“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” ~ Peter Drucker

Ensuring employees are actively engaged in the success of an organization is a challenge all leaders face on a continuing basis. I’ve observed that employees fall into one of the following categories:

1. Actively engaged in organizational success; puts team success over personal gain

2. High achievers who put out best effort every day but are more interested in their own performance and career path than on team success

3. Solid performers who do their job competently but are not interested in anything else.

4. Poor performers who do the bare minimum, are self-serving, have low emotional intelligence and may actively work towards sabotaging team efforts overtly or covertly.

Building employee engagement can be a slow process and like most relationships must be built on trust. In their book Strength-Based Leadership, authors Rath and Conchie describe a study done by the Gallup organization. It was a study of what makes people follow a leader. In a nutshell their conclusion was that leaders must provide hope, stability, trust and compassion to have followers.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s human nature to want to be appreciated, respected and cared about. Building employee engagement is all about building trust and showing respect, remembering that respect is something that can’t be faked. If you look down on someone and don’t believe them to be your equal or deserving of your respect, they will know by your conscious and unconscious behavior. So take a look at your own values, assumptions, thoughts, and behavior as an important first step in building employee engagement.