Six skills managers need to drive employee engagement and results

​A recent study conducted by Jack Zenger, author of Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, highlights six skills that focus on improving leaders’ people skills and organisational results. These ‘behavioural bridges’ have been created following analysis of 360 degree assessment data from 60,000 leaders.

According to Zenger, the best leaders do the following:

1)      Communicate clear strategy and direction
When people are confused about the organisation’s strategy or direction they quickly become dissatisfied and disengaged. To achieve the best results, leaders must give their team the clarity of the direction and strategy of the organisation.

2)      Inspire and motivate
Leaders who are solely results driven often neglect these areas. Leaders with less power in an organisation, such as Supervisors, often rely on people skills to achieve results. Because of this, Supervisors are twice as likely to be rated highly in both their team’s satisfaction and its results.

3)      Establish stretch goals
Setting stretch goals means the whole team is needed. This gives all members of the team a sense of value and engagement.

4)      Work at a high integrity and inspire trust
To be trusted, leaders need to show they can ‘walk the walk’ and never ask their team to do something they would not be willing to do themselves.

5)      Develop others
Leaders who invest time in developing the skills of their team will be able to reap the benefits as their team’s productivity increases.

6)      Respond positively to coaching
Just as leaders should focus on developing their team, this also applies to the leader themselves. Gaining feedback from colleagues creates a culture of openness allowing colleagues to help if they see their leader about to make a mistake.  
 
How can we help?
MSB Consultancy has designed and delivered leadership development programmes for 30 years.  We develop cutting-edge programmes which combine academic rigour with real-life pragmatism.  In partnership with Lancaster University Management School, one of the world’s best business schools, we also offer accreditation/certification.

To find out more about how MSB can support your organisation’s leaders – and future leaders – please see the leadership development page on our new website.