Do your leaders know that 45% of your employees are disengaged right now? Transform your leaders to deliver 300% increase in performance

 
All the research confirms that at any one time 45% of employees across the UK are emotionally disengaged from the goals of their organisation. This means that right now you are sitting on an immense untapped reservoir of potential performance, and missing out on as much as 40% higher productivity in operational roles, 49% more profit in general management roles, and 67% more revenue in sales roles. What are your leaders doing today to unleash this additional performance across your organisation?

This paper explains the link between leadership and bottom line results, it looks at why it’s difficult to identify what’s hindering your leaders from accessing this performance and examines what you can do to transform your leaders and the performance of your business.

Why it’s tough being a Leader today

The last decade has brought a significant shift in the leadership landscape. Today’s leaders have to deal with unprecedented challenges from every angle – from investors, customers and a multi-generational workforce. And these challenges are coming round more often, there’s more of them, and they’re more difficult to solve.

External Leadership Challenges

At first sight – the fundamental business challenge is the same as it ever was:

• You supply products and services to your customers
• Your customers are free to choose who they buy from – you or your competitors
• So your products and services need to be as good or better than them
• They need to be priced right – preferably at a deserved premium
• And you need loyal customers who continue to choose you over your competitors

So what’s really different then?

At its simplest – more competition, more discerning and increasingly promiscuous customers, a growing global economy with fierce emerging markets, ever demanding shareholders with a focus on the short-term and a pace of change that leaves most business leaders without time to catch their breath.

Today’s successful businesses have worked out that staying on top in this ever changing landscape is about making connections with customers and giving them more compelling reasons to choose you over the competition. Ultimately turning them into advocates for your business due to the strong emotional relationships they have formed with you.

More than ever before customers are demanding that they receive what your brand promises. And if you can’t consistently deliver what you promise – you can bet that one of your competitors can! If you’re not obsessed with looking after your customers – someone else will.

Internal Leadership Challenges

When we look inside many organisations we can see the additional pressures placed on today’s leaders. Employee satisfaction results regularly tell us there is a problem with ‘leadership’ at all levels across organisations and this is significantly impacting performance. So what’s causing this?

• Engagement levels are at an all time low – up to 45% of employees are disengaged
• A new generation of leaders are taking up the reins in organisations – and we have woefully under prepared them for the challenges of the 21st Century
• Today’s workforce is different from its predecessors – increasingly multi-generational, multi-cultural, disparate and diverse, time-poor, and self-centered, its attitudes and values reflect those of today’s wider society
• The traditional manager – team relationship is being replaced by ‘networked’ groups, distributed across locations and time zones and working remotely from their manager and co-workers
• Today’s leaders face new and fundamentally more complex challenges as they’re required to lead and unite groups of people with genuinely different needs and expectations
• Increasingly, employees are thinking and acting more like volunteers than conscripts; coming to work not just for a salary, but to make a genuine difference
• For today’s workforce, corporate rhetoric is neither persuasive nor motivating; obligation and loyalty are no longer automatic. Instead it’s a sense of emotional connection that most effectively motivates and engages them with the organisation. And it’s this connection that creates the desire to align with, support, and ultimately, embody the goals, values and ethos of the organisation they’re part of

Research shows the benefits of ‘Engaging Leadership’

Independent Research

• As early as the mid-80s Harvard Business School was publishing data on the financial benefits of adopting what they termed the ‘Service Profit Chain’ effect. Their data clearly demonstrated the link between superior business results, loyal engaged customers, motivated, productive employees and great leadership. Their research proved that by increasing employee satisfaction and loyalty through great leadership by as little as 5 points, profitability could be increased by between 25 - 85%
• In the 90s this work was taken up by the Gallup organisation. Their work showed that a chain of human interaction initiated by managers, and involving employees and customers, directly affects a company’s profit and overall performance. Put simply, their research proved a causal link between engaged employees and engaged customers, which lead to growth, profitability, and an increase in a company’s stock price
• And in the early 21st Century we see the next iteration of the same thesis in the seminal work ‘Human Sigma’. If we didn’t believe the business schools insights into what drove customer loyalty, we now have irrefutable evidence from the world of neuroscience that proves beyond doubt that if we peek inside the head of customers as they think about different companies – the brain activity changes. The paper concludes that those customers who demonstrate a deep emotional connection with a company behave significantly different to those who do not when it comes to propensity to buy and value of purchase. This research goes deeper than ever before and clearly shows the connection between a customer’s emotional engagement and sustainable company profitability

