In Elizabethan times you might never have noticed someone slipping a coin into your beer. When you found it at the bottom of the glass it was too late. You had inadvertently accepted the ‘Queen’s shilling’ and consequently been legally enrolled in Her Majesty’s Navy. But it is not easy to force someone to be involved so that they readily accept what others want them to do. Most press-ganged victims made poor sailors and deserted as soon as they could.

Press gangs merely highlight the real difference between involvement and full-hearted engagement and commitment when people choose to give of their best. As Martina Navratilova, the tennis star, once put it, to understand the difference between involvement and commitment, ‘Just think of bacon and eggs’. She said: ‘The hen is involved but the pig is committed!’

Leaders who know how to involve people seldom do it out of pure kindness, but because it has a practical result. It can be highly transformative. Their ‘democratic’ form of leadership creates satisfaction, awareness, new ways of thinking, and outstanding performance. This ideally suits the emerging needs of twenty-first-century organisations. We can therefore expect a growing demand for this particular leadership capability, in contrast to the old style of leadership.

Old and new leadership

Old-style leadership	Shared or involving leadership
You’re a leader because of your position in a group or hierarchy.	You’re a leader because of your ability to create quality interactions between people.
You’re judged as a leader by whether you solve problems.	You’re judged as a leader by how people are working together.
You are responsible for providing solutions and answers.	Everyone plays a part in getting results; you enable this process.
There is a distinct difference between you the leader and your ‘followers’, through character and skills.	People are interdependent, all actively contributing to the process of leadership.
Communication tends to be formal, rather than conversational.	Communication is central, with a stress on conversation and dialogue.
You may see secrecy, deception, coercion and pay-offs as acceptable ways of making things happen.	You are driven by values in which honesty and shared ethics are paramount and you seek the common good.

“Leadership is about constantly thinking: ‘What can I do for the team to help them achieve what I want them to achieve?’”

Tracy Edwards, skipper of the first round-the-world all-female crew

As a leader, your attraction to organisations will mainly depend on whether you can involve people. Why? Because this ability provides you with the resources needed to transform situations. At its most basic, people voluntarily participate in what you want to achieve. At its most advanced, anyone can contribute to the leadership role through their willingness to be accountable for results, using their unique knowledge, skills, character, connections and determination. The diagram illustrates this involvement spectrum.

Intensity of involvement

The ways in which you involve or engage people in what you want to achieve are essentially simple. First, you need to recognise the value of involving people. Second, you must choose practical ways to go about achieving it. Third, you need to initiate action that creates it.

Participation and enrolment

Creating basic participation is usually the easiest part of the involvement journey. At this low level of intensity, people may at least offer token compliance. That is, they are willing to go through the motions of involvement. For example, they may say they support what you want to do, attend your meetings, nominally accept work assignments, and so on. But it is only with actual engagement, commitment and beyond that you can expect to see transformative performance by both individuals and the organisation.

When someone enrols in your vision or intention, they become sufficiently committed to offer support. This usually occurs once people start to understand what you want to achieve, and realise they can be part of the grand design, with a possible role.

Only when people fully grasp what you want to achieve can they make up their minds to ‘buy in’. This is partly why all effective leaders choose to become powerful communicators. They know how important it is to learn the art of persuasion and how to make a verbal impact. Is this your strong or weak area? If necessary, consider investing in some presentation coaching.

Apart from putting the message across well, you can encourage enrolment through directly asking people if they will join with you in your scheme. This is not seeking their permission, rather it is checking whether they wish to participate in the grand design. Invite people to tell you what they require to feel enrolled. It might be anything from a hefty salary to a challenging job, from time off to care for a dependent to the opportunity to job share. Never take people’s enrolment for granted, even if you originally employed them. Try to uncover what they themselves feel would make them committed to the purpose.

Two of the most powerful ways leaders obtain people’s enrolment are by showing people they will be engaged in something extraordinary, and clarifying the value of their personal contribution.

You cannot expect people to enrol if what’s on offer is dull or pedestrian. It must capture their imagination and make them feel the risks along the way will somehow be worth it. Develop the knack of explaining how even the simplest tasks link to the grand design. One reason James Dyson insists that everyone joining his company spends a day learning to assemble his breakthrough vacuum cleaner is that it helps them relate directly and viscerally to the manufacturing and design purpose that is driving the company.

By showing people how their contribution will make a difference to whatever you are wanting to achieve, you bring alive for each person the part they can play, no matter how small or indirect. An example of this happens in Disney theme parks. In Disneyland the employees most often approached by visitors for help and directions are those tasked with keeping the place clean. They are no longer lowly sweepers, but important contributors of information and advice. Similarly, in an international logistics company the leaders realised that employees most often interacting with its customer base were not its office staff but its delivery drivers. Previously treated almost as cannon fodder, ‘Just doing my job, mate’, they were promoted to customer liaison staff, given additional training and ongoing support.

The importance of clarifying why you need someone’s help is underlined by David Barrass, an experienced interim chief executive specialising in turnaround roles at struggling businesses. He has described how, when working at the Royal Mint, ‘The first couple of managerial meetings I held, it was just me saying, “this is what I want, here are the targets I am setting for us and that I am committing to the Treasury that we will deliver.”’ Yet ‘within six months he had brought people with him and the pronoun changed from “I” to “we”.’¹

It helps if you say why you need help. Don’t assume employees realise their job is to contribute. If you want more than passive compliance, in which people apparently go along with what you want, be willing to explain fully how their support can make all the difference.

Why engage?

Engagement goes beyond mere enrolment or participation. With engagement people will go that extra mile and the benefits flow to both them and the organisation. For example, Gallup sifted through data from around 200,000 employees in 36 organisations and across 21 industries. It found levels of employee engagement directly affected five key business outcomes: productivity, profitability, customer loyalty, employee retention and safety. There are plenty of other studies showing a clear relationship between employee engagement and key company financial metrics.²

Similarly, UK research in the NHS showed staff engagement as a critical factor for delivering a successful service. For example, shared influence over decision making in teams resulted in lower levels of patient mortality, while staff involvement and improved job satisfaction led to improved team and patient satisfaction.³

There is often a long way to go before many organisations fully engage their staff and utilise the potential for better performance. A UK study by the consultancy company Towers Perrin showed that only 12 per cent of UK employees were highly engaged, 65 per cent moderately engaged and 23 per cent disengaged. Moving people up the engagement scale can therefore have a large effect on performance.⁴ Similar low levels of engagement have been found in more wide-ranging global studies.

How to engage people

How do you move your people beyond compliance or participation towards engagement? There are some basic steps to take for winning commitment and engagement. One useful approach is called VIDI⁵ – shorthand for saying that people need to feel:

• Valued
• Involved
• Developed
• Inspired.

This is both a checklist and a plan of action. These four core requirements offer a route map for winning engagement.⁶

Being valued

One of the deepest hungers of the human heart is to be seen and understood – in simple terms, to be feel valued. This has great resonance in the twenty-first century when so many people feel alienated and disassociated from the world around them. To value those around you and gain their engagement, start seeing them as individuals and reflect this in your leadership actions. This is a particular challenge for anyone leading a large organisation, yet talented leaders still manage to create a culture where individuals feel valued for what they bring to the party.

Many leaders think the only way of valuing people is to pay them more. If these leaders’ budget is tight, they feel stymied and impotent. And yet so much research shows that money is rarely the sole motivator for people’s commitment. As has been said, ‘In difficult times when you have to be financially stingy, you can at least be emotionally generous’. Acknowledgment, recognition and appreciation really don’t cost that much.

In our own company we used to have a box of gifts called ‘the above and beyond box’. At any time, when a team member felt a colleague had contributed something beyond their role, they could call the team to order and announce the presentation of an award. The recipient would then select a present from the box. It was a small gesture, but helped people to feel recognised and appreciated.

People want to feel valued for who they are – their individuality. This means you need to encourage an environment where your people feel they have a unique contribution to make. It is where, as a leader, you:

• encourage and recruit diversity
• treat others with respect
• avoid using stereotypes
• make it clear that prejudice is wrong
• don’t allow bigoted comments by others to go unchallenged.

Paying attention to how employees live their working lives and helping them to improve is a sound investment if you want to involve them in your goals. Valuing their unique individuality also requires paying attention to their well-being and work–life balance. In an era of 24/7 communication some might argue this is no longer possible – that rather than a work–life balance we can now only expect a perpetual digital hum governing our existence. But such a view abandons any responsibility for people’s well-being or the need to establish a humane environment in which people can flourish.

One of the biggest obstacles to people feeling valued is the lack of trust. Studies around the world show extremely low levels of trust between leaders and their colleagues. You can build trust by keeping your promises and behaving with integrity, but also by trusting and empowering your people. If you believe in them, then they are likely to feel valued.

Being involved

Winning people’s involvement is another important step along the way to gaining their engagement. It is now high on the agenda of many far-sighted organisations and will almost certainly continue to be so for many years. For example, in the UK the O₂ organisation employs a ‘head of employee involvement’, while the retailer Marks & Spencer has a permanent Business Involvement Group (BIG). It ensures people have an opportunity to voice their views and ideas. Similarly, the John Lewis partnership, long one of the UK’s most successful retail concerns, has always recognised involvement as its secret formula for survival and growth.

The amazing turnaround at ITV started when CEO Adam Crozier and his HR team launched an initiative called ‘Let’s Get Engaged’. He kicked it off with a series of road-shows. Staff were invited to contribute ideas for improvements. The leadership received 9,000 notes with suggestions. Employees certainly felt involved at the prospect of being able to make a difference. The HR team followed up with responses to every single idea and each month communicated news of action that had resulted from the suggestions.

Communication plays a key role in creating involvement, but only around a third of employees feel their leaders communicate openly and honestly. Rigid communication channels and a culture of keeping information hidden all contribute to switching off people’s involvement.

Try to keep the communication as open as possible. At Happy Ltd, an award-winning computer training company, all finances are open for everyone to see, including everyone’s salaries. Open communication keeps people involved and facilitates better relationships. Find out what people really want to know and, unless there is a very good reason for secrecy, make the information available.

Being developed

As children we can hardly help but develop. Growing and developing is a natural human drive and should continue throughout life. The smart organisations realise that and encourage it. Even so, development is often seen as a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential. While some organisations may provide simple skills training, they miss out on investing in someone’s long-term growth.

In contrast, if you give careful attention to your people’s development needs, not just their training requirements, you demonstrate a commitment to them. And the same goes for career advancement. Make sure that everyone has a personal development plan evolved from discussions with them and review work allocation to ensure people are fully stretched and challenged.

Being inspired

We tend to assume leaders are meant to inspire us. Yet few do. In our development work in companies, both nationally and globally, many leaders we encounter have either forgotten how, or lost the drive to excite and uplift their people. For instance, only 10 per cent of American business professionals are inspired and few look forward to going to work – and most point to a lack of leadership as the problem.⁷ But inspiration is an important driver of engagement – we look at it in more detail in the next chapter.

Meetings

In theory, meetings can help you win people’s involvement. In practice, most meetings are notoriously dull and boring. One recent study even found attending them makes you stupid by lowering your intelligence!⁸ When you add in the complications of conference calls, video-conferencing and other technologically driven variations, the problems mount up. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Live meetings are a rare opportunity for a group of people to get together and produce ‘more than the sum of the parts’. If managed well, a meeting can be an exciting creative process where there is indeed a meeting of minds and even hearts.

You can use meetings to get everyone present involved, by distributing responsibility, encouraging debate, sharing ideas and building relationships. Even conference-call meetings, with clever planning, can include creative elements such as problem solving, brainstorming, sharing examples of inspirational performance and personal disclosure.

Meetings are expensive because normally the time of everyone present is being paid for. So, they are worth investing in. You can bring humanity and creativity to your meetings by making sure they really do provide a space where people can connect, contribute, feel they belong and become involved.

Empowerment

“When the best leader’s work is done, the people say: ‘We did it ourselves’”.

Lao Tzu, philosopher of ancient China

Ordering someone to ‘be involved’ is like shouting at a plant to ‘grow’! The ultimate aim of involvement is to allow people to move from a culture of control to one where they can take responsibility. Having the autonomy to take over all aspects of managing their work, including holiday scheduling, ordering materials and hiring new team members, can produce spectacular gains in productivity and creativity.

The days of command and control leadership are rapidly ending. Leadership in the twenty-first century is more about sharing your power and giving support to your people so they feel inspired to do great things. You see empowerment at work in self-managed teams where people are allowed to take more charge of their lives and their work. There the leadership moves around, and everyone feels permitted to take on aspects of the leader’s role. It is a bit like a theatre ensemble or a chamber orchestra. No one is totally in charge. Instead, everyone works collaboratively and takes collective responsibility for leadership.

Paradoxically, by handing over some of your leadership authority you do not diminish it, you actually enhance it. People then feel more able to ask for your help, to hear your suggestions and to follow your lead. Some of the known results arising from empowering others include:

• energising jaded employees
• increasing morale
• raising productivity
• improving quality
• reduced staff turnover.

There are countless ways you might empower others through your leadership. Some well-tried ones include:

• Show people they’re part of the management and can help the organisation improve.
• Ensure ideas are appreciated, even if they are not always implemented.
• Trust people with responsibility.
• Respect people’s ideas and judgement.
• Allow people to make decisions around their own area of work responsibility.
• Give them a budget to manage – with generous sign-off levels.

Both enrolment and involvement are easier to achieve if people have a personal investment in the vision or purpose. When someone has something at stake and a personal commitment they are less likely to fall by the wayside and cease to support your project. This personal investment is rarely financial, but rather about putting important aspects of themselves into the work. This might include their:

• time
• energy
• creativity
• ideas
• know-how
• reputation
• promotion prospects
• personal resources such as information and contacts
• personal development
• formal training.

When you demonstrate you also have a major personal investment in the vision or purpose, others are more likely to join in.

Coaching

Coaching can be a highly effective way of promoting involvement. It brings you in close proximity with a person – normally on a one-to-one basis. The focus is usually on developing people, helping them achieve outstanding results and through that becoming more involved.

Coaching is well established in around 90 per cent of companies, according to the CIPD in the UK. Learning to coach is likely to be in high demand in twenty-first-century organisations that attach importance to getting the best from their people. True, coaching is time-consuming and requires a personal commitment to master the basics. But by using it you build people’s confidence to become more engaged, committed and ready to take new levels of responsibility, such as being willing to coach others.

How ready are you to coach? Do you feel fully equipped to do this type of work with colleagues? Coaching is not just a technique, it’s a relationship. You don’t ‘do’ coaching to someone; it’s a two-way affair in which both of you learn. You can learn dozens of ‘how to’s’ for coaching, but the most important one is your willingness to make it into a mutual development experience.

Why bother with coaching when in the short term it is simpler and quicker just to tell someone what to do? If you can guide, prompt and stimulate the other person to decide for themselves what to do, they won’t be constantly coming back to you. Quite simply, coaching is a good investment of your time.

A coaching session can broadly cover five stages, as shown in the diagram.

Five stages in a coaching session

Each of the stages requires you to do certain actions. For example, in assessing someone’s willingness to change you need to discover how committed they are to this. Or when it comes to practising you will need to identify further issues where coaching support might be useful.

Coaching is an area where you can usefully get help both to learn and to practise your technique.

One of the best ways of using coaching is in informal situations where there is not enough time to prepare for an in-depth session. Informal coaching can take place at any time, anywhere. Somebody might meet you in the coffee area and ask to have ten minutes of your time as they need a bit of coaching.

In these circumstances, you can use action-focused coaching and can obtain value from even a five- or ten-minute encounter. This approach has an attractive logic and simplicity. You work through three stages with the other person:

• objective
• obstacles
• action.

In each case you encourage the other person to explore the implications, and you help them with carefully directed questions to prompt their thinking in new directions.

Giving people a voice

One way managers and leaders have traditionally encouraged involvement is through offering an ‘ever-open door’. Supposedly, any supporter can walk through this and raise issues or share concerns. Yet the reality is rather different. Probably less than one in five employees feel they experience an open door and instead say they face discouraging formal processes and procedures.

Rather than offer an open door, remove the door itself. Instead, get out there with your people and make yourself visible and available, seeking information, demanding feedback and mixing with others to hear their views and ideas. Michael Bloomberg, for example, when he became mayor of New York, implemented a ‘bullpen’ open-office plan, reminiscent of a Wall Street trading floor. Dozens of aides and managerial staff were seated together in a large chamber, which was intended to promote accountability and accessibility.

Action-focused coaching

“Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you’re at the top of the chain, sometimes people won’t give you honest feedback because they’re afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.”

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, before Agincourt the king memorably dons ordinary clothes to mix anonymously with his troops to hear what they are thinking and feeling about the coming battle. This is leading the way – refusing to be content with second-hand reports or hearsay, and both giving and receiving feedback.

In today’s organisations many leaders are noticeably ill-equipped to deliver constructive feedback. There is often a reluctance to be direct for fear of possible conflict and damage to working relationships. Relatively few organisations have an effective performance review process. Either it has degenerated into an annual box-ticking exercise, or it is so closely tied to remuneration decisions there remains little room to explore each person’s current level of engagement and involvement.

It is hardly surprising that many organisations have a culture of avoidance in tackling potentially awkward or seemingly confrontational discussions. Many top leaders do not value or pursue frank dialogue, since most people feel uncomfortable critiquing others. But this weakness can easily be overcome by a combination of the right learning and development, and repeated practice.

If you truly want to involve people and know what’s going on, start treating feedback as a gift, not a threat. This means encouraging uncomfortable or confronting information that may challenge your current perceptions of what is currently happening.

¹ C. Chynoweth, ‘Real chiefs get their hands dirty’, Sunday Times, 3 October 2010.

² See, for example, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2009.

³ Department of Health, Staff Involvement: Better Decisions, Better Care, 2003.

⁴ Navisys, The Case for Increasing Employee Engagement, Navisys Transformation, 2007.

⁵ From the Latin videre (to see): leaders need to see what people need in order to engage them.

⁶ See, for example, Maynard Leigh Associates, Talent Engagement: How to Unlock People’s Potential, 2010.

⁷ See, for example, Carmine Gallo, ‘The seven secrets of inspiring leaders’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 10 October 2007.

⁸ See, for example, Uncommondescent.com, ‘Human intelligence diminishes in group tasks’, January 2012 (commenting on a study at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute).