“It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” – Peter Gibbons, Office Space
It was an early fall morning at Fort Campbell, KY, with a crispness to the air that signals the changing of the seasons. It was still dark – the time change was still a couple of weeks away – and the troops were assembling for physical training. My platoon sergeant and I were behind the formation, and I was listening to him describe a quiet weekend “watching flowers grow,” his way of saying that he’d been watching PBS.
As we stood there chatting, another platoon leader walked between the ranks with a red lens penlight and his green notebook, casually talking to soldiers while looking up their personal information on the pages of the notebook. My platoon sergeant looked down, shook his head, and muttered some choice obscenities. “What?” I asked.
“That’s not how you do it,” he grumbled in response. “If you can’t remember their names, don’t insult them that way. Put down the notebook and actually get to know them.”
It was a subtle reminder that people matter, and that leaders are only as successful as they are at engaging their teams with authenticity. Or, as my platoon sergeant was always quick to remind me, “It’s about them, not about you.”
THE PROBLEM WITH TPS REPORTS
The 1999 Mike Judge film, Office Space, offers a classic study of leadership engagement. Not the good kind, though. Bill Lumbergh, the division vice-president of the software company, Initech, is the principal antagonist of the film and the exemplar for how not to engage your team. Lumbergh is that manager who engages their team with empty, rhetorical small talk, offering a droll, “What’s happening?” before launching into an unenthusiastic diatribe about some meaningless piece of busy work or the ubiquitous cover sheet expected on all “TPS reports.”
Rather than use employee engagement as a means to connect and motivate his team, Lumbergh engages people with false enthusiasm and overt micromanagement. The end result is a miserable workforce that works, in the words of the film’s overworked, overstressed and oversupervised protagonist, Peter Gibbons, “just hard enough not to get fired.”
Peter’s misery makes the film memorable. We can all see a little of Peter in ourselves. We’ve all faced similar challenges at one time or another, and most of us have been similarly micromanaged to the point of near insanity. And at some point in our careers, we’ve had to contend with our own Bill Lumberghs. The film makes us laugh because it is relatable to the point of being painful.
10 Ways to ENGAGe WITH PURPOSE
Leadership engagement is crucial to the long-term success of any organization. Leaders play an equally important role in assuring that their engagement is both genuine and meaningful, that their teams are motivated, empowered, and inspired. Such engagement is at the heart of transformational leadership, yet according to Daniel Pink, the bestselling author of Drive, only 3 in 10 people feel engaged in the workplace.
In the wake of the great resignation following the pandemic, employee engagement reached new lows. While the impact on workplace culture is crushing, the effect on organizational effectiveness is worse. A Gallup study captured the performance gaps between high- and low-engagement companies and the results are startling: 81% more absenteeism, 43% more turnover, 64% more accidents, and 23% less profitability.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. Engagement isn’t rocket science, and there are 10 proven ways to effectively engage your team as a leader.
1. Lead by example.
Be a role model for your team. Connect words and deeds. Be someone they want to emulate.
2. Lead with vision.
Motivate and focus your team with a clear and compelling vision of where you want to lead them, then fuel that vision with passion.
3. Lead with authenticity.
Authentic leaders honestly want to make a difference for their people. And when they pursue a vision, they do so in a way that draws the very best from everyone around them.
4. Lead with stories.
Employees want to know the leaders they follow. Share your stories, let them get to know the real you. Connect with them through storytelling.
5. Lead with your heart.
Trust is the backbone of any organization. It underpins culture and drives meaningful engagement. You build trust through three powerful, but often under-appreciated traits: humility, compassion, and empathy.
6. Lead with recognition.
Recognition is one of the easiest and most effective ways to inspire employee engagement, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Find out what motivates your team members on an individual basis and adapt to what inspires them.
7. Lead with transparency.
Nothing kills organizational culture like the cone of silence. Prioritize regular and open communication and encourage constructive feedback. If you want people to trust you, give them a voice.
8. Lead with likeability.
Leadership isn’t a popularity contest, but studies show that teams perform better for a leader they like. That doesn’t mean you have to be their friend, just that you treat them with respect and genuinely care for them.
9. Lead with appreciation.
Cultivate an environment where people know they matter – their opinions, their beliefs, and their contributions. Don’t wait for a formal recognition ceremony to let someone know that you appreciate them.
10. Lead with a push.
Create a culture of development in which you commit to pushing your team to the next level, investing in their growth and development while shaping them for future opportunities.
Finally, get up, get out, and get busy…engaging. Grab your coffee mug and engage your team. In the military, we called that “leadership by walking around” or “battlefield circulation” but in execution, it’s just leadership engagement. Build relationships, build trust, build camaraderie. Build your team.
