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How Senior Leadership Benefits from Employee Engagement

When employees are productive, the company is productive—and senior leadership doesn’t need much help in understanding how productivity helps the bottom line.

But the advantages of engaged employees don't begin and end at productivity. Companies with higher rates of engagement report turnover rates ranging from 25 percent to 65 percent lower than average, depending on the industry and company type, according to Harvard Business Review.

There are the obvious financial implications of high turnover—it takes a lot of time and money to recruit and train employees, after all—but there is also the impact it can have on a larger team. One unengaged employee, or, worse, an actively disengaged employee, can have serious repercussions on a team, causing the whole team's outlook to sour.

The opposite can be true, though, with engaged employees helping the rest of the team stay more focused, more efficient, and more engaged.

Kevin Kruse breaks down the importance of engaged employees to managers and entire companies in no uncertain terms:

"An employee’s discretionary effort results in the Engagement-Profit chain. Because they care more, they are more productive, give better service, and even stay in their jobs longer. All of that leads to happier customers, who buy more and refer more often, which drives sales and profits higher, finally resulting in an increase in stock price."

When everyone from individual contributors on up is engaged and focused on making their work the best it can be, everyone profits.

iCoach Coaching Tip - Be Demosthenes, not Cicero.

Okay, that title is a little high brow, but give us a moment, while we prove an important point!
Demosthenes and Cicero were two great orators who lived in antiquity. Cicero was an amazing speaker. Whenever he addressed audiences, they would wildly applaud and everyone praised him and gushed about his speaking prowess. Demosthenes was different. He didn’t get as much praise for his finely turned prose… but when he presented, his audiences would get fired up. So fired up they’d often storm out to grab their weapons and charge out to fight the enemy.

The difference was that Cicero was praised because of how well he gave smart speeches, but Demosthenes’s power was in how well he persuaded people to act.

This is an important distinction for coaches and managers to understand. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting that lasted 3x longer than it needed to, because everyone needed to go around the table and hear themselves speak, you understand this phenomenon. If you’ve ever talked to someone who isn’t listening because they are too busy thinking of what clever thing they plan to say next, you’ve experienced it.

We all want to be inspiring and wise, but at the end of the day it pays to remember that it doesn’t matter how smart you sound. It matters how much of an impact you make on your employees. As a coach or manager, your job is to validate them, boost them up, motivate them, and help them grow their capabilities.

Be Demosthenes, not Cicero.

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Coaching Tip -

Don’t waste time treating symptoms instead of the problem.

As managers, it is easy to get sucked into treating symptoms instead of causes. If an employee is consistently late with a weekly report, for example, it is faster and simpler to criticize them or privately jump to conclusions about why that is happening than to ask what is really going on. But the truth is, unless you ask, you may be addressing the wrong issue.

Being too quick to treat symptoms can make us miss serious underlying problems that may be going unaddressed—or even being exacerbated by your focus on the symptom. If you are too busy chastising Sally for her late reporting, you may be missing the feelings of inadequacy that are making her over-check her numbers—or her crippling belief that you don’t have confidence in her. Behavior is always a symptom. Highlight your concern with the employee and then listen to their side of the story. Don’t interrupt. Ask why. Ask why again. Probe deeper to get at the root cause. And then work from there.