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 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’re capable of… 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 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 for the majority of our 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.

HR May Talk About It But Leaders EARN It

Think back to the comment I referenced a few times previously about this so-called “fuzzy initiative driven by someone in human resources that never yields tangible results”... The fellow who made that comment went on to explain that this was because “most CEOs continue to sit on the sidelines and let HR wack away at the problem.” I believe we’ve covered enough firm data to eliminate the question of whether or not tangible results ARE achievable by working to intentionally improve employee engagement… Quite frankly, I believe that’s the ONLY way to address this particular profitability killer; The Cost of Disengaged Employees…

Now I want you to think about the list I just challenged you to make detailing the specific things the best leader you’ve ever worked with did to earn that extra discretionary effort from you… Before I start working through a list of my own here, I need to ask you one more thing as it relates to your list: were those things that inspired you, motivated you, and earned your active engagement done solely by someone in the human resources department? In case you’re wondering, this is definitely one of those rhetorical questions... I would be utterly stunned if anyone could answer this affirmatively, including folks who actually work in human resources! Having been that guy in human resources, I know all too well the need for someone higher up the food chain to be casting the vision and earning engagement. When I no longer had that, after nearly two decades with the same organization, the work I was doing lost that majority of its purpose and I chose to move on…

All that said, if that fellow I traded comments with on LinkedIn had only ever seen HR folks deal with anything related to engagement, I can understand why he had that perspective. But it absolutely should not be that way! In fact, here’s what I found in an article from Gallup called Who’s Responsible for Employee Engagement backing my opinion:

“Engagement isn't just an "HR thing." Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. There are no quick fixes when it comes to human relationships. It is essential that managers effectively interact with and develop each team member over time.”

Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not bashing the human resources profession (this time). They have a very distinct and critical role. In many cases, they’re the ones who provide the tools to the supervisors, managers, and executives they work with so they can “effectively interact with and develop each team member over time,” but they’re rarely going to be the one doing it with every individual team member on a routine basis.

Before we move on to listing and detailing the specific steps you, or any leader on your team for that matter, can take earn the kind of engagement that leads to that the “57% improvement in discretionary effort” and “20% individual performance improvement,” I believe it’s important to keep one thing in mind: it’s rarely a matter of a manager not wanting better performance or simply not being willing to develop their team members! It’s nearly always because they just don’t know who to go about it. As the Gallup article said, “There are no quick fixes when it comes to human relationships” and so many supervisors, managers, and executives today have worked their way through the ranks based on a completely different expertise. And the tools that got them there aren’t often the ones they need most to interact effectively with their teams!

With that being the case, let’s review a list of some simple things we need to do, then (soon) we’ll wrap up our look at this particular profitability killer by laying out the practical steps we can take to implement and sustain each of those things…

What Leaders Can Do To EARN Engagement

I just mentioned that we’d soon work through some “simple things” that we can each do to EARN engagement from the teams we’re leading, and more specifically, some actual steps we can take to put those things into practice. Here’s the thing: just identifying those “simple things” - let alone taking action to sustain them over time - ain’t always very simple! But it sure should be…

I found one article on Forbes.com called Six Ways Leaders Can Boost Employee Engagement - And Why It’s Important that shared, well, six things the author suggested as necessary for getting the 60% or so of folks who are in our boats but just along for the ride to pick up their oars and actively contribute to the cause. Another article from Forbes titled How Leaders Can Improve Employee Engagement - Even During Challenging Times referenced “The Three C’s of Employee Engagement” early on so I was hopeful for something more condensed than the lengthy six listed in the other article. I had to read the article twice to even find the three C’s - clear, consistent communication - because they were buried by the EIGHT things the author of that article was suggesting.

In complete transparency, I didn’t take issue with any of the things (14 in total) that were outlined in those two articles. That said, I’m a fairly simple guy so I want to provide you with a simple list - and throwing fourteen things at you just doesn’t seem all that simple to me. Further, I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone carrying any significant level of leadership responsibility who’s had an abundance of spare time to add any one thing to their to-do list, let alone more than a dozen things…

In his book The Truth About Employee Engagement, Pat Lencioni shares a fascinating fable about a retired executive who buys a minority stake in a rundown pizza joint to scratch his itch for being in the business world. Through that process, the executive lands on three things he’s convinced are just as critical to the evening shift crew in that small restaurant as they were to his previous corporate team - and anyone in between. Lencioni lists immeasurement, irrelevance, and anonymity as what he believes contributes to a miserable work experience. His fictional pizza joint story goes on to tell how the main character works to offset each for the individuals working the evening shift and how much the business’s overall results improve.

If you’ve ever read any of Pat’s work, I have no doubt you understand why I connect with it so much! His stories are short and fun, but he weaves in a solid message every time. The reality I’ve had to come to terms with over the last twenty years is that we, as leaders, may never have enough time to do everything that demands our attention. We need to build systems into our routine so we can achieve as much as possible - every single day. And even then, we’d better make sure those systems are simple so we can sustain them on the days the stuff hits the proverbial fan - and it absolutely will… If we truly want to EARN engagement from the teams we lead, being intentional about providing them with clear measurement for their work, the relevance of that work, while removing the anonymity that’s far too common in even small businesses today, we’ll do all that so much more effectively when we build simple systems for doing it so that’s exactly where we’ll pick up soon…