In today’s highly competitive talent marketplace, employee engagement is critical to a company’s success.  More than just boosting productivity, when a talented workforce feels cared for, they will share the sentiment and behavior with their peers and customers.  They will bring their best ideas to table, encouraged by the support they feel from their leadership and peers. They will go the distance to treat customers joyfully, working as ambassadors of the company’s brand. This has a direct impact on the company’s sales as customers return to purchasing products and services and refer others to do the same based on the positive experiences they have with its employees.  You might expect this to be obvious, but in fact, it requires intent and purposeful systems (activities and routines) as most managers do not naturally think of their employees’ experience.  

A leading eye care company faced challenges in cultivating a people-centric leadership mindset and navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.  Like many organizations, medical companies rely on word of mouth, so a decline in customer experience was problematic, especially when it began to show itself in comments and online ratings.  The HR Business Partners first impulse was to implement customer service training, until they noticed a higher-than-normal increase in unplanned attrition. Declining sales, sluggish turnaround time, and delayed time to get new products to market fueled a sense of urgency to identify and solve the problem. They were losing top talent in the Research and Development and Commercial Functions to the competition.  As they sorted through the past two quarters of employee engagement surveys and exit interview data, they saw a trending complaint: “We need better managers…” and “Our leaders need basic professional skills training.” What was once thought of as a luxury, leadership development became a necessity. The company needed a strategic approach to develop leaders who understood how their teams delivered competitive advantage, and could inspire, motivate, and develop people to do their best.

Leadership…Intuitive or Intentional?

In the real world, when managers do not understand how their people contribute to their customer’s success, let alone the company’s balance sheet, they fall short of creating a culture where their employee can do their best. Several factors can get in the way:

Lack of Awareness

• Unrecognized Importance: Some managers may not fully understand the impact of employee experience on overall organizational success, understand their role and responsibility for creating the experience and the culture on their teams, and may prioritize other areas such as financial performance or operational efficiency where they feel most comfortable.  They may have been promoted because of their high performance in these areas and will default to these tactics when problems arise.
• Limited Training: Managers might lack the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to influence how an employee experiences them.  Developing self-awareness requires deliberate practice of acting, reflecting and redefining.  Most of our actions are innate; We are not programmed to be hyper aware of self, let alone how others are perceiving us so that we can shift accordingly.  Professional skills and emotional intelligence training may not have traditionally been included in the mainstream curriculum for your managers.
• Biases: Unconscious biases can lead to favoritism or unfair treatment, harming the overall employee experience.

Competing Values and Priorities

• Resource Constraints: Managers often work with limited resources, which can force them to prioritize short-term gains over long-term investments in employee engagement and well-being, especially when they do not recognize the importance and impact of continuing this investment.  I often draw the analogy of routine maintenance on heavily worked machines. We don’t skip on maintaining our vehicles.  Regular oil changes are part of the cost of having a car. 
• High Workloads: The demands of running a business can leave little time for managers to focus on improving the employee experience, leading to it being deprioritized especially when health and well-being is taken for granted. 
• Performance Metrics: If a company’s performance metrics and incentives are not aligned with employee well-being, managers might focus on hitting targets at the expense of the employee experience.  Worse, people analytics maybe missing altogether.  In many companies, this only becomes apparent when revenue begins to fall, managers complain that on time deliver metrics are running high, only to admit it is due to understaffing, and are then forced to measure retention.

Personal Limitations

• Micromanagement: Lack of trust, perfectionism, insecurity, and fear of failure often lead to a habit of micromanaging employees. Superiors who micromanage can stifle creativity and autonomy, leading to a negative employee experience.
• Lack of Empathy: Managers who do not practice empathy may fail to recognize or address employee concerns, leading to disengagement.  This can also be hidden or excused away as a leadership style (“This is who I am, deal with it.”) lacking in emotional quotient.
• Poor Communication: Ineffective communication can lead to misunderstandings, lack of clarity, and employees feeling undervalued or ignored.
• Feedback Ignorance: Managers who do not seek or act on employee feedback miss opportunities to improve the workplace environment.
• Burnout:  Managers themselves may be experiencing burnout, which can affect their ability to positively influence their team’s experience.

Organizational Culture

• Toxic Work Environment: In organizations with a toxic culture where bad behavior is tolerated (or even expected as the ends somehow justify the means), even well-intentioned managers may struggle to make meaningful changes without broader support.  And make no mistake, culture is about collective behavior, so when support is missing, it speaks volumes about the culture.
• Resistance to Change: Long-standing practices and resistance from other managers or employees can hinder efforts to improve the employee experience.  This resistance can be caused by inertia/ingrained habits and beliefs (this is business not personal), comfort in the status quo, fear of failure, looking silly or stupid for following what may be perceived as “the flavor of the month” initiative, or “If my friends aren’t doing it neither should I”), or strict, inflexible policies.
• Lack of Development Opportunities: Without opportunities for growth and development, employees may feel stagnant and undervalued.  This is often seen in organizations where leaders do not have a growth mindset, innovation is delegated to the favored few, and others are expected to wait to for opportunities to appear rather than create it themselves.

External Pressures

• Market Pressures: External market pressures and economic conditions can force leaders to make tough decisions that may negatively impact the employee experience, such as layoffs or budget cuts.  An employee once described this as feeling like a grenade is going off cubicle by cubicle, and he lived in constant fear he would be next until the announcements stopped.  The prevailing anxiety made him less than his usual jovial self around peers and customers.

Since managers can significantly elevate the employee experience, these challenges needed to be recognized and addressed to create a supportive and engaging work environment. Structured and purposeful leadership training, awareness, and a strategic focus on employee well-being are essential for leaders to effectively enhance the employee experience.  I implemented a comprehensive leadership development roadmap that addressed leadership needs at all levels of the company, developed a capability model aligned to the company’s core values and business initiatives, designed, then personally delivered learning interventions across four main areas of skill development: Leadership Effectiveness, Business and Financial Acumen, Team Development, and Continuous Improvement.

Leadership Effectiveness

This included Leadership (Self) Assessments and 360 Feedback to build awareness, and new habits to develop emotional quotient (mindfulness, reflection, interpersonal acuity, learning to read and regulate the emotional states of self and others).  Workshops included practical techniques for diffusing emotionally charged situations, resolving conflict in a way that takes the relationship to the next level, coaching, mentoring, delegating with trust and collaboration, giving constructive feedback not disguised as personal preference, judgement, or criticism and receiving both constructive and non-constructive feedback with grace and gratitude.  

Business and Financial Acumen

All programs included a business simulator that mirrored the mechanics of how the company operated, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly tasks and decisions that need to be made to generate customer value and earn profits.  Managers juggled the needs of a team against customer and market demand over four simulated quarters with real life scenarios and quickly understood the importance of investing in talent and teamwork, and the realities of competing for talent in today’s world.  They understood key financial terms and processes, and how their (and team’s) performance directly tied into the company’s balance sheet.  There was no such category as a “supporting function” as everyone saw the impact of cross functional work directly tied to business outcomes. They learned how to identify and align performance metrics and incentives with employee engagement and satisfaction goals, balance short- and long-term needs, and prioritize investments that produced both immediate results, and delivered long term gains and sustainable outcomes.

Team Development

As part of the program, managers were taught the attributes and mechanics behind high performing teams and applied a structured process with tools to move their teams from good to great.  They understood how to set clear expectations, identify, and provide tools, resources, spot and nurture hidden talent, build team capabilities for immediate results and future growth, measure performance to build accountability and celebrate success. They identified and implemented best practices, routines, and habits, ensuring that their pursuit of excellence became second nature. They learned how to monitor the team’s culture and address and discourage any toxic elements early. They built a resilient and agile learning mindset by regularly integrating new technical and digital skills to keep their teams ahead of the curve.

Continuous Improvement.

Each program also focused on continuous improvement by streamlining processes to remove unnecessary work and uplift the customer experience.  Having grown up under the tutelage of Jack Welsh, I understood the power of a lean mindset and toolkit to hone and optimize output/throughput, processes and measure the value created.  Managers quickly realized that revenue isn’t just about sales; it’s the entire process that drives profit.  They also developed strategic thinking and scenario planning skills to prepare for external market pressures and economic conditions and applied techniques to recession proof their departments and avoid layoffs.  They learned how to optimize their team capacity and cross trained employees where appropriate which allowed people to move seamlessly across the functions when needed.

Outcomes and Results

By implementing these strategies on the job, managers began to uplift the company culture. Within the first six months, over 750 managers were developed and promoted, leading to a 57% increase in employee engagement scores. This improvement in engagement correlated with a 35% increase in customer satisfaction scores, as customers experienced better service, consistent positive interactions, enhanced problem-solving, and employees who took ownership of issues across departments until resolution.

As a result, product and service sales revenue increased by 28% by the end of the third quarter. This growth came not only from existing customers making new purchases and referring others but also from faster turnaround times on quotes, delivery of goods and services, and quicker accounts receivable collection.

The success of these initiatives gained the attention of other managers, leading to a waitlist for the leadership programs. Today, the leadership pipeline continues to grow by 60-70% annually, with strong gender and ethnic diversity, training over 1200 new leaders each year. Beyond improving employee engagement, these leaders regularly track their teams’ performance and celebrate significant achievements. They have successfully implemented AI Chatbots for Services and AI-enabled Decision Making, which have delivered $5 million in productivity savings, a 15% margin expansion, and increased cash flow.