Why is Managerial Engagement Critical for the Company and Employees?

Being committed to your job as a manager is not the same as employees being committed to their jobs. Of course, we are all engaged to different degrees and by different factors.

The underlying forces that drive your personal engagement as a manager are similar to those that drive your team's engagement. But an engaged manager is much more than an engaged employee: whether or not a manager is engaged is not something to be taken lightly.

For most managers, employee engagement is: if you do what I ask you to do, the way I ask you to do it, if you comply with it, then you are engaged. Congratulations!... An engaged manager does not use real or perceived pressures such as mobbing, deprivation of privileges, dismissal, etc. to get employees to be engaged. Employees choose to be engaged; they cannot be "forced to be engaged".

Read Our Related Blog: The Formula for Building an Engaged Workforce

The engaged manager is responsible for putting in place the conditions that will encourage employees to choose to be engaged in their work. The keys to Employee Engagement - Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact and Belonging - are primarily the responsibility of the individual employee. In other words, employees choose to be engaged because they find meaning, autonomy, growth, influence and belonging in their work. But at the same time, a manager is responsible for creating the environment that enables employees to choose to be engaged.

Engaged managers create the enabling environment for their subordinates to be engaged by creating the conditions that enable them to be engaged in their work and in the workplace culture. Then, based on what they know about their employees' passions, interests and needs, they encourage them to find their own unique ways of being engaged. Managers who are not engaged either do not know what motivates their employees or simply do not care. They manage with authority, threats and pressure.

Read Our Related Blog: Are there any managers in your organization who stand in the way of employee engagement?

In industrial psychology, there is a principle called the Pygmalion Effect . According to this principle, a manager's attitude, behavior and expectations from his/her employees determine and predict their behavior and performance. In short, if you as a manager set high expectations for an employee's performance and communicate these expectations in an affirming way ("I have full confidence that you can do this"), the employee is likely to perform in line with your expectations.

To give one more example: The Golem effect, named not after the character in Lord of the Ringsbut after the mystical creature in Jewish culture. The Golem Effect is the opposite of the Pygmalion effect. It is the negative side of self-fulfilling prophecy. The disengaged manager naturally expects less performance from their employees or expects them to fail at their jobs, and the team works at the level of these low expectations.

The difference in the effect in these two cases is due to the observer-expectation effect, also called experimenter bias. This effect says that an experimenter or observer will often transmit unconscious cues, just as children perform on a test in accordance with their teacher's unconscious bias. A manager who believes that a subordinate is unlikely to perform well on a given task may unintentionally communicate cues that will damage the subordinate's confidence or diminish his or her performance. The reverse is also true.

In both cases, Pygmalion or Golem, the manager's expectations often come directly from his or her own level of employee engagement. If a manager is fully engaged at work, they are likely to have a positive outlook on what the team can do and communicate this belief in an empowering and encouraging way. Managers who are disengaged, dissatisfied with the organization and disinterested in their work poison their teams with their own apathy, negativity and belief that the work is not important. The team's performance reflects this.

So, dear managers, if your team is not engaged (or is engaged), take a look in the mirror. The similarity here is not by chance.

Want to know how engaged your leaders are? Download the Engaging Leader Assessment Guide below. To share your views on this topic and for more information, please write your questions in the comments section below.

LEADER ASSESSMENT THAT CREATES ENGAGEMENT