Ingaging Leadership Meets the Younger Generations

Evan Hackel

• Publisher: Ingage Consulting
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087897332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this book, business leader Evan Hackel explains the Ingagement philosophy that he has used to lead successful companies to new levels of profitability and success. In this transformative book, Evan provides focused advice on applying Ingagement to leading members of the younger generations. Ingagement is a philosophy that it is not enough to tell people what to do, but to engage their hearts, emotions, and minds. This book offers practical advice on how to listen, plan, communicate and apply other leadership skills to create an optimized and highly successful organization.This is the book that will transform your leadership and your organization.

Chapter One: Discovering Ingagement

Chapter One: Discovering Ingagement

Ingagement is a leadership philosophy for those who believe that it is not enough to tell people what to do, but to involve their minds, creativity and even their emotions. In this chapter, we will get a first glimpse at how Ingaged leadership works and how powerful it can be.

What is the philosophy of Ingagement? It all starts with a belief that:

When you align people and create an organization where everyone works together in partnership, that organization becomes vastly more successful.

Ingagement isn’t a single action that you take just once. It is an ongoing, dynamic business practice that has the power to transform your organization, your people, you, and ultimately, your success.

Everyone in a company can create Ingagement—company leaders, members of a top leadership team, middle managers and people at many organizational levels. Ingagement goes beyond the management you will find in many companies today, where top executives and middle managers believe that effective leadership means giving instructions or offering incentives.

Ingagement is different—it offers a way of moving from good to great. Ingaged leaders trust people to participate actively in the creation and development of a strategic vision. They openly involve key stakeholders in an ongoing conversation about the organizational vision and how it can be put into action through planning and follow through.

You develop Ingaged leadership when, through your Ingaged attitude and open listening, you let people know that you are partnering with them and that you truly listen and believe what they are saying has value.

Authenticity is key to Ingagement. When you listen sincerely, you cooperatively create plans and practices that are supported by everyone in your organization, not only initiatives that have been developed at the top.

To be clear, Ingagement doesn’t mean having a democracy. In most organizations, it is the role of senior management and the board to ultimately make the best decisions for an organization in the long term. Yet when people at all levels feel heard, they are more likely to support company plans, even if their own ideas might not have been utilized completely. When people know they have been heard, they are more likely to become invested in their work; they become more eager to continue to share ideas and to cooperate. As a result, the entire organization improves and grows.

Ingagement is a highly effective way to lead members of the millennial and Generation Z groups—a cohort that I will refer to in this book as the “younger generations.”

Ingaging Your Key Stakeholders

Ingagement is not limited to internal operations. When successful Ingagement extends beyond company walls, it can help you multiply your success. You can achieve such success by involving your customers, vendors, distributors, and other stakeholders in open conversation.

From a management perspective, the result is that you build an organization in which more people focus on executing the right, productive things. But getting everyone’s priorities and to-do lists directed toward your organization’s immediate goals is only part of the picture; both the power and the reach of Ingagement are transformative, not just habitual or “standard practice.”

Let me tell you the stories of two executives I have known.

Executive One: Organized, Controlling, Ineffective

I once had the opportunity to closely observe this executive because I worked in his company. For the purposes of this introduction, let’s call him John.

John had a strategic vision for his company, and he was actively communicating that vision to everyone in his organization. However, John also had a non-Ingaged philosophy. He was invested in several assumptions, common in many executives.

John believed the following assumptions:

• John thought that people in his company wanted him to be someone they could “look up to.” He believed it was up to him to set the company strategy, to explain the strategy to others, and to tell them what they needed to do to execute the strategy.
• John also believed that asking openly for feedback and ideas would make him a weak leader because people would believe that he lacked a cohesive, strong vision. His view was, “If I admit to people that I don’t have all the answers, that I could use their help solving problems, they will doubt that I can lead them confidently.”
• Leadership “style” really counted for John. He believed that if he focused closely on communicating his vision for the company with energy and conviction, he would motivate people to carry out this vision. He told me that management should be “so informed, so all-knowing, and so capable that people feel good about following.”

So, how successful was John’s company? It would be dishonest if I spun a tale in which the company failed utterly in the marketplace. It didn’t. It is not that John’s leadership style was necessarily bad. The issue is that while his leadership approach was common, it is far from optimal. I like to wonder how much more successful his organization could have become if he had practiced Ingaged leadership because some very clear operational problems had become ingrained in John’s company. Most employees were uninspired and non-supportive, and they saw problems but rarely mentioned them because they felt no one was listening.

Similar problems exist in many organizations today; new and fresh ideas do not circulate freely, and competing companies often gain an edge.

Another operational problem: John, just like the many other executives who practice his leadership philosophy, never heard from salespeople, customer service representatives, and people in other front-line positions who could have offered him a wealth of critical intelligence. Any company that falls into that pattern undermines its own competitiveness, alienates employees, and sets a ceiling on its potential for ultimate success.

Executive Two: An Eager but Inauthentic Listener

Let’s call our second executive Paul, one who saw himself as an enlightened manager. Paul communicated often and attentively with the people in his organization.

When Paul was preparing to attend an intensive leadership workshop, he received a package of pre-workshop materials. Along with registration forms, there were worksheets to evaluate the effectiveness of Paul’s leadership; one of them contained a list of questions for him to distribute to people within his organization.

One question on the worksheet asked Paul’s colleagues to evaluate how well he listens. Since he had always thought of himself as a good listener, he was expecting to get positive feedback—and positive feedback was exactly what Paul got.

“People replied that I was great at listening to them,” Paul recalls. “They also reported that I asked great questions and when conversations were over, they truly felt like they had been heard. Needless to say, I felt very good about the positive things that people in my organization were saying about my ability to listen.”

After Paul attended the workshop, however, his upbeat feelings about his abilities as a listener changed dramatically.

“The workshop showed me that I had never been an honest and open listener,” Paul now says. “In fact, I learned that I had been very manipulative; I would ask big, open-ended questions, but inside, I had a negative mindset. I was asking questions only to find out where others were wrong and where I was right. I acted like I was listening, but only to gain people’s confidence so that I could uncover their weaknesses. Armed with what they told me I could prove that they were wrong.”

How do I know so much about this guy named Paul? What was going on in his mind? There’s a simple answer: I know those things because I am Paul. (Or maybe more accurately, because I was Paul.) I changed my name when writing this case study, but I am the executive who went to that workshop held at an organization called the Center for Authentic Leadership.

That workshop was the catalyst that inspired me to change the way I listen. I realized that it was time to revise an internal thought process in which I was always searching for areas where other people were wrong. Over time, I have been able to convert that process to a new one in which I am always searching for the kernel of truth in what people are saying to me. I had to transition my thought process so that I was not operating from a defensive or adversarial place, but from an inclusive one. As a result, I was able to stop being a negative leader and become one who is dedicated to positive, open, and supportive listening.

As my negative outlook and management style started to change, I discovered that I was hearing more great ideas and building on them. Of course, there were times when I did not agree completely with someone else’s views, priorities, or opinions. Yet my new approach to listening and communicating created much better results, and I became a significantly more effective leader. Now members of our organizational family were able to discuss, disagree, agree, and explore new possibilities. Through that process, our organization invariably ended up with results that were far better than we had ever seen before in my organization.

I also came to realize that many executives are impostors when it comes to Ingagement, just like I was. Before I began to interact genuinely with people, I was not achieving the success I sought. Through Ingagement, the quality of ideas we all generated, including more of my ideas, increased dramatically.

From the experience of moving to an Ingaged leadership sytle, I learned that people are more likely to support leaders who are willing to receive input without judgment. What a difference!

Concluding thoughts for this chapter:

The question is, how do you create Ingagement? Ingagement starts with senior management and a true belief that Ingagement will lead to a wide range of benefits including increased employee satisfaction and retention, stronger market orientation, the ability to adapt more quickly to marketplace trends and events, improved customer service and satisfaction, and higher efficiency, productivity, and profits.

So, how do you get the ball rolling? How do you start your personal and organizational progress toward success through Ingagement? We are soon to answer those questions in the chapters ahead. I invite you to turn the page, read on, and start the process now.

 

Chapter Two: Does Ingagement Really Work?

Ingagement really works. Here is evidence that will convince you:

If I were you, after reading the previous chapter I would be thinking, “It is great that Evan believes so strongly in Ingagement and that he feels so positive about it, but where’s the proof that it actually works? Why does he feel it is so effective in managing and leading younger workers?”

Those are good questions to ask, and I have asked them about and of myself. I would like to address my answers in two ways: First, I would like to direct your attention to an appendix that you will find on page “TK” of this book. There, you will find statistics from studies that have established the effectiveness of Ingagement. In this chapter, I will offer case studies that illustrate how Ingagement has produced superlative results.

Case Study One: Ingagement Rebuilds a Brand and Supports Profits

Let’s move on to some case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of Ingaged leadership, the first being from my own professional life.

In the year 2000, the company I worked for, CCA Global Partners, acquired our number-one competitor, a company called Flooring America. Before our acquisition, Flooring America had 700 locations; about 400 were company-owned, and the rest were owned by franchisees.

But then the Flooring America parent company/franchisor went out of business. The circumstances were troubling, as four hundred stores that bore the “Flooring America” name had going-out-of-business sales. The brand was seriously tarnished.

The owners of those franchises were angry, frustrated, and fearful; they had to go to court to secure various concessions from their former franchisor. To make matters worse, they also had to deal with the fact that the company that had just acquired them (my company, CCA) had been their main competitor up to that point. Many of those franchisees were in no mood to even speak with people who worked at CCA. Many of them believed that we had only bought Flooring America so that we could shut down their businesses and become the dominant player in the flooring industry.

Regardless, that was not our intention. We made a commitment to bring success to the stores that had been orphaned after Flooring America’s failure, and we made good on that commitment in a very big way....