Hey, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership on today's discussion on employee engagement.
I want to talk about something that I've been seeing pop up in my
kind of trends and feeds a lot recently, and this is you know,
kind of sheets and tip sheets and posts and LinkedIn around productivity. And I
think this is interesting because when I first started popping up, I was thinking,
you know why, why is the algorithm giving me these things from all
these people talking about how to be productive during the day. And there was
one of them that that I saw that had something in it that made me
think, oh, you know what, maybe there's something here as it relates
to leadership and employee engagement that I just am not that I wasn't seeing at
first, because there's so many different ones out there. And it got me
thinking that if you want to be good at employee engagement, if you if
you want to you know, raise your hand as a leader and say you
were taking on the task of helping employees engage more productively and more fully with
their jobs and with their coworkers and their career pathing all of those things.
You have to be productive at it, meaning this isn't something you can just
sometimes do and sometimes not do. You have to be good at at getting
things done in that space, because it's a process to get people to a
place from where they don't feel engaged to where they do feel engaged, or
where they feel slightly disengaged, and you want to get their engagement a lot
higher. Any movement that on that scale requires active work as a leader,
and active work is made up of individual tasks that you have to get done.
And when I say tasks, you say you think of tasks, You
think of, you know, making my bed and cleaning my house. No
tasks are anything is on your to do list that you could put on a
calendar that has to get done, even if you don't know precisely how it's
going to go. It could just be the act of doing something that that
you know causes this to happen. But but when you were trying to get
people to engage more fully, it is a It is a step by step
process that involves all of these things you have to get done, and if
you're not working at calendarizing them or writing them down, or or figuring out
these lists of things to do, you're essentially just kind of like hoping the
employee becomes more engaged because you've done something, and that's that's not going to
work long term. Yeah, I agree. I think it's it's such an
important thing to consider how not only we spend time, but how we prioritize
time, but also like how do we like I don't want to dehumanize like
the idea of like tasks related to people, but the reality is, like,
that's it's a thing. It's very true. It's like, no,
a task of being a leader is having conversations with your team. A task
of being a leader is is doing things that may not be like in the
moment like this is a part of the business or the job or what we
quote unquote maybe should be doing, but like a part of it of leadership
and the work is like the informal dialogue and conversations and that how you know.
A mentor and leader of mine has said for years like leaders vote with
their time. Wherever you spend your time is what shows your people, which
you prioritize. So if you spend your time talking to people, if you
spend your time in some of these conversations and building relationships and understanding people's motivations,
and their their dreams and their inspirations, like these things matter to people
when building culture and when engaging your teams. Yeah, that's so true.
You know, I'm thinking about some of these things that are on these you
know, productivity charts and sheets and infographs as far as you know how to
be more productive, and when applying them to engaging employees, they really fit
well. And so I think about things like, you know, we've all
heard the term eat the frog, you know, tackle the most challenging task
first, right, And that doesn't that isn't necessarily the one that is the
most challenging from a you know, a chore standpoint. It could be the
thing that you know in the pit of your stomach is the one that you're
avoiding. So thinking about you know, times when I've had large teams of
people reporting to me and I had a lot of stuff that I had to
get done on a given day. There were definitely days where there was something
that I knew I had to get done and I didn't want to do it,
and so I found ways of filling the day with other things that also
had to get done. Like they did. I was productive, but the
thing that I didn't want to do was still waiting for me the next day
and the day after that, and it still had to get done. And
if I think back on those times, I wasn't putting my all into the
other things that I just had to do instead, because part of my brain
was kind of locked onto that thing that I knew I had to get done
and didn't want to do. And so, you know, tackling that task
first that does not the first thing in the morning, but first on your
to do list when you start engaging with your team as you start work for
the day, the thing that you want to do the least on that list
of things is the thing you should do absolutely first, if for no other
reason, then you can start engaging fully in the other things you have to
get done without kind of you know, taking this having this this daunting thing
take away from you. I want to go over some of the things that
really successful leaders do in terms of being more productive and prioritizing the things they
have to get done to increase employe engagement with their teams. But first I
want to give up towards to one of our sponsors. All Right, if
you're a leader of people and you're trying to engage more fully with your team
and increase engagement with the people on your team. Two things that a lot
of great leaders do in this space who do it well are they calendarize everything.
