Engage for Success has launched and hopefully now companies everywhere will be encouraged and inspired to boost engagement.  This is great news for our suffering UK economy and its reported £26 billion in lost productivity but the real job has only just begun.   

Engagement campaigns cannot build performance cultures: that only happens when managers get stuck in and relish their roles as engagers of others. 

 Helping managers become expert engagers is something HR must be resolutely focused on. This starts with assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the management population within the context of engagement. HR must strive to know their managers as individual engagers and not as a generalised group.

 The research we undertook with a global management population resulted in a profiling tool that can help managers explore where their natural strengths and weaknesses lie.  The profiling results show that, of the five roles I highlighted as crucial for engaging others (Prophet, Storyteller, Strategist, Coach and Pilot), the Coach is one of the trickiest areas for managers to crack.  But because it doesn’t sit that naturally with most managers, it either doesn’t happen or it doesn’t happen very effectively.  Of course, this weakness may or may not be typical of your own organisation, but the only way to arm managers with the specific support they need is to know what you’re dealing with first.

 As I have shared with HRZ before, the good news is that HR are often strongest at Strategist, a highly logical and pragmatic role that focuses on the detail and planning needed to ensure engagement plans come to fruition.  This role is vital in pulling together a specific engagement plan for each manager that help builds their competency and confidence across the five areas of engaging they find most difficult. 

If managers are serious about increasing the engagement levels of their employees, knowing their manager-as-engager strengths and weaknesses is an obvious but vital place to start. HR can have huge influence in pulling together the practicalities needed to make it happen and not let another engagement campaign amount to nothing. It’s great that Engage for Success has been launched and should raise the awareness and desire among British businesses to engage their people to create higher performance, but it’s the sustaining of that momentum in organisations that will be key.  This is where our Strategists and Coaches come in – and where HR has a massive opportunity to make a sustained difference.