NKD Research

20 years of leading, motivating and coaching leaders in Private Equity, major PLCs and as external consultants have convinced NKD of the benefits of a well led, highly engaged workforce who emotionally connect with customers. The results speak for themselves:

• 20% increase in sales margins and up to 50% increase in sales volumes
• 27% reduction in employee turnover
• 30% increase in customer loyalty
• 40% higher productivity
• 15% lower cost base
• Significantly enhanced organisational innovation
• Faster routes to market
• A reputation as industry leaders
• In excess of 25% higher returns to shareholders

A wide range of data from Harvard, Watson Wyatt, McKinsey, Bain etc. supports our empirical research and consistently confirms that engaged employees create engaged customers – and that this translates into superior financial results. And the key lever in unlocking this chain reaction of benefits is the quality of leadership in an organisation.

So why isn’t todays Leadership working?

If it’s such common sense – why isn’t it ‘common practice’?
Why aren’t our leaders emotionally engaging our employees?
Why are customers no more satisfied and loyal than they were 10 years ago?

In our view its down to a few key factors:

• When it comes to emotions – most companies don’t do emotion very well
• The new breed of ‘Generation X’ leaders just don’t ‘get’ how to do it – traditionally successful leaders have high IQs and limited understanding of their Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
• Often today’s leaders are resistant to changing their behaviours because:
  
  • They’ve tried development approaches before and have not been impressed
  • They’re wedded to things that used to work for them in the ‘old world’
  • They’ve been starved of any development and don’t see the need for it now
• Quite frankly, it’s ‘hard’ to achieve an engaged organisation because the prevailing mindset is often that it takes time and it is complex to ‘do engagement’ in business
• Often traditional leadership development doesn’t cater for this new approach to leadership opting to focus on more traditional skills like – coaching skills, influencing skills, communication skills and misses the core essence of how to build emotional enagagement
• Frequently, HR and Training often don’t have the time, support or resources to assess whether current techniques are working, create new programmes or approaches to fix the shortfall

Many external solution providers lack the insights of working in line management roles in business and develop solutions that simply miss the point. They take a purist approach to their subject matter, they create technichally fantastic solutions … but they fail to appreciate the constraints and realities of applying this to the business realities leaders face today.

In our view traditional leadership development is failing today’s emerging leaders. This new internal audience demands a more gritty, real-world approach to learning and development. Corporate rhetoric doesn’t work for them. They understand that it’s different now. They are looking for innovative, stimulating learning and development that benefits them in both their work and personal lives.

Internal approaches to solving the leadership challenge often fail to deliver too. Here the problem lies in under-resourced HR and Training teams being tasked to find a ‘quick fix’ to the leadership problems, to bring in the latest leadership fad, to simply just ‘do something’ about leadership.

In our view leadership development is a significant strategic lever that is being underutilised by most organisations and is the key to unleashing the performance potential of your organisation. It’s time to move it off the HR ‘to do’ list and make it a strategic business imperative.

NKD’s ‘Engaging Leadership’ solution

Building the Platform

To start realising the benefits of Engaging Leadership we have to go to the source of the problem. It starts by getting inside the heads of leaders. They won’t start behaving and thinking in different ways by chance. We need to understand why they’re not doing it now. If we don’t get under the skin of leadership then the benefits won’t flow.

We help leaders understand the new models and give them the time to take this on board. We help them move beyond the notion that ‘development is for whimps!’ The pace of change is so fast that now, more than ever before, successful leaders make it a priority to take ‘time out’ – to provide themselves with the time and the space to regroup their thinking and refresh their skills and knowledge.

This hunger to learn from every experience and stay at peak performance is the hallmark of today’s successful leaders.

Leadership Philosophy

The old models of leadership just don’t work in this new landscape. It’s time for a new approach to leadership with a distinct focus on:

Leading For Change – responding quickly to ever-changing environments and quickly creating new systems and solutions
Leading Through People – exciting and retaining the workforce
Leading For Results – driving ever higher performance both locally and across the business
Leading For Tomorrow – leaving a leadership ‘legacy’ by identifying, training and mentoring future leaders

The key skill your leaders need to achieve success in the 21st Century is not an advanced understanding of global economics, or an in-depth understanding of emerging technology (though both of these would be useful) – quite simply, they have to enhance their natural ability to harness the power of human nature! They need to be Engaging Leaders.

Whatever way we cut it, it’s about making emotional connections with employees, teams, individuals, business partners, colleagues and peers and ultimately customers. It’s about engagement.

Leadership Model

Our research and insights have helped us develop a model of modern leadership that can set your organisation apart. We know that successful leaders display the following key traits:

1. They understand and exploit their own Authentic style:

• Are comfortable in their own skin
• Are aware of and actively manage the ‘shadow’ they cast on the organisation
• Respect and value what others say and do
• Passionately stand up for what they believe in

2. They are Uncompromising in their pursuit of excellence:

• Display genuine passion and energy for their brand/company
• Believe the only way to deliver sustainable results is through people
• Are 100% focused on what makes a difference to customers and employees
• Are driven to develop talent and release individual and team potential

3. They have highly developed Engagement skills:

• Confidently make emotional connections with employees and customers
• Inspire and excite through the use of compelling stories and examples
• Free up the energy of the organisation and encourages contribution
• Genuinely care about people at a ‘human’ level

Leadership Capabilities

This new breed of successful leaders are increasely ‘self-aware’, they develop their emotional intelligence, lead from their strengths and manage their limitations. They are adept at aligning their team with the organisation and its goals – ensuring their leadership message is consistent, engaging and focused on delivering results. And they are acutely aware of planning for tomorrow – actively identifying, training and mentoring emerging talent, leaving a lasting legacy for generations to come.

These new-age leaders understand and work hard to create working environments where their best performers can do what they excel at, over and over again for the benefit of the customer and ultimately the company. When this happens, and engaged employees utilise their natural talents, they provide an instant, and constant, competitive advantage that translates into sustainable profit and growth. They recognise that how employees choose to behave today will directly affect your business results tomorrow. And they know that how they lead their employees has a direct impact on how they behave!

What you can do to create an ‘Engaging Leadership’ culture

If this isn’t the style of leadership you see across your organisation then ask yourself three fundamental questions:

1. Do your leaders know what’s expected of them?

• How clearly do you articulate what you need from your leaders during these changing times?
• How do you let them know – are they engaged?
• How do you check that they’ve understood?
• If you don’t know what you expect of them in these changing times – how can they possibly perform to those expectations?

2. Do your leaders have the skills to deliver these new expectations?

• What training and development have you given them to prepare them for these changes?
• What regular peer sharing and coaching goes on?
• Is development seen as something that people who don’t have a proper job do?

3. Are your leaders genuinely committed to making your business successful?

• How emotionally engaged are your leaders?
• Do they really ‘care’ about your business and driving results?
• How passionate about your business are they?
• Do they understand the consequences of being successful or not?

If you can answer positively to all of the above, then go straight to the top of the class. Most organisations can’t. They want the benefits of having great leadership, but they haven’t put the groundwork in to make this a reality.

Want to quickly experience some of the benefits of an ‘Engaging Leadership’ culture?

Have you leaders focus on these four areas:

• Focus on setting clear expectations – most employees do not know what is expected of them – on average only 25% of employees are clear on what they are expected to do to make their company successful
• Invest in appropriate tools and training – most employees want to do a great job, however we often deprive them of the skills and tools that allow them to make the biggest contribution to our businesses
• Recognise, recognise, recognise – it is through praise and recognition that people define their personal value, and assess how others value them. It’s the most powerful motivational tool… and it’s free!
• Build emotional relationships – critical relationships include an employee’s manager, colleagues, customers and close friends at work. Demonstrating the importance of relationships, 70% of those who leave a company do so because of their relationship with their manager, not the company

Why partner with NKD to improve your leaders’ performance?

Leadership development that delivers real business value

We’ve spent the last three years getting inside the heads of today’s successful leaders. We did this for one simple reason – to understand how today’s leaders want to learn and to develop solutions that would switch them onto a new and more successful way of leading.

We now understand the unique demands that are placed on leaders at both an intellectual and emotional level. We know what makes them tick, what turns them on… and equally what turns them off when it comes to personal development.  
 
We know that if you want to emotionally engage employees then you need to engage the leaders with this agenda. So you need to talk to them in a relevant and contemporary way. You need to help them understand and feel comfortable with their own unique, authentic style. And you need to provide them with tools and techniques that are relevant and practical in today’s workplace. That’s what we do at NKD.

How we do it

As a result, our leadership solutions provide leaders with the rare opportunity to step back from their day-to-day responsibilities and create the time and space for them to acquire the knowledge, skills and behaviours required of today’s 21st Century leaders. But what really makes NKD Learning stand out from the pack is:

One size fits no-one
We know that each leader’s challenges, and strengths, are different, so all our solutions are bespoke grounded in and created specifically for the reality of your organisation and dealing with the specifics of your leadership issues rather than the generalities of broad leadership thinking.

Focus on business improvement
Our bespoke leadership development solutions focus on the key areas that influence management and leadership performance. And they are built with your specific organisational goals in mind, to ensure your version of ‘modern leadership’ delivers exactly what your organisation needs to the bottom line.

Contemporary, innovative solutions
We recognise that adults access personal and professional development in many different ways and we design our leadership development solutions with this in mind, using a wide range of innovative learning approaches.

Creating a high impact ‘time out’
Our hands on, practical leadership development programmes create a supportive and personalised learning environment in which leaders can examine and discuss the daily challenges they face. We combine this with providing the space and support for participants to critically examine their current mindset and biases, transforming their view of themselves as leaders. The focus is on finding workable solutions that individual leaders feel committed to putting into practice back at the workplace.

We aim to sustain!
Leaders emerge from our programmes feeling challenged at a personal level, with greater self-awareness, increased knowledge and with renewed confidence to lead with lasting impact. We build in techniques and processes such as our unique 90-day success journals to ensure a higher ‘stickability’ factor for your organisation.

Don’t believe the hype?

A growing club of successful blue chip leaders – including Virgin Atlantic, AstraZeneca, British Airways, Vodafone and npower – confirm that NKD Learning have cracked what this means for Leadership Development and provides genuinely innovative and impactful development solutions for this new generation of leaders.

We know that the principles we adhere to at NKD Learning work for companies during both the good and the more difficult times. Our heritage is in helping leaders drive enhanced organisational performance during some of the most testing scenarios – during Private Equity buy outs and major PLC turnarounds. If our solutions can work in those tough situations – just think what they could do for your business right now?

But don’t just take our word for it – here’s what some of our clients have had to say about working with us on leadership projects:
 
“Working with NKD has been a great experience. They made the process very easy by getting into the heart of the company’s culture and understanding how things need to change and evolve. The leadership programme designed for us has really increased the awareness of individual behaviours amongst our management team. We are starting to see real, tangible changes in performance across the whole 4000 leaders – in the short time the programme has been running this has exceeded all of our expectations”.
^{Matt Bagshaw  Head of Leadership Training, British Airways}

“Ownership of the project was genuinely shared. Our weekly project management sessions were a unique combination of rigour and fun. The NKD team didn’t just help us to do it, they also transformed our own leaders into capable facilitators for the future”.
^{Rob Cook  HR Director, AstraZeneca}

“NKD made a real difference and connection with all levels of leadership across the organisation through engaging and thought provoking meetings, workshops, training courses and seminars”.
^{Michael Parker  Head of Change, npower}

“Working with NKD gave us the confidence to try out new thinking and approaches to our Leadership Development. The results have been staggering”.
^{Chris Birt  Service Training Manager, Virgin Atlantic Airways}

“NKD really challenge your thought processes. Their solutions are practical and can change the way you work overnight with very positive results”.
^{Steph Fox  Regional Operations Manager, npower}

Take the ‘Engaging Leadership’ challenge

If you’re thinking it’s time to review and re-fresh your organisation’s approach to leadership then we challenge you to test our leadership thinking against the others in the market place and tell us if you can taste the difference!

In July and August, we’ll give you a free ‘Engaging Leadership’ consultation. We’ll help point you in the right direction and even throw in a simple guide that you can use to implement some of the basics yourself.

Why not take up the challenge now? Give us a call on 0207 208 7258 or email info@nkdlearning.co.uk