They put things on the calendar that have to get done, because it's
so easy to go multiple days or weeks without doing something and not think that
that's what's happened, and to think, oh, I just did that recently,
I don't need to do it again. I'm talking about setting time on
the calendar for each person who reports directly to you, where you put them
on the calendar at an interval, and then you know when the last time
it was that you spoke to that person, that you had a conversation with
them about something that was not work related, that you had a conversation with
them about something they were doing well at work, or something they need to
get better at. Putting things on a calendar will tell you, in plain
black and white how productive you are as long as you're holding to it with
the things that you have to get done in terms of engaging with your people
and making sure that the relationship is SELLI between you and them. The second
thing that a lot of leaders do who do this really well, is they
know what they don't have to get done. I speak back to that example.
I gave a minute ago on the things that I filled my day with
to avoid that one daunting task. In that particular case, they were all
things that I had to get done. In other cases, sometimes I can
fill my day with things that don't actually have to get done or don't have
to get done by me. They should be done by somebody else in an
attempt to avoid something else that I don't want to get done. So be
very good at deciding what doesn't need to get done and label those things as
such so you can't go back to them later and think I have to do
this. You already know that's not for you to do. Let that be
done by somebody else, and focus on the things that you're supposed to do
as a leader. Yeah, and I would add in as well as you
know you mentioned this before the break, But I think planning out to have
the harder conversations, like when you talked about like the tasks that you don't
want to do, I think sometimes those tasks are like you know, you
need to go talk to that person and you need to have this conversation and
you talk about whatever this thing is, and you can give yourself a million
reasons why you don't want to do that today, or it's not the right
time, or it's not like you know, all those types of things.
But I think that prioritizing those things in those conversations, I feel strongly that
you need to get to those quickly. The longer you have in between,
you know, when something happens or when a conversation needs to be had,
and when you actually have the conversation, it just creates space for a lot
of things that can cause a lot of problems into the future. So I
do think the calendation, the calendarization piece is critical. But then also moving
forward, moving up on the calendar the things again that you don't want to
do or that maybe not the most enjoyable part of the job, but need
to get done, get those done fast, and get them done quickly,
and get them done kind of on the front end and in a timely manner
so that you're not pushing them down the road. Because just by simply as
a leader, allowing something to not be addressed kind of is by default co
signing the behavior, whatever that might be. So like jumping in and doing
those quickly are or really really important. Right If the longer you wait before
giving somebody feedback on something, or or clearing the air or having the conversation
that at least level sets where the two of you stand on something, the
longer you push that that away or kick the can down the road, it's
very very unlikely that the situation won't get worse. It is virtually never a
situation that will get better on its own if it's something where you need to
address it, but in most cases it will get worse. So yeah,
don't don't avoid those things, take them on. You know the old adage
the best time to plant a tree was one hundred years ago, and the
second best time is right now that this This is what you need to do.
Any of those tasks where you think to yourself, I should have done
that yesterday. If you're already thinking that, then do it now, like
right now, and make sure that it's done in a way that is respectful
of the the employee and the relationship that you're trying to maintain and the kind
of the the the ability for that employee to move forward through whatever it is
they have to move forward with without allowing the behavior to continue, you know,
simply out of because you you didn't address it in time, and now
you feel like you owe them some sort of of of grace. That's not
necessarily the case. The if a behavior needs to stop, and needs to
stop right away, and it's on you as a leader to address the fact
that you should have that you should have done this earlier and didn't, but
now you're moving forward with it, and now you want to make sure they're
on the same page with you. Thank you all for joining us for this
episode of Employe Engagement. We'll see you all next Thursday. Have a great day.