What's the X Factor in Culture, Engagement and Talent Management?

Spoiler Alert: It’s managers and leaders. Now let’s talk about how and why – and what that means about your company’s sustainable growth and success.


On the surface, my last three posts might seem unconnected:

• Are You Asking the Right Questions About Engagement? 
• Great Culture Goes Beyond Coffee and T-shirts 
• How Do You Create a Leadership Pipeline? 

But as I wrote each one, they kept bumping up against each other and overlapping. Conversations with readers on LinkedIn have helped clarify how they all connect, and that’s what this post is about. (If you have been involved in any of those online conversations, THANK YOU for sharing your insights. Let’s keep the conversation going!) 

Culture:

An organization’s culture arises organically from its people and their shared values. If character is “who you are when nobody’s looking,” culture is “who you are not just in the boardroom, but also in the back room.”

Your organization’s culture defines the answer to this question: “What’s it like to work here?”

Ultimately, culture is defined by the people an organization selects, develops and retains and by the values that drive those decisions. 

In most organizations, managers and leaders are responsible for hiring people and helping them grow. That makes selecting, retaining and developing the right managers and leaders a prerequisite to optimizing organizational culture and reaping the benefits of that optimization.

Managers and leaders are the X factor in organizational culture.

Engagement: 

Engagement and culture are symbiotic. High levels of engagement can become a cultural value, embodied in an organization’s people and the way they work. Positive, vibrant cultures can support high levels of engagement. Here’s how the interaction of engagement with culture creates a virtuous cycle for an organization:

• Highly engaged people do their very best work. 

• Highly engaged people are more likely to stay with the organization. 

• Highly engaged people contribute to a more positive workplace culture.

• Positive workplace cultures and high-performance teams attract better job candidates.

• Selecting, retaining and developing the right people optimizes culture, improves the employment brand, creates high-performing teams, and reduces unwanted turnover. Those effects go straight to the organization’s bottom line. 

Consider these statistics: (Gallup, Business Journal, April 21, 2015)

•  Managers account for 70 percent or more of the variance in employee engagement within organizations across business units. 

• Only 18 percent of people currently in managerial roles demonstrate high levels of talent for managing other people. 

That makes selecting, retaining and developing the right managers a prerequisite to maximizing engagement and the benefits that naturally follow.

Managers (and the leaders who hire them) are the X factor in employee engagement.

Talent Management: 

Creating a healthy leadership pipeline requires an organizational culture of talent spotting, coaching and mentoring. From C-suite leaders all the way down to front line supervisors, the people entrusted with management responsibilities hold the keys to the kingdom on an organization’s future because they are the ones who have the opportunity to identify high potential, invest in people’s growth and promote them to higher levels of management and leadership.

• Managers and leaders have to look beyond performance to assess potential. 

• They need to invest the greatest time, energy and resources in developing the people on their teams who have the greatest potential for next-level leadership. 

• They need to know those people’s dreams…and how to help each of them achieve optimal growth. 

• At the same time, they need to invest in their high performers – and everyone else on their teams – to maintain high levels of engagement and ensure optimal performance among the people who aren’t next-level leaders. The Career Investment Discussion is a great tool for this purpose. 

The X Factor on What?

If managers and leaders are the X factor in engagement, culture and building a leadership pipeline, they are the X factor in your company’s growth and sustainable success.

What are you doing to ensure that every single person you put into a management or leadership role has the right talents and gets the right development opportunities to drive the best possible results for your organization?