Alphabet Soup: Employee Engagement from A-Z

[Lisa Forsyth]

I don’t claim to be an expert on Employee Engagement, but I couldn’t resist using David Zinger’s invitation for submissions of an alphabet with the keys to engagement as an opportunity to capture what I have learned so far. These “keys” are a combination of things I have discovered through my own experiences, what I have learned from different management and leadership books, (just finished: The Dip; just started: Remarkable Leadership; up next: Dream Manager), and the insights I have picked up from various voices on the web (like those here at EEN).

Aspirations
Understand what your people aspire to and empower them to reach it--it is their aspirations that make them unique, and they are most engaged when working towards them.

Balance
Sustaining engagement is about maintaining balance, yet organizations still reward (and rely on) people, usually the self-propelled and energetic, who sacrifice this balance at their expense when it serves the purpose of an organization’s success. We can’t force balance, but we can create the conditions for it when we understand the difference between effective and ineffective engagement and recognize its characteristics. To employ the analogy used by authors Jones Loflin and Todd Musig, ineffective engagement can feel like Juggling Elephants—learn how to become the ringmaster of your circus and teach the people you support how to do the same.

Community
Communities embrace the individual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each member and mobilize based on the common belief that the whole is capable of accomplishing much more than the sum of its parts. If employee engagement is to be sustained over time, we must adapt this community mindset, and forge mutually beneficial connections between individual aspirations and company goals. Community cannot be artificially manufactured, but it can be nurtured. Create the conditions for community by adopting a common vocabulary around engagement as it relates to interaction, participation, sharing, fellowship, collective action, results, and success.

Differences
Celebrate the differences between people. Differences are opportunities to step outside our frame of reference and connect with others in a way they find meaningful.

Ego
We are all ego-driven individuals who want to be known for our successes. If you want your people to appreciate the impact employee engagement has on business results, show them how their work matters. We want to know our successes had a meaningful impact on the company's success.

Failure
An engaged employee is more likely to fail, because we are more likely to fail when we stretch ourselves. Yet we often try to soften failure by calling it an oversight, a mistake, or an unfortunate result. This disavowal of failure reinforces fear of failure, so take back ownership of the word failure for the sake of engagement. Encourage self-reliant problem solving, engage employees in the redefinition of failure, and celebrate failing forward.

Giving
Opportunities for employee engagement extend beyond opportunities within their own teams. Managers need to give. We need to give our employees the opportunity to move across assignments, teams, and other boundaries, and we need to give other managers an opportunity to leverage their talents. Organizations that foster giving with serial reciprocity remove barriers to full engagement.

Humor
Appreciate the power of humor and laugh at the humors of work and life at work. People want to have fun on the job, and even brief moments of frivolity and levity generate energy and enthusiasm, spark creativity and innovation, and fuel productivity.

Instruction
Teach the core beliefs and values of engagement to everyone in the organization.

Judgment
Judgment plays a critical role in effective leadership, and poor judgment can undermine any leader's success. Be judicious. Understand what is critical to your people and organization, take all known facts and perceptions into account, and communicate the meaning behind decisions made. Make judgments visible. Engage your people in decision making. Teach them the basis of making sound judgments by involving them in the process where such judgments are made. Share an error in judgment with your team and encourage feedback that reveals errors in judgments, for these too are development opportunities for everyone.

Kinetics
Direct the motion of engagement by understanding and adapting to the different styles, attitudes, feelings, and experiences that inform what people do and how they act.

Loyalty
Inspiring loyalty is a fundamental objective of employee engagement, as feelings of loyalty motivate, empower, and drive us to achieve results. Once loyalty is achieved, it must be kept in balance in order to sustain engagement--don’t throw too many sticks, as the loyal will fetch them whether they were intended to be fetched or not.

Motivation
Forge and evangelize the connection between individual aspirations and the strategy and goals of the organization, and people will feel motivated to achieve results and empowered to make a difference.

Nuance
It is easier to dismantle engagement than it is to build it, and it can be less obvious when engagement is lost versus when it is gained. Employment engagement requires astute attention to nuances, those subtle changes in tone or behavior that suggest disjoint between employees, leaders, managers, and organizations, and result in disengagement.

