Creating a high level of employee engagement is easy for some business leaders. For others, it’s difficult. Regardless of your level of proficiency at creating employee engagement, one thing is for sure: an employee’s passion for the company is clearly a leading indicator of future performance.
Leadership drives performance within companies. In large part, a leader’s effectiveness at driving performance is tied to his or her ability to engage their team at a visceral level.
You may be thinking that this is an obvious statement, and I would agree with you. But, there seems to be a need to remind people of this point.
Recently, I presented on the topic of "creating effective leaders" at a client’s annual conference. At the beginning of this presentation, I posed the following question to the audience: "How many of you feel you have highly effective leaders within all departments of your organization?"
The answer, by a show of hands, was startling. Less than 10 percent of the audience raised their hands, indicating that there were significant voids of effective leadership within their organizations. Couple this with the realization that there are too many companies that are underperforming financially, then we’ve got to ask ourselves if there is a connection between effective leadership, employee engagement and sustainable financial performance.
Again, the answer should be an obvious yes.
Over the next couple of months in this column, I will discuss a couple of keys to success to improve employee engagement. Today, let’s start with discussing the importance of defining success and sharing results.
Define success … articulate the vision
Effective leaders define success for their employee team. Every person within the organization needs to be able to articulate and understand the key goals of the organization and their department. Ensuring the employee team understands the vision of the organization is the first step in creating a high level of employee engagement. It’s important that all employees have great clarity regarding what success looks like for the company as a whole as well as for their department.
Share results … keep score
Another step in creating a high degree of employee engagement is reporting the financial and operational results. Top performers want to know how their team is doing. This information helps people understand the cause and effect relationship between their actions and the financial results those actions have produced.
Sharing results means sharing key financial and operational performance data. Don’t leave anything out. When business leaders share performance results, the employee team is then able to transform themselves into highly effective business analysts and consultants to the benefit of the company and all stakeholders.
Sharing performance data adds meaning to an employee’s work and is an easy way to excite and engage the team. Sharing performance data also delivers a strong message that you, as the business leader, trust and value the employee’s input. From an employee’s perspective, without performance data, it’s impossible to fully engage and buy in to a company’s success.
Think about it, if a company doesn’t trust and value its employee team enough to share performance data and results, how engaged and emotionally vested can an employee get? Not very.
Let’s look at this another way. Imagine you’re at a friend’s house getting ready to watch the Super Bowl, only to find out that the volume on the television has been turned off, and that player stats, game analysis and other interesting information that would normally be shown on the screen is instead blocked out and not available. How long do you think you would sit there and watch the game? Not long, I’ll bet, because all the game looks like is a bunch of guys running up and down the field. There are no statistics to sink your teeth into, to analyze and/or to debate with your friends. Boring, right?
What’s the difference if you’re a business leader not sharing meaningful performance data for the company with your employee team?
If the above game scenario describes your company’s leadership style, then your company may not be an inspiring place to work. People may be working there just for the paycheck, waiting to find a company that demonstrates that they value their employees by sharing the company’s vision and performance results with them.
