Think…more juice from each lemon!
Think…passionate team members who are thrilled to find ways to contribute to customer loyalty, increased sales and decreased expenses!Think…committed employees, lower staff turnover and enhanced productivity!
Imagine…how would it be if every single one of your leaders and employees were passionate about these things that have a very real impact on your bottom line?
What do the statistics tell us about employees’ commitment and productivity?
The stats aren’t a good look I’m afraid. Separate surveys, conducted by the Global Leadership Council and the Gallup Management Journal, found that:
- Only about 10% of employees exhibited a very strong commitment to their jobs.
Compared to your average employee, these guys perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave. These gems are already giving you lots of juice from the lemon!
- Around 15% displayed no commitment to their employer.
They’re actually fully disengaged—and actively opposed to their organisation. Yikes!
This tells us that more than one in ten of the people you pay are likely to be working against you, not for you. These lemons are as dry as. There’s no lemonade here!
- The remainder, a huge 75% of your employees on average, are only moderately committed.
Yes, the great bulk of your employees are simply not making an effort to go ‘beyond the call of duty’. They’re not avoiding doing their job, but they’re not doing any more than they have to either.
So where are your opportunities to squeeze more juice? Lets take a look.
What does the research reveal about your opportunities for extracting more juice?
As well as revealing these startling statistics, the research makes it clear that the 15% of employees who are disengaged are, generally, hard to shift. You might consider them as ‘high hanging fruit’.
The 10% who are strongly committed are already performing at a high level. And like high-performance Formula One race cars, they can still refine and enhance their performance.
However the most fruitful group is often overlooked—the whopping 75% of your team members who are only moderately committed. With this group, mostly because it is so large, big opportunities lie for significant increases in performance! How? Read on…
How Can You Move the Moderately Committed People on Your Payroll to Being Strongly Committed?
Here, there’s some extremely good news for leaders…
Highly committed employees are not spread evenly through organisations. The research shows that instead they tend to occur in clumps. What’s behind this clumping?
The research tells us that, by a long shot, the number one factor behind the clumping of high employee engagement is you, their leader.
As the leader, not only do you hold the key to how committed your team members are to you, the research also tells us that you and your behaviours hold the key to how committed your team members are to their job, and to their team, and to the organisation.
Why is this such good news? Because you are entirely in control of you. You are the person who can get lots more juice from a whopping 75% of the people in your team!
Hold that thought for a minute in order to fully digest it—you are THE person who has most impact on determining whether your team members put in the discretionary effort that makes the difference between failure and success or between mild success and massive success!
What sort of leadership behaviours are we talking about here?
Some of these behaviours might surprise you…
Commitment levels are actually heavily impacted by leadership behaviours that might, at first glance, appear seemingly insignificant. We’re talking about things like their perceptions of how well you:
- Respect them.
- Display realism with your performance expectations.
- Demonstrate honesty and integrity.
- Care about helping them find solutions to problems.
- Defend them as a member of the team.
- Personally care about them.
- Interesting stuff isn’t it? And you hold the key—yeah!
Your Leadership Call to Action
I propose you move into observation mode for the next couple of weeks…
Listen to yourself. Be alert to what you do and what you don’t do. For example, notice when your team member would clearly feel highly respected by you—and when they might not. Be aware of how effectively you support your team members in conversations with others.
In your next bulletin, we’re going to investigate what opportunities you have to increase your team member’s discretionary effort. If you can’t wait until then, email me and we’ll arrange a time for us to talk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Carolyn Stevens has worked with leaders for more than 25-years—hundreds of them.
She’s supported leader after leader (including those who previously struggled to confront the difficult, let alone persuasively deal with the it) flourish—and become confident, courageous and impressively influential.
Carolyn is authentic and results-oriented. She draws on an eclectic array of approaches, tools and techniques to suit the situation.
