The Leadership Void

In previous articles, Wayne has discussed the worldwide issue of employee disengagement: what it is, what causes it, and how pervasive it is. This article begins a look at root causes. First up is poor leadership, which stems from poor decisions relative to who gets hired, promoted, and developed as leaders for the future. Effective leaders are the only people in an organization who can change the conditions that lead to disengagement.

For at least a decade now the Gallup organization has been conducting annual, world-wide surveys of employee attitudes and engagement levels. The American data show that, on average, 70% of all employees are disengaged from their jobs. The data reveal that this is attributable to poor managers.

Also, this may be the most costly human resource issue in modern business. The following areas are places where disengagement may be manifesting itself:

Employee turnover
Spoilage
Rework
Material waste
Absenteeism
Burnout
Quiet quitting

It is not hard to visualize how these issues, stemming from employees low in motivation and commitment, could easily cost your company 4–5% of sales annually.

Additional Gallup research has found that, 82% of the time, companies consistently fail to choose the right person with the right talent for a leadership/management role. That means the success rate for picking managers with the talent to do the job is only 18%. Experience tells us the most likely cause of this is a poor decision process that does not assess for the behavioral traits and competencies known to be consistently present in effective leaders and managers. Blindly flipping coins would yield higher success rates!

It’s no wonder that engagement levels are so low when 82% of the time the manager is not well-suited to do the job!

Digging deeper, Gallup research reveals that, on average, about one in 10 of the people in an average company has the natural talent to fill a leadership or management role. This seems to be the normal distribution of leadership talent in the general population. If we could identify the “naturals” we could, at the very least, improve our success rate for picking successful leaders by a factor of 3–4X.

Using the findings of behavioral science one more time we will have the plausible, even likely, beginnings of a workable solution to the management issue at the root of employee disengagement. According to Dan Harrison, PhD, if you enjoy at least 70–75% of the tasks required by your job or role you are 3X more likely to perform them well. The reason: Performance-Enjoyment Theory, which posits that the things we do repeatedly tend to be things we enjoy and that we’ve performed many times. The more we do these things, both our preferences for doing them grow and, also, we tend to become more fluent or better at them. Over time, the things we do most often tend to become strong behavioral traits/tendencies. We all have several strong tendencies we use as often as possible and, also, a few we don’t enjoy and don’t use much. There are about 50 basic traits/tendencies. Somewhere around 15–20% of them are either our natural strengths or the tendencies we might find ways to avoid or procrastinate using. The rest of these traits are sandwiched between the two extremes.

A lot of research has been done over the last few decades correlating specific traits to specific jobs and roles. As a result, there are well known tendencies that effective leaders, for example, have and use. The one in 10 described above most likely possesses these traits and tendencies. Here’s why this is so important: tendencies predict what you will do, not what you can do. In considering people to hire, promote, and develop for the future, what they can do (skills, knowledge, experience) are important. Knowing if they have the right behavioral traits and will do what is needed is crucial!

It appears that to begin to solve the disengagement issue a new look at identifying and hiring/promoting/developing managers and leaders may be justified. We don’t have a very good record and we’re picking from a small slice of the population. Using the research done by Dr. Harrison and others, we need to evaluate potential candidates and determine if they have the traits and tendencies they will need to dramatically improve their chances of success.

This is only a first step but, if the manager is at the root of the disengagement issue, we need to begin to change that picture. There are very few things that, as a business owner or CEO, you can do that are more important than insuring the people you place in leadership/management roles are well suited in terms of having the right talent for the job. If you’d like to discuss this further please reach out below or email to the address given below.

Wayne Lynn, CEO and founder of Lynn Consulting, can be reached at [email protected].