Leadership

The 6 Reasons for Employee Disengagement

There’s a lot of buzz these days about improving employee engagement.

But if you think about it, when someone joins your company, they’re already highly engaged. They’re excited to be there, they want to prove themselves, and they want to make a difference.

Therefore, as a leader, we don’t need to worry as much about how to engage people as much as how to keep people from becoming disengaged!

As the old saying goes, “People don’t quit companies, they quit bosses.”

Therefore, the question is, “why does disengagement occur?”

Disengagement most often occurs because a leader does or says things that cause people to become disillusioned and less engaged.

Typically, disengagement occurs when leaders:

Tolerate bad behavior (or behave badly themselves)
Treat people like “things”
Treat adults like children
Don’t treat people with respect
Lack integrity
Take people for granted

Here are the leading causes of disengagement and what leaders can do about it.

Tolerating Bad Behavior

A company’s culture has a significant impact on attracting and retaining good employees, boosting engagement, and achieving a strong bottom line. Most people think that a company’s culture is defined by the values and behaviors a company aspires to. That sounds great and makes sense. Except it’s not true…

A company’s culture is defined by the values and behaviors the company tolerates.

And who does that tolerating? The leaders do. The values and behaviors that the leaders tolerate become the company’s culture. But it doesn’t end there. It gets worse. When a leader professes to value a behavior but acts in a manner at odds with it, it demonstrates a lack of integrity. And when a leader is seen to lack integrity, people stop trusting and lose respect for that leader. And when people lose trust and respect for a leader, they become disengaged.

Treating People Like Things

When we interact with people without compassion, empathy, or understanding, we’re relating to them as things. And the consequence of treating people like things is that you’ll get compliance, but not commitment.

When a leader treats people like things, it sends the message that they are unimportant. When the company tolerates leaders who don’t care about people, people tend not to care about the company or the leaders. And when people don’t care, they become disengaged.

What does “treating people like things” look like? It’s when a leader is insensitive to people and interacts with them as if they have no feelings. A leader treats people like things when he or she ignores the fact that everyone has hopes and dreams and fears and stress. And leaders treat people like things when they don’t show respect for people or value their contributions, efforts, and potential.

A good leader understands that people’s hopes, dreams, fears, and stresses are real and matter to them. A good leader inspires people. A good leader interacts with people as people, helping them to be their best. A good leader has empathy. A good leader relates to people the way they themselves want to be treated. And a good leader helps people achieve their own goals.

Treating Adults Like Children

How does a leader “treat adults like children”? Why would a leader treat an adult like a child? The most prevalent reason stems from the flawed perspective that if people aren’t told what to do, they will do the least amount of work possible, doing just enough to keep their job.

When a leader doesn’t trust people to do what needs to be done, and doesn’t trust their judgment, they are treating them as if they are children. When they micromanage people, they are treating them like children. It shows a lack of respect and trust. And when people feel they aren’t respected and trusted, they lose respect for the leader. When people feel they aren’t respected and valued, they become disengaged.

If someone doesn’t know what to do, then our job as a leader is to develop their knowledge and abilities. The shortcoming lies with the leader, not the follower. If someone lacks the necessary judgment for a task or decision, then our job as a leader is to develop their judgment. If their judgment remains inadequate, then either we aren’t as competent a leader as we need to be, or we just have the wrong person on our team. Either way, resorting to treating someone as a child is a poor course of action.

Not Treating People with Respect

The impact of showing respect is powerful, but not nearly as powerful as what happens when a leader does not show respect for others. When a leader doesn’t respect people, they lose respect for the leader. And when people feel they’re not respected, they become disengaged.

People feel they’re not respected when they’re spoken to in a manner that either minimizes them or makes them feel that they and their ideas are being dismissed.

We show respect to people when we give them our full attention. It demonstrates that we care about their ideas and concerns, and that we feel that what they have to say is valuable. People usually feel they have good ideas and have something to contribute. Whether we agree with them or not, soliciting input from others demonstrates that we value them and their ideas, and that goes towards earning their respect. The most effective means of showing respect for others is asking good questions of people and then listening to their answers. If their ideas are misguided, it gives us the insights we need to help coach and mentor them.

Not Having Integrity

A leader who lacks integrity has a difficult time influencing and inspiring people. People assess us by our words and actions over time. A leader earns trust by how he or she acts in everyday situations. A leader’s words and actions will carry more weight and have greater impact if they’ve earned the trust (and respect) of others in advance.

Acting with integrity means doing what you say you’re going to do. Committing to a deadline creates an opportunity to demonstrate your integrity. Regardless of the importance of the task, fulfilling your commitment on time cements your level of integrity in the minds of others. Only when you have consistently demonstrated that you are a person of your word can solid trust be established. When you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, people become disengaged.

Acting in integrity is slightly different than acting with integrity. It’s about how we conduct ourselves in relation to the values we claim matter to us. Acting in integrity means that if we say that treating others with respect matters, we are always respectful of others – regardless of the situation or the person’s position. Acting in integrity means that if we say that honesty matters to us, we are honest – regardless of the situation. If you say that work/life balance matters, then you go out of your way to strike that balance – not only for yourself, but for the people you lead. When we act at odds with the values we say matter to us, people become disengaged.

Taking People for Granted

In order to bring out the best in people, they need to feel valued. A leader must show appreciation for their efforts and recognize them for their accomplishments. Being taken for granted is disheartening and demotivating. And when people feel unappreciated, they become disengaged.

Some leaders adopt the attitude that people are paid to do a job and therefore the payment of a salary is sufficient appreciation and recognition for their work. And while it’s true that people have an obligation to do good work in exchange for fair pay, people are still people. They have emotions, pride, fears, self-esteem, and a desire to please.

Having one’s effort taken for granted can be disheartening. If a leader wants people to do and be their best, it’s important to demonstrate that he or she values them. There is a difference between appreciation and recognition, and the distinction is important to understand. Recognition is offered to acknowledge a person’s achievement and is usually done publicly. Appreciation on the other hand, is offered for someone’s effort.

Most people want to be appreciated for their efforts more so than for their accomplishments. Appreciation is generally personal, heartfelt, and given privately from one person to another. It is an expression of gratitude for someone’s effort. Its impact is immediate and long-lasting. Telling someone you appreciate their effort in completing a project over the weekend has a far greater impact on engagement than offering a token of recognition for the end result.

Reducing disengagement keeps the base level of engagement high and increases overall engagement over time. A highly engaged team becomes committed to the outcome of an initiative, and the results from a committed team far outweigh those from a team that is simply compliant.

If you’d like my help reducing disengagement (and increasing engagement), please contact me.

Why Setting Company Goals is Ineffective

We all know how motivating setting a goal for ourselves can be. “My goal is to lose 20 lbs. in the next three months.” “My goal is to get to the gym three times a week.” And we become motivated to do what we need to do in order to achieve our goal.

But setting a goal for someone else has a completely different dynamic. No one cares because the goal usually has no meaning for them.

Oh,… they’ll “work at” achieving the goal. But their efforts are a matter of compliance rather than commitment. And as we know, the results produced by a compliant team are far less than those from a
committed team.

You see, a goal is just a metric to measure progress in the execution of a strategy. It has no emotional or inspirational component. It’s simply a means of determining progress. A strategic-sounding goal might be, “Our strategy is to double revenues over the next three years.” No matter how detailed the plan is to achieve that goal and regardless of the fanfare with which it is rolled out, this non-strategy is simply a goal to double sales – nothing more. Not only that, but the only people who will be enthused about the goal are the ones who set the goal. And while it may result in an initial burst of activity, it soon fades, resulting in business as usual.

If a leader truly wants a team to get behind a strategy and really strive to achieve it, the strategy must have an emotional component. There needs to be a compelling “why”. An effective strategy has to embrace a meaningful reason for the pursuit of it. Only then will the team be committed and their efforts be persistent enough to reach the objective.

So, the question becomes, what is a strategy with “an emotional component”?

A strategy is a direction that a company (or a team) needs to move in in order to address a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. By its very nature, the strategy will have an emotional component. In other words, people can take pride in achieving it or it matters to them and has some significance to them.

An example of an initiative with an emotional component might be something like: “We want to be known in our industry as the premier provider of custom solutions. We want to set ourselves apart from our competitors by developing creative solutions for the difficult problems faced by our customers.”

If you want a committed team and meaningful results, develop good strategies rather than setting goals.

It often helps to have a sounding board and to get outside perspective when developing a strategy and get strong buy-in. That’s why executive coaching is valuable.

How to Reverse Manager Disengagement

As the economy has become more challenging and unpredictable, workers are being asked to do more with less. The consequences, of course, are employee disengagement, burnout, and higher turnover. All of which make matters even worse!

These teams are being asked to do more with less by the leaders of the organization. The leaders don’t take these decisions lightly and generally don’t enjoy having to cut head count. Employees know that, but it doesn’t really help the situation.

There is, however, a “hidden” negative consequence to this issue of doing more with less.

The “hidden” negative consequence is the toll it takes on the managers of those teams. The Gallup Organization just released a study examining this issue.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

According to the study, the drop in employee engagement cost the world economy $438B in lost productivity in 2024! Gallup says the primary cause was a drop in manager engagement. And as manager engagement drops, so does team engagement, thereby compounding the problem.

The study goes on to say that the manager engagement issue especially affects managers under 35 years of age and female managers. Overall, manager engagement fell from 30% down to 27%. That means that almost ¾ of all managers are not feeling engaged!

What can leaders do to reverse this trend and improve manager engagement?

Provide Training on How to Manage
Most managers are people who were great individual contributors. After all, they’ve proven they know how to get the job done! The reality, however, is that technical competence isn’t enough to be an effective manager. Clearly, a good manager needs – among other things – to be able to oversee their team’s work and provide guidance, properly allocate resources, and help their team deliver quality results on time.

Because many of these skills don’t automatically come with being a good individual contributor, leaders need to train their managers on how to manage others.

Provide Training on How to Coach and Mentor Others
In addition to those skills mentioned above, managers also need to be able to coach and mentor their team members. Developing subordinates doesn’t only make them more valuable, enhance engagement, and increase productivity, but it also makes them more promotable and drives manager engagement.

It is essential that leaders teach managers how to coach and mentor their team members.

Provide Continuing Personal Development
When a manager develops team members it helps improve engagement, productivity and job satisfaction. The same things happen when leaders develop managers.

People don’t want to feel stagnant and/or stuck in their current role. They want to continue to grow, expand their skill set, and prepare for advancement.

If leaders want managers to stay engaged and committed (as opposed to simply being compliant), they need to provide development opportunities for them.

Have an “Open-Door” Policy
The final suggestion for helping managers stay engaged is for leaders to have an open-door policy. In other words, make it comfortable for managers to come to their boss with questions, ideas, and problems without feeling they’ll be criticized or judged.

Having an open-door policy allows both the manager and leader to grow and connect. People want to be heard and respected. Knowing they can come to their boss with questions and/or ideas helps accomplish that.

3 Hurdles to Developing Leaders

Every executive wants his or her leadership team to be effective. And from my experience, most of these senior executives do make the effort to help their leaders develop.

But the problem is that there are several hurdles to successfully developing leaders internally. Here’s what makes things difficult:

1. Addressing Symptoms
Typically, executives see one or more issues with a leader’s effectiveness and attempt to address/correct the behavior. But more times than not, the effort is at best only mildly successful.

The reason is interesting. In my years of coaching leaders, I’ve noticed that the issues a leader wants help with are often symptoms, rather than problems. And as we know, addressing a symptom rather than the problem usually makes things worse.

The art is in uncovering the underlying problem(s). It’s often a matter of asking the right questions and successfully changing their perspective. It’s one of the reasons bringing in a good executive coach is helpful.

2. Interpersonal Dynamics
For meaningful improvement to take place, open, honest, challenging, and confidential conversations with a leader must take place. But it’s virtually impossible for a leader to be completely open, honest, and vulnerable when those conversations are with the person who will decide their role in and future with the company.

It’s unrealistic to expect a leader to acknowledge their shortcomings and fears in a conversation with their boss. It’s unrealistic to expect a leader to share their frustrations and dissatisfactions to that boss. And it’s unrealistic to for a boss to challenge a leader’s thinking or judgment and expect them to respond transparently and honestly.

The interpersonal dynamics between boss and leader make it nearly impossible for an executive to effectively develop his or her leaders. It’s another reason bringing in a good executive coach is helpful.

3. Objectivity
Virtually everyone around a leader has an agenda – their direct reports, their co-workers, their spouse and especially their boss. They either want things to change or they want things to stay the same. They want the leader to act and make decisions in a way that gives them what they want. Consequently, for a leader to hone their thinking and judgment, they need an unbiased sounding board.

Because getting objective perspective and having an unbiased sounding board are essential to improving a leader’s judgment and decision-making, it’s nearly impossible for a boss to effectively develop his or her leaders. Yet another reason bringing in a good executive coach is helpful.

In summary, dealing with symptoms, interpersonal dynamics, and lack of objectivity can all limit the effectiveness of an executive’s efforts to develop his or her leaders. These issues are why utilizing an executive coach has become so popular.

Problem Leaders Are Still Common

As I work with senior executives around the country, it’s apparent that problem leaders abound. These are leaders who, although bright and experienced, cause problems within the workplace and make progress that much harder.

I’m regularly brought in to coach these problem leaders and I’ve found that the issues often fall into several categories, namely 1) lack of strategic thinking, 2) inability to influence and gain buy-in for their ideas, and 3) feeling the need to micromanage their team.

1) Lack of Strategic Thinking

A lack of strategic thinking often exists because for years prior to someone becoming a leader, they mastered the art of thinking tactically rather than strategically. In addition, they tend to see things in their “silo” – which results in a narrow focus rather than a broader, higher-level perspective. All of which leads to another common issue. The issue of addressing symptoms rather than the underlying problems.

Each of these issues causes friction in the workplace, slows progress, and frustrates everyone. Plus, to compound things, they have blind spots. They can’t see what they’re missing.

Helping them learn to think strategically and more broadly makes them (and their team) more effective.

2) Inability to Influence

The inability to influence others and to get buy-in for ideas is one of the most common sources of frustration and friction with leaders.

Because of their years of experience, they often have good ideas – ideas for driving results, solving problems, and/or moving in a new direction. The problem is that unless they get buy-in for those ideas, the best they can hope for is compliance from their team. And as we know, the results from a committed team are very different than from those of a team that is simply compliant.

The longer this dynamic continues, the more frustrated the leader becomes. And the more frustrated they become, the more agitated and confrontational they become.

Showing them how to have greater influence and how to be more persuasive has a positive and immediate impact.

3) Feeling the Need to Micromanage

Leaders who feel the need to micromanage cause widespread disengagement within their team, which of course, leads to low productivity and high turnover.

Leaders who micromanage don’t understand how to lead professionals. They don’t engage or listen to their teams. They don’t create a trusting environment. They treat adults like children. And they even treat people like “things”.

The key to effectively leading professionals is to treat professionals like professionals.

At the heart of this approach is the reality that most professionals want to do a good job. They want to produce professional results. Consequently, a leader doesn’t need to constantly monitor the work and progress of a professional. Instead, they need to ensure that the person is clear about what needs to be done, what the outcome needs to be, and when the task needs to be completed.

Once all of this is established, the leader needs to leave them alone to complete their work. They can (and should) wait for and expect the results to be delivered with quality and on time.

Helping leaders learn to let go while still holding people accountable is key to making them more effective.

If you’d like further insights on how to deal with problem leaders and make them more effective, feel free to download my whitepaper on
Strategies for Dealing with a “Problem Leader”: https://www.elicitingexcellence.com/problem-leader-strategies