting on engagement every quarter and communicating the CEO's performance metrics throughout the company) will they be motivated to measure up. For more on measuring engagement, see Chapter 15.

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.

Purple People Leader: Identifying the Behaviors and Traits of Engaged Leaders

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.

If you're considering hiring or promoting someone as a “people leader” in your organization, evaluate whether that person possesses the following traits:

• Caring
• Empathy
• Energy
• Equitableness
• Expressiveness
• Fairness
• Honesty
• Humility
• Neutrality
• Optimism
• Passion

In addition, great people leaders

• Communicate a clear vision for their part of the organization
• Translate their vision into motivating strategies and implementation plans
• Help people set short‐term priorities in line with long‐term goals
• Help direct reports understand how they contribute to the vision
• Recruit and hire talented, high‐performing employees
• Clearly communicate performance expectations
• Manage and evaluate performance (including making the tough decisions)
• Focus on how results are achieved as much as on what results are achieved
• Recognize and reward achievement when performance surpasses expectations
• Base pay fairly on both quantitative and qualitative results
• Provide clear, specific direction and give open, honest feedback — including positive feedback, when deserved
• Place a high priority on coaching people
• Create a continuous learning environment
• Help others prepare for increased responsibility
• Proactively look to promote from within
• Work with employees to identify career‐growth plans that link with business‐growth plans (known as cross‐training or professional development)
• Help less‐experienced employees gain experience interacting with clients
• Look to eliminate unnecessary work or obstacles to productivity
• Proactively identify and develop a successor
• Maintain open communication
• Create an environment and culture that motivates and inspires, and enables others to succeed
• Inspire people to follow
• Willingly share their best individual talent with others
• Create and facilitate productive teams
• Delegate and empower
• Remain distant enough to be objective
• Keep their promises and honor their commitments
• Seek input before making key decisions
• Encourage feedback
• Listen
• Treat people with dignity and respect
• Respect the importance of other people's time
• Work cooperatively with others to achieve common goals
• Successfully manage conflict
• Assess issues and come up with shared solutions to improve performance
• Work effectively with peers and colleagues
• Strengthen employee/manager relationships and build a stronger team
• Work effectively in a cross‐cultural environment
• Appreciate the value of diversity (race, nationality, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation)
• Adapt to cultural differences

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.

Take a hard look at your organization. Who are your best managers? What are the traits and behaviors that make them so good? These are the traits and behaviors that define success in your firm, and the traits and behaviors you must cultivate in each and every line manager. Be prepared to make an investment in the development of people skills in the same way you would in the development of technical skills. For more on assessing traits and behaviors, see Chapter 12.

Here Comes the Train Again: Training Managers to Become Engaged Leaders

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.

These people leaders can truly make or break your overall engagement efforts because they're perfectly positioned to transmit key information up and down the ranks.

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.

Trust is the first step toward capturing discretionary effort — the invaluable byproduct of great leadership. If leaders withhold trust, they can hardly expect employees to trust the leadership in return. Leaders who trust their employees will soon see this trust reciprocated.

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.

An organization needs talented, skilled leaders of people at the line-manager level. If a person doesn't like to lead people or isn't good at it, that person should not be in line for promotion to management, period, end of story.

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.

If line managers disagree with a corporate mandate, the proper forum for discussion is with his superiors, not with those lower in the chain. Agreeing to serve as a leader means forfeiting the right to vocal cynicism! That being said, effective managers also happen to be authentic, real, and transparent. Employees can see through a manager who engages in “corporate speak.” Bottom line: Enthusiastically embracing a mandate is often a struggle when you know it may cause a disconnect with your employees. This is a fine line that managers have to walk.

Put Me In, Coach! Coaching for Engagement

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.

A quick guide to coaching

Coaching is a continuous process, consisting of three primary steps:

1. Set expectations and confirm a plan of action.

   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!

2. Observe performance and provide developmental opportunities.

   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.

3. Solicit or offer feedback and provide direction, instruction, or perspective as needed.

   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:

• Speaking: Asking questions and giving feedback
• Checking: Checking for a response
• Listening: Using active listening skills

Coaching is not about “fixing” people, or about the coach having all the answers. It's a give and take.

