by Advanced Medical Resources Category: General
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“It’s not you, it’s me.” It’s the quintessential line that’s often used to veil the real reason for a break up. But there are occasions when that’s the honest truth, and if your employees are walking out the door more often than you’d like, this might be just the line your leaders need to start reflecting on.
Jim Collins, author of the book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, popularised the idea of the “the window and the mirror”. Effective leaders (that is, leaders who drive employee engagement scores up, not down) look out the window to credit their employees for success, but look in the mirror and assume responsibility when things aren’t going well. This is excellent advice, given that research proves a leader’s attitude and approach has direct and measurable impact on employee engagement levels.
Here are the 4 leadership qualities your leaders need to adopt if they want to attract top performers and build a company culture people want to stick around for:
Expecting employees to follow simply because directives were issued from higher echelons isn’t going to keep them around long-term. Organisations where leaders led in a manner that demonstrated company values had more than double the engagement scores of those whose leaders did not.
“If you want others to follow, you absolutely have to lead by example,” says Naomi Simson, Director of Redii. “The most important characteristic of a good leader is integrity. You simply must be, live and act 100% on the values of the business – people are looking to you for guidance on how to operate. Integrity creates trust.”
Without trust, people simply aren’t going to respect or follow your leaders. And what good is a ‘leader’ if people aren’t following them?
The best organisations understand that the key to their success is the people who are doing the work. The way to engage them is to foster meaningful relationships that motivate and inspire. Top performing companies know the importance of creating a community, and the easiest way to do this is by getting to know your people. Influential, effective leaders know employees by name, care about who they are, both inside and outside work, and understand that investing in training, development, and recognition and reward programs not only drives performance and productivity, but builds commitment and loyalty among their people.
Speaking at a roundtable on leadership earlier this year, CEO of Carnival Australia Ann Sherry said, “Risk aversion is killing us. We need the capacity to take calculated risk… We must believe in the future.” Rather than being hindered by the fear of looking foolish or making mistakes, Sherry believes effective leaders model courage and can explain to people why the future looks better than the past. “The sense of possibility ignites people,” Sherry said, “To be part of growth is exhausting, but it’s exciting and people want to be part of it.”
Some leaders play to win, others simply play ‘not to lose’. The pattern of results for leaders in the former group reflects steady growth; their positive, proactive leadership style creates higher employee engagement over time.
Reactive leaders, on the other hand, tend to focus on problems, risk aversion and try to push people for results, rather than leading the organisation on a journey. For organisations with these types of leaders, employee commitment, productivity and retention scores may rise and fall within a tolerable zone but over time this behaviour leads to little or no improvement in employee engagement, and is more likely to push people out the door.
Gallup reports that 45% of actively disengaged employees would fire their supervisors on the spot if they could, so it makes sense that the top performing organisations hold their leaders to account for team engagement and performance.