AN UNUSUAL PHENOMENON EMERGED IN 2022 AND IT SHOWS NO SIGN OF STOPPING IN 2023.
Seemingly every couple of months, the media would report on a new workplace trend – or more accurately, a buzzword – that was about to revolutionise the workplace. The buzzword itself had most often become popularised on social media and in most cases, it was women that were popularising it.
First there was ‘quiet quitting’; essentially a withdrawal of consent for ‘going the extra mile’ at work, then came ‘loud quitting’; whereby employees were encouraged to take the risky step of quitting and using their platforms to share why they did so, and now we have ‘rage applying’; the act of firing off as many applications as one can manage while powered by the ‘rage’ of being passed over for promotion. I’ve also seen ‘climate quitting’ gaining traction recently.
The relative merits of these trends are debatable. Each one is rooted in a sense of confrontation between worker and employer and that’s never good. But their emergence does highlight an issue that needs addressing. Workplaces around the world are suffering from an engagement crisis.
Laura Ashley-Timms looks at the soft skills required in the new ‘world of work’, how to implement them, and how by changing leadership coaching we can drive engagement, productivity and inclusion.
Laura is recognised as one of the UK’s top Executive Coaches and is the co-creator of the STAR® model (2010) and the multi-award-winning STAR® Manager program (STARmanager.global).
She is an expert and thought leader on how to leverage Operational Coaching™ behaviours across organisations to drive commercial results and improve productivity and engagement levels.
As the co-founder and COO of Notion, a performance improvement consultancy established in 2000, Laura has led the team to win a string of awards for innovation, learning design and academic partnerships and for its work with FTSE and Fortune 500 clients, including Personnel Today magazine’s prestigious Learning & Development Supplier of the Year.
Laura is the co-author of the best-selling book The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader.
THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT TODAY COMPARED TO JUST THREE YEARS AGO.
People are dealing with a lot; war in Europe, a cost-of-living crisis, environmental concerns and adapting to remote or hybrid working are just some of the obvious ones. So, it’s no wonder there’s an issue with engagement. My colleague and co-founder of Notion, Dominic, calls this ‘the great realignment’. We’re reprioritising and seeking balance, and engagement at work is one of the casualties which is often due to the people skills and capabilities of our line managers. .
Whenever problems with engagement emerge, we naturally look to managers to provide the solution. But is it actually solely their responsibility to fix lagging engagement? Managers have an incredibly hard time, especially those ‘accidental managers’ who were promoted into leadership roles because they excelled at something else, with little desire or intention of becoming a manager of people. While managers should be able to foster a degree of engagement in their team, we can’t expect them to fix everything relating to engagement. Furthermore, I believe that leaving managers to solve the engagement crisis on their own denies non-managers an important opportunity.
2023 could be the year where everyone, manager or not, takes back ownership of their own engagement. That could be through finding better ways to ‘manage-up’, discovering new ways to contribute, ways to inspire others or to simply clarify to ourselves and those we work with what we want from our work and our careers.
As well as being at the forefront of the social media push to raise awareness of poor engagement, they’re also leading the line when it comes to taking action.
A 2022 McKinsey study found that “women are demanding more from work, and they’re leaving their companies in unprecedented numbers to get it. Women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rates we’ve ever seen—and at higher rates than men in leadership.”
SO HOW DO WE TAKE OWNERSHIP OF OUR OWN ENGAGEMENT?
One of the drivers behind the ‘quiet quitting’ trend was people realising how little they actually cared – or thought they cared – about their jobs in the context of what else was happening in the world.
To me that’s a shame. While not everyone can find their dream job right away, work can and should always have meaning. Whether that comes in the form of personal development and growth, through learning a specific new skill or simply managing to do things that make you feel uncomfortable, there’s lots of meaning to be found in work.
Another great way to power-up our own levels of engagement is to get better at asking questions.
AND HOW DO WE IMPROVE THE SORT OF QUESTIONS WE ASK?
Start with understanding that there are two types of questions. We have common, transactional questions like ‘have we generated any leads today?’ or ‘will we have an MVP by the end of the sprint?’. The questions appeal for context specific information. They’re often easily boiled down to yes or no answers.
Then we have rare, insightful questions. These are not designed to inform the person asking the question, but to enlighten or ignite a creative, problem-solving fire in the person being asked the question. Questions like the two below can be extremely provocative, in a good way.
‘If you were to look at the situation from your boss or colleague’s perspective, what do you think they would say?’
‘If time wasn’t an obstacle in overcoming this challenge, what would you do differently?”
Any question that helps encourage a new way of thinking is an insightful question.
GETTING BETTER AT LISTENING
What happens after the question has been asked is almost as important as the question itself. In the best-selling book The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader, which I co-authored, our readers are encouraged to become ‘intuitive listeners’.
This is a progression of the concept of ‘active listening’. Key to its success is the ability to focus deeply and intently on what the other person is saying, and not simply waiting to speak.
Developing your listening skills as well as your questioning skills is a powerful way to supercharge your own engagement levels at work and your career success.
