By Michael Kanazawa

This post is based on a question by a reader looking for specific recommendations on how to inspire and engage people for maximum performance. The question is worded quite well because inspiration and engagement are more linked that people think.

All of the following tips are based on the principle that if employees are truly engaged in the business they will be inspired to drive for excellence. So, how does engagement happen? Here are five specific tips that you can implement immediately.

#1: Create a vision that is a “cause”

Many people work at places where they feel like the business only exists to make the owners rich and to create paychecks for employees as a fair exchange for hours worked. If that is the state of existence, you need to generate a motivating vision. Every day people should feel like they are advancing he cause, not coming in to punch a time-clock to earn their pay. As an example, Southwest Airlines makes business travel fun and Starbucks makes a cup of coffee an indulgence during a busy day. Notice that these share the idea that the business exists to make life better for customers. It is no coincidence that the employees at these two companies are typically energetic and pay attention to doing a quality job. If you don’t have a customer-focused vision that serves as a motivating cause, work with your team to develop it. Hold a working session and ask the question, “If the media were to write a story about us five years from now taking about something great that we’ve accomplished as a business, what would the story say?” Let each person write their own title and first paragraph to the story on their own and then everyone can discuss their responses. Look for the similarities across responses and discuss any significant differences. Take all of the input and work with a small team to generate a simple customer-driven vision based on that input. 

#2: Connect personal passion to the cause

Once a clear cause exists for the business it is important to specifically hire for people who share a personal passion for the same cause. Find people who have both the right basic job skills, but also will personally enjoy their work. If you need customer facing employees who care for your customers, make sure the people you hire are extroverts (derive energy from being with people) and see work as a way to meet and interact with a lot of new people every day. If you are hiring a technology support person, make sure they truly enjoy problem solving. Get to know each person on your team personally is necessary to understand their unique passions to figure out how they can best be leveraged at work. If you have people on your team who don’t appreciate the vision and can’t be placed in a job where they have passion, they should be replaced. Just one low-energy, cynical employee can bring down large teams. 

#3: Ask questions first, like “What would you do?”

Having an impassioned team of people working towards a common vision will generate lots of suggestions for improvement. It takes a lot of work to get to this point so treat each suggestion as a real opportunity. Too often, enthusiastic employees with new ideas are accidentally shut down by managers who respond with indifference. Responses that shut things down include the common, “oh yeah, we thought about that one before, not sure it will work, or ok hmmm, we’ll need to think about that.” Instead, treat each idea, especially the first ones somebody raises to you as valuable tips. Ask, “tell me more about how you think that would work,” or “what would you do about that.”

#4: Actively maintain engagement to drive inspiration

Keeping people engaged in the business does not happen through a one-time meeting or off-site work session. It actually requires ongoing effort. A good way to maintain engagement is to have regularly planned meetings, pre-scheduled throughout the year, to review the vision/strategy, take stock on how much progress is being made, generate new ideas, and plan for the next performance period. At every monthly management meeting you can identify a specific period of time where the group will think about business improvement ideas. You can introduce a specific business challenge, let the team brainstorm and prioritize solutions, pick one action to try across the team, and measure the results. Allowing people to get creative and have a true impact on the business is one of the most inspirational activities you can engage your team in doing.

#5: You can’t want it more than they do

If you have to coax people too much to engage in the business and you are seeding all of the new ideas, you need to back off. It often takes employees a bit of time of the boss being quiet to start discussing their ideas. If you have taken on the first four Power Tips well, then you just need to have the strength to ask questions and wait for responses, even if there are a few silent pauses. For many employees the quiet time is required to have time to think of good ideas. Be patient.

These Power Tips are all very typical coaching tips that come up in our consulting with start-ups all the way through CEOs and executives at Fortune 500 global corporations. You can apply these ideas at a company level, department or office level. The principles are the same. Let me know how these work for you.

For more information on this article contact the author:
Michael Kanazawa
mkanazawa@disseropartners.com
And, stay tuned for informaiton on Mike’s upcoming book BIG Ideas to BIG Results, Financial Times Press to be launched in February 2008

Picture credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thepretenda/77126807/

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Tips, Engagement, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.