What are some ways an executive coach can improve employee engagement?

For an employee to be engaged. They need to have been valued. And taught what they think maters. And that their voice matters. It’s a relationship. It’s not something that happens overnight. That's what “culture” is. How employees feel every time they walk through the door.

A strength is not something your employees are good at but rather what energizes them and makes them feel alive. Focus on true strengths and your employees engagement will skyrocket.

First things first, it’s all about understanding each individual’s unique strengths and motivations. People thrive when they’re seen and heard, right? So, listen actively and be that sounding board. Empower employees by encouraging autonomy, giving them the reins to make decisions and innovate. Building trust is another golden ticket. A transparent, open environment where folks feel safe to express ideas and concerns? That’s gold. Also, don’t underestimate the power of recognizing and celebrating wins, big or small. A little ‘well done’ goes a long way.

While the benefits of engaging employees and activating high performance are well understood, the lack of these is often positioned as a problem on the employee's side. Leaders frequently ask, “Why aren’t my people engaged?” rather than looking at how their own behavior, the company's culture, or ways of working impact employees’ levels of engagement.

Promote vulnerability as a leader. This can be done through storytelling where wisdom was gained. This humanizes you and places you on level of the employees, creating an emotional connection, which can be used as fuel for unlocking untapped potential. This is exactly the tactic mass media uses for control, only we are using it for good and to help other thrive.

Two of the important ways an executive coach can improve the employee engagement is by helping the clients with the following 1. creating alignment between their aspirations and the organization's goal. A clarity about WIIFM (What's In It For Me) goes a long way in developing a "relatability" factor in the client. 2. ensuring that the client has the correct understanding of the organization's vision and then helping them convert this vision into actionable goals for themselves. Perceiving vision in terms of tangible actions/ steps will provide (better) clarity to clients about what they need to do.

Set SMART goals and help your coachee understand to be the change they want to see in the world. If they want loyal and engaged employees, they have to be loyal and engaged first!

My work with an executive coach, late in my career, was enlightening and also challenging. He said things to me that were very direct, but also very necessary for me to hear. One outcome was that I was much better equipped to contribute to the organization.

Organizations attempt to create alignment and engagement through goal-setting but tend to miss the mark by not including employees in the goal setting process, setting unattainable goals, changing priorities or projects and not changing goals or performance development expectations, and not ensuring that the goals are aligned with the employees development plan.

Clarity is power; I've seen it transform businesses. The absence of well-defined goals is often the Achilles' heel of an organization. Let me share an experience. A client in the service sector was tangled in inefficiencies. We implemented crystal-clear goals aligned with the company's mission. Employee engagement soared along with profits. It’s not rocket science; when you give your team a purpose, they're not just filling hours; they're fulfilling objectives. Goals are not mere signposts; they're the lifeblood of corporate ambition. As a coach, make sure that blood runs strong. Your clients' success depends on it.

Top-performing employees crave feedback. This takes the form of both praise and constructive feedback. A simple framework that I use with those I coach is Like/Wish That. This is a great framework to include in 1:1 meetings so that both an individual contributor and manager can give each other feedback on a regular basis and "get their reps in". This is a great place to start as feedback is a skill and the best way to hone a skill is to find small ways to practice it more regularly.

Feedback may be powerful when given and received properly. You want to help employees improve when giving feedback. Recognizing good work and offering suggestions for improvement helps achieve this. Managers who give feedback make employees feel valued and that the company cares about their progress. This boosts staff engagement and retention. Leaders don't always know how to give and take feedback. Coaching helps leaders and employees give and receive detailed, personalized, performance-focused feedback. The conversation will be more productive for everyone. To practice the skill safely, coaches can run scenarios with coaches.

Feedback isn't just a tool; it's the soil in which professional growth flourishes. I've had clients whose feedback systems were dysfunctional. Using NLP and Gestalt therapy techniques, we created a culture where feedback and recognition thrived. The effect was dramatic—a 40% spike in engagement within a quarter. People crave recognition; they want their work to be seen, felt, and appreciated. Lack of feedback is a business malpractice, period. As a coach, I urge you to teach your clients to see feedback not as a chore but as an opportunity—a catalyst for growth and team unity. Your clients' success hinges on how well they wield this double-edged sword. Choose wisely.

If you want to encourage a culture of feedback, give it often, immediately, ensure it's future focused, developmental, and make it part of normal conversation.

Many executives are accustomed to having the hard conversations, but I have found many struggle with the softer side of leadership. Recognition can be difficult, but not often out of ill regard. Many struggle because the organization has grown large enough that they no longer know who should be recognized. As terrible as it sounds, many don't want to recognize someone who did something great this time, but is a consistent low performer. It's a difficult position when they can't get their hands around the organization.

Overall empowerment derives from leaders asking instead of telling. If you are a leader, get curious, and instead of dictating how someone completes a task, encourage them to complete it the way that works best for them, but still leads you towards your goals.

From my experience, an executive coach can be internal to the organization, or external. I have served as an internal coach while participating in an in-house program. Personally, I worked with an external coach.

