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Becoming a First-Class Leader E-Zine - Issue No. 53/ September 2008

Dear Reader,

What are your ambitions in life?

Even if it is not your target to become a C-Level executive (CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, etc.), you might find today's article useful to achieve your ambtions.

Working as a professional coach, but also using coaching with the people at Progress-U, I keep noticing that our own perspective is often the most limiting factor to achieve what we really want.

I hope you find today's article helpful to achieve your ambitons, be it to become a CEO or anything else.

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

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Series: The (not so) Secret Keys to High Engagement
Part I of V: The Power of High Engagement

By Charlie Lang, Executive Coach & Trainer
Corporate Culture & Leadership Expert @ Progress-U Limited

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As an executive coach, I get to see many different companies. Some are large multi-nationals, others are midsized companies and sometimes smaller enterprises. Over the years, I have developed a “fine nose” for the various cultures of the companies I work with. In many cases, I can already get a sense of a company’s culture the moment I walk into their office. And in most cases my initial sense is confirmed by the executives I’m coaching.

In the past couple of years I started to pay special attention to the engagement level of the people working in these offices. How would I know if the engagement level is high or rather low? And why does it matter anyway?

In the course of this series I will share with you not only my observations in working with many senior executives and management teams but also results from recent research on this topic. I will endeavor to provide you with a complete view on this topic and useful strategies and tools to assist you in what you most probably want: a top performing team or organization.

Let’s first define the term ‘highly engaged employee’. I like the definition brought forward by Hewitt Associates as part of their Best Employers Research. They summarized it with three ‘S’. Highly engaged employees

• say good things about their team and/or company. Their communication towards people inside and outside the company about the company is positive;
• stay longer with the organization because they can identify themselves with the organization and feel committed to it;
• strive to work at their best possible level, strive to learn what’s necessary to deliver excellence and are willing to go the extra mile.

The following graph shows the financial impact highly engaged employees have on financial results (adapted from the Best Employers Research by Hewitt Associates)

These average per annum numbers may be different in your company or for your team, but I think they are a good indication why optimizing employee engagement is not just a nice thing to have, but actually a critical factor for business success.

When I learned these figures, the first question that came to my mind was: Why are some employees highly engaged and others not – often even in the same team with the same manager in the same company we notice considerable differences. Why does it seem that some managers are more able to build a highly engaged team than others? Why do I notice such differences even within the same company?

I started the quest for a deeper understanding of employee engagement in 2004. In 2005, I published my first book “The Groupness Factor” which is about one specific and highly influential aspect of employee engagement. I will elaborate more on that aspect in Part III of this series.

The longer I studied this topic, I noticed more and more determining factors for employee engagement and the whole topic became almost overwhelming to me. For those who know me, they know that I hate models that are too complex because they usually are not very practical and rarely lead to the desired outcome. One example was the question of trust. When we researched this topic several years ago, we asked over 1,000 people to think of two people they deeply trust and what makes the difference. We got lots of different statements and it seemed overwhelming. Eventually however, we were able to find three key elements to which all these statements could be related and thus develop an effective and applicable formula for trust.

So I realized that I needed to find a way how to integrate these complex ideas into something easier to grasp. And as it often happens when you search for something, it will somehow show up if you are sufficiently patient and persistent. And it did!

Last year, I co-delivered a leadership program with a UK trainer, and he shared this graph with the participants (adapted from CLC 2004 Employee Engagement Survey):

Note: ‘Discretionary effort’ could be translated to ‘going the extra mile’ or ‘doing more than what is necessary’ and is therefore a strong indicator of high engagement.

That’s exactly what I was looking for – a deeper understanding of what actually makes people highly engaged. It took me a while to fully grasp the meanings of these commitment types and how we could help organizations to apply them in a highly effective and efficient way.

I noticed that many efforts by line managers and HR are focused on rational commitment types (red color). For example, incentive systems tend to increase the rational commitment to the manager (“I’ll work harder and be more loyal to my boss because then she will more likely give me a higher bonus.”). From the above research we see that this has a comparatively low impact on high engagement.

The rational commitment types mean that people are committed becauseof some expected benefit. The emotional commitment types mean that people are committed because they simply love the job, the company, the team, the boss.

Consequently, in this series I shall focus on the types of emotional commitment and what you can do to make use them to create higher engagement.

• Part II: Emotional Commitment to the Job
• Part III: Emotional Commitment to the Organization and Team
• Part IV: Emotional Commitment to the Manager
• Part V: Putting it all together – possible consequences for you

If you have any comments in the meantime, please write to charlie.lang@progressu.com . We will post any comments to this series in the next part we publish.

Charlie Lang is an executive coach and trainer who founded Progress-U in 2002. His mission is to assist his clients in becoming first-class leaders.

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