3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement Begins with Engaged Leaders

If you’re looking for the holy grail of management, then employee engagement is where you should focus. When team members are fully bought into and actively participate in achieving the organization’s mission, then the team is all but guaranteed to be successful. 

But employee engagement isn’t something that can simply be turned on and off. It is embedded into the organizational culture and built by engaged leaders.

Being a leader involves significant responsibility. Part of this responsibility is modeling the behaviors that you expect from your team. If you want to improve employee engagement, then you must be a more engaged leader. 

Focus on these three areas:

1. Engaged leaders openly live the organization’s values. Leaders show that they aren’t exempt from the team’s core expectations. 
2. Engaged leaders emphasize transparent, multidirectional, and free flowing communication among the team and throughout the organization. Employees feel a connection with a company’s mission when they also feel a positive connection with leadership. Employees feel especially supported, engaged and committed when they know that they are being heard.
3. Perhaps, most importantly, engaged leaders share responsibility for the team’s successes and failures. Employee engagement is practically impossible when employees bear the responsibility for the company’s performance while disengaged leaders sit on the sidelines. On the other hand, employees are highly likely to rally behind a leader that shows compassion through a coaching approach.

So, before you start developing policies designed to engage your team, please be sure that you yourself are truly engaged. Trying to build employee engagement without fully engaged leadership is a non-starter. 

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