7 Key Leadership Skills To Drive Employee Engagement
Updated: Jul 1, 2021
Written by: Catherine Elizabeth Wood, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Many leaders are unsure how to drive employee engagement in the workplace. Along with reward, recognition, and retention, employee engagement results in high performance. However, during these uncertain times, employees often need to navigate multiple challenges within their personal life as well as navigating change and uncertainty at work.
As a leader, you can feel unsure in how to respond to emotion-charged situations at work where employees are perhaps struggling to manage their conflicting priorities, managing stress, or they are feeling overwhelmed with increased work pressures.
Having a collaborative approach as a leader will build a future-fit organization. Your leadership behavior will impact your team and the organization. Workplaces have a need now more than ever, to collaborate to enable teams to thrive. Not only is there a need for a collaborative leadership approach across each team, but also a need for the collaboration of a heart and brain leadership approach. This means having a focus on caring about the needs of employees as well as promoting team growth and development to drive employee engagement.
There are 7 key leadership skills that will positively influence behavior, attention, memory, decision-making, and effectiveness.
1. Listening
You can become a better listener by building your self-awareness and self-regulation. You can develop the skills of ‘tuning in’ to understand how you respond to challenges and develop strategies to use at the moment to maintain a sense of calm and control within your team.
Listening to understand employees is a skill you can develop as you learn to ‘tune in’ to the needs of your team by developing emotional competence, a combination of emotional intelligence and emotional resilience.
2. Aligning
There are many distractions in the workplace, and it can be challenging for you as a leader to juggle conflicting priorities daily. Acknowledging which activities are either time-wasting or taking too long, is the first step to aligning yourself to a smarter way of working. Perfectionism and unproductive meetings are just a couple of examples.
Aligning yourself as a leader means to be disciplined in what you spend your time on, being clear in how you add value as a leader, and how you can bring out the best in your team through your leadership behavior.
Team alignment is about having a shared purpose, accountability, integrity and above all else, a foundation of trust in you as a leader.
3. Empowering
Enabling your team to generate new ideas and better ways of working is powerful in helping them to have a sense of purpose. Empowering employees to make choices in their roles to improve team performance is key to promoting a culture of inclusion and innovation.
Providing positive and constructive feedback to your team as well as inviting them to provide feedback on your leadership is important to drive employee engagement. Giving your team an opportunity to have their say is key to you and your team working effectively together.
4. Serving
Identifying and addressing potential roadblocks for you as a leader and those within your team is often overlooked.
“By changing nothing, nothing changes,” is a quote by Tony Robbins. If you can action yourself out of the problem and encourage your team to do the same working together, then change results in a change. Seeking to serve your team is to identify what is not working before brainstorming solutions and involving your team in the problem-solving process.
Serving is about identifying your leadership traits, purpose, and the legacy you want to leave behind as a leader.
5. Collaborating
Your willingness to collaborate will impact you and your team. Sometimes you can prefer to take ownership over tasks or responsibilities particularly if you have experienced this type of approach in the past. However, this approach can result in employee disengagement. Sharing responsibilities and creating a collaborative culture will promote trust in you as a leader and pave the way for connectivity within your team and across the organization.
Sharing in decision-making with your team, providing inspiration, showing courage and generosity are all key elements of a collaborative approach.
6. Social Awareness
Understanding what your emotional triggers are and how you manage your emotional responses are both important in impacting your team positively as a leader through your behavior. Your team will be observing how you respond in emotion-charged situations and forming their perception of you as a leader. Having some strategies in place in how to respond positively and constructively will help you to model leadership behavior.
Social awareness is knowing how you can positively and constructively respond to the different personalities and behaviors in your team.
7. Communicating
Adapting to change as a leader is important to help your team to feel supported while knowing there will be challenges along the way but having the ability to achieve the desired change together. There is always a resistance to change however as a leader you can help your team to adapt to change as well as influence change.
Providing clear communication as a leader is necessary particularly navigating your team through change and uncertainty. Understanding the most effective way to communicate with individuals will help to bring out the best in your team.
Communicating is knowing what to say and how to say it to promote connectivity. Having regular engagement with employees to develop your understanding of them and their needs will help them to build trust in you as a leader.
Catherine Elizabeth Wood, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Catherine Wood, is a leader in mental resilience, science-based coaching through neuroscience, and creating new habits for behavior change. After an acute brain injury as an adult left her having irrational thoughts and self-doubt, Catherine developed an interest in neuroplasticity to understand how she could challenge her self-beliefs, promote helpful thoughts and create new habits for behavior change. Catherine has since dedicated her life to helping people to establish their self-belief in who they are as their best self to drive helpful thoughts and create new habits for behavior change in the workplace and in their personal life.
Catherine is the Founder of Life Renewal, the online coaching business combining leadership coaching and team coaching with evidence-based techniques in neuroscience. Catherine helps leaders drive employee engagement by modeling leadership behavior across 7 key leadership skills. Catherine has helped clients through her own coaching programs, workshops, and digital courses including "Mastering Emotional Competence in Leadership." Catherine has been a guest writer for Thrive Global which included an article on "Seeking Opportunities While Navigating Uncertainty", and she hosted a resilience series including "The Neuroscience of Resilience".
Catherine's mission: Science-based coaching for collaborative leadership behavior.
