What Leadership Qualities Are Required to Help Leaders Sustain an Engagement Culture?

[Judy McLeish]

Terry Seamon, just posed a great question to me. I think it is worth a discussion.

If we want to sustain a culture of engagement, what qualities should our leaders possess to ensure that they are able to continually motivate and engage their staff?

Here are some characteristics that we believe that leaders must possess in order to sustain a culture of engagement:

Contagious enthusiasm for what their company, what they are doing and the people they work for.

Overly attentive to their employees and their individual growth objectives and dreams.

Proactive nature with the tendency to create or influence the work environment.

Hard working, ambitious, confident and resourceful individuals. Leading the way!

Engage in activities for their own fulfillment rather than for specific gains or rewards.

[Debbie Payne]

Being able to provide meaningful recognition for a specific effort- this illustrates that the leader "notices" an individual and the contribution they make. Simply saying- I noticed you did XYZ and this was valuable to me and the company, thankyou... can really engage employees. The blanket- "you did a great job", actually is disengaging. Sometimes by looking at what disengages employees we are better able to figure out what to do and not do. so maybe we could add a question to this discussion- what should leaders avoid doing that will disengage others?

[George Reavis]

I also was fortunate to learn from a past employer who, in my case, mentored me in a best practice with which he had engaged employees from start-up to almost two thousand operating units over a span of a half-century. The practice was user-centered in that he worked backwards by giving line managers and even team leaders the tools and life skills they needed to work with their employees in consistently asking (mostly non-verbally) the critical questions for "How are we doing?"

This built five key leadership qualities within those front line leaders. Without any one of which I do not believe you can sustain employee engagement for the long-term.

- gratitude, in recognizing and being appreciative for customers, employees, and stakeholders.

- commitment, where everyone knows what you are about, where you are coming from, and clear about your intentions.

- learning, by being reflective in all that you say and do.

- focused, from paying attention to all activities and the people that are a part of those activities.

- enjoyment, through the satisfaction and achievement experienced in the connections everyone makes.

These qualities are purposely not capitalized or emboldened because the leader that sustains employee engagement does not view them as nouns, subjects, or destinations. Rather, they are simply verbs that demonstrate the journey and a part of who a group is and what they do.

It is important to point out that these front line leaders who sustained employee engagement understood that they could not 'engage' anyone but rather help everyone learn to experience and 'engage' themselves!

[Janice Summers]

This is a great list of atributes here, but I was wondering why Listening was not amoungst the ones specifically called out. I would think that to be a very effective leader of engagement when dealing with adults, you should really be good at listening. Perhaps for many of us we assume it is there inbetween all the atributes that were stated, but I think it deserves to be specifically called out. Don't you?

[Rocky]

What a great topic for discussion. Employee engagement is a difficult and ever changing adventure. Engagement is a constant. It needs perpetual attention. Leaders have to have a finger on the pulse of the culture at all times. That is why I think that a leader has to be a good personal and business coach. The business can only be successful if the inviduals that make up the culture are successful. I believe that success breeds success. Leaders cannot get success from the failure of others. The more successful employees, the more successful the organization. This is not intended to imply that their are never failures. However, successfully navigating failure is a key ingredient to employee engagement. There are also those employees that are not suited to the organization and sometimes that has to be dealt with. However, I do think that the main goal of the leader of an organization is to help each employee be as successful as possible. I think the best way to do this is provide support and coaching when possible.