Do you feel unengaged in your business workplace? Unengaged with your upline supervisors and chain of command? Or unengaged with your downline team members? Or, worse even still, just totally unengaged in both directions?
Yeah, me, too, in various times during my forty years in business. So I know how you feel, because I’ve sometimes felt the same way, but let me tell you what I found out.
You control the level of your engagement both upline and downline and the success of your engagement in either direction is directly connected to the success of your engagement in the other.
So, in order to be Great! All the time! you need to engage your entire team in both directions. Here’s some tips on how to do this:
Substitute annual (or more frequent) performance reviews with continuous bi-directional conversations.
Talk more often to both your upline and your downline. Take notes (using a mechanical pencil in a paper journal is best, IMHO) of only the key points discussed. Use whatever opportunities to communicate you can create to set expectations and goals, praise success, correct only nicely to repair occasional lapses, and listen closely to the needs of both your upline and your downline to learn how you can help each and all of them do their job better
Encourage specificity.
Generalities are generally nonactionable. Being told, “Frank, I’m just not happy with your performance” and leaving it at that provides no information about how you can do things better. The best response to such a statement would be, “Well, frankly, Frank, I have no idea why that’s so, so why don’t you tell me exactly why you’re so dissatisfied.” (Okay, maybe not quite so smarmily, but you get the idea.) On the other end of the stick, when a subordinate person tells you they are not happy doing what they are doing how they are doing it, ask them to describe in immaculate detail how their practically perfect performance in this aspect of their life would look. And then, listen intently and take notes.
Realize that everyone everywhere in your organization hungers for consistent appreciation, dignity, and respect; so give it to them.
People like being loved at times, but strange as it may sound, they love even more just being liked all the time. Continuous appreciation of other team members leads to better job satisfaction, which fosters better internal and external client/customer service, which leads to better client/customer satisfaction and progress, which leads to more things to appreciate in one big happy continuous circle.
We will talk more about working with both employees and employers in the future.
[reminder]When was the last time you told your upline or downline, “Thank you for letting me work with you another day!”?[/reminder]