Ingaging Leadership

21 Steps to Elevate Your Business

Evan Hackel

• Publisher: Ingage Consulting
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087896625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

In this book, business leader Evan Hackel lays out a new philosophy of leadership - Ingagement - that he has used to help businesses of many kinds achieve new levels of productivity, profitability, and success. Ingagement is an ongoing, dynamic business practice that has the power to transform your organization, your people, you, and ultimately, your success.

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

What is the philosophy of engagement? 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.

Chapter One: What Is Engagement?

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

What is the philosophy of engagement? 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.

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

Engagement is different. It offers a way of moving from good to great. Engaged leaders trust people to participate actively in the creation and development of a strategic vision. They openly engage 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 engaged leadership when, through your attitude and actions, you let people know that you are partnering with them and that you truly listen.

Authenticity is key to engagement. When you listen sincerely, you cooperatively create plans and practices which are supported by everyone in your organization, which are much more based in reality, and which become vastly more energized than initiatives that have been developed only by at the top.

To be very clear, engagement 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.

Engaging Your Key Stakeholders

Engagement is not limited to internal operations. When successful engagement extends beyond company walls, it can help you multiply your success. You can achieve that 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 things. But getting everyone’s priorities and to-do lists directed toward your organization’s immediate goals is only part of the picture, because both the power and the reach of engagement are transformative, not just practical or day-to-day.

To back up those statements, 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. He was actively engaged in communicating that vision to everyone in his organization, which was good. However, John also had a non-engaged philosophy. He was invested in a number of assumptions, common in many executives.

John believed the following assumptions and explained them to me:

• John thought that people in his company wanted him to be someone they could “look up to.” He believed that it was up to him to set the company strategy, to tell people what it was, and to tell them what they needed to do.
• 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. He view was that, “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 really lead them.”
• 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 it out. 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? I would be untruthful if I spun a tale in which it 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 is very common, it is far from optimal. I like to wonder how much more successful his organization could have become if he had practiced engaged leadership. Some very clear operational problems had become ingrained in John’s company. For example, most employees were uninspired and non-supportive. 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 within them. Competitors often out-perform them.

Another operational problem? John, just like the many other executives who practice his leadership philosophy, never heard from people in sales, customer service and other front-line positions who could have offered him a wealth of critical intelligence. Any company that finds itself in that position 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, an executive 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 the registration forms, there were worksheets designed to evaluate the effectiveness of Paul’s leadership. One of them was 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 good a listener he was. Because 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 that when conversations were over, those people truly felt that 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.”

But then after Paul attended the workshop, 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 was very manipulative. I would ask big, open-ended questions. But inside, I had a negative mindset. I was asking 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, which was 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 dedicated to positive, open and supportive listening.

As my negative outlook and management style started to change, 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 toward listening and communicating created much better results and I became a significantly more effective leader. Now, we were able to discuss, disagree, agree, and explore new possibilities. Through that process, we 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 engagement, just like I was. Before I began to interact genuinely with people, I was not achieving the success I sought. Through engagement, the quality of ideas we all generated, including more of my ideas, increased dramatically.

From my experience 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 engagement? Engagement starts with senior management and a true belief that engagement will lead to a wide range of benefits that include 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 engagement? We are about 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 Engagement Really Work?

Yes it does. Here is evidence that will convince you.

If I were you, after reading the introduction I would be thinking, “It is great that Evan believes so strongly in engagement and that he feels so positive about it, but where’s the proof that it actually works?”

That is a good question to ask. It is one that I have asked myself. I would like to address it in two ways. First, I will provide some statistics from studies that have established the effectiveness of engagement. Second, I will offer two case studies that illustrate times when the engagement philosophy has produced superlative results.

Research: Gallup Study Shows that Engagement Builds Highly Competitive Companies

Gallup Consulting’s “Employee Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio,” is a landmark study on the benefits of employee engagement within organizations. The study’s findings emerged from more than 30 years of research involving more than 17 million employees.

To quote from that study . . .

“The world’s top-performing organizations understand that employee engagement is a force that drives business outcomes. Research shows that engaged employees are more productive employees. They are more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and more likely to withstand temptations to leave the organization. In the best organizations, employee engagement transcends a human resources initiative — it is the way they do business. Employee engagement is a strategic approach supported by tactics for driving improvement and organizational change. The best performing companies know that developing an employee engagement strategy and linking it to the achievement of corporate goals will help them win in the marketplace.”

Gallop created what it calls a “macro-level indicator, called the Engagement Ratio, that serves as a benchmark for the level of employee engagement within organizations. It is a numerical ratio that compares the level of engaged employees to those who are actively disengaged.

Gallup determined that ratio by asking employees of different companies to respond to the following statements, rating which are true and which are not:

• “I know what is expected of me at work.”
• “I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.”
• “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”
• “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.”
• “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.”
• “There is someone at work who encourages my development.”
• “At work, my opinions seem to count.”
• “The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.”
• “My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
• “I have a best friend at work.”
• “In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.”
• “This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.”

Based on the responses to those questions, Gallup determined the level of employee engagement in the companies in its study and found that in average-performing organizations, an average of only 33% of employees were engaged, 49% were not engaged, and 18% were actively disengaged. That represented an engagement ratio of 1.83:1, or the ratio of engaged employees to disengaged.

Gallup also de...