“Let me just do this myself, then I know it is done and done correctly”.
Does this sound familiar?
I have heard this so many times in the smaller to medium sized businesses where the owners or top management live very close to the day to day operations of the business. There could be many reasons why this situation occurs, but I truly believe that one of them is that we as business owners just don’t trust some of our people.
Maybe we should consider whether the level of employee engagement doesn’t play a major role in building trust between management and employees. Gallup, a global analytics and advice firm that helps leaders and organisations solve their most pressing problems, has done a lot of research and work in the area of employee engagement. On their website they pose the question: “Who is responsible for employee engagement?”. Their answer:
“Employee engagement should be a manager’s primary role responsibility. Managers are in charge of ensuring that employees know what work needs to be done, supporting and advocating for them when necessary, and explaining how their work connects to organisational success. To succeed in that responsibility, managers need to be equipped to have ongoing coaching conversations with employees. Unfortunately, most managers don’t know how to make frequent conversations meaningful, so their actions are more likely to be interpreted as micromanaging without providing the right tools and direction. So, it’s not enough for leaders to simply tell managers to own engagement and coach their teams.”
As business owners and or senior management of the business it is our job to ensure all of our people are engaged and in doing so we will experience that they become trustworthy and we wouldn’t need to take work out of their hands. Over the last coupe of decades leadership, what it means and how we can grow as leaders, has grown exponentially. One of these leadership gurus, John C. Maxwell, developed what he calls the 5 levels of leadership to assist owners and senior management to practice leadership skills so that we can fully engage our employees. He also categorically states that leadership is influence, nothing less and nothing more.
SlightlySkew believes that the cornerstone of deeper levels of employee engagement is leadership. Unfortunately, even the world of “leadership” has become plagued with unnecessary complexity and consultancy-talk.
The foremost thinker of modern leadership, Dr John C. Maxwell maintains a simplistic understanding of this ability and categorically states that “leadership is influence, nothing more and nothing less”. This does not mean that developing as a leader is an easy feat. Dr Maxwell offers a tried and tested framework for developing leaders and calls it “The 5 levels of leadership” which define how a leader could develop from any position and how business owners could put their leadership skills to use in order to create more engaged employees.
SlightlySkew provides various leadership programmes that could be catered for your exact needs. Contact us through our “Contact Us” sheet on our website and we will engage with you.