Decision making, problem solving, and employee engagement

Who solves the problems and makes the decisions in your company? Where do you acquire the information you need to do these two things? Today's topic revolves around your daily-weekly-monthly execution of your business strategy, how it impacts employee engagement, and how that, in turn, moves the company forward. 

Your processes for solving problems and making decisions can affect quality, teamwork, worker autonomy, and the company's overall speed and agility. These two linchpin processes can either enhance or detract from employee engagement. Have you been strategic about how you approach these two processes, or have you coasted along through force of habit? If you have been the business's primary content expert, you might have some development to do in this area.

Here's what some of the gurus have had to say:

• The father of the quality movement, W. Edwards Deming, said, "In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data." Deming was a believer in fact-based decision making. He also charged management to drive out fear in their organizations. Fear damages businesses because it causes team members to limit or sanitize the information they share with management.  This defensive behavior prevents the company from identifying problems and solving them quickly. This is relevant to your business on several levels, but in particular it's important to consider what happens in your real world right now when someone makes a mistake. Are you driving out fear? Or are you creating the conditions that result in incomplete or distorted data?
• Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa was a proponent of the concept that the people closest to the work are the ones who know the most about it.  His bottom-up approach was a huge departure from the traditional organizational structure, where the bosses were the smart ones, the mid-managers were the communicators, and front line workers were expected to check their brains at the door and do the work assigned to them.  Ishikawa is also known for establishing front-line quality circles and the Fishbone Diagram that helps teams to identify root causes to solve problems. To what extent are you involving your front lines in problem solving and decision making? Do you give them authority to act within certain parameters, or does everything have to come back to your desk at some point? Have you defined a process that helps them solve problems and not just treat symptoms?
• Peter Senge wrote about The Learning Organization. Senge posed that a company thrives when its team members share a collective vision of where it is going. In learning organizations all employees tap into their potential, challenge ideas, and help the organization stretch. How much of your plan is shared by all of your employees? How much of your budget do you allocate for continuous learning, whether your preferred vehicles are workshops, classes, consultants, conferences, books, etc. to help team members at all levels grow?

Your strategy relies on effective leadership behavior, your daily blocking and tackling.  Have you determined that employee engagement the key to higher performance in your company?  If so, you can't wave a wand and cause engagement to appear. Engagement is not about the carrot or the stick. Engagement is about involvement, inclusion, mutual respect and trust. It is the reward, the outcome from the choices you and your leadership team make about things like the manner in which the business accomplishes its work processes. When your employees are engaged, your business benefits from the full power of your team's collective intelligence. 

Do you know whether your employees are fully engaged or not? How recently have you measured employee engagement in your business? ProActive Leadership Group can help you identify the extent to which your leadership behavior is accessing the full brainpower and productivity of  your employees. Reach out to us for a brief conversation.