Skip to main content

Maintaining Employee Engagement in Difficult Times

By
I am struck by the number of amazing leaders I hear lately saying "there is nothing I can do to make things better for my team given the climate in which we work today."  Times are difficult, particularly in the federal sector where employees are facing furloughs, an increased workload, or both.  But how can you expect to maintain or increase employee engagement when you yourself are slowly disengaging either through burn-out or personal advancement disappointments?

Albert Einstein said, "Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means."

If you expect your team to weather the storm, you better be the first one in line with an umbrella and a raincoat.  Seriously.

When leaders say there is nothing that can be done, they convey that they have given up.  Why would an employee keep pushing forward when their leader has given up?

Does this mean that you should start pumping the soundtrack from the broadway musical Annie through the office?  Not at all.  But don't be playing Les Miserables either!

So take a moment each day to sit down and write down one thing you CAN do.  It doesn't have to be complex and it doesn't have to cost anything.  I'll even give you your first one - "I CAN ask my employees if they have any ideas on how we can operate more efficiently and avoid burn out going forward."  And then REALLY listen.  Don't start thinking before they even finish about why that idea will never work.  Ask questions like:

  • How would that work?
  • How would that affect other operations?
  • What else could we do?
Encourage the rest of the team to ask non-leading questions as well but enforce the one rule of not allowing anyone to say why something won't work.  Fight the urge to reply immediately, just take notes and promise to follow up with everyone by a certain point in time.  Find at least one thing in the list you can do and in the follow up announce what you are going to do as a result of the team recommendations and make sure everyone knows that you are open to receiving future suggestions as well.

What things are on your CAN DO list this week?

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What an Extraverted Intuitive Needs to be Productive

By
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. Jung observed that people have inborn preferences for gathering information and making decisions and that these preferences guide an individual’s behavior. The mother/daughter team of Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers expanded on Jung’s theories and created an assessment to make the combined work accessible to all individuals. Today, the assessment is used by most Fortune 100 companies and over two million people worldwide, annually. The assessment identifies an individual’s inborn preferences on four dichotomous scales: where you focus your energy, how you prefer to take in information, how you make decisions, and how you deal with the outer world. Type is best used to understand other people, improve communication, and develop individual skills. The first dichotomy is Extraversion (gets energy from other people) and Introversion (gets energy from reflection).  The second...
1 comment
Read more

Your Personal Plan - Part 1

By
Every January 1 there is a rush to make New Year's Resolutions.  I don't know about you, but a list of resolutions never seems to stick for me.  In the training and development area we are constantly talking about Executive and Individual Development Plans.  I will be honest, I can really get into these with a client.  But, I don't have one in the form I recommend.  Is this part of do what I say, not what I do?  Maybe.  Maybe not. I've been thinking that one plan for what you want to accomplish at work and one for home and one for your volunteer work can be as aggravating (and ultimately useless) as trying to maintain a paper calendar at work, an outlook calendar, a hanging calendar on the fridge at home, and a google calendar for your extracurriculars. I think what we really need is a one-stop shopping personal plan that merges everything you do now and everything you want to achieve in the next five years (or whatever time period you are using). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Do Elmo, Colbie Caillat, and Daniel Goleman Have in Common?

By
"When your monster wants to throw things and your monster wants to shout, there's a way to calm your monster, and chill your inner monster out."  We laugh when we play this for our young child and the cute little Elmo turns into a monster and we dance with our little one when Colbie Caillat melodically sings "Belly Breathe."   http://youtu.be/_mZbzDOpylA   Toddlers are notorious for meltdowns.  All the research says it is because they don't have the words to express their feelings and guide the parents to stay calm. But what about when you are at work and YOUR monster wants to throw things?  The Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i), a popular emotional intelligence assessment, includes Emotional Management and Regulation as one of composite scales with Stress Tolerance and Impulse Control as subscales.  In other words, how well can you chill your inner monster out? In his book  Emotional Intelligence , Daniel Goleman, posits that 20 percent of an in...
Post a Comment
Read more