Leading to Engage: Challenging Work and Covering the Basics
By: Diane Daum, Vice President, Research and Analytics, ddaum@valtera.com and Susan Grant Palombo, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, spalombo@valtera.com.
New Year’s is the perfect time to recommit to your role as a leader. In our prior two blogs we covered three of the five Leadership Essentials to create and sustain engagement in your work teams. We discussed the unique role you have as a leader. Today we focus on leadership essentials #4 Ensuring Challenging Work for your Team and #5 Attending to Management Basics.
To engage your team, create jobs that capture their minds and hearts. Design job attributes with company goals and objectives in mind, and ensure that the job is strategically relevant as well as personally meaningful.
Demand the full use of team members’ most important skills and abilities and they will feel appropriately stretched. Specific, difficult goals are welcome challenges when they are accompanied by feedback and the celebration of achievements. Give timely and useful feedback when things go well, and when they do not go well, use those as opportunities for training and not to place blame.
Making the work meaningful has personal and organizational consequences that are clearly beneficial. In fact, meaningful work is the most powerful accelerant of employee engagement. How can employees’ jobs be infused with meaning? By creating work that has variety, challenge, and built-in feedback. Give team members the autonomy to decide what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Requiring people to use the skills and abilities they value most not only makes the work meaningful to them but is also most likely to lead to opportunities for personal growth and development.
The 5th leadership essential for engagement sounds really simple: Cover the basic management tasks.
Leadership is difficult, but taking care of the basics can make it easier. People cannot be engaged if they don’t have the resources to do t
heir work. Identify what your team needs to accomplish its goals and be sure to fill those needs by providing:
- Critical resources: Tools, equipment, space, supplies, time
- Critical training: On-the-job, classroom, information updates
- Critical support required: Encouragement, participation, empowerment
- Clear information
- Clear expectations
So now, armed with knowledge from research around the five leadership essentials to create and sustain engagement, kick off the new year with a resolution and commitment to focus on what matters to engage your team. Here’s to an ENGAGED NEW YEAR!
