Leadership Skills For Improving Employee Performance And Engagement

The following assessment develops Communication and Social Skills Learning Outcome and Graduate Attribute by facilitating students’ knowledge and awareness about how to run an evidence-based intervention targeted at a specific type of employee so as to develop their communication skills in a professional setting.

You are required to develop a PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint presentation must be supported by references on the final page. It should show how one small part of the Positive leader theory can be turned into a skill development exercise useful in the workplace.  

Please note that you MUST upload 2 documents:

1. your PowerPoint slides through Turnitin in either .ppt or .pdf format.
2. your written notes for your presentation in a Word document .doc format.

Chose one topic

1. Identify one of characteristics of being a positive leader and develop a presentation about one strategy that a positive leader could use to improve the productivity and wellbeing of one type of employee (such as emotional labour (such as nurses or carers) or first response employees (such as police officers/ soldiers) or different types of professionals (such as engineers) or a specific generational cohort or any other type of employee. The presentation can include different types of skill development exercises aimed at demonstrating the impact of each strategy.   

Or

2. Develop a workshop for improving positive emotions/workplace relationships/hope/psychological capital/positive values or any other positive attribute evident in the peer-reviewed journals.

Or

3. Develop a presentation showing how you would use positive leadership skills to convince your management (Board of Director) of an idea that would improve employee performance (engagement/wellbeing).

Leadership skills for improving employee performance and engagement

Leadership skills are those skills, which are used in an organization for employees to make them reach shared goals. In basic terms, all these leadership skills help in motivating others to complete a series of tasks and often according to the schedule (Daskal, 2018). Hence, leadership is not just one skill but rather it is the set or combination of several types of skills, which makes employees work together effectively and efficiently (Mitre finch, 2019).

Organization success lies in the hands of the effective leaders as they help in building up a strong team within the corporate and ensure that the missions, creativities and the other working functions are performed effectively. All this happens because of the skills of a leader, which involves multiple interactive and communication abilities. Due to all this, good leaders help in increasing employee engagement, support a positive environment, and aids in removing obstacles for the team. One of the leadership skills features also highlights that they are contagious, helps in inspiring colleagues in order to apply positive leadership traits in the given effort (Ebrahimi Mehrabani, and Azmi Mohamad, 2015).

Raising and maintaining the higher performance among the workers is the most important element of the organization in order to reach the ultimate goals and the objectives. Similarly, leaders play a vital role in ensuring and improving employee performance. Moreover, with these effective leadership qualities, the entire workforce gets motivated and proves to the organization most valuable resources (Doyle, 2018).

This report highlights the leadership skills that not only helps in generating the organization success and leads to the fulfillment of the organization objectives. Nevertheless, other than this, it helps in improving the employees’ performances as well as helps the organization top management to know more about their employees, their involvement in every activity of the organization, which ultimately leads to the employee engagement (Maythew, 2019).

According to my analysis, the success of the organization lies in the hand of employees that how well they perform their tasks. Likewise,

Communicate clear expectation: Being a leader of the organization, they need to clearly and succinctly explain that what are the organizational goals and the exact tasks are. Influential must have all procedures of statement comprising one to one communication, departmental, full staff conversation as well as communication through phone calls, electronic mail etc. Moreover, the major part of communication includes listening. Hence, leaders should establish a steady flow of communication between staff members and themselves so that they can easily discuss the issues and concerns with the employees (Miller, 2015).     

Communicate clear expectation

Motivation: In this aspect, leaders need to inspire their workers so that they can go the additional mile for their business. Just paying the salary is not enough for encouragement. There are numerous ways to encourage workers and to build employees self-esteem through acknowledgment and rewards or giving employees more duties and responsibilities to upturn their investment in the corporation.

Empowering employees to do their job well: empowering workforces can be done in many other ways through which they can gain the power to make decisions that have a massive impact on accomplishments. Along with this, the leaders also need to take step towards improving morale by developing the working environment, improving the salary levels, making employees to understand the missions and the vision of the organization. Lastly, when employees understand their role appropriately this helps the organization to generate success more often (Fobes Coaches Council, 2017).

Advocate for employees: a good leader always know about the employee’s needs, concerns, strength, and weaknesses. By knowing all about them, leaders then have to find ways to actively uplift the employees based on their knowledge. If they are struggling with any particular task or their job role, that should be reassigned according to their strength. And when the struggling employees see that leader is understanding their struggle as well as their potential, leaders give them an opportunity to succeed so that they can engage themselves in something good and performs well in order to achieve the higher level success (Ebrahimi Mehrabani, and Azmi Mohamad, 2015).

