Truth 69. You’re still the boss

Take a moment, if you will, to imagine the perfect day at work. By the time you arrive, everyone is already there. Everyone works brilliantly together. All your employees completely understand the many layers and values of pulling together as a team toward a common goal. They work long hours when necessary, without being told to. They support each other’s efforts and celebrate each other’s successes. They trust each other implicitly because they themselves are trustworthy.

All except one. And that’s the one person who makes you doubt the entire construct of employee engagement and the power of intrinsic motivation. This is the person who challenges you every day to remember that you’re still the boss.

It’s one thing to consider the fine, most-elevated points of leadership and high-performance management in the safe confines of ideal-world thinking. But it’s quite another thing to look at employee engagement from the battlefield perspective. And sometimes it is a battlefield. If it’s been a rough quarter so far, you might be looking at a landscape pocked with the craters and smoking heaps of projects gone bad and rivers running red with the ink of failed, expensive initiatives. It could be one bad employee who has caused such devastation or the whole team that has set back the entire cause.

If you’ve been leading your department with the perfect-world ideals of engagement, you will have to make some tough decisions—and soon. Take a fresh look at your company’s published, formal set of values. Consider how you can realign your own actions to both reflect those values and to use them as the leverage you need to assert your authority to drive performance to higher standards.

• How can you use your company’s culture of trust, caring, inspiration, belonging, and tradition of excellence to influence your people to perform at an elevated level?

• How can you use your own behaviors as a way to model the standards you want all your people to aspire to?

• Who can you reach up to in your organization for coaching and leadership support that will help you keep your team dedicated to achieving the goals you’ve set for yourselves but also the culture in which you want to achieve those goals?

• Do you need to be recommitted to the ideals behind your organization’s mission?

• What training do you need to strengthen your ability to lead with both inspiration and authority?

However self-directed your team may be, you are still the leader. It’s up to you to establish and model the ideals and principles of your organization in the way you run your group. Remember the principles of engagement that we established in the beginning of this book:

• Engaged employees believe in the mission of their organization.

• Engaged employees love what they do and understand how their jobs serve the bigger picture.

• Engaged employees don’t need discipline; they need clarity, communication, and consistency.

• Engaged employees augment their skill sets with positive attitudes, focus, will, enthusiasm, creativity, and endurance.

• Engaged employees can be trusted, and they trust each other.

• Engaged employees respect their managers.

• Engaged employees know that their managers respect them.

• Engaged employees are a constant source of great new ideas.

• Engaged employees will give you their best.

There’s one more: Engaged employees know who’s boss. That’s you. And you owe it to your people to exercise your mandate to get results by tapping into their most dedicated passions and efforts.

It’s your job to get the best from your people. When you do it well, your people get the best from you.