Leadership behaviours that are needed to improve the work environment include inspiring a shared
vision, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart. It is clear from the Employee Engagement
Survey that the company has issues regarding trust in leadership. Many employees feel that leaders
make decisions not based on ethics and values. To remedy this, creating a set of values and
encouraging all to work together using these values will help the company grow in a positive way.
Work is needed in regards to leader relations with employees. Employees feel that their supervisors
do not act ethically, utilize their skills, nor support or care about them. Leaders should be providing an
inclusive environment engaging in dialogue with employees on career coals. This is reflected by a 36%
positivity rating when employees are asked “provides an inclusive environment where each employee
is considered as an individual.” These are serious issues regarding lack of leadership as the company is
trying to expand into a different region. They will run into issues if effective leadership skills are not
implemented.
This toolkit should involve communication skills, leadership training, and continuing to respect
diversity. Communication skills are needed to ensure goals and expectations are clearly defined.
Communication skills especially from leaders are needed. When communication skills improve
between leaders and workers, trust may improve. One tool my company has used is ‘people styles.’
People styles increases self-awareness and helps us understand how to communicate with different
styles. Leadership training should involve ethics as many workers don’t believe their leaders act in
ethical ways. With effective leadership training employees can start to feel more appreciated for their
work and heard by the employer. Creating an inclusive environment will help business as people can
feel comfortable sharing ideas with various people.
Improvements in the recommended leadership skills involving communication and leadership skills
will ultimately help the company grow and be successful. By Encouraging the Heart, leaders can
authentically show appreciation for individual and team excellence. This will cause employees to feel
valued and appreciated, and will make them work harder One way the company can show
appreciation for employees is by providing more time off. This will help employees feel more cared
for. My company did that during the pandemic to show appreciation for employees as it was a
stressful time for all. By having leaders re-align their values with workers will ultimately help the
bottom line and improve workers’ belief that leaders are acting ethically. The leadership training
should encourage listening to other ideas. This will help create an open, supportive, and team-
oriented atmosphere.
The trends I identified from the employee survey were:
Employees have felt less valued consistently over the last four years
Employees are not satisfied with the quality of their supervisors
Receptiveness to employee feedback must be improved
Based on those trends, leaders in the company need to improve at Modelling the Way, inspiring a
Shared Vision, and Encouraging the Heart. There are many skills that will contribute to improvement
in these areas, but the most important to work on are effective and open communication with
employees, setting SMART goals (with emphasis on achievable and realistic), and expressing empathy.
The reason for these skills is that the results of the survey are likely symptoms of a deeper issue with
workplace culture. Widespread employee distrust of supervisors is probably not the direct fault of the
supervisors, but more likely due to pressure on them from above. Changing this degree of lack of
confidence in management must start at the top - front line supervisors must be empowered to
improve their relationships with their employees.
These survey results make me think of a call centre-type environment, where immediate performance
metrics are the only thing that matters, things like call time and sales figures, with no room for
anything else. These types of work environments always assign overly ambitious metrics, relying on
constant turnover to keep seats full rather than long term, satisfied employees. The pressure to meet
those metrics never comes from the front-line supervisors, they are little more than messengers, but
they end up bearing the brunt of employee anger and frustration.
Changing that kind of culture can be hard, but if successful it will have a huge impact on morale and
productivity. Employees who feel they can trust their supervisors, who feel that they are not always
one or two mistakes away from being fired, generally do better work. Moving away from such strict
adherence to metrics, or making them more realistic, will allow employees to feel as though they are
contributing to the company's success.
An effective leader must have the capability to envision and relay the future of the organization. A
transformational leader can take that vision and connect their subordinate's daily task to the success
of achieving the overall big picture. ¨The future is where opportunity lies. You must spend time
thinking about the future and become better at projecting ahead in time¨ ((Kouzes & Posner, 2017).
As the director of leadership and learning of the given organization, the desired future state is a 10%
improvement for the next survey in two years. However, to act and wait two years for results in hope
that your actions are effective is the formula for continued negative trends. To achieve success, the
leadership team should have open dialog with employees on a quarterly basis to assess the trend of
the organization.
