Page 318 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Self-Engagement C305

some underlying assumptions that put a ceiling on our own capacity
to self-engage and to provide a list of issues for managers to openly
explore with employees.

Common Self-Defeating Habits
In survey comments, we found ample evidence that employees and
their managers are acting in ways that sabotage and complicate their
relationships and thus undermine their own efforts to stay engaged
and cause others to disengage. We have observed these same negative
habits of thought and action in our years of professional coaching. We
present them here as a checklist to help you evaluate whether any of
them may be inhibiting your own efforts to self-engage, or the efforts
of those around you. We also show actual selected survey comments,
some referring to the respondent himself or herself, and others to a
manager or coworker, that serve to illustrate each of the habits:

___ Avoiding conflict
Fearing escalation of emotion or possible rejection to the point of
avoiding confrontations necessary for moving forward

Illustrative survey comment

“Those of us who are not comfortable speaking up publicly or have questions
need to trust our managers; knowing they will in turn deliver our message/
suggestions correctly without divulging our identity or adapting/editing the
message for the benefit of the receiving party.”

___ Win-lose
Needing to win so badly that someone else must lose; making every
interaction an adversarial one

Illustrative survey comment

“My manager does not pull her weight. She always wants others to help her
do her job—she’s a bully, bossy, disrespectful, insulting, always trying to put
fellow employees down by insulting them.”