“Business and human endeavors are systems... We tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.” - Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization

Take two organizations at two ends of the “Healthy Organization” spectrum. Organization A has little turnover of its highest-performing people, generates creative solutions, rallies around adversity, makes more sound, often participatory decisions, has fun together, produces high profits, has satisfied and loyal customers, and resolves conflict in a healthy manner. Organization B sees high turnover among their best people, wastes time and energy through workplace negativity, experiences high levels of absenteeism, takes their frustration out on customers, and is generally falling behind the pack in terms of innovation, achievement, and profits.

What is it worth to you to be more like organization A? What energies are you willing to redirect to move further in that direction? To what lengths are you willing to go to develop a culture characterized by participation, positive collaboration, enthusiasm, support, and satisfaction?

Despite all the focus on employee engagement over the last 20 years, many organizations still find it an elusive goal; a golden egg that many seek but never fully obtain. A grim 2021 Gallup study found that only 36% of employees are engaged in their work, and disengaged employees cost their company 18% of their annual salary. One reason organizations haven’t tackled the engagement problem is that they may be looking in the wrong places. Organizations try quick fixes to improve their engagement, such as pay increases, company shindigs, breakroom kegs of IPA, and team-building workshops involving human pyramids and trust falls. Although these may move the engagement dial in the right direction, organizations often find the momentum short-lived or altogether ineffective.

The issue here is that organizations and leaders often fail to see that employee engagement rests in a system of interconnected parts. Adjusting just one component of the system won’t fix the engagement problem. To improve engagement, you have to improve the entire system surrounding it. And the subsystem within this larger system with the most significant influence on engagement is leadership and management (we will use these two terms interchangeably here). It’s your leaders who set the bar in terms of your organization’s culture, morale, and level of organizational health.

If you want to improve engagement, the best place to start is to improve your leadership culture. At Nash Consulting we often share this Morale Formula with our clients: Skilled managers = high morale = all that cool stuff you can't pay for and you can’t punish for – which includes employee engagement. As Stephen Covey put it, and we paraphrase here, you can pay employees for their hands and backs, but they volunteer their hearts and minds.
(Learn how Nash Consulting helps organizations improve employee engagement.)
So, what does it mean to have skilled managers? What exactly are the skills and behaviors that lead to employee morale and engagement? In our popular Managing with Mind & Heart leadership workshop series, we train leaders in The Top 15 Management Skills, and we’ve found that organizations that are dedicated to practicing these skills and behaviors see huge payoffs in employee engagement.

The following is a brief overview of The Top 15 Management Skills. Consider taking each skill and giving yourself a one through five rating, with one being “I rarely do this well” and five being “I almost always do this, and I do it well.” Now consider your leadership team as a whole and do the same exercise.

1. Show caring and respect. (The best way to create psychological safety.)
2. Advocate for your employees. (You take actions to help your employees be successful.)
3. Communicate, communicate, communicate. (Become an information curator.)
4. Involve others in decision-making. (Ask for people’s opinions and really listen.)
5. Be consistent, fair, and equitable. (People are given equal respect, opportunity, and understanding.)
6. Give autonomy and trust. (This is all about “ownership.”)
7. Ask for and be open to feedback. (You don’t know what you don’t know, so ask - and listen non-defensively.)
8. Fix problems. (The biggest source of negativity at work is unresolved issues.)
9. Be approachable. (Effectively deal with the “power differential.”)
10. Give recognition and thanks. (It’s a basic human need to be “seen” and appreciated.)
11. Hold employees accountable. (Unhelpful behaviors are addressed effectively.)
12. Be available and responsive. (Engage in M.B.W.A. and return emails and calls.)
13. Follow through and follow up. (Do what you say you’re going to do and...see #3 above.)
14. Make your expectations clear. (Be specific- and provide sponsorship as needed.)
15. Provide resources and training. (Give people the tools they need to be successful.)

What did you notice? Are there areas of opportunity for you or your leadership team? The good news is that these are all skills that can be learned, and we’ve seen it happen over and over again. It just takes practice, and with practice comes setbacks, so give yourself a lot of self-compassion along the way (because no one is perfect).
***
It’s important to emphasize that these 15 behaviors are “deliverables.” And guess what? They won’t deliver themselves. The manager who depends on these 15 things to just naturally occur throughout the course of the days will inevitably find that she is providing some of what some of her employees need but will be creating a whole lot of gaps. The key here is intentionality. Through group meetings, one-on-ones, quick check-ins, and your general availability, you can find a myriad of ways to meet employees’ needs if you can keep these important behaviors on your radar.

Now, let’s take a handful of these skills and see them in action through real-world examples:

Skill #1 – Show Caring and Respect. A manager once said to a consultant of ours, “I feel like I’m in a good place with these skills - I think I have all of them down, except showing caring and respect.” Sorry, bub, it doesn’t work like that. Although most of these 15 skills are not in any rank order, this one tops them all and is fundamental for effectively implementing all the other skills. I think you can see why. When you find yourself in a relationship with someone who has some control over your life (like your manager), you do what you need to do to keep yourself “safe,” both consciously and unconsciously. And if you sense that this person – the one who has some control over your tasks, hours, reputation, morale, and much more – doesn’t have your best interests at heart, your energies will go toward self-protection, which will drain away from your desire and ability to be creative, engaged, proactive, and effective. Therefore, managers must find ways to demonstrate that they care about their employees as human beings and not just for what they contribute.

In my first job out of college, I took a position that required driving to client sites and presenting myself "professionally." Sitting on a heap of student loan debt, I relied on hand-me-down suits that fit like a wall drape. Unknown to me at the time, the Director told my manager that my attire needed an upgrade. This manager, rather than embarrassing her employee and assuming I didn’t know how to find a well-fitting suit (which I didn’t), treated me to a trip to the mall to buy me some new clothes. This is admittedly a rather far-out example – not something that’s possible for most leaders – but the point illustrates an example of a leader that has a focus on treating employees with respect. This same manager gave another employee two weeks of paid vacation when a family member died and insisted that the employee leave all their work equipment at work while they dealt with the grief. She was also known for pulling up a chair right next to employees to help them with their workload when they were struggling to keep up, starting every one-on-one with the question, “how are you really doing?” and never reprimanding people in public. You see, showing caring and respect means simply remembering that every employee needs exactly what you need: to be treated with dignity and respect. And the best (and very inexpensive) way a manager can show caring is to truly listen.

Skill #3 – Communicate! A manager we once worked with was discouraged by the feedback she was getting from her staff. The comments we heard from her team were, “She doesn’t communicate what I need to know to do my job,” and “I can’t handle all the communication I get from her – it’s too much and most of it is irrelevant to me.” She was frustrated, and rightfully so.

We coached and encouraged this manager to do two things. First, she set up a team meeting with her staff to ask what they wanted more of or less of from her in terms of information distribution, which led to a consensus decision-making process in which they agreed on the best avenues for communicating different types of information, what information needed to be distributed to the whole group, and the overall communication expectations. Second, she began having monthly one-on-one meetings with each employee, which provided the opportunity to tailor the communications to the individual and provide an opportunity to dialogue, clarify, adjust, and share information that was relevant to that individual. (Check out our article and podcast episode on regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings. It’s one of the main avenues for delivering all of the Top 15 Management Skills.)

Skill #7 – Ask for and Be Open to Feedback. Doing this not only allows you to get ahead of problems and deal with them (Skill #8), it also demonstrates your approachability (Skill #9). In fact, this skill overlaps with almost all of the Top 15 skills and allows you to deliver them more effectively. Feedback is a gift…but it also tends to make people defensive. By asking for feedback, you’re potentially opening yourself up to criticism and the feeling of inadequacy. It’s normal to not love getting negative feedback, but you absolutely want your employees to see you as safe. And there’s no better way to create that sense of psychological safety than to ask for feedback, be open to it, and receive it nondefensively.

A leader whom one of our consultants worked with believed he really understood this concept. He asked and asked for feedback in all his one-on-one and team meetings, yet he was getting increasingly frustrated because he rarely received any feedback. “I just don’t understand - I ask for feedback all the time, but no one takes me up on it. I want to fix problems and improve, but I can’t get anyone to say anything. What am I doing wrong? Does my team just not care?” The consultant helped the manager identify three causes of the issue: he wasn’t asking open-ended questions, wasn’t giving people time to process his questions in advance, and was unintentionally exaggerating his power differential, creating the conditions for a lack of psychological safety. (The power differential is a topic we cover in this article and in this podcast episode.)

Open-ended questions are designed to avoid eliciting a one-word response such as “no,” “yes,” or “fine.” Rather than asking “Is there anything you need more of or less of from me,” try asking, “What would you like to see more of or less of from me as a manager?” Notice that the latter version of this question builds permission for critique right into the question – the “what” opens the door for more specific feedback, and this can help minimize the power differential and create the space for authentic candor. By asking well-designed questions, practicing showing up nondefensively, and giving people time to process his questions before meetings, this manager started getting more direct feedback. He was pleased. (See more examples of effective open-ended questions here.)

Skill #12 – Be Available and Responsive. The most obvious ways to do this is by responding to your emails, returning calls, having an “open-door policy” (which, by the way, has nothing to do with doors), and being generally accessible. In short, be there for your team. But with the new challenges of managing remote workforces, how can managers continue to demonstrate their availability?

A manager we worked with was experiencing a drop in his employees’ morale and engagement. Prior to his team moving to a remote-work arrangement, he was recognized by his staff for connecting consistently in the breakroom and hallways, engaging in MBWA (Managing By Walking Around), and trouble-shooting on the way to the parking lot. The new realities of work began deteriorating his positive reputation of being an impromptu and responsive communicator and problem-solver. Our consultant worked with him on setting up systems to help mimic his previous ad hoc style of management. Rather than increasing the number of team and individual meetings (a tactic that we’ve seen backfire on managers), he simply communicated to his team that he’d be available in an online meeting room for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. He posted these times on all the communication platforms and sent out a group chat whenever he was in the virtual room if it fell outside of the predetermined “office hours." Additionally, he clearly and often communicated to his team not to hesitate to text him whenever they needed some “open door policy” time so that he could get back to them at his earliest convenience. These were simple solutions, but they significantly improved his team’s engagement and performance.
***
These real-world examples of managers practicing some of the Top 15 Management Skills are just that – examples. We’ve seen countless instances of managers using their own style and flavor to effectively practice and deliver these behaviors. If, like us, you believe in the power of engagement and the outsized positive effects it can have on the performance of your workplace and the well-being of the people who work there, take these 15 skills to heart.

For heaps more on how to practice and implement the Top 15 Management Skills, listen to our seven-part podcast series on the topic: episodes #38, #39, #40, #41, #42, #43, and #44.