All employees want to be connected to their organisation, and not just their job. The concept of “the whole person” person really does exist, where what we see, the visible layer, is actually people’s behaviour. Of course, that is what others see from us too, if we are a leader, our own behaviour. How do we behave as a leader, is it in ways that will either connect us to the organisation or disconnect us, from either the organisation, or from our goals in the job?

Employees Want To Feel Connected To The Leaders 5

Most people are pretty engaged with their job, they like their jobs, and they have work tasks that should relate to their job roles. They may have a job specification, one that says here is what you job is about, and here are the goals, and here are the key tasks. All very fine, but while that may keep them busy, it really does nothing in regard to guaranteeing they will actually be engaged in the overall vision and ambitions of the company that they work for.   That’s fair enough, because there are a lot of people who don’t want more than a job, they don’t want to be overly committed to anything, or  they may have so many other commitments outside of their work, that they couldn’t possibly over commit to an organisation. That is acceptable, and it is an unwritten contract where we may have expectations along those lines.

The piece that really interests us, are the people who joined up with us, or have worked with us for some time, but they have got switched off, totally disengaged to an extent or actively disengaged to a level where they are negative contributor in attitude and in deed. These people could have been connected, but we have turned them off. They could have been some of our best performers. We switched them away from  this possibility through our behaviours and actions, we ensured they would never be passionate and engaged with the company, because they didn’t trust us as leaders, and we never met their core needs, and work expectations.

Building Performance.

Building High Performance teams, developing high performing people, and creating enthusiastic people hinges on us understanding the needs of our people, having conversations to get to know them, and treating people with respect.

The Gallup Q12, which a lot of companies in Ireland and the UK use, gave a great set of questions to allow us to consider what we need to think about, in relation to our employees.

These are questions like, “My Supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person”.  I don’t know how many times I have experienced organisations where the agenda at Performance Management meetings was very far away from this ethos. It is evident that many leaders do care, but under pressure, a lot of our leaders revert to type and use a forceful and compliance based approach to get performance from their people. They do not really care.

If people feel they won’t have an opportunity to learn and grow, or are not respected, treated well, or share some of what’s going on in the organisation, and why decisions are made, they are less likely to be committed and stay long term. If people don’t feel they are part of something, it becomes harder for them to engage or believe there is a meaningful role for them long term.

Building Trust To Foster Care.

Understanding the values that build trust, Acceptance, Openness, Congruence and Reliability and their associated characteristics and behaviours, brings awareness to leaders about how to engage people, how to build alignment and clarity for teams, and also ultimately to foster a core quota of Passionate employees, who will pull out all the stops to deliver on the company’s goals and objectives. These are the people you will get discretionary efforts from who can influence others on the borderline.

Are you willing to start the journey to building employee passion ? Find out more about Builing Trust.

Author

Employees Want To Feel Connected To The Leaders 6Peter O’Connor is the MD of Performance Partners Ltd, a Management, Leadership, Sales and Personal Development Facilitator & Trainer, based in Ireland, who works internationally.  Peter can be contacted peter(at)performancepartners.ie or on 353-1-2402255
Find out more about the Employee Passion Survey here
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