I am amazed how business leaders don’t understand the power of team engagement. The better your team is engaged, the better they perform. An unengaged team can only give you normal results but, if you are in the business to make a difference or to be able to upscale then create a highly engaged high-performance team.

A happy team is not necessarily an engaged team. Being happy doesn’t necessarily mean you are engaged. Being satisfied doesn’t mean you are engaged. It’s been estimated that only 34% of your work force are engaged.

The same survey still says, only 40-50% of any workforce team are satisfied with the job. Meaning, the other 50% are only giving you 50% of their time, ability & emotion. This means, they will never get you to fly at the level that you need to fly. Every organization that I have gone into for the first time, you feel the team could perform better.

Engagement is a business winning tool. It is a tool that helps you make more money. In fact, it is a success tool. If you are not doing whatever it takes to have your team engaged for high performance, then you’re missing out. It is difficult to work with companies that are not aspiring to be the best in their sector, why? They will always perform like they want to be number 2. Go for number 1 and then work hard to stay there.

Engagement is where your team is emotionally engaged in the organization’s goals and will take discretionary action every time to ensure that they are surpassing their goals. So, it is a business winning tool. If you can help organizations and leaders to begin to care about their people a little bit more, psychologically the people begin to reciprocate.

These 5 steps will help any leader increase the engagement of their team.

Don’t assume that you know.

As a leader, be deliberate. Take time to do a survey. Do it at least 3 times a year and every time, ask some deep questions. Ask people things that are important to them. Let the questions you ask force people to think about their answers, not to just say yes or no.

For example: Why do you that your boss is not communicating with you? Do you feel that you are growing? Would you recommend this place to another person to come and work?

The deeper the questions, the better the litmus test is going to be and as soon as you get the results, share them with everybody not just for the leadership.

This helps you and everybody else to know where exactly the organization is. And when you begin to implement the ideas, you can begin to see movement & progress. Share the ideas, share the results and then come up with a plan of action. Say, this is what we are going to do to take us from 80% to 100% and let everybody know.

You must communicate.

A leader without a title is the most effective leader. You don’t need a title to be able to lead, why? People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Most importantly, your foot soldiers will always make you shine. And they can only make you shine if you are communicating effectively, up, down openly making sure you communicate past just work, making sure you listen more than you speak.

That will help your communication go to another level. Make sure that it is easier for the people to bring their ideas up to the leadership and vice versa.

Challenge and grow your people consistently.

Why? Tony Robbins says, every day if you are not growing, you’re dying. If your team is not growing, it’s dying. I am imploring you, challenge them. If you are not challenging your people consistently, throw stuff at them, see how they step up, see how much they can take, see how much they can grow. Challenge them and when you challenge them, they have got to grow.

Create winning business processes.

Create processes that help people to have those daily wins. Let the customer service process be that at the end of the day, a customer can give a thumbs up, why? People like to win, people like to feel like they contributed and people like to know that today they made a difference. You begin to engage people. Get the processes to make people feel that they are serving. Get people to feel that they are contributing to something bigger, something better.

Reward unconditionally.

So many entrepreneurs, leaders are really challenged by this one. They say we give them a monthly bonus, yearly bonus. I say, if somebody is performing consistently every month and, you are going to wait until the end of the year to reward them, don’t you think there is something wrong there. Most importantly, that means that your rewards are conditional.

How about if you rewarded according to performance, how about you created a situation where you rewarded monthly, how about you created a situation where you reward every person in the department if they have done well. And guess what, where we have seen this work, the company tripled their performance in less than 6 months.

When they introduced the employee of the month, the employee of the week, the department of the month, performance and engagement results went up. All of a sudden, they could see things are happening, why? Because people felt hey, we are doing something here, there was competition. It was just a fantastic vibe to see. And I think that is one of the greatest success stories we have ever had, simply, because they started to reward unconditionally.

Reward now. Don’t wait for you to be successful, then, you will see what will happen eventually. Plant the seed now and see what happens.

Before you know it, the results are through the roof. The team is super engaged, and results are becoming much better.

Stay awesome.

#Rapid Influence System 1