What is Leadership Engagement?
Leadership engagement is about having highly engaged leaders and managers at all levels of an organization. Engaged leaders inspire trust and motivate people around them. They connect, empower and grow people. Strong leadership drives employee engagement; a highly engaged workforce drives sustainable innovation and growth.
So how do leaders keep employees engaged? How can we measure an individual leader’s impact on employee engagement? To more precisely define what we mean by employee/leadership engagement, let’s compare the definition of employee “satisfaction” vs. “engagement”.
Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is the extent to which employees are happy or content with their jobs and work environment.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work. Leaders who positively impact employee engagement, go far beyond the more passive effect of employee satisfaction.
While research continues on the leadership factors which impact employee engagement, the preliminary findings provide an important base for measurement.
In an insurance industry study which included factor analysis of the linkage between “leadership 360” results and “employee engagement” measurements, three key themes were discovered:
Leaders with the highest employee engagement scores had 360 feedback results that were high on:
Supports the team Performs effectively Displays Intergrity
in their role
While research continues on the leadership factors which impact employee engagement, the preliminary findings provide an important base for measurement.
In an insurance industry study which included factor analysis of the linkage between “leadership 360” results and “employee engagement” measurements, three key themes were discovered:
Leaders with the highest employee engagement scores had 360 feedback results that were high on:
Supports the teamPerforms effectivelyDisplays Intergrity in their roleCorrelation and regression results showed that “supports the team” was the strongest predictor of engagement; semi-partial correlations showed that all three leadership competencies (supports the team, performs effectively, displays integrity) overlapped in their relationships with engagement. Of these three competencies “supports the team” had the strongest, most unique variance.
While additional research is ongoing, these results demonstrate that there are multiple ways in which leadership behaviors are associated with employee engagement. The primacy of “supports the team” suggests that leader behaviors in this competency should be a priority.
In summary, team-oriented behaviors are the most important for leaders in achieving high employee engagement. The results also indicate that other leadership behaviors including, performing effectively and displaying integrity – facilitate employee engagement.
With more than 30 years of leadership development experience, we have tailored a “Leadership Engagement 360” feedback assessment to help measure and develop strong engagement qualities in leaders at all levels. The questions are designed specifically around the three factors which correlate to leadership engagement.
