Creativity is a key driver of innovation and problem-solving in the workplace. However, while creativity is undoubtedly a valuable talent when used effectively, its overuse can lead to unintended consequences, including inefficiencies, unnecessary risks and implementation challenges. To keep creativity as a positive force, creatives and their organizations need to find the right balance. How can they achieve this?
Understanding the Overuse of Creativity
Creativity, when overused, can result in a lack of focus and direction. Creatives, and teams led by creative leaders, may end up generating too many ideas without ever fully developing or implementing them. This can lead to “idea fatigue,” where employees feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new ideas and possibilities. Additionally, the overemphasis on creativity can cause teams to stray from proven methods and frameworks, leading to unworkable ideas and operational inefficiencies.
Another risk of overusing creativity is the tendency to prioritize novelty over practicality. While innovative ideas are exciting, they are not always feasible or aligned with the organization’s goals or customer needs. This can result in solutions that are exciting and interesting but impractical, diverting attention and resources from more practical, cost-effective alternatives.
What Overuse of Creativity Looks Like
When someone relies too heavily on their creative talent, it can lead to several imbalances and challenges, including:
What Triggers the Overuse of Creativity
Overuse of the creativity strength is usually triggered by several factors related to both personal tendencies and situational factors. Common triggers include:
Strategies for Managing Creativity
To avoid the pitfalls of creativity overuse, organizations must ensure they harness the power of creativity while maintaining focus and efficiency.
Creativity is a powerful talent, but like any talent, it must be used wisely with careful consideration of the needs of the situation and resources available. By setting clear objectives and guiding principles, fostering critical and pragmatic thinking, and promoting collaboration, creatives can harness the benefits of creativity without falling into the trap of overuse. These strategies will ensure that creativity remains a driver of innovation and success, rather than a source of inefficiency and frustration.
If you want your employees to achieve better performance and career success by optimizing their strengths and gaining insight into potential blind spots and limiting behaviours from their overuse, contact us at info@talentpredix.com to learn more about the award-winning TalentPredix strengths assessment.
Boldness (or courage) has always been one of my greatest strengths. Throughout my career, this underlying talent has enabled me to challenge the status quo and speak out honestly in the pursuit of progress, both in corporate settings and as an entrepreneur. In 2005, boldness inspired me to start my first venture: a pioneering positive leadership and online strengths assessment business. At the time, this approach was still nascent and not widely regarded as a scientific method for talent management and people development. Today, it is a cornerstone of progressive organizations’ talent strategies. However, influencing this change in the early years required resilience, perseverance, patience, and above all, the courage to challenge the prevailing weakness-based assumptions about people management and development.
My boldness can be traced back to my childhood when I regularly challenged parents, teachers, and other authority figures whenever something seemed unfair or illogical. However, in my early years, this boldness was often used clumsily, leading to unintended negative outcomes…and numerous canings from teachers (yep, those were the days when corporal punishment was permitted). I vividly recall a moment in my mid-20s when I carelessly challenged an executive at a financial services firm where I worked. My challenge, poorly worded as a statement rather than a question, was ill-judged. As a result, my manager, who was present, provided harsh but fair feedback on being more thoughtful when challenging top leaders in the future. This incident might have been acceptable in Scandinavia, where I worked for a few years, but it was certainly not in a traditional British bank in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, at that time, there was little understanding of the idea of overusing one’s strengths; strengths and weaknesses were seen simplistically as binary opposites with most of the time focused on fixing weaker areas. Even today, my experience suggests that only 5-10% of people at work are familiar with this crucial concept, which highlights serious failings in our efforts as talent development professionals and coaches to help employees achieve greater self-awareness and mastery over their learning and growth.
Yet, this concept is transformative for personal development, often providing ‘ah ha’ moments for many we work with. People are more receptive to feedback when they understand it relates to one of their strengths used ineffectively. Most of us strive to use our strengths skilfully because these areas energize us the most and give us a greater sense of unique identity, purpose and value. When we recognize our overused ‘blind spots,’ previously seen as weaknesses by colleagues and others around us, we feel empowered to implement strategies to manage them effectively. You can read more about some of these strategies HERE.
When Boldness is used excessively, it can manifest as:
For leaders, this overuse may result in overbearing or domineering leadership, especially if Boldness is paired with decisiveness, confidence, and a strong focus on results.
There are various triggers that can lead to the excessive use of Boldness. These include:
Below are some proven strategies to avoid overusing Boldness:
By integrating these strategies, you can maintain your Boldness while ensuring it doesn’t lead to negative consequences. Balancing Boldness with understanding, empathy and situational agility will help you achieve more positive outcomes and build stronger relationships.
To find out how we can help your organization avoid using overused talents to help your employees thrive in their careers, contact us at info@talentpredix.com.
In today’s tough talent marketplace, improving talent mobility is more important than ever. Talented employees are looking for more frequent career moves that align with their strengths and aspirations. Talent mobility enables employees to move more easily in the organization, creating a dynamic and highly skilled internal talent marketplace. So, what are some of the ways you can improve talent mobility?
Identify the unique strengths and career motivations of your people
It is vital to understand and value the unique and diverse strengths and talents of your people, which may not be obvious. Therefore, we recommend a profiler like TalentPredix that helps people understand their talents and strengths and how to get the best from these by aligning them with opportunities that are most likely to motivate and advance them. As a next generation strengths assessment, it also provides actionable insights about individual’s career motivations and values, enabling them to focus on roles and career pathways that will suit them most.
Provide and communicate clear, flexible career pathways
It is important to design fluid career pathways to facilitate movement to different parts of the organization. However, a flexible structure without good communication will do little to unlock mobility. It is vital to provide up-to-date and engaging communication about different career pathways to all employees. For example, employee video stories of non-traditional moves can be captured and shared to highlight the range of possibilities open to employees, including cross-department, lateral and country moves (if the company operates across multiple geographies).
Any openings should be posted internally to encourage internal moves within the organization before opening the vacancy to external candidates. This can be done in various ways, including on the company’s Intranet, internal job boards, collaboration platforms and/or regular email notifications. The posting process should be guided by HR policy and guidelines that specify the specific procedure to be followed to promote fairness, transparency, and objectivity.
Promote cross-functional/business unit projects
In our experience, too few businesses are harnessing the numerous benefits of encouraging cross-functional/business unit projects and initiatives. Advantages of such projects include improved cross-department understanding, better collaboration and problem solving and greater levels of creativity and innovation. Employees assigned to cross-functional projects will build a greater understanding of the business and learn about opportunities they may wish to transfer to in the near term or at some point in future.
Offer regular development
Inclusive and regular skills development is crucial to ensure employees can expand their skills and take on new challenges and roles in the company. As well as technical skills training, professional skills development in crucial areas such as resilience, navigating change, communication and influence, digital literacy, and problem-solving should be offered to improve these skills throughout the business. Insofar as possible, it is always better to open such training to everyone in the business so that employees can come together, meet colleagues from other areas of the business and learn from them.
Provide mentoring and coaching
Mentoring programs provide opportunities for less experienced employees to be guided and supported by people who are more experienced, ideally those outside their immediate team and/or business area. This helps employees to think more expansively about opportunities and ensures they are better prepared for future roles. Similarly, managers should be trained up as competent and confident career coaches so they can offer regular check-ins and high effective career conversations that enable meaningful career planning, action, and adaptation.
Beyond mentoring and coaching, promoting cross-team networking and companywide social activities are also important to encourage new collaborations and insights into different areas of the business.
By implementing these talent mobility strategies, organizations can create a positive and dynamic internal talent marketplace where employees feel encouraged and supported to navigate a flexible career path that fits their strengths, aspirations, and motivations, rather than a rigid one prescribed by the organization.
If you would like support to unlock the full potential of your internal talent and promote talent mobility and thriving careers, contact us at info@talentpredix.com
London (November 2023) — TalentPredix™ is delighted to announce that it is launching in Scandinavia through a partnership with Gudman Leadership. TalentPredix, an innovative next generation strengths assessment system, provides a comprehensive measure of people’s unique talents, career motivations and values. It transforms the way clients hire, develop, and engage talent, enabling businesses to improve talent outcomes and unleash the full strengths and potential of their people.
“As a coach and a seasoned International Talent and Leadership Professional, I firmly believe in building diverse, inclusive and high performing cultures. I help people play to their strengths, unlock their greatest potential, and drive growth by creating caring and sustainable teams” says Marlene Gudman, founder of Gudman Leadership and continues, “The future of leadership is all about building relationships and creating a place, where people belong. In this process, it is essential to have an assessment tool that covers the employee life cycle, identify people’s strengths, motivations and values and is based on substantial research. I am very excited to introduce TalentPredix to Scandinavia and I have already had some amazing feedback from new and existing clients, especially when working with diversity.”
James Brook, founder and CEO of TalentPredix™, comments: “The way we work is changing faster than ever, yet most workplace assessment tools haven’t kept pace with these changes. It is the ability to uncover a candidate’s unique talents, career motivations and values that sets TalentPredix™ apart and suits modern thinking around amplifying individuality and strengths in the workplace. When organizations understand and optimize people’s unique talents and strengths, their results and capacity to transform the success of the organization are significantly multiplied and sustainable. Having spent several happy years living in Denmark when working for Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals in a corporate Talent and Leadership role earlier in my career, I am excited to be partnering with Marlene and her team to grow our business in Scandinavia.”
TalentPredix™ can be used in different stages of the employee life cycle, from recruitment and team building to career development and preparing people for future roles. Spotlighting strengths and bringing out the best in people enables them to thrive, accelerates performance and delivers better business results. Applied organization-wide, the assessment and strengths-based talent solutions help businesses to optimize their employees’ strengths and create diverse, high-performing sustainable teams and workplaces.
For more information, please contact:
Marlene Gudman, Gudman Leadership
Email: marlenegudman@outlook.com
Website: https://gudmanleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlene-ramsing-gudman-672a2b3/
James Brook, TalentPredix
Email: james.brook@talentpredix.com
Website: www.talentpredix.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshbrook/
A positive mindset paves the way for success and peak performance. It will also leave you feeling happier and more satisfied with your life. This has been well established through decades of research which shows that when people work with a positive mindset, performance on key metrics like productivity, creativity and engagement improves. Neuropsychologists have also found that a positive mindset enables better problem-solving through enabling better use of the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher level, complex thinking tasks.
There are also countless testimonials from many of the most successful business leaders like Arianna Huffington, Sheryl Sandberg, Richard Branson, Peter Jones, Warren Buffet and Jeff Weiner about the power of building and maintaining a positive mindset.
A positive mindset involves a lot more than simply being upbeat and optimistic, a ‘glass half full’ type of person. There are 5 main elements:
So, here are some of the ways you can strengthen your mindset and become someone who thinks like a winner:
Don’t allow yourself to become a victim to negative thinking and adverse circumstances otherwise you’ll enter a vicious cycle of low self-confidence, pessimism, helplessness and eventually depression. We can all learn from Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who pointed out in his bestselling book, Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Your personal strengths are those underlying qualities that naturally energize you, not just skills you have learned or competencies you’re good at. What do you love to do that you could do every day without getting bored? For example, some managers are energized by being strategic and creative while others are more organized and detail oriented. The areas where your strengths and skills overlap are what we call your “sweet spots”, they are areas where you have opportunity to make the greatest contribution and impact at work. Studies show that when people discover their strengths and find ways to use these more fully in their day-to-day work, they are more likely to enjoy work, perform better and achieve success in their careers.
Recognise and write down the negative, limiting things you say to yourself. Treat these as if they were being said by an external person who wants to make you miserable. Dispute or argue against these points as if you were disputing something someone has said which is unfair or unjustified. Try reframing these negative statements as positive, empowering ones. Write these down and look at them every morning before work and whenever you are experiencing episodes of self-doubt or anxiety. Over time, your negative narratives will be replaced with more positive ones.
