As we approach the end of the list of Elements of Employee Engagement, we come up on number eleven:
In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
This one is amusing me more than usual at the moment, because this week is my birthday, and I've been reflecting a lot about my own progress. My new weekly video series with my partner Lawrence Henderson is called "Grow or Die" for a reason. I am committed to the idea of getting better -- in anything, everything, all things. Without that underlying goal, I can't envision the motivation to bother getting out of bed in the morning.
And, as someone who is very self-propelled in this regard, I freely admit that I have not always been a great boss by driving this conversation. I'm a self-starter, and so I often struggled with the idea that each member of my team didn't have a clear idea of what they wanted and the determination to chase it down on their own. I was happy to help them accomplish their goal, but I was less great about helping them figure out what they really wanted it to be.
In hindsight, I believe this was one of my biggest failures as a boss. I didn't understand how to help them get to answers that were genuinely their own. I asked superficial questions, not insightful ones. And when I look at the meaningful progress I've made in my own life over the past two years, it was because I went out and found people, ideas and concepts that would aggressively challenge everything about myself. It was only through that process that I am now approaching my 45th birthday happier than I have ever been before.
The reason I am such a fan of teaching managers how to be good coaches is because of this gap: most people want to grow and learn and improve, but most leadership models assume some kind of top-down structure that includes a boss imparting wisdom on the poor neophytes, who then take it and blossom.
Horse shit.
In a knowledge economy, the boss is not all-knowing about anything. They facilitate, inspire and influence. They don't rule. And knowing what someone truly wants is the best way for them to define their goals and for you to find a way to help them accomplish them. And once you've done that, then staying in touch about actual progress is much easier and more natural, and often happens far more frequently than every six months.
