Everyone has experienced the struggles of falling out of bed early in the morning and getting themselves off to work. Many of us have built habits to overcome these hurdles and get ourselves up and going. But what about your business? What keeps it going day after day?

 

Active Knowledge Question:

As a business leader, what do you believe energises your business? 

 

The Energizer Bunny

Do you recall the Energizer Bunny TV advertisements promoting battery life, where the pink bunny just kept going and going? Unfortunately, as humans, we certainly cannot just keep going and going.

Apart from all the obvious ingredients, such as good food, water, clean air, exercise and the like, we also need a purpose that seeds and energises us to keep going. Without purpose and motivation, we don’t travel very far. We certainly don’t travel with any real energy, creativity or strength.

How do we get ourselves out of bed every morning? We create a purpose, a reason for rolling out of bed, getting our feet on the floor and moving. We build habits that give us that initial push and we power those with motive, a reason to move. The quality of our motive reinforces the habits we are trying to build and sustains them. The strength is determined by our motive.

And when we reach our place of work? Well, what happens there depends on our level of engagement with our work. If any business leader wishes to build a competitively fit business, then they need to focus in on that engagement.

 

Engagement

As a business leader, recognition that the competitive strength of your business lies in the hearts and minds of all those people who work within and with your business is the starting point of engagement. Hand in hand with engagement, there must be trust – but we will come back to that another time.

If you do not invest yourself and your leadership team into the challenge of engagement, then you are allowing the competitive strength of your business, its level of fitness, to drift in the winds. That is no way to build a great business.

Last week, we discussed that ‘A Leader’s Most Important Task’ was to enable each and every person to reach and deliver their greatest potential and to achieve enduring success in their lives.

To start down this pathway, it is necessary that you recognise that as a leader you are seeking to unlock the human potential in your business. This means engagement, and engagement that connects at the deepest level of human potential.

Let’s think about engagement for a moment and consider why someone would come to work for you, in your business. But let’s do it a way which draws to the surface how the strength of the ‘why’ can build.  For example, different people may say they work for the money but the where that money is going to can significantly impact their commitment:

1. I need the money:
   • To live.
   • So I can travel overseas.
   • To support my family.
   • To allow my children to have the education I want them to have.
   • To retire.
   • Simply, so I can live the life that I have chosen.
2. I like the people I work with:
   • It gets me out of the house.
   • Gives me someone to talk to.
   • They are my friends.
   • They are my family.
3. I am learning and growing:
   • This is a great career step.
   • I am learning so much.
   • It is allowing me to reach my full potential.
   • I am being mentored by amazing people.
   • This is the place where I am going to be able to excel beyond my wildest dreams.
4. I am so proud of working here:
   • This is a great place to work.
   • I am able to invest myself in a worthy cause.
   • We are having a real impact on our community.
   • I am fulfilling my life purpose.

Can see you how someone who simply works to earn a living may not have as much commitment as someone who is working to pay for their children’s education? Or the difference between how someone who is working in a business because they feel it is a great place to work, against someone who sees the work allowing them to fulfil their life purpose?

It’s important to remember that you actually do want the reasons to compound. Your highest level of engagement will likely be with someone who:

• Earns enough money to support their lifestyle.
• Really connects with the people they work with.
• Can reach their greatest potential.
• Is connected with your purpose as a business.

Remember, engagement is important to your business because it will get your team:

• Out of bed.
• Excited to come to work.
• Actively thinking about how they can improve the value you deliver to your customers, while also wanting to make a difference.
• Taking a real interest in your business and customers.
• Finding purpose and motive in what we do as a business.

 

Increasing The Level of Engagement

Your basic tools of engagement are the words, images and stories you share. You can do this through many mediums or channels. But what is it that underpins you and your leadership team’s ability to engage with these tools in a meaningful way? A way that will carry the power to connect at the deepest levels?

The answer lies in the who and why. One of my earlier articles, ‘Strategy – Is It About The What, How Or Why?’, explores this question from a strategic planning perspective, which some may find easier to connect with.

The ‘who’ refers to leadership and the ‘why’ to how you connect what your business does with a purpose. There are eight elements, which start with aspects of the ‘who’ and move into the ‘why’ as follows:

1. Worthy leaders – ‘I want to work for you because of who you are as a person, what I can learn from you, and because I know you will draw the best out of me.’
2. Trust in leadership – ‘I trust the people I work for and with and that they are honest, sincere and put the customer first not themselves.’
3. Purpose – ‘I want to be involved in what this business is doing and the people whose needs they are meeting.’
4. Motive – ‘This business is not all about profit-first but is all about competing to deliver the greatest value to the customer, knowing that if we do that well the profits will be there.’
5. Culture – ‘I love the people I get to work with. We are all on the same journey and I get to work with the best who are all giving their best.’
6. Vision/quest – ‘I want to be part of and contribute to this challenging journey we are on.’
7. Customer focus and capabilities – ‘I can contribute and learn so much in meeting the needs of our customers.’
8. No barriers and great rewards – ‘This is somewhere I can excel with no barriers, and am fully supported.’

These eight elements are the levers that you can activate to fully open up the engagement of everyone in your business. They are the elements of your competitive engine, which sets the floor and ceiling to the success of your business.

Engagement, the level of competitive fitness of your business, the ceiling to its success – all of these outcomes are in your hands as a business leader. Recognise them and pick up the tools that will take your performance to an entirely new level.

 

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An entirely new level of performance.

Want to become a part of the Entrepreneurs+ Community and learn how to make your business competitively fit? Join now.

 

All the best in the success of your business,

Richard Shrapnel