Hey, this is Christian Macumut Leadership on today's discussion on employee engagement. I
want to talk about predictability from a standpoint of what it does to employee engagement
and how employees react when they have a predictable job, predictable space, predictable
company culture, predictable leadership versus when it's not that way. Gallup recently released
numbers showing that for the first time since pre pandemic, the percentage of actively
disengaged employees dropped, So it was on a steady increase from twenty twenty all
the way up through twenty twenty two, and then in twenty twenty three it
dropped just a little bit, and a lot of the reason for that is
related to predictability of their job. When people feel like things are kind of
up in the air, they are more likely to be a disengaged from their
job, less likely to kind of think outside the box as far as what
they can do to help the company get better, do more than just whatever
job is versus when things are predictable, it allows people to feel safe enough
to kind of step outside what their daily work is and think about things they
can do on top of that to help further the organization or or make things
better as opposed to just kind of keeping their head down and focusing and kind
of being almost like a like one track mind. This is really interesting data,
and I think it falls in line with what we're talking about and the
importance of predictability in a workplace. Yeah, I think it's a great topic,
and I think honestly, like we we're all hungry for it, you
know what I mean, Like there's an element of wanting to know, like
what's expected, what's going on, what does the normal kind of look like,
you know, can you can you not be distracted by changes and stuff
that's happening, kind of in the opposite of like, if it's an unpredictable
space to work in, you don't really know what's always going on, or
you're not exactly sure what the direction is or what might be impacting you,
so it's hard to focus and stay really committed to the work that you're doing.
So I think it's very very you know, timely topic, especially as
we're continuing to kind of now distance ourselves by a handful of years now from
kind of the you know, the pandemic and shutdowns and all the stuff that
had happened back then to kind of give back into this now, this kind
of this newer normal of what this looks like. So it is it's interesting
to see the data continue to change, but I think it's such an important
thing to talk about because it's always something in my mind that's always relevant,
but probably more now than ever before. Right, So, there's been there's
been data out there for a long time that says that, you know,
if you're an organization and you and you need to make cuts to jobs,
if you need to lay people off, that the right way to do it
is to really consider everything that needs to be done or that might need to
be done in the you know, upcoming six months or a year, and
to cut once, very deep, you know, all at the same time.
It might hurt more to do that all at once from an organizational standpoint,
but if you if you commit to only doing that once and then knowing
that you're done making those cuts, what it does is it sends a sense
of permanence to the people who did not get cut, to kind of say,
okay, I survived this, let's get through this, and let's let's
move forward. That they can they can move forward with a greater sense of
job security in order to kind of do the work that needs to be done
to help the organization get out of whatever rut it is in. It's a
lot of organizations kind of a tendency to, you know, kind of you
know, pepper it out a little bit. You know, we want to
we don't want to cut too much, so let's do a little bit here
and then a little bit there, and you know, and it and it
takes place over the course of two years as opposed to one time. And
then what you have is you have employees who they don't They never know when
the next next shoe is gonna drop, right They they they wonder, Okay,
I survive that round, but what about the next one? What about
the one after that? If they can. If they're thinking that, it
means that they're not focused on anything besides surviving. They're they're trying to figure
out what can I do to survive or or they're already actively looking for employment
with their place because they don't like living that way where they're wondering whether or
they're going to survive the next round of layoffs. So, you know,
cut once, cut deep, and then move on. This predictability that helps
with employee engagement. From an overall job perspective, I think it's equally as
important if you are a leader of people to be predictable and so you know.
I think this is important because even if your your organization provides some level
of predictability with regard to, you know, the job expectations and job stability
and security, if you, as a leader aren't predictable, Meaning if your
employees are going to make a decision on something and you would ask them,
how will I react to this situation, if they can't immediately give you an
answer, that's a problem. You as a leader need to be predictable to
the point where your employees know how you're going to react based on your values,
based on your previous decisions, and the transparency of why you made those
decisions. The more information you can give your employees as to how to read
you in advance to know exactly how how you're going to react, the better
it is for their engagement and their likelihood to think about what they can do
to you know, further, the results and the performance and the productivity of
the team as opposed to just whatever their own individual job is. Yeah,
I think it's you know, it's such an important thing. You know.
The I think of the times in my career where where I flourished the most
as a person and as a leader, and it was at times when I
had a leader who was very predictable, It was very clear about their expectations,
was was very like, very consistent in their kind of reactions and their
perspective, very very like I said, very consistent in their decision making,
which made it much much easier for me to understand and to think about,
like, you know, in this situation or in making this decision. You
know, if I was to call this leader right now, what would they
tell me? And I had the answer already in my head. And that
was such a helpful thing and an empowering thing to make those decisions and to
be able to do those types of things. And I think think that,
you know, when it comes to leadership, that is such an important part
of that, like that when you have your leadership brand, that people know
what to expect from you, they get a sense of who you are as
a person, they're really clear about the filters that you use when making decisions.
