Why Employees are Disengaged & Demotivated? Part 1

It’s 10 a.m. and you have a meeting at the company that you are working at.

You enter the meeting room, and then you get hit by the demotivated faces of your colleagues.

5 minutes later, you look around you to see some of your colleagues are already checking their phones; others are hidden behind their laptops, and some of them seem extremely bored and about to sleep.

After the meeting finishes, you walk outside the meeting room with one of your colleagues and have a side talk, where during this short discussion he explains to you how pessimistic he is about the future of the projects that you are working on.

He even says that he lost hope, and stopped fighting to get things done on time because they never work. On top of that, he explains to you that nobody seems to care, and the management does not seem to listen to their problems.

You start wondering ‘’we have the technology, manpower, budget, and people with great experiences. Why is the performance of our employees going down? Why do they look so disengaged? And why should we always fight in the last few days of the fiscal year to achieve the company's financial goals?’’

Do you want to know the reasons for these problems?

There is mainly one big reason, and there are 9 sub-reasons. And today in this article we are going to speak about the main big reason which is: Choosing the wrong unqualified people to fill managerial positions.

I know that you heard this a lot of times before, but I want you to be patient with me for only 3 more minutes.

I said it a thousand times, and I will keep saying it again and again. Choosing an employee to fill a managerial role because he is good at what he does is a big mistake.

Leading people is far bigger and requires a totally different skill set than the ones this employee used in his operational job.

And unfortunately, Managers and executives inside companies are usually chosen based on three criteria:

a- Their Performance

b- Their Image & Exposure to the upper management and how connected they are (and this is even more important as a selection criterion than the performance).

c- Politically. As an example, a company that wants to show that they are supporting gender equality and female rights can promote female employees to managerial positions not because they are qualified or the best fit, but because they have to choose females to improve the image of the company and to show that it is supporting female rights and gender equality and so on.

And please understand me right, this is just an example of how politics play a big role inside companies and what is happening in reality. For me personally, I have nothing against female leaders or promoting qualified females to leading roles.

So, these are the 3 main selection criteria and usually, nothing more is considered.

Decision takers rarely consider other more important factors while making this selection, such as:

- The Influence and reach of this person. In other words, is he influencing the people around him positively or negatively?

- Trustworthiness & Character. Which means ‘’do the people trust, respect and believe in this person and his way of thinking?’’

- Team Work. Is this person a team player by nature or selfish and will focus only on his or her advancement no matter what the price is?

- And finally, Communication skills and conflict handling. Is this candidate a good communicator? Can he or she build strong relationships with people within his or her team and outside the team or not?

Unfortunately, all these factors are neglected. And you can imagine the emotional impact on other employees when they find out that one of their colleagues who is known for being aggressive, disrespectful to others, angry all the time, or selfish, is being promoted to a higher job and will lead them.

Either they will search for another job to avoid this new boss, or they will get a direct message about which behaviors are being rewarded and promoted within this company, and they will lose any hope or dreams of making a career inside this company.

And here is an important statement: There is nothing more dangerous than a person living aimlessly without a specific goal or something to achieve. Because this person or employee will not only impact himself but will impact others around him.

Living without personal goals makes all things equal. If you did a lot of things today or if you did not do a lot of things, then it is the same. If you get a salary increase or your salary stayed the same, then there is no difference. If you finish things before the deadline or after the deadline is OK for you.

There is no goal, and with it, there is no motive. And if you are thinking that having a salary to have bread on the table is enough motive, then you are making things even worse. Because there is a huge difference between taking actions with the intention to thrive and taking actions with the intention to barely survive.

It is like in school when you go to the exam, and you just want to pass or when you go to the exam, and you want to get an A. Both are motives. But one to thrive and one to survive, and you can easily estimate who will do more work, be more prepared and put more effort in preparation for this exam.

With the motive to thrive in the exam, you will read the full books and prepare for the exam by doing exercises once and twice, but with the intention just to survive, you will do the bare minimum. You will ask yourself ‘’Which areas or parts of the book will most probably appear in the exam, and you will only study these parts.’’

Do you remember when I told you five minutes ago that there is mainly one big reason, and there are 9 sub-reasons for employees’ low performance and disengagement?

After selecting the new manager, the way that I explained above, companies & Leaders follow this decision by doing more crucial mistakes that lead to the other 9 sub-reasons

But that’s what we will discuss in the next article.

Share with me your opinion in the comments section below.