Are disengaged leaders undermining employee engagement?

Is a disengaged leadership tier undermining workforce engagement?

According to recently published data, when leaders aren't engaged, 99 per cent of their teams aren't engaged either.

Leadership engagement is more than a morale issue, says Thomas O’Neill, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Calgary – it shapes team dynamics, goal clarity and connection to purpose.

“A leader that's not engaged tells me that they're an absent leader,” O’Neill says.

“An engaged leader would get to know employees on a personal level and develop that rapport. Of course, people are hired to do the work, but most people want real purpose in their work, and I think that that's a major role of an engaged leader, is to provide that purpose and that direction and give people fulfilling work activities.”

Overworked frontline leaders

The ADP report Today at Work revealed that when a team leader is fully engaged, 35 per cent of their team isn't. 

O’Neill points out that overburdened frontline leaders are often juggling too much due to poor upstream planning by “out of touch” senior leaders.

“That then becomes a leadership issue at the mid to higher levels of the organization, where they're essentially demanding too much from their frontline leaders,” says O’Neill.

“So, these leaders are trying to do their own work, and they're trying to make sure their teams are doing their work, and it just doesn't work … they might be engaging externally, but they have to engage just as much with their own leaders, monitor their own leaders’ health and give those leaders a lot of development.”

Aliza Aldana, PhD student in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Calgary, adds that a key reason for disengagement is that time for team leadership is not prioritized – she recommends intentionally building this time into job expectations “so that it's supported as part of their role specifically, not just an add-on, expected thing.”

Segment and equip leadership teams with data

Jay Caldwell, chief talent officer at ADP, says that understanding leader engagement starts with good data that focuses specifically on leaders themselves.

"When you start to segment your data or segment your understanding of the organization, that can give you some very targeted or surgical actions,” he says.

“When you start to segment leadership as a population, then you start to see this differential impact that they have.”

He explains that organizations must push data to the front lines quickly, especially through pulse surveys and simple tech-enabled tools, so leaders can use the data as a tool to engage and collaborate with their teams.

“Use modern technology to get those surveys out there, collect them back really quickly, and most important, get the results in the managers’ hands as fast as you possibly can, because they're the people that can really impact it,” Caldwell says.

“Instead of the traditional employee surveys where the leadership team or executive team looks at the results for a month before it's shared, flip that on its head, get the information to the leaders as fast as you possibly can, so they can engage your teams and talk to them about ‘Well, here's what you all said. Now, what can we do about it at our level?'

"And if the company decides to do some big macro things, that's great as well, but let's talk about what we can control and build within our own team.”

Clarify leader expectations and develop feedback skills

According to Caldwell, leaders’ engagement can be affected by uncertainty around the expectations of their roles.

“What do we expect of leaders within the organization? Do they understand the behaviors, the skills, the type of management approach that we want to see within the organization, and how we're going to hold them accountable for that?" he says.

“Do they also know what we're going to expect of them tomorrow, for example, in the age of AI, and how that's going to change, and how we need them to help us lead through the future?”

Plus, building a healthy feedback culture should be stressed, he says, adding that framing is important as many employees see feedback as negative, which creates reluctance—especially when it flows upward.

“Most people avoid like the plague giving their manager feedback, because there's a certain power dynamic there … you want to be careful.”

Caldwell suggests HR normalize safe, low-risk feedback habits at the team level.

The easiest way to do it is encourage your managers to ask for it,” he says. One method: during a regular meeting, simply ask, “What's one thing I can do to manage the team's work more effectively the next three months?”

Leadership development should also be protected from budget cuts during economic downturns, he adds. “Training, I think, is one of the easiest to cut back on in the learning and development space.”

To make the case for investment, HR needs to tie leadership capability to business performance, he adds.

“That's what HR organizations can do, is lean on the data harder to show 'This is the impact of the investments that we would make in our people leaders,'” Caldwell says.

"This includes linking engagement to retention, and retention to revenue impact. “You can draw a very clear line to the impact on your revenue or profitability as a business by investing in leadership skills.”

Ultimately, HR professionals must anchor their strategies in facts, he says. “That's one thing we can do more in the HR space, is leaning on the objective research backed reasons why we're recommending certain actions organizationally.”