We are approaching the end of 2013 and it’s time to review what you have accomplished so far this year as a manager, supervisor, or business owner.  This time of the year is a very good opportunity to reflect on your engagement and the engagement of your employees as you develop your plans for 2014. 

Think about this.  You started the year ready to follow your plan and achieve your goals.  You put in long hours every day. Did you monitor your progress carefully adjusting the plan as you went along.  You also see what still needs to be completed before the New Year.  How did you get this far?  How are you going to do what still needs to be done?

Let’s take a look at what may be going on.  As a manager, supervisor, or business owner you know that task mastery is only one element of the puzzle of your success.  You know that, without that bond that connects the employee to the business, you would not, at a minimum, obtain your expected results.  Therefore, you need to look at your engagement level and at your employees’ engagement level before you even begin to think about next year’s plan. 

So, let’s start with your engagement level because you as a manager, supervisor, or business owner have a major impact on the engagement level of your employees. You are their engagement role model.

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How engaged are you?  If you are highly engaged, very likely, you enjoy your work and look forward to rising to the challenges that it brings every day.  If, on the contrary, you are not highly engaged, you may dread going to work and dislike having to handle many of the issues that you face every day.  If you are not highly engaged, you could be looking for very logical reasons not to do what you are supposed to do.   Any thoughts on how these two potential outcomes may affect the end of the year results?  How about their impact on how you come across to your employees? 

Now let’s go deeper.  What does being engaged mean to you today?  Let’s look at the benefits of engagement. Because you are engaged it may be easier to handle the long hours and the additional efforts that managing others entails because you feel that you are part of something greater than yourself.  Being engaged is one of the reasons why you are not considering taking a position somewhere else. 

We invite you to ask yourself the same questions about your employees.  How engaged are they?  What does being engaged mean to them?  We ask you to consider them as individuals and as a group and to compare these answers to your own reflections about your own engagement.  We are willing to bet that you will find many similarities because of your impact as a role model to others and would like to hear from you. 

After you analyze this information, you will be ready to start thinking about what you need to do to change what you are doing to get different results by the end of next year since engagement is tied to business results.  Is engagement a priority in your objectives/plan/outcomes/achievements/results for 2014? Think twice… Remember that it is all about engagement, yours and theirs. 

We invite you to think about including specific actions to increase employee engagement in your plans for next year.  How can you do it?  That will be the topic of another post.