Employee Engagement and Leader Approachability: New Gallup Research

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Subject: Employee Engagement and Leader Approachability: New Gallup Research

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New Gallup research proves the relationship between leader approachability and employee engagement.

If you want to improve engagement there is really only one place to look – your supervisors. Gallup’s most recent report, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, found that:

“Managers account for up to 70% of variance in engagement.”

And there’s the rub.

As leaders, we constantly struggle to keep employees engaged. It’s the most important, and most challenging, part of our job. You can have a perfect market, a high quality product, solid economics and wide distribution all nailed down. But if our employees don’t care, none of it matters.

Everyone knows this. That’s why “employee engagement” is such a hot topic in business today. And we as leaders know we are mostly responsible for that engagement. But we still struggle. In fact, Gallup estimates that only 29% of the American workforce is actually engaged.

This can mean only one thing: as leaders we are failing our people.

Research on leader approachability is still in the early stages. We are one of the pioneers (check out our white paper here). That’s why it’s so exciting when we see others finding the same results we’ve found. Again, from Gallup:

Among employees who strongly agree that they can approach their manager with any type of question, 54% are engaged. When employees strongly disagree, only 2% are engaged, while 65% are actively disengaged.

That’s an amazing finding. Check out this chart from the research:

Robin Camarote, author of Own It: Drive Your Career to a Place of Happiness and Success, is also a believer in approachability. Her recent Inc. article cites Gallup’s research and provides her own “6 Tricks to Being More Approachable.” Here they are:

Make the first move. You can’t wait for employees to come to you. As I explain in The Approachability Playbook: 3 Essential Habits for Thriving Leaders and Teams, people in low power positions often fear approaching someone in a high power position. You have to initiate. Why? Because of power-distance (check out our article here on how power-distance killed Nokia) Where do you start? A great place to start is with our three questions (see number 6 below). In addition to work-related topics, ask your coworkers about their families, hobbies and what is exciting them outside of work.
Listen carefully. Engage in active listening. This means listening with a purpose to summarize back what you’ve heard. If you do this you are more likely to ask clarifying questions and to behave in a way that shows you are really listening (because you are!) Don’t try to figure out what you’re going to say next – try to keep them talking as long as you can...

Click here to read the full article on our blog.

Check out our new book!

The Approachability Playbook: 3 Essential Habits for

Thriving Leaders and Teams