Be transparent about where the company is heading Most of the employees were respected enough to be informed about the decisions that the Board to directors make and all these decisions impact them and their career outlook. Accordingly, the employers should become more transparent towards their employees and give them the insight of certain benchmarks, so that they can easily understand the role they have to play in the organization and ensures that the goals are to be aligned with the organization objectives (Owen, 2017).

Create meaningful goals for employees:  In this, if an organization aims at increasing employee’s engagement, leaders need to connect performance to the goal setting. For this, they need to follow the SMART, which denotes as specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Along with this, they should also honor the unique talents that each of the employees has. All this can only be possible when an organization should conduct regular meetings with their employees in order to help them in identifying the potential obstacles and then guiding them towards the right direction so that they can feel motivated and work over the improvement of their self-development as well as the overall organization performances (Sanda, 2017).

Motivation

According to my analysis, the leadership skills that help in convincing the board of directors and helps in improving the employee performance and their engagement are, I think the organization must have coaching as the main component which helps employers to empower employees to take charge of their careers. Moreover, the adoption of emotional intelligence also helps in the growing foundation of an engaged workforce. Along with this, the organization should also apply the open door policy in which leaders need to handle those day to day interruptions which are as chances for management to exhibit leadership, by the use of these interruptions as coaching and mentoring opportunities can bring people together.

Above all, according to my analysis, employee performance can be improved when the board of directors will share the data with the employees with honesty and integrity, which helps the company in maintaining a positive image. Along with this, if a leader is having problem-solving skills then they can make a quick decision, resolve obstacles with their team and ensure that projects are completed according to the set targets. Lastly, leaders should be as examples to their team members and with positivity, compassion, purpose, humanity, and love achieve all those set goals, which were defined by the organization in their mission and objectives.

The RRG group, overall aim was to display the first and the foremost factor was to prevent workforce from disengagement and converting them in fully engaged in relation to the remuneration, induction process, work, and life balance and communication.  There are numerous factors such as training and development, quality management that help in driving employees’ engagement at RRG group. Moreover, the general leader also highly influence the level of engagement through the set of skills likewise, communication skills, listening skills, giving feedback, performance management and also giving recognition to their ultimate employees in order to develop employees engagement (Longenecker, 2010).  

The MHI global Inc. is one of the well-known and one of the largest committed performance improvement companies in the world. The study of the company revealed that there are certain key skills and attributes that affect the first line leaders all over the world. This particular company focus is over the fresh model of successful first-line leadership, who are outlined by fourteen major skills with four more core capabilities that help in boosting up the engagement and the employee's performance of the company. The MHI global company states that the first line leaders are so experienced that shows that, if in the company there is an unskilled leader in this regard the entire employee engagement suffers which overall leads to the decrement of productivity, increase the turnover and lastly affects the internal and external relationship (Anon, 2015)  

Empowering employees to do their job well

Ghanaian Telecom Firms is also one of the leading businesses who has shown the importance of both authentic and transactional leadership styles and the positive influence over their employee's creativity. The role, which their employees and managers play while usage of authentic and transactional headship work in a particular environment leads to the innovation and creativity, work-related flow, is also generated within the employees in order to nurture their creativities. Moreover, by providing training to their leaders enables them to perform the leadership function of their managerial activities towards the incubation of their subordinate creativities. Along with this, the creative psychological working climate helps in nurturing the innovativeness and creativeness in their employees Akbari, et al, 2017)

5star hotels experience also highlights the role of leadership in constructing and managing hotel management. Moreover, customers’ loyalty, attracting and sustaining the skilled and well-trained employees identified as the main benefit of the good corporate reputation. Other than this, companies apply leadership style such as the charismatic style of leadership and skills, which results in having a positive influence over the corporate reputation. Moreover, leaders must be sensitive to the internal environment, should take care of the subordinates needs and their skills.  It is mandatory to give great attention to the internal environment as well as human resources skills and needs in order to generate and develop a good external organization reputation (Stavrinoudis, & Chrysanthopoulou, 2016).

 Hyatt: in one of the CSR programme, gave its employees the opportunity to care about not only their customers but also the community and the environment (Mirvis, 2012). While all these initiatives made by the company and the entire teams from all across the hotels came together and display their talent and passion towards this noble cause towards the community and the society. Such participation made by the employees with the positivity, passion holds the immense potential to change and thus making and leading to the change in the entire working of the organization as well as improving the overall reputation of the organization (Taj, 2018).

McCall in the easy jet company worked as a great leader along with the qualities of an executive to cope up with the entire organization. The traits, which assisted her to drive the corporation onward, were the capacities inside the administrations, her perseverance, and encouragement for workforces, honesty, elasticity, endurance, and discipline towards work. Her foremost motive towards the worker was to encourage them, build faith within them, creating that image which supports association and individuals both for their accomplishment. Furthermore, she persuaded them towards the communal learning, demonstrating the optimistic conduct within them and creating them conscious about holding the greater performance, which is expected at the early phase. Overall McCall as a front-runner evidenced to be the finest for the easy jet company. Moreover, it will be more profit not only for the organization achievement but also for those workforces who are functioning under her working grace (Hollinger, 2014).

Advocate for employees

Conclusion

From the above report, we can conclude that the use of positive leadership skills definitely helps the organization to improve the performances of the employees as well as retain them for the longer period and hence leads to the employees’ engagement. All this can be done when the board of directors or the top management try to focus on leaders tackling skills likewise, the communication aspect, motivation aspect of the employees and generating meaningful goals for the employees so that they can perform better and wholeheartedly for the organization and lastly leads to the improvement of the organization reputation. The above report also supports the argument by the experiences they faced. Hence, by all these organizations it is too declared that leadership skills always helps in improving the employee performances as well as organization overall reputation.

References

Akbari, M., Seyyed Amiri, N., Imani, S., Rezaeei, N., & Foroudi, P. (2017) why leadership style matters: a closer look at transformational leadership and internal marketing. The Bottom Line, 30(4), 258–278. Doi: 10.1108/bl-08-2017-0021

Anon, (2015) New Study From MHI Global Reveals Key Leadership Skills That Can Improve Performance and Engagement of Non-Management Employees. PR Newswire, pp.PR Newswire.

Daskal, L. (2018) everything you need to know about great leadership [Online] Available from: https://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/everything-you-need-to-know-about-great-leadership.html [Accessed 24/1/2019]

Doyle, A.(2018) top 10 leadership skills [Online] Available from: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-leadership-skills-2063782 [Accessed 24/01/2019]

Ebrahimi Mehrabani, S. and Azmi Mohamad, N., (2015) New approach to leadership skills development (developing a model and measure). Journal of Management Development, 34(7), pp.821-853.

Fobes Coaches Council, (2017) 16 essential leadership skills for the workplace of tomorrow [Online] Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/12/27/16-essential-leadership-skills-for-the-workplace-of-tomorrow/#4131c2154cea [Accessed 24/1/2019]

Hollinger, P. (2014) Carolyn McCall: Flying high at Easy Jet [Online] Available from: https://www.ft.com/content/8e57d15e-70ac-11e4-8113-00144feabdc0 [Accessed 24/1/19]

Longenecker, C.O., (2010) Coaching for better results: key practices of high-performance leaders. Industrial and Commercial Training, 42(1), pp.32-40.

Maythew, R. (2019) How do I improve employee performance through leadership? [Online] Available from: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/improve-employee-performance-through-leadership-1957.html [Accessed 24/01/2019]

Miller, B.(2015) Techniques to manage and improve employee performance [Online] Available from: https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2015/08/27/techniques-to-manage-and-improve-employee-performance/ [Accessed 24/01/2019]

Mirvis, P., (2012) Employee engagement and CSR: Transactional, relational, and developmental approaches. California Management Review, 54(4), pp.93-117.

Mitre finch. (2019) 6 effective techniques to improve employee performance [Online] Available from: https://mitrefinch.com/blog/how-to-improve-employee-performance/ [Accessed 24/01/2019]

Owen, J., (2017) The Leadership Skills Handbook: 90 Essential Skills You Need to be a Leader. London: Kogan Page Publishers. 

Sanda, M.-A. (2017). Guest editorial: leadership and organizational development in Africa. African Journal of Economic and Management Studies, 8(3), 254–261. Doi: 10.1108/ajems-05-2017-0098

Stavrinoudis, T. A., & Chrysanthopoulou, D. (2016). The role of leadership in building and managing the corporate reputation of 4 and 5-star hotels. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 17(2), 176–189. Doi: 10.1177/1467358415613392

Taj, Y. (2018) Solving the employee engagement puzzle in hospitality [Online] Available from: https://www.peoplematters.in/article/employee-engagement-ideas/solving-the-employee-engagement-puzzle-in-hospitality-19987 [Accessed 24/01/2019]