Managers: Just Pay Attention to Your Direct Reports

If you're a manager looking to weed out the actively disengaged from among the ranks of your direct reports ... just pay them attention.

This tip comes from Page 26 of Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath. There he writes:

If your manager ignores you, there is a 40% chance that you will be actively disengaged or filled with hostility about your job. If your manager is at least paying attention - even if he is focusing on your weaknesses - the chances of your being actively disengaged go down to 22%. But if you manager is primarily focusing on your strengths, the chance of your being actively disengaged is just 1%, or 1 in 100.

The golden nugget for being a manager - buried beneath unreasonable expectations and limited training and resources and a corporate purpose that too often has no meaning and no one knows what it is anyway - is that expectations are so low. All you have to do is do that which few managers are willing to do:

Just pay attention to your direct reports.*

Tom's someone you should believe. He has been with the Gallup organization for 14 years. Currently, he leads their workplace research and consulting practice around the world.

That makes him an expert, a workplace expert not a workplace academic. He applies his research in real-world settings where his reputation and that of his company are at risk. So are their incomes.

He's also the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, a long-running Wall Street Journal bestseller.

A few months ago, Tom spoke with me  in 2010 about Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. You can listen here.

* Yes, there's more to creating and sustaining high levels of employee engagement. But the key step is this: pay attention to those around you. That starts the conversation, the engaging with them. Once that starts, we're on the journey, the process of learning and discovering and engaging more.

WARNING: Self-Promotion.

If you want to know more ways to pay attention to or recognize your employees, my book RECOGNIZE THEM: 52 Ways to Recognize Your Employees in Ways They Value offers 52 ways to recognize your employees, easy exercises to reinforce those habits and skills and inspirational quotes to keep you going.

Here’s what some business experts are saying about the book.