Only 35% of U.S. Managers are Engaged
Disengaged leaders lead disengaged teams.
Only 35% of U.S. managers are engaged in their jobs. Is it any wonder that only 30% of the workforce is engaged.* Worse yet, engagement levels go down the longer you stay with the same organization.**
Connection, not distance, increases engagement.
Engaged leaders are more likely to lead engaged teams. Charlene Li’s new book, “The Engaged Leader,” offers practical strategies for leadership success through digital engagement.
Engage with others, if you expect them to engage for you.
Listen at scale
You may not be comfortable creating content for digital platforms, but leverage them to listen.
Listening is essential to connection. Connection enriches influence.
“The Engaged Leader,” explains how to hear what people are really saying about you and your organization.
Share to Shape
“When leaders share, they engage and attract followers.” Charlene Li
Sharing creates confidence – confidence ignites boldness. Share what you think so others will know what to do.
Li’s suggestions for sharing through digital channels:
- Share with, don’t talk at.
- Share frequently. When it comes to sharing information, more is better.
- Share informally, more than formally. Formality blocks connection.
- Share imperfectly, rather than polished. Polished communications feel staged and contrived. Perfection hinders connection.
*Adapted from, “The Engaged Leader.”
Great decisions are preceded by great conversations. “The Engaged Leader,” explains how to enter and shape digital conversations.
Engage to transform
Distance between leaders and team members increases fear and hinders influence. But, digital channels enable leaders to narrow the perceived gap and connect.
Positive transformation requires powerful connection.
“With digital and social tools, hierarchy and the chain of command disappear and the rules of engagement become less formal…” The Engaged Leader
How might traditional leaders migrate toward digital leadership?
Bonus:
“You start talking about the day they leave the day they start.” Charlene Li
Charlene in her own words (2:02 ):
I had people around me who focused on my weaknesses.
Charlene in her own words (1:28):
(Poor quality is in the recording not the playback.)
*Only 35% of U.S. Managers are Engaged in Their Jobs
**Companies are Maximizing Only 5% of Their Workforces
Dan, are you sure it is 35% and not closer to 20%?
Thanks Bob. 🙂 … I’m going with Gallup on this one. But, I’m sure it depends on the organization.
Dan, I went through the report and cannot find where they described how they determined that 35% are unengaged. Managers who say they are engaged may or may not, in fact, be engaged.
Bob – April 2 News Release:
Only 35% of U.S. Managers Are Engaged in Their Jobs
by Amy Adkins (Gallup) –
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/182228/managers-engaged-jobs.aspx
Story Highlights
51% of managers are not engaged; 14% are actively disengaged
Disengaged managers create disengaged employees
Only 30% of U.S. workers are engaged
Managers have the greatest impact on employee engagement, which makes this finding very worrisome: A strikingly low percentage — just 35% — of U.S. managers are themselves engaged, while 51% are not engaged and 14% are actively disengaged.
By Gallup’s estimates, the “not engaged” group costs the U.S. $77 billion to $96 billion annually through their impact on those they manage. And when we factor in the impact of the “actively disengaged” group, those figures jump to $319 billion to $398 billion annually.
Gallup’s latest report, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, provides an in-depth look at how great managers inspire employees to become engaged — and examines the impact of engagement on vital business outcomes, such as profitability and productivity.
The Cascade Effect
Day in and day out, managers are tasked with engaging employees, but 51% of managers have essentially “checked out,” meaning they care little, if at all, about their job and company. And that attitude has dire consequences. A manager’s engagement — or lack thereof — affects his or her employees’ engagement, creating what Gallup calls the “cascade effect.” Essentially, employees’ engagement is directly influenced by their managers’ engagement — whose engagement is directly influenced by their managers’ engagement.
Gallup has studied engagement data from 190 diverse industries and has found that managers who are directly supervised by highly engaged leadership teams are 39% more likely to be engaged than managers who are supervised by actively disengaged leadership teams. And the link between engaged managers and engaged employees is even more powerful. Employees who are supervised by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by actively disengaged managers.
(it continues with graphs and other information…)
Dan, read Page 10 of the report, especially the last paragraph. I’d post it here but I think they don’t want readers to copy and paste.
I’ll stick with my 80%.
Thanks Bob. I’m loving this.
