Psychological safety is a crucial factor in creating a healthy and productive team environment. Here are some steps that can help create psychological safety on a team: Encourage open communication: Build trust: Emphasize the importance of learning and growth: Promote inclusivity: Lead by example: Set clear expectations: Address conflicts: Creating psychological safety on a team…
Category: employee engagement
The Five Behviours of Cohesive Team
Summary Patrick Lencioni’s 2014 book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” offered a useful fable about an executive taking over a company (Decision Tech) and her challenges creating a cohesive executive team. The novel is an easy read with recognisable characters. Everyone will relate to the scenario of a team of leaders that struggle to be…
How Managers Impact Engagement
We have a saying – Employees join companies and quit managers. When it comes to engagement and retention, managers are the key pivot point for employees. Gallup has found that 70 percent of the variance in engagement relates to the relationship between a manager and his or her team. Let’s explore this further. An engagement problem is typically…
Engagement Trends
After all this time collecting valuable data on the engagement trends in an organization, what are we finding? Let’s dive in. Overall Engagement Trends When we measure engagement, the results usually look like a bell curve. The Actively Disengaged and Somewhat Disengaged employees fall on the left side of the bell curve, and the Actively Engaged and Engagedare over on the right….
Understanding Instrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in the Workplace
This past month we’ve talked all about the brain, emotions, and our natural and intense need to establish safe and secure relationships both at home and at work. For our last post in this series, I’m taking on an important topic when it comes to understanding behavior: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Motivation isn’t about inspirational…
Adult Attachment Theory: The Science of Employee Engagement
Understanding Engagement Early man discovered a harsh reality when it comes to survival in a primitive era – the best defense in a hostile and violent environment wasn’t a spear or a shield – it was a clan or a tribe. For hundreds of thousands of years our predecessors lived every day with a simple,…
The Role of the Limbic System at Work
What do you think drives employee behavior? Pay raises? Happy hours? Free coffee? It’s possible these perks can boost your team’s moment-to-moment happiness, and they are certainly nice benefits. But, when it comes to getting work done – and retaining your best performers – will lattes influence their long-term behavior? The answer is no. What…
Leadership Challenges: Leading with Intention
All month I’ve been working through challenges managers bring to me during my bootcamp and workshop sessions. Today’s challenge is all about how to lead with intention to create an engaged culture at work that doesn’t solely rely on the leader but rather creates a culture of engagement throughout the entire company. It starts with…
Leadership Challenges: Leading a Multigenerational Workforce
Over the past few weeks we’ve touched on challenges all leaders face. Today I’m tackling an issue I’ve seen pop up over and over again lately (and one that we will continue to face!): how to lead a multigenerational workforce. I get questions about this from managers all the time. “How do I calibrate my leadership…
Leadership Challenges: Retention
This month I’m tackling the topic of leadership challenges. Leaders face challenges at every turn. Beyond the external challenges like increased competition, changing best practices, and new markets, leaders also face pressures inside the company – everything from retaining your best employees to ensuring your entire senior leadership team models the values of your company….
Leadership Challenges: Accountability
This month I’m taking on your biggest leadership challenges. Last week we discussed creating a retention strategy to keep your top performing employees. This week I’m touching on accountability, an issue that comes up frequently during my work with CEOs. Understanding to whom (or to what!) your employees feel accountable to will help you in…
The Four Most Important Lessons Regarding Core Values for Your Company
Every company has a set of values that impact the daily behavior of employees. Company values can either be nice, inspirational words on the office wall with little to no impact on employees’ day to day, or they can represent the true embodiment of what a company culture stands for. Leaders that heed these four…
Correcting a Disengaged Culture
Do your employees exhibit low levels of trust and reliability? Do they produce poor quality work, attempt to evade responsibility, or make excuses for bad outcomes? If so, the problem goes beyond your employees – it’s time to step back and pay attention to your whole work culture. Widespread disengagement is a result of a dysfunctional culture in…
Learning a Relational Leadership Mentality
In his seminal book Instant Replay, about the World Champion Green Bay Packers under legendary coach Vince Lombardi in the 1960s, Jerry Kramer describes Lombardi’s leadership. He was authoritarian, mercurial, and endlessly demanding. Despite a roster of Hall of Fame players, everyone knew who the boss was. Players feared Lombardi and his tirades and worked tirelessly…
Four Factors That Motivate Your Employees Daily
Every employment comes with a paycheck; it’s the very definition of a job. But as long as employees are fairly compensated, survey after survey shows that money is not one of the top workplace concerns. Far more impactful in today’s workplace are a number of workplace conditions that could be labeled as quality of life on…
Subtle Signs of a Toxic Company Culture
The marketing guru Stan Phelps likes to say that it’s hard to see the label from inside the can. He’s talking about having perspective in a marketing sense, but the same holds true inside a company’s workplace. When things go wrong, it’s often senior leaders who are the last to know. Most organizations don’t set…
Breaking Down the Corporate Hierarchy
n his seminal 1989 study, The Iceberg of Ignorance, consultant Sidney Yoshida found that top management and middle management are aware of less than one-tenth of front-line problems, whereas supervisors are aware of three-quarters of them, and front-line employees know about all of them. This is probably not shocking to you. In many organizations, the lowest-paid…
Culture Problem
How to Know When Your Company’s Problems Lie in Corporate Culture There is a pervasive feeling among your managers that their frontline employees aren’t invested in the company’s goals and objectives. Your office empties at 5:00 p.m. and doesn’t fill again until 9:00 a.m. the next day. People trickle into meetings five or ten minutes…
William Kahn: Father of Employee Engagement
In 1990, when Jack Welch was leading General Electric to ever-greater heights by preaching the power of firing 10 percent of his employees each year, Dr. William A. Kahn advocated a different approach. Kahn—a professor of organizational behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business—published groundbreaking research in the prestigious Academy of Management Journal in which he…
You Must Measure Employee Engagement
It’s well accepted in business that what gets measured gets done. Organizational leaders can talk all day about employee engagement, but measuring the organization’s progress brings into stark relief whether those efforts are working—providing a road map to what should come next. When an organization measures its employees’ engagement, it signals to the staff that…
Create a Circle of Safety for your team
Simon Sinek describes what he calls the “Circle of Safety” with this simple story: A lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another so that whichever way he approached…
The Importance of Accountability in an Engaged Workplace
A workplace in which employees are engaged without being accountable is unsustainable. Accountability is critical to any human operation in which work must get done efficiently, effectively, and within budget. More importantly, it also has a major impact on top performers and overall employee engagement. Consider a workplace environment where some employees are highly engaged…
We Are All Orphaned Children: The Importance of Connection
Look around you. The trappings of modernity dominate your life—computer-phones, electric cars, drones, connection, and so on. But the operating system for your physical and emotional being dates to the earliest proto-humans. Our progenitors rose to the top of the food chain primarily because they learned how to pool and share social resources. They found…
What Really Drives Employee Engagement?
Most of us want to work in organizations where we look forward to going to work and feel a sense of engagement in what we do and who we do it with. The challenge we are hearing from CEO’s across the country is “what is the best approach?” Satisfaction vs. Engagement What is the biggest mistake…
Your Brain’s Limbic System Offers a Roadmap to Productivity
If you’ve ever attempted to motivate an employee by focusing on their faults and insinuating that their job was on the line, and then found that their performance deteriorated, or that they became defensive and angry, you have encountered the brain’s limbic system. The limbic system is the reason that employees who feel safe in…
Five Steps to Building an Engaged Team at Work
The brain is hardwired to seek connections, to be in a tribe. People don’t grow up in tribes anymore, but they do join one – their workplace. If businesses want engaged, enthusiastic, loyal employees, they must create the conditions that the brain was born seeking. When it finds it, it thrives. Your job as a…
How to Give Feedback That Empowers Employees
For many organizations, feedback is an annual event at which an employee is often shocked to hear that their manager’s assessment of their work doesn’t match their own. Recent research has found that roughly one in three annual performance reviews resulted in negative outcomes. Clearly, this isn’t the best way to provide meaningful feedback. Effective…
The ABC Method of Accountability in the Workplace
There is an ongoing conversation among business leaders regarding the need for open and positive workplaces. It’s a cornerstone of the effort to create a productive culture that promotes employee engagement. Yet at the same time, employees need to be held accountable to their work, their team, and to company core values. How can managers…
The Three Components of Employee Engagement
Humans crave social connections in all aspects of their lives. As herd animals, these relationships reinforce our valued membership in a group. Across the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and so on, all humans share this common need. High-performance workplace cultures are built on engaged employees who feel safe and secure in their roles, and…
Social Baseline Theory and the Workplace
No Man is an Island It turns out the brain has a baseline, a norm, it assumes will be true when we accomplish the tasks in our day. This assumption is that we will perform our tasks with others, not alone. It is a social baseline. Dr. James Coan refers to this hardwired brain function as social…
How Does a Leader Get People to Follow?
Hierarchy is the most natural and enduring form of leadership in human history. After all, it has survived for millennia. People typically prefer to outsource key decisions that impact the larger group or carry high risk to someone else. There is a very high metabolic cost in making difficult choices that affect other people’s lives….
Changing Corporate Culture
An upscale athletic club was struggling as they tried to move from a culture established under the previous owner to a more vibrant and accountable culture desired by the new owner. Decades of a low-accountability management style left a deep imprint on employees and it was shared with new hires both formally (from managers) and…
What Creates Trust?
We use the word trust all the time. We know how important it is at all levels within an organization as well as with our customers, vendors, opinion leaders, and community. But like so many broad and powerful words, we rarely dig deeper for a more comprehensive and meaningful understanding of what the word means at an emotional level….
Why you Need Super Cooperators on Your Team
OUR ANCESTORS faced many challenges – disease, predators, and sustenance, for example – that forced them to adapt and change their behaviors just to survive. The result of these circumstances over a hundred thousand years of evolution is a species that is hard-wired to thrive in a communal setting. A human being who, on a neurological…
Leading Actively Engaged Employees
Over the past four weeks we’ve discussed the four types of employees that exist in (almost) every organization. Managers who understand the traits of the four types of employees and work to understand their impact on their teams ultimately reduce disengagement and further business goals. Last week we discussed the Engaged employee, the largest segment of engaged…
Leading Engaged Employees
This month we’re discussing the four types of employees that exist in (almost) every organization. Understanding the traits of the four types of employees and working to understand their impact on their teams ultimately reduces disengagement and furthers business goals. Last week we discussed the Somewhat Disengaged employee, the largest segment of employees in an organization. This…