Engaging leaders engage their staff to enhance mutual understanding and commitment to work better together towards achieving their objectives. Engaging your staff so that they’re always highly committed to working with you to achieve the necessary and expected goals is difficult for the following reasons:
(1) People are different. You can’t treat everyone the same way to get the best from them, but you can act with integrity and in accord with your values. (We already covered in an earlier instalment how to clarify the values that are important to you and use them in working with people.)
(2) People can change. Their needs and motivations may change depending upon changes in their personal circumstances, such as an employee becoming a parent for the first time and wanting to spend more time at home.
(3) People may react differently to changes in their work situation. Individuals and groups may react differently to, for example, changes in organisational structures, systems and processes.
(4) People can misunderstand. Misunderstandings can easily occur about aims, objectives, decisions and actions, especially when people don’t articulate their thoughts clearly and concisely, don’t listen carefully or make assumptions.
To gain and sustain the commitment of your staff, you have to be highly skilled in engaging people so as to notice or discover the factors that are impacting upon them, or that have to be addressed.
Four foundations
Now let us discuss about the four foundations for effectively engaging people (these foundations also underpin you being an engaging leader):
(1) Relating. Really connect with individuals and groups by showing a genuine interest in them.
(2) Proacting. Share and seek information, and critique each other’s’ thoughts by ‘speaking your mind’ and asking searching questions.
(3) Sensing. Switch on your senses to gather data and information about others’ thoughts, emotions, needs and commitment to act.
(4) Inter and re-interpreting. Interpret and reinterpret data and information, including views and opinions, to create mutual understandings and commitment to act on work issues and problems.
These four foundations are intimately connected with each other and are sub-processes of the overall process of engaging people. For you to be an engaging leader - someone who’s effective at engaging staff and work colleagues - you have to become skilled in using these four sub-processes simultaneously.
Relating to people
Many people see their relationships as being stable and long-lasting, but in fact the relationships between you and many of your work colleagues can change. You may have strong relationships with, perhaps, just a few individuals: you may not see or even speak to these people for many years, but you can pick up the relationship immediately and have a conversation as if you’d spoken only a few days before.
If you have less strong relationships with most people, these relationships are less stable, or even fragile, simply because of how you both relate to one another. As a result of your interpretations of your experiences of each other, these types of relationships can change more quickly than you realise.
Relating to people is a more appropriate way of thinking about how you and your staff connect with each other (instead of thinking of stable relationships), because the term more effectively conveys the potential for, and rate of, change in the relationship.
Here’s a good description of relating (to a person): Connecting with a person through having, and demonstrating, a positive interest in him and his needs (as a human being).
Benefits
The benefits of developing your skills in relating to your work colleagues include the following:
(a) You’re more likely to be conscious of the effect you have on people and that they have on you when you recognise that how people relate to each other is a dynamic, fluid process.
(b) You develop a better understanding of people when you have a genuine interest in them and find out more about them. You’re more likely to develop more meaningful and important relationships through this approach.
(c) People show more interest in, and have a greater commitment to, helping you to achieve what you want when you demonstrate that you have a positive, genuine interest in them.
(d) People are more likely to acknowledge and accept your explanations of the need for changes in organisational structure, systems or policies that have an adverse effect on them if they appreciate that you have a genuine interest in them as individuals.
You need to strive to develop your skills in relating to people to really connect with them, and through this approach build mutual respect for one another and stronger, more meaningful, lasting relationships.
When you’re relating effectively to your work colleagues, you’ve adopted the approach of ‘working with’ rather than ‘doing to’ them. ‘Working with’ a person is based on you having and showing total respect for people and striving to really understand them.
Being Captain Courageous: speaking your mind
If you are an engaging leader, you need to have courage to speak your mind: to express your thoughts openly and honestly. In my experience many managers, including senior managers, don’t openly and honestly express their thoughts in meetings, as you see in the later side-bar ‘I was just going to say that!’.
‘Speaking your mind’ is more than being open and honest in expressing your thoughts because it also involves encouraging others to speak their mind: to express their thoughts. As thoughts may include questions as well as views and opinions, ‘speaking your mind’ may also involve critiquing the thoughts of your work colleagues, as well as encouraging them to critique your thoughts.
Proacting
Some writers coin the word “proacting” for this combination of activities. The word captures being proactive in prompting and having meaningful conversations to share and clarify thinking in order to make something happen. The purpose of you and your colleagues proacting - seeking, sharing and critiquing each other’s’ thoughts - is to:
(1) Generate and clarify information.
(2) Use this information to enhance mutual understanding about, for example, a work issue or problem that then (a) enables better decisions to be made. (b) generates commitment to take action to implement those decisions.
You really need to be courageous because expressing your thoughts and encouraging your colleagues to critique your thoughts is risky: you and/ or they may feel embarrassed or threatened because:
(1) Your views about a work issue or problem may be significantly different to those of your colleagues.
(2) Your colleagues may cause you to question your thoughts and views.
(3) Both of these scenarios may happen in a meeting when other people, perhaps more senior managers, are observing or are involved in the conversation.
You may need to develop your self-confidence to handle the perceived risks of speaking openly and honestly and of being vulnerable to having your work colleagues’ question, critique and challenge your thoughts. You can discover in a later instalment how to develop the ability to be courageous in having meaningful conversations with work colleagues.
Be a great role model for the people who work with you by demonstrating your willingness to express your thoughts, critique others’ thoughts and encourage your work colleagues to do the same in working with you.
Switching on your senses
Have you ever been so consumed by your thoughts that you fail to notice something? For example, your partner may be talking to you and you don’t notice what she’s saying until she criticises you for not listening!
Or you’re watching a drama on television and realise that you’ve missed an important incident, because your thoughts drifted to a real incident that you experienced earlier that day.
You don’t consciously switch off your senses so that you don’t notice things happening around you, but you’re just not as well tuned into those senses as you could be. Also, I suspect that our senses have become dulled over generations as we notionally have more control over our surroundings in a modern society by adopting technology such as air-conditioning in buildings and cruise control in cars!
One of the main causes of people being disengaged at work is that they perceive that their manager doesn’t give them enough attention, listen to them or show enough interest in their well-being.
One of the biggest compliments that you can give people is to give them your total attention, because by doing so you’re demonstrating that you respect and value them.
To give a work colleague your total attention, you have to be good at sensing what’s going on around you:
(a) Bring yourself ‘into the moment’. Focus your attention on the here and now, on the person(s) you’re working with at that moment, (b) Switch on your senses. Bring your senses into a heightened state of awareness so that you’re highly alert and attentive to what’s going on around you. In particular, turning up or tuning in your visual and auditory senses is crucial for you to notice small and subtle changes in the person or people you’re working with, as well as in yourself.
Switching on your senses enables you to better notice nuances in another person’s and your own: (a) Emotions, especially from noticing the expressions on a person’s face Behaviour or body language, (c) Energy, particularly regarding whether a person is enthusiastic or not about the issue or topic being discussed., (d) Use of, and emphasis on, words to clarify and understand fully the meanings that the person’s attempting to convey to you, (e) their priorities, (f) their perspective on, and views about, an issue, (g) their level of enthusiasm or commitment to taking an agreed action, (h) you find out how to switch on your senses or, put another way, improve your sensing ability.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired company director with over 35 years’ experience in senior business management. Presently he is a business consultant, freelance newspaper columnist and a writer. He could be contacted on [email protected])
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