Optimism
The belief that goodness pervades reality is what keeps us moving forward. Some people will always find a negative spin, and negativity is such a heavy weight to carry that it makes it hard for people to move. By embodying the belief of the optimist, we can inspire our teams to expect favorable results as they take on new challenges. We can create enthusiasm and a desire to excel that is not hindered by the roadblocks of negativity.

Passion
Passion dwindles when it is left unsatisfied for too long. The concepts can be resurrected, the keys can be re-examined, and the commitment to engagement rebuilt, but if you want to sustain engagement, finds tangible ways of reaching it.

Quality
The desire to improve Quality is the fuel behind employee engagement--increase the quality of conversation, commitment, interactions, executions, deliverables, and results, and you increase the quality of the organization.

Recognition
Build a culture of recognition that rewards the extraordinary, wonderful, unusual, and uncommon, as all employees, regardless of individual differences, want their hard work recognized, especially when it looks easy. Ask, listen, and find creative ways to recognize.

Scarcity
Build win-win relationships based on a model of scarcity, not abundance. When resources are scarce, the focus is on linking and leveraging them in new and diversified ways to foster growth, but when resources are abundant, they are used in a standardized manner that actually stunts new growth. Embrace the idea that the unique talent of each employee is a scarce resource, and foster an environment where this uniqueness is leveraged to diversify the organization and ensure its success.

Trust
Build relationships born of trust. When you trust your employees, they will feel honored and respected, but when you fail to trust them, they will feel undervalued and become disengaged. Examine your beliefs and check your actions--it is much easier to talk about trust, than to show trust, and much easier to lose trust than to build trust.

Unity
Create one clear center from which you and all the people you support consistently derive a high degree of security, power, wisdom and success. Champion an “all for one, and one for all” attitude, and energize an organization around the common purpose of engagement.

Visibility
Visibility, and the involvement that comes with it, is crucial to forging a shared purpose across an organization. Engage employees in the big picture and provide them visibility into where their own contribution is meaningful. Set up a clear communication process for reaching agreements about what individuals, leaders, managers, and the organization can expect from each other as they work towards engagement.

Wonder
By challenging ourselves and our employees to look at things with the same sense of puzzled interest we did as children, we can empower new ways of thinking that challenge assumptions, stimulate engagement, and re-instill our sense of wonder in the world.

Xanadu
When you seek employee engagement, you are embarking on a journey that is constantly evolving. But we all need a finishing line. The finishing line is Xanadu—that idyllic place of great contentment where it all comes together.

Yielding
Engagement is an active and constantly evolving process, but when we continuously reach for new heights, the finishing line can seem further out of reach. We can find ourselves asking when a situation of opportunity became predicable in its sameness. Yielding, powering-down, and even letting go, are all key to sustaining employee engagement. “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time” (Seth Godin, The Dip).

Zeal
When we approach a situation with zeal, we approach it with an enthusiastic diligence that reveals new possibilities, alternatives, and options. Create an atmosphere of zeal, where others can seize opportunities and solve problems, and you will empower them to achieve, generate enthusiasm, and foster their desire to excel.

[Lisa Forsyth]

Thanks David and Terrence for the encouraging words. It means a lot to a rookie especially coming from the pros. My understanding of Employee Engagement is still developing (not that I expect it to every stop developing) and my perspective is from the middle. I am a manger working with my employees to develop our team into one that becomes a model for engagement—a model formed through mutual commitment and trial and error, but one that hopefully produces some repeatable ways to build and sustain engagement that can be shared across an organization that has some of the mechanisms for it in place.

[Terrence Seamon]

Lisa,
Ditto what David said. Some of your choices were definitely unexpected (like kinetics) and thought provoking (like wonder). Nice job.
Terry

[David Zinger]

Lisa,
You've got it covered from A to Z. I appreciated a number of them. I liked "yielding" and your tip into Seth's The Dip. I also like the word nuance as I don't think I have ever seen that word connected to employee engagement. Thanks for taking us to Xanadu.
If you are a rookie at blogging you will be in the majors in no time with this quality of writing.
David