Effective coaching requires the following core communication skills:

• Active listening: This is a set of skills — namely, attending, following, and reflecting (that is, briefly restating, in your own words, the core of what the speaker has communicated) — that demonstrate that you understand the thoughts and feelings being communicated by the other person from her frame of reference.
• Soliciting self‐feedback: To solicit self‐feedback, you must ask questions to get the other person to reflect on his own performance. This helps the person think critically, leading to increased self‐awareness and ownership of one's performance and development. Key questions include, “Specifically, what did you do well?” and “What would you do differently next time?”
• Giving feedback: You must give feedback to reinforce or correct behavior, leading to greater results and effectiveness.
• Asking questions: Asking the right questions can be incredibly powerful. Doing so can help people to think more critically, help them explore and solve their own problems, and lead to self‐discovery — or, to quote Oprah, that “a‐ha” moment. For best results, use open‐ended questions (that is, questions whose responses tend to be sentences, explanations, or insights) to solicit self‐feedback and facilitate insight and learning. Use closed questions (that is, questions that require no explanation or insight, and often result in single‐word answers) to focus a conversation or to clarify information.
• Providing perspective: A key aspect to coaching is helping your coachee find and understand additional information — to take a broader view of issues and challenges. You can use several lenses to view problems or opportunities. For example, you may discuss how other people or groups may view the situation. Also, discuss the multiple aspects and impacts of an issue — for example, by running “what if” scenarios.

When it comes to coaching, keep the following tips in mind:

• Before you start coaching, make sure there are shared expectations for the coaching discussion.
• Keep the conversation focused and on track, and create two‐way dialogue.
• Solicit information from the coachee to find out how she self‐assesses her own behavior, strengths, and areas for improvement.
• Listen to truly understand the other person's unique points of view. Be an effective listener.
• Provide feedback that is timely, specific, and objective.
• Be able to deal with difficult situations, such as defusing and addressing defensive reactions to corrective feedback.
• Ask effective, open‐ended, clarifying questions, followed by silence, to allow your coachee to reflect and answer the question completely before moving on to the next question/subject.
• Facilitate the process of brainstorming and problem solving in coaching discussions instead of just giving the coachee the answer.
• Help others to understand and explore alternative perspectives when considering different actions or solutions to an issue.
• Help others to feel re‐energized, focused, and committed as a result of a coaching discussion.
• Support your coachees in helping them develop their own action plan for their development. This should include setting short‐term and long‐term goals.
• Instill a sense of accountability with employees by coaching them on success measures and following up on their progress.

To better understand your current coaching skills and capabilities, try ranking your skill level with regard to each of the preceding tips, assigning a score of 1 to your weakest skill and a score of 12 to your strongest skill. Use each number only once. After you've ranked yourself, look at the skills you ranked the lowest. These are the ones you probably need to work on. Don't forget about the other skills, however. Even the ones you ranked highest may require attention.

Using the GROW model

When planning a coaching session, whether formal or informal, consider using the GROW model. GROW stands for the following:

• Goal: What is your goal? What do you want to achieve? To determine this, you might ask the following questions:
  • What would you like to discuss?
  • What do you really want?
  • What is stopping you?
  • What is important to you about this?
• Reality: What is the current reality of your situation? You might assess this by asking the following questions:
  • What's going on/getting in your way?
  • What have you tried so far?
  • What worked or didn't work?
  • What decisions do you need to make?
• Options: What are you options? To establish these, try asking the following questions:
  • What might you do to reach your goal?
  • What if that course of action doesn't work?
  • What is another way of looking at this?
  • What else do you need to take into consideration?
  • What is another possibility or option?
  • What is the upside or downside?
• Will: What will you do or commit to? To tease out this information, consider the following questions:
  • What will you do?
  • When will you do it?
  • What support do you need to accomplish it?

Do This, Not That: Identifying Leadership Best Practices

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.

I feel you, man

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.

If what your employees love (or hate) is different from what you love (or hate), suck it up. Act interested. Sure, it's a basic thing, but it goes a long way toward earning their devotion and ensuring their continued engagement. Besides, you may learn something!

Offering a hand up

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.

Chapter 6 talks about developing a “line of sight” for your organization. In addition to this “macro” line of sight, there's also a “micro” line of sight that exists on an employee level. This line of sight is all about “What job do I currently have?” and “Where am I going?” The more concern you show for your employees’ growth and development in their careers — their personal “lines of sight” — the greater the probability you'll have engaged employees.

You're not the boss of me!

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.

Also, avoid describing how to do a project or task. Give your employee the destination, but leave the driving directions to her. Employees often have their own ideas about process, and those ideas are often quicker, more innovative, and more efficient than the “tried and true.”

Recognize, recognize, recognize

When it comes to engaging employees, recognition is one of the most effective weapons in a leader's arsenal. Experienced managers have learned what neuroscientists and child psychologists have known for decades: Positive reinforcement and recognition lead to the replication of positive results. This is such a key leadership best practice, I've devoted an entire chapter to it — namely, Chapter 17.