In June of 2007, James Harter, Ph.D., Gallup Organization’s Chief Scientist, addressed Training Magazine’s Leadership Summit. Harter, co-author with Rodd Wagner of “12: The Elements of Great Managing” (Gallup Press, 2006), presented some survey statistics that reveal how effectively engaged executives have significantly better performing organizations.

The performance measured was in terms of consistent year-to-year growth in profitable revenues. Gallup’s findings were based on analyzing over 10 million responses to employee surveys on management excellence. The surveys were taken with international Fortune 1000 Businesses; profit and non-profit organizations; and small to medium enterprises.

Employees were divided into three categories: “Engaged”- those that put effort into their work; “Not Engaged”- those that “have a job”- show up and punch the clock; and “Actively Disengaged”- for lack of a better term, let’s call them business anarchists. Harter’s presentation talked about how employees were engaged by leadership as well as whether or not leaders were engaged at all.

In looking at how executives and managers engaged their employees, Gallup separated the how into three categories: Strengths focused engagement (leaders strategically engaged employees’ strengths on organizational activity); Weakness focused engagement (leaders focused on fixing employee weaknesses through training and/or punitive reinforcement); Ignored (employees were left to their own devices to “figure it out”).  Harter showed that how management engages employees correlates to how many employees were “engaged” versus “actively disengaged”.

Now this is quite a revealing bit of information. First, look at how much better performing the strengths based focused management style is. These are organizations where Monday mornings are not dreadful and absenteeism is low. Looking at the weakness focused management style reveals two interesting observations. First, there is a potential for significant office politics to take place with large numbers of people engaged and disengaged. After all, you can’t very well get rid of 22% of the workforce. Secondly, although weakness-focused management in an organization does not have the employee commitment that strengths-focused organizations have, it is significantly better than the “ignored” management culture. This may be why the weakness focused managers continue on their merry way; when bench-marked against the “ignored” organizational manager, they are doing quite well.

Which then brings us to the ignored management style. The statistics are frightening to say the least. The business anarchists- when left unhindered- have taken over. Furthermore, by not paying attention to anyone who has the potential to perform, the employees who were engaged in their work either left the company out of frustration or succumbed to the fact that doing well is a waste of time.

While there was more to Harter’s presentation- and significantly more to Gallup’s findings- about engagement, for the sake of brevity and food for thought on this subject alone- we’ll conclude here. For further discussion, please look at the blog post in the far left column under “Book Corner”. BACK TO NEWSLETTER