Staff Engagement

One of our most popular training sessions in the field of leadership is around staff engagement. We use an electronic voting system [rather like on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’] to gather attitudes from participants. Responses are relayed to a powerpoint session which is played live, so the answers come up straight away, but anonymously for the group taking part.

So we display statements like: ‘”My professional development is encouraged” and “I feel valued for the work I do”, and we immediately get percentage responses for those who do and do not agree. It’s not possible to duck the issues which are brought up in these sessions, especially when the participants are, perhaps, the entire senior leadership team at a large school, or an entire teaching staff.

So what are the conditions which tend to engage staff?

What should we be doing to engage our staff, or teams, or the children in our classes?

We say AMP:

Autonomy  – give your people as much autonomy as they can appropriately handle

Mastery – give your people the tools to become as proficient as possible at what they do

Purpose – and here we are talking about ‘big-picture’ purpose – how does this help me and others?

We say that if you can supply the conditions for all these three to be met, your people will be engaged in what they do, whether it’s leading or teaching or learning.

We say if you can’t, you will likely have your people at best not engaged, and at worst actively disengaged.

One definition of leadership is : “Accomplishing change through the efforts of others”. If we agree with that, and value distributed and situational leadership, we need to get our people engaged, so they work with us and for us.

So we say: “How should we lead? Promote AMP”.