The three-focus area´s that the organization must strive to improve is Recognition & Praise, Job
Satisfaction, and Working Conditions. However, the common trait that all three of this focus areas
questionnaire results have is a lack of trust in supervisors. The leadership behaviors that are needed
to improve the work environment and bridge the trust gap between supervisors and subordinates is
to listen effectively, ask employees what is most important to them, and clear communication on the
organizations vision. By acknowledging and acting upon subordinates' preferences, supervisors will
build trust ((Forbes Coaches Council, 2017). The behavior that might be the most challenging for
leaders to follow is to be a humble leader. The Employee Satisfaction Survey (ESS) indicates that as
negative trends were identified two years ago, no action, or at least any substantial action was taken.
Often time, leaders fill that the survey results are wrong, or simply just disagree with their employee´s
opinions. Two years ago, six less employees trusted supervisors, but instead of thinking why don´t
they trust me, leaders convince themselves of all the reasons they should be trust. When the ESS was
very clear, ignoring the data has led to even more significant negative trends, with nine more
employees not trusting supervisors.
The leadership skills I recommend to my organization's leaders toolkit is to take the information
collected from listening deeply to employees and appeal to common ideals while establishing a
common purpose. These skills can be achieved by each leader reflecting on the past, attending to the
present, and prospecting the future ((Kouzes & Posner, 2017). The reoccurring survey allows leaders
to reflect on the past, while the recommended quarterly open dialog with employees will allow
leaders to attend in the present. To build the prospect of the future, leaders must fully understand
what the goals of the organization is, connect the big picture with the common ideals that employees
have shared. Once leaders can connect their employees' common ideals with the big picture, they will
truly have employees with a common purpose. f
Employees with a common purpose through the leadership skills and behaviors mentioned
before, will have a direct impact on all three identified focus areas. More importantly to the
organizations stake holders, these improvements will result in increased productivity and higher profit
margins. In the recent ESS, there was a 28 percent decrease in employees over the past four years
who felt their job makes good use of their skills and abilities. By rebuilding the trust within our
organization and listening to subordinates, employees´ will fill less under-utilized, directly improving
their job satisfaction.
My insights after evaluating the employee satisfaction survey data are that half of the total survey
questions related to leadership had mean scores under the 60th%. The focus areas of job satisfaction
and recognition and praise were identified as having the lowest mean scores and were related to
leadership and environment.
The leadership behaviors that are needed to improve the work environment are those that align with
the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (Kouzes, 2021). To improve the work environment for
employees it is critical that the leader model behaviors that clearly show company values and set the
example to light the way. Also, inspiring and enabling others to collaborate and rally around shared
visions and goals will build trust and foster a healthy work environment.
The leadership skills that I recommend for my organizational leader’s toolkit that would develop
identified leadership behaviours are those that encourage the heart so that recognition and praise
become a regular occurrence. Also, create learning opportunities for communications and team
building for all leaders to provide leaders with information to bolster or develop their skillsets for
leading in a VUCA (Kouzes, 2021) world. By improving these leadership skills and behaviours,
organizational performance will improve by fostering motivation and commitment to the company,
reduce absenteeism and turnover, increase productivity, and ultimately improve the work
environment and employee satisfaction scores company wide.
In the article by Ibarra and Scoular (2019), we learned about the four different styles of coaching:
directive, situational, laissez-faire, and non-directive. The GROW model is a method for
leaders/coaches to improve their non-directive coaching. This method relates to leading by
questioning team members and really listening without judgement (Ibarra & Scoular, 2019). In this
way we can ascertain different perspectives and promote free thinking and creativity. With the
GROW model, coaching is done through goal-setting, exploring options along the way and setting
specific, measurable metrics in place for accountability and clarity.
Based on the findings of the Employee Engagement Survey (EES), the most predominant pain point in
the organization relates to the relationship between team members and their supervisors. f There is a
general lack of trust and team members do not feel they are a proactive part of the training,
development, and review processes. f Landry (2020) cites a recent study in which nearly three-quarters
of employees surveyed rated teamwork and collaboration as essential for engagement. Another
study showed eighty-six percent of process failures in an organization can be attributed to ineffective
communication. Clearly, specific processes will need to be implemented to bridge the gap between
team members and their supervisors.
Reflecting on the Ten Commitments of Exemplary Leadership (Kouzes & Posner, 2017), four of the five
leadership practices could use improvement. f In Model the Way, leaders are asked to find their voice
within the team by setting the example and aligning their words to their actions. In the EES,
employees gave their supervisor low scores in questions related to trust and support. f Leaders that do
not walk the talk are perceived as ones that do not understand tasks they are assigning and therefore
incapable of helping subordinates with challenges. Enable Others to Act asks leaders to build a
foundation of collaboration to strengthen members of the team (Kouzes & Posner, 2017). With low
favourability scores related to inclusiveness and feedback, this is another area of opportunity. Lastly,
Encourage the Heart suggests that leaders should appropriately recognize contributions and celebrate
success (Kouzes & Posner, 2017). While the EES scores show positive answers about goals specifically,
they fall short when it comes to recognition and reward systems.
The GROW model encourages that goals be clear, measurable, grounded, and actionable (Ibarra &
Scoular, 2019). Based on the EES scores, coaching in the past has likely fallen more into the directive
path. f Supervisors have specific initiatives for their team, they relay the requirements, and then follow
up when there is a problem. f Supervisors are given the authority and are perceived to "know" the role
they are overseeing. f Often this is not true, especially today when roles are becoming more technical
and specific. A team member who believes they know more about the job than their superior is one
who can easily disconnect and lose respect. f Through non-directive coaching, leaders can better allow
the space for innovation while improving their relationship with team members.
By implementing non-directive coaching behaviours and setting clear, measurable metrics, the
organization can begin to repair the relationship between leaders and team members. This process
will start with proactive listening - and hearing feedback without judgement. After rounds of dialogue,
a collaborative process of setting goals, identifying important processes, and implementing desirable
reward systems will further build a bridge in the team. Leaders will support and encourage team
members along the way, sharing openly when challenges arise, and working through them together
without heavy-handed punishment. Crews, Brouwers, and Visagie (2019) say that transformational
leaders have charisma, a shared vision, are expressive, and communicate: with the new performance
and reward metrics in place, the organization will see a healthy improvement to their EES scores in the
years to come.
Company and Strategy – There is a 20% decline in the “My company cares about its employees”
question from Four Years ago to today.
Job Satisfaction – There is a precipitous decline for 3 core elements here. “My job makes good use of
my skills and ability”, “I am very satisfied with my job”, and “My supervisor shows appreciation for my
work”. All three of these see declines over 4 years between 27% - 31%.
Working Conditions – There is a decrease across the board by these metrics, the standout is “Provides
leadership who act in just and ethical ways” at a 34% decline over 4 years.
It is clear to me some of the leadership behaviours that should be of focus are for leaders to have
behaviours consistent with company values to set an example. Job satisfaction is low, recognition of
jobs well done can improve employee satisfaction with the job. Based upon Job Satisfaction criteria,
individuals feel they can contribute more and may not feel valued. By figuring out a way to care and
support for staff could be beneficial.
Some of the skills/principles from the organizational leader’s toolkit would be; challenge the process,
encourage the heart, and enable others to act. Challenge the process could give staff trust in their
voice mattering. Enabling others to act can help improve upon staff feeling leaders are not doing
things in ethical ways, that speaking up is encouraged. Encouraging the heart is about caring, that the
company cares about the staff, this can make everyone feel appreciated.
All these skills work independently and interchangeably with each other. What that means is
essentially "a rising tides raises all boats". Staff feelings they are encouraged to speak up can make
them feel the company cares more, that unethical behaviour is not welcome and that can in turn make
people overall happier with the vision of the company. Long story short one can expect improving one
aspect in turn will improve one of the others as well.
What leadership behaviours are needed to improve the work environment, determined via your
assessment of the employee engagement survey?
Provide clear career paths and individual goals for each employee. The employee surveys state the
employees don’t feel that they have been spoken to regarding training and development goals.
Management should provide a clear, step-by-step career path with attainable goals. Management
should meet with each employee to customize a career plan that meets their individual needs.
Secondly, the company must establish an effective feedback system. Offering a safe place for
employees to share ideas and feel heard will lay the groundwork for open communication. The
employee surveys are important for employees to provide their feedback. Management should
accept feedback openly and adjust business according to the employee needs this will ensure
employee retention. Management should implement an open-door policy, which will allow
employees to reach out when they have concerns. Management should provide team-building
activities and events that encourage face-to-face interactions.
In third place is training. Management should develop a plan and act on it. It will show employees that
management means what it says. Consistent training and development plans can connect an
employee to the leader’s goals and help them feel included in the future of the company. Annual and
quarterly reviews can help an employee stay on track and acknowledge a growth plan that fits their
skills. Management should allow employees to communicate what training they need to fulfill their
job duties effectively.
Question: What leadership skills would you recommend including in your organizational leader's
toolkit to develop the identified leadership behaviours?
Leadership should invest in their employee’s futures and develop their future goals. Management
should mentor and coach employees towards leadership positions. Employee leadership
development and growth is essential for company success. Management should show employees how
their leadership growth can accomplish company goals. This shows that the company is sincere about
investing in its employees.
Management should listen to their employees and use their feedback to create changes within the
company. Management should ensure complete transparency between them and the employees.
This transparency will allow employees to share new ideas and criticisms for current practices that are
no longer productive. Leaders who encourage honesty and open communication represent integrity
and courageous authenticity.
Management should lead by example. Management should express how they want to accomplish
goals and work side by side to help employees accomplish these goals. Management should help
employees with the unwanted tasks or work during the undesirable holidays to ensure a project is
completed on time this will show employees you are part of the team. People are the company's most
important asset.
Question: How will improvements in the recommended leadership skills and behaviors improve
organizational performance?
If management begins developing employees, listening, and leading by example, the entire team will
become a team of leaders. Growing the team into a team of leaders will spread enthusiasm and
passion for company goals. A great leader should use leadership tools to help them adjust their skills
to move from reactive to creative leadership. Listening is a step away from reactive into creative.
Management should be flexible and use the leadership toolkit to pinpoint the areas of concerns can
assist the change from reactive to creative leadership. Balance is a main component of an exemplary
leader. As stated in Scaling Leadership, “At its heart, great leadership is radically human—that is,
showing up in more transparent, authentic, vulnerable, empathetic, passionate, and compassionate
ways, and even loving one another (characteristics that separate us from machines).” (Anderson, &
Adams, 2019, p. 10)
In reviewing the Employee Engagement survey, I determined the following leadership behaviours are
necessary to improve the work environment:
Leaders need to be more effective at modelling the way for their team members. Leaders have not
built a foundation of trust in their organization and the survey has made it evident that ethics across
the leadership team are in question.
Leaders need to encourage the heart and show appreciation for the work that is being done amongst
their team. When a worker does not feel appreciated for the job they do, it stalls motivation and the
desire to improve in their role.
Leaders need to challenge the process and enable their team members to act. Workers do not feel
that they are being challenged or that leadership makes good use of their skills.
To further develop the identified behaviours above, I believe the leadership team needs to inspire a
shared set of values. In doing so, leaders need to be strong in their own convictions and values and
share those with their team members. When a leader shares their OWN personal values with their
team, I believe it “humanizes” them more. It opens lines of communication so they can connect on a
more meaningful level. Managers also need to “walk the walk” and “talk the talk”. They need to model
the behaviours they preach to gain the trust of their organization. f
Second, Leaders need to encourage the heart and show appreciation for a job well done. I have
learned myself that showing appreciation is one of the easiest things that a leader can do to motivate
their team. Even the smallest gesture, stopping someone in the hall and saying “hey, great job on that
analysis you completed yesterday,” can help a team member feel more empowered in their role. At
my current organization team members are encouraged to give “kudos” via note cards or “e-grams.”
Far too often we go about our daily tasks and forget to thank others or inspire them with a simple “Job
well done.”
Lastly, leaders need to foster collaboration and enable their team members to act. They need to move
away from a “Command and Control” style of leadership and reduce “precision questioning”. Doing so
will diminish feelings of judgement and open lines of communication for new ideas and processes.
Leaders also need to be present and have a solid understanding of their organization and understand
current challenges.
Taking these small steps can improve organizational performance in several ways. Team members
want to know how their role is important to their organization. When they know their work is
valuable, they will seek continuous improvement. They will ask questions and will search for ways to
better themselves in their role for the shared values of the organization. Opening lines of
communication with team members to acknowledge their work and coach them will make them feel
more comfortable in sharing ideas. Leaders will be provided more tools from their team to determine
what is working and what is not. The bottom line is communication, trust, and appreciation can go a
LONG way.
Reference
Anderson, R. J., & Adams, W. A. (2019). Scaling leadership: Building organizational capability and
capacity to create outcomes that matter most. Wiley.
Kouzes, J. M. (2021). Leadership Challenge. Wiley Custom Learning Solutions
Kouzes, J. M. (2021). Leadership Challenge. Wiley Custom Learning Solutions.
Forbes Coaches Council. (2017). 12 Ways Managers Can Establish a Trusting Relationship with
Employees. Forbes.com.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/04/28/12-ways-managers-can-establish-
a-trusting-relationship- with-employees/?sh=d5a022bc2976 Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017).
Theœ leadership challenge (Sixth edition ed.). Wiley.
