10 Engagement-Building Behaviors for the Boss
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Study after study has shown us that if you're the boss, you are the person with the biggest impact on the productivity, morale and engagement of your team. Here are ten things you can do to improve all three.
1. Show up a lot. All good things flow from this. You get to know your people and they get to know you.
2. Take every opportunity to help individuals and the team succeed. That's your job. It will be easier if you do it in frequent, little steps instead of a few heroic ones.
3. Have lots of short, informal supervisory conversations. Most of your chats with team members about their behavior and performance won't require documentation.
4. Set clear expectations and check for understanding. You may think that your expectations are clear, but check anyway. Check when you set the expectations. Follow up to see how understanding has turned into performance.
5. Praise effort and highlight superior performance. Praise is the tool you use to get people to try. It's also the tool you use to let people know what's important to you.
6. Build on strengths. People will do better and feel better if you can help them develop their strengths. Teams will perform better if team members are using their strengths.
7. Make weaknesses irrelevant. You don't always have to eliminate weaknesses. But you do have to make it so the weaknesses don't affect individual and group performance.
8. Have a transition conversation before you move to formal meetings and documentation. Don't surprise people with documentation. Let them know when you've reached the point where documentation will happen if they don't change.
9. Make sure people have the resources to do what you expect. Resources include skills and time and equipment and support. If your people don't have them, get them before you hold people accountable for results.
10. Weed out those who can't or won't perform. They're cancers eating at your team from the inside.
Boss's Bottom Line
None of this is rocket science. But it all takes work. The good news is that your work will pay off in improved productivity, morale and engagement.
Free Employee Engagement E-Book
This material was my contribution to a powerfully helpful free e-book put together by David Zinger with contributions from members of the Employee Engagement Network. It's called The Top Tens of Employee Engagement. There are almost 100 pages of advice from 30 experts. Here are the titles of just five of the articles.
10 Questions Designed To Engage by Steve Roesler
10 Ways to Engage Remote Teams by Wayne Turmel
10 Principles of Employee Engagement David Zinger
10 Ways to Measure the Impact of Employee Engagement Interventions Stephen J. Gill
Top Ten Tunes of Engagement by David Marklew
Click here for your free copy.
I particulary love #9 - it is so important for leaders to assess that their team has what it needs to be successful, and take responsibility to assure resources are in place.
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Thanks, Julie. This one's forgotten by too many bosses. I can have perfectly clear expectations and you can understand them perfectly, but if you don't have the time, money, people, or authority to get the job done, it's not likely that the job will get done. But if that's the case, I can' hold you accountable.
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Wally - great post.
And #5 is a gem - the phrasing is perfect. "Praise is the tool you use to get people to try. It's also the tool you use to let people know what's important to you."
Managers need to understand that they have a range of tools at their disposal to inspire certain behaviours and praise is incredibly powerful.
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Thanks for that extravagant praise, Connie. It's also true that for most managers, praise is the most under-used tool in the box.
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None of it is rocket science, but much of it is science. There's a lot of research behind the 10 behaviors you just listed.
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Thanks, David. You speak truly. I think research is important to understand what we do and to suggest better ways to do things. But I also think that the research lens, of necessity, focuses very narrowly. We need the narrow view and the wider ones.
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Great summary Wally!
If I had to choose, I'd take numbers 1, 3 and 4. The more communication the better!! Be present, have informal conversations, talk about your expectations.
The more you can open the channels of communication the more you will hear and learn about your team and the challenges they are facing. You will hear about problems earlier, and have a better idea about who to praise and reward.
Open and frequent communications also allow and encourage you to discuss poor performance or improvement areas more quickly rather than waiting for them to become big issues.
Plus when it comes to performance review time, everything will be out on the table and the stress of the process will be gone!
I'm printing this out and sticking it above my desk!
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Thanks, Jamie. All these things work together. But they all grow out of number 1: show up a lot. As the post says, "All good things flow from this." If you're working in an environment where your team is scattered about, you might change this to "touch base a lot."
One point you make that's really important is "when it comes to performance review time, everything will be out on the table and the stress of the process will be gone!" Those conversations and corrections and comments and praise are the real work. The formal evaluation should really be a summing up, with no surprises on either side.
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I'm sure we all have our favorites. I bet we also all have one or two items we'd love to add to the list. Overall, though, I'd say you got some of the biggest ones.
Managers should have to post this list at their desk and read it every day!
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Thanks for those kind words. I learned long ago that I wasn't likely ever to get things perfect and that the comments people like you make add a lot of richness and depth.
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Poor bosses demand uniformity, which doesn't work because people are different. Great bosses (per # 6-7) play to people's strengths.
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Thanks, Laura. Number 7 (making weakness irrelevant) is every bit as important as building on strength, methinks.
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