Don’t try to Motivate your team, Employee Engagement is what matters: So What (Part 2)

In the previous blog I discussed why we should forget trying to motivate staff and instead focus on employee engagement. Let’s now have a look at why this is important.

SO WHAT?

In approaching this theme, we have to first reflect on what Paul Rogers would normally ask “So, what?”

The answer to this question relies on a simple logical sequence:

Employee Engagement –> Trust –> Effective Work –> Contribution –> Customer Success –> Perpetuation of the Organisation

A) EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT BUILDS TRUST.

Trust is a basic ingredient of any positive relationship. If Trust is missing then teamwork does not exist. This is because cooperation and daily interaction easily deteriorates into arguments and conflict which is destructive for the morale of a team and diverts their attention from the real targets.

Hence, the existence of Trust is the building stone for the team members doing effective work and contributing to the team.

B) EFFECTIVE WORK MEANS FOCUS IN PERPETUATING THE ORGANISATION

As I will discuss in a future blog post, employee contribution is a key element to achieve Customer Success.

This seems self-evident i.e unless employees truly care and try to excel in the delivery of their work and the advancement of the Organisation’s vision and targets (provided of course that the Organisation’s positioning is rightly adjusted), the Organisation will not succeed in its goals and hence, its customers will be less likely to be successful in theirs.

On a broader scale, Drucker’s vision takes a more existentialist view on what an organisation is there for:

An “Organization is, to a large extent, a means of over-coming the limitations mortality sets to what any one man can contribute. An organization that is not capable of perpetuating itself has failed…….. An organization which just perpetuates today’s level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt. And since the one and only thing certain in human affairs is change, it will not be capable of survival in a changed tomorrow.” Peter Drucker from The Effective Executive.

So, for Drucker the organisation is a means for individuals to make a lasting contribution to the world.

From that perspective it is not only a necessity for an organisation to put in place a framework that ensures employee engagement so that employees can maximise their contributions and thus, secure the organisation remains relevant and profitable in this fast-paced world. But a responsibility to secure a framework that allows its employees and in extension itself to maximise its contribution to society overall.

In essence, looking at the grander picture i.e. that the Organisation is the lever for expression and progress in modern society or not, one thing is for sure: the success of the organizational goals is heavily reliant on employee engagement and contribution.

In my next blog post I will discuss some practical ways to achieve this.

[Image credit: 123rf.com]