Leadership, Engagement and Handing Over a Loaded Gun

If this is too long for you to read, skip to Recommendation #4. If intrigued, start back at the beginning to see how we got there.

Would you hand over a loaded gun to someone whose never held a gun before? In Ukraine, citizens who have never held a gun before are being armed to defend their homeland. Even they are handed an unloaded weapon, provided brief guidance on the weapon and directions on how to get basic training with that weapon. The weapons instructors, sourced from across the globe, have thousands of hours of experience shooting and manipulating weapons. Even in this example, it is a clear priority, that these first-time gun owners will need proper training to leverage their new weapon appropriately, safely and effectively – or there will be dire consequences.

Corporate America has a long-standing issue with leadership performance in middle management. To solve for it, numerous predictive analytics, surveys, assessments and ‘insight’ driven platforms and consulting approaches have become a lucrative business. For good reason, they are effective when levered by design and with the full attention and follow up required. However, I’ve yet to see this happen even once. Of all elements, I want to focus on the aspect that is like handing a loaded gun to someone without firearms experience.

With these effective tools, reports and data are given to leaders that don’t know what it means. But… they are a leaders they play it cool, as if they do know. Add to it that the words in the report sound familiar enough, there are colors to make it presentable and to get their time and attention long enough to look at it, you convince them it will be easy and not take up a lot of ‘brain space’… voila - they think they DO know what it means. The truth is, they don’t… and nobody has ever taught them to know what it means. So, one of three things happens.

1.?????They sit on it and don’t take action because they aren’t sure what action to take.

2.?????They draw the wrong conclusions, miss the sources for the symptoms and take actions that exacerbate the problems

3.?????They take-action, but it’s action for sake of being seen doing SOME-thing, though rarely if only by accident, doing something that makes an improvement.

In all instances, we end up in the red… lost credibility from the survey participants, lost credibility in the leader by the subordinates, lost time and money to draw the insights and as demonstrated in our current market – lost engagement resulting in turnover and increasing costs of hire & attrition. So… now what?

My recommendations:

1.?????Honest commitments. Don’t make a verbal or implied commitment to your people if you cannot keep it (i.e. do not have them participate in data gathering, surveys or refer to ‘commitment to our people’ on town halls if the people will not see corrective action or follow-up that is meaningful).

2.?????No loaded weapons. Do not share leadership insights without very clear education on what they mean, how they will be leveraged and the actions that will be taken. If you do not have the scale to have these clear conversations with leaders, then first plan, train and develop those layers before going out with the data. The irony here – most of the times the data tells you that these skills don’t exist as-is.

3.?????Be timely. Action has to be timely. It has to be seen and demonstrated as important, not just stated as important. If you have time to debate on things that are easier to see (i.e. compensation or P/L drivers, then you have time to commit to understanding how to improve employee engagement).

4.?????Show up. If you are a leader that is too busy performing for your boss, that you aren’t around to enable your own team, then you are the centerpiece to your leadership problem. Your job is not to leverage your team to perform for your own boss. Your job is to make it easier for your team to achieve their objectives, aligned to your org’s goals, by moving obstacles – and your relationship with your boss is based on letting her know how she can do the same for you.

Have you seen leadership and engagement efforts that have gone well, or that could have gone better? Please share any take-aways and your recommendations in the comments.