Hey, this is Christal Hacking your leadership. On today's discussion on employee engagement. I want to go over a process that has been around for a few years. It's from a UK based company called Engage for Success, and this process is called the four Enablers. These are things that organizations can do to kind of level set and check as to whether or not the engagement in their organization is low, and if it is low, what they can do to fix it. The four Enablers from Engaged for Success.
I think the reason I like them is because they don't depend on each other. They are individualized, but they are all required at the same time, and so you don't have to not focus on one area because another is lacking. These are all things that kind of have to be done at the same time, and I think it'd be very hard for me to find an organization who had these four things and had low employee engagement,
and so I think it's really all encompassing. If you look at them, I'll kind of go list them off real quickly we can discuss them. The first is a strategic narrative, so there's a visible, empowering leadership who provides a strong strategic narrative about the organization, where it's come from, where it's going. There's engaging managers, people who focus on their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals,
coach them and stretch them. There's employee voice, so throughout the organization, the employees feel like they can contribute, they can give feedback. They are asked about their opinion on how the organization functions, and their their ideas and expertise is used in kind of creating strategy and moving forward.
And then organizational integrity. Do the values kind of listed in the employee handbook or up on the wall, do the actions exhibited by the organization, by the leaders do they match what those words are or is there a disconnect between those two? And again, if organizations have all four of those, it'd be very difficult to find a
lack of engagement. In general, you'll always have individ people who just don't like the organization, but but in general you'll have high engagement if you have these things.
Yeah, I think as you were reading through them, my first thought was that's a really high bar. Yeah, to have these come to life, you know, at all times. And I think I think that they're great you know that kind of they're great filters though, and they're great questions to ask because really, like if that's what you're striving towards, to your point, like it will never be perfect and you can never I don't think you can ever say check this box one hundred percent of the time.
I think that there have been some organizations that collectively have been very close and have had done a lot of different and innovative things to like make these things happen that but most would say are kind of outside of the box or a different approach, you know, or it's kind of like the feeling of like, oh, well, you know, you're you're giving your people too much power to make decisions and that could cost you, you know,
on the bottom line. But also at the same time, this empowers people and gives them a reason to want to enjoy the decisions that they make in the job
that they have. So like I just think of like immediately really high bars, but the right things and a good I think, a good you know framework to figure out where are you organizationally, if you were to make this into like a square, where would you lean more one way or the other, and how would you go about addressing these things as you kind of talk through them.
I think as a as a local leader, many of these things as you talked about them as an organization, this is a really high bar as a local leader of people. I think you could scale this down and create spaces to bring this to life for your teams. You could kind of make create a like a you know, a microcosm of the larger by being really intentional with
some of these things. But I do, on the surface think it's like really really good questions and really cut right to the heart of like is this happening in your org or on your team or not?
Right, So, the first thing I said, you kind of touched on it a little bit is that is that this isn't something you arrive at. It's something that you are constantly striving for and constantly working at. It's like, you know, if you there's a difference between a person who wants to run a marathon and a person who
is a runner, right, Like, they're two different things. A person you can train and go and run a marathon and then be done with it, and then you know a month later, you you know, don't want to get off the couch and run Again, if you're a runner, you're constantly doing these things, whether or not you are
have accomplished it or not. And so because the team's kind of ebb and flow, because you'll have people who will come and go from teams, people who promote, people who leave the organization, the work that is needed on these elements are always needed. And even if a team doesn't change for a while, even if it's the same people for you know, a period of several years, it still requires work because people will go through different things in their own lives that will make them more or
less capable of doing these things. And constantly thinking about whether or not they exist is important because if you don't think about them for too long, you will find that they will slowly go away and you won't realize that they've they've been lost until it's until once you get to that point, it will take a lot more work to get them back than it just takes to maintain them if you are in the rhythm of maintaining them.
And I completely agree with you that there are things that can be done on the local level, because really, if you think about where leadership happens, it's in the one on one interaction between two people regardless of what happens at the kind of broader company level. So I want to go over how individual leaders can make this
happen regardless of what happens above them. But first I want to get up toward to for one of our sponsors, when it comes to employee voice, ask your people what their thoughts are about the last thing that you said, or the last meeting that you held, or the last time that they that you had to give them feedback, and you know, you want to know how if you
did that the correct way. You know, the individual conversations you have with your people where you genuinely want to know their opinion on you as a leader or on what the way forward is for a strategy that you're developing. Those are the things that will raise the perception that employees have a voice in the organization, especially if you are using their their information as you go forward, you give them credit for it and kind of hype them up and put them on pedestals for you know, kind
of for the contribution they're making. Engaging managers, you know, if you're engaging with your team individually, one on one, Uh, it doesn't really matter whether or not You're a leader, and I want to say it doesn't matter. I keep saying that when it comes to organizational integrity, the say do gap you know, do as I say, not as I do. That only happens in the one on one interaction between a person and their leader. You know, if a if an organization is saying one thing, the the
doing another thing is not done by the organization. It's done by you. It's done by the people who work for the organization. And the only thing you can control
are the actions that you do. And so if you say something to your people, whatever it is that you say, whatever you proclaim are your values or what you stand for, or how you hold people accountable, how you promote people, what the expectations are, if you are holding yourself to those same expectations, and you're holding your people to those expectations equally and fairly across the board, not you know, playing favorites or holding them to different standards. You know,
that's the reflection of organizational integrity. And if your people see that from you, they will feel that and they will be highly engaged, even if you don't necessarily feel it from the people above you.
Yeah, I think it's such a great call out and kind of break down because I think again, it's like controlling what you can control, and when you are a leader of people, there's a lot of things that you can do to bring you know, these types of filters to life and bring the values of an organization to life. You know, I've been very much subscribed to the idea of kind of you know, the layers of two above you.
So like basically, you know, ninety five percent of your experience at work is going to be impacted by your boss and your and your boss's boss. Like, those two layers of leadership are really where most of what you experience you get from. So if they're they're doing the things that you're talking about, if there's dialogue around you know, how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, How am I involved here?
If I understand, you know, organizationally, what the big picture is and where we're going, and how I fit into that. Like if these things are happening in our conversation and dialogue, and and then as my direct leader, you're creating these spaces for me, I feel really good about these things, and I feel that like this, this is exactly how kind of the company is showing up for me because again, my experience is my direct leader and then their leader.
And I think that that's such an important responsibility, regardless of the industry that you're in or the organization that you work for. I think some some companies have really really strong and clear narratives. Some companies you know, like, Okay, this is a thing that we do. But but how I feel about, you know, my work every day and my involvement of that, it has so much more to
do with that leader that I have. Because in both cases of companies that have really clear, strong narratives or companies that don't, that direct leader is going to either
bring that to life or create that for me. And so like that's why it's so important to consider these types of things, to reflect on these types of things, to write down, you know, these things, and then say, how am I doing this for my people or my teams If I'm looking to create the best possible kind of working community slash culture that I possibly can as a leader.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that there's this this this element of in some people's minds that oh, this isn't happening at the top, so it has to
start there. And you know, when it comes to leadership as a whole, it's very difficult to make broad sweeping changes to an entire organization if the if the leaders at the top are not on board clearly, but whether or not your people feel engaged and bring their best has far less to do with that and far more to do with how you interact and engage with them
on a daily basis. And so when it comes to, you know, a strategic narrative that comes from the top, you know, the further away from the execution you go, the more strategic and less tactical it is. It's less about what you have to do and more about here's where we're going. What we have to do to get there is really decided by the different levels along the
way down to who actually has to execute it. And so what your people feel from you and from the organization when it comes to their expectation of executing a strategy is largely going to be about how you hold them accountable to the actions that you have told them you expect, which comes from your boss talking to you. But if we talk about it through the context of
our culture acronym L for lend Air support. You know, what your people here, they should hear from you directly, and what you give to them should not be a should not reflect your lack of ability to should not reflect your lack of engagement with your own leader. It should reflect a desire to keep them engaged even in the absence of your engagement with your own leader. And so again, all of this happens between you and your people.
And that's one of the reasons I like this particular way of looking at employee engagement because it really has kind of an extreme ownership element to it that leaders can look at and kind of take hold of this on their own, as opposed to, you know, something they have to depend on others to make happen. Thank you all for joining us in this episode. We'll see you next Thursday for our next discussion on raising employee engagement. You have a great day.