Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report for 2017 shows that 70% of employees are disengaged at work. Think about what that means for your business? You could achieve so much more if you developed a leadership culture that engages employees, gives them purpose and meaning in their work, and helps them see early and often if they are headed in the right direction. This iterative, adaptive approach is the central concept of agile, and it harnesses the power of real teams working on high value, meaningful work, and constantly improving the way they work.

Agile organizations experience employee engagement by:

Delivering value. This is the key promise of an agile approach. You work iteratively and incrementally, with teams that are first and foremost focused on delivering high business value work every iteration. There is an incredible amount of efficacy here as developers see their work delight customers and get real feedback on work they just completed. It also provides incredible flexibility in that teams are empowered to change and adapt to customer needs and market conditions when appropriate, within the confines of company purpose and vision. They do not have to wait for a singular order from the top of the organizational hierarchy. This will make your organization more responsive to changing conditions and make you better suited to thrive in the complex and unknowable future market.

Putting the customer first. Similar to delivering value in that this behavior allows
teams to really see the outcome of their hard work. By practicing intense customer
centrism, placing the customer at the center of all that you do, your organization will
cultivate a truly purpose-driven approach to development. Everything your teams do will be focused on how it benefits the customer. And they will get very quick feedback if they are headed in the right direction. This immediate reinforcement and recognition of
outcomes will drive engagement skyward.

Creating Self-organizing teams. This is a buzzword in agile, and many organizations
struggle with how to make this happen. They key is not to try to make anything happen,
but to allow it to happen by changing your behavior as a leader. This is the leadership
shift from manager as task-master, to manager as coach. By stepping back, and
providing teams with a trusting and support environment, with a vision and purpose,
leaders can provide supportive coaching along the way and teams learn to organize
around their work and share leadership. We push decision making and authority down to the team level, where the actual work happens, and give leaders space to do other
things. This is where the magic happens. Leaders can then start to look further and
further out, pull out of firefighting mode at the tactical level, and see further toward the
horizon of strategy and direction. It also provides them the space to remove
impediments that are blocking teams from achieving even more. This type of leadership
shift that can allow self-organizing teams to emerge requires a commitment to a journey of personal and professional change, and needs great coaching, guidance and support
along the way.

Continuously Improving. Truly agile organizations are dedicated to continuous
improvement. They constantly look for opportunities to improve their process in order to deliver better. They also strive to deliver the best product they can. This speaks to
quality, business value, and meeting customer expectations. They also want to be
better as a team. This could include how they work, who does what, what they need
from their leadership and supportive systems around them, and what specific skills they
need on the team. At an individual level, all team members are looking for opportunities
to improve. Everyone has a growth mindset, and raises their hand for new challenges
and opportunities to pair with someone more experienced so that they can develop new
skills. It is no longer solely the manager-to-employee relationship that drives professional development, but the team pulling together to be better as a whole. Scaling this up beyond the team team level, as impediments become a leadership and organizational challenge, agile organizations maintain an organizational backlog of impediments that the leadership team works on daily in order to remove blocker and increase the flow of high value work through their delivery teams.

Radical Transparency. Another much-used word in the agile community, it simply means giving teams and individuals the information they need to deliver, reflect, and improve. People want and deserve to know how they participate in the broader value stream for your customers. This greater awareness of the system they are a part of provides a greater sense of purpose and will, in turn, greatly increase their engagement within that system. You cannot expect people to be responsible and accountable for their work if they are not provided the autonomy to execute in a purposeful way — freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. Another key element related to the concept of
transparency is the ability to take a more holistic, systems approach. Value creation is a
horizontal outcome, relying on value streams that move from customer need to delivery.
Yet most organizations are built vertically, by functional group, and the hierarchy around them is designed to control and manage all of this complexity. The result is employees locally optimizing their work, doing most what they are told, with little recognition of the larger value stream that they are a part of and the customer they are creating value for. By nurturing the organizational capability for systems thinking, we allow individuals and teams to optimize across a value stream and create more value.

Leadership Storytelling. Leaders set the vision and direction for the organization. They
should not merely be placed in a position of authority in order to control and manage
what people do. Sharing the vision of where the organization is going, the values it will
take to get there, and the missions that everyone needs to accomplish is the most vital
thing for leaders in an organization. Without good leadership storytelling and
communicating a vision for the organization, people will start to tell their own story, and
this is likely going to be the wrong message. Establish the “why” for your organization
by clearly articulating a vision. This can be done in a variety of ways, but ritual,
storytelling, and reinforcement are key. Leaders must create a framework of intent that
clarifies the vision and enables people in the organization to act in the absence of
orders. This is how modern militaries operate.

Those are just few thoughts for you to consider as your evaluate ways to engage your employees more.

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason