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FIRST-CLASS LEADERSHIP E-ZINE - ISSUE NO.57 / DECEMBER 2009

Dear Reader,

When I completed the article below, I realized that it took me over a year to finish the articles series on engagement. I also realized that over that time I got quite a few new insights into this topic. And I realized that this year I often gave other work priority over completing this articles series. Good or bad? Who knows...

Anyway, I'm happy to have finally completed this series and I hope that you'll find it useful. If you'd like to receive a copy of the complete series in one document, send a blank email with subject line 'e-book engagement' to progressu@progressu.com and we'll send you the complete document in return.

Wishing you the very best for 2010. I get the feeling that it will be a much more pleasant year than 2009 - this is the optimist speaking...

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

Series: The (not so) Secret Keys to High Engagement
Part V of V: Putting It All Together - Possible Consequences for You

To read Part I of this series, visit http://www.progressu.com/ezine-leadership-2008-4.php
To read Part II of this series, visit http://www.progressu.com/ezine-leadership-2008-5.php
To read Part III of this series, visit http://www.progressu.com/ezine-leadership-2009-1.php
To read Part IV of this series, visit http://www.progressu.com/ezine-leadership-2009-2.php

By Charlie Lang, Executive Coach & Trainer
Corporate Culture & Senior Leadership Expert @ Progress-U Limited

Download this article

We have now looked in more detail how to maximize the emotional commitment factors. As you can see, it’s not extremely complicated, we just may need to part from some old habits and establish some new ones.  Most of all, we need to care because, as the saying goes: “People don’t care until they know you care.”

When we truly care for the people who work for us, like how parents care for their kids, or like how you may care for your spouse or friends, then people tend to get more committed to us in return. Caring doesn’t mean doing everything the other party wants, in the same manner as good parents wouldn’t do everything their kids want. It’s this paradoxical combination of toughness and tenderness that creates true commitment.

The research on engagement mentioned in the first part of this series was repeated by the CLC and the results are now available. It is interesting to see that not much has changed between 2004 and 2008 when it comes to the importance of emotional commitment in creating high engagement.

What about rational commitment?

Of course, it is also useful to improve rational commitment as it has an impact as well, especially rational commitment to the organization. The more traditional approaches towards higher employee engagement such as compensation and benefit systems, career path, employee protection plans, etc. positively influence the rational commitment types. The drawback of these approaches is that they tend to be quite costly and less effective than any investments into emotional commitment.

From our experience, we know that working on the emotional commitment types requires significant work on the leadership level. The challenge in many organizations is that many senior leaders believe that they don’t need to learn or change anymore. They believe that the fact that they reached the top is sufficient testimony of their capability and that they don’t need to learn anymore.

Truly great leaders know that this is false. They know that in order to stay on top of the game, one needs to keep ‘sharpening the saw’ as Stephen R. Covey calls it in his bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Or like the legendary and extremely successful former CEO of Kimberly Clark, Darwin Smith answered the question about the secret of his success: “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”

Let me summarize some of our key findings on how to enhance emotional commitment and as a result increase employee engagement:

• It all starts with hiring the “right” people, “right” meaning candidates who are a good match in both eligibility (experience, education, skills, etc.) and suitability (personality traits, workplace preferences, personal values, etc.). We found particularly the newly launched version of Harrison Assessments (HATS) to be a great tool to support this process.
• Even if you haven’t hired the ideal people in terms of suitability and eligibility, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to exchange them all. Most people can be developed through appropriate training and coaching programs. Even personality traits can be developed to some extent. At the same time, best practice is to periodically assess if we have the right people on the bus in the right seats. Sometimes moving people into a different seat on our bus or another bus is a faster and more effective way than trying to make people fit into the seat or to make the seat fit to the people.
• Groupness remains an important factor for high emotional commitment to teams and organizations and leaders can use the levers ‘direction’, ‘differentiation’ and ‘identity’ to increase groupness or the sense of belonging in the group (team, department, division, business unit or company) they are leading. The key lies in working out what can be exciting to the people we are leading. Mission statements like “We aspire to be one of the world’s great specialist banking groups” are – sorry – not very inspiring to me. “To make the world a more sociable place”, the mission statement of the Australian alcoholic beverage company Lion Nathan has the potential to inspire all stakeholders (employees, customers, shareholders). Equally important is to make all such statements (vision, mission, values, differentiators, brand definition, etc.) so simple that they can be easily understood and communicated. Making things simple and yet meaningful takes a lot of effort, actually.
• In order to enhance emotional commitment to the manager, it is important that managers expand their leadership repertoire to include the principles, mindset, skills, and processes of effective coaching. This presents a special challenge here in Asia where many employees are not used to taking  ownership and responsibility and still prefer to be told what to do. From our practice of working with numerous organizations in this region we know that while more challenging, it is very possible to successfully implement coaching as a leadership style also here in Asia. The benefits are numerous, an important one being increased levels of emotional commitment to the manager and as a result higher engagement.

Take for example our company, Progress-U.  Modesty aside, we are proud to have a highly engaged workforce and never take it for granted. We know fully well that a continuous effort is needed and establishing some positive processes and organizational and individual habits have proven to be very helpful in sustaining a high engagement culture.  This in turn translates to a strong desire in all of us to ensure that our clients progress towards the goals they want to reach for their organization and/or themselves personally. We are passionate about our work and we keep innovating, improving our programs and approaches, making what works well work even better. We pay attention to walking the talk and applying the same principles that we found effective for our clients to our own organization.

We’d be happy to discuss more with you how we could assist you in your efforts to increase engagement. Contact me at charlie.lang@progressu.com to arrange for a first conversation. I’m passionate about this topic and would love to talk about it with you.

Let’s keep progressing!

Charlie Lang

This is the end of this series of five articles. If you would like to receive all five articles as one e-book, please write to progressu@progressu.com with subject line “e-book engagement” and we’ll send you the same in return.

For more information related to Progress-U Leadership Training and Coaching, please click here.

For more information about the author of this articles click here.