Are you wrestling with a logjam of middle performers who don’t seem to respond to your incentive programs? It may be time to get to know yourself better.
“Workers follow the lead from the person above them,” Joseph Folkman, co-founder of leader development firm Zenger Folkman, stated recently in a Forbes.com article. “Effective leaders produce engaged employees. Leaders don’t create high-performance teams primarily by recruiting only the most engaged employees. They take a variety of teams and individuals, and in short order, through their leadership efforts, they create highly engaged and productive groups. Broad scale programs targeted toward the employees would appear to be a waste of time if the managers don’t provide appropriate leadership for them.”
“It’s Shakespearean: to thine own self be true,” Chester Elton, co-author of a number of books on motivation and driving workplace improvement, told Sales & Marketing Managementin a recent telephone interview. “When asking, ‘Am I all in and are my people all in?’ you can’t get an answer to the second question without understanding the answer to the first question.”
When corporate America wrings its hands over the reported high disengagement of the work force, the blame tends to fall on the work force while the lack of engagement of managers and executives tends to get glossed over.
“The people who are supposed to be leading the organization up the hill to conquer its competitors are just slightly more engaged than the soldiers,” Folkman says. “The leaders are the ones who should be providing the vision, direction, enthusiasm, commitment and passion for the work of the organization, but they are on average only 6 percent more engaged than those they are leading.”
He contends that the suggestion by some to replace disengaged managers with better leaders is unrealistic. Companies are more likely to help leaders use a “natural and comfortable approach” to inspire and motivate subordinates.
“For some this may be creating a clear vision. For others it will be a relentless drive for results. For others it will be extremely principled behavior, while others will respond to a leader who engages and listens to employees. For others it may be their highly enthusiastic approach to the projects at hand. Varying approaches work. These are skills that can be developed. Leaders can learn to inspire subordinates and we contend that these are learnable skills, not inborn talents. Replacing managers is far more costly than developing the ones already in place.”
