You Hold All The Power To Make Change At Work

You just don’t realize it.

A friend recently approached me to ask for advice on how to get senior leaders to care about employee engagement. He wanted to figure out how he could get their buy-in to improve low engagement levels. And this wasn’t the first time. I could tell the issue had been weighing on him for a while and was starting to take its toll.

How do we get executives to see that the way they’re operating is negatively impacting employee engagement? How do we get them to care that the mission they’ve defined is missing the mark, the constraints they’ve put in place are squelching creativity, and their unrealistic expectations are burning people out?

There’s plenty of data that explains why employee engagement is important. In their latest study, Gallup once again found that teams in the top quartile of employee engagement significantly outperformed those in the bottom quartile.

Compared to those in the bottom quartile, work units in the top quartile of engagement see:

• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability

The data on employee engagement is plentiful, and it’s not new information either. Who wouldn’t want things like increased productivity, lower turnover, or higher profitability for their organization?

I can’t speak to the motivations of an executive, so I won’t try to. But if you don’t see the value in prioritizing engagement by now, then I tend to think you probably just don’t care to do so.

What I am going to do is speak to you as someone who might work for a leadership team like this, now or in the future.

Before starting my consulting career, I spent 10+ years working in corporate human resources, and my advice stems from a combination of these lived experiences. Here’s the thing…

Employees, you hold all the power at work. You just don’t realize it yet.

If what you’re getting from leadership isn’t good enough for you, you can leave.

Now, this isn’t to say that you should throw in the towel and quit every time senior leadership makes a decision you disagree with. That isn’t realistic or sustainable in the long-term.

Employees need to share their feedback, express their concerns, and generally seek to be heard before giving up on influencing meaningful change at work. After all, no leader can help solve a problem that they don’t know exists.

But, when you have been heard, and leadership still doesn’t care to take action or make a change, you now have a choice to make. Do you stay or do you go?

Organizations that don’t care enough about their people to listen to their feedback and take it to heart should pay the price for that. And that price should be losing their best talent.

If there are no consequences for bad behavior, and if employees don’t use their power to stand for or against the way the organization behaves by way of its senior leaders, why would they ever change?

I see too many people who stay working for leadership teams who either don’t care what employees have to say or whose values don’t align. If you’re one of these people, my advice to you is to take back your power.

Because it’s not until enough people stand up and say, “this is not good enough for me” that these leaders will be forced to make a change.

• If executives can’t be bothered to treat people like human beings, leave.
• If the vision leadership has articulated isn’t compelling enough, leave.
• If the values held by senior leadership are not up to your standards, leave.
• If the C-suite is all talk and no action, leave.

We’ve been taught to think that we need a full-time job working on someone else’s dream to be ‘successful.’ We’ve been told that we need the stability that a paycheck every other Friday provides to live a comfortable life. We’ve been told that we can’t have adequate health insurance without being part of a company plan.

I call bullshit.

As someone who walked away from all that to do my own thing on my own terms, I can tell you that this is a false narrative. And, I’m not the only one realizing this. At the end of 2019, Gallup reported that nearly 30% of the US workforce was — at least partially — self-employed.

The only people these beliefs serve are the people who want you to be fearful enough that you remain stagnantly working for them even when what they offer you isn’t good enough.

So, instead of settling for ‘not good enough,’ learn to take back your power.

You’ve held this power all along; you just haven’t realized it.

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