Conscious Leadership – Transformational Leader or Creating Job Misery?

Conscious Leadership Scenario:

My experience tells me there is a significant amount of misery in the global workforce [mental health pandemic]. More Senior Executives are miserable in their jobs than fulfilled by their work environment which trickles into their personal lives. This misery starts from the C-suite leaders who don’t value human capital as their primary asset, “people first.” It’s the responsibility of Transformational Senior Executives to catapult employee engagement. Today we are going to focus on changing this ethos-reassuring your team is fully engaged [optimized].

Leadership Fail: Not Optimizing Employee Engagement

You are buried in corporate goals, division goals, personal goals, maintaining budgets, and managing your team to gain the ultimate competitive advantage. Oh yes, then there’s the personal/family aspect [more on that later]. Slow down and focus on optimizing employee engagement on your team. But first you must understand there are three root causes to Employee Disengagement: Anonymity, Irrelevance, and Immeasurement/Non-Measurement.

Negative Affect on Culture and Organizational Performance: 

Without fully engaged employees your team/organization can’t win.

• Decreased Productivity
• Negative Customer Experience
• Decreased in Morale and Company Culture
• Failed Corporate and Team Goals

Conscious Leadership Solution:

The Benefits for Transformational Leaders that optimize employee engagement are Increased Productivity, Greater Retention, Lower Costs, and Sustainable Cultures. These benefits can only be gained by addressing the root causes of disengagement.

Anonymity – Everyone on your team and in your organization is seeking to be heard, understood, and excepted as the individual they are. Your team members are looking for your interest in them as a person-removing anonymity. This is a basic form of human kindness. Ask questions that provide you better insight into your team members lives. Always showing empathy and curiosity. This isn’t a one-time thing. This is a long-term commitment from each leader.

Irrelevance – Everyone on your team seeks relevance. Human beings need to be needed and they thirst to be reminded of this every day. They need to know they are helping others, not merely serving themselves.

All employees must have clarity on two questions in order to stay fully engaged in their role and it’s their manager’s responsibility to aid in these answers.

1) Who Am I Helping? Leaders/Managers must break this down to each team member, so they clearly see who’s lives they are changing. It’s also the leaders/managers responsibility to point out the “who” each day.

2) How Am I helping? Leaders/Managers must help team members understand how they are helping. A room service attendant is not only delivering food. They are helping a tired traveler feel better about being on the road away from family and the comforts of home. A C-suite executive is assuring Stakeholders and Shareholders that their investment of monies in his/her organization is safe and they have a secure future.

One of the most important points of awareness a Leader must act on is to help each team member see why their work is important and matters. This is a fundamental part of human nature.

Immeasurement/Non-Measurement – If an employee can’t track and assess their own progress this creates ambiguity in the employee’s eyes. The employee needs to see a measurable based on their own success not an opinion based on a manger’s perception. The highest performers in the market don’t like subjective views from peers or other teammates. Leadership must create milestones that can be tracked daily/weekly/monthly that can be observed by each team member. Great teammates must be challenged with the opportunity to WIN not fame or money.

Each of these tools can have a significant impact on a team’s ability to become laser focused and fully engaged.

So, at Thomas & Taylor Partners, we are here to help. For us, our purpose is leadership for a better world, and we are here to help you in showing up as the leader you need to be. We are here to support you globally. We are on this journey together. This is an invitation, an invitation to join us in creating a collaborative movement: the movement that is leadership for a better world.

Live2Lead

Travis