By: Barbara Bowes
Date: February 27, 2010
Winnipeg Free Press

It's well known that employee engagement, as it's called, has a significant impact on the bottom-line performance of a company. After all, workplace elements such as lower absenteeism, lower staff turnover and high employee productivity all lead to higher corporate profitability.

But what does the word engaged mean in today's workplace? How is it that these employees become engaged?

Employees who are considered engaged are individuals who are totally involved with their work. They apply themselves to the best of their ability. They are mentally, emotionally and physically focused on their task at hand. They want to be at work, they enjoy their work and they often put in an effort that is above and beyond what is required.

However, at the same time, these engaged workers want to be led by a leader whom they can trust, who cares about them, is a good communicator who actually leads. What this means for organizations is that the issue of front-line leadership is extremely important and in fact is key to creating, building and maintaining those so-called engaged teams. And believe me, it is not easy to get a group of people to continually invest their hearts and minds in their daily work.

Not only that, employees today don't want to be managed in that old-fashioned authoritarian way. Instead, they want to partner with their supervisors and front-line leaders to solve problems, to collaborate, to create and innovate. They want to work within general guidelines and be able to use their initiative.

This means that front-line leadership is much more complex and requires a much higher level of skill than in previous years. As a result, many of those leaders are not performing at the level required to lift their organization to greater performance.

If you really think about it, these front-line leaders are your first line of defence and can actually have more of an impact on productivity than your senior managers. They are the ones who are face to face with the majority of your workforce; they are the ones whose job it is to motivate and inspire not only individuals but entire groups of people.

The role of these leaders is critical, yet training for this group is often neglected. And by failing to train those leaders, organizations are also failing to create the skills needed to mobilize their employees and to take advantage of the opportunity to create performance gains.

With this in mind, it is also important to examine what kind of training is required for these leaders. The following list of training topic areas can help to guide the development of an effective frontline leadership program.

Understanding the "self" - Leaders need to understand themselves first and foremost before they can lead and develop other people. A good training program will entail an assessment and debrief of their individual learning styles, personality and communication style, and how each participant manages conflict. A facilitator will then need to discuss what impact these findings have on their leadership strategies.

Understanding today's leadership - The training program must establish a strong foundation in the concept of leadership and help participants understand what role front-line leaders play in an organization. They need to know how leading is much more than directing, but rather it includes advising, teaching, mentoring, collaborating, facilitating and decision making.

Goal setting - In my experience, an area that leaders most often neglect is setting specific and measurable goals. This is not as easy as it sounds and takes practice. Goals need to be set not only for personal achievement but also for the employees being supervised and the business unit goals. A strong leadership program will deal with this issue early in the training program.

Developing others - Learning to develop others is complex. It includes how to motivate, how to coach for success, how to communicate and build relationships and how to deal with performance issues. The leader needs to know how to bring issues to the forefront and facilitate group discussions that result in creative solutions.

Developing the organization - Front-line leaders need to understand how their work affects the overall organization. They need to be able to build team synergy with other departments and to manage the inevitable workplace stress that affects both themselves and their teams. And whereas we are in such a fast-changing world, front-line leaders need to develop good skills in leading and managing change. They need to develop a workplace culture within their unit that is flexible, innovative and motivational.

Designing and developing a solid front-line leadership training program is one thing, but delivery of the program is also important. For instance, I am certain there are many people out there who have attended a well structured, three-day leadership training program where they met a lot of different people, enjoyed what they learned and developed some excitement about what could be done back in the workplace. However, if truth be told, the program material is probably still sitting on a shelf, still unread. Leaders get busy and soon the program learnings dwindle away.

In my view, the most effective delivery strategy includes two key elements. First, select a training program that involves your own leaders working together in an in-house training program. This allows participants to share experiences that are directly relevant to your workplace. It helps to develop relationships across departments, builds organization-wide teamwork and helps participants to understand issues from different, relevant perspectives.

Secondly, an effective program will embark immediately on teaching front-line leaders to set goals. Often this effort requires more than one discussion as participants slowly learn how to write personal goals, team goals and business unit goals. Goal setting helps individuals become more productive on a personal basis and also creates a foundation for evaluating their team members and departmental achievements.

Finally, one of the critical aspects of a good training program is to deliver the program every two to three weeks over a six-month time frame. In this delivery strategy, participants are expected to directly apply what they have learned and will report their successes back to the group. In addition, the regular pace of the training reduces any disruption from being absent from work, keeps people motivated and allows them to directly apply what they have learned. You will never again be troubled by seeing a program manual sitting idle on a shelf.

Barbara J. Bowes is president of Legacy Bowes Group a leading human resource and executive search firm. She is also author of three books and host of the weekly BowesKnows radio show. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .