As a business owner, manager, or team leader, it’s important to for your crew to be lead led in a way that keeps them engaged, inspired, and ultimately, productive. Engagement is one of our top core values at Bluejarvis, specifically engagement through knowledge. That’s why we’ve come up with the top three knowledge-based engagement tactics you can use as a leader to get your team engaged:
1. Adopt a bottom-up mindset
The foundation of a company comes from the front-line staff. These are the people that execute strategy, implement action, and are notified of service and product concerns from the target market. These individuals are often sidelined when it comes to their input on strategy and overarching company goals, yet they are the key to strategy pivots and goal status as they are the ones gathering feedback from the front lines.
Creating a bottom-up style of management allows leadership to take advantage of the data the foundational team gathers and improve the direction of the company or organization is headed. This style of management also creates a collaborative environment by hearing the voice of individual front line workers and acting on their suggestions. Having influence from the bottom means team members are not only more engaged, but they are more productive because they have a vested interest in their voice being heard and applied by leadership.
2. Create a Feedback Portal
In order to create a bottom-up management method, the leadership has to create a feedback portal for team members which incentivizes employees to participate. It’s quite intimidating for most employees to sit down in front of their peers and give feedback on how strategies, services, and products are performing.
Instead of going the traditional route and simply gathering feedback during meetings, create as many feedback outlets as possible for your team. Once you identify the ways in which your team feel the most comfortable providing feedback, stick with those and make sure to review all suggestions with your team. Gather all teams across divisions or departments to notify everyone of all feedback, review what you have taken into consideration, what you have not, and the reason behind your decision making. Then continue to update everyone on the results of this feedback. Acknowledging ALL feedback provided during team reviews allows everyone’s voices to be heard with justification.
3. Gather Your Team’s Collective Intelligence
As you start to implement bottom-up leadership and gain insight into the feedback gathered by your front line team, the next step to take is to create a collective intelligence (or in other words, a knowledge hub). By definition, collective intelligence is “the wisdom, talent, information and knowledge that can be used/shared for intellectual cooperation in order to solve problems, create, innovate and invent.” Simply put, a collective intelligence is a process or portal where any team member can go and access niched knowledge to help address a business challenge without needing to take up the time or energy of the individual who provided this knowledge in the first place.
These reserves of knowledge are extremely practical for organizations to create if they want to work on new product development, test ideas, create new technologies, and utilize customer feedback. The collective intelligence should be designed in such a way that individuals use it on day-to-day tasks as while as ad-hoc projects that require expert-level knowledge. Most importantly, this knowledge reserve can then be instantly accessed by anyone on the team who needs it, saving on communication time and encouraging individual autonomy. For leadership, this means you can ditch the micromanaging as all of the information your team accesses has already been vetted and approved by you, so you can focus on the overacting strategy and bigger business goals.
Conclusion
As the old cliche goes, knowledge is power, and knowledge engagement goes a step beyond power, it’s productivity.
For more knowledge management and engagement tips, download our full bundle of how-to guides here: bluejarvis.com/knowledge
Comments