If your leadership team has ever pondered just how much better sales revenues and profit would be if only your people could be encouraged to really perform, the respected 2012 Towers Watson Global Workforce Study has the answers. It found that organizations with:

• Low employee engagement, had average margins of 10%
• High traditional engagement, had average margins of 14%
• ‘Sustainable engagement’, had average margins of 27%

When explaining sustainable engagement, the report concluded:

“Many employers are pursuing a variety of wellness efforts, typically focused on giving incentives to people who embrace healthy behaviors like exercise, good diet or effective management of a chronic illness. These are important, but to sustain energy, employers have to go beyond these core programs and embrace the notion of an energized workplace on a far broader plane.”

Here we look at how to energize employees.

Energize employees by energizing mindset and attitude

Having a high emotional intelligence is the key to unlocking self-performance. Providing employees with the tools and techniques to greater self-awareness through emotional intelligence will help to create an organizational culture that encourages innovation, improvement, leadership collaboration and greater productivity.

When you put in place strategies to energize employees, you move toward the sustainable engagement that soon becomes an integral part of your organizational culture. This is one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today.

Don’t confuse energy for energizing

Too often we see energetic leaders being mistaken for energizing leaders. Many good managers are energetic. They work hard, contribute more hours than others, and become involved with committee after committee.

Energizing leaders are different. They pass on responsibility to their employees. They let people know that their contribution makes a real difference. How a leader interacts with employees is what creates energy.

What do energizing leaders do?

When studying successful organizations and how they are managed, we see five traits of energizing leaders that directly impacts sustainable engagement. Energizing leaders:

• Focus on opportunities rather than problems and constraints
• Discuss and consider suggestions, even if they disagree with them
• Create a flow of information and experience
• Are flexible about the road taken to achieve goals
• Remain true to their values and beliefs

Create your energizing leaders

Leaders that are able to engage and energize their people will create a new environment. This will promote the culture to produce the sustainable engagement that is an aim of forward looking business strategy today. Energizing leaders are rarely born, but commonly created.

It is important to analyze the effects of current leadership styles and then diagnose those effects. Most leaders are surprised when these results are evidenced, realizing the techniques they have been employing are micromanaging rather than leading. This leads to greater self-awareness and review of how to use their own expertise and experience more productively.

Leaders that ask themselves key questions like the following will be taking the first steps to becoming energizing leaders:

• Are your solution-finding strategies destroying the energy of others?
• Do you listen to others’ points-of-view, or do you impose your will?
• When there is conflict, do you focus on the individuals or the issue?
• When was the last time you chose to share your experience to help others find their own solutions?

Contact Primeast today to discuss our Management Development Series, including our Energy Leadership Program that will provide your leaders with the secret of how to energize employees and create a culture of sustainable engagement.