Forum's 4 Keys to Effective First-Line Leadership
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The document discusses the importance of first-line leaders and their impact on key business issues like increasing revenue, improving productivity and costs, boosting engagement, and retaining employees. It identifies the four essential leadership skills as self-leadership, people leadership, coaching, and thinking strategically. Specific skills discussed include providing effective feedback through coaching, focusing efforts on high-value activities like people leadership, properly delegating tasks, and understanding how to improve employee engagement by meeting core needs for accomplishment, recognition, enjoyment, belonging, and advancement.
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Forum's 4 Keys to Effective First-Line Leadership
- 1. 2012 The Forum Corporation
- 2. Your Presenters, Forum History: Founded in 1971 Global pioneer and innovator in the industry Andrew Shapiro Vice President and Regional Sales Director, Forum Driving business performance through: Leadership Development Sales Optimization Customer Experience People and places: 300 employees and associates 14 global offices Presence in 28 regions around the world www.forum.com 1
- 3. Your Presenters, Exelon About: Leading U.S. competitive energy provider 26,000 employees Operations in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Canada $23.5 billion in revenue Merged with Constellation Energy Group in 2012 Allison Manswell Performance that Drives Progress With one of the cleanest and lowest-cost power generation fleets and largest retail customer bases in the country. The Exelon family of companies participates in every stage of the energy business, from generation to power sales to transmission to delivery. Learning Development Programs Manager How We Rank Exelon Top-ranked electric and gas utility on the FORTUNE 500 each www.forum.com year since 2008. Fortune Magazine named as one of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” since 2006 Named the No. 1 ranked U.S. and global electric utility on Platts’ Top 250 Global Energy Companies list in 2012. 2
- 4. Agenda The Impact of the First-Line Leader The Four Leadership Essentials What’s Key and Core for Today – A Winning Coaching Practice – Thinking Like a Leader Means Doing Less with More – Making Delegation Meaningful – The New News on Employee Engagement www.forum.com 3
- 6. Does Any of This Sound Familiar? “We need to grow revenue despite the soft economy” “Increasing productivity is vital because we are resource constrained, but how can we keep doing more and more with less” “Employee Engagement has become a key organizational concern” “If we could improve employee retention we know it would dramatically impact our bottom line” “Strategic initiatives often lose momentum or are muddled by the time they reach all employees” www.forum.com 5
- 7. Poll No. 1 Which of these pressures are having an impact on your organization? Increase revenue Keep costs down and raise productivity Improve engagement Retain employees Execute strategy/change quickly and successfully www.forum.com 6
- 8. Where Can You Get the Most Lift to Address These Key Business Issues? 50% 80% www.forum.com 7
- 9. Investment in Leadership Development Per Leader (Thousands) 7 6 2009 $6016 2012 5 1.8x 4 $2700 3 2 1 $1671 2.7x $1000 $533 $3333* 3.1x 0 First Line Mid-Level Source: Bersin & Associates www.forum.com 8 Senior
- 10. Leadership Development Lessons at Exelon www.forum.com 9
- 12. A Leader’s Success … Other People 80% Source: Carnegie Foundation www.forum.com 11
- 13. People Leadership Skills Link to Superior Business Performance Average Performing Companies (60%) Top Performing Companies (20%) Low Performing Companies (20%) Source: “Talent Management in America and China,” Leadership IQ, July 2011 www.forum.com 12 Leaders in top performing companies use critical people leadership practices at 3 times the rate of low performing companies
- 15. Key and Core for Today: 1. A Winning Coaching Practice www.forum.com 14 LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS
- 16. A Simple Feedback Process 1 The What DESCRIBE OBSERVATIONS 3 2 OFFER AND ASK FOR SUGGESTIONS The What Next DISCUSS IMPORTANCE The So What www.forum.com 15
- 17. Key Coaching Situations When you want to … Your feedback should … Be ... 1. Reinforce something an individual does well and should keep doing Highlight what was done well and encourage more of the same Proactive about looking for strengths to reinforce 2. Develop an individual who needs and/or wants to perform more effectively Focus on positive ways to achieve growth in an area Confident about talking about ways to grow and improve 3. Improve Performance of an individual who demonstrates a pattern of behavior that negatively impacts performance Target counterproductive, problematic behaviors Courageous and have the conversation as soon as a problem arises
- 18. Key and Core for Today: 2. Thinking Like a Leader Means Doing Less with More www.forum.com 17 LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS
- 19. Why Is This Difficult? Think Like a Leader: Investing time and effort strategically in order to focus more on truly highvalue activities 100 90% % OF MANAGERS 10% Source: Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghosal, “Beware the Busy Manager,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 80, no. 2 (February 2002), pages 63 to 69. www.forum.com 0 Purposeful 18 All Others
- 20. First-Line Leaders Get Trapped 1. Racing to get a lot done 2. Not enough delegation 3. Not expending enough effort to build and lead the team 4. Not asking for feedback and coaching 5. Putting too little emphasis on people-leadership activities 6. Staying in my comfort zone 7. Failing to admit what I don’t know 8. Believing that being a manager gives me authority 9. Thinking that my job is to “carry out” rather than to create www.forum.com 19
- 21. Poll No. 2 Think about the first-line leaders in your organization. Which trap do they tend to get caught in most? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Racing to get a lot done Not enough delegation Not expending enough effort to build and lead the team Not asking for feedback and coaching Not putting enough emphasis on people-leadership activities www.forum.com 20
- 22. Know Your Value/Effort Ratio … VALUE EFFORT … and increase it www.forum.com 21 Peopleleadership activities are always high value
- 23. The Average Leader … High 1 HIGH EFFORT LOW VALUE 3 HIGH EFFORT HIGH VALUE 56% EFFORT 2 LOW EFFORT LOW VALUE 4 LOW EFFORT HIGH VALUE Low High 71% www.forum.com VALUE 22
- 24. Guidelines High 1 HIGH EFFORT, LOW VALUE 3 HIGH EFFORT, HIGH VALUE STOP CONVERT 2 LOW EFFORT, LOW VALUE 4 LOW EFFORT, HIGH VALUE DELEGATE KEEP EFFORT Low High VALUE www.forum.com 23
- 25. Key and Core for Today: 3. Making Delegation Meaningful www.forum.com 24 LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS
- 27. The Secret Sauce 1. Actively delegate 2. Focus on guidance areas: – context and goals – results – what to do – how to do it 3. Clarify readiness High Individual’s Level of Readiness Low Manager’s Level of Guidance www.forum.com 26 High
- 28. Key and Core for Today: 4. The New News on Engagement www.forum.com 27 LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS
- 29. High Engagement is… … a deep sense of ownership for the organization and strong feelings of involvement, commitment, and absorption in one’s work … which is motivating … it looks like … … a strong contribution of discretionary energy … which translates into productivity … and results in … … improved personal and business performance. www.forum.com 28
- 30. An Engaged Workforce Is a Market Advantage 30% 18% 20% 10% Absenteeism Turnover Shrinkage Safety Incidents 0% Patient Safety Incidents Customer -10% -20% -30% -40% -27% -37% -37% -41% -50% -49% -60% -70% Source: “The State of the Global Workplace,” Gallup Consulting, 2010 www.forum.com 29 16% Productivity Profitability 12%
- 31. Forum Engagement Research 1,106 respondents 45% employees Global: North America, UK, China, India, Australia Individual contributors, team members, firstline, mid-level, and senior leaders Measured – Size of discretionary energy contribution – Importance of engagement factors – Extent to which each factor is present www.forum.com 30
- 32. Engagement Needs Shorthand Need for … Feels like … ACCOMPLISHMENT “I am productive.” RECOGNITION “I am valued.” ENJOYMENT “I enjoy my work.” BELONGING “I belong here.” “I’m getting ahead.” ADVANCEMENT www.forum.com 31
- 33. To Improve Engagement Know your own dominant engagement need To improve team engagement, be conscious of all the engagement factors Meet individuals’ core engagement needs www.forum.com 32
- 34. Summary Slide The Impact of the First-Line Leader The Four Leadership Essentials What’s Key and Core for Today – A Winning Coaching Practice – Thinking Like a Leader Means Doing Less with More – Making Delegation Meaningful – The New News on Employee Engagement www.forum.com 33
- 35. www.forum.com/blog Strategy. Accelerated. Forum mobilizes people to embrace the critical strategies of their organisation and accelerate results. When you need to swiftly align your people to tackle an opportunity or tear down a roadblock, Forum is an essential business asset. www.forum.com www.forum.com 34 @TheForumCorp Join The Forum Corporation’s LinkedIn Group Facebook.com/TheForumCorp
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Andrew Shapiro leads Forum’s largest North American sales team and is focused on growing Forum’s business across some of its key territories. Prior to taking a sales leadership role, Andrew was a London-based Executive Consultant with Forum helping client organizations build leadership capability and bench strength to drive successful strategy execution.
