Relationally Intelligent Leaders
You’ve probably seen the statistics about how much of an employee’s likelihood to stay with the company depends on their manager. According to Udemy, nearly half of employees said they’ve quit a job because of a bad manager. Gallup found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
But at Core Strengths, we think there’s more to the engagement and turnover picture: relationships. What if nearly half of employees have quit a job because of a bad relationship with their manager? What if 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manager-employee relationship?
Yes, bad managers exist. But have half of all working people really encountered one? Or have (mostly) good managers just tried to manage everyone the same way, and have their efforts fallen flat? A diverse group of direct reports will have different needs, motivations, strengths, and values. The biggest mistake managers make is to apply a similar leadership style to everyone, rather than viewing management as a series of individual leadership relationships.
And while management interactions happen in the moment, relationships are built over time. They have a past, a present, and a future. The reason you may not be as effective at managing certain employees in the present — and why they may view you as a ‘bad manager’ — is that some experiences with them in the past haven’t been productive, leaving lingering mistrust. To co-create a future that both parties are bought into and excited about, you have to align expectations on the six Rs of manager effectiveness:
Relationships
Roles
Responsibilities
Recognition
Reasons
Results
Alignment in these six areas will increase trust and make employees much more likely to stay.
Relationships
Often, when thinking about retention, managers think first about aligning roles, responsibilities, and results — but you’ll only have effective conversations about those topics if you start with relationships. Employees’ sense of purpose, and therefore their job satisfaction, can be bolstered through their primary relationships: with their boss and the other key people in the organization who they work with.
To heal past mistakes and misunderstandings, have effective interactions in the present, and create a productive future, managers and employees both need to develop Relationship Intelligence, or RQ. Relationship Intelligence is insight for adjusting your approach to make interactions more effective.
Since relationships develop over time, you can use three components to gauge the quality of a relationship:
Bad relationships often have a history of conflict and an expectation that things won’t get better and that not much will be accomplished together. Good relationships often include a history of disagreements and even some conflict, but the people involved have worked through such issues, work effectively together, and look forward to accomplishing shared goals.
RQ allows you and your employees to maintain mutual positive regard, meaning you believe you both have the capacity to reason and to make your own decisions, and that every person has a moral right to be treated with dignity and respect. This creates conditions where people are free to do their best. If you have positive regard, you can give feedback to employees from a place of care, curiosity, and lack of judgment.
To develop RQ, you and each of your employees should take the SDI 2.0 assessment, a simple questionnaire that shows who you are and how you work through four interrelated views:
Motives: You’ll learn the three core motives behind your approach to people, performance, and process, a blend that’s expressed as your Motivational Value System (MVS).
Conflict: Your Conflict Sequence shows your changing motives as conflict escalates, giving you the chance to course-correct before you get too upset and limit your ability to see other perspectives.
Strengths: Your Strengths Portrait presents all 28 strengths you use at work. It also reveals how your motives drive the strengths you use most often.
Overdone strengths: Everyone pushes their strengths too far in some cases. You’ll learn which ones you overdo—insight that can keep you from losing effectiveness.
As you’ll soon come to learn, these four views will look very different for each of the people who report to you, and you’ll have to adjust your approach to work most effectively with each of them. This is a good thing! RQ gives you an actual system to leave one-size-fits-all management behind, once and for all. It also provides a reliable way to adapt your approach to others while still feeling genuine and authentic.
Once you have these skills and apply them in your management relationships, you can start talking to employees about their other critical relationships and helping them apply RQ in those. Anyone with a strong network of thriving relationships at work will be far more likely to stay and grow with the company.
Roles
Roles are seemingly straightforward, but role confusion is surprisingly common among employees — and it’s not their fault. People may understand their job description, but their actual day-to-day role can change quite a lot from the time of hiring, or they can take on multiple roles, while their job description doesn’t get updated.
A role also doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s a description of who someone is in the organization: where they are on the org chart, who they report to, who they support, what’s their territory, etc.
As the manager, have a curiosity-based conversation with your employee, not an inspection. Too often, managers approach role clarification with a tone that the employee has strayed from the path laid out for them. But roles can actually get very fuzzy over time, and everyone can benefit from regular conversations clarifying their definition.
The better you both understand their role, the better they can understand, and nurture, their most important relationships within the organization.
Responsibilities
While the role is who someone is to the organization, responsibilities are what someone does for the organization.
