Strategy and leadership must come together to create real balanced prosperity. One important way you as a leader can improve prosperity, is to align your culture (leadership development, values, purpose, connection) with strategy.
Go put creed into your deed
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the past 6 months, I've been researching and developing an exciting new strategy model that expands possibility for leaders seeking to optimize long term value.
It appears that while lip service is given to notions like core purpose, values, and offering employees support and development, at the end of the day, between the discomforting pace of increasing complexity and the compelling thrill of "winning the game", the leader often disproportionately focuses on leveraging competitive advantage, expense cutting and short term profit.
As a continuation of my previous article Mastering Employee Engagement, below are 4 additional strategies to help you create meaning and connection at work.
1. Model Appreciation and Weave it Into Your Culture
According to a worldwide Towers Watson study, the single highest driver of employee engagement is whether or not workers feel their managers are genuinely interested in their well-being. Today, only 40% of workers believe that. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, "Why Appreciation Matters So Much," Tony Schwartz reminds us that all employees need to be praised, honored, and routinely acknowledged for their efforts and achievements. When this acknowledgment comes from a heart-centered place, a deeper connection is made and engagement arises naturally.
2. Build Employee Engagement Into Strategic Planning
The legacy of strategic planning has been disproportionately focused on how to achieve competitive advantage. It takes into consideration market segmentation, political, economic, social and technological trends, competition, internal capability, product line viability and plots a course to a desired future state mapping out key initiatives and resources required. Developing human beings (or "human capital" to be buzz-word compliant) is a separate function, supported by a separate industry, rarely aligned with strategy.
Strategy and leadership must come together to create real balanced prosperity. One important way you as a leader can improve prosperity, is to align your culture (leadership development, values, purpose, connection) with strategy.
3. Practice Servant Leadership
If the single highest driver of employee engagement is you being genuinely interested and serving the well-being of your employees (according to the Towers Perrin study), how do you do that when the tyranny of the urgent is attacking you with a cacophony of competing agendas? And when we all operate within a cultural paradigm of completive-adversarial behavior growing from erroneous beliefs of scarcity?
Certainly developing a practice to maintain presence of mind and grounding is a start. Then, we must enable ourselves to undergo a counter-cultural paradigm shift from the guiding question of "how do I get what I need from them" to "how do I really hear what they need from me, and orient myself to support them - from a place of caring". People feel understood with when you connect to their pain, and inspired when you show them a solution.
4. Serve People's Authentic Motivation
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Author, Daniel Pink, in his latest book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, discovered that 30% of job growth in will be "algorithmic" - tasks that follow process and instructions - perfect for people who are extrinsically motivated - by money. The other 70% of job growth will be heuristic - tasks that require the evaluation of possibilities while defining creative solutions. For the heuristic work life of the future, the intrinsically motivated seek inherent satisfaction in the activity itself, valuing freedom, purpose, challenge and well being over money. According to Pink, you can motivate your people by extending 1) autonomy in their jobs, 2) learning opportunities for mastery and 3) a sense of meaning through purpose. These will be the “A” players of the future and always outperform in the long term.
Master Employee Engagement (Part I) - The Most Important Strategy For Revitalizing Your Organizatio
When contemplating the notion of employee engagement, it occurred to me that the systemic cause of low engagement is a crisis of meaning. And the highest calling of a leader is to be an organizational logotherapist.
Access Your Unrealized Leadership Potential
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” ~ Lao Tsu, Ta...
A Leader’s Guide to Better Listening
I’ve been studying a revolutionary system for leading, innovating, problem solving, and developing strategy. It was developed by MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer, in conjunction with seminal thought leader Peter Senge. It’s described simply in a business book they co-authored called “Presence”. The entire process begins begins with listening.
