People Management
Leadership
September 16, 2024
How to foster an engaging work environment
The role of leadership involves clear communication regarding expectations, goals, organizational objectives, and necessary skills
Numerous studies seek to explain how leadership can foster an environment of engagement within their teams, catalyze a sense of belonging among employees, and sustain this behavior over time.
It is unnecessary to emphasize that engagement cannot be acquired like a product in a supermarket, as we are dealing with human beings, who possess varied beliefs, values, mental models, motivations, and interests. It is this diversity that significantly contributes to new ideas, different points of view, and constant questioning of status quo. All of this favors the growth and perpetuity of businesses.
Thus, leaders will need to understand their role in fostering and maintaining an environment where people feel engaged with their work and the company they work for, effectively working in diverse teams. To this end, it is important, first, to understand what an engaged team means and what its characteristics are.
Studies indicate that people engaged with their work are proactive; they face challenges as opportunities for growth and a way to increase their potential, using the companies they work for as laboratories for personal and professional growth; they err, get up, fall again and succeed, extracting lessons important from mistakes and successes.
Furthermore, engaged people demonstrate dedication and consistent commitments, and when they perform complex and challenging activities, they become fully concentrated to perform work of differentiated quality, entering the state of flow, that is, totally absorbed, to the point of losing track of time and space.
We could, therefore, say that leaders would like to have teams with these characteristics. The good news is that leaders can indeed catalyze an environment of commitment, engagement, and a sense of belonging in their teams, but for this, they need to promote a culture of responsibility within their areas and organizations, the so-called leadership accountability, which would be the “holding accountable” of leaders or the “responsibility” of leadership in promoting, from their teams, environments of commitment, transparency, ethics, and diversity.
The main pillars of leadership accountability are:
- Common purpose – Communication rituals with clarifications on the importance of the activities people perform and their impacts on organizational objectives and company strategy. This contributes to people understanding that what they do in the company has a greater purpose;
- Clear expectations – Clarity on what is expected from the team (outcome to be achieved). This helps people understand their performance goals, standards, and expected behaviors;
- Clear capacity – What skills do people need to meet expectations; what resources will they need (which must be provided). The more qualified the team, the more strategic ideas will come from it. Skills and challenges in balance foster proactivity, self-efficacy, and self-confidence, catalyzing “intrapreneurship,” which is the ability to innovate within the company, proposing new ways of performing work, creating products and services with a sense of ownership.
- Clear measurement – Communication rituals should address expectations, goals to be achieved, agreement on delivery milestones, and how this result will be measured. Leaders need to hold people accountable for their actions and results, fostering commitment conversations.
- Clear feedback – Honest, open, and two-way feedback on the assessed indicators. This feedback should be continuous, systematic, positive, and corrective, aiming for continuous performance improvement by the teams. A culture of feedback and recognition contributes to maintaining consistent dedication – one of the pillars of engagement.
- Team empowerment – Delegating, granting autonomy, and enabling decision-making are attitudes that contribute to a sense of belonging, as people understand they are protagonists of organizational results, taking ownership of their actions, behaviors, and feelings, which, in turn, increases self-motivation and self-realization.
- Culture of trust and transparency – Our results, behaviors, and attitudes involve what we do and the people we interact with. In this sense, leadership needs to build a trusting relationship within their teams, being fair and transparent in all processes. Furthermore, they need to foster environments for exchange, without fear of retaliation from the team, where everyone can constantly speak up and give their point of view, bringing security to take risks, face challenges, succeed, fail, and assert themselves when needed.
- Personal example – Leaders need to set an example, demonstrate integrity, keep their promises, take responsibility for their actions, be ethical, and be human. Self-efficacy, one of the characteristics of engaged people, is catalyzed when there is experimentation with successful situations through the use of their potential, as well as observing and learning from the successful behaviors and examples of other people. In this context, leadership must constantly set an example.
It is not easy to maintain team engagement consistently. This requires hard and systematic leadership work involving daily actions, attitudes, and behaviors. Leadership does indeed have important responsibilities in fostering a committed environment and, when it understands its role in this process, it can achieve superior results from the people it leads.
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Who wrote this column
Denise de Moura
