Boost Engagement - now and for the long term.

In the VUCA world, most companies struggle to retain and fully engage their employees. In this article, I will describe the three most important ways to boost engagement for the long term and the three pillars that will help you succeed with your people.

Human support

The most crucial of the three is human support. As the proud owners of mirror cells in our brains, we depend on human attention. Our performance is directly linked to how much of it we get. That is why top athletes and managers always have coaches, often several of them; world-class performers employ whole teams of supporters.

It is not only about mirror neurons. When two people support each other, there is an exchange of emotional energy and tacit knowledge, as well as value appreciation. When we work with a coach or trainer, we feel seen, connect the dots much faster, and discover new possibilities much easier than alone.

This happens provided the coach has a positive attitude, values the client, and has the necessary skills to provide the right structure. On the contrary, an unskilled or overwhelmed manager will most likely damage the goodwill and engagement of their people.

In this context, good social skills, previous leadership experience, or even coaching credentials are insufficient to understand each employee's unique intrinsic motivations and align those motivations with team and organizational goals.

Many companies skimp on coaching budgets. Others hire coaches but don’t apply what they bring strategically or systemically. Coaching and training are often treated as a short-term band-aid rather than systematic support for employees and managers. Few see the actual value of creating a coaching culture.

What to do?

Never neglect the power of right & systematic support, especially if you aim for significant progress.

Step 1. Employ the best coaches, mentors, and trainers—often not those with similar backgrounds. Make sure they have the necessary capacities—think it through thoroughly. This is as crucial as hiring the right staff. They don’t need subject matter expertise in your industry.

Step 2. Do everything you can to follow up and apply the ideas from the coaching and training sessions. Create buddy and group systems to implement systematically and learn continuously. This is the crucial task of any leader.

Step 3. Create a coaching culture. Learn together by coaching each other, doing systemic work, and following up. Treat those activities as sacred for your business - never let the other tasks take the space of the support work.

The above might seem complicated and an additional burden on your already tight schedule. It is complex but can be made much easier if you create the right systems—more about them at the end of this article.

Personal Energy

Only 24% of employees strongly agree that their organization cares about their well-being. When leaders ignore well-being, employees' disconnection grows. It's already a big problem. Gallup Institute

Well-being generates fresh or renewed energy, which creates the drive for performance. No support will be sufficient if your people lack personal power. To harness that power, you must help them maintain it at high levels in physical, emotional, mental, and core domains.

You can help your people have more energy in various ways. First, you must create the right conditions for optimal work. Office design, equipment, lighting and ventilation, recovery rooms and activities, and task scheduling play a significant role. Every company can make progress here.

Second, you must help them become open to high-energy practices, which will get them in even better shape. Education, training, and modeling are necessary, as are supportive people, devices, benefits, and recognition for those who progress the most in this area.

Third, you must create a culture of high energy. If you authentically focus on boosting energy sources, your people will pay you back with their engagement. Again, you can find professionals who will help create optimal systems and help your people transform themselves, injecting more vitality into your organization.

The crucial thing is to balance the needs of the individuals with the needs of the organization. Learning about the neuroscience of motivation, the psychology of human engagement, and resilience will be helpful here. You cannot jump ahead of yourself or your tribe, so implement those ideas step by step.

Also, remember, unless you train sprinters, you want results climbing steadily, not just short spikes of excellent performance. So, take care of the fundamentals described here before you expect fantastic results. Deal?

Team Unity

United teams overcome barriers to performance and achieve much more than divided ones, yet leaders often still forget this when trying to push business forward. It is time to focus on where the money is made—only in well-functioning teams.

Your first goal is to address the common Why. Your team must have a unifying purpose to which everyone believes and is committed. ‘Making more money’ or ‘being the best’ as the purpose will not be enough—it must attract all kinds of personalities and values and include the motivational diversity of your people.

Your second duty is to foster positive and fruitful relationships between your staff. It starts with helping them fully align based on their values, needs, and aspirations, which must also be aligned with team and company aims. The main tools here are the buddy system and designed alliance. Solid agreements to which everyone is committed make a difference - so focus on them without delay.?

Step three is to agree on expected behaviors and ways to secure and measure them to make the agreements work. The best way to do this is to create a team charter, written in bold letters, with a team agreement that includes the team's values, vision, goals, and rules that everyone will abide by.

You will see dispersion, chaos, and diving productivity if the above steps are neglected. Rules are not 'necessary evils'; consider them tools for unity and team effectiveness. Yet they must be formulated together, accepted voluntarily, and never pushed on or “rained” onto people.

It is best to think of the team as a living human system. The team is like a garden; it must be watered consistently and fertilized generously to bear fruit. At some point, a united team will learn to manage itself, which will free your time so you can focus on strategic aspects of your business.

Model for Implementation

How can you provide the right conditions for Personal Energy, Human Support, and Team Unity in your organization? To be genuinely and steadily engaged, people, in this case, your employees and managers, need consistency in implementing the above and a human approach. Both are scarce in today’s organizations.

Consistency is scarce because managers don’t have the skills and don’t have the time to be consistent in taking care of energy, support, and unity. It is simply not a priority. Human approach? That requires even more: changing managerial mindset, leadership and coaching skills, and changing the organizational culture. So what are the possible ways of achieving it?

One way is to train managers to become engagement agents and ambassadors of coaching culture. It works to some degree, but most organizations fail here. It happens because managers often don’t have a background in social sciences. They develop a go-get-it mindset and focus on results, not so much on people.?

Even if you want to say, ‘’We hire only talented managers; we don’t have that problem’, let me warn you that managerial skills in directing high-performing teams are not the same as team development skills based on expertise in psychology and systematic practice in facilitation.?

There is also the ongoing dilemma for any manager, regardless of their capabilities, of conflicting priorities between leadership (vision of what is possible regarding business results) and developing the team and facilitating its changing dynamics.

A new promising way to implement what I call engagement culture is to divide the manager’s duties into two areas: 1. Results and 2. People. Then, give the job to two different people focused on delivering higher results in each area:

1. The operational manager - responsible for setting and achieving team goals.
2. Support coach - responsible for the team’s well-being, unity, and growth

At People Centric Organizations (PCO group), they call a support coach a “PCO Sherpa." Unlike operational managers, they have the expertise and time to deal with the complexities of working through people in a VUCA environment.?

Such a coach/trainer/guide is a highly skilled facilitator in human skills such as social observation, conflict prevention, team dynamics, and motivational coaching. They can work with several teams in a company, for example, ? day a week with each team, making the whole firm more efficient and cohesive.

With such support, team members develop systemic emotional and social intelligence, allowing them to largely self-motivate, self-organize, and self-correct. This allows the operational manager to focus on operations instead of forcing or cajoling various individuals to do their job. Ultimately, everyone is happier, and PCO claims it doesn’t involve higher budgets.

Summary

To achieve outstanding results, your teams need exceptional energy, motivation, and unity. That means you must implement systems that consistently boost those three qualities in all your employees. The key from my research and Gallup Institute's findings is to build human support structures in your organization.?

Now, you have a choice: You can try to do it through your managers by teaching them all the necessary mindsets and skills or hire an organization such as PCO to do it for you. Both cases will require many changes, but the results will likely exceed your expectations if you truly commit to becoming an Engaging Organization.?

#engagement #leadership #motivation #HumanResources #Innovation

Jacek "Skyski' Skrzypczyński, engagement and performance researcher/coach

consulted with John Thompson