The No 1 Reason Your Employees Think You're a Lousy Leader*

I had to make a call recently to the customer service department of the travel firm we'd booked our holiday through (and no, this isn't going to be a rant about poor customer service - the rep was great...but then he had to be, as you will find out).

Of course, this being one of the world's major travel organisations (headed up by a bearded leadership guru), the call, although placed in the UK,was routed, presumably through VOIP, to a call centre, presumably outsourced, in India.

And this is where it gets to the meat of my post, because the call quality was painful. So painful that I could hardly hold a conversation with the guy in the call centre. His voice kept getting fainter and fainter. The conversation went something like this;

CSR - please can I.... Me - Sorry, can you repeat, your voice has disappeared. CSR - Yes, please can you tell me the long number on... Me - do you want the long number on my credit card? it's .... CSR - Let me repeat that, it's... Me - sorry, I can't hear you...and so it went on and on and on. And I was paying for the call!

It got me to wondering, what must it be like to spend your working days as this CSR and his colleagues and all those other employees doing work for companies around the world; doing all you can to provide a great customer experience, but having that destroyed because your employer (and their clients) can't or won't provide the right equipment and resources for you to do your job properly.

So I thought I have a go.

Will you come with me across the Desert?

I promise you it will be fun, we will have a great time. You can trust me. When have I ever let you down?

I'm getting together all the stuff we need, so you won't need to worry. And the great news is I'm buying it all on the cheap, so it won't cost us much;

• I'm told that the water bottles may leak a bit
• I can't afford much fuel for the Land-rover (but I'm sure we'll overcome that by getting more on the way). In any case it's really old and not very reliable, so there is no point spending too much on fuel, we may not get to use it
• Food? - we'll find it on the journey
• Blankets? - I've got a couple. They're a bit threadbare but they will have to do
• Safety equipment? - the guy I bought the Landrover from tells me its all in there.

If I explained all this to you what would you say to me?

I'll tell you what my colleague Steve said;

"John, perhaps you should do this without me."

The No 1 Reason Your Employees Think You're a Lousy Leader

And yet, we ask (indeed expect) our employees to sign up for these journeys all the time, in the full knowledge that we aren't going to give them the resources and support they really need. And we expect them to do a fantastic job without providing them with all it takes. More than that, we tell them they have to do it without complaint and without us, because we'll be meeting them at the other end instead of traveling with them in the rusty old Jeep!

Want to know why your employees think you are a lousy leader? Because you don't do anything to make their working lives easier.

Oh, of course you listen to them, you talk with them, you empathise with them, you make promises, commitments even...but you don't go into battle for them, you don't fight on their behalf to get the resources they need, you don't take action to remove the barriers that stop them being great.

You fail to act and sort out these infrastructure issues.

No wonder they think their leaders are lousy. Who wouldn't? You probably feel the same way about your boss.

So what's it to be? "Lousy Leader" or "Make My People Great"

The systems people (like Deming) have it right - success is 95% systems and 5% down to individuals.

Isn't it about time you did it properly? For the sake of your customers, shareholders and of course, your employees?

If you want to know what your employees really think about your Leadership and Infrastructure, then pay attention to what your Employee Engagement Survey says. And if it doesn't include questions about your systems, processes, structures and resources, then find one that does.

Are you ready to face an inconvenient truth?

The bald (or even bearded) truth is that you may think you have the very best leadership the world has ever seen and the most supportive culture in the Universe...but if you don't provide your employees with good systems, structures, processes and resources - if your processes prevent delivery, if your resources are insufficient, if your structure leads to silos - you will not get engagement and performance. And your employees will still think of you as a Lousy Leader.

If you don't, won't or can't make it easy for your employees to be great - why act surprised when they aren't?

* Based on aggregated results from Emenex extraMILE Employee Engagement Surveys carried out in 2014

Photo credit - "Small Dunes of Badain Jaran Desert" by Sjoerd van Oort - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons