Creating Employee Engagement as a Leadership Competency

Employee Engagement is the result of a complex set of factors. While some of them affect only the organizational level, many elements of employee engagement are under the direct control of managers. Therefore, a skillful manager can greatly improve the engagement of their team. Employee Engagement Competencies represent the core skills that managers need to master in order to create an engaging environment for employees. We call people with these competencies leaders who create commitment.

Attention, you may be missing something

Despite your best efforts (and the advice of your employee engagement survey vendor), your plan for improving employee engagement often lacks a critical element. Most likely, in your view, you conducted a thorough survey process last year, carefully analyzed the results, and took meaningful action. But the success of your engagement efforts will always be limited until you can properly leverage the support of your organization's key executives.

You should know that managers play a vital role in creating an environment of engagement in your organization. Moreover, they shape the employee experience that all companies are trying to create these days in a way that HR, senior leaders and even the CEO cannot influence. Because managers are closer to employees' contributions, achievements, development needs and the details of their individual lives. In short, managers are in a crucial position to help your organization build its engagement proposition.

Harness the Power of Your Managers

So what is the best way to get the support of your managers when you are working on employee engagement? Many organizations we have observed try a cascading results approach, meaning that after the engagement survey, each manager creates an action plan based on the survey results. Can this be effective? It can be.

When the organization is ready for such a level of accountability, it can assign managers to action planning. However, action plans based on survey results are reactive in nature and often lead to only marginal improvements in the chosen focus areas. To create truly transformational change, an organization needs to go beyond reacting to survey data in a reactive way. In other words, it should include a proactive approach in the process and address employee engagement from the source.

Engagement as a Competency

After collecting millions of employee engagement survey responses over the years, our partner DecisionWise has learned something very important: it takes a set of core leadership behaviors to create an engaged work environment. In other words, building engagement is a competency.

What this tells us is that the traditional "measure and react" approach to employee engagement that has been practiced for years now requires a significant shift. Your leaders' engagement-building competencies can be measured and developed. So by helping your managers develop the skills they need to create the right environment for their teams, you can increase employee engagement in your organization.

The high level of effort that goes into the results of an engagement survey does not go into understanding the competencies of managers to create engagement. Of course, survey results will point to something that is within the purview of managers. But addressing the identified problem often requires extensive training and development for managers, and organizations rarely have the desire to address it properly.

A proactive approach, by definition, means not being reactive to the results of the survey. While the survey still provides valuable insights, a proactive approach requires focusing on the leadership behaviors and competencies that actually create engagement, rather than dwelling on low-scoring survey results. And it starts with leaders.

Choosing the Right Competencies

A prerequisite to understanding which competencies or managerial behaviors will create an engaged environment is to understand how engagement is fundamentally formed. Our partner DecisionWise analyzed 14 million survey results and found universal factors that keep people engaged. We call these factors the MAGIC factors, which in our language we call the MAGIC of Employee Engagement. The MAGIC model of employee engagement focuses on a competency model designed to build engagement in the areas of meaning, autonomy, development, influence and belonging. For example, we know that a critical condition for building employee engagement is development. That is, employees need to feel that they are developing at work. Of course, there are many factors that influence development and not all of the development work falls on the manager. However, a manager's ability to provide feedback on the performance of employees, the coaching he/she offers to employees both about their ongoing development and about managing their ambitions, and the ability to establish the right dialog between them, directly affects employees' feelings about development. In other words, this hasa very important impact on employees' perceptions of their own development.Engaging Leadership is a learnable competency, and leaders with these skills lead to increased employee engagement as a result of increased perceptions of their own development. But first you need to identify which of these competencies your leaders possess.

Of course, the idea of developing managers is nothing new. Most organizations already have some kind of executive development process in place in one form or another. However, awareness of the need to put in place training and development programs, especially in the area of building engagement, is still low. We argue that companies need to quickly learn and develop these skills in specific areas that will help them improve the employee experience, in conjunction with engagement-building leader programs. This approach will help make engagement an ongoing focus in your organization, rather than just reacting to the annual survey when the time comes.