Always comparing yourself to others (especially those you consider as highly successfully) is counterproductive and will probably only make you miserable in the long run. Happiness and success are highly subjective and often very private so unless you can see inside the person’s brain, you will never know how happy and successfully they really feel.
Spend time undertaking work and leisure activities that make you feel more fulfilled and genuinely happy rather than activities and interests you see others you admire doing.
People are seen as likeable when they are kind and trustworthy, have a good sense of humour, offer unsolicited support and help, practice regular gratitude and don’t take themselves too seriously. Displaying these behaviours will enable you to initiate and build relationships with co-workers and other people around you who impact your happiness and success. Even if you are by nature a more negative, suspicious or pessimistic person, spending regular time with people who are happy, resilient and optimistic will eventually result in a positive shift in your mindset, energy and effectiveness.
If something doesn’t work the first time, try it again and do it differently. Rather than allowing failure to undermine your energy and confidence, treat it as one of your most respected teachers. Remember that almost every successful business person fails on multiple occasions. The best often stand out because of their ability to dust themselves down and move beyond these setbacks, rather than allowing themselves to be defined by them.
Many people keep themselves so busy at work and home that they don’t take time to slow down and notice the good moments and things in life. For example, we often fail to spot our co-workers doing great work or a friend or partner making a special effort on our behalf. Many even fail to notice and celebrate their own learning, progress and professional achievements. They simply move on to the next thing and lose a valuable opportunity to enjoy the viewing points in their overhasty quest to climb the ‘mountain’. By taking time to notice and appreciate these moments, however small, we will enhance our positive thinking as well as the joy and satisfaction of those around us.
Negative thoughts (I’ve never liked this misleading label) are perfectly normal and healthy so don’t push these thoughts and feelings aside when they arise. Emotions like being sad when you are grieving or being angry or disappointed when someone lets you down are usually helpful responses that motivate us to action to improve our work, lives and relationships. So don’t suppress or deny these feelings without first acknowledging and understanding them. Asking yourself whether they will improve your work, life and relationships is a simple test to decide on how you wish to deal with them.
TalentPredix offers bespoke consulting and coaching solutions to help you and your team build the right mindset for success in today’s ever-changing world of work. Contact us to learn more at info@talentpredix.com or visit our website to learn more.
Most of us have experienced times when we lose our mojo at work. We drag ourselves into work and battle through the day, waiting for the workday to end. Fortunately for most of us this doesn’t happen every day but some people stay in this motivational void for too long.
Here are some steps to help you get out of this unhelpful place:
What’s causing you to be demotivated? It is something at work like your boss or growing boredom with the job? Does it stem from problems at home? Or are the underlying reasons something else like a poor diet and lack of exercise?
Can you change the source of your demotivation and if so, what action will help you change things? Most of the time, we have a lot more influence and control over events than we realise, especially if we call on the help of others when we are struggling. Think broadly and creatively how you can take back control of the situation.
When we lose our mojo, we tend to generalise our dissatisfaction and forget all the positive stuff that’s happening. We get into a negative spiral of despair and unhappiness. Take time to remember what’s going well. What were your recent achievements and successes? What did you do well to achieve these results?
Find solutions to take back control of your situation and regain your mojo. Be courageous and decisive, don’t live with the demotivation. Call on the help of people at work and your friends and family to recover your mojo. Remember that the longer that you stick with a broken mojo, the harder it is to fix as you’ll start becoming consumed by a sense of helplessness. So act now and always remember that it’s your choice to change things for the better.
TalentPredix provides bespoke solutions to help you build a thriving place to work where your people show up motivated to succeed. Contact us for more: info@talentpredix.com
Major changes like Covid, digital transformation and the growing environmental emergency are disrupting traditional business models and creating huge impetus for transformation and innovation. To succeed, today’s organizations need to be highly adaptive and constantly innovate to keep pace with disruptive forces and changing customer preferences.
