We recently facilitated a leadership development program for a large cable television operation in the upper Midwest. During that time, we had the occasion to meet a supervisor named Madison. At the ripe old age of twenty-three, Madison’s new supervisory role was one of the first jobs she ever held out of college, and by the time we met her, she had only been working in the role for six months. Naturally, this meant that she spent much of the morning with that deer-in-the-headlights look so familiar to many training professionals. So during the first break, I sought her out and initiated a conversation.

“I’m curious, Madison,” I said to her, “how prepared do you feel for this new leadership role of yours?”

“Truthfully?” she said. “I don’t feel at all prepared.”

She went on to describe all the technical and operations training she had received as a new leader, and while she thought that was helpful, she also believed that it lacked in the kind of guidance and skill-building she needed to handle the wide array of individual and team situations that a leader is expected to handle. Even employee issues as straightforward as repeated tardiness created a challenge for her. How should she handle something like that with someone who once was her peer? Never mind the time she had to address another team member who made an emotional outburst about the unfair way that the leadership team determined work schedules.

“The transition has been a little jarring,” she explained. It was easy to see how that could be the case. She had recently moved from being a friend and colleague of her team members to now being bombarded with performance, attendance, and other personnel issues as their leader.

As Madison and I were chatting, I happened to notice an experienced supervisor named Manny sitting alone in the back of the room. His participation and contributions during the session had impressed me. To me, this seemed like a golden opportunity.

It turned out that Manny and Madison knew each other as colleagues, but not well. I sat us all down together and asked Manny to share some stories of the challenges he faced as a new leader. With every story, Madison seemed to grow more comfortable that she wasn’t in way over her head. Next, I asked Manny to describe for Madison all the key information and insights that most contributed to his transition to leadership. Manny was happy to oblige.

The two of them talked throughout the break, and later worked together in a small group that met frequently during the workshop. Afterward, Madison shared with me that this was the best and most helpful training she had participated in since her promotion.

On a return visit to the site three months later, I learned that Madison had transitioned so well to the role that she was one of the highest scorers on the company’s LEI surveys. Not only had she gotten comfortable with her new role, but she had learned how to excel at it.

So what is the lesson here? The surface lesson is that this simple combination of formal training, peer coaching, and the sharing of best practices will go a long way toward helping the Madisons in your organization find success. The deeper message that we will explore with this chapter is that the investment in time, energy, and resources will provide a huge return on investment compared to the cost of failure. As we have been saying, investing in leadership is the surest, quickest, and most complete business strategy on which an organization can focus.

With this chapter, we present a simple challenge: Let’s make sure we are paving a clear path for our leaders. For new leaders, we need to ensure that they know how to be a competent leader. We can’t assume that they naturally know how to drive team performance forward (at least not without using authority or intimidation in their leadership style). For existing leaders, we need to have programs and messages in place that help foster their growth as leaders and commitment to the organization.

The Case for a Focus on Leadership

Many new leaders fail to excel in their new roles. They rely on technical competence or operational knowledge to guide them. But new leaders quickly find themselves faced with a plethora of “people issues” that they are unprepared for and uncomfortable addressing for fear of wading into waters too deep for their skills. New leaders unprepared for the role will craft ways to dodge people-related squabbles, challenges, and even coaching opportunities. Soon, employees become disenchanted, engagement falls, attrition increases, and performance wanes. Unfortunately, this is a well-traveled path.

According to Jim Bowles, former vice president of workforce development at Cingular and then later at AT&T Wireless, leaders are the driving force of any engagement and retention initiative, but they’re all too often unprepared to lead in this way. “Broader buy-in is what leaders can deliver,” Bowles told us. “It’s not just enough that the person’s direct manager understands how to apply these tools. Within the organization, from the front line up to the highest levels, a focus on leadership increases the chances that this kind of initiative will be successful. If everybody is talking the same language and applying the same specific engagement strategies, then reinforcing it at every turn, then it all works far better.”

At AT&T, Bowles observed this effect throughout the organizational hierarchy. It usually started with a manager who had a blind spot about why this effort is so important. If a leader has spent his whole career focusing on delivering the desired business numbers, it’s sometimes tough to get her to put in the work to create better relationships with the staff. “But they would always become a believer once they saw how these tools work,” Bowles said. “Leaders have so many things coming at them in terms of the metrics they have to manage, the numbers they have to meet, and the sales they have to make. Sometimes engagement strategy falls down the list of priorities. We found that it was up to upper management to drive this up the priority list. Then, every time there was follow-through, it would show tremendous results. Then it would catch on like wildfire.”

Supervisors are the face of the company for the majority of employees in most organizations. Recognizing that leaders, particularly those on the front line, play a starring role in retention is only the first step. No leader comes to work wanting to do things badly. But desire and motivation alone do not beget skill. Leaders need to be trained in key skills and understand their role in retaining and motivating people. Leadership development must be about specific business outcomes, and few business priorities will have more visibility in the near future than keeping talented employees and ensuring that they’re actively engaged in their work.

When it all works, when an organization zeroes in on helping leaders learn how to be retention experts, you get quotes like this one from a customer service representative in a TalentKeepers study: “My current manager is supportive, flexible, caring, creative, knowledgeable, sincere, and focused. She carefully develops a personal relationship with our entire team. Her dedication and support has been unsurpassed. I can honestly say that I love her for her caring drive and desire to ensure our success as a team. She’s a true professional in her commitment to excellence, and her desire to succeed. She’s honest in her dealings, and a trusted leader. I have the greatest respect for her as a true leader; what an asset to this organization. Let’s clone her and watch our company grow with creativity, enthusiasm, and excitement as we take the marketplace by storm!”

HR is likely to gladly share ownership of this initiative. But good planning and sound implementation are necessary to help leaders embrace their part in retention, not to mention the need for them to learn new skills and behaviors. In order to hold leaders accountable, providing them the training and support to perform their new role is a critical success factor. Surprisingly, given the mountain of available research on leadership skills covering everything from vision and strategy to delegation and feedback, precious little has specifically targeted retention, one of the most costly of all business problems.

Why Focusing on Leaders Gets Results

In the previous chapter, our discussion of the four drivers of employee engagement and retention highlighted an important (and all too often overlooked) point: Leaders are the one driver that can change the quickest in terms of their influence on engagement. From a leadership perspective, it’s all about awareness of the engagement issue and the leader’s behavior in relation to the initiative. Hopefully no leaders come to work and say things like, “How do I break trust today?” or “How do I let my team down today?” And yet too many leaders are unaware of the little things they do that have that same impact.

The impact of leaders on all of the other engagement drivers is so significant that we created a model to illustrate the impact leaders have on organizational engagement. Figure 3.1 charts the relationship between leader engagement and organizational engagement and identifies four types of team member sentiments that result. The descriptions that follow of the characteristics of leaders and teams within each of the four quadrants will hold true most of the time. However, there are always exceptions to look for when determining the best way to coach a leader in each of these areas.

Uninspired

When leader engagement is low and organizational engagement is high, employees are often satisfied with the organization as a whole but are not giving that discretionary effort so sought after by engagement efforts. If leaders can leverage employees’ affinity for the organization and inspire them to contribute more, then these teams represent an opportunity. Focusing on the lower-rated leader engagement elements is a proven method for improvement. Employing the “Start, Stop, and Continue” questioning sequence is especially effective here, because all the elements within the leader engagement driver are firmly within the control of the leader.

With the proper awareness, great leaders begin to identify those behaviors that are preventing them from being seen as more engaging by their teams. It’s often a subtle change—not a watershed one. A leader can adapt and change in small ways to make a huge difference. For this reason (and many others) the leadership driver can generate positive and quick change. That’s good news for organizations. It’s tough to change the organizational drivers quickly, likewise, the job/career and coworker drivers. But leaders are a different story.

According to our colleague Dr. Richard Vosburgh—who is well versed on employee engagement practices, having held senior leadership roles in organizations including MGM, Compaq, Campbell’s Soup, and Volkswagen—the data proves that employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction, which, in turn, leads to improved financial outcomes. Vosburgh has dramatically improved engagement for a number of companies, but while working with a large and fast-growing technology firm, he proved this correlation with empirical data. His research established the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction, customer satisfaction and both gross margin and market share, employee/customer satisfaction with brand equity and shareholder value, and more. In other words, as Vosburgh explained, “Talented, motivated, and empowered employees find better operational ways to deliver results, allow us to meet and exceed customer expectations, resulting in the delivery of our financial commitments.”

Another major component of why this is true is that leaders are the lens through which their teams view everything else about the organization. In the Workplace America research, we ask a question about how frequently leaders meet with team members to talk not just about performance or the status of a given project but also specifically about engagement. Meetings about engagement involve questions like, “How are you feeling about your role here? Are you achieving what you want in your career? Am I doing what you need to achieve your top performance? Am I recognizing you appropriately and giving you proper respect for what you do?”

In our studies, we have found that 70% of the best-in-class organizations have these kinds of meetings at least quarterly. Twenty-six percent of those same organizations conduct these meetings as frequently as monthly. On the flip side, some organizations (19%) never have this meeting—ever. This is a huge oversight, as a leader has so much power to shape the employee’s views of the organization. The more a leader focuses on discussing the individual employee’s needs, the more the individual employee feels engaged and willing to stay. The more often these meetings happen, the better—and the effort leads to spectacular improvement in business results, almost across the board. Figure 3.2 depicts the big difference between best-in-class organizations and all others on this important metric.

Since leaders have the most interactions, observations, and dialogue with employees, this makes them the best person to talk about the employee’s career and coaching. Our research shows that more leaders could be having these conversations. It’s no fault of theirs, though. Most of them aren’t aware it’s part of their job. Others don’t want to make a mistake like overpromising to a team member that they’re going to get a promotion or a raise or training/development or anything they would value from a career standpoint because the leader isn’t sure whether promising such things is feasible, appropriate, or even within their authority.

Unfortunately, this compels some leaders to avoid giving honest feedback to their underperforming team members. We see a lot of career frustration on the part of employees in part because they don’t receive that direct feedback. It’s far easier for a leader to tell a team member that they’re doing great and are on the list for being recommended for promotion. It’s not as easy to have the more difficult conversation about what’s preventing you from being considered for advancement. This is something that more leaders are going to have to work on in order to improve engagement for their employees.

Finally, focusing on leaders gets results because those leaders already have the responsibility to improve employee engagement. Many of them just don’t realize that fact. Reinforcing that it is part of their job to improve engagement is the quickest way to achieve the result you desire. Only they can make team members feel engaged, important, valued, and so on. If you ask team members what they like about their leader, for the best leaders they begin with statements like, “They have my back.” If the employee needs something or they make a mistake, they know that the leader will be their advocate. These kinds of leaders drive engagement, not just in themselves and in their team members, but in other leaders as well.

Those leaders that have found a way to get better engagement from their teams often hold the key to how other leaders can achieve the same success. The real opportunity is to look at leaders who have been able to achieve high LEI scores and share this data with lesser performing leaders. When you’re working with an engagement initiative and you’re assessing, don’t hide the data. Comparing and contrasting performance on engagement and retention items is important so leaders can learn from their peers who are doing well.

Best Boss/Worst Boss

We know that leaders and their approach to leading directly affects employee perceptions of many major organizational factors, such as job and career growth, compensation, culture, teamwork, and more. Data shows that an improvement in leadership strategies will have the greatest impact on employee engagement, as reported by organizations that have participated in our Workplace America research. According to those same organizations, improving leaders’ communication skills will have the greatest impact, followed by increasing their ability to effectively coach and develop their teams. Figure 3.3 shows the percentage of organizations that see each engagement factor that, if improved, would have the biggest impact. Note that job/career strategies are seen as most impactful by a growing percentage of organizations. This suggests that the most impactful strategy would be to leverage the leader as a conduit for career discussions with employees. We’ll say more about this in Chapter 5.

It’s obvious why this is the case. Everyone knows the old adage “people don’t quit companies, they quit bosses.” Think about the best boss you’ve ever had. What were some of his qualities as a leader? As a colleague? As a human being? Now think about the worst boss you’ve ever had and ponder the same questions.

We have done exactly that with millions of survey respondents and in hundreds of workshops. We have asked participants in our surveys—some of them leaders, some of them in non-leadership positions—to think of the worst boss they have ever had, and toss out a word that describes them. Every time, we get a long list of statements like, “He was condescending,” “He was a micromanager,” “She was never available,” “He was untrustworthy,” “She was overly critical,” and on and on.

When discussing this lousy boss, we would present questions like:

• “How excited were you on the drive in to work every day?”
• “How willing were you to go the extra mile for that leader?”
• “How badly did you want to quit or transfer?”
• “How did this leader impact team morale?”

And so on. You can imagine the negativity in the responses. In a nutshell, excitement was low, as was morale and willingness to work hard. People working for someone they identified as a bad boss expressed an active interest in finding a new job far more often than their counterparts working for a good boss.

When you pose these same questions to these same people, asking them about the best boss they have ever had, the contrast becomes clear. That kind of leader’s impact runs deep. It affects people’s engagement, energy, motivation, trust, loyalty to the organization, self-esteem, performance, and so on. The Leadership Engagement Index returns similar numbers every time: Best bosses retain higher numbers of employees and keep them engaged; worst bosses underperform. How the bosses go, so goes the business of the organization.

So we know that leaders matter most. The question is, why don’t more organizations understand the value here? Further, why don’t more leaders embrace the idea that, to improve their teams, they must improve the way they interact with those teams?

We’re going to dig deeper into these questions in a moment, but for now, keep this in mind: It’s not about the money. Sure, if you pay your leaders more, you may get better people seeking leadership roles, but money only takes you so far. Across the board, we have found that improving the quality of leadership is more about raising awareness around three issues:

1. Leaders matter more than they realize when it comes to employee engagement and retention.
2. Employees from different backgrounds respond in different ways to different sorts of interaction.
3. The focus needs to be on improving every employee’s progress through what we call the “commit, engage, excel” continuum.

Leaders Underestimate Their Impact

Leaders—particularly frontline leaders who interact with the greatest number of employees—routinely discount the influence they have on their team members’ engagement and retention decisions. This reaction is not defensive or a rationalization, either. After training tens of thousands of leaders, we believe that they are genuinely sincere in this humble belief. If we want to get leaders to be open to accepting their important role in the employee engagement and retention equation, then this is the first notion that we must dispel. But how?

One technique we successfully use in our leadership development programs is to ask leaders how influential they are on their team members’ engagement and retention levels. Consistently, these frontline leaders place themselves in the bottom half of the top-ten influencing factors such as pay, schedule, benefits, promotion opportunities, and so on. We then ask another question, much later in the session, regarding the influence that their immediate leader has on their own engagement and retention. Consistently, these frontline leaders rate their manager as a top-two or top-three factor. We then ask why their own influence on their team members would be any less than their manager’s influence on them. You can see the light bulbs flashing as they reassess their own influence.

This strategy is effective, but it comes with an important caveat: This message should be one of empowerment—not punitive accountability. When you build this increased awareness, most leaders are eager to learn how they can leverage this newfound influence to increase engagement, retention, and ultimately performance.

Ultimately, the best way to show leaders how much they impact their team members’ engagement and retention decisions is to measure their influence through the LEI metric. This becomes more impactful when we show leaders how they compare to their peers on LEI, and the behavioral components that comprise the LEI metric. Many leaders with lower LEI scores get wide-eyed when viewing the LEI scores of their peer group. Suddenly, their perception that “everyone must be struggling with this” is turned upside down when they see that other leaders in the same role, dealing with the same challenges, have found a way to achieve higher scores. Most of the time, these higher LEI peers are also enjoying higher team-performance levels, which lead to more compensation and opportunities for growth. This “aha moment” often turns a skeptical leader, who blames everything and everyone but themselves for low engagement and higher turnover, into an interested learner looking to leverage their newfound influence.

Different Background, Different Response

Every organization depends on human beings to work together to achieve organizational success. But it’s important to recognize that human beings always fall into subgroups with their own identifiable attributes. In the previous chapter, we introduced this topic when we referenced the differences between the baby boomer, generation X, and millennial generations. From an organizational standpoint, we must also separate high performers from the rest of the pack and engage with them differently. Paying attention to these kinds of subgroupings helps an organization identify strategies that will increase its ability to engage and retain the most crucial and talented individuals, and to increase organizational success as a result.

The most important point to note is that specific subgroups have different motivations, work styles, job/career aspirations, and so on. Catering your engagement and retention efforts to fit those groups almost always proves beneficial.

The confluence of multiple generations in today’s workforce makes it easy to see that knowing how to adapt leadership techniques to suit specific generations is a highly valuable leadership skill. When asked if their leaders are challenged by leading employees of different generations, a surprising 91% of organizations agreed. This is a leadership trend heading in the wrong direction, with 65% agreement in 2012 and only 39% in 2011. The millennials are likely the complicating factor, and their entry into the world of work is quickly growing.

Because of that (and since it’s now the largest generation in American history), let’s start with the millennials. Tech savvy, energetic, socially conscious, and hard working, millennials will soon make up half of the working-age population in the United States. Today, they make up 35% of the workforce, surpassing baby boomers in 2015 as the largest generation in the US workforce. They have a strong, pent-up desire to either get started or get on with their careers.

The millennial generation comes with its own styles and preferences that may prove difficult to understand for leaders who are not prepared for the change. Millennials tend to require precise instruction, frequent feedback and coaching, check-ins and praise, and transparency in communication. “We don’t turn off,” a millennial employee working at a technology firm once told us. The point here is clear. They are always connected—to business apps, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and on and on. For them, countless digital tethers connect them to the outside world. Social media isn’t only social; it bleeds into the millennial lifestyle and work life. These approaches to work are often at odds with some of the more traditional leadership styles and workplace cultures. How organizations and their leaders respond will impact how engaged their millennial employees become, and how long they will stay with the organization.

Millennial generation employees are very much aware of their career aspirations and opportunities, yet those aspirations don’t always fit common career paths. Leaders of millennial employees need to be informed of career and job opportunities, and proactive but realistic when it comes to helping millennials evaluate personal career goals and how to achieve them. Adaptation and flexibility will be required on both sides of the career equation as this generation floods the workplace.

Another sound investment is to train leaders on how to effectively engage and retain millennial team members. Our research shows that this type of training is on the rise, but the majority of organizations (60%) are still not onboard. The bright exception is once again our best-in-class organizations, where 84% are providing this resource for their leaders. See Figure 3.4 for the trend on how this type of training is increasing.

In many organizations, millennials are now leaders. Madison from the cable company story at the beginning of the chapter is just one of many examples. Millennials are now well into their twenties and thirties, which puts them at prime ages to begin accepting leadership roles. The burning question is, how do millennials engage and motivate boomers and generation Xers who work for or with them, either as employees or peers?

We’re going to be discussing these key principles throughout the book. For now, let’s turn our attention to another key group of employees: high performers. These are the highly valued, consistent contributors that give organizations a distinct advantage in today’s marketplace. Engagement and retention of this group is a key piece of the performance puzzle.

High performers add value in a variety of ways. Often exceeding performance expectations and goals, they motivate and support those around them while contributing to a positive culture. They can improve the functionality of teams as a whole and can help to diagnose or even solve performance issues in low performers. This group of employees offers personalized feedback to colleagues, models commitment, and serves as an example to other team members of what it means to excel.

A sound investment in high performers is expected to provide a positive return. For the best-in-class organizations, 70% report having a strategy in place specifically for engaging and retaining high performers, and their results illustrate the benefit, because 100% of best-in-class organizations rate their organization as at least moderately effective at retaining their best contributors, with 35% rating their organization as very effective.

High performers often are recognized and reinforced for their contributions, but having an effective engagement strategy targeted specifically for them will go far in keeping this high-value group delivering results for your organization, instead of somewhere else.

So what is that effective engagement strategy? How can we engage different key performers and leaders from different backgrounds? It all starts with commit, engage, excel.

Commit, Engage, Excel

TalentKeepers has developed an engagement continuum that we use to describe the process of getting individuals engaged with their work. As you might have guessed from the title of this section, it’s called “commit, engage, excel.”

Many people think of engagement as a light switch that we turn on or off. We often think of people as either engaged in their work or not. In reality, becoming engaged in one’s work is a process we all go through. Figure 3.5 illustrates the commit, engage, excel continuum.

Let’s talk about the three phases of that process:

1. Commit: Each of us makes a commitment to our job in various ways and to different degrees. We commit to a role, a leader, the team, and the organization when we see alignment between what we want to achieve from our work and what we perceive the opportunity will provide to us. Employers want people to make intellectual, emotional, and even behavioral commitments to, for example, perform to the best of our ability. This commitment begins during the recruiting process and evolves as an employee gains more experience. This is why it is so important for recruiters to provide a realistic job preview to potential employees.
2. Engage: Once we make that conscious or perhaps subliminal commitment, we begin to dig in and apply ourselves. At this point, we have the opportunity to become engaged in the work and bring that energy and discretionary effort to our role and the organization. As we described earlier, the four drivers of engagement and retention play an important role here over time: credible leadership, supportive coworkers, job and career satisfaction, and a high-performing organization.
3. Excel: For many employees, engagement leads to sustained high performance over time, and we excel in our roles. Here is where all stakeholders—the employees, their leaders, and the organization—reap the rewards of discretionary effort in the form of higher performance in the areas of service, sales, productivity, safety, and so on.

As a reminder, employee engagement is the ultimate goal here because it improves employees’ ability and willingness to contribute to organizational success, especially their willingness to give discretionary effort, going beyond what is typically required in their position to make the organization successful. Employee engagement is an essential element of organizational health. An engaged workforce leads to more committed employees, higher-performing individuals, satisfied and loyal customers, and a more productive and profitable organization.

So how do we get there? As the continuum suggests, it starts with commitment. Engaging your leaders to increase the commitment from their teams is a matter of communication. The process involves implementing a “stay interview,” for example, and establishing a structured procedure for improving communication. Trust is also a building block in fostering commitment. Getting leaders and employees to connect and commit to each other, their roles, and the organization is imperative for building engaged, loyal, and productive team members. Organizations that are successful in achieving this goal enjoy the following benefits:

• Stronger bonds between the leader and her team.
• Commitment to the organization, the leader, and the role.
• Quicker time to productivity.
• Reduced early-tenure-turnover rates.

The next phase of the continuum, engage, calls for ensuring that all the four drivers of engagement and retention are working effectively for your employees. Organizations with a highly engaged workforce enjoy many advantages, including the following:

• Committed employees
• High-performing workforce
• A productive and profitable organization
• Satisfied and loyal customers

The final phase, excel, leads to a continuation of the development of an engaged culture. By this point, leaders are focused specifically on areas of engagement and are empowered to enhance interactions and performance with team members.

Helping your employees adapt to new challenges and needs while excelling in their roles is an ongoing challenge. Your organization is invested in these employees and motivated to coach and develop them to their fullest potential. Organizations that create this atmosphere enjoy the following outcomes:

• Effectively manage change at all levels
• Foster career growth, regardless of the trajectory
• Avoid “quit and stay” and other plateauing behaviors
• Guide high-performing individuals through transitions

Once we achieve a highly engaged workforce whose team members are excelling in their roles, the only thing that can derail us is the only true constant in life: change. When changes arise in an organization (the more typical kind of change being when a new leader or team member joins the organization, with the more rare being something like an acquisition or merger), a previously committed, engaged, and excelling team member needs to make a recommitment to the new leader, role, or organizational change. This recommitment is necessary for the employee to reassess whether this changed environment still aligns with their individual goals and aspirations. Changes to team members’ personal situations—such as the birth of a child, caring for an aging parent, or attaining a college degree—will have the same impact. Employees experiencing personal change will need to reassess whether their role, leader, coworkers, and organization still align with their changed situation.

So how do we combat the impact of nearly constant organization and individual changes? First, we must understand the goals and aspirations of each team member through effective conversations and relationship building. Second, we must document this information for each team member, and refresh it periodically to capture changes to their individual goals and aspirations. Another benefit to documenting this information is that it will allow future leaders of the team members to build upon previous leaders’ work versus having to start anew. And third, whenever an organizational change impacts an employee’s commitment—a change in role, change in leader, change in a major policy—management needs to proactively communicate, through every leadership level, the reasons behind the change and the impact the change may have on team members’ roles, leaders, coworkers, and the organization.

Because organizations are constantly changing, the next chapter will discuss strategies, tactics, and pitfalls for successfully maintaining a highly engaged culture in an ever-changing environment.