According to an October 2011 Gallup report, “seventy-one percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive.”
Everyday Leadership wants to know if this is this true in other countries. What do you think? Share your views in the comments.
What To Do About It?
In the most recent issue of Sonoma Leadership Systems’ The Leader’s Almanac, there is more on why this is important and how leaders can address this issue. The article, called Employee Engagement Revisited, The Power of Leadership Behavior on Engagement, offers simple yet potentially profound strategies for leaders who want to impact employee engagement. Leaders can, for example, behave in ways that say, “I will enable you to be more effective in your job” and “I will tell you and show you how you and your work matters.”
In early February, Elaine Douglas, senior technical specialist from I-TECH Seattle, and Dr. Hamza Adus, I-TECH Ethiopia training director, offered a week long “Leadership and Management Basics Training of Trainers (TOT)” to 30 high level officials from local partnering universities, the Regional Health Bureau, representatives from the Ministry of Health and I-TECH Ethiopia staff. Co-facilitators included Dr. Ephrem Tekle, vice dean from Mekelle University and a certified leadership trainer for the British Council, and Murida Kemal, senior programs manager at I-TECH Ethiopia. In line with the goals of PEPFAR, the objective of the training was to strengthen local capacity in the area of leadership and management as a key part of transition of NGO-led programs into the government.
“The workshop was a great success, primarily because the participants were introspective, interactive, and insightful — three important qualities of great leaders,” said Ms. Douglas. “I was impressed by their eagerness to share their ideas with each other and to develop their leadership capacity.”
One key insight came from a female participant from the Ethiopian Ministry of Health. Reflecting on the role of women in leadership positions she commented, “as history shows, women have not had many significant positions in leadership, which for long made us believe that leadership is something reserved for men who come to it naturally. However, this training revealed the mystery to me [that leadership can be learned]. Thanks to the training, I find myself now a person with better skills and knowledge, perhaps even better than men.” She further stated that she couldn’t wait to go to her organization and pass along what she has learned to the people she manages.
As referenced in a previous blog post, leadership theory used to be built around the assumption that only men are born leaders. Several video clips in the Everyday Leadership collection address the issue of gender and leadership:
Dorothy Namate, PhD, RNM, Global Fund coordinator for the Ministry of Health in the Directorate of Planning and Policy Development of Malawi, reflects on times when was not taken seriously as a woman:
Ann Phoya, PhD, RNM, director of the Sector-Wide Approach for the Ministry of Health in Malawi, discusses her use of confidence in order to assert herself as a woman in a place of power.
The training in Ethiopia was set up as a “training of trainers.” Participants who completed the program now have the ability to disseminate the training materials and offering further leadership and management trainings at their work places. The training materials came from I-TECH’s original Leaders in Health Series. Explore the agenda and course materials (slides and facilitator guides) and adapt them for use at your own work place. Let us know of the key lessons learned from your training.
Thanks to Yonathan Alemu, communications manager for I-TECH Ethiopia, for reporting from the training in Ethiopia and contributing to this article.
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According to an October 2011 Gallup report, “seventy-one percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive.”
