In addition to developing personal connections, exceptional leaders create corporate connections, closing the gap between associates’ daily work and the company mission.
When do you feel most engaged at work? What separates the great times from the bad? Under what circumstances do you feel energized, and under what circumstances do you feel drained or burned out?
There are certainly many factors that impact how we feel about our efforts and ourselves on any given day. A serious mistake in our work, a misstatement in an important meeting, an embarrassing moment during a presentation, or a heated argument with a peer where we realize we were wrong can make us feel like we want to crawl under a rock and hide. Having a great conversation with a peer, nailing a presentation, being congratulated for our ideas during a meeting, and knowing we performed some of our best work that day, on the other hand, can leave us enthusiastic, wanting to return and do it all again. These moments come and go, typically subsiding after a day or two.
Personal relationships, on the other hand, dictate our feelings for more than a couple days. Feeling respected, heard, appreciated for our efforts, and like a part of the team is radically different than when we feel like we have a poor relationship with our direct leader, a partner we just don’t click with, or suffer team dysfunction. The latter can make us feel demoralized, especially the longer the problem persists. There is often an ebb and flow to personal relationship troubles, though, as they can feel overwhelming when a problem first arises yet fade with time. The good and bad days, weeks, or months come and go as relationships improve or are redefined and lines redrawn.
How we feel about our work is not just about singular moments or personal interactions, however. It is also tied to how we feel about our company, the relationship we have with our company. Do we believe in the company’s mission? Do we believe in the benefits of the company’s products and services? Do we tout those to our friends and neighbors? Do our beliefs around community involvement align with the company’s actions? Do we feel pride when we answer the question, “Who do you work for?” While feelings toward individuals can fluctuate, those toward a company are stickier. They take longer to form and to change as they are an aggregation of many beliefs, experiences, and relationships.
How people feel about their company is a reflection of how they feel about the leadership of the company, and not just the C-suite. Connecting associates emotionally to your company is difficult. It requires thought and purposeful action, showing them how their efforts advance the cause. Most associates’ work is focused on daily tasks with mission, vision, and strategy too often being vague concepts or worse, irrelevant or nonexistent. Exceptional leaders achieve remarkable results by closing this gap. They engage their team’s hearts and minds in targeted ways that make them feel their work is important.
People want to feel connected to their organization, their team, and their work, knowing they are contributing to a larger purpose. Creating an emotional connection with your associates is not only about establishing personal connections. It includes creating connections to work, clearly linking their daily efforts up through to the corporate mission. One of the most important leader responsibilities is to provide clarity for team members. With clarity comes understanding, buy-in, and alignment, allowing a team to work in unison, delivering results with the speed and efficiency that come with that. As noted in the Associate / Leader Connections diagram, the following components make up the work to which associates must feel connected:
- Mission: Why we exist
- Vision: What we will become
- Strategy: How we will become that
- Needs: What each business unit requires to become that
- Goals: Milestones along the way
- Outcomes: Measurable results that get us to our goals
- Capabilities: The ability to do the things needed to achieve the outcomes
- Operational: ability to do the day-to-day things required
- Capital Improvements: ability to do things in the future we cannot do today
- Innovation: ability to do things in a new way
- Objectives: A person’s target contributions to the outcomes
- Metrics: Measures of success and opportunity
- Quantitative: mathematically measured
- Qualitative: not mathematically measured, descriptive in nature
While this may look like a lot and you may question whether every link in the wheel is important, speaking to each as a distinct element provides the opportunity to draw clarity for your team, connecting what you are working to accomplish, why, and how. Leaders look to the future, preparing for what comes next and beyond. Most team members live day-to-day in the capabilities, objectives, and metrics area of the framework. As you move upward toward strategy, vision, and mission, things can feel less relevant to associates. Establish the linkages for them through every link, however, and they will have a deeper understanding of the work overall and feel differently about their contributions, more engaged and energized, less drained or burned out.
In upcoming corporate connections posts, I will provide thoughts on each element in this part of the framework with specific, actionable approaches and techniques you can use to engage associates to accomplish the difficult work you face.
Share your thoughts below.
Some may say connecting associates’ work loosely to the mission, vision, and strategy is all that is needed for people to feel good about their contributions and the company, that going further does not provide value. Where do you land on the spectrum? How do you connect your associates to your company?
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