Leadership Development

Leadership Development and Engagement

Engagement means a deep connection between who the person and the work. Engaged employees use their physical, cognitive, and emotional energies to maximum performance. Engagement is also related
to individuals’ feelings of pride for their organization and their willingness to go “above and beyond,” expanding their roles to meet the organization’s needs. Thus, engaged employees are not only satisfied
: Instead, they feel that their work is part of their identity; their work colleagues, members of their community.

Engagement sets a high bar to . employees and organizations. However, the effort is worthwhile, as the phenomenon has been tied

to greater productivity, better customer service, higher quality, lower turnover, and, overall, a more meaningful and rich work life. The purpose of The Meaningful Leader® program is to introduce leaders to key competencies related to employee engagement.

The Meaningful Leader®

The Meaningful Leader® competencies are self-awareness, building connections, developing others, and inspiring meaning. We recommend adding to the program personality, a baseline 360 competency assessment, and an engagement survey. To measure personality, we recommend the Narrative Big Five assessment, which provides users with scores on five main traits (Resilience, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and 23 subtraits

Resilience refers to a person's reactivity and tolerance to stress.
Extraversion has to do with general sociability and friendliness.
Openness refers to a person's levels of imagination, complexity, and comfort with change.
Agreeableness refers to a person's comfort with not having his or her way and cooperating with others.
Conscientiousness refers to a person's general levels of focus, methodicalness, and organization.

To measure The Meaningful Leader® competencies, we developed a 360 tool, which may also be completed as a self-assessment. The tool may be combined with our engagement survey, which helps participants assess their team's current levels of engagement.

The Meaningful Leader® Competencies

The leadership competencies we used to build The Meaningful Leader® are:

Self-awareness means the ability to recognize one’s personality tendencies and typical behaviors, as well as one’s assumptions, biases, and emotions.
Building trust: Meaningful leaders build a culture of trust and enhance their own trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is the quality of someone who can be trusted. The leader’s trustworthiness impacts the followers’ feelings of meaningfulness and safety at work. The Meaningful Leader® program addresses five components of trustworthiness: Benevolence (altruism, service, concern for others), Authenticity (openness, honesty), Reliability (value-behavior congruency), fairness, and competence.
Breaking silos involves leaders’ ability to build bridges among their reports and encourage a collaborative and open environment.
Information sharing means openly sharing information with the followers and fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.
Leading for fit means assigning to reports responsibilities that match their abilities, personality tendencies, and interests. Managers who “lead for fit” also help their reports uncover unique strengths and devise “alternative success routes” or strategies when the reports must accomplish less natural tasks.
Maximizing performance means supporting employees’ development and helping establish an advancement plan and process. This competency includes coaching; providing timely, balanced and clear feedback; and establishing an optimum balance between challenge and support.
Facilitating growth means supporting and encouraging the career development of one’s reports.
Promoting psychological safety means modeling respect for others and holding employees accountable for making their team members feel safe at work.
Recognizing the work means acknowledging the followers’ contributions to the team and the organization as a whole.

Program Structure

The Meaningful Leader® may be facilitated in a two-day workshop or through a series of 8-10 sessions facilitated face-to-face or online, via synchronous webinars. Customization services are available to better connect the program to your organization's needs and goals. The following is a possible sequence of sessions:

Session 1: Self-awareness and personality
Session 2: What is engagement and why does it matter?
Session 3: Building trust, breaking silos, sharing information
Session 4: Leading for fit, connecting fit and personality
Session 5: Maximizing performance and facilitating growth
Session 6: Psychological Safety
Session 7: Fostering a Culture of Recognition
Session 8: Program conclusion, wrap up, action plans