Employee Engagement and Leader Approachability: New Gallup Research

New Gallup research proves the relationship between leader approachability and employee engagement.

If you want to improve engagement there is really only one place to look – your supervisors. Gallup’s most recent report, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, found that:

“Managers account for up to 70% of variance in engagement.”

And there’s the rub.

As leaders, we constantly struggle to keep employees engaged. It’s the most important, and most challenging, part of our job. You can have a perfect market, a high quality product, solid economics and wide distribution all nailed down. But if our employees don’t care, none of it matters.

Everyone knows this. That’s why “employee engagement” is such a hot topic in business today. And we as leaders know we are mostly responsible for that engagement. But we still struggle. In fact, Gallup estimates that only 29% of the American workforce is actually engaged.

This can mean only one thing: as leaders we are failing our people.

Research on leader approachability is still in the early stages. We are one of the pioneers (check out our white paper here). That’s why it’s so exciting when we see others finding the same results we’ve found. Again, from Gallup:

Among employees who strongly agree that they can approach their manager with any type of question, 54% are engaged. When employees strongly disagree, only 2% are engaged, while 65% are actively disengaged.

That’s an amazing finding. Check out this chart from the research:

Robin Camarote, author of Own It: Drive Your Career to a Place of Happiness and Success, is also a believer in approachability. Her recent Inc. article cites Gallup’s research and provides her own “6 Tricks to Being More Approachable.” Here they are:

1. Make the first move. You can’t wait for employees to come to you. As I explain in The Approachability Playbook: 3 Essential Habits for Thriving Leaders and Teams, people in low power positions often fear approaching someone in a high power position. You have to initiate. Why? Because of power-distance (check out our article here on how power-distance killed Nokia) Where do you start? A great place to start is with our three questions (see number 6 below). In addition to work-related topics, ask your coworkers about their families, hobbies and what is exciting them outside of work.
2. Listen carefully. Engage in active listening. This means listening with a purpose to summarize back what you’ve heard. If you do this you are more likely to ask clarifying questions and to behave in a way that shows you are really listening (because you are!) Don’t try to figure out what you’re going to say next – try to keep them talking as long as you can.
3. Share. To truly be approachable, you have to be vulnerable. You can only grow a relationship and build trust by sharing with others. That’s what makes people comfortable with you. It makes them see you as a full person and not just someone who’s higher up the ladder. Your success won’t impress people. Being down-to-earth in spite of your success will.
4. Make it professionally personal. The point here isn’t to become a gossip or an amateur psychiatrist. You want to know what is going on in the lives of your people without being nosy or too personal. Keep things professional.
5. Note your non-verbals. Robin really nailed it here. Non-verbal communication is critical! Trying to have a personal conversation with someone while checking email on your phone or standing with your arms crossed defeats the purpose of the conversation to begin with. It’s belittling and making them feel unimportant. Hot tip: stuff like this sends people flying over to the “actively disengaged” side of the scale.
6. Keep a running list of questions to ask. Have a few gems in your back pocket for feeding conversation once it starts. Camarote suggest general questions that can be used in any array of conversations. “How does that make you feel?” or “How do you see that working?” Or use a variation of our three questions: Do you have what you need? What would make work better? Where are you going?

This is all great advice. I think it boils down to two things.

1. Leaders HAVE to care about their people. You wouldn’t be reading this post if you didn’t. But how are you showing it? Remember what FDR said: nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Think about how you can show how much you care in the way you carry yourself, the way you communicate and follow up with your team, and in how available you are to your teammates.
2. Don’t make things difficult. This is where Approachable Leadership all started for me. There is so much advice out there about what leaders can do to increase engagement. Most of it is complex and hard to remember in the moment. To me, it’s simple. Focus on being more approachable. Everything else will follow.

It is great to see organizations like Gallup backing up what we’ve been preaching about the critical importance of approachable leaders to employee engagement. If you are looking for tips on improving your approachability and haven’t picked up The Playbook yet, that’s a great place to start.

Are employees of your more approachable leaders more engaged? Have you worked for a leader you considered approachable? How engaged were you working for them? Have you ever worked for a leader who hurt your engagement? How approachable would you say they were? Let us know in the comments!