Yet too many companies still stifle the ideas and creativity of their employees. They straitjacket people with directive leadership and rigid policies, processes, and procedures, smothering the voice and imagination of their people. The results are predictable. Motivation, teamwork, and innovation nosedive, followed by declines in customer loyalty and financial results.
To succeed and compete in this new era of disruption and innovation, organizations need to learn how to harness employees’ incredible creative potential, as innovation is a distinctly human endeavour. The world’s most innovative companies systematically devise ways to promote a culture of collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Here’s how you can do the same by putting these principles at the heart of your organization’s people strategy:
Creative and imaginative thinking involves intentionally expanding our thinking to find new and useful ideas and solutions to overcome problems, accelerate innovation and enable the organization to achieve its goals. Studies show that it is one of the most important competencies for leaders and teams to possess to be effective. In future, it is likely to become even more important because of growing rates of change and disruptive innovation. Just like emotional intelligence, it is also extremely difficult for AI and intelligent machines to perform creative problem-solving as effectively as humans.
But creative thinking is not natural for most employees, as it is not taught at school or even by most universities. Organizations seeking higher rates of innovation should therefore invest in training their staff in creative and collaborative thinking methods, ensuring people have the skills, tools, and techniques to unlock the power of cognitive diversity and people’s collective ideas. Through developing creative thinking skills like learner mindset, powerful questioning, reframing, divergent thinking and cognitive diversity, organizations will promote a culture that encourages curiosity, experimentation, and innovation.
At innovative companies like Google, LVMH, Apple, Unilever and Salesforce, employees are encouraged to express their individuality and apply their unique strengths, imagination, and know-how to achieve their own goals and those of the wider business. Employees in these companies are not expected to be well-rounded. They are empowered to optimize their strengths and work with diverse team members that complement them. By building highly inclusive and cognitively diverse teams, these companies unlock ideas, creative problem-solving and improved rates of innovation. They also become ‘talent magnets’ for the most talented people who seek organizations that provide opportunities for them to shape decisions and the future of the business.
Innovative organizations create opportunities for people from different parts of the business to connect and work together in mixed teams that span diverse functions and business areas. A growing number of innovative and dynamic businesses are organized into natural teams that assemble to deliver specific projects or products then disband once the project outcome or product is delivered. This way of organizing work is a natural evolution of the popular matrix structures found in many innovative organizations.
However, the big difference is that functional lines of reporting are looser or even non-existent. Work is organised by team leaders and highly empowered teams and people are assigned to teams based on their experience, performance track record, and strengths. Innovative organizations also promote informal and frequent connections among employees by enabling people to socialise and have fun together, both in physical and online environments. Enabling employees to spend such time together builds trust, improves collaboration, and accelerates knowledge flows. This provides more opportunities for employees to discuss and refine ideas, as well as a chance to share insights, and better practices.
Many organizations are now promoting psychological safety as a fundamental pillar or their people strategy. This is crucial as people need to feel they are in a safe and supportive environment that appreciates them and values their input and contribution.
However, there is another compelling business reason to pursue a culture where psychological safety becomes the norm. To succeed in today’s ever-changing environment, organizations are going to need to accelerate creative thinking and innovation. The only way to do this is to ensure everyone feels they can openly and honestly voice their ideas and opinions, no matter how controversial or challenging these are.
Employers often unintentionally cultivate risk averse and conservative cultures through centralising decision-making and stifling the creativity of people at lower levels in the organization. They create a fear culture by discouraging risk-taking, initiative, and direct challenge of top management. In innovative organizations like Gore, Meta and 3M, employees are actively encouraged to engage in creative problem-solving, hackathons and experiments to improve products, processes, and practices. Leaders in these companies recognise that tolerating mistakes is required to accelerate progress and achieve breakthrough innovation. They encourage and reward employees for coming up with great ideas to improve the business and its products, creating greater value for customers and other stakeholders. They also empower people to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone and embrace curiosity, agility, and continuous learning.
Today’s organizations need to be able to adapt quickly and innovate in the face of fast-changing conditions. Leaders and teams who can anticipate, innovate, and adapt faster will enable the business to gain a clear competitive advantage over rivals. They will also be able to attract and retain the best talent, as the most talented people look for employers that value and leverage their ideas and full potential. By implementing these five principles organizations can accelerate creative thinking and unlock the extraordinary creative potential of their people.
Understanding Others is crucial at every level of the organization, particularly for leaders and managers seeking to enhance their own and their teams’ performance. When being used optimally (what we refer to as “In the Zone”), behaviours associated with this strength include taking the time to listen to colleagues to understand things from their point of view, giving emotional space to understand how your people are feeling and stepping in to help others when they are upset, overwhelmed or emotionally low.
However, when used too much or in the wrong way (what we refer to as “Overuse or In-excess”) excess, Understanding Others may result in some of the following behaviours:
However, there are a variety of techniques that highly empathetic leaders and employees can apply to avoid these risks, such as:
Separating emotions and personal life from work
This is not to say that leaders should embody indifference at work. Instead, they should take care to boundary their personal time and mental energy so that they do not get overinvolved in others’ problems. If they don’t do this, their tendency to identify too much with others’ emotions and provide support to others when they are in distress or experiencing challenges at work or in their personal life may end up being detrimental to their own work, mental health and personal happiness. In extreme cases, it can also result in an unhealthy relationship of dependency that can prevent people from becoming more self-sufficient, confident, and resilient.
Set clear guidelines and expectations – and enforce them
As mentioned earlier, some may take advantage of the leader’s/person’s warm and compassionate nature and inclination to help. This may result in them find opportunities to offload unwanted work inappropriately or abusing the leader’s warm-hearted and understanding nature. To avoid this, leaders should clearly communicate role responsibilities and ensure people are held accountable to what has been agreed and subsequently delegated. If it is apparent that a team member is struggling with their workload, the leader should show empathy and understanding in helping the person to improve, particularly where these challenges are caused by genuine personal challenges outside work (e.g., major illness in the family). However, while reasonable allowances can be made, the leader needs to remain firm about what needs to be delivered and offer only reasonable assistance to address any shortfalls.
Don’t constantly try to rescue others
Whilst compassionate and understand leaders typically have good intentions by stepping in to try and help others, they often end up doing more harm than good. Check in with your direct reports and colleagues whether they need help before stepping in to rescue them. If they do need help, provide advice and guidance of where to find the best support (e.g., through the HR function, GP practice, professional counselling services) rather than always trying to provide this yourself.
Understanding others is essential for leaders and managers to enhance performance and build strong, positive relationships at work. However, it should be balanced to avoid emotional exhaustion, dependency, and interference. By setting boundaries, establishing clear expectations, and providing support when truly needed, empathetic leaders can create a thriving work environment that fosters self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and success.
To find out how we can help your organization avoid using overused talents to help your employees to thrive in their career, contact us at info@talentpredix.com.
A manager has many responsibilities, one of which is keeping their team engaged and motivated at work. Unfortunately, the economic slowdown and threat of a recession make this harder on managers, while also negatively impacting employee morale, leading to decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and higher turnover rates. This has been amplified by The Great Resignation, where employees are willingly leaving their jobs to pursue other opportunities because in the past few years, the demand for talent has grown and now exceeds supply in many occupational areas like software development, B2B sales and leadership. Current data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) predicts that one in five of UK workers will seek other employment options this year. More recent research from Unum UK, an employee benefits provider, found that 19% of workers plan to look for a new position in 2023.
However, the outlook for employers is not all bleak as recent trends show the rise of Boomerang Employees. The World Economic Forum defines this phenomenon as “staff who leave their jobs but choose to return at a later point when the stress passes or priorities shift”. Data shows that 1 in 5 people who have quit their jobs during the pandemic have gone back to the job that they have left. This suggests that employees are realizing that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and the demotivating factor/s that caused them to leave in the first place are being tackled more swiftly by employers who are keen to war for the best talent. For example, many companies that previously had no flexible work policies are implementing these to remain competitive in an increasingly ‘hot’ talent market.
