CEOs and executives
What does a CEO actually do when engagement scores fall?
The first thing a CEO does — or should do — is resist the temptation to commission an action plan. Engagement scores that are falling are a symptom. The cause is almost always something specific: a leadership problem in a part of the business, a change that wasn’t explained well, a set of expectations that were never made clear. Finding the cause requires listening, not programme-launching.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Care, Context, Celebrate
Go and look
When I ran Westpac and engagement moved in ways I didn’t expect, the most useful thing I could do was go to the place where the number was low and have direct conversations. Not through an intermediary, not via a summary. Sit down with people — in small groups, without their managers present — and ask them what’s happening. What’s frustrating them. What’s changed. What they’d want different. People know. They’ll tell you if you create the conditions for honesty.
Identify where in the organisation the problem actually lives
Aggregate engagement scores hide more than they reveal. A 5-point drop in the overall number could mean a 15-point drop in one division and no movement anywhere else. Find the geography of the problem before you design a response. A company-wide initiative addressing a team-level problem is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in people management.
Look at what your managers are doing
Engagement is built or broken at the level of the direct manager. When scores fall in a specific area, the question to ask is whether the managers in that area are doing the things that drive engagement: being clear about expectations, giving people context about why their work matters, recognising good work, removing obstacles, genuinely caring about the people in their teams. Often the answer is one or two of those things are missing, and they’re missing systematically.
Be honest about what caused it
If a change you made — a restructure, a strategic shift, a leadership transition — drove the disengagement, own it. Say so. People’s confidence in leadership falls further when they believe you either don’t know what caused the problem or won’t acknowledge it. And it recovers faster when leadership is honest about what happened and clear about what’s going to be different.
Where judgment matters
Sometimes engagement falls because the business is going through something genuinely hard — a difficult market, a necessary restructure, a period of uncertainty that can’t be resolved quickly. In those cases, the right response is not to pretend everything is fine, but to be honest about the difficulty while staying clear about what you’re doing and why. People can tolerate hard situations. They struggle with situations they don’t understand.
Do you know which specific part of your organisation has the lowest engagement — and have you spoken directly to the people there?
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