Employee Engagement And Productivity Fall on The Three Responsibilities Of The Leader

The Responsibilities Of A Leader

So often when I have worked with small business owners and leaders, I am told that they cannot figure out how to get their employees to do what is needed in their roles. These are typically the same businesses where the leaders are all working far below their positions, and the lower-tiered employees do not seem to have any desire to accomplish more; at first glance, anyway. The leaders grow resentful toward the employees and have no idea that the employees themselves are already frustrated with their leadership team. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry, you are not alone, and there is a very simple solution to fixing your employees’ engagement and productivity.

The first thing I tell leaders going through this is that employee engagement and productivity failures are most likely the leaders’ fault. Yeah, I get a lot of sour looks on the faces staring back at me at first. What most leaders fail to recognize is that there are three main responsibilities of every leader. Typical managers were never taught this before being promoted; they were just really good at being an employee, and ‘Presto’ was given the duty of leading a team overnight. The assumption was that this employee-turned-leader would just develop how to lead without being given any of the tools necessary, but that seldom works as well as hoped for.

The three main responsibilities of a leader are the building blocks of increasing employee productivity while allowing leaders to work at their true potential instead of doing lower-tier responsibilities. What are these three key ingredients that were missing? Having an agreed path for the employee’s success, understanding what motivates them, and knowing what obstacles they are facing that slow them down.

As soon as I make my way to a new business to help, I ask the leaders to rank their employees and tell me who their top performers are and who are not. With the employees not performing well, I ask the leaders what the employee needs to do in order to be top performers. Most often, the leaders have a giant list that they can recall while telling me what the employee is doing wrong. I will take one or two of these items and ask the leader what path they have agreed with the employee on, and ways to achieve success in this area. This is typically when I get a lot of blank stares back at me.

In one company, the leader told me that the employee, Paul, had no initiative; after being the best employee for years, Paul now just does the bare minimum required. I asked the leader when the last time they spoke to Paul about this and got Paul’s commitment to what that looked like for success; you can probably guess that I got another blank stare. The three of us met later that day, and I asked Paul if they were successful in their position. Paul told me that he was average but wanted to be better. I asked Paul how he could add more value in his role, and he quickly gave a list of ideas, one such being that he wanted more responsibilities. I asked Paul to tell me things that he could do without much training from his leader going forward, and again, Paul had a giant list that he had been thinking about for years. The leader jumped into the conversation quickly and said that it would take off a lot of time on their plate, but why has Paul never said this before or done it? The answer might astonish you if you have even been in this position before. Paul looked at him and said, “You never asked me to, and I didn’t want to step on your toes.” At that minute, we began making a plan to utilize the leader’s worst employee to be the one who added the most amount of value to the leader. If we don’t have a path for our employees that the employee agrees with, how can we ever say that they aren’t working the way we have instructed them to, and gain the best productivity from them?

This brings us to the second responsibility of a leader: understanding what motivates our employees. Going back to that initial meeting I had with leaders, while they list off their top producers to their least producers, the next question I ask is what motivates each of their employees. If they can’t answer that question, I will ask when the employee is at their happiest and most engaged. The leaders will typically be able to tell me what motivates the top producers, but not the employees they are struggling with. Simple answer: You can’t inspire an employee if you don’t know what motivates them.

At a company in Wisconsin, I was at, one such employee’s name came up was Ashley. Ashley was a decent employee, but the manager didn’t know how to motivate them. As you can probably guess, the three of us met, and quickly into the conversation, I asked Ashley what motivates her. She was hesitant at first and said she loved her job, but then she said, “My job would be so much better if, a few times a week, I could talk to other people in the company. I’m stuck in a small office away from everyone and feel alone.” The manager jumped into the conversation and asked if Ashley would like to take on a few new responsibilities, such as passing out daily work packets to other employees, which takes the manager twenty minutes a day to accomplish. Ashley said she would love to, and that would get her excited to finish her other work so that she can do that afterwards. Ashley is motivated by personal interactions, which she was not getting; now, she is excited to do something that also frees up time from the manager. How can you inspire an employee when you don’t know what motivates them? Some of your employees are motivated by a simple ‘high-five’ or a ‘thank you,’ while others are motivated by public speaking or a change in work tasks.

The third responsibility of a leader is knowing what obstacles are in their employees’ way. Do you know what is causing them the most stress? Do you know what slows them down? Do you know what makes them not want to pull up into the parking lot to start their shift? If not, and you probably don’t, ask them! In one company in Dallas, when we asked an employee what their biggest obstacle was, they humbly told us that they couldn’t read English, only Spanish. The employee has been with this company for five years and couldn’t read the daily production orders that he was given because it wasn’t in his needed language. We instantly translated all of the forms and got the employee what he needed to be successful. He almost doubled his production overnight with this change. How were we leading this employee before, if we failed to ask what the employee needed help be led through?

The three main responsibilities of a leader will help even your least engaged and productive employees become value-added employees. As your employee engagement and productivity increase, you will quickly find yourself not doing lower-tiered work assignments because there will be a path you create with your employees to do those tasks. They will even be happier doing those tasks because you have invested time into motivating and leading them through their obstacles. Employee engagement and productivity fall on us as the leaders to step up, not on our employees, who count on us to lead them.