For an organization to sustain growth, one of the important areas to be aware off is to ensure their workforce is having high engagement score. Engagement, in simple terms means that employees are self-driven and motivated to deliver the quality work they are assigned, upholding the values of the organization they are working for.
The engagement of workforce is dependent on many factors but most important of all is not the work life balance or paycheck but how they feel in the organization. The feel factor is delivered to the workforce by the leaders they are working within the organization. Years of social psychology research has revealed that people may forget how their leaders helped them solve a problem or how good they were at managing teams etc., but they will never forget how they made them feel. If they felt good and inspired working with a leader, they will go that extra mile to deliver their best and vice versa.
With the organizations growing globally, the leadership groups have broadens and that has led to pockets of cultures emerging within the organization, because outcome of a practicing leader is culture. Every leader has some uniqueness in their way of working and the people, who are working under a leader, are directly influenced in thought and action, by that leader. The problem starts when the same team members have to move to work with another leader on a new assignment and they are not able to adjust to the new leaders’ style. This leads to dissatisfaction and eventually disengagement.
Disengagement of workforce adversely impacts quality of work and client satisfaction because it leads to demotivation, stress in teams and eventually attrition, eventually leading to high cost pressures.There is a need for organizations to bring about some uniformity in the leadership group while maintaining the diversity which is always good to keep the work environment healthy and fresh. Grooming the leadership group to enable them to uphold values and culture of the organization in their actions, has become imperative. While this seems to be a magnanimous task, a steady process at different stages has helped many organizations successfully achieve this and not at the cost of their growth.
Few quick wins
Few quick wins, which won’t require a huge change management, are:-
- Competency model revision: Introduce some key leadership skills in the competency model to ensure that new team members actively plan to work for those and it can be measured
- Culture overdose: For new hires at leadership level, its important to give them a culture overdose while onboarding. This will help them transition into organizations culture, smoothly yet rapidly
- Learning and development road mapping: In your learning and development roadmap for workforce, include trainings that can help them learn and sharpen their leadership skills
- Frequent leadership exchange: it could be a meeting; outing, video conference or any other medium where leaders can connect and talk about things which they are working on in their own spaces e.g. have a sales leader talk to your operations leader etc.