To clarify responsibilities, sit down with your employee and enumerate all the things they’re doing, alongside all the things the team needs to get done. It can be difficult for someone to even list everything they do in a busy work week, but specifics are important in this exercise. You’re likely to find things they could do more of and things they can skip, automate, or delegate to make better use of their time.
Your relationship with the employee — and with everyone on your team — plays a huge role here. If you understand their strengths, you can move some tasks around so people can flex their top strengths on tasks they’re naturally good at.
On the opposite end of the strengths spectrum, you can have grace for people stretching the strengths they may use less often — understanding that they may not enjoy certain tasks, or might be slower to complete them. Helping people be more agile in the use of their strengths is part of your role as a manager and will lead to more fulfilled employees as they see concrete evidence of their personal and professional growth.
Recognition
According to TINY pulse survey data, employees that don't feel recognized when they do great work are almost 2x as likely to be job hunting. But all recognition doesn’t land the same way with everyone. Relationships play a huge role in learning how each employee prefers to be recognized for their contributions.
It’s crucial to recognize someone based not on what’s important to you, but what’s important to them.
Think about someone who really loves cars. They know a lot about cars, and they feel that the car they drive is an expression of their personality. Suppose they have a friend who doesn’t know the first thing about cars and couldn’t care less. If they give that friend a compliment on their car, it won’t mean anything to the friend. But if they receive a compliment on their own car, it will mean a lot.
When you start recognizing people for accomplishing what they care about and are deeply motivated to do, it will change the relationship for the better.
Reasons
Reasons are also all about internal motivation: can the employee connect the work they’re doing to their values? This is about engagement in daily tasks but also about growth and development.
Engagement in tasks
Employee engagement is low nationwide because many people are complying with instructions but not engaging in their jobs. Again, it comes back to RQ. If you know your employee well, and can connect their primary motives to the team and organizational goals, they’ll engage more deeply than they would for any external motivational system.
Engagement in development
As a manager, you spend a lot of time coaching employees to support their growth and development. But when someone needs to start or stop a behavior, nothing will change unless you connect the feedback to a good reason to change — their values and motivations. The abundance (or lack) of opportunities to grow and advance is also tightly connected to retention, so frequent growth and development conversations will help people see that you’re invested in them and they can grow with you.
Results
So often, as managers, we start with the result we need and focus all our energy on getting that. But if the other five elements above are in alignment, results will most likely fall into place.
In the event there’s a mismatch between the effort your employee is putting in and the impact they’re actually making, a relationally intelligent conversation can get them back on track to get results.
If there’s a strong, trusting leadership relationship, anchored in a mutual curiosity and understanding of what matters most to each person, you can give honest feedback while letting the employee know you’re rooting for them — and they’ll believe you. When an employee with RQ has a development conversation with a supervisor with RQ, that’s when engagement can transform, results can multiply, and people stop putting out feelers for a new job.
Core Strengths can help you retain employees.
Our SDI 2.0 assessment is the place to start when you want to learn about yourself and your team, and develop relationship intelligence. You’ll gain insight into everyone’s motives, conflict styles, strengths, and overdone strengths.
If you’d like to take it further, we offer many more services and tech products to help you make RQ part of your organization’s daily life.
How to Make Employees Feel Valued
Around the end of the year, most people managers start thinking about how to make their employees feel valued for the hard work they’ve put in over the past twelve months. But employee recognition isn’t just an annual activity for leaders to check off at holiday time. It’s an ongoing process.
The American Psychological Association found that 93% of employees who feel valued are motivated to do their best at work and 88% feel engaged. These metrics are in stark contrast with employees who say they don’t feel valued, where just 33% are motivated to do their best work and 38% feel engaged. Making employees feel valued is a win-win for the individual and the company.
Pay isn’t the only—or even arguably the best—way to make employees feel valued. Core Strengths has found that the sense that one’s work has purpose and that they’re an important part of the company’s mission comes from internal motivation. But it can be bolstered through a person’s primary relationships at work.
People managers can do a lot to reinforce the sense of feeling valued. You’re the person who has the most influence on your direct reports’ careers, and you can help guide them toward connecting work assignments and responsibilities with their inherent motivations and strengths. Perhaps just as importantly, when a work assignment or responsibility demands using strengths that a direct report is less comfortable with, the ability to reframe this as an opportunity to grow can help someone experience the discomfort in a much more positive manner. Growing and learning requires some discomfort, and helping a direct report see that they are developing greater capability through the use of strengths they have used less often in the past can be a highly effective way to help them feel valued when they are working on something they find challenging.
Here, we outline three ways you can make employees feel valued, starting today.
Make employees feel valued by generating a sense of self-worth.
Self-worth is about valuing yourself, but also feeling valued by others for the things you want to be valued for.
Let’s break that down.
Usually, we focus on the first part of that definition. Valuing yourself for who you are is an enduring internal drive, a deep understanding and sense of acceptance that’s not likely to fluctuate with good or bad days.
Self-worth arises out of a strong sense of self-awareness, when you know who you are, what you care about, what comes somewhat naturally and what doesn’t, what drives you, and what makes you tick.
This is where the second part of the definition comes in. A person with self-worth wants to be valued by others for the same things they value themselves for.
Take, for example, Holly, a top sales rep who values helping people. Her manager, Clarence, values competition and winning, and he always recognizes her for her results. When Holly told Clarence she wasn’t happy in her role, he was confused. In his eyes, she was successful and he was praising her for her success. But for Holly, all of his analogies about being a championship team didn’t resonate.
Once she explained to Clarence that she valued herself for her ability to help people, he told her about an opportunity to be a trainer, helping every sales rep in the district get better at their jobs. Now that Clarence values Holly for what she values in herself, not what he values in himself, she loves her job and is no longer at risk of leaving.
There’s room in every type of role for people with every type of value system. While sales roles tend to attract people motivated by results, people like Holly can still thrive. While caregiving roles tend to attract people motivated by helping, managers should work to make sure people motivated by strategy or performance feel valued in their role, too. You can do so by considering the five Rs.
Make employees feel valued through the five Rs.
Michael Maccoby talks about the concept of the five Rs of employee engagement in his book, The Leaders We Need. They are:
If an employee doesn’t feel valued, you can sit down with them one-on-one and take inventory of these elements. Here are some discussion questions:
Reasons: Can they connect the work they’re doing to their values?
Responsibilities: Do they know what’s expected of them?
Recognition: How do they prefer to be recognized for the recognition to be the most meaningful?
Relationships: Who are their key relationships in the organization and are any of them under strain?
Rewards: What is their preferred material expression of their value?
Often, when someone doesn’t feel valued at work, it’s because one or more of these five Rs is out of alignment, like in the example of Holly and her manager Clarence. She was getting recognized for different things than what she valued in herself.
Managers can correct this misalignment by collaborating with the employee to get all five Rs in line with their internal motivation. That may mean changing their role description, rewriting goals, recognizing them in public rather than in private (or vice versa), letting them work cross-functionally with other teams, helping them find someone to mentor, etc.
Make employees feel valued with handwritten notes.
It’s quick. It’s inexpensive. And it makes a lasting impression. The handwritten note is still untouchable when it comes to making people feel valued.
As a manager, the skill of writing meaningful thank you notes will take you far. A meaningful note expresses gratitude for something the employee did—from the lens of what matters most to them. This shows that you understand why they contributed in the way that they did, and lets them know you recognize the importance of their values.
Ask your employees about a compliment or note they’ve received that stuck with them and why. If you don’t already know what they want to be appreciated for, this exercise will give you a good idea.
Here are a few tips for writing a great note:
Make sure it’s handwritten—not typed
Express gratitude that they did something that was meaningful to them
Share why their actions meant a lot to you
Stamp it and send it to their home address
We’ve put together MVS-based thank you cards to help you get started; you can download them here.
Discover what your employees value in themselves.
The SDI 2.0 Assessment from Core Strengths is a reliable way to discover your employees’ internal motivations—and your own.
Take the assessment as a team to gain insight into their values that will drive the actions you take from this article.
Engagement and Motivation
Most strategies that leaders use to improve employee engagement often make one key mistake: they assume that the entire workforce will be motivated in the same way.
But people are individuals, with different reasons for coming to work every day. If engagement is flagging, you may not be tapping into those reasons: their motives.
People don’t give top performance at work because of a ping pong table or free lunch on Fridays. When we try to make work more palatable with these perks, the unspoken assumption is that work inherently isn’t palatable. But work can be more than palatable: it can provide energy and purpose.
To truly improve employee engagement, focus on establishing relationships with individual employees and empowering them to bring their purpose and motives to work every day.
What is employee engagement?
