Engagement - Engaging Managers

Is this how you manage employees already? Is this how you would like to be managed yourself? So often in organisations, we copy the style of our own manager, often unconsciously and unintentionally. If we don’t find our manager engaging, we need to work especially consciously on ensuring we are, and we might need to invite 360’ feedback from the people we manage, and our peers to check out how we are doing?

Growing your team

It can be hard getting to know a new team, or building a team from scratch. But it’s worth taking time to find out about the individuals who make up your team. What motivates them? Whom do they trust to tell them the truth about what’s happening in the organisation?

One way of getting to know the individual members in your team and developing them at the same time is to have regular team discussions about specific topics. It’s a way of finding out what they value, what they have in common, where they need to develop, and helping them grow as a team that supports one another and learns together.

Here are some ideas of topics you may want to choose for occasional topics at a team meeting.  

It’s always worth thinking about team dynamics, and the fact that every time someone new joins the team, Bruce Tuckman’s model of forming, storming, norming and performing starts again. The team needs to recognise it is new, and agree its values and behaviours. You mustn’t rely on a new member just picking these up, information you want them to know, and how you like things to run, imply by osmosis. You need to be pro-active in giving the new team member a great induction to the team, where they fit into the organisation, and their work.

Disengaging your team!

You may have been fortunate to have only ever worked for inspiring managers. Not everyone has, and it’s worth thinking about what really annoyed and disengaged you, and checking you aren’t doing that too, for example:

• making promises, but never keeping them – that weekly 1:1 chat; mentioning that great piece of work you did to the boss’s boss
• keeping all the interesting work themselves and not giving you meaningful, interesting and stretching work, so you are developing
• failing to give you regular specific and constructive feedback on your work
• not running meetings to time, or with an agenda, or a clear set of action points at the end, so everyone knows what has been decided and who is doing what
• not including everyone in the team, and valuing only people they like, or who are like them
• looking down on ‘junior grades’ and not valuing their input
• never listening to your ideas
• looking out for their work/life balance, but not yours
• turning a blind eye to bullying and harassment rather than making it clear it is not tolerated and tackling it if it arises