Leaders MASSIVELY Impact Employee Experience
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If you care about employee experience, it’s vital to continue to develop and level up leaders.
Continued professional development of leaders is key.
Here’s why:
For many people, how much they like their jobs and their experience as an employee ultimately boils down to the relationship and experience that they have of their direct leader. The quality, caliber, and capabilities of leaders inside any organization has a gigantic impact on engagement, productivity, morale, and retention.
Leaders really, really matter.
A focus that I believe a lot of companies miss when they think about employee experience and engagement is who is leading those employees. The reality is that the same staff member can thrive or be miserable in their role as a direct result of their relationship and how they experience their leader.
It takes a lot to be a great leader. It’s not just about temperament and likeability and a leadership title — it requires a high level of concrete, practical skills. There are a number of people-focused skills that are low hanging fruit when it comes to the basic things that leaders should be highly skilled at.
To name a few specifically; being skilled at giving and receiving feedback and coaching, communicating clearly, setting expectations and delegating, effectively navigating conflict and difficult conversations, self awareness and unconscious bias including understanding how it affects decision making.
If these are not things that any organization can confidently say across the board that their leaders are excellent at, then they’ve got work to do.
Identify areas of opportunity to improve.
If as a team or company this hasn’t been on your radar, no worries. A good place to start is to perform an audit to identify your biggest areas to improve.
Have a conversation as a leadership team, ask for feedback from your employees and do some investigating to find out what areas of opportunity would make the most immediate impact to address sooner than later. Once you have those figured out, get to work.
Start small. You don’t have to have giant budgets to do this kind of work to level up — there are hundreds of books written on any topic you can imagine, and hours upon hours of free content on YouTube, internet blogs, etc. There’s plenty of leadership content out there to keep folks learning and growing.
A couple of my absolute favorite books that I consistently recommend are Fierce Conversations (by Susan Scott), and Crucial Conversations (by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Al Switzler, and Ron McMillan). Both of those books are practical, straightforward, and life-changing.
Learning = growing.
My strong suggestion is to make this kind of professional development a requirement for anyone who is a leader of people inside an organization. When someone is hired or promoted into a leadership position, have it trigger some development for them to make sure that they are skilled in some crucial areas that will greatly impact them and their team.
And this shouldn’t be just for leaders. If every employee inside a company is highly skilled at feedback, resolving conflict, communicating clearly and effectively, and they are highly self aware then as a byproduct you will have healthier, stronger relationships, less static and friction, higher engagement and morale, and higher retention. When people have the ability and capacity to interact with the help of these types of skills it makes for a much better workplace culture.
Any company that cares about employee experience needs to add this focus to how they operate. Leveling up and increasing the skills of leaders is a must, and it pays off across the board.
Related Blogs:
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop