The Undisputed Way to Communicate with Your Employees Effectively
Want a solution to your employees’ lack of motivation? It may have to start with you.
The world of leadership needs a humane shift.
Away from fear-based control and towards an approach that values emotional intelligence, growth, purpose, and service to all stakeholders.
In Humane Leadership, you’ll learn how to create an environment where:
Your team feels empowered, respected, and supported to do their best work.
You lead with authenticity and confidence, inspire radical and practical love, and drive exceptional performance.
Are you looking to revolutionize your leadership style and create a workplace culture that attracts top talent, fosters lasting loyalty, and achieves outstanding business success for your organization?
Gallup's extensive employee engagement research that spans several decades found that not having clear goals and expectations is one of the top five reasons employees are disengaged. Worse, why some leave their managers.
It's rather ironic because one of the most consistent ways to inspire and motivate people is to do just that — clarify goals and expectations and keep people abreast of those goals over time.
As we quickly learned during the pandemic, things change — and fast. When they do, good leaders don't leave people in the dark. So, my questions to you are: Do your people consistently know what is really going on? And what is expected of them at work?
Breaking The Cycle
The best solution to make consistent, clear goals and expectations an operational reality is through an often-ignored, old-school technique: one-on-one conversations.
Nothing influences motivation more than the relationship a manager has with their workers. But if the prospect of more communication and more meetings makes you cringe, the role of leadership may not be your cup of tea. Here’s what I mean: Good leaders thrive when they strengthen relationships with their people by spending more time with them, not less.
I know what some of you may be thinking: you’re already going from one remote meeting to another. You’re all over your Slack or Microsoft Teams channels, emailing and texting…isn’t that why we’re using technology – to avoid more meetings? Furthermore, you may be saying I don’t have the time to add more meetings to my schedule – I have ten employees reporting to me!
These are valid complaints. We don’t want to add unnecessary meetings to our schedule. That said, here’s a quick lesson that will hopefully stick with you today.
Your lesson
Leadership is about engaging people on an emotional and intellectual level.
Read that again. 👆
Making this work for you takes the human-to-human component that text-based technology cannot replicate.
According to neuroscience, even video interactions don’t measure up to being face-to-face in a room together. That may not be possible anymore if you’re 100 percent remote. However, please know that humans are wired in their genetic code for connection in ways that virtual environments cannot fully replicate. Studies in neuroscience all say that the physiological response in the brain is simply not the same as it would be face-to-face.
The one-on-one meeting
This brings us back to the one-on-one meeting. Spending quality one-on-one time with your direct reports is not that hard, and the good news is that they actually become time savers. However, you need to know how to structure them so that they work to your advantage. For the rest of this article, I will offer you five crucial steps to have effective one-on-ones in a way that will get the best engagement out of your people.