The Role of Senior Leaders In Employee Engagement
By Elizabeth Black


News flash for CEOs and senior executives: You don’t have to “give away the store” to gain and keep employees who are engaged with your business and who are less likely to leave your organization at the first sign of a “better offer.” Businesses with engaged employees also enjoy remarkably higher percentages of customer loyalty, profitability and revenues.

Stephen Covey, in his book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness To Greatness, writes, “Great companies know that their innovative and competitive edge depends absolutely on the dedication of their employees. They also know they don’t get this through employee compensation. They get this from employee engagement, where employees can match their personal purpose with the company’s mission-critical objectives.”

So what is your role and the role of each senior leader in your organization in ensuring that your key employees can find a match between their purpose and your organization’s purpose?

We believe that the role of senior leaders centers around four elements: sponsorship, championship, communication and reinforcement.

Sponsorship and championship go hand in hand. Your employees need to know that the senior leaders of the organization truly want to create and maintain an engaged, empowered workforce. If you decide to implement an employee engagement strategy or initiative, each of your senior leaders needs to be crystal clear on the objectives of the initiative, the measurable outcomes and what he or she needs to say and do to support it. In the past, it was a popular belief that senior leaders had to be charismatic. They had to be able to lead teams from the brink of despair with “rah-rah” speeches and their colorful personalities. The problem with that leadership attribute alone is that most employees could see right through the façade. Being able to “walk the talk” became a popular rallying cry for employees who were looking for their leaders to engage them in a dialogue about where the company was going, how the leaders planned to get there, and what role the employees could and should play in the organization’s success.

Sponsorship means providing leadership and guidance on what you believe it will take to allow employees to become and stay engaged and passionate about your organization. Figuring out what to do about employee engagement can’t be the exclusive domain of the HR department or a talent management function. Employees need to see that senior leaders are leading the initiative or drive toward employee engagement by their words and their deeds. You can’t be a champion of something if you don’t really believe in it, wholeheartedly, so the championship role will take time and effort on the part of every senior leader to truly understand what the objectives are and how they will be achieved. We like to say, “You have to give employees a reason to believe,” and that will only be achieved if you believe it yourself.

Just as sponsorship and championship of employee engagement go hand-in-hand, so do communication and reinforcement. Here’s a poignant story about a CEO of an engineering consulting company who was having a conversation with an HR leader about his frustration with employees not understanding the company’s strategic direction. The CEO explained that during a meeting with a key client, the client was very impressed with the company’s strategic direction and the significant innovation the CEO indicated was occurring in his company, but the client said, “Gee, it would be nice if your people knew all this. Your employees are supporting my business and none of them ever breathed a word of any of this to my team.” The CEO, in frustration, said to the HR leader, “I’ve conducted town hall meetings; we send out regular email announcements. I’ve said it a million times! How many times do I have to tell them?”

The irony of this story is that the CEO and other senior leaders of this company thought they were doing their utmost to communicate the company’s strategy and plans on a regular and timely basis, but the communication wasn’t getting down to the employees.

How could this happen? Perhaps we can find a hint in the CEO’s question of “how many times do I have to tell them?” Telling isn’t communicating. Town hall meetings and email communication can serve a purpose, but they usually aren’t the most effective ways to engage employees. Not very many town hall meetings that we have experienced have resulted in a good exchange between rank and file employees and senior leaders. There might be a few brave souls who venture to ask a question or two, but it is rarely dialogue that provides insight and engagement. Email communication is always “push communication,” and does not provide for two-way exchanges.

In this example, the HR leader was able to help the CEO understand that he was communicating even when he wasn’t doing town hall meetings or sending emails. By encouraging the CEO to spend more time, face-to-face or at least by telephone with employees, they could truly understand his motivation and the direction he and the other senior leaders were taking the company. Even conference calls with teams on a regular basis would provide a forum for two-way communication and would allow employees to “test drive” the organization’s direction and purpose and to map it to their own values, needs and desires. Effective communication is the vehicle that drives and supports employee engagement. It can demonstrate that leaders are in control of the company’s destiny and open to new ideas, feedback and yes, even challenges from all employees. This is the backbone of building a trusting culture and one that supports employee engagement.

Then, when everyone is working hard toward the goals of getting and keeping an engaged workforce, it is also imperative that senior leaders reinforce the good results. Psychologists will tell you that reinforcement is a powerful tool to get sustainable behavior change. Ken Blanchard of the One Minute Manager fame calls it “catch them doing something right.” What he means is that senior leaders must reinforce the behaviors and values the engaged employees will demonstrate. Who is going the extra mile for a client? Who hired the most new employees? Which part of the organization had the lowest employee turnover? Which team came up with a great new product idea? Which managers had the highest employee satisfaction ratings on an esat survey? Which department is doing the best in employee reward and recognition? Whatever metrics you and your team decide are the barometers of employee engagement should be regularly recognized and reinforced in senior leadership communications and one-on-one conversations. Don’t wait for a special occasion or an annual performance review to reinforce the behaviors you think will align your employees with your organization.

In closing, let us leave you with three rules for senior leaders who want to find and keep an engaged workforce:

Be Fair

Be Consistent

Be Here (in words, deeds and actions)

Think about what these rules mean for you and how you will begin to build a culture of employee engagement in your organization, and then, JUST DO IT.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elizabeth_Black