This article is part of the TwoGreySuits Managing Employee Performance Series and is offered by our partner, TwoGreySuits as a service to our members.

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The Culture of Engagement

Every business owner or manager aspires to lead an organization that produces consistent and sustainable high performance. It is people who deliver performance, but just telling or worse, just hoping your employees will perform will not yield the results that are achievable. Creating a high-performance organization is a deliberate and purposeful act of leadership. Only by instilling a certain set of conditions and behaviors can your employees’ potential be unleashed. What would a High-Performance organization look like and how do you develop this?

 

The High-Performance Organization

It is important to understand the behaviors of employees in a high-performance organization. Not only are these employees fully competent in performing their jobs, they also are comfortable with team collaboration in creating innovative solutions. They are committed to the organization’s strategic priorities and understand fully how their performance contributes to its success. They are energized and highly motivated. They know the organizational goal, they know their role in achieving the goal and they consistently deliver on commitments.

 

In High-Performance organizations, employees continually strive to assist one another. They are eager to initiate and participate as a team member responsible for analyzing and solving problems, and in successfully implementing agreed solutions. Innovation and challenging the status quo is encouraged and rewarded. This type thinking is integrated into their jobs everyday.

 

The employees have been trained and coached extensively in the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to make these kinds of contributions. They come to work expecting and seeking opportunities for engagement, creativity, personal fulfillment and recognition.

 

An organization that has employees who think and behave in this way enjoys a rich Culture of Engagement. Managers are not struggling with the belief that they alone are responsible for possessing all the right answers. Instead, managers are consistently unleashing the incredible potential of their employees. By encouraging and sharing discretionary power, managers have created the environment and conditions for employees to participate more fully in the organization’s decision making and ultimately their success. Employees respond to this with enthusiasm, commitment and quality efforts. Talent at all levels is nurtured, valued, and recognized.

 

In this environment, speaking up is the norm, employees are confident and not at all concerned about thinking and saying things that may be contentious because it is potentially in the interest of the organization. This is management of the brave and confident and requires a different approach than traditional management. In this scenario, managers cannot be controlling. Managers need to understand their role to be one of directing, coaching, supporting, and inspiring the development of their employees. The single most important role of a manager in this environment is to develop employees to become more competent.

 

Managers and employees are working together to achieve shared goals, objectives and outcomes. There is a certain synergy that propels everyone to higher levels of performance and achievement. There is excitement, creativity, measured risk-taking, out of the box thinking, and collaborative harmony. Everyone feels responsible for the organization’s success.

What does it take to create this kind of culture?

 

Conversations/Dialogue

Having ongoing, healthy conversations with employees is the foundation for developing a Culture of Engagement. Employees need to comprehend the context in which the organization operates and what contributes to its success. It is only by having them participate in formulating their own goals and objectives, linked to the organization’s strategy, that they will become truly committed to their jobs and to the organization’s goals.

 

In this description, conversations mean something very different from telling. Unlike a one-off statement, a conversation is a continuing discussion that creatively explores a wide range of ideas and options. It requires a respectful, safe environment for active listening, measured consideration, mutual learning, and a willingness to be adaptable and not jump to conclusions. It is the role of the organization’s Leader to model this approach and to exemplify this type of behavior consistently. A conversational dialogue with employees does not always mean there has to be a conclusion to a conversation or idea; rather, ideas are explored in a way which encourages employees to keep communications open, ongoing and free flowing.

 

Alignment

Translating the organization’s strategic priorities into business operations is a process of development and alignment. This is how competitive opportunities are converted into products or services. Again, actively engaging employees in shaping what this means and how it will be implemented will yield better solutions and will result in embedded ownership at all levels. Employee involvement is closely related to commitment vs. compliance where employees are not as involved. There is a big difference. Committed employees do things because they were involved from the beginning and bought in early on in deciding what has to be done. Compliant employees do just what they are told because they realize that their involvement at a higher level is not valued by the organization.

 

Tight alignment throughout the organization eliminates inconsistencies and confusion.

It creates a unified and harmonious work environment. This alignment cascades through the organization’s core: from strategy to operations to departmental objectives to each individual employee’s performance. These relationships are transparent and understood. Existing business processes and operating methodologies need to be reviewed, so that improvement opportunities can be harnessed. Finally, where there are internal inconsistencies, they must be identified and resolved. If there are instances where those inconsistencies cannot be resolved, then they must be openly acknowledged as such and thoroughly discussed with the employees.

 

Tight alignment would mean that employees would be able to cite the overall mission and goals of the company and how this relates to their department and their own individual performance objectives.

 

Training and Coaching

Extensive training and coaching of employees is essential in order to develop the competencies, knowledge and behaviors that are critical to their participating and contributing fully in a high-performance organization. Managers need to be properly trained in managing employees in this new environment and will need to invest significant effort over an extended period of time in the development of their employees.

 

In high-performance organizations, employees have superior technical expertise in performing their jobs and are cross-trained for other roles. Additionally, they will be competent in working effectively in teams; communicating with integrity; analyzing and solving challenging problems; crafting innovative solutions; instilling enthusiasm and participation; explaining and championing strategic priorities; and consistently modeling appropriate, professional behaviors consistent with the values of the organization.

 

Delegation and Accountability

For employees in a high-performance organization, being accountable by delivering on commitments is a fundamental principle. These employees are committed to their performance. They want to make significant contributions and they believe that it is essential that they receive feedback and be subject to evaluation. They know that these are the vital components of their personal growth strategy. Highly achievement oriented employees will actively seek out performance feedback on their own.

 

Because the employees have been properly and thoroughly trained and, therefore, are competent and motivated to perform their jobs, managers are eager to delegate to them. As standard operating procedure, managers assign responsibility and authority to the employees, thereby broadening the scope and richness of work throughout the organization. Conversely, managers hold the employees to deliver on their commitments, accounting for their performance.

 

Innovation

A bias of continuous improvement and innovation will result from engaging employees in collaborative problem-solving. Only when an organization has established a foundation that aggressively challenges its basic assumptions, core processes and operational methodologies, can new thinking have an opportunity to emerge and flourish. A Culture of Engagement is the necessary pre-requisite for fully harnessing the organization’s ultimate capability allowing for realizing their full potential.

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Leadership

As stated earlier, creating a high-performance organization is a deliberate and purposeful act of leadership. The Leader needs to have a clear sense of the directional culture and must communicate this relentlessly and consistently. The Leader’s enthusiasm for the future and its undiscovered opportunities will become virus-like, infecting and infiltrating every aspect of the organization. To support this, the Leader must ensure that all managers also fundamentally believe in the direction and that their behaviors publicly reflect and support this. A high-performance organization is an exciting and vibrant place to work. It becomes the preferred destination, wherein workers experience the opportunity to make meaningful contributions, grow as human beings and explore their full potential. In such an environment, truly incredible things can be accomplished.

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​TwoGreySuits is a leading-edge provider of on-line human resource management information, processes, tools and forms servicing the North American market. They have integrated the HR practices associated with the key drivers of Employee Engagement within the well-organized information on the website.

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