Chapter 9
Elephant: Your Employees Are Disengaged
Let’s imagine that your unicorn has moved through the recruiting and onboarding processes and is now a stellar member of your team. Hurray! He is delivering on his potential and leading the organization to new levels. Now the question becomes: How do you keep him from jumping ship?
As a people leader, you have to know what motivates your direct reports. We spend an enormous amount of time at work. We want our work to be meaningful, to see the connection between the job that pays our bills and our larger hopes and dreams. Your job as a people leader is to help make this happen for your direct reports. When employees feel disconnected from their larger selves, they become disengaged from their work, too.
This is especially true for younger generations, the Millennials and Gen Z’ers. You won’t get any generation-bashing from me. I admire how our younger cohorts, especially Millennials, feel so committed to effecting positive change in the world. Millennials as a group eschew compartmentalization. According to a 2010 Pew Research study, they desire work that engages all of themselves; they want to feel committed to a higher purpose. Here I run the risk of stereotyping, but these trends have been widely reported on. I also want to avoid labeling all younger workers as Millennials. I recognize that the oldest members of this generation are approaching 40. For the purposes of this discussion however, I’ll address Millennials specifically, as members of Gen Z were born after 1995, so it is difficult to measure their impact on the work force at this point.
Millennials have not grown up with a “silo mentality.” They don’t expect to be one person at work, another at home, and a third with their friends. Millennials are aware of the danger to which this kind of thinking can lead. Many came of age with the Great Recession. They saw up close how greed, unchecked and disconnected from the lives of real people, tanked the housing market and wrecked the economy. This crisis was the backdrop against which many younger people entered the work force. For many of them, the question, “Is it good for business?” may not be enough. The bigger question is: “Is it good for people?”
No matter the age of your work force, team members will do their best work when they are connected to the larger picture of how they are making a positive contribution to the world. Employee engagement starts with one all-important question: “Why?”
The Company “Why” Drives Employee Engagement
As you read in Chapter 5, if your business is ultimately going to add value and meaning to lives, employees have to be connected to their “why.” But it’s not just the employees’ “why” that matters—the company one matters as well because that helps drive employee engagement on a larger scale. If you want to avoid employee disengagement, you have to be able to identify your company’s “why” and connect it to that of your teams. Do you communicate the core values of your company from day one? Does your “why” drive all your decisions? Working to make sure your team members feel connected to the larger “why” is one way to keep them engaged.
Yvon Chouinard is a great example of a leader connected to his “why.” Chouinard is the founder of Patagonia and a passionate nature lover. Patagonia is a $750 million company; yet in making decisions, company leadership has remained committed to a love of the earth rather than the pursuit of fast profits. Early on, Patagonia stopped making the metal spikes for climbing, called pitons, that were its first product because of the damage they caused to rock faces. Chouinard later took an even bigger risk by switching to all-organic cotton for clothing fabric. Today, Patagonia remains committed to conservation and has lobbied against moves by the Trump administration to shrink national parks and monuments.
It pays to get crystal clear about your values, mission, and vision early on. These values drive decisions and shape your employer brand. That way, you attract employees who are already aligned with what you want to do in the world. Your company draws to itself unicorns who are ready to jump into the work with both feet.
That’s the work that takes place before the work: gaining clarity on mission and values (the company “why”) and then strengthening employer brand so that top-notch employees are drawn to you. But once you have your team of unicorns, you must work to make sure they stay engaged.
This part of the work begins with recognizing a simple fact: Your unicorns are so much more than the job they’ve been hired for. This is another way of saying that people leaders need to see the whole person, not just the job description. To care personally about your direct reports, you must allow them to be who they are—not just what the role demands of them.
Managers fall into a trap when they look at an employee’s resume and expect him to replicate past successes beat for beat. “I see what you did with company XYZ—now do that exact same thing for us!” This ignores the context in which the unicorn achieved his past success. What was his team like there? Will he be similarly supported in your organization? Was he given the freedom to innovate and think outside the box at his past company, and will he have that freedom here? Moreover, this impulse ignores the person. Sure, the unicorn accomplished a lot in his role at his previous company. But how has he evolved since then? Is the position you’re considering him for in line with his career growth? Or could his talents best be utilized in another capacity within the organization? Most important, what does he want?
This pigeonhole thinking played out in my own life earlier in my career. I’d enjoyed success as the UK PR manager at Sony for the PlayStation launch. I felt pride in the accomplishment and exhilaration as PlayStation went on to crush the competition. But then I wanted to do something else. The launch was incredibly exciting, but I didn’t want to keep “babysitting” launches. I was drawn to the more people-centered work of human resources rather than the branding and marketing work of PR. However, back then, HR was more about writing job descriptions than coaching and equipping people for leadership. My “dream job” didn’t yet exist. I would have to forge my own path.
Yet people had a very hard time accepting it. Years after the PlayStation launch, I was still being pigeonholed as a PR executive. It was a confusing time for me. I’d thrown myself into PR and become very passionate about the job. No wonder others had me pegged in the role. I had to work hard to change my own narrative and create a career that merged my strengths and passions.
It took time for me to claim all my different passions—to become, as author Jeff Haden puts it, an “and” person. I was hugely influenced by his 2018 book The Motivation Myth. In it, Haden speaks of the need to claim all our different interests. Over the past 30 years, the way we work has changed, but the way we talk about work has not. We still speak to college students about finding their passion: the one career path that will fulfill them intellectually, emotionally, and financially. Yet this does not reflect a true work experience—especially now, when most of us have four or five (or more) different careers over the course of our lifetimes. Nor does it reflect a true life experience.
No one has just one interest. When I was trying to break out of my PR executive mold, I wished desperately that hiring managers would understand that. Your direct reports, too, are multifaceted people with many passions. A surefire path to employee disengagement is to stifle their interests in tasks that fall outside their job descriptions. “You can’t do that—that’s a marketing thing.” Or, “We don’t need you to lead that training. That’s what we have a training department for.” Effective people leaders see their employees as varied, complex individuals. They expect team members to do their jobs, but they’re always interested in their employees’ unique interests and passions, and they strive to draw these out within the context of their assigned tasks.
What Seeing the Whole Person Looks Like in the Workplace
Google famously honors the many talents and interests of its employees by allowing Googlers 20 percent of their work time—one whole day a week—for work-related passion projects. Good leaders recognize that if our brains get too accustomed to any one task, we get bored. We need to take on new challenges and explore new interests so that we’re ready to face whatever problems may come our way. How can you facilitate this type of dynamism on your team?
Once again, the key is to care personally. You have to know your teammates and know what motivates them. This requires people leaders to really dig in and have nonthreatening but in-depth conversations. How many times have you sat down to have an honest discussion with your direct reports and ended up with something like this?
You: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Your direct report: “I’d like to be where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing.”
This may be gratifying to your ego, but you can safely assume it’s false. What really gets your direct reports excited? Is it the prospect of holing up with a complex engineering problem? Or do they come alive at the thought of managing others? Even if you discover that your unicorn’s secret passion lies completely outside his job description—let’s say he ultimately wants to open a school for children in a developing country—you can still use that information by connecting it to the work he’s doing for your organization. If he wants to open a school, he’ll need experience overseeing administrative issues, so when those opportunities arise, seize them. Tell your unicorn, “I thought this role would be a good fit because of your wish to strengthen your administrative abilities.” He will likely be gratified and motivated to do a stellar job because you cared enough to remember his interests and let him shepherd his own growth and because he can see how the work he’s doing now can help get him where he ultimately wants to be. (If you’re unsure how to structure conversations like these, I’ve included a resource list of questions for you at the end of this chapter.)
Put Yourself in Your Direct Reports’ Shoes
I once coached someone—we’ll call him Anthony—during his first 100 days on a job who was enthusiastic and ready to jump in until, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. He completely ghosted me. It seemed so out of character, so I was determined to find out what was going on.
I’d worked with Anthony’s boss (let’s call him Henry) the previous year. “What’s going on with Anthony?’ I asked. “He was so excited!”
“It’s unfortunate,” said Henry. “Anthony’s attitude is really deteriorating.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. But as Henry went on, he told me about three major earthquakes Anthony had endured within his first 100 days. The project for which he had been hired had been canceled; a whole slew of people had been laid off, and the person who’d hired Anthony had left to work for a competitor.
I felt like grabbing the nearest megaphone and shouting into my phone, “No wonder his attitude is deteriorating!” But I kept calm. “Don’t you think all these significant changes in the organization are why Anthony’s attitude is ‘deteriorating,’ as you say?” I asked. “In fact, he is probably looking for a different job as we speak.” Henry was taken aback. I was surprised by his surprise. Could he not understand how conflicted and desolate Anthony probably felt? When I contacted Anthony and told him I knew about the situation and understood why he was reluctant to get in touch, he sounded relieved. He spoke candidly about how he felt. He was angry and upset. He was just trying to keep his head down and figure out what his role was since it seemed to change by the day. Anthony said he didn’t have the mental or emotional energy for coaching at the moment. I was thankful for his candor and told him I completely understood.
As Anthony’s coach, I was able to bring perspective to both Anthony and Henry. Anthony was in the weeds, while Henry was so focused on his own issues that he hadn’t considered how the company shake-ups had deeply affected his brand-new hire. Anthony had very, very good reasons for disengaging with me. His work landscape suddenly looked completely different from the one he’d been hired into. He felt as if he did not have the backing of company leadership—an all-too-common problem for employees in “fixed mindset” companies (more on that in the next section).
Anthony was lacking empathy from his bosses. No one was checking in with him on a human-to-human level, so of course, he became disillusioned, stressed, and disengaged. If you as a people leader sense that one of your direct reports has withdrawn, stop and place yourself in his shoes. See the situation from a new perspective, and then make a genuine connection with the team member and work together toward a solution. Near disaster was averted when Henry was able to understand how disorienting a time it must have been for Anthony, and the relationship, communications, and engagement improved.
Drive Engagement with a Growth Mindset
Does your company have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied and written extensively on how growing and constantly improving is adopting a growth mindset for success. Fixed-mindset companies, on the other hand, tend to reward a select few who perform in a traditional way with promotions and raises. Employees who are not perceived as premier leaders at these fixed-mindset companies are more afraid of taking risks and feel that management does not have their backs. They display less commitment than workers at growth-mindset companies and are more likely to keep secrets and cheat to get ahead.
Organizations with a growth mindset view talent differently. Managers tend to speak more positively about their direct reports. Many are more likely to say that their employees have management potential. At these companies, collaboration is the norm. It’s expected that employees across the organization, whatever their level, will look for out-of-the-box solutions and seek to grow and develop new skillsets while at the company. Dweck’s research indicates that adopting a growth mindset takes a lot of work, but it can be done if the CEO is committed to developing employees. Growth-mindset companies frequently hire from within; hiring managers are interested in potential and reward candidates who display a passion for learning.
Though research is not yet conclusive on which model is more profitable, I’m heavily in favor of the growth mindset as it relates to employee engagement. People leaders who invest in their employees’ learning and development create an exciting environment to work in. That’s something you don’t find everywhere else, which helps with employee retention. Why would a unicorn leave a job in which her boss truly cares about her, her mind is engaged, and she is developing a diverse set of useful skills?
We are all so much more than the job we’ve been hired for. We want a workplace that allows us to bring our whole selves to work and that understands we have needs and lives outside the office. No one takes a job without careful consideration of how it will affect every other area of life: “This job will provide great health benefits for my child with special needs,” or, “Working through the weekend is not expected here, so I can take more hiking trips,” or, “This job has great parental leave in case I decide to start a family.” You don’t need to know every detail of your direct reports’ personal lives. But you do need to invest time in getting to know your team and creating a safe space in which they can feel supported when they come to you with pressing personal matters.
For example, how will you respond if a direct report comes to you with a cancer diagnosis? If a team member is on leave, do you have a system in place to check up on her throughout her absence? If a direct report confides he is considering starting a family, is he aware of the company benefits and guidelines for parental leave? Being a people leader means caring about the whole employee. It also means being open about your own life: “I’m having a rough time because the baby was up screaming between midnight and 4 A.M., so forgive me if I’m a little unfocused today.” A simple admission like this requires a certain amount of vulnerability and reminds your direct reports that you’re a human being, too. All this is part and parcel of the growth mindset and helps you achieve greater levels of employee engagement.
The Emotional Intelligence Factor
Engaged employees have higher levels of self-perception (the first component of emotional intelligence). They are working toward self-actualization (a subcategory of self-perception) by pursuing things they find meaningful and improving and broadening their skill sets. An emotionally intelligent boss can model emotional self-awareness, which also falls under the umbrella of self-perception. A boss with high EQ levels acknowledges her emotions and takes responsibility for them, thus creating an environment in which it is safe for team members to do the same. Negative emotions are not given free rein. Rather, when there is stress or frustration—or, on the flip side, joy and excitement—both boss and direct reports have the freedom to express those feelings without letting them interfere with the work at hand.
Genuinely caring about your direct reports (and making sure they know you truly care) is one of the most important things you do as a people leader. Allowing people space to be their whole selves will mean so much more than any raise or promotion ever could. Think of someone in your own life who really knows you and has been committed to your growth as a person. How devoted are you to them, even if you haven’t seen them in years? When your direct reports are engaged and committed to bringing their whole selves to work, there’s no limit to what your team—and your company—can accomplish.
Below are 18 questions I give to my coaching clients to ask their direct reports so they can better understand what drives them. I recommend you ask them at the start of the working relationship and then in quarterly one-on-ones. But remember, feedback should never be limited to these intensive sit-downs. Feedback should be ongoing and flow both ways between you and your direct reports. Ask them:
1. What is your biggest strength at work?
2. What do you like most about your current role?
3. What do you see your primary responsibilities as?
4. How would you describe these responsibilities?
5. What do you want to accomplish in the next 30/60/90 days?
6. What do you want to accomplish in the next 12 months?
7. What do you perceive my expectations of you to be this year?
8. How will you measure your success?
9. What are your expectations of me as your manager?
10. What gives you the biggest sense of achievement?
11. What is most inspiring about your work?
12. Why is it the most inspiring? (Don’t assume what they tell you in question 11 is the answer you will receive here. Inquire a little further.)
13. How do you prefer to be recognized for your achievements?
14. Is there something you would like to learn at work? Any ideas on where or how you can learn this skill? Why is this important to you?
15. How often would you like to meet to discuss how things are going?
16. Would you like to learn from anyone in the organization?
17. How can we best measure your progress here?
18. Is there anything else you would like to add that would help me know you better or help us work together better?
Then you can ask some broader questions during a quarterly follow-up:
▶ How would you describe the last three months?
▶ What do you want to achieve in the next 30/60/90 days?
▶ How and who will help you reach those goals?
▶ What do you need from me to help you succeed?
Taking the time to have these conversations communicates to employees that you view them as active partners in the organization and in their own development. You don’t expect them to carry out marching orders from on high. Instead, you recognize that people do their best work when they are invited to engage on every level, both personal and professional.