There are a number of steps managers can take to keep employee engagement and morale up during times of uncertainty, and create a culture that employees will not want to leave, but also are more inclined to return to if they do resign:
Implementing simple, actionable ways to keep employees engaged during the economic slowdown will not only improve performance, motivation and retention, but former employees may even boomerang back onto your team.
As a leader in strengths-based assessment, development and coaching, TalentPredix can help you boost employee engagement, performance and retention. Contact us to learn more.
Disengaged employees can be detrimental to productivity, employee engagement and overall output. Our previous blog covered signs managers should look out for in employees to help nip this problem in the bud.
Spot and prevent low motivation and engagement
Of course, the best way to ward off quiet quitting is for managers to check in on the motivation of their people on a regular basis. There are different ways of doing this, including careful observation of behaviour, emotions and energy shifts, engagement surveys and asking questions that uncover people’s motivation during regular check-ins and quarterly performance review meetings. Some of the questions managers can consider asking are as follows:
Once managers identify a disengaged employees they can explore the root cause of their low engagement in a one-on-one conversation.
Amplify strengths, successes and progress
Managers, like most of us, are conditioned to focus more on the negatives we see rather than the positives. This is what psychologists call the “negativity bias”. It is therefore important for managers to consciously learn to spot and magnify strengths, successes and progress, even small wins and shifts in effort.
By giving positive feedback and praise, managers will promote progress, excellence, and employee engagement. When people feel they are valued and their progress and achievements are recognized regularly by their manager, they are more likely to feel motivated and exert higher levels of discretionary effort (i.e., effort over and above the required level).
Conduct retention/stay interviews
Retention interviews are a powerful tool to improve employee experience, build trust, and nip problems in the bud. RotaCloud recommends that retention interviews should be kept relatively informal, held in private, and be consistent as much as possible across different team members. Keeping consistency might be difficult, as everyone has their own sentiments and feelings, but managers can keep a set of key questions or discussion points handy and let the conversation flow from there. This can be done in both in-person and remote or hybrid workplaces. Responses should be collated and kept on record somewhere in order to refer to eventually.
Demonstrate empathy
It is important that managers self-reflect and be empathetic above all else. Try to picture themselves in the position of their employees and see their realities to understand where they are coming from. Reflect on how they would react if they were put in their employees’ position? Additionally, consider the employees themselves and the value they have brought to the team, and their strengths and their talents and how these can be further supported to allow them to thrive.
Act on employee feedback
Taking this into consideration, it is now time for the manager to act on the feedback given from their employees. It may be revealed that employees are frustrated with a lack of progression and/or development opportunities available to them, then the manager should explore options in upskilling and/or career development for their people. In virtual teams, managers may find that some employees feel disconnected from the broader workforce. This last one might be common among the younger workforce, who are likely dealing with proportionately more “Zoom fatigue” from the pandemic. If this is the case, the leader should find more creative ways to foster connectivity or, if possible, try to organize in-person events to enable the employees to connect with each other more.
Lastly, it should be ensured that this feedback loop is not a one-off occurrence. A communication line has been opened, and it should be kept this way. The manager should devise a plan to regularly collect feedback, comments, and suggestions from their team, and be flexible enough and willing to find ways to act on suggestions being made. Data can be collected either through formal measures like sending out employee engagement surveys or more informal measures such as sitting down and having a conversation or booking regular one-on-one meetings. Gallup finds that the best practice is for managers to have meaningful 15–30-minute conversations once a week with each employee.
By actively listening to the needs and wants of their people, managers foster a work environment that is inclusive and supportive, which can help their team members feel valued, motivate them to perform at their best and thus address the issue of employee disengagement.
TalentPredix has the strengths-based tools, resources, and skills to engage employees to help you build a thriving place to work so your people can reach their full potential. Contact us today to learn more.