- Nabeel:Allison V. Manswell is responsible for Leadership Development Programs at Exelon Corporation. She started in the Nuclear Group seven years ago and has worked in several business units enterprise-wide. Allison holds the ASTD credential as a Certified Professional in Learning and Performance. She also serves as the President of the Baltimore Chapter of Exelon African-American Resource Alliance. Before Exelon, her experience includes leadership and organizational development, diversity & inclusion and employee learning at several Fortune 500 companies and in the Canadian government. Exelon Corporation is the nation’s leading competitive energy provider. The Exelon family of companies participates in every state of the energy business from generation to competitive energy sales to transmission to delivery.
- [5:00]Welcome to everyone and thank you for joining Allison Manswell and I as we talk about the keys to effective first line leadership.We are very excited to share our latest research, tools, insights and experiences on this topic and can’t wait to get your reactions and thoughts.There are three main sections to our presentation today. First, we’ll talk about the impact of first line leaders on the business Then, we’ll talk about the four essential practices first line leaders need to master today more than everThen for the bulk of our time together, we’ll be looking more deeply into those practices. Some of them will be familiar to you, others perhaps not as much, but in each case we’ll talk about what’s important about them today.For those of you who participated with me last spring in the Leading in Change and Complexity webinar, you will see some links to some of what I talked about then. What we are really doing now is going deeper into how first-line leaders can be more effective within that landscape of complexity. TRANSITION: Go to next slide
- So let’s begin with the impact of first-line leadersGO TO NEXT SLIDE
- Let’s start by talking a little about the context of leadership today. This is what we have been hearing from business and HR leaders and around the world about some of the pressures on their organizations.Let’s do a quick poll to see how much of this you are experiencing.GO to the next slide.
- [8:00]READ the question and TELL participants to choose ALL that apply. “Which of these pressures are having an impact on your organization? Nabeel is going to pull up a poll and you should select all that apply.REVIEW the pressures:The pressure to grow revenue despite a soft economyThe need to raise productivity despite downward pressure on costs and resource constraintsA strong focus on employee engagementA focus on improving employee retentionAn increasing need to execute strategy quickly and successfully at the front lines of the organizationNabeel, how are we doing? Nabeel will wrap it up and show the responses.COMMENT briefly and SAY,[1 min.]ALLISON, could you share with us what EXELON is experiencing and how you see that affecting leadership?…TRANSITION: so it shoulds like you are finding that strong leadership is more important than ever, which brings us to the question of how to think about leadership development in this kind of environment. [NEXT SLIDE]
- [10:00]… and one way to think about it is where you can get the most lift in the organization. And this is what we think. First-line leaders make up 50-60% of management on average and directly supervise as much as 80% of the workforce. [Fred Hassan, The Frontline Advantage Article Preview, http://hbr.org/2011/05/the-frontline-advantage/ar/1. Accessed 10/24/12]. Which means that they are, in many ways, the most important group of leaders. They really are the linchpin in all those issues we talked about: strategy execution, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement, productivity and retention, in reality, they are the main driver of business results…Last May, Fred Hassan, former CEO of Shering-Plough and in the process of taking over as Board Chair for Avon Products, Inc., published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Frontline Advantage.” Here he recounted some of his experience as a turnaround specialist in the pharmaceutical industry. He attributes much of his success to a focus on first-line leaders and said, among other things, that in today’s environment, “leaders must create an organization that is adaptable and highly responsive,” and that “front line managers are the key to bringing such an organization to life,” and called them the “central players in a company’s business strategy.” NEXT SLIDEALLISON – can you share your thoughts on the importance of first line leaders in your organization and your organization’s approach to leadership development
