Leadership elements for trust and engagement
Leadership impacts employee engagement in the evolving workplace of today.
Despite this being a hot topic, the issue is a common one across countries. The commonality is that the figures are poor across the globe.
Employee engagement is a direct result of the quality of leadership. Given the way the employee engagement figures are, that only means the quality of leadership is not great. Today’s society demands a much more different leadership approach.
Employee engagement is much more than having regular communication, work involvement, and nice events. Great engagement is engraved by things that have to do with leadership, the values of the corporation and how things are being done.
It’s up to leaders to connect with people, not just communicating to tick a box, so the communication has traction. Communication is not just words but words that are delivered with sincerity and transparency. On top of this, a leader needs to walk their talk. By doing this, it fosters the trust needed for people to want to be there and contribute.
So what exactly is leadership to communicate that fosters engagement?
The message needs to clearly explain how they will set their employees up for success thus opening the pathway to engagement.
Leadership needs to be able to answer the following questions in the positive to create the enablers to underpin the desired engagement behaviour.
– Does our workplace include or offer challenges to the employee for him or her to put their skills into practice?
– Does it include clear values for the work?
– Does it include constructive and unbiased and authentic feedback?
– Does it include encouragement to help the employee try new things?
– Lastly, does it include respect for the employee and his or her beliefs and what that employee may want to say to improve things?
The above questions again highlight the leader’s ability to connect with transparency and sincerity.
Previous generations for various reasons stayed in the jobs yet were not engaged. The younger generations are honest and straight-forward and vote with their feet if they are unhappy.
Without that leadership connection, happiness is harder to find.
Follow the links above to gems that help your focus in being more transparent and your connection with people more heightened.
About the author, Ross
Behavioural leadership coach committed to bringing more soul into business and reducing a leader's stress in managing their people