It's time for senior leaders to lead the charge in supporting their people

For so long sup­port­ing and invest­ing in peo­ple in the work­place has been HR and line man­ag­er ter­ri­to­ry but with a glob­al pan­dem­ic snap­ping at our heel’s, times have changed. It’s time for senior lead­er­ship to lead the charge in sup­port­ing their peo­ple. McK­in­sey note in an arti­cle about CEO mind­sets; ​“ask suc­cess­ful investors what they look for in port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, and many will tell you they’d rather put mon­ey on an aver­age strat­e­gy in the hands of great tal­ent than on a great strat­e­gy in the hands of aver­age tal­ent.” And go on to say, ​“The best CEOs think sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly about their peo­ple: which roles they play, what they can achieve, and how the com­pa­ny should oper­ate to increase people’s impact.”

As a senior leader, what should you invest in right now to sup­port your peo­ple? And how should you lead the charge? A busi­ness-crit­i­cal place to start is with employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance man­age­ment.

Good employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance man­age­ment impacts your bot­tom line 

The real­i­ty is that invest­ing in employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance man­age­ment dri­ves prof­itabil­i­ty. A study by Gallup found that ​“high­ly engaged teams show 21% greater prof­itabil­i­ty”. We recent­ly spoke to CEO Jamie Allam, at Amthal Fire and Secu­ri­ty about why he felt it was so vital­ly impor­tant to lead on invest­ing in their employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance man­age­ment right now:

“We always say that peo­ple are the most impor­tant aspect to our busi­ness, and if we’re only com­mu­ni­cat­ing with those peo­ple once every 12 months, we aren’t real­ly walk­ing our own talk.” 

Amthal adopt­ed Clear Review in Octo­ber 2019 and Jamie has seen many ben­e­fits includ­ing increased account­abil­i­ty across the organ­i­sa­tion: ​“There is an increased lev­el of account­abil­i­ty because at least every quar­ter, or with­in my team once a month, we are review­ing and check­ing objec­tives and actions and what’s hap­pened against them. We don’t get side-tracked, and we are actu­al­ly hold­ing each oth­er account­able — that goes for me as well — on the things that we say we’ll do, imple­ment and what our focus­es are.” 

Good per­for­mance man­age­ment offers greater clar­i­ty and direc­tion for employ­ees too. Jamie believes that unless every­body knows where they stand they can­not progress or be as pro­duc­tive: ​“We have to work hard to keep train­ing peo­ple in how to use it effec­tive­ly but I like to feel that I should be able to look at any team mem­ber in Clear Review and see a clear set of objec­tives for that indi­vid­ual. If it’s clear to me, then its clear for that indi­vid­ual as well and I can see how that per­son is pro­gress­ing from both a tech­ni­cal and per­son­al point of view.” 

Senior lead­ers need to role mod­el – it can’t just be HR 

Research by McK­in­sey found that ​“CEOs who insist on rig­or­ous­ly mea­sur­ing and man­ag­ing all cul­tur­al ele­ments that dri­ve per­for­mance more than dou­ble the odds that their strate­gies will be exe­cut­ed. And over the long term, they deliv­er triple the total return to share­hold­ers that oth­er com­pa­nies deliv­er.[1] Doing this well involves thought­ful approach­es to role mod­el­ling, sto­ry­telling, align­ing of for­mal rein­force­ments (such as incen­tives), and invest­ing in skill building.” 

Jamie attrib­ut­es role mod­el­ling from him to the suc­cess­ful changes Amthal have made to their employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance man­age­ment, start­ing off with Jamie request­ing feedback:

“I went out to every­body and said I love that we are all giv­ing each oth­er feed­back, and that I have received feed­back but very lit­tle of that has been con­struc­tive, I’m pret­ty sure that’s not because I am per­fect, but it’s that you’re not being hon­est with me, so can every­one give me some con­struc­tive feed­back? That was enlight­en­ing for me because I actu­al­ly asked them and almost gave them per­mis­sion and every­body gave me some con­struc­tive feed­back which was good.” 

Every­body wins with good employ­ee engage­ment and per­for­mance management 

Right now, more than ever as we go through this tur­bu­lent time, it’s vital to be sup­port­ing and invest­ing in per­for­mance man­age­ment and employ­ee engage­ment. It cre­ates greater clar­i­ty, removes ambi­gu­i­ty, helps you assess who your high per­form­ers are and ulti­mate­ly cre­ates a moti­vat­ed and engaged work­force who can dri­ve prof­itabil­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty — every­body wins! 

Jamie at Amthal believes; ​“If you’re not work­ing on try­ing to engage and moti­vate your team then your team won’t be as pro­duc­tive. They’ll do what’s required of them but noth­ing more. It’s real­ly about try­ing to have a high­ly engaged team so that we can deliv­er our com­mit­ment to our cus­tomers but also more impor­tant­ly to con­tin­ue to grow our business.” 

[1] Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger, Beyond Per­for­mance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Lead­ing Large-Scale Change, Hobo­ken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019.