Forget Employee Engagement, Focus on Leader Engagement

I am going to start with a bold assertion, employee engagement is an illusion.  No really, let me explain.  Leaders create the environment where employees work and it is what the leaders do and say every day that impacts how engaged an employee feels and behaves.  Therefore, employee engagement is nothing more than a side effect of Leader Engagement.

So, what do engaged leaders do to increase employee engagement?

1.  Discover what frustrates employees and fix as much as they can. 

Daily frustrations wear people out.  Especially when the people who have the most control over reducing frustrations are the leaders, and they aren’t doing anything to fix them.  If the computer system is always shutting down, meetings are mostly wasted time, and it takes a monumental effort to order a pack of pens, it’s hard to get excited about work.  Employees aren’t likely to bring these problems up unless their boss has specifically asked for them, reinforced sharing them, and fixed what they can.  Trying to increase employee engagement without putting effort into reducing major frustrations is an impossible feat.

2.  Give employees control over their work and don’t micromanage.

No one likes having someone look over their shoulder all day or having to ask permission to do every little thing.  Lack of control over work that you feel competent to complete is a serious drain on engagement and is directly linked to stress.  Engaged leaders look for opportunities for employees to have input and flexibility in how the work gets done.

3.  Understand and use positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is a big source of happiness for people and in most workplaces, there isn’t nearly enough.  Research says that students do better in school, work teams perform at a higher level, and marriages are happier when people get about 4 or more positives for every negative.  Sending a bulk, generic “good job” email doesn’t count.  The reinforcers should be personal and specific.

4.  Focus on developing relationships.

Think about someone you highly respect.  If that person praised you for a job well done, how would you feel?  If that same person suggested something you could improve, would you want to improve it?  Now think about someone you really dislike and ask yourself those same questions.  The answers change, don’t they?  The successes are even more invigorating and the tough times are easier to endure when we have robust relationships with our colleagues at work.  We want to do good work for and with people we care about.  Relationships must be developed and nurtured.

If leaders engage in the four behaviors described above, employee engagement will be inevitable.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Procedure!

Near the end of the courses we teach in organizations we encourage the attendees to find and complete a small performance improvement project.  Generally, people are pretty happy to have an opportunity to improve some aspect of their work environment and take this assignment on with enthusiasm.  We have seen some absolutely wonderful, high impact projects come from this.  The course attendees feel reinforced by their success as well as the encouragement they receive from their peers and bosses.  In other words, we have at least temporarily created a work environment where people want to do projects that add value to the workplace.

Yet, it never fails that senior leaders, hoping to maintain this momentum, decide that the best course of action is to create a standard procedure for doing projects.  Because nothing says, “let’s give this all we can!” like an 8-page procedure.

To illustrate why this won’t work, let me provide an example from one of our client sites.  A woman who recently took my course decided her project would be reducing unnecessary and redundant paperwork and was going through each set of paperwork on the site and creating a leaner, and more useful solution.  She had eliminated a lot of stuff already, saving them time and money, and she was everyone’s hero for doing so.  After all, no one wants to enter in the same expense three times.  One of the site leaders said that they had never seen her so motivated.  I would hate to see that spark of enthusiasm squashed by trying to make her fit what she was doing to step-by-step a procedure.

Procedures don’t motivate people, consequences do.

They didn’t need a procedure, they needed champions who would continue to encourage and support their efforts.  They needed a little time each week to work on making improvements.  They needed to create a community of people at their workplace who were highly committed to behavioral science and continued to talk and learn about it after I left.

A lot of times, people say, “that sounds too hard, wouldn’t a procedure be easier”.  It is hard to sustain BMT or any large-scale initiative, but it’s the only way to create a lasting shift in the culture of your organization.  Writing a procedure is easier, and it is also easy to file it away and never look at it again.

It’s what your people do and say everyday that matters, no matter what is written in your procedures.

Be Careful What You Reinforce

In our courses, we often say, “punish the behavior, not the person.”

So, instead of saying, “Jim, you are such a downer,” you could say, “Jim, whenever I bring you a new idea, you tend to list all of the reasons it won’t work rather than thinking about what value it could bring and ways it could work.  It makes me not want to bring you ideas.”

The first one sounds like a trait that can’t be changed and such a sweeping statement might produce a serious blow to the ego and maybe even retaliation.  The second one, while still probably difficult to hear, describes a behavior, the consequence of that behavior, and what you’d like to see instead.  It’s actionable and less likely to make Jim want to throw his coke in your face.

However, I have rarely, until recently, heard people articulate that we should be careful to reinforce behavior, not people.  Some recent research highlights why it’s important.

Researcher Carol Dweck and her colleagues at Columbia University conducted a study with children who completed IQ tests and praised one group for their intelligence and the other group for their hard work.  When asked if, for the next problem set, the kids would prefer an easy or hard test, most of those praised for their intelligence chose the easy test and most of those praised for their effort chose the hard test.

Why would this be?  The kids praised for their intelligence may have wanted to continue to appear capable while those praised for their hard work may have wanted to continue to demonstrate how hard they work.

When given another round of tests that were equally as hard as the first test, those praised for effort improved and those praised for smarts got worse.  You can read more about this study here:  http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

Think about this study the next time you give a performance review and ask yourself if you are reinforcing or punishing behaviors or traits.