It is the role of the manager to keep information and dialogue about engagement active over the course of the year. To build a highly engaged team, the quality of managers that an organisation puts in front of their people is important.
Managers forget what it was like to be an employee and the qualities important for managers to have. Also, managers need to maintain strong relationships with the people they manage.
Employees will tolerate a lot from a great manager. But employees are very quick to leave a manager. The manager is the way in which all broader initiatives are translated and filtered and make sense to individual employees.
My description of a bad manager is, 'Be good, but don't be better than me.'
Most companies have become very good at measuring the engagement levels of the workforce. However, they do not take the next step to discover ways to build these engagement levels.
One mistake is that managers practice position-ship rather than leadership. They focus on constituency, the people they need the most and depend on, only caring about how they are viewed by the leaders above them, thereby following position-ship.
The manager sets a tone for that work group. The average-to-mediocre manager can set a very destructive tone, too.
A great manager is someone who says, 'You come to work with me, and I'll help you be as successful as possible; I'll help you grow. I'll help you make sure you're in the right role; I'll provide the relationship for you to understand and know yourself. And I want you to be more successful than me.'
Negativity is like a blood clot, and actively disengaged employees sometimes clot together in groups that support and reinforce their beliefs.
