The leader’s role in creating an engaging work environment
Date: January 6, 2015
Name: The leader’s role in creating an engaging work environment
Presenter: Bob Freytag
Sometimes employee engagement can influence the morale of the work environment. It is important for leaders to ensure they create the right conditions for their employees. Bob Freytag, the Director of Consulting services from The Ken Blanchard Companies, will share his point of views to help leaders to measure and improve their employee’s level of engagement. His 25 years of expertise in leadership development will provide significant insight for many leaders. This webinar will help leaders to develop their team members to achieve maximum effectiveness and productivity.
The Leadership Profit Chain
Bob Freytag believes the four primary factors to improve employee engagement are context, communication, collaboration, and support.
He introduces the leadership-profit chain model where leadership is makeup of three major components.
- Organizational vitality
- Employee work passion
- Customer loyalty
The three major components are connected by strategic and operational leadership. Freytag believes the strategic leadership includes the vision and values of the organization, the organizational culture and the strategic imperatives. As for operational leadership, it includes policies and procedures, leader behaviors and fairness and justice.
Leadership and Ambiguity
Freytag defines leadership is an influence process. It is working with people to accomplish their goals and the goals of the organization. It is important to ensure people are fully engaged.
Freytag defines clarity is people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about. If people cannot understand the clarity in the organization, the organization decision making will be skewed. In most organizations, they do more complication instead of collaboration.
Freytag believes sometime leaders can unintentionally train or communicate the wrong clarity to their employees. Therefore, Freytag suggests leaders to answer the follow 3 questions.
- To not know what could be known?
- To be inattentive to details and results?
- To not share what needs to be known with you?
Leaders need to communicate clarity, and clarity will lead to trust.
Communication – trust, goals, and feedback
In order for leaders to influence others, the key is to increase the frequency and quality of communication between manager and the people they depend on. This means reduce redundant meetings and increase quality of meetings.
“Trust is based on perceptions, not intention”
Trust can be formed by behaviors. Freytag believes there are 4 key leadership behaviors leaders need to understand.
- Caring about others
- Acting with integrity
- Maintaining reliability
- Demonstrating competence
Leaders need all four behaviors to produce trust. Leaders to be connected with their employees by understanding their focuses, produce meaningful communication, and provide necessary recognition. By acting with integrity, leaders need to show honesty, value and fair process. Leaders can create reliability by provide strong responsiveness, accountability, and organization dependency. Therefore, leaders need to demonstrate competence by their expertise, performance result and facilitation skills.
Managing people’s energy
In the study, leaders need to concentrate their 50% of time towards performance planning, 40% of time on performance monitoring, feedback and coaching, and 10% of time on performance review. Freytag believes leaders should have a clear agreement about performance and provide effective feedback and coaching. Lastly, leaders need to ensure there is no surprise at review for better results.
The situational leadership II model
Freytag introduces the situational leadership II model for leaders to understand the process of increasing employee engagement. Leaders should switch their leadership style based on the level of directive and supportive behaviors from employees. Leaders should start from “Directing Style” when employees have high directive and low supportive behaviors. When employees start to have higher supportive behaviors, leaders should change to “Coaching Style”. Leaders should switch to “Supporting Style” when the have low directive behavior. Lastly leaders will transfer to “Delegating Style” when employees have low directive and low supportive behaviors.
Leaders should change to different stage when employees are ready. Freytag recommends leaders not to judge employees at certain stage when they are not ready.
“People ask to be at the stage, not judge to be at the stage”
Feedback is important for employee engagement. If leaders realize their employees’ performance is not on track, Freytag suggests leaders to ask these four questions and provide meaningful feedback to their employees.
- Is it a problem of an unclear goal or expectation?
- How things changed to impact goals achievement?
- Is it a problem of lack of competence?
- Is it a problem of lack of commitment?
Collaboration
Freytag defines collaboration is working together towards shared goals to create value internally and externally while fostering trusts and transparency without physical or virtual boundaries. In order for teams to have collaboration, each team will need to go through the predictable stages of development, which are “Orientation”, “Dissatisfaction”, “Integration”, and Production”.
The process is very similar to the leadership model mention earlier. Leaders can ask these 3 questions to ensure employees are aligned with collaboration.
- Who we are?
- Where are we going?
- How we get there?
Performance
Performance is a combination of purpose and values, empowerment, relationship and communication, flexibility, optimal productivity, recognition and appreciation, and morale. Leaders can communicate with their employees with “what did we do well?”, “What did we learn?”, and “what would we do differently?” to maintain their performance.
To reduce ambiguity, Freytag suggests leaders to follow this process.
- Establish purpose
- Generate alternative
- Narrow alternative
- Make a tentative decision
- Confirm final decision
- Action plan
Leaders can support their employees by identifying employee’s needs, accessing resources, and empowering employees. Freytag suggests leaders to watch out for false diagnose from their employees; instead, leaders should have effective dialogue to ensure a proper communication with employees. Collaboration connects with trust and a lack of collaboration is due to bad experience from employees. Therefore, leaders should lead by example, and show they care about their employees.
“Transcendent values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity”