How the Right Kind of Connection Keeps Your Team Engaged

Last week we started discussing the idea of connection, in particular the idea of connecting new starters to the business, their peers, and the wider network they need to succeed.

This week, we're exploring the other end of the employment journey. The reason people leave their roles and how we can prevent that. And it too is about connection.

This graphic is the third time I have seen this data presented by McKinsey based on their global research. It shows the reasons people leave their roles. The reasons themselves jockey for a place with each iteration, but the top 5 have been pretty consistent for a while, which means we have a target we can aim at and hit to solve this. Let us focus on that first circle: the lack of career development and advancement.

The Five Types of Connection Your Team Needs

Before we get into the specifics of development, it helps to understand the full picture of connection. At the most basic human level, connection has been a critical element right back from when we were merely apes. The idea of a tribe connected by common purpose gave them a critical advantage over lone wolves. The modern workplace honestly isn't significantly different.

1. Human Connection

Employees need to feel part of a team. They need to feel that somebody at work cares about them, whether that be their manager or their coworkers. Gallup specifically questions this in their engagement surveys because feeling connected and cared about can boost business performance by up to 23%.

2. Connection to Purpose

This applies even more evidently to younger employees, who will rule out organisations that are not purpose-led. It isn't just about having a purpose. It's about connecting people with that purpose so they can clearly see how they contribute. People who feel like they are making a difference are 21% more productive and innovative.

3. Connection to Vision, Mission, and Objectives

Where is this organisation going? What is it trying to achieve, and how? If an employee is clear on how their daily tasks impact the business and the world, they are much more likely to feel connected and three times more likely to stay with your team. Real clarity also means employees are less likely to waste time on needless activity, so productivity and efficiency go up.

4. Connecting Employees with Their Aspirations

This normally happens through discussing their skills, experiences, current strengths, and required development. Your role is to be transparent about where the gaps are and build a bridge with them to get there. Especially in talent-short markets where high performers are being approached with multiple job offers, your best talent market is internal.

5. Connecting the Dots

This is the connection many leaders overlook, often because they are trapped in the doing rather than the leading. Connecting the dots can take several forms:

• Helping employees who are onboarding to embed and integrate when they join or step into a new role.
• Leading lessons-learned activities for the team.
• Helping employees build their network and access resources across the organisation so they can perform better.

Connecting the dots is a result of reflection and integration. It means taking a moment to examine what is the most important thing you should do, versus doing all the things.

Why Career Development Is the Critical Connection

Employees leave teams because they don't feel like they are making progress. Added to the cost of living increases many families are facing at present, plus the fact that employees want to see career success, especially younger generations, employers are under particular pressure to do something a bit different.

One of the questions I often ask leaders who are going through our first WoW Lab, "Align", is to think about and describe the moments they were most proud of. Their career highlights. This normally turns out to be the moment they were given the opportunity to shine by someone who believed in them. They were connected to a development opportunity. Think about it: how did you get your current job? Because of the skills and experiences you have. And how did you learn those? Perhaps through development?

Employees want to show you what they can do and to be given more opportunities to show you.

Whether early in their roles and wanting to show you that they are competent, or keen to support you by taking on additional responsibilities, the challenge for you as a leader is how do you connect your team with these opportunities?

The Commercial Benefits of Developing Your Team

Connecting people with development and supporting them to grow has a massive commercial upside. If your team is developing, they have more skills to enable solving more complex problems. They contribute new ideas and perspectives. They can offer insights. All of this creates value and bottom-line performance improvements.

Why Leaders Fail to Develop Their Teams

Leaders who don't develop their team tend to fall into one of four categories:

1. They believe they are too busy, or that their employees are too busy to undertake development.
2. They don't have the budget for development courses or to pay for coaches at the moment.
3. They are fearful that if they develop their team, there may be competition from their employees and this puts their position at risk.
4. They actually do development but don't talk about it as being development or maximise what is happening through reflection or integration of learning.

Understandably there is a tension between development and delivery in many leaders' minds. It is up to you as a leader to identify those factors for each individual and then to plot some steps with them on how they can do their jobs in a way that enables this development. We call this on-job development.

The Most Impactful Change You Can Make

Not many people know about on-job development. It costs very little and is actually fully within your control and often makes the biggest difference to performance because it's centred on them learning new skills and experiences to help them perform better in their role.

The one thing that we see that makes the biggest difference to employee perception, performance, retention, and engagement is the connection conversations we have before, during, and after the development happens.

Do you think you have 10 to 15 minutes to connect with each of your employees to talk about their goals and aspirations? You could even pre-send a little questionnaire and ask them to fill it in so they have time to prepare. Easy right?

Then connect with them to identify their strengths and work out what might be the best way to develop those strengths so they can achieve their goals. It might be going on a course, or getting a coach, but more often than not, it's actually about on-the-job development.

Examples of On-Job Development

• Taking part in a new project
• Attending meetings with you to observe and learn how they work
• Being asked to take a look at a problem they haven't seen before
• Being asked to speak in front of the team
• Asking team members to attend the meetings of another team to share what they are working on or to listen to what others are working on

Whichever activity you choose, remember it should be linked to helping them achieve their goals and aspirations whilst growing their skills and experience to deliver as an employee.

Connecting the Dots: The Secret Sauce of Development

None of this is particularly innovative up to this point. The secret sauce of development is connecting the development with your employees' awareness of development.

Many leaders actually do quite a bit of on-job training but they forget to tell the employee about it, forget to check in during it, and forget to take the opportunity to maximise the learning through reflection and integration. We say forget, but from experience, it often isn't something they are aware of.

The secret lies in the connection.

A Summary of Connections Leaders Can Make

1. Connect with your employee and talk about their goals and aspirations, then tell them that you are going to connect them with an opportunity to undertake some on-job development.
2. Connect with your employee each week for 10 to 15 minutes and ask them what they are learning through the development you have set up with them.
3. Connect with your employee after a month or two and ask them their reflections about themselves and how their experience has changed since they started this development.

It is also worth stepping back periodically and asking which of the five types of connection is missing for each person on your team. Leaders and their teams are often in very different places when it comes to their views on this. That gap is worth surfacing, because you cannot fix what you cannot see. The WoW pre-programme assessment exists precisely to give everyone a shared, honest picture to work from.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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