“Leadership is a process of social influence that takes place through communication.”
Erin Jewell
Erin Jewell empowers leaders to get the most out of their teams and see the results they deserve. She tends to attract clients who have an appetite for things like conscious communication, taking a mindful approach as well as a desire to be respectful, while honouring teams and other humans. That being said, Erin generally works with leaders who have been in this space for a long time.
The focus of Erin and Brendan’s conversation in today’s The Culture of Leadership (TCoT) Podcast is how to motivate employees in the workplace so, let’s take a minute to firstly define engagement versus disengagement.
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There is a quality of trust that shows in a team member who is engaged in their environment and their work. They trust the leadership, their peers and themselves. They have a lack of ambiguity and an attitude of commitment – being reliable and present – with a results-driven approach. An engaged team member asks questions and displays a certain curiosity. They have a healthy engagement with conflict and are comfortable with confronting, without being confrontational. An engaged employee will be advocating for the things they believe in.
A disengaged team member is the opposite. They will have a lack of trust in the process and in themselves. Leaders will find them questioning a lot of things, hesitating to ask for or offer help and avoiding accountability. There will be a sphere of conflict with the disengaged employee which could be fear or a sort of an apathy, almost like an attitude of resignation. There is going to be a lot more ambiguity with a disengaged employee and they are going to have a hard time making decisions. Leaders of disengaged team members will notice a change in team morale, as this attitude affects others in their space.
Studies show that only about 20% of employees feel like their strengths are being leveraged in the workplace, which can obviously have a tremendous negative impact on somebody’s feelings of sense of purpose. McKinsey & Company talk about the Meaning Quotient (MQ) and equate it to Emotional Quotient (EQ) and Intelligence Quotient (IQ). The MQ calculates the sense of purpose that an employee feels in an organisation and the impact it has on their productivity. If somebody works in an organization where there’s a high EQ, IQ and MQ, when they are at their peak performance rate, their productivity is five times above normal.
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As a Thrive Global Top 10 Coach of 2021, executive mindset, growth and performance coach and professor of leadership at Villanova University, Erin understands that being an effective leader requires taking the judgment cap off and putting on that cap of observation. Eventually, that self-observation turns into self-awareness and that self-awareness drives behavioural shifts. Behavioural shifts lead to more effective leadership. What Erin likes to do is give the leader their power back and say, “you know what, you can’t really fully control the actions of your team, but you can control your own”.
With COVID causing the Great Resignation in the US, now is the perfect time for leaders to start evaluating their core values and personal leadership story and, with 20 years of experience in the leadership sector, Erin Jewell is the perfect person to teach you how. Click here to join the conversation…