If you multiply this technique by hundreds of employees, you end up with one of the most effective and reliable economic levers available to you.

The question is where do you begin? What are the key levers to realising this discretionary effort and driving employee engagement? Joe Folkman’s whitepaper, Top 9 Leadership Behaviours that Drive Employee Commitment, highlights 9 leadership behaviours that, when done well, have a direct impact. Some of these behaviours, such as building trust or supporting others, might sound easy, but they are in fact often overlooked.

I recommend taking the time to read and discuss these 9 critical behaviours, either individually or collectively as a leadership team.  Identify individual or team behaviours that may need attention. These behaviours will not only be costing your organisation, but diluting the efforts of you as an individual and of your leadership team.

Secondly, it is extremely important that you highlight the behaviours you are already doing well, and think about how you can apply this approach to strengthen your leadership even further. In other words, if you do more of what is working, the commitment of your staff will continue to grow.

This whitepaper highlights some practical, easy to achieve actions and logical first steps that cost nothing other than paying more conscious attention to your leadership and how it is experienced by your staff.

As a leader, everything you do, no matter how small, has an impact that can be negative or positive.  Look closely and you may well find that just a couple of small changes to your leadership behaviour have a large impact on your employees’ performance and productivity within a very short time.

Read Joe Folkman’s whitepaper, Top 9 Leadership Behaviours that Drive Employee Engagement, here.  Zenger Folkman are strategic partners of Natural Direction Ltd. 

For more information on Natural Direction’s Extraordinary Leaders programme, contact Martin Coburn on 0844 415 0937 or email info@naturaldirection.co.uk.

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Time spent in meetings can be costly if not used well.

The cost of the time for those who are attending; the opportunity cost – what you could be doing were you not wasting your time in a poorly designed and run meeting; the cost to the team, project, organisation and relationships for lack of progress, loss of ideas and withdrawal from future meetings. Add frustration to the menu and the need to invest more time in the design and facilitation of meetings becomes more than apparent!

We provide expertise in providing design and delivery of meetings/events to achieve your business outcomes.

Examples of where we can help

• Keeping leaders actively involved in focused dialogue and guiding the team to a making a decision.
• Ensuring there is open and honest dialogue
• Where YOU need to participate fully rather than concern yourself with the people and the process
• A large group where you need to get the most of everyone
• Where there are complex strategic issues to consider or problems to be solved
• Time for the team to review and take stock of progress and challenges
• A new project launch or development phase

Our promise to you - a meeting that results in decisions that are supported with a clear plan of action.

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It’s our responsibility to ourselves and to those around us to grab all the opportunities the universe presents to us. There’s something inside all of us – an inner voice that recognises opportunities and makes us think, “I should be doing that”, “I’d be great at that” or “I’d love to do that”.  However, more often than not there’s a counter voice that tells us, “I can’t do that’”. “I can’t do that because I’m doing something else”, or “because I might not be good enough”.

When you begin embrace the opportunities presented to you, the universe will present you with more and more.  This will give you the energy to do what you should be doing.  You’ll want more, you’ll feel excited and you’ll create momentum in your life.

The sad truth is that so many people do not honour this calling or embrace these opportunities. They don’t have the fundamental belief that we were put on this earth to do something well, rather than to do something poorly. We were put here to do something that we enjoy, to have a great time and to give value to those around us. By not engaging in opportunities, our skills and motivation will, bit by bit, die off inside. Our spark, the light inside of us and that uniqueness that no-one else has will start to fade. When this happens you live a life less than satisfactory than it could have been, and it’s a shame – life can work for you if you let it, and our choices can become self-fulfilling.  It can be easy to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t have done it, or we shouldn’t have taken the risk – after all, nothing came of it, so why bother? But if we don’t take the risk and or take up these opportunities with energy and passion then we lose our chance. We need to wait for the next one to come along, and sure enough, after giving away a few they become less and less frequent, and soon the universe stops providing altogether. We need to tackle opportunities head on with energy, enthusiasm, action and drive! We need to honour our calling.

Try to imagine a world where more people are doing what they really enjoy and what they genuinely want to do. Think about the feelings of satisfaction and pride, and the passion and energy that we feel when we are achieving. Not only will you lead a more fulfilled life, but those around you will benefit from it too.

Let’s rise to the challenge! The challenge is for each and every one of us to embrace the opportunities presented to us for the sake of ourselves and those around us, who will benefit from us being focussed, successful and playing to our strengths. Follow your calling and be true to yourself and others in everything that you can.

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It’s simple – identify what you’re great at and play to those strengths.  We are born to naturally excel in certain areas and we are all good at something.  We just need to identify these natural strengths and then showcase our talent.  Often we will hear people being acclaimed.  This acclamation usually highlights what they are doing well: “You did a fantastic job on that report, you have such a talent to present the key information with clarity and depth” or “Excellent presentation, you are a natural at engaging the audience” and such like.  It’s all about being able to demonstrate and highlight your strengths – the tangible things that you are good at.

The accolades, recognition and praise comes from those areas makes you stand apart from the others.  Traditionally, we focus on delivering in all areas and often try to excel at everything.  Imagine if you adopted a different approach – consider focussing on some key strengths and use these to catapult your profile by demonstrating what you can do better than others.

In the coming weeks, start thinking about what you’re good at.  Where do you really add value and what makes you stand out? How do you feel when you do these things and how does this impact on those around you? It will become clear to you that identifying, focussing and continually improving in these key areas will do wonders for your profile.  Not only will those around you see what you are truly talented at and where your strengths lie, but you’ll feel great! You will be motivated, empowered and feel as though you have so much to give.  By enjoying and engaging in what you do, you add more value to those around you, making you feel stronger.  Raising your profile by demonstrating the value you add can only be a positive – after all, it’s your responsibility to share your natural talents.  Identify them, work on them and excel in them!

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By aiming to please others or by constantly doing them favours, feeling obliged and not wanting to let them down, you can put yourself in a position where you feel under pressure.  In the situations where you feel unsatisfied or disengaged, you are not truly able to add value to those around you. So when you find yourself in this position, it’s likely you’re not playing to your strengths, performing at your best or delivering all that you can.  Constantly doing favours for other people can become difficult for you or take longer than you would like, and you’ll end up delivering at a lower standard than you usually pride yourself, eventually causing you to become disillusioned.

Think about what you could deliver if you were leading from a position of strength. What would happen if you allowed yourself to spend more time using your natural talents and abilities or always delivered at your optimum? The mistake we often make is trying to deliver in all aspects of our work and personal life because we assume that’s what’s expected of us, and don’t like to admit that we’re not skilled in all areas of our work. If we can recognise where we add value, and then focus on the areas where we possess talent or feel passionate about, we can please ourselves while adding value to those around us. The feeling you get from successfully delivering at your optimum, and the quality you produce, will actually far outweigh the benefit of you doing things you’re not inclined towards, are not one of your natural strengths, or are not particularly skilled in.

Being bold and brave enough to accept the areas you’re good or not so good at, and recognising the tasks you can and can’t do well, will allow you to consistently deliver exceptional results. By being selfish and having the courage to begin the conversation that says “I’m not very good at A, but I am really great at B, so if I do B instead I’ll be much more valuable to you”, you’ll benefit from placing yourself in a position of strength. You please yourself by enjoying yourself and playing to those areas of natural strength. Only when you are being true to yourself and playing to your strengths can you truly deliver the most to those around you.

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