Step up to Leadership – A Key to Employee Engagement

I was recently talking to a business owner that told me that his people were not “engaged”.  I asked him to clarify engagement; I wanted to ensure that our definitions were similar.  His response was that younger people today don’t care about their companies that they work for and they only care about themselves.  These comments puzzled me; I asked how that was different from other employees?  After all we all think of ourselves first?  After a discussion we determined that the issue was not the employees attitudes but rather the inabilities of management to connect with their younger counterparts.  His management team consists of older individuals that are not connecting with the millennial generation.  This is an issue with many organizations and we also see this in sports today.  I recently heard some sports casters suggesting that the old coaching methods are no longer relevant.  Coaches that are tough on players are not inspiring the younger generation; the younger coaches that are connecting with these young millionaires are not using pressure tactics and calling their players out.  If they’re changing their way in sports to get the most out of their team I would suggest that we need to be doing the same in business.

I continued to explain that managers today need to have the skill set to connect with all 4 generations in the workplace.  Never before in our history have we had these 4 generations all in the workplace at the same time.  Our managers need the skills to connect and inspire each of these different groups of people.   They think differently and what motivates them is different.  Leasers are under pressure to lead their teams and people and new tools are needed to connect with their people.

"Tell me what to do, and I'll do it to protect my job." 

 "Make me want to do it, and I'll do it to the best of my ability."

Supervisors who understand this simple truth and know how to implement it are the ones who create impact in today's organizations. Great managers develop high-performance teams that get results because they know how to lead and inspire a team, not just manage it.  

One tool that we offer participants in our Leadership program is what we call an “Innerview”.  This tool gives managers a simple process so that they can connect with their staff.  This tool is often brought up by participants that have gone through the program, they comment that it has been a breakthrough for them and their relationships with others at work.

The “Innerview” is a process of finding out what is important to others, and the questions are based on factual questions, causative questions, the how and why and value-based questions.  The idea of the process is to connect with people at level that they never have in the past and gain a deeper understanding of what is important to them so that as managers we can inspire them.

Try it, you’ll be surprised at the results!!