Summer is one of my favorite seasons. I enjoy being active and making more time for outdoor exercise. It reminds me of how important it is to be fully engaged in whatever I am doing. There’s a lot of talk these days about employee engagement - increasing the amount of discretionary effort that employees give to their work.

Research shows that if we improve the quality of each person’s inner experience while they are on the job, they will naturally want to expend more of that energy in their work. In other words, the better we feel at work, the more discretionary effort we are willing to expend.

This seems pretty common sense, so why don’t more employers focus here? Most likely it’s partially because it seems invasive to monitor how people feel at work. It can also seem like we need to become “mind readers” in order to have a positive impact on employee engagement.

One point of leverage is the impact each manager or supervisor has on his or her direct reports’ quality of work life. Managers have a direct impact on climate in the workplace. Think about a time in your career when you were happy and fulfilled. Chances are you had a manager who motivated and inspired you. Now consider a time when you felt disempowered. There’s a good chance that your manager had something to do with that, too. So how do we help managers and supervisors engage those they supervise?

First, we focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. People are more motivated and inspired when they know what they do well. Conventional wisdom tells us focusing on strengths won’t improve performance. To the contrary, we create more leverage for improvement and excellence when we help people maximize their talents and skills, rather than trying to improve upon what’s missing.

Next we teach managers coaching skills, which gives them new tools and awareness for how they expand or limit the creativity and problem solving abilities of direct reports and others in their circle of influence.

Finally we teach people how to adapt or change. Many professionals reach a point in their work and lives where they feel like they are no longer learning new things. In my work with clients, I notice that this occurs less because of opportunity or a lack of desire to grow, and more often because their work environments have a low tolerance for risk and failure. Yet the rapid pace of change today makes it vital for professionals to be able to not only navigate change, but embrace it. Most of us are most fully engaged when we are learning something new. When we move away from fear and focus on the excitement and pleasure in learning new things, positive change becomes a natural and almost inevitable outcome.

For more about a program that can help you or other managers in your organization increase employee engagement, go here.