- And we are seeing an uptick in investment in the development of front-line leaders over the past few years. This shows the increase in per leader development investment from 2009 to 2012. What you see is that overall, organizations have increased their investment in leadership development across all levels, but the greatest increase has been at the front line – just over 3 times what it was three years ago (the corresponding increase for mid-level is 2.7 times, while for senior leaders, it is 1.8). As a proportion, the investment in first-line accounts for, on average about a third of the total development budget, just one or two points higher than for mid-level, with the rest going to senior leaders and high potentials.We feel this upward investment in first-line leaders is a positive trend. TRANSITION: ALLISON, I’m going to hand over to you to talk with us about what your organization is doing in terms of leadership development.[NEXT SLIDE]
- [3-4 mins]
- And that’s where the leadership essentials come in. So the question we started asking last year was, what should those essentials be? If you have a limited pool of money and a lot of people to develop, where do you focus that investment? NEXT slide
- [20:00]One clue was this: that the ability to lead people effectively—people-leadership skills—is roughly three to four times as important to an individual leader’s success in his or her career as are other skills and knowledge. In other words the ability to work effectively with people accounts for about 80 percent of an individual leader’s success. This means that the technical skills and knowledge that often get someone recognized and promoted into a first line leader role in the first place are much less important to their success (and by extension to the organization’s success) than is the ability to lead people.I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you, as it didn’t to us, but it is interesting that this work as been replicated in a variety of different types of work in leadership over the past century – including Forum’s own work on climate, Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, and much more.TRANSITION: so we know that people leadership skills are key to personal success, but how does that impact the business?
- This study looked a broad swath of industries in the U.S. and China, essentially comparing management practices in a stable, developed economy to those in a rapidly growing and developing economy. Over 1400 (1463) U.S. and almost 1000 (972) Chinese organizations self-reported market performance based on financial, innovation, employment, and brand metrics. The researchers then divided organizations into leading performers, average performers, and lagging performers within their industries, with the top 20 percent in each industry ranked industry leaders, the middle 60 percent average performers, and the bottom 20 percent industry laggards. In each case, industry leaders reported much higher application rates of key people-leadership practices than industry average and laggard performers. In fact, when compared to laggards, industry leaders used the critical leadership practices about 3 to 4 times as often. TRANSITION: This finding supported our hypothesis about which particular skills first-line leaders need to focus on mastering. That hypothesis was based on our own 40 years of experience working with first line leaders.So what are those people leadership practices?
- There are three people leadership practices that first-line leaders should master. We call them “Coach Your Team,” “Get Results Through Others, and “Engage People.” But there is also a fourth – which we call “think like a leader -- which is really about personal effectiveness or self leadership. We’ve found that without this self-leadership, first-line leaders generally don’t focus enough of the people-leadership practices. And we’ll show you why in just a few minutes. A quick review:Think Like a Leader. You could also call this “think strategically” because they are strategic about how they invest their time and effort so that they can focus on truly high-value people leadership activities. Coach Your Team—they are great coaches, which fundamentally means know each of their team members needs to do, is capable of doing, and they work to develop them using feedback and coaching. Get Results Through Others – they know how to deliver results to the organization, but more importantly, they know how to do it through their team. A big part of this is about delegating work effectively.Engage People – they understand the relationship between engagement and performance and that what motivates and engages one person is not the same as for another person. They use that knowledge to build and maintain engagement.TRANSITION: At this point you may be thinking “hmm, those practices on the bottom – Coach and Get Results – really aren’t new. And you’d be right. In fact,we think of these core blocking and tackling skills. However, our experience is they are critical things that first-line leaders tend to have a lot of trouble with. We’ll talk quickly about these two in terms of what we’ve found to be particularly useful to first-line leaders, especially in today’s environment and spend a bit more time on the the other two practices.
