Chapter 1

1.Employee Engagement Cycle

Your Team Is Stuck

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you didn’t buy this book for me to lie to you. Your team is stuck.

The number one question I get asked when speaking to hundreds of business owners is, “How do I motivate my people?” Others chime in with agreeing sentiments:

• “No one works as hard as me.”
• “My team is happy with theirnine-to-five.”
• “I can’t find any great people.”
• “This new generation is entitled and lazy.”
• “People don’t work as hard as they used to.”

If you’ve thought any of these things about your team, stop being a victim and start playing offense. The employee engagement cycle is going to be the tool we use to identify where your team members are in their roles at your organization. The first phase is employee alignment, the second phase is employee development, and the third phase is employee transition. These three phases pinpoint what part of the growth cycle your team members are in, at any given point in their career withyou.

Setting relationships with your team members up for success through the interview and onboarding process islow-hanging fruit. We will dive into how to optimize your existing processes. But the greatest opportunity I see time and again is the lack of emphasis on what skills team members need to develop to be able to transition into a new role. Instead, most, if not all, of your team members are stuck in a perpetual state of development.

Let’s think about your onboarding process. Unless you’ve painted a massive picture for them that they have an opportunity to move from their current role to being promoted to a senior and then to leading a team, your team member is perpetually stuck in the development phase. I think of this as employee purgatory. If you’re not showing them a big picture of your business growth and how they can contribute, they will never know what the next step looks like. They don’t understand what skills they need to develop because they don’t know why they would need to develop into something different; the picture has not been created.

So when you think about this model, identify which bucket each of your existing team members is in. Are they in alignment, development, or transition? If they’re in alignment, they’ve either just been hired within the past ninety days, or they were just promoted within the last ninety days.

Depending on your growth, you should target 20 percent of your team to be in the alignment category. You should target 60 percent of your team to be in the development phase, which means that they are focused on being a top performer in their role.