And then at the end of the day, it helps the kind of
it cascades to them. They start to take on some of those similar types
of lenses and perspectives, which makes it much easier to make the day to
day decisions, so that you could spend the time maybe in the more complex
ones or in the space of more learning and development. Right, So,
if you're a leader and you're trying to think about, Okay, how do
I become more predictable. How do I make sure that I'm doing this for
my employees so that they feel comfortable in knowing how I'm going to react or
what my response is going to be to any situation. There's some things you
can do to make this happen, and we'll go over that, but first
I want to get up toward to one of our sponsors. All Right,
if you're a leader of people and you're trying to make sure that you are
a predictable leader, or or if you believe you already are one, your
people might not necessarily know that. The first thing you can do, the
most important thing you can do, is to articulate why you've made any decision,
even if you think it's obvious. And so if you are if an
employee comes to you for advice on something, or they ask for help on
something and you give your advice, or you give the reason you know why
they should do a certain thing. It's important to follow up with them and
let them know why you came to that conclusion. If you can root that
decision in something that is greater than just whatever the decision is, either a
policy of the organization that you think is incredibly important, your own personal value
system, which is you know, probably the best way of doing it.
If you can do that, anything that can anchor that decision in something more
than just it being a one off, and so it becomes less of a
how is Chris going to react in this situation versus how will Chris react in
situations going forward that are similar to this? If you can do that for
your people, so it's not just a you know, here's my advice for
this particular one off. But the reason I gets give you this advice is
because I believe in this and this and this this is important to me.
And what that does is that let your people know that you've articulated exactly the
things that are important to you and to the organization, so that the next
time they have a question, they will think about it from the from the
standpoint of Okay, I'm gonna go ask Chris about what to do in the
situation. Well, okay, what's important to Chris. Oh, it's this
and this and this. Okay, it's likely he will react in this way,
and then what will happen is they will test it. They will come
and ask again, and then you'll react if you're acting in the same way
that is in line what they believe that how you were going to react.
Already, you are furthering their belief that you become a predictable leader. You
do that enough times and they will stop needing to ask you. They'll be
able to execute on their own and make decisions on their own without knowing how,
because because if they're asking you for help, it means they don't know
how you're going to react, and they want to make sure that they're doing
the wrong thing. If they're able to do this on their own without asking
you, you've essentially given them the answer in advance, so they know what
the right thing to do is. If you can do this, you'll have
teams of people that becomes self sufficient and they can make important decisions without having
to get you involved. Which is exactly what you want as a leader,
so you can make sure that you can focus on actually leading people and developing
people as opposed to like making day to day decisions. That's kind of a
great breakdown of what I was saying earlier on kind of the cascading of the
behavior and the understanding from the team. I think even beyond kind of the
decision making peace, I think that there are just the way that you build
culture and how people are treated and how people treat one another and understanding.
Like I think of the times when you have conflict amongst people, and a
lot of times most of the time it's as a result of maybe a misunderstanding
or you know, somebody is just having maybe somebody had an adverse reaction that
was a little too quick and has not yet gone to make it right.
And then I think as a leader, when you do those types of things,
and when you are the one who is predictable, and you're the one
who gets in front of the team and says stuff like, hey, we
made a mistake here, I made a mistake here, I made a bad
call here, or hey, you know, we dropped the balls. Leadership
team, We're going to make this, right, We're going to correct this.
These are all things that you're doing that are that create predictability. To
know that if a mistake is made, my leader will own it and there
will be some changes, and we'll talk about it, and we'll put it
out in the open, and it's okay to make mistakes. Those types of
things, even amongst peers, allow there to be more positive conversations. Even
if somebody has an element of conflict, people are more likely to go back
to one another and apologize or talk it out or those types of things.
So I think it's, you know, besides the decision making of the day
to day, I think it's such a larger piece of you know, how
you impact the culture when you are a leader and you are very predictable.
Right. I think about the times that I have walked into work, and
we joke about this sometimes because it's happened to all of us. You walk
into your place of business and you say hi to your boss, and for
whatever reason, they're distracted or doing something and their response to you seems colder
than normal, And it's not intentional. It's just they are in the middle
of something or whatever. You caught them off guard. And they respond in
a way that is that is completely not in line with how they would normally
respond to you. Your immediate reaction is, oh, my gosh, I
did something wrong. They're going to talk to me about this later because there's
some there's something I did, and I got to think back about what did
I do wrong? And then you start thinking about it and you go,
well, I didn't do anything wrong. I haven't there's nothing there to be,
you know, going on here. This is the type of predictability I'm
talking about, and you know, unfortunately it can manifest itself in you kind
of having negative thoughts about a certain situation. But in general, it is
a good thing for a leader to be predictable because it can help with the
decision making process and overall employ engagement. Thanks for joining us for this discussion
on employe engagement. We'll see you next Thursday for another one. Have a
great day.