I think the worst part of that is not the “un-engaged managers” part but the “actively dis-engaged” ones that comprised about 1 in 7 managers, which showed up in the Gallup data. All those managers who simply don’t give a crap just might make things much worse for the employees who DO care.
It’s hard to care for customers if you don’t think the boss cares for you.
And it is hard to care for a company if your manager doesn’t give a rip.
Nuts. And companies seem to simply choose to develop these cultures. It is poor leadership and poor management and a focus on profits over everything else. They spend money on systems so that they do not have to train people. As we do more and more with AI, you can expect this to become a greater problem…
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Thanks Dr. Scott. “It’s hard to care for customers if you don’t think the boss cares for you.” KaPow!
Good ol’ ““People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” seems to be an appropriate point of reference.
Thanks WP… YUP!
By “digital and social tools,” does Charlene Li mean using electronics – and other “third” channels/networks to communicate with employees/staff? That’s fine if the managers use face-to-face connections first, and regularly more often than digital and related tools. And, THAT’S fine if the managers are really ENGAGED with that employee/staff member during the physical communication. And, not thinking and looking at other things.
Thanks Painting. Yes Charlene’s focus is on digital platforms. Thanks for jumping in.
It’s funny, but managers have MORE connections with remote workers than people in their own workspaces. Go figure…
I firmly believe the single thing that an organization could do that would have the greatest impact on engagement would be to stop using the term leadership to refer to management. The idea that only managers can be leaders puts unrealistic expectations on managers. And recognizing the two as unique and distinct concepts helps managers develop as managers and helps everyone develop as leaders.
Thanks Cybuhr. I run fast and lose with the term “leader.” But, as you indicate, there is a huge difference between the functions of leadership and the functions of management. Good call.
Cy and Dan – But Leadership says “lead” and to lead involves at least some level of engagement, alignment and interaction. Some vision of the future and all that stuff…
Too many “managers” simply manage the numbers and you hear from them only when not meeting the production goals. They are not leading but simply operating — and in the no news is good news framework.
I would much prefer that supervisors be co-labeled leaders and engagers and supporters and all those other “people things” rather than number arrangers, like we see so often and that the data keeps hammering on.
Yeah, there ARE differences in leadership and management, but it is the managing that is creating a lot of the issues around themes of engagement and innovation.
Heck, with some of the new hardware out there, you can measure and manage keystrokes per hour, movement time away from the terminal, time and number of words spoken to customers and all that other metric stuff. Those devices for tracking are pretty scary, actually. Who wants to be completely accountable to a computer every working minute of every working day?
(Hard to measure / manage “thinking time” and similar.)
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Cybuhr, I’m in total agreement with you. Not everyone in leadership (as it’s called now) is a leader. That has always been bothersome to me as well. Leadership is something we in management positions should strive for, and it’s an art more than a science. Those who report to us will decide whether we are actually leaders.
So true, if the leader isn’t involved why would employees want to be. good lesson for all business owners.
Weaknesses/Non Talent vs Strengths/Talents
“What are your children’s gifts?” If we want to encourage growth or change that is sustainable, the deficit model needs to be off the table like it is in this example. It is about resources we can draw on, and what change we can affect in our practice or in an organization to achieve a desired outcome.
Instead of a SWOT Analysis, a SOOT Analysis would empower us with a challenge to overcome an Obstacle instead of a Weakness. That is a minor disruption – maybe a major disruption is in order.
I would be curious the leader’s perception of being engaged vs. the team member’s perception of their leader’s engagement. I have a feeling it would be significantly different. Often those in leadership positions who lack fundamental effective leadership skills have a skewed perception of their contributions.
I would be interested to know what Charlene Li says to organisations which espouse the “need to know” principle as their model for sharing communication, with everything strictly regulated in silos and hierarchy.
I have recently been party to a prolonged period where the organisational communication scheme has been to send out an email saying: “we are not allowed to tell you anything, even if there is anything to tell you, which we can neither confirm nor deny.” once every month or so. Any facts have been kept dead secret at the highest possible level, and I’m sure you can guess the result.
The rumour mill filled the volume for those that were interested, for many of those that were not interested, apathy took over. Trying to keep focus was almost impossible.
