Welcome to this month’s Link Letter.

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at the Partners’ conference of a professional services client of ours here at Engage. The theme was fascinating and our first two articles on leadership and engagement this month relate directly to the two key things I saw and heard there. Firstly, to engage its people, any firm needs to answer some very fundamental questions. Who are we? What makes our company unique? What is the basis of our advantage? What value do we create, and for whom? As our first article from HBR this month argues, defining your core purpose clearly and in an engaging way isn’t done well by many firms. But when it is, engagement starts firing on all cylinders. That’s exactly what I witnessed earlier this week. The impact was amazing to watch. A group of 250 Partners, wholly engaged and also ready to go out and engage the rest of their workforce with delivering the firm’s core purpose.
 
Secondly, you need senior executives (in this case, the group of Partners) to be engaged if you are ever going to get the rest of your people on-board with where you are trying to get to and how you’re going to get there. Our second article this month, from Forbes, throws the spotlight on this. Many organisations focus their engagement efforts on the mass of employees at the front-line - absolutely the right thing to do to harness their collective power to gain productivity, deliver for customers and drive growth. However, the engagement of your most senior executives is too often neglected. The firm we had the privilege of partnering with this week have tackled this head-on. With a very direct Partner engagement survey, they have assessed how engaged that senior group is and what drives engagement at the most senior level. Firms should not make the assumption that the people who have risen to the top of their organisation are always the most engaged. Segmenting this group and getting under the skin of their own engagement is vital to then engaging the rest of the firm. And at the top, even marginal gains in engagement can have an exponential impact on performance.

We hope you enjoy this month’s reads.

Dr Andy Brown, CEO, ENGAGE

Leadership Engagement

Connect Your Firm's Strategy to Its Identity - Harvard Business Review

Leadership Engagement Always Trumps Employee Engagement - Forbes

5 Insights to Help You Become a Better Leader - World Economic Forum


Employee Engagement

Google Discovered These 3 Factors Make a 38 Percent Difference in Team Performance - Inc.com

Developing Employees' Strengths Boosts Sales, Profit, and Engagement - Harvard Business Review

3 Ways to Promote a Culture of Innovation - TLNT


Communications Engagement

Get 'appy: A Great Way to Engage Your Employees - Business and Industry UK
 
Aviva World - A Maturing Social Intranet - Simply Communicate
 
Best Practices for Effective Internal Communications - Forbes

 
And one fun infographic...

15 Jobs That Didn't Exist 30 Year Ago