Practice Notes

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Leadership and strengths

We recommend investing in Tom Rath’s and Barry Conchie’s book, Strengths and Leadership. Their basic ideas are that the most effective leaders:

• are always investing in their strengths and those of their people.
• surround themselves with well–rounded teams that have strengths in different areas.
• understand their followers’ needs, which according to Rath and Conchie are trust, compassion, stability and hope.

Leaders can’t be good at everything, and there’s a trap in trying to emulate the leadership style of different sorts of leaders or leaders you admire. The key is to discover your leadership strengths, play to them and surround yourself with others who have different ones.

If you buy the book, you can also take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test and work out what your strengths are.

Engaging staff and the issue of pay

Many organisations we’re working with are trying to improve staff engagement. They’re either using the JRA or Gallup engagement surveys. Both are good in our view. The one issue that often gets mentioned still is pay. All the evidence shows that higher pay in itself doesn’t engage people. But pay still occupies people’s minds. So we went back and looked at what Gallup says about pay.

Wagner and Harter, in their book 12 The elements of great managing (based on the 12 Gallup questions) argue that the issue of pay is complicated and it’s emotional. Many people spend years trying to attain more material possessions and wealth, but it doesn’t buy them more happiness.

Pay is also more about status, and comparative status at that. We have a view about what we are worth in comparison with others. And if what we get is less than others, we’re likely to be aggrieved.

How many organisations make their pay rates public? Hardly any. (Sometimes you can work out what people get.) If they are made public, it’s likely to cause an emotional comparative response.

So, is there any way forward? Well, maybe. First of all, if organisations don’t want to make pay rates public, they could make pay criteria public. (This happens to some extent via performance management systems.)

Secondly paying people a good salary (comparatively of course) when they are engaged already, will result in additional effort from staff. If staff feel their employer is looking out for them in a whole variety of ways, then they will look out for the employer.