Literally all I could do was say “I know no more than you do, so let’s keep going forward”. Understandably, some were not inspired to go forward into the dark…
You are going about this analysis in the wrong way – because the entire premise is faulty. Gallup’s 2013 study on the global worker revealed that only 13% of the workforce is engaged (only 6% in Asia), in fact 23% is actively disengaged. You can lead til you are blue in the face, but without real structural changes this will not change for the following simple reasons, the work day is too long, the work organization is out of sync with physical capacities, and the worker is devalued to begin with as wages remained stagnant, while the economy expanded dramatically (CEOs compensation increased to 500 times the median worker wage from 1980, a time when the average CEO income had been only 30 times that of the median worker wage).
You have a highly developed workforce, who wants to be engaged, but in order to do so, need to utilize their creative capacities and analytic capacities. These work participating individuals are essentially trapped in a outdated work organization structure, the 8 hour day. A structure that came into existence in the 30s, before cars, before computers, before women in the workforce, before universal education.
Literally the 8 hour day was an improvement on 16 hour-day labor exploitation strategies in the early 1900s, in a time when the battle was against child labor, for child education, for better labor conditions and wages, for women’s rights, against racial discrimination, etc. culminating in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
A multitude of studies prevail that show employees’ productivity plummets when working too many hours and too many days. “The simple reality is that work, both mental and physical, results in fatigue that limits the cognitive and bodily resources people have to put towards their work,” said Ken Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute think tank (Sullivan, January 26, 2015, cnbc.com). Studies link job stress to depression (www.cdc.gov). Indeed, depression has become the major concern for organizations as the cause of disability, absenteeism, presenteeism, and productivity loss among workers, causing 200 million lost workdays each year and at a cost to employers of $17 to $44 billion.
Why? Because these outdated workstructures are making people sick. In The Bright Side of Blue, and in their article on the Evolutionary Roots of Depression, Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thompson take a very different approach to depression from our current ideas. They look at function.
Thinking up solutions to problems requires a lot of concentration. Neurons in the VLPFC (ventrolateral prefontal cortex) region of the brain have to fire non-stop for a person to avoid getting distracted. This demands a lot of energy and breaks down the neurons. Studies have shown that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying these neurons with the fuel they need and prevents them from breaking down. The body responds with depression, in effect, shutting down functions to save energy.
According to what we now know about productivity, it is not about how long you work, but how well you focus during work. The brain and body functions optimally with 90 to 120 minute productivity sessions and 20 to 30 minute breaks between to recharge. This is in tune with the ultradian rhythm throughout a 24-hour circadian day. Even the different stages of sleep run in 90 to 120 minute sleep cycles. The highest performing workers were found to work 52 consecutive minutes followed by 17-minute breaks, according to DeskTime, a productivity app.
70% low morale among workers is pretty conclusive. Unhappy employees outnumber happy ones by two to one worldwide. The way we work – does not work.
Last year was the 100-year mark of the year when Henry Ford shocked the world by reducing the standard workday to eight hours and doubling his workers’ pay in 1914. Ford’s profit margins doubled in two years and his company flourished. He was the first employer to recognize the value of workers’ productivity, and the value of his workers not only as horsepower in an industrial manufacturing factory, but as consumers, and even more, people.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, the celebrated British economist, predicted that technology in the developed would be advanced enough at the turn of the century for us to achieve a 15-hour work week. Technologically this is possible.
We are now in 2015!
So what is going on? Some really outdated domination economics and management control philosophies that serves no-one, least of all our joint economic enterprise.
The kind of progress we live, demands real adaptation. Look at http://theenergyproject.com/key-ideas, look at http://www.neweconomics.org.
Let’s open our minds and move forward as we are meant to. Human beings are driven to progress. It’s in our DNA. This highly developed individual of today, is ready, poised, and depressed, because they are not allowed to progress.
Thanks for hearing me out:)
Charlotte Lansinger (Industrial Sociologist)
Hello Charlotte, excellent comments, thanks.
My VP at HQ did a pilot study for a police department in a Texas city. After testing 8 patrol officers he briefed the group of senior officers on how each tested patrol officer would react when stressed. The senior officers found the briefing quite interesting. When my VP said that Officer John should not be assigned to SWAT because, “he won’t listen and is too emotional,” the Chief laughed like hell and said, “That is exactly why we had to remove him from our SWAT team.”
We know that job success depends on competence, culture, and job talent but most employers ignore job talent.
Leaders who approach their work with a sense of joy of learning inspire others to follow their lead. When people feel valued for their contributions, the workplace becomes both more pleasant and more productive.