Leading from Above the Line

"In the wake of the great recession, in businesses and organizations around the world, we have a crisis on our hands. But it's not the crisis we all think it is and talk about. It's worse. ... We don't have an Employee Engagement crisis. We have a Leadership Engagement crisis. It should be no surprise that only 13% of employees are engaged when you discover that only 19% of managers and executives are engaged! Engaged Leaders are outnumbered 4 to 1 by those who are not. Bradford D. Smart (Topgrading) reports that the top Human Resources executives of the largest 100 companies in the world admit that only 20% of managers they hired turned out to be the high performers they expected. 'That's an 80% mis-hire rate!' Smart, says. And yet, these are the same leaders that we are expecting to raise levels of Employee Engagement in our organizations. Maybe the old saying is still true—people join organizations but they leave managers."