Leadership Soapbox – Building Morale Part 2
Tuesday October 13, 2020
How to build morale by showing your staff that the organisation is capable
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hi, my name’s Neil Poynter, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Leadership Soapbox, now this is part two of my three, or probably be four-part series actually, on how we build morale and engagement in our organizations.
So if you remember, in part one, I described that we’ve got to engage three parts of people, we’ve got, got to engage us at three levels, there’s our emotions, there’s our intellect and there’s actually us as physically, as people. So last time we covered the emotional engagement. ie engaging the heart, and that was about having a clear objective and goal that people want to get to, a plan, and then people understanding their part in it.
So this week we’re moving on to the intellectual engagement, now it’s great if we’ve engaged people emotionally, cause they wanna be part of it and they will, and now they go, so how, how do we do this?
And what they now start to do is to look at you, your plan, and your organization. So again, three things we need to do, to be able to engage people intellectually that, yes, this is going to work.
So first of all, the plan has to be seen as being achievable, if challenging. Now there are some people who would say, needs to be challenging to put the stretch in there, but it needs to be something that even if challenging people go, yes, that’s possible, it’s achievable, yes with a stretch, we can do it, because if it’s not, they’re just not going, they’re going to give up.
Okay, you might have the best goal, and a reasonable plan is active and people understand that, but if I don’t believe that you’re actually going to be able to achieve the plan, that they’re just not going to engage.
Okay, so let’s say you’ve got an achievable plan, great, tick! Part two, the organization is capable and effective, all right, so what people do is look around themselves and go, so this plan with this group of people and this capability, can we achieve it?
Now again, if they’re thinking, well, we’re not organized properly, we haven’t got the right capabilities, they’re going to lose faith. So again, here’s something, is the organization capable of achieving that goal and that plan?
Now it might be that part of the plan is to develop the capability, well that’s okay, that’s good, but you’ve got to tick that box. Can people look around the organization and think yes, this organization is capable of doing it.
Now the third one is where this gets personal, people look at the leadership and go is the leadership of this organization competent?
Able to lead this plan?
And does it care about its people?
Is it going to think about it’s people on route now, this is where it starts to become about us, and it’s really important that if you’re the CEO of your manager of a department or leading a department that your management team, your leadership team is seen by the people in the organization as being competent and capable of leading this plan.
That’s not just that they’re good leaders, but there’s actually got to be a degree of technical competence here, so that they are capable of executing this plan, now, I think there’s also that final part in there that, you know, do they care?
Are they going to think about the people that they’ve got in their teams and how they’re going to deploy this plan?
So three things, again, this intellectual engagement, this is where people are going to quiz you mentally, is this plan achievable? Is this organization capable of achieving this plan? At least the leadership competent.
So this is where we get quite pithy, so I don’t know, ask yourselves is your leadership team competent? Is the plan achievable? Is your organization capable?
Now, if you’d like to discuss that or have a talk about that, then please get in contact with me, you know, what are your plans for making your organization competent and capable?
Is your leadership team up to what you’re doing?
Okay, so that’s part two. I’ll tie this in with part one, but let’s start thinking about this, what are you doing to engage your people?
And let’s have a conversation about it. Thanks very much and I’ll see you next time.
