Question: What defines a great manager? Answer: Her team.
We all know a great team when we see one: happy, motivated, and successful. This greatness doesn’t happen by chance. Behind every great team is a manager whose actions inspire commitment and drive results.
Yet, as common as thriving teams are, we often see the reverse: disengagement, dissatisfaction, and a lack of motivation. A manager can make or break a team. What separates managers who cultivate excellence from those who struggle to keep their teams motivated? The answer starts with engagement.
What is Engagement?
Employee engagement (engagement) is the commitment an employee has to an organisation and its goals. Culture Amp, a leading employee experience platform, measures engagement as a combination of five factors (shown with their corresponding questions):
- Pride: “I am proud to work for my company.”
- Recommendation: “I would recommend my company as a great place to work.”
- Present commitment: “I rarely think about looking for a job at another company.”
- Future commitment: “I see myself still working at my company in two years’ time.”
- Motivation: “My company motivates me to go beyond what I would in a similar role elsewhere.”
An engaged employee would agree with these questions. A disengaged employee wouldn’t. But why does engagement matter? Because an engaged team is a happy, high-performing team.
Engagement is more than a buzzword — there are measurable benefits to engagement at work. When you (or your team) are engaged, you’re happier, have more positive mental health, and perform at a higher level. Productivity is positively impacted, too: an increase in engagement by 20% contributes to a 20% increase in team and manager productivity. In terms of retention, engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave compared to disengaged employees. So how can you make this happen?
I’ll share three different areas of research to inform how you manage your team for engagement and motivation.
First: research on motivation from psychologist Edward Deci.
Second: data on employee engagement from Culture Amp’s industry benchmarks.
Then finally: findings on high-performing manager behaviours from Google’s Project Oxygen.
The Research: What motivates us?
Professor Edward Deci has been studying motivation for over 50 years. His work with clinical psychologist Richard Ryan led to the development of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), one of the most influential and extensive theories of human motivation.
A core finding within SDT is that people have three basic psychological needs. Our environment often strives to thwart these needs. Yet when these needs are met, we can be at our best; we thrive. Sustainable motivation is supported when the following needs are met:
- Autonomy: People want to have a choice.
- Mastery: People want to use their skills.
- Connection: People want to feel connected to people they care about.
Great managers support their employees’ needs; those employees can then thrive. How have you supported these needs? How have your autonomy, mastery, and connection needs been supported?
The Research: What engages us?
Each year, Culture Amp publishes employee engagement data collected from thousands of companies and millions of survey responses. According to this data, the top 10% most engaged companies (87% engaged) are 16 percentage points more engaged than the average company (71% engaged). They’re also 33 percentage points more engaged than the bottom 10% (54% engaged). This is a huge difference!
Year after year, several questions appear as the top drivers of engagement. Employees who disagree with these questions tend to have low engagement, and those who agree tend to be more engaged. What are these drivers? Here are the top three questions:
- “My company is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development.”
- “The leaders at my company demonstrate that people are important to the company’s success.”
- “The leaders at my company have communicated a vision that motivates me.”
These are the key levers you can pull to engage your team. How much do you agree with these? What would your team say?
The Research: What makes a great manager?
Further insights on great managers come from an internal Google research project called Project Oxygen. Engineers at Google, a naturally sceptical bunch, didn’t like the idea of management. So, Google set out to prove that managers weren’t needed. What its researchers found was surprising — great managers exist, and these managers have a remarkably positive impact on their people. The teams of top managers had greater satisfaction, retention, and productivity.
Based on their findings, the researchers created a list of ten core behaviours most strongly associated with high-performing managers at Google. Here are the behaviours of Google’s best managers:
- Is a good coach
- Empowers the team and does not micromanage
- Expresses interest in and concern for team member’s success and wellbeing
- Is productive and results-oriented
- Listens and shares information
- Helps with career development
- Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
- Has key technical skills that help her advise the team
- Collaborates across the organisation
- Is a strong decision-maker
Can you see these behaviours in leaders you respect? What about yourself?
How do we synthesise this research? What should you take away from these findings? In short…
The Question
Given this information, what should you do to engage your team?
The Short Answer
Do the following for your team:
- Help them grow
- Show they matter
- Inspire with vision
The Long Answer
How do these behaviours connect with the research on engagement?
- When you help your team with career development, you help them grow.
- When you express interest in and concern for team members’ success and wellbeing, you show people they matter.
- When you have a clear vision and strategy for the team, you can inspire with vision.
Here are the three areas you should focus on to engage your team, with a few example actions.
1) Help them grow
Question:“My company is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development.”
Behaviour: Helps with career development
Need: Mastery, Autonomy
When you help your team with career development, you help them grow. Satisfy their need for mastery by providing opportunities to apply their skills. Provide your team with the autonomy to choose their path with your support.
How might you do this?
- Engage in a job-crafting exercise.
- Provide time for innovation (e.g. Google’s 20% time).
- Delegate meaningful work and provide a greater scope of control (learn how in my free email course).
2) Show they matter
Question:“The leaders at my company demonstrate that people are important to the company’s success.”
Behaviour: Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and wellbeing
Need: Autonomy, Connection
When you express interest in your team members’ success, you show people they matter. You make them feel like they’re more than a cog in the machine. Show that the work of your team matters.
What actions could you take?
- Ask what your team wants.
- Connect senior leaders with your team.
- Recognise and celebrate effort, not just achievement.
3) Inspire with vision
Question:“The leaders at my company have communicated a vision that motivates me.”
Behaviour: Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
Need: Connection
When you have a clear vision and strategy for the team, you can inspire with vision. Your team’s need for connection and purpose is satisfied when they are part of something larger than themselves.
What can you do to inspire your team?
- Repeat, repeat, repeat the vision.
- Connect the vision to company values.
- Involve your team in the creation of a strategy.
The Bottom Line
Management is both an art and a science. Great managers take specific, repeatable actions to produce high performance. The teams of great managers are more satisfied, more productive, and stay with the company longer. Engaged employees feel the same.
What should you do? Support your team’s need for autonomy, mastery, and connection. Help them grow, show they matter, and inspire with vision. Follow the lead of top managers and you’ll build a successful and committed team.