How to Increase Engagement

Individuals can become engaged in two ways: through self-directed engagement and through engaging leadership. For most, sustaining self-directed engagement requires the personal connections that come from an engaging leader. Individuals ultimately choose how to use their discretionary effort, but leaders should seek out and facilitate mutually beneficial ways to inspire them to use such effort. Engaging leadership is about tapping into an individual‧s potential to allow greater and more satisfying results for themselves, their leaders, and their organizations.

Through intentional actions and specific behaviors, leaders can increase engagement and tap into the discretionary energy of others. It is important to for leaders to recognize that both their abilities and their rapport with others directly influence success levels. The stronger the interpersonal connection, the better the chance a person will be willing to engage.

PRINCIPLE

A strong interpersonal connection with a leader is the primer for individual engagement.

Developing strong interpersonal connections requires leaders to have a biopic perspective. Through one lens leaders are mindful of their intentions, actions, and behaviors; through the second lens, they create personal connections and relationships with others.

The First Lens: Self-Mindfulness

The engaging leader approach is built on mindfulness of self and of others. Being mindful is being aware of internal thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions. It is also being aware of the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions of others. Being mindful means listening to an inner voice and willingly and intentionally finding ways to connect with others on a meaningful, personal level.

Self-mindfulness is important to engagement for a number of reasons. First and foremost, leaders are the primary role model for others—and people do monitor their leaders’ engagement levels. While this monitoring may not be explicit or intentional, people nevertheless pick up on their leaders’ engagement vibes. They notice levels of trust in the organization, methods of managing performance, and levels of emotional engagement. The more leaders engage, the more likely they will be to inspire others to engage. Therefore, it is critical for leaders to monitor their own level of engagement to make sure it models well for others.

The second reason mindfulness is important is because in order to truly engage others, a leader must get to know and understand them. Self-exploration gives a leader practice at finding an inner voice and deeper thoughts and emotions. It requires leaders to ask themselves some challenging questions about the implications of trust or distrust in their own work relationships; about their preferences when others manage their performance; and about the extent to which they are emotionally connected to their work. Once leaders know themselves well, they are more likely to empathize with others as they explore and articulate their own needs. Asking themselves challenging questions will make it easier to ask others the same kinds of questions.

While it is not easy, leaders can become more mindful through self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-management. Self-awareness occurs as leaders become aware of personal opinions, thoughts, feelings, preferences, and heuristics. Heuristics are unconscious routines that individuals develop in their lives. They are hard-wired into the brain, and because of this, people often fail to recognize them. Instead, they often believe that everyone shares their world view and sees things the same way as themselves. Just recognizing that these tendencies exist is the first step toward understanding them and their influence on individual thoughts and actions.

Self-understanding occurs when leaders take their self-awareness and known heuristics and explore them to better comprehend how they shape personal perspectives, character, and leadership approaches. Understanding their own leadership approach allows leaders to actively and consciously make choices about how to interact with others. It can also facilitate a better understanding of how others perceive their leader. This kind of self-understanding is necessary for leaders to achieve congruence between who they are and who they want to be.

The congruence that an individual seeks as a leader happens through action, which is where self-management takes place. If awareness is the internal recognition of yourself and understanding is the internal comprehension of it, then self-management is the part most visible to others. This is because people more easily recognize actions and behaviors (as opposed to thoughts). For example, if a leader is consistently playing to peoples’ strengths, it will likely be noticed. These visible behaviors allow leaders to build more effective and engaging relationships.

Getting to know yourself can be a scary process, but it does not have to be. Think of it as an iterative process over time. Individuals live and learn, which requires their perspectives, preferences, opinions, and approaches to evolve with time.

Engaging leaders can take advantage of many ways to develop self-awareness and self-understanding, each of which is a step toward more effective self-management. Self-assessments are a great place to start. Effective self-assessments provide a framework for learning about yourself, and yourself in relation to others. Some particularly helpful self-assessments include:

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(r) (MBTI(r))

Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior(tm) (FIRO-B(r))

SPEED of Trust(r) Audit

Emotional Intelligence Self Appraisal(tm)

In addition to self-assessments (which risk incorporating significant amount of personal bias when individuals lack self-awareness or are not honest about personal shortcomings), multi-rater assessments, such as a 360-degree feedback assessment, are quite valuable. Multi-rater assessments allow participants to recognize personal traits they may not have been aware of previously. Being aware of these blind spots and understanding them can lead to increased congruence between personal thoughts and corresponding actions or behaviors. It may also highlight the need for self-work. The self-awareness that comes as a result of these assessments often requires individual flexibility and a willingness to adjust previous leadership approaches.

Engaging leaders can become self-aware in other ways as well. For example, journaling can be helpful in capturing a state of mind, including thoughts on physical and emotional reactions to situations. However, journaling is only helpful if writers revisit and explore their entries and learn from them afterwards. Thinking about what happened and why can be insightful, and if done with an open mind, can lead to greater self-understanding and more effective choices.

Another way to become more self-aware is to have open discussions and forums on important topics. Numerous topics can generate thought-provoking discussions, including personal leadership philosophies, past practices from leaders who did or did not engage people, what people like and dislike most about their work as a leader, the role that trust plays in working with others, what unique motivators each person has, and how people prefer to be managed. These discussions can help participants discover other helpful points of view.

Forging personal connections with others also requires that leaders be genuine and be perceived as genuine. Only through honest, direct, and genuine conversations can leaders engage others.

PRINCIPLE

To be authentic and genuine, you must understand who you are (and who you are not) and who you want to be as a leader.

Former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico said, “Beware of the tyranny of small changes to small things. Rather, make big changes to big things.” Becoming an engaging leader may mean making big changes, and it is a choice each leader has to make. Engaging leaders do not cheapen themselves by simply going through the motions; instead, they buy into the importance and value of self-mindfulness and authenticity when working with others. Being social is a part of that authenticity and a part of the human experience. Sometimes leaders lose sight of the need for human connection. Becoming engaging may require a willingness to reconnect with the human side of the workplace or in some cases to reinvent one‧s self with a renewed sense of conviction to be authentic and genuine.

“One day, out of nowhere, you realize you don‧t know who you are, and none of the cards in your wallet provide the slightest clue to your real identity.”

— SAM KEEN, FIRE IN THE BELLY

The Second Lens: Creating Personal Connections and Relationships

Through the second lens, leaders must view personal connections and relationships as the primary vehicle for engaging others. This may require a fundamental paradigm shift in the way leaders think about their colleagues: Rather than think about their colleagues only as knowledge workers, they must recognize them as human beings who have personal goals, desires, and needs. This makes creating connections and building relationships critical. If leaders want their colleagues to be loyal and committed, they must reciprocate that loyalty and commitment. The only way to achieve this is through meaningful, positive personal connections and strong relationships.

Leaders must take four key actions to connect with and engage others. These key actions are the four cornerstones of engaging leadership:

Build trust as the foundation of effective relationships.

Motivate individuals in ways that are uniquely meaningful to them.

Take a people-centric approach to managing performance.

Engage the emotions of others in their work.

Engaging leaders demonstrate self-mindfulness while creating personal connections with others. Each of the four cornerstones of engaging leadership involves self-mindfulness and creating personal connections.

Each of the subsequent four sections of this book is dedicated to one of the cornerstones of engaging leadership. Leaders can become more effective by making any one of these a serious priority But by separating the cornerstones, an important element is lost. Combining these principles through the lens of engagement will unleash the true potential of others and inspire effective performances and an amazing sense of pride and commitment, enabling individuals and organizations to achieve their best results.

By building trust, understanding unique motivations, managing performance from a people-centric perspective, and engaging emotions, engaging leaders can tap into the true potential of others. This humanistic approach creates situations where engaging leaders, their colleagues, and their organizations all benefit. By shifting a paradigm of what it means to lead others, engaging leaders can create connections and ensure success at all levels of an organization.

If leaders want to fully engage others, they must recognize each individual‧s unique needs and preferences. To use an analogy, engagement is like food and each of the four cornerstones of engaging leadership is a bite of nourishment. Individuals want and need different portions, and they are hungry for them at different times. Some prefer smaller bites of many different foods, while others prefer large bites of a single kind of food. Some individuals want the sampler platter, while others want to gulp down the entire meal! No preference here is necessarily right or wrong, only more or less satisfying for any given person.

“Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional.”

— MARK SANBORN, THE FRED FACTOR

RECOMMENDED READING

Boyatzis, Richard E., and Annie McKee. Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

Carlson, Peg, Anne Davidson, Sue McKinney, and Roger Schwarz. The Skilled Facilitator Field Book: Tips, Tools, and Tested Methods for Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers, and Coaches. San Francisco: Tossey-Bass, 2005.

Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline Field Book. New York: Doubleday, 1994.