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Organizations may have a great strategy in a PowerPoint slide deck that can be explained in easy terms, but unless they have conscious leaders at the helm who actually live it, they will continue to have low trust and low employee engagement across the board.
Why would anyone want to get up every morning and go to work for someone who does not value them and what they bring to their work? No corporate mindfulness or meditation program can change the fact that we need a new breed of leaders who care for the people in their organizations. Because when you value the lives of people and the gifts they bring to your organization, you spark their ability to partner with you to achieve the organization’s purpose. It goes beyond traditional cookie cutter employee engagement programs, which generally only pay lip service to their stated goal of truly engaging people.
The statistics that we are repeatedly witnessing in most studies and journals—see Gallup’s engagement index and Imperative’s purpose study—show that only a third of today’s workforce is engaged or comes to work with purpose. Such statistics will continue unabated in a meaningless fashion unless we start recognizing how deep our wounds are, and take the necessary steps to address them.
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Remember, too, that behind these statistics are real people. Go into any restaurant in a highly dense business district, and you will likely find that seven out of 10 conversations consist of people openly complaining about some roadblock they are facing at work due to a lack of competent leadership. This is not to say that every person’s complaint is justified, as sometimes people create their own roadblocks even if they work for a great leadership team, but too often poor leadership does stifle or completely eliminate many great growth opportunities.
When leaders facilitate creativity, innovative thinking, and an environment where people feel genuinely valued, then productivity and the bottom line are likely to increase.