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By: Getty Stewart
Head of the Home Range
Employee engagement – winning the hearts, minds and spirits of employees – is a lot easier said than done. But, if we want employees to bring their best to work, we have to do our best to engage.
Like most leaders and organizations, I think we do a pretty good job of engaging the mind. It’s reaching employees’ hearts and spirits that presents the greatest challenge, and unfortunately, there is no objective, off-the-shelf, ten-step program for this. We’ve discovered that in order to engage the heart and spirit of employees you have to lead the way by putting your heart and spirit into it.
I experienced this concept first hand as a professional speaker. When I began speaking years ago, my presentations were jam-packed with the latest research, theories, facts and how-tos – they were completely focused on engaging the mind. Even the participant interaction was designed to engage the mind by focusing on practicing the specific techniques presented.
While participant feedback was polite and positive, I always felt something was missing from these presentations. I knew participants valued the information, but I also knew they were never fully engaged.
With the help of my peers and mentors, I discovered that I had to put more of myself into my presentations and to make it possible for participants to share more of themselves. The more I did this, the greater the response from participants. Today, I plunge into my presentations, not with an agenda, but with a personal, heartfelt story that demonstrates my own challenges with the particular topic we’re discussing. I talk with the audience as we were friends. We banter back and forth and share stories and strategies about what works and what doesn’t. Of course, we still cover relevant content but we do it in light of our personal experiences.
I never would have thought (there’s that thinking thing again) that people would be interested in hearing about my stories or those of other participants. But, lo and behold, they are. It’s what draws people in and makes any lessons to be learned much more real. It is the beginning of engaging the heart and spirit.
Darryl has experienced similar results as a leader and entrepreneur. He has found the more he connects with people in a personal, sincere way, the more employees seem to engage with him and his vision for IBEX. In the early days, Darryl was focused on the work and doing as much of it as possible himself. His employees were there to support him. He took very little time to listen and connect to people on anything but the pressing issues of the day. It was the time of IBEX’s slowest growth and greatest employee turn-over. We needed a different approach.
Today, Darryl focuses on the people involved with IBEX and making sure he’s connecting with them. He is there to support them as they do the work. By listening to them, taking an interest in their lives, responding to their needs, being sincere and putting himself out there, Darryl has not only changed the trajectory of IBEX’s profits, but he’s built an incredible team of engaged employees.
For two logical, critical thinkers, it requires a lot of effort to expose our heart and spirit as freely as we do now. But logically and somewhere deep down inside, we know it’s the right thing to do.
P.S. Thank you to those readers who contributed their ideas for making new employees feel welcome in response to my last article on onboarding. I loved the thought of sending a fruit basket or flower bouquet to the home of a new employee several days before the first day of work. Another great first day experience came from an alarm installer, who got to go tool shopping on his first day with a fellow installer and a company credit card.
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