What Kind of Leaders Do You Need?

By Keith Ayers, President of the Integro Leadership Institute

So much has been written on the subject of leadership. In fact if you were to search on Amazon.com today, you would find over 16,000 books with the word leadership in the title. So by now we should know everything there is to know on the subject, and everyone in leadership role is doing a fantastic job, right?

If that was true, Gallup research would be showing significantly more than 29% of the US workforce as engaged. It is important for us to understand that our leaders are either increasing engagement, or decreasing it—there is no middle ground. Everything a leader does that impacts on employees either increases or diminishes engagement.

The Truly Engaged Employee

Rather than start by looking at what kind of leaders you need, I suggest we should get really clear on what it means to be a truly engaged employee. We then we can better understand the kind of leadership we need to provide.

When looking at human motivation, I think it is helpful to do it in the context of The Whole Person Concept or Iceberg Model that we described in a recent Leadership Update. The underlying principle in this model is that all motivation comes from within the person. More specifically, motivation comes from the Needs or Values levels of our model.

In other words, people do what they do either to satisfy a need or because they believe they should (i.e. it is consistent with their values). Full Engagement rarely comes from just satisfying employees needs. Receiving a pay rise or bonus, extra benefits or even a promotion can have a temporary impact on engagement, but it doesn't last long. The fully engaged employee is one whose needs and values are aligned with their work and their organization.

Five Leadership Skills that Increase Engagement

After almost 30 years of research I have determined that there are five essential skills that leaders must have if they are going to succeed in increasing employee engagement. They are:

1. Building Trust. Trust is an essential ingredient in increasing engagement. The first thing leaders need to know about building trust is that it does not happen just because you are trustworthy. People do not know how trustworthy you are until you demonstrate it by using trust building behaviors.
   The most important of these trust building behaviors is to trust others. We build trust by trusting others. This requires a basic belief in people... a belief that people are essentially trustworthy. After all, if you don’t have trustworthy employees, why did you hire them and why are they still there?
   
2. Mentoring. The relationship between the employee and his or her immediate manager is a critical factor in how engaged the employee will be. We have to get away from the idea that Managers cannot mentor the people who report to them. The Gallup research is very clear on this point. Employees need feedback. They need to know how they are performing and to be able to discuss their needs for growth and development with a Manager who cares about them—and not just once a year at review time.
   This is a must have skill for effective leaders. They need to be able to give and receive feedback and to coach and counsel employees in a way that increases engagement and commitment.
   
3. Inclusion. Whether employees feel like an insider or an outsider also impacts on their level of engagement. Effective leaders know that everyone on their team has strengths the team needs to be successful. They know how to get the best out of each person regardless of their ethnic background, gender, age or sexual orientation. They understand that people with different personal values can work together effectively when they commit to the same values about trustworthiness and standards of work performance.
   
4. Alignment. Engaged employees feel aligned with their organizations Purpose, Values and Vision. Their work is meaningful to them because their leader helps them see the connection between what they do and the success of the organization. The effective leader also understands that gaining their team's commitment to the organization's values increases the team's performance standards as well as their engagement.
   
5. Team Development. Effective leaders understand the potential for significant increases in performance through high performing teams. They make sure that all team members understand the strengths they and other team members bring to the team. They work at developing a process that capitalizes on all of these strengths. The leaders focus is on developing the leadership potential of each team member, and ultimately implementing a shared leadership approach to continuously improving performance that is owned by the team.
   

All of these skills are needed to fully engage employees. If any of them are missing, engagement will be diminished. The challenge in developing these skills is that they are dependent upon one another. That is, you have to build trust before you can be effective at mentoring, and you will need your mentoring skills to be effective at inclusion and alignment. You won't have much success at getting all employees aligned unless they feel they are an insider. To build a high performing team, the leader needs all of the above skills.

The reality is that while these skills don't come naturally to many managers, they can be learned. But extensive research by Daniel Goleman (author of Primal Leadership) on leadership learning has established that they cannot be learned during a single training event. Developing these skills will for many managers require the unlearning of old habits, often habits of a lifetime, and the learning of new habits. It takes time, reinforcement, practice and a serious commitment from both the organization and the managers involved.

With all the evidence we now have about the significant increases in organizational performance as employee engagement increases, we challenge you to ponder the two following questions—What kind of Leaders do you need? Can you afford not to make the effort to develop them?