One of the most powerful things you can do to empower employees is to help them discover how their sense of purpose aligns with the work they do. McKinsey research shows that people who say they live their purpose at work are six and a half times more likely to describe themselves as resilient, four times as likely to describe themselves as healthy, six times as likely to want to stay in their job and one and a half times more likely to go above and beyond. To help people find purpose, ask them about meaningful moments in their life and ask them to reflect on how those moments connect with why they do what they do today. Go back to look forward, to understand their identity and direction for a future with engagement and authenticity.

Real talk: a disempowered employee is a disengaged one. I've witnessed organizations stagnate because they suffocated autonomy. I coached a client to switch gears—empowering their team—and they saw a 25% boost in innovation within six months. Here's the deal: empowerment isn't optional; it's fundamental. Delegate, offer autonomy, and involve your team in decision-making. And never forget, growth is ongoing. Offer continuous learning opportunities. As a coach, drive home this message: development and empowerment aren't perks; they're necessities. When your team feels valued, their loyalty and productivity soar. Adopt this as your coaching ethos, and your clients' engagement metrics will thank you.

An executive coach can help both the employee and the leader in this situation. From an employee perspective, coaching can help them understand how their current career opportunity can further their own skills. It can also help them work through challenges that might be butting up against their value system. For leaders, coaching can help them see blindspots (especially if they're open to a 360 like Hogan). It can also help them address culture challenges that they haven't seen before. And, honestly, many leaders have imposter syndrome, which can hurt their ability to see their role clearly, which in turn hurts their ability to lead their team. Addressing their own growth and learning helps them help their team.

Let me lay it out: A team without trust is like a car without fuel; it won’t go far. I recall turning around a client's toxic work environment, boosting collaboration by 30% within just a quarter. We used Gestalt therapy methods to dissolve conflicts and create openness. The key is a 'safe space'—a term often thrown around but rarely understood. Employees should freely express, challenge, and learn. As a coach, you're not just instructing your clients to be collaborative; you're molding them to be leaders worth trusting. In my experience, when trust and collaboration rise, engagement is never far behind. Make this your coaching cornerstone, and watch disengaged employees transform into powerhouse contributors.

Collaboration and trust are the key elements to employee engagement and retention. This is also key in a coaching environment as well. In order to obtain this you must coach the management team to foster these key elements within their teams and help them to better understand why this is so important.

Creating a learning culture is important, establishing the clients opportunity to drive that is often key in improving the environment and honing their own persuasive leadership skills. Focusing on all humans involved and how bets to recruit them for this is crucial.

Creating a "Shadow board" that is comprised of team members outside of the C-Suite and SMT. Allow the shadow board to recommend places for improvement to the board. Allow the shadow board to critique "Board Actual" decisions. This can create a culture of trust, respect and collaboration.

Conflict over ideas, not targeting individuals, is a healthy thing. When the individuals on a team have reached the fourth level of psychological safety, challenger safety, they are better equipped to resolve those conflicts and achieve better outcomes. In order to make it to that level, people must first feel like they belong in the group, it's safe to make mistakes and learn, and it's safe to speak up and offer their own ideas. There are a variety of ways that leaders and model these behaviors, recognize power differentials, and make space for others.

There is beginning to be more empirical research in the field linking coaching to enhanced employee engagement...i.e. a coached leader might have more engaged employees, or a leader who learns coaching skills might have more engaged employees. This line of research is still new but quite promising.

Executive Coaching doesn't have to start at an Executive level. Many companies identify high-potential talent in its pipeline and Executive Coaching can be a useful tool to getting this population to think, reflect and plan differently. The best employee engagement strategies are highly targeted (e.g. Individual needs and skill sets) and provide a clear path to internal progression. Executive Coaching puts high-potential talent in the driving seat, ready to develop skills they will need as they progress in their company.

An executive coach can improve employee engagement by developing leaders' communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence skills. They align goals, provide feedback, and promote recognition. Coaches encourage employee involvement in decision-making, offer development opportunities, and support work-life balance. They also foster a culture of continuous learning, team building, and well-being initiatives. These efforts collectively create a more engaging and motivating workplace.

Employee engagement is not just job satisfaction; it taps into an employee's intrinsic motivation and emotional connection to their role and the organization. Employees are not just driven by tasks but by stories – stories of impact, change, and value creation. Unearth their personal "story"/purpose: what drives them and their aspirations, and how can that intertwine with the company's narrative? Encourage leaders to be storytellers to resonate emotionally with their teams. Showcase how an individual's role plays into the grander narrative of the company. By aligning personal and organizational stories, you create a symbiotic relationship where passion meets purpose, enhancing engagement. It's deeply personal, and because of that, it works.

An Executive Coach can help employees bring front and center their purpose for doing the work they do at the organization they choose to work for. Most employees to not take a job just for the pay check, they take a job that will allow them to feel professionally fulfilled, to contribute, to grow and learn, to advance, to connect and to be a valuable member of the team. While the day to day often does not facilitate that those positive reasons to be engaged are seen and felt as often as they should be, working with a coach can help employees stop and take a wider view of their reasons for wanting to contribute to the organization and reflect on what they can and should do to feel more engaged and aligned with the organization