Last week I looked at some of the current causes of disengagement in organisations and shared with you, four personal stories where I had experienced disengaged service or attitudes from people.

Today we look at five of the key components to disengagement, where they come from and what needs to be done to turn disengagement into engagement.

Lack of Confidence

Probably the most important aspect of engagement is confidence and this can consist of several components that impact directly on engagement, such as competence, effectiveness and self-esteem.  Stress and anxiety can also have a negative impact on confidence and subsequently on engagement.  If your mind is somewhere else, it’s not engaged on the job, and your confidence becomes dented.

Often people over-compensate by becoming over-confident or bragging as they attempt to control a situation where they feel out of control, just to appear engaged and dragging unwitting colleagues and bystanders into the drama.  You can be over-confident and still disengaged.  Congruence is King.

Another area is aggression, either direct or passive aggression where un-confident people, who lack control, seek to exert it by being aggressive and with passive aggression they don’t act out their anger but boy do we feel it!

Lack of Purpose

Having a sense of purpose and direction as an organisation moves forward and especially when it does so in different directions.  As different generations come together in an organisation, each may feel they don’t see or understand their roles.  We know that Generation X and Generation Y employees are driven by different needs and expectations and this can be a source of friction and conflict especially when each group feels that their expectations are not or cannot be met.

Motivation can be a serious issue especially with all the news about the current economic and job climate.  As motivation declines, so does employees’ sense of adventurousness, their willingness to face challenges and to engage their sense of passion, all of which help to create that sense of  engagement with work and with colleagues.

Lack of Flexibility

As the going gets tough, people begin to retrench, to seek security in their habits and in the old ways of doing things.  People are less willing to take risks and be flexible in their behaviours.

The ability to adapt to different situations, to bounce back from unexpected circumstances and accept the change is another significant link in the engagement chain.  An openness to other ideas, new ways of doing things and a curiosity to learn new things all help to keep those links strong yet flexible.

Lack of Collaboration

As confidence, motivation and flexibility decline, so often does the ability to effectively work with other people.  The ability to work co-operatively begins to disappear as the individual gradually isolates themselves, finds a safe place to ‘coast’ through their job or simply just to cope with the office politics.

Empathy and rapport with others reduce as individuals go into ‘psychological lockdown’ just to cope with the stresses of the job, the demands of the current economic climate and to cope with colleagues who are similarly disengaged. Disengagement can be contagious.

Lack of Critical Thinking

Probably the greatest aspect of ensuring engagement, of individuals and the organisation is the ability to look and think critically at all elements of the work process and environment.  The ability to be self-reflective, to look at the reasons why we do things, perhaps why a project became destabilised, why an executive derailed an organisation or even the ability to reflect back on things that went well, learn from them and to undertake to stretch ourselves even more next time.

Critical Thinking also extends to our ability to be personally self-aware – why do we behave as we do, communicate as we do, succeed, as we do and of course fail, as we do.  How can we try to understand other people, our staff, our kids, if we don’t understand ourselves first?  How can we seek to engage people if we ourselves disengage on a regular basis?

And then finally, the ability to regulate our emotions, one of the five pillars of Goleman’s definition of Emotional Intelligence.  Unless we can control our emotions and regulate them resourcefully on a regular basis, we can become a slave to our emotions and work on a constant ‘roller-coaster’ of disturbing ourselves and others.

All of this might appear at first glance to sound like Armageddon, the end of the world or at best a nightmare.  But it isn’t drama and it isn’t trouble-mongering.  Employees continue to disengage in large numbers in organisations and employees, managers & leaders, continue to be un-responsive to a problem that burns time and money within the organisation and in the process cause lots of pain to their business and to individuals.  Yet it is important to understand that people rarely disengage willingly.

And that is where the core of the problem lies, and thankfully the solution also.

Coming Up Next Week……..5 Steps to Developing Engagement

The Power of Partnership.

www.cognitions.co.uk