- [25:00]So let’s start with coaching.In our business we do a good job of creating comprehensive coaching models and processes and programs. And I have created a few such things in my career – and don’t misunderstand they are good, and coaching is important and often it requires thought and preparation. But for first-line leaders in particular, many of whom may be reticent to coach because it is new, seems somewhat difficult and might involve emotions, it’s important that they have a clear and simple approach. So there are two things I want to share with you that we are finding highly effective for first-line leaders…
- The first is a simple model for giving feedback in a highly effective way.The first step is to be very specific and concrete about what you observed – another way to think about this is that it is “the What.” One problem we see a lot is people being vague – “That meeting with the client wasn’t very professional” vs. “I noticed during the meeting with the client that she was impressed by what you said but that you looked down at your notes most of the time.”The next step is to talk about why what you observed is important from a performance, productivity, or other business or personal results standpoint. This step is often skipped completely when something like, “If you made more eye contact with clients, what you’re saying would be that much more powerful.”The third step is to both offer, but importantly, ask for suggestions – and this is the “what next.” Asking for suggestions and ideas is what creates the buy-in to the “what next.” “One idea would be to keep your notes, but just look up from time to time, or maybe periodically ask the client for reactions – what else might work for you?”What’s great about this framework is that it can be applied to the range of coaching situations a first-line leader is likely to find him or herself in, which brings us to point 2…NEXT SLIDE
- … which is a way to frame up the kinds of coaching situations a first-line leader is likely to come upon and where to target the feedback and coaching in those situations.The first is a situation where you need to reinforce great stuff…The second is a situation where you need to develop skill because it’s not quite there OR because the employee has requested development in a particular area…The third is a situation where there is a pattern of poor performance…What we find is that leaders (and this is not just a first-line problem by any means) tend to be most reluctant to provide feedback in the third situation and ignore the first situationthe most. This turns out to be a big problem for engagement – and we will talk about engagement more in a few minutes, but for now,let me focus on one finding: When we asked people globally, “what one thing would cause you to be less engaged in your workplace” the most frequent response -- over half of people responded with answers that fell into the category of my work/efforts not being acknowledged by my manager. When we broke this out by level of engagement we found that the more highly engaged a person was, the higher the likelihood that this one thing would disengage them.[2 mins] ALLISON, what have you been learning about coaching in your organization? TRANSITION: okay so that’s coaching… NEXT SLIDE
- [30:00]Now we’ll move to what thinking like a leader really means today…
- READ the definition.But, a few years ago, a seminal, decade-long study of managers across a variety of industries was published in the Harvard Business Review. The first thing that study showed was that managers are extremely busy. Today, there is plenty of evidence (including Forum’s own research) to show that managers are even busier than they were 10 years ago when this study was published.Heike Bruch and SumantraGhosal, “Beware the Busy Manager,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 80, no. 2 (February 2002), 63-69.The second, and arguably more important, thing these researchers found was that most managers spend too high a proportion of their effort on low-impact activities. In other words, these people are very busy, putting a lot of effort into many tasks, but they are not always the right tasks. In fact, only about 10 percent focus most of their effort on highly effective and impactful activities. And remarkably, these were not the managers who seemed to be the “busiest.” They were the managers who were much more successful at achieving business results for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.What we’ve found is that this requires a mind shift – it’s about being purposeful and focusing on high value activities, among which people leadership is of highest value to organizations. TRANSITION: so what’s hard about the mind shift?
- Because first line leaders – especially when they are new – tend to get trapped by some natural reactions they have to the demands of the role. These are very common and avoidable once you know about them. We’ve found NINE traps, and among those, the first FIVE are the ones that tend to rise to the top as the most challenging in the groups we are working with, so we are going to focus on these for todayRacing to get a lot done. This is about “doing.” A lot. Many leaders, especially in this group, feel that it is very important to be seen as busy. And often what they are doing is urgent but frequently don’t contribute to contribute much way.Not delegating enough. First line leaders often fail to delegate, either because the work they could delegate is something they are good at or interested in, or because it’s difficult and they worry that it won’t be done right.Not expending enough effort to build and lead the team.New leaders often think that they need to work on individual relationships – with good reason – sometimes they are leading former peers. But the mistake is focusing on individual relationships instead of investing in developing the team as a unit. Not asking for feedback and coaching. Many first-line leaders think if they ask for feedback and coaching, they will look like they don’t know what they are doing or seem overwhelmed. But this is critical to their success.Putting too much emphasis on non-people-leadership activities. This is the hardest barrier to avoid. Many new leaders tend to think that what they were good at before they were promoted – which is often a technical skill or other expertise is the key to their success after promotion. And, often they are expected to continue exercising those skills when they have many of the same responsibilities plus the responsibility of leading the team.Now these traps show up everywhere, but organizations are different, and the fact is that culture and other things play a role in determining which might be more prevalent for your first-line leaders. TRANSITON. So let’s do a quick poll to see what your first-line leaders face and then we’ll hear from ALLISON about the leaders in her organization.
- [30:00]READ the question and TELL participants to choose only ONE option. “Think about the first-line leaders in your organization. Nabeel is going to pull up a poll and I’d like you to select the one trap that you think causes the most trouble for them.”READ the optionsNabeel, how are we doing? NABEEL will wrap it up and show the responses.STATE which were the top choices COMMENT briefly. I’m going to handover to ALLISON now to talk with us about what she’s seen in her organization.[2-3 mins] ALLISONTRANSITION: Just to dive a bit more into the last trap, when we ask first-line leaders to list all their responsibilities, activities, tasks, etc. we find that only about 20-25% of their activities are related to people-leadership. Which certainly validates the trap. And, it’s eye-opening for them to see that they are putting effort into about 4-5 times fewer people leadership activities they are other activities…so of course, we asked why…And the answer is this is a trap for them because they aren’t thinking in terms of the value of their activities. NEXT SLIDE
- This is in part because they may not have a context for what constitutes a high value activity and so aren’t defaulting toward putting more of their effort into those types of activities. First, a quick definition of effort: here we don’t just mean time, we mean that plus the energy, attention, thought a leader dedicates to something.A quick definition of value: This is really about the importance an activity has for achieving the leader’s own goals and objectives, the broader strategy, and for the team’s ability to deliver results.And the key thing for first-line leaders (and all leaders) to understand is that people leadership activities are always high valueYou can think about this as a ratio of effort to value where you want to increase that ratio by getting more value out of the effort you put out.For the mathematically disinclined among you (like me), this is about doing LESS with MORE instead of doing MORE with LESS. So LESS effort, MORE value.NEXT SLIDE
- What we see here is the kind of 2x2 people in my business love – We find that this approach makes it easy for leaders to identify whether an activity is high or low value and high or low effort and they can divide their activities pretty easily into the four quadrants. AND you might be interested to know is that when we asked leaders (448) from around the globe which of these quadrants they spent too much time in – in other words, where they had too many activities, CLICK 71% said low value, and a full CLICK 56% said High Effort Low Value (which is essentially wasted effort).TRANSITION
- We also provide them with some advice about what to do with the activities in the various quadrants – again with the goal being to increase value – particularly to focus more effort on high value people-leadership activities. SAY a word or two about each quadrant…For each activity, regardless of the quadrant you put it in, ask yourself, “What would happen if I stopped doing this altogether?” If the activity is a necessary one, ask, “Who needs to own it, me or someone else?” This is where delegation can come into play. You could delegate to someone on your team, or in another part of the organization. Even if someone else can’t own it, the goal for the leader should be to expend less effort, which can also lead to delegation. Allison?TRANSITION: Okay, so this is the kind of “strategic thinking” that’s the heart of thinking like a leader… NEXT SLIDE
- [35:00]… and now I’d like to take a few minutes to continue the delegation conversation we just started here…Over the years we’ve found that first-line leaders are not naturally good at delegating… in fact, they tend to do one of two thingsNEXT SLIDE
- When we ask leaders what their natural delegation tendencies are – from delegating as much as possible to delegating virtually nothing, we see that especially new first-line leaders bunch up in the moderate to virtually no delegation. For those who do delegate what we see a lot of is leaders will often tend to fall into one of two delegation extremes -- One extreme is a leader who is TOO comfortable and secure about handing off work to others.. This results in “throwing work over the wall” and walking away. That can lead to abandonment.The other extreme is the leader who is too worried about the work getting done well, or on time or at all and resorts to constantly looking over someone’s shoulder as they complete the task. That can lead to micromanagement. ALLISON, what are you seeing in terms of first-line leaders and delegation?GO to NEXT SLIDE for the quote as ALLISON talks.
- They have “secret sauce” and it has three key ingredients in their secret sauceThey look for things to delegate to their team members(remember the value/effort ratio) so that they can help individuals and team achieve goals and objectives, increase the value of their own activities, and most importantly, develop the skills and capabilities of the people on their teams. They have a value and development mindset.They now that whoever they delegate two has to be clear about four things: The Context and Goal for the activity The results that need to achieveWhat they have to doAnd How to do itAnd these leaders are prepared to provide guidance in all four of these areas.But, most importantly, before they delegate, they know what that person is experienced with and capable. So they can match the person’s readiness for the task to the amount of guidance they give them on those four areas when they delegate it and when they follow up with them.TRANSITION: so that’s something new about getting results through othersNEXT SLIDE
- [40:00]So now on to our final piece – employee engagement – where we feel that we have some exciting new news to share.“Engagement” is a very hot topic right now for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the impact that employee engagement has on the business.NEXT SLIDE
- REVIEW the definition. First, our definition of engagement – this is similar to what you see from other organizations, but I want to point out this one phrase: discretionary energy. This is energy, time, effort, mindshare and contribution that is willingly given to an organization, above and beyond what the organization might expect of the individual based on job description and other factors. Discretionary energy is the result of engagement and it can be measured.And we did…NEXT SLIDE
- These are Gallup data from a meta analysis they did a few years ago. You can see that high levels of engagement reduce things like absenteeism, and increase things like customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. SAY, I’m going to handover to ALLISON to talk about what her organization is doing about engagement.[2-4 mins] TRANSITION: The organizational approach to engagement can be very powerful when the organization focuses on making changes, but unlike what we’ve heard from Allison, what we hear a lot in our work with organizations across the globe is that they have a survey regularly, but nothing happens as a result. Earlier this year, Forum embarked on a study to understand whether it was possible to improve this situation. NEXT SLIDE
- We were actually interested in both employee engagement and in how leaders in organizations can more effectively engage non-employee stakeholder groups like business partners, suppliers, customers, and non-employee associates. Our idea was that the factors that engage employees would be universal and drive engagement for non-employee groups. And that’s basically what we found. We won’t have time to talk about the entire study today, but look for our research report coming out soon.Today I’m going to focus on the employee respondents – which were 45% of the total. You can see that we spanned the globe, and covered off on all level of employees in organizations. And these are the three key things we measured. We asked people to tell us the extent to which they were contributing discretionary energy to their workplace from “none” to a “very large amount” – and this was our measure of engagementWe asked them to rate a series of engagement factors which are similar to those used by other organizations and And we asked them to tell us the extent to which each of those factors was present in their workplaceIn terms of discretionary energy, our results were similar to other engagement studies; 15% of our respondents reported contributing discretionary energy to a very great extent, 65% to a moderate extent, and 20% contributed none or very little. We also found that all of the factors we measured contributed to engagement and that on the whole organizations were not doing enough of those things.None of this was surprising, but we were happy with the results because they validated existing research.BUT, we also suspected, while the factors are all important, individuals differ as to which factors best fulfill their individual engagement needs. In other words, what tips someone into deeper engagement and a higher contribution of discretionary energy is different from person to person. NEXT SLIDE
- Taken together, Forum’s research strongly suggests that to improve engagement, a leader should focus on doing three things:Gain insight into his or her own dominant engagement need in order to take it into account when working with other people. We often assume that what is most engaging to us is equally engaging to others. This assumption can create a blinder for leaders. If, for example, a leader wants to enhance someone’s engagement and wrongly assumes that this person is most motivated by advancement, when it is really accomplishment, focusing on actions that increase advancement would have a diminished effect. This type of “blinder” could backfire in a couple of ways. First, the manager could pull the wrong engagement levers—increasing factors, for example, that are not core to the team member, and thus resulting in no increase in engagement. Second, by focusing on factors that are not core to the person, the manager might inadvertently reduce the most needed engagement factors, resulting in a decrease in engagement.To improve overall team engagement, be conscious of the 25 engagement factors and, for the team, create and maintain the conditions that favor them. To improve individual engagement, be aware of the core engagement needs of individual team members. This allows leaders to place more effort and focus on the things that really matter for individuals. Remember that a leader should not ignore any of the factors, but if there are one or two of these engagement needs that don’t motivate anyone on the team, the leader can place less emphasis on them.
- [50:00]I know many of you have been typing in questions. If you have a question for me or for Allison and haven’t yet typed it in, now would be a good time as I briefly review what we’ve shared today. We’ve shared …[read]… And ALLISON has shared a lot of great stories and insights about how this all plays out in her organization, EXELON.