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Every leader wants to see their employees engaged, truly locked in to the work they’re doing. What some leaders forget is that engagement starts with them. As a leader, your style and approach can either make or break employee engagement.
In this post, I want to highlight the latter—a few insidious ways in which your leadership style can compromise the engagement of your team.
How Leadership Lapses Compromise Engagement
No Sense of Goals or Mission
Your employees want to feel like they’re part of something bigger. They want to have a clear sense of what the company’s trying to achieve, and how their own role furthers those objectives. Are you consistently grounding your leadership style in the Big Picture—or do you get so swept up in the day-to-day that you neglect to connect employees to that broader mission?
Forgetting That You Set the Tone
If you’re constantly working long hours, staying in your office until late into the evening, or sending a lot of after-hours emails and texts, that sends a clear signal to your employees: That they, too, need to be putting in long hours at the expense of their family life. That’s a recipe for burnout, and for poor engagement. Remember that you lead by example, for better or worse!
Not Allowing Employees to Be Heard
Do your employees feel like they can offer ideas or feedback without being judged? It’s vital for your employees to know that you care about their opinions. That doesn’t mean you have to act on them—just that you should provide a channel for employee input.
Failing to Measure Engagement
We live in a world where data and analytics are easily accessible—and that includes data on your employee engagement. Are you sending out surveys? Are you looking at the numbers? And are you using data to plan for ongoing improvement? Leaders, work with your HR team to ensure that you’re taking a methodical and data-driven approach to employee engagement.
And there you have it: My advice for leaders who wonder if they’re helping or hurting their engagement numbers. To speak with me more about engagement, or about potential solutions, reach out directly!