A manager can talk all day about employee engagement. If that’s the only real engagement that manager demonstrates, it won’t go far with employees.

It’s well-known that employees often look to and then imitate their immediate manager’s behavior. Plain and simple: if your goal is to increase your people’s engagement, increase your own.

And make it visible.

This tip appeared in Top ten tips to engage yourself:

Set a Goal. Create short-term goals/objectives relating to engagement for yourself. Acknowledge those goals. Hold yourself accountable for achieving them. Share your efforts and successes with others.

Here’s all you have to do:

• Determine what you can and want to do that will boost your own engagement. This may be job, team, company, or community engagement. They are not all the same, but they all have similar modeling impact on those around you.

• Make your goal both short-term and meaningful. Hard to keep everyone interested in a goal it will take you two years to achieve.

• Acknowledge your goal. With no unnecessary hoopla, let people know of your sincere effort to improve some specific element of your engagement performance.

• Invite your team to help you stay accountable. This proves the authenticity of your effort, and it engages others.

• Give ongoing accounts of your goal progress so your engagement efforts become real to your people.Authentic behavior and trustworthy communication from the manager/supervisor are specific factors of employee engagement.

Yes, it is simple. However, it’s a number of steps to put in process. I suggest either of two ways of making that happen:

1. Write out your plan. Specify each of the five action items indicated above. Use a notebook (manual or digital) that motivates and records your progress.
2. Consider a short-term coaching alliance. A coach can help you identify your goal and construct the sequence of actions to achieve it.

Enjoy your engagement!

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Tags: Communication, Employee Engagement, Management