Saturday, May 3, 2008

Need energized and engaged leaders

The bottom-line story on what I am seeing in the research data on leadership confidence that has been in the Leadership Pulse study is that many managers and leaders have severe "stacking work syndrome." They have so much to do, so many projects, and multiple demands that they don't have enough time to do even their core jobs. They keep surfing from stack to stack, trying to get even just a small amount done of every little project, and then nothing is completed - making them feel de-energized and less confident. These leaders do not have time to engage their employees. Someone needs to help them first. You have to start with leaders - they need to be at an optimal energy level before they can even start to think about employee engagement.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our experience working with leaders and teams is consistent with your findings.

We see that, especially during change, when leaders take the time to stop 'working' and get into dialogue with the teams they are leading, the team becomes much more confident in its leaders. It makes perfect sense: how can you be confident in leaders who wont take the time to discuss critical issues with you? Confidence comes from hearing their point of view, and poking at it and challenging it, and seeing that they know what they are talking about.

And it doesn't have to be a whole complicated process. We have watched the simple act of opening a space in a meeting to comments and contrary opinions, and actually listening and discussing, greatly increases engagement and the teams trust/confidence in leaders.

Anonymous said...

We have found that communication is always one of the top themes employees discuss in our dialogues. We all need honest, frequent and relevant communications.

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