How Effective Leadership Drives Employee Engagement

By this point, we should have a solid understanding of just how much profitability is being killed in our respective organizations by just an average number of employees who aren’t actively engaged. But knowing the issue exists and having a plan for addressing it are two VERY different things! We’ll wrap this look at the cost of disengaged employees up with a few very practical steps any leader can take to begin capturing that lost profitability soon. Before we work through how though, let’s really think about WHY it matters; not why it matters for our bottom line but why it matters to each member of our teams…

I want you to think long and hard here about the kind of leadership you’d need in order to deliver that “57% improvement in discretionary effort” that the HBR study I referenced before suggests. Let’s be honest when considering this - it’s a huge statement! This isn’t a factor of someone who’s already performing at 100% capacity simply dialing it up a few notches to give it 157%; there’s no such thing. I remember hearing a story once about John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach who won 10 NCAA National Championships in a 12 year period, telling his teams that the most anyone could ever give at any one time was 100%. He explained that on the days they decided to only give 80-90%, they could never make up. 100% is all anyone ever has so making up the 10 or 20% they didn’t give the day before was physically impossible… 

With that in mind, how could it be possible for ANYONE to deliver a 57% increase in discretionary effort? Some quick calculator math tells me that the most someone could have possibly been giving prior to a 57% increase was 63.5% of their individual capacity… (I played around with the base percentage multiplied by 1.57 until I got as close to 100 as I could…)

For the sake of argument, let’s just stick with the folks who were neither actively engaged nor actively disengaged. Let’s assume our actively engaged folks are already rowing as hard as they possibly can… And as I mentioned before, I think it would be a far better use of our time to start the process of completely removing the actively disengaged folks from our boats rather than wasting much effort trying to convince them to row as hard as they possibly could. If we use the numbers I shared before from Gallup’s “State of the Global Workforce” 2022 report, that leaves us with around 60% of our team who may well only be performing at (or below) 63.5% of their total capacity. I won’t pretend to speak for you here, but I’ve certainly never accomplished much - and definitely nothing of real significance - by only giving 63.5% of my effort! With that likely being just as applicable to the majority of team members, I don’t think there’s much question as to how critical this profitability killer is to address…

So back to my previous question: what does a leader need to do to EARN that 57% improvement in discretionary effort? Pounding their chest and reminding us that they’re in charge ain’t gonna get it… I truly believe this is one of the biggest separations between supervising or managing and genuinely leading a team! Covering even the best talking points won’t make much difference without solid follow through. For now, I’ll challenge you to make a list of the specific things the best leader you’ve ever worked with has done to earn that extra from you. While it’s likely a bit different for each of us, there are some basics that apply across the board so that’s where we’ll pick up next time.