We’ve all heard the gut-wrenching numbers of how low employee engagement is around the world, and how pretty much everything we want to accomplish—whether it’s productivity, creativity, or stellar customer service—hinges on that one statistic. But what we often forget is that their engagement has 70 percent more to do with the way they are managed than any other single factor. As Dr. Jim Harter, the chief scientist for Workplace and Wellbeing at Gallup, says, “Performance fluctuates widely and unnecessarily in most companies, in no small part from the lack of Consistency in how people are managed.”1 Your role is nothing short of powerful, to say the least!
You accepted the position of being responsible for the morale, productivity, vision-casting, and motivation on your team, and since your team is made up of individuals who all accomplish those things with different strengths, who feel appreciated in different ways, and who each show up with different needs that need to be addressed, your task is to see each person on your team in a way that feels safe and satisfying to everyone who reports to you. Basically, leadership is relationship.
To that point, the most effective leadership style in most cases is no longer that of the stereotypical “taskmaster” who uses fear and micromanaging to get things done. Rather it’s that of the “coach” who uses “the quality and quantity of their interactions with team members” to develop an “individualized understanding of each team member” with discussions mostly “strengths-based” for the purpose of coaching them “to be their best.”2 Those quotes come from Gallup’s The Real Future of Work series, which are built from global data of effective leadership. But hopefully now we’re attuned at identifying our Three Relationship Requirements in their definition. Our interaction with our direct reports needs to be frequent and regular (Consistency), for the purpose of us seeing each other’s strengths and needs (Vulnerability), and based on us feeling appreciated and supported to be our best (Positivity).
Nearly 60 percent of us have left a job because of our direct supervisor. And even if we give reasons like wanting more money, the majority of us admit that we’d stay for a lower salary if we worked with a “great boss.”3 Further, if you add in the other top reasons people leave—unhealthy office politics, feeling undervalued, or feeling disrespected by our colleagues—we quickly have yet another reminder of just how crucial healthy and positive relationships at work are to those on our team.
If I were to sum up the three biggest actions I think more managers could do immediately to improve the relationships around them, these are the ones I’d pick:
1. Err on the side of fostering the highest Positivity ratio you can. There will be stress, disappointments, critical feedback, and unmet expectations whether we like it or not. But we can always focus on offsetting that as much as possible by remembering that Positivity—our team feeling good about themselves in our presence—is the foundation of our leadership. If we make it our goal to be a catalyst for positive emotions, then we are not only banking them for when we need to make withdrawals, but we’re also modeling to them the behaviors we hope they practice with each other. Ask yourself:
• Do I know my employees’ strengths well enough that I can watch for them using it and express appreciation in real time?
• Is there an easy way I can facilitate more consistent cheering, celebrating, or appreciation in our workplace?
• What’s a positive emotion that matters to me (for example, gratitude, fun, empathy, amusement, hope) and what actions would help me authentically feel more of that in my job?
• Going down the list of my employees, using a scale of 1–10, how positive does each relationship feel? Of the lowest ones, what might I experiment with to try to purposely raise those scores?
2. Initiate conversations and assessments that lead to more team-initiated solutions. In line with our role as coaches, it’s not our job to have all the answers as much as it is to provide the space for us to ask the right questions. I’m often brought in to facilitate the Healthy Team Relationship Assessment in order to give all team members the chance to score their experience on the team and calculate an overall team score in each of the Three Requirements. I’ve never followed it up with “so here’s what you need to do to bring that score up.” Rather, I say, “So let’s break into small groups and brainstorm all the ways your team might increase that score.” And to this day, there has never been a team that hasn’t produced an entire list of creative ideas that are customized to that particular industry and team. Our job as coaches isn’t to know exactly what we need to do to increase Consistency, Positivity, and Vulnerability on our teams as much as it’s to broach the conversations that allow our team members to give honest feedback in a safe way and to value their ideas and suggestions.
To that point, it can actually be to our detriment to think we have all the answers. In the above assessment, 80 percent of managers rate the health of their team relationships higher than their team members do. On average, managers tend to score their experience on a team ten points higher than the members of their team do; so we’d be wise to hold enough humility to realize that our experiences aren’t usually the same as those on our team.
We can occasionally take the time to ask some of the following questions that can help foster more awareness and trust:
• What would help us all feel safer on this team when it comes to brainstorming?
• Let’s go around the circle and each share what a reliable source of inspiration is for each of us. What tends to provoke our ideas, stimulate our thoughts, lift our spirits, or foster more hope?
• If we could be completely honest about how we would want someone to approach us if we were frustrating them, what advice would we give?
• Let’s spend some time this morning talking about what the most meaningful way to celebrate the upcoming holiday together would be? Is it a party or something else? Let’s throw all the ideas up on the board and vote on our favorites.
• Let’s go around and give ourselves credit for something we did that no one else patted us on the back for this last week, or maybe even saw that we did it. I’ll go first. “I pat myself on the back for doing . . .”
• Since communication is the bedrock of everything we do together, let’s lay down some ground rules that leave us feeling like we can better rely on each other. You make suggestions of what would feel important and I’ll list them on the board up here.
3. Be vocal that you want your team to have healthy friendships and provide the training and time for them to foster them in healthy ways. When asked if “My manager/boss intentionally fosters friendships on the team,” only 13 percent of respondents on the Friendships in the Workplace Survey said, “definitely true.”
My manager/boss intentionally fosters friendships on the team |
||||
Definitely True |
Probably True |
I Don’t Know |
Probably False |
Definitely False |
13% |
25% |
19% |
19% |
24% |
Even if we add those who claim it’s “probably true,” that still means only about a third of our workforce feels that they can credit us with attempting to foster healthy friendships.
We can, at minimum, frequently repeat how important it is to us that they foster healthy friendships here at work. Then, we can begin to look for ways to:
• Share the data with them on how much workplace friendships impact our productivity and engagement, so they know they have our permission and encouragement to foster friendships.
• Bring in trainers, speakers, and facilitators who can help us inspire and train our team to foster healthy expectations, answer questions, and help our team role-play scenarios that will give them better overall people skills. We can continue to embed it in our culture by ongoing workshops or lunch-and-learns that focus on specific aspects such as the power of empathy at work, how to minimize gossip at work, and healthy conflict management.
• Plan off-site meetings that have protected time away from the office for our teams to have fun together and make memories.
• Work with our department or larger organization to possibly make this the focus of a campaign or initiative. The organization where my sister works (44,000 employees worldwide) stated their annual goal “to raise the number of employees who have a best friend at work” and then regularly sent out ideas in newsletters, fostered events for meeting new friends, and ran contests giving away free lunches for employees who snapped photos of themselves with a workplace friend.
The outcome of building strong relationships with each employee is that they feel more loyal (an outcome of Consistency), more appreciated (an outcome of Positivity), and more valued for who they are (an outcome of Vulnerability).
May leaders like you rise up and change the way our workplaces feel about friendships. May you be an advocate who knows just how much it matters to have your team excited to show up at work and feel like they belong. May you be someone who isn’t scared of the risks as much as you’re motivated by the possibilities. And, may you foster the friendships in your own life that leave you feeling so very seen for all that you do and for who you are; so very satisfied and happy; and so very safe as you live with the peace of knowing you are completely supported.