Engaged employees: nature or nurture?

Much has been written about how much and how often companies have to change the way they do business. Exploding technology, the recession, competitors with new angles, demanding customers – it’s all stacked up to demand that companies change or die. But with all this change in the company, how are your employees keeping up?

When you think about it, keeping up with an ever-changing work environment is a full-time job. Karen Ferguson, executive vice president of Resources Connection Inc., puts it this way: “(Companies) have no choice but to change, and employees have to constantly change with them. I think you have to change your skill set until the day you retire.”

This scenario puts enormous pressure on employees to continually learn new skills and new ways of thinking. And it begs the question, “Where do you find employees that successful companies would struggle to keep?” Are they just born that way, or can employers develop and engage people by creating an environment where employees are able and willing to continue to make a positive impact on their companies, clients, and colleagues?

Let’s say you have two employees, both technically competent, but you can afford to keep only one of them. What skills or behaviors would you consider in determining which of the two employees you would retain or let go? This question was asked of more than 500 decision makers, including CEOs, managers, hiring managers, and business owners. His responses were surprisingly consistent. The ability to stay employable in the long term, they said, depends on the employee’s ability to:

1. Demonstrate “value added”.
2. Take charge of their personal lives.
3. Accept and initiate the change.
4. Work smarter, harder, faster and better.
5. Communicate openly and directly.
6. Look for leadership opportunities.
7. Have a positive impact on your companies, clients and colleagues.

While some of these traits may be inborn, they can all be learned. However, none of these traits would survive for long in an environment that was not also characterized by the same values. People would close or leave. In the end, you need to create an environment in which continuous learning is not only possible, but likely because leadership is open, direct, accepts change, builds trust, and rewards innovation and strong performance.

Leadership is about influencing people working in an uncertain environment. In our work with top executives, we emphasize that leaders cannot truly lead if the trust of subordinates is low. If you think about it, people love other people; not because of who they are, but because of how they make them feel. We willingly follow others for the same reason: it makes us feel good to do so.

Now you might say to yourself, don’t we also follow platoon sergeants, self-centered geniuses, demanding wives, and overbearing bosses? Well, we sure do. But it’s not because of his leadership skills. It is for a variety of reasons, such as not being incarcerated in a military prison or holding on to a marriage or a job. For us to willingly accept direction from other people, it must feel good to do so. Wanting to follow a leader is where trust comes in.

Mutual trust is critical to business relationships and so is helping employees become business partners who can make a significant impact. You build trust by being trustworthy: keeping your promises, communicating honestly, accepting responsibility, respecting others, and relying on the other person’s trust and reliability. The second way to build trust in a business relationship is through empowerment: raising another person’s motivation, sense of personal responsibility, or authority to a higher level. It has to do with communicating with people in a way that makes them feel more capable.

In their book A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters and Nancy Austin write that “the leader’s role is to improve, transform, train, nurture, trust, and encourage.” To fulfill that role, the leader has to communicate in a way that empowers others for positive results. One of the oldest leadership guides may have the last word. In the I Ching, Confucius wrote: “Radical changes require proper authority. A person must have inner strength as well as an influential position. What a leader does must correspond to a higher truth… If a revolution is not based on that inner truth, the results are bad and it is not successful. In the end, people will support only those undertakings that they instinctively feel are just.”