Actively disengaged
Jan 12, 2024
On Monday Evelyn, 6, sat down outside her house and, with big wet tears rolling down her face, refused to move.
We’d just left our house for the morning dog walk and seen our neighbour (Evelyn’s mum) trying to coax her daughter to walk to school with her, her older brother and baby sister. But Evelyn was having none of it and had decided to protest by doing the only thing that was in her power to stop it happening: sit.
Thankfully, Barnaby (our dog) was up to the challenge and with a very waggy tail went over, licked her face and let her stroke him. This did the trick and with some more coaxing she got up and joined her family on the walk to school.
The 'I don’t want to go back to school!’ theme didn’t stop there. On our walk we bumped into one of the maintenance team who was mowing the grass in our local park. We talk regularly to him (and he loves seeing Barnaby), but this time he was really down about his return to work after the Christmas break. He couldn’t see the point of mowing grass that obviously didn’t need to be mowed and he knew the weeks ahead would be just more of the same mindless tasks until it got a bit warmer and he and the others could do more interesting work.
Over the past few decades, the survey company Gallup has interviewed more than 25 million people across a wide variety of industries and organisations about how ‘engaged’, ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ they are at work, (see * below for the source).
They have found that generally managers and executives are the most engaged but they’re apparently not doing a great job engaging others. And even though managers are doing the best in terms of their own engagement, more than half still aren’t especially engaged.
When they dig deeper into the data, they can see that managers who focus on their team member’s strengths have a much more engaged team, compared to those managers who focus on weaknesses or neglect to focus on much of anything at all.
This seems so obvious but it’s hard to do it consistently, especially if you’re not feeling it either as the manager.
One tool we use that can help stimulate engagement (and focus on individual needs and strengths) is our ‘What’s In It For Me?’ tool. Try it yourself and download the pdf and video guides here: https://www.goslowtogofast.co.uk/A1
(It doesn’t include Barnaby as part of the support, unfortunately).
We’d just left our house for the morning dog walk and seen our neighbour (Evelyn’s mum) trying to coax her daughter to walk to school with her, her older brother and baby sister. But Evelyn was having none of it and had decided to protest by doing the only thing that was in her power to stop it happening: sit.
Thankfully, Barnaby (our dog) was up to the challenge and with a very waggy tail went over, licked her face and let her stroke him. This did the trick and with some more coaxing she got up and joined her family on the walk to school.
The 'I don’t want to go back to school!’ theme didn’t stop there. On our walk we bumped into one of the maintenance team who was mowing the grass in our local park. We talk regularly to him (and he loves seeing Barnaby), but this time he was really down about his return to work after the Christmas break. He couldn’t see the point of mowing grass that obviously didn’t need to be mowed and he knew the weeks ahead would be just more of the same mindless tasks until it got a bit warmer and he and the others could do more interesting work.
Over the past few decades, the survey company Gallup has interviewed more than 25 million people across a wide variety of industries and organisations about how ‘engaged’, ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ they are at work, (see * below for the source).
They have found that generally managers and executives are the most engaged but they’re apparently not doing a great job engaging others. And even though managers are doing the best in terms of their own engagement, more than half still aren’t especially engaged.
When they dig deeper into the data, they can see that managers who focus on their team member’s strengths have a much more engaged team, compared to those managers who focus on weaknesses or neglect to focus on much of anything at all.
This seems so obvious but it’s hard to do it consistently, especially if you’re not feeling it either as the manager.
One tool we use that can help stimulate engagement (and focus on individual needs and strengths) is our ‘What’s In It For Me?’ tool. Try it yourself and download the pdf and video guides here: https://www.goslowtogofast.co.uk/A1
(It doesn’t include Barnaby as part of the support, unfortunately).
Happy team building,
Hazel and Nick
*Gallup source here: https://hbr.org/2013/06/ten-charts-that-show-weve-all-got-a-case-of-the-mondays
*Gallup source here: https://hbr.org/2013/06/ten-charts-that-show-weve-all-got-a-case-of-the-mondays
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