Culture to Engage

5 questions about your manager engagement

Questions about manager engagement

Ask yourself. Ask your managers. Ask anyone whose answer will help you increase your levels of manager engagement.

• How often do your managers meet specifically to discuss their employee engagement efforts?

• How often do they get together to discuss their employee engagement problems?

• Do they ever get together to discuss their own engagement? Or what is making it hard for them to feel/be engaged?

• Does your business have its own, specific definition of what 'employee engagement' means? How it looks? What it does? How it is measured? Why it matters?

• What does your business leadership do to support your managers' employee engagement efforts? your manager engagement efforts?

6 Contributors to Manager Engagement

Yesterday's posting was too much fun not to try again.

Couple of weeks ago I read an article from the folks at Development Dimensions International (DDI), in their Workforce Performance Solutions (promotion) publication.

They listed the 6 actions business leaders take that promote an Employee Engagement Culture in their business. Here are the 6

• Have a passion to lead
• Select for fit
• Make the connections
• Promote accountability
• Develop talent
• Recognize the obvious

 Let me take a little twist, because I suggest that each of these are what (can) generate truly high levels of engagement among managers. Here's a fact: employee engagement is directly influenced by manager engagement A manager may want her employees to engage fully; but if she does not engage, then they are not likely to either.

So let's look at those 6 leadership actions and see how they are instrumental to manager engagement (and so to a culture of EE).

Passion to Lead. As a leader must demonstrate the passion to lead, a manager must possess a passion for management. A manager must want to manage before he can fully engage in managing. Be careful of that almost forgotten Peter Principle: don't promote someone beyond ability or beyond desire.

Select for Fit. As you want to place employees in job assignments where they fit the function and the culture, the same is true of managers. The fit must be true. Before placing a manager pre-assure there is a match between the individual and the job (managing) and between the individual and the function (operation). A notable exception is the exceptional individual manager who can take on a new and unfamiliar responsibility in order to broaden management awareness and ability.

Make Connections. A manager must have super-comprehension of the connection between company goals/directions and her department's goals/directions. She must clearly understand her responsibility and role in that connection. And she must be able to convey that connection outward to her employees.

Promote Accountability. Accountability is dependent upon expectations, understanding expectations. The manager must not only understand global expectations (i.e., company vision and mission) but also the specific, day-to-day functional expectations of the individuals in his team. Promoting their accountability begins with expressing and confirming their expectations...and that each employee clearly comprehends the expectations. This is what's expected of the manager.

Develop Talent. 39% to 46% of employees say they leave their employer due to insufficient developmental opportunities. The figures are likely similar for managers. Providing continuous learning -- functional and professional -- for managers contributes directly to their engagement, as well as to their ability to manage and to their retention by the company.

Recognize the Obvious. As employee engagement becomes a more common concern, managers are expected to provide more recognition to their employees. Managers are employees. Managers have similar "recognition cravings". Recognition may be for the successful performance of the manager's unit or team. It may also be for the manager's specific engagement in guiding, developing, leading, motivating that team.

OK. I don't argue with DDI's point that there are 6 ways business leaders can promote their own Employee Engagement Culture. Yet, I'll add that these are also areas in which attention should be paid to manager engagement. Their engagement is pretty critical to building a viable, workable, maintainable business culture.

Derailing managers' engagement

Doing last week's research on employee engagement, I discovered Profiles International  offers a self-promotion report, Five Critical Management Derailers.

They list these five:

• Poor interpersonal and communication skills
• Inadequate leadership skills
• Resistance to change
• Inability to deliver expected results
• Inability to see beyond their functional silo

I'm betting there are more than 5 'critical derailers. I do, however, see a distinct connection  between PI's 5 and employee engagement...or, in this case, management engagement.

So, I'm hoping PI doesn't mind if I cop their 5 and offer you my own suggestions for upping the manager's engagement to get him back on track.

Interpersonal and communication skills. Certainly training, coaching, mentoring, and education will improve a manager's communication skills. But the key is the transfer of those skills to on-the-job application. The starting and finishing point for improving those interpersonal and communication skills, then, is expecting (requiring) a regular and frequent communications between managers and employees. These can/should be all types of communications: one-on-one, formal, informal, full-blown presentations, facilitating meetings and discussions.

Inadequate leadership skills. Engaging your managers in leadership situations (aka, trial by fire?) is a sure, fast way to determine leadership potential and ability. Get past the assumption that leading and managing are the same thing. Every leader must have management skills. Every manager must have leadership skills. But those skill sets are not the same thing.

First, be sure you and your organization have a clear and consistent definition of what leadership means and does. Then form-fit those skills to projects which will enhance specific managers' abilities within your leadership definition.

Resistance to change. Conversation can determine the cause and degree of the manager's resistance. Two-way communication around changes anticipated, pending, and/or in place can determine the manager's acceptance of these specific changes and willingness to work supportively. The best "engagement" action here may be to remove the highly change-resistant manager(s) from the highly change-frequent assignments. And what if your entire organization is change-frequent?

NOTE: Too much time and attention in this area may require more psychological skills than you have at hand.

Inability to deliver expected results. The key word in this phrase may not be "inability." It may be "expected." The manager, especially if new to management or the functional area, may not clearly understand expectations of her. This a primary cause of an employee's failure to engage fully. Who says it can't happen to a manager also?

Frequent, varied discussion of expectations is required. Be sure the discussion is two-way. It's risky to talk, talk, talk the expectations and just assume they are heard and understood. Engage the manager in restating, asking, setting scenarios, and other conversational tactics that demonstrate clear awareness of expectations.

Inability to see beyond their functional silo. Sounds like a call for engagement beyond the team or department level. Engagement across disciplines or functions. Engagement with managers from other departments. This is where networking--as an engagement opportunity--serves you well. Provide opportunities for managers from a variety of departments, units, teams to share insights, ideas, issues, challenges, concerns. The more they hear about what goes on in other areas of the business, they less silo-bound their perceptions. The less-silo bound their perceptions, the stronger their (and their employees?) engagement at the company level.

Thanks, Profiles International, for stimulating thoughts about how engaging managers can keep them on track!

Generating Respect Generates Engagement

Generate respect.

Just two quick reminders:

First, your Employee Engagement Strategy can stimulate any of dozens of success results you and your company desire. The power of a fully engaged employee base motors your way to that success.

Second, five simple, yet dynamic tactics allow you to implement the strategy successfully. The previous four postings have given you Tactics 1-4 respectively.

Here's Tactic #5: Generate respect.

Personal harmony among employees and between each employee and the manager/supervisor are instrumental to engagement. The more harmonious those relationships, the more willing the employees are to engage in their functions.

The great thing about respect is that it's a two-way street. Walking one way guarantees a return journey. IOW, the more you display respect for your employees, the more respect they will return.

And that can become a continually reinforcing cycle.

So here are 3 suggestions, proven to generate respect:

• Stick by the truth. Especially when it comes to bad news, be up front and authentic. No matter how well you can get away with padding the truth the moment, the naked truth will always (and all ways) come back to get you.

• Celebrate employees' success with recognition and appreciation. Show respect for specific engagement, for jobs well done, for extra efforts exerted. The celebrations need not be grand or glorious. Recognition, more than celebration, generates respect.

• Remove poor performers, whether managers or employees. When employees provide valid, unfavorable feedback about their manager's performance, keeping the manager on the job shows the employees their opinions are not respected. That works against your desire.
  

Knowing Acceptance, Building Engagement

Nurture acceptance

When a member of any team feels accepted, that member more fully engages in the team's efforts.

Doesn't your employee base comprise one or more teams?

Today's 4th of 5 Tactics to support you Employee Engagement Strategy is

Tactic 4. Nurture acceptance.

I suggest offering plenty of attention to four simple yet strong components to nurturing acceptance:

• Trust. Assuming "because they're on the same team, they share a high trust level" can be a mistake. Spending just a little time making trust a frequent topic of conversation prevents that mistake. How about 5-minute meetings starters around questions like: How is trust important to our success as a team? What (else) can we do to build internal trust? What are recent positive 'trust examples' we've witnessed?

• Focus. Acceptance depends upon sharing the team's common focus.  Managers can provide clear opportunities for all team members to know (and focus on) team objectives and approaches. Situations and conditions change; this may require shifts in team focus. Reinforce continual attention to necessary updates and alterations.

• Communication.  Participation in two-way talk about team purpose, team effort, team success, team obstacles and much more generates true membership. Presuming that such communication automatically occurs and involves all team members is risky. Create opportunities for open discussion of what is going on within your team. Include all team members.

• Feedback. Think 360 degrees. Shared opinions of performance and ability, of success and difficulty are feedback. Opportunities to offer and to receive feedback stimulate greater comfort and value derived from the feedback. Use individual employee evaluation surveys. Create informal feedback opportunities in which you give and receive feedback, in which employees give and receive feedback.

These four actions support the nurture acceptance tactic. The more employees experience team achievement, the more they will know their acceptance, the more they will accept. Employee engagement grows with acceptance.