At Core Strengths, we see employee engagement as the energy exerted by employees when they’re performing, growing and learning, and when their relationships are thriving at work.
At a high level, the contributors to employee engagement are twofold. People must be able to tap into their own intrinsic motives when doing the tasks associated with their jobs, and also be able to understand the motives of their colleagues.
Strengths and motives in the context of employee engagement
How do you know what matters most to employees? We put motives into three major categories: people, performance, and process.
The SDI 2.0 assessment can give you an accurate and detailed view of how all three motives blend within each person. However, you can still use just the three categories to enhance your understanding of your colleagues.
When you know your own motives, you can connect any work task to reasons that matter to you. When you know your colleagues, you can connect any message to their motives.
Why is employee engagement important?
In our increasingly collaborative work environment, colleagues with diverse perspectives, experiences, motives and strengths depend on one another to get work done.
This interdependence can be a huge advantage when it works well; successful collaboration leads to higher innovation and greater responsiveness to market trends. But when people don’t seek to understand each other, unhealthy conflict rises and employee engagement plummets.
As a leader, if you can make work a source of energy instead of a drain, you win.
Research has shown that high employee engagement improves organizational performance through higher customer satisfaction, productivity, operational efficiency and profitability, as well as lower absenteeism and reduced turnover.
With an engaged workforce, all other positive business outcomes will be much easier to achieve.
How do you improve employee engagement?
People seeking purpose in their careers often receive the advice, “Do what you love.” A better piece of advice would be, “Find meaning in what you do.” It’s possible to find meaning in any task if you can see how the task fulfills your motives.
There’s a myth that leaders need to create employee engagement. Instead, we need to unleash the engagement that’s already there by ensuring every employee is connecting their motive to the work they do.
Connecting the organizational mission to individual motives
A well-defined organizational mission and purpose is an important piece of employee engagement. Focusing on purpose over profits, as an organization, does improve employee engagement. But let’s take it one step further.
Leaders need to connect the individual’s primary motives—performance, process, or people—to the organizational mission.
If it’s possible to include employees in the process of creating the mission, that’s ideal. But the way you communicate about the mission is also critically important.
For example, at a nonprofit organization focused on helping people, their leadership delivered most of their messaging through a focus on people motives. When their leaders began including components of all three motives–people, performance, and process–in their communications, employees whose primary motives were performance or process began feeling more connected to the organization’s mission and purpose.
The language of high employee engagement
Think about individual motives like languages. As a leader, you need to become fluent in the languages of people, performance, and process–and be intentional so you can transition seamlessly from one to another.
If you notice that an employee is lacking engagement, ask yourself if you’re speaking to them in a way that connects what they’re doing to what matters to them. Instead of making the conversation about their low engagement, approach the conversation like this:
Change the way you talk about the task, framing it around their primary motive
Give them space to tell you how to make the task more meaningful
Keep making connections between tasks and their primary motive over time
High employee engagement doesn’t mean that there won’t be moments when work feels hard. But when the employee knows how to connect task completion to the fulfillment of their motives, they remember why the hard work is meaningful.
In fact, the essence of employee engagement is the moment when an individual with a negative, disengaged approach to a task can reorient themselves and connect it to what matters most.
For example, James left his job selling copy machines to work in pharmaceutical sales because he wanted to deliver life-saving medication to people who needed it. What he didn’t realize before quitting his job was that the copier is the heart of every elementary school. Teachers and principals make copies of worksheets daily that help them deliver critical education to children. If James had known the language to understand that he’s motivated by people, and had the skills to change his perception about how copiers help people, he likely would have seen both jobs as meaningful and rewarding.
When leaders empower employees with the language to talk about what matters most to them and the skills to make the most mundane task more meaningful, the entire organization will collectively tap into an endless supply of employee engagement.
Start improving employee engagement today
If your company doesn’t have much budget for employee engagement initiatives, you can still tap into people’s motivation and lift engagement today. Here’s how:
Ask everyone in the organization to get a few thank-you cards and write notes of recognition to their colleagues. Here’s the key: the notes need to thank the person for specific things, and use the language of their motives.
We’ve made it even easier by including a thank you card download for each individual team member’s motives.
If you’re interested in learning more about the power of individual motivation at work, take the SDI 2.0 assessment or offer it to your entire workforce.
We also offer training and a platform to make motivation part of your company’s language and further improve employee engagement.