It’s time to make the critical shift from leading the business by yourself to leading an organization of people. At P2Excellence, we help you navigate the uncharted territories of organizational growth with clarity and confidence.
Earlier this month, I had the distinct pleasure of attending an event called “DisruptHR” The event was hosted by Patrick Lynch, President of The Frontier Group and Tom Darrow, Founder and Principal of Talent Connections. It was a fast-paced, innovative and disruptive evening. The speakers were limited, I mean really limited, to 5-minute presentations in which they shared how disruption is impacting human resources in 2017.
I loved the energy and perspectives of these HR professionals from many industries. They were honest, funny, innovative, and thoughtful. And all focused on helping us move talent thinking and talent success forward in the very disruptive work era in which we operate.
Clearly, disruption is a constant: you’re either being disrupted by others or creating the disruption. You may be responding to the disruption in your marketplace or, better yet, you are creating the disruption and leading the change.
In past issues, I’ve talked about how to identify disruption, plan for disruption, work with disruption, and thrive in disruption. Now I’d like to shift the focus to the team realm – that is, how ‘employee engagement‘ is critical (and different) in a world of disruption.
According to Gallup, “a company that outperforms their competitors is made up of an engaged workforce,” and “a highly engaged workforce [is] the difference between a company that outperforms its competitors and one that fails to grow.”
Sobering statements. Especially in a work world where many managers are held more accountable for their individual workload than managing and developing their team.
Let’s clarify the terminology. Despite what you may have heard, ’employee engagement’ does not mean a company engaging their employees to do their job better. On the contrary, it means recalibrating individuals and the team dynamic to ‘engage to’ the specific mission and outcomes of their projects and ‘engage to’ their customers.
How then do you set expectations for employee engagement and make that happen? How do you personally create a culture that makes employees want to be a part of engaging to the mission and to customers? Especially in disruptive times. We’ll explore this more in the weeks ahead. I welcome your input on the subject. Please don’t hesitate to comment, and together we’ll find out more about setting expectations for successful employee engagement.
