The number one need expressed by employees is to feel fully appreciated for their work. Although leaders widely recognize the need for employee appreciation, it tends to be a blind spot for many leaders. In other words, leaders generally believe they are much more appreciative of their employees than their employees think they are.

The engaging leader knows that appreciating the person is just as important as appreciating his/her contributions. The most effective ones had one thing in common--they expressed a sincere interest in, and appreciation for, their employees as people. "Sincere" is the operative word here.

Learn something new each day about one of your employees. Ask them about their families, hobbies, leisure activities, etc. You will begin to understand and appreciate them more fully. Then weave this information into your interactions with them. They will return your appreciation with passion for your leadership.

The bottom line is this: we do more for those who appreciate us. Appreciate your employees and you will engage their hearts!

Humility is not thinking less of ourselves, but thinking of ourselves less. Excellent leadership, in any venue, is about other people... not ourselves. If we are fortunate enough to build a great team, we will all excel. Staying humble enables us to use our leadership platform to take a stand and conquer much more as a team than we could alone. Humility is not only a desirable trait in leaders, but it is also the fuel for leadership excellence.

Humility is expressed in our actions, not our words. We cannot afford to be like the guy who was a member of a nationwide, professional association of leaders in the workforce. He was voted the most humble leader in the entire association for leaders. The association presented him with a medal that said, "The most humble leader in America." Then, they took it away from him at their next meeting because he wore it!

Ask yourself with each decision and interaction, "Who am I doing this for--myself or my team member?" Nothing wrong with taking care of ourselves, but the humble--and excellent--leader is generally focused on others' success. They know that the fastest path to success is to make other people successful.

Maintaining our humility is a constant struggle for most of us. So let me know about your battles--and victories--with humility.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, applied this definition and took his stand when Starbucks wanted to move into a particular international market. However, Schultz was discouraged by every analysis he read, even after he spent over a half a million dollars on consultants, telling him not to go. Further, all of his direct reports were against the move.

On the advice of one of his gurus, Warren Bennis, he met again with his team, listening to their concerns and answering their questions and asking for their support. In the end, he had mobilized the support of his management team, and as Bennis had encouraged, he went with his heart, with what he thought was right and entered the market in question. Schultz stood his ground and, ultimately, was able to score another successful expansion of Starbucks into the international marketplace.

Please share time when you acted on courageous instincts... and were rewarded!

And now for the third installment of Lee J. Colan series of guest posts. If you like what you're reading, pick up his new book, Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results.

Engaging employees' minds tends to come naturally for many leaders. The mind represents the intellectual aspects of people that are based on reason, logic, and cause and effect. It requires the science of leadership which is the focus of most leadership training and education. Engaging the mind builds employee performance.

Elevating employees' performance by engaging their minds involves the basics of leadership, but the basics are often overlooked. Even the best professional athletes can lose site of the basic skills of their sports: An all-star wide receiver takes his eyes off the ball and misses an easy touchdown pass. An Olympic downhill skier doesn't stay in a tight tuck, catches a draft and eats snow. A world-class golfer forgets to shift her weight during a tee shot and shanks it.

It's no surprise that, as leaders, we can also sometimes forget the basics. The basics of our "sport" involve meeting employees' three intellectual needs:

1. Achievement

2. Autonomy

3. Mastery

When you fulfill these needs, you create a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement, growth and high performance for your team. The mind is a muscle. It must be exercised or it will weaken. Engaging the mind is a form of mental exercise--it strengthens your employees' ability to perform. Engage their minds and watch their performance grow!

So what can you do to eliminate barriers to achievement? Following are a few actions you can take:

Involve your employees in defining and improving their work. Even in the most routine jobs, you can still get input from employees about ways to make improvements. When you give employees the appropriate level of autonomy, you engage their minds. The benefit to you? People support what they help create... and that yields increased discretionary effort from employees.

Giving employees control over their work requires trust in your team. Autonomy is generally more important than doing it "the way the boss said to do it." What's the risk of not providing autonomy? Employees basically become robots--they give you their hands and feet, but not their minds and hearts.

Toyota employees are required to submit two suggestions per month that they can implement themselves or with a teammate--in other words, something the employee can control. As a result, Toyota receives about 1.5 million employee suggestions for improvement each year. More impressively, 80% of these actually get implemented! What kind of impact would this approach to autonomy have in your organization?

Mastery at work is not built gradually also. So create a rich learning environment for your team. Use various learning sources--special projects, cross-functional assignments, presentations to management and training colleagues. Successful leaders achieve results through others. Your employees' mastery gets you results.

The most important source of learning for your employees is YOU! Share your experiences. There are lessons to be found in everything your team does. Look for opportunities in:

Seize all of these experiences to coach your employees toward mastery.

When you invest in a mind, you engage it!

Stop back in later today for Lee's final guest post, or visit his website at www.theLgroup.com.

Below is the second part in Lee J. Colan's series of guest posts. We'll have two more for you tomorrow. To read his first entry, click here.

Engaging the Minds and Hearts of Your Team--Part

Management guru Peter Drucker advises leaders to, "Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer." Employees as volunteers is a useful concept to remind leaders that they must continually engage their people. Only fully engaged employees will give you the discretionary effort required for Passionate Performance. In the era of the volunteer worker, leaders must engage their employees to elicit discretionary effort from them. It may sound like pretty heady and heart-wrenching stuff to fully engage your employees. But there are clear steps you can take to turn a mental meltdown into a mental breakthrough and convert a heart attack into a heart light.

The solution to the engagement challenge is found within the minds and hearts of employees where basic human needs are fulfilled. It's a simple but powerful formula: When my needs are fulfilled, I am engaged and I perform at my peak ability. When my needs are met, I'm motivated to help those who meet my needs. When my needs are not met, I'm frustrated, out of control, unfocused, and disconnected--in a word, disengaged.

We all have these basic human needs, and they have remained the same amidst the tornado of external change. Times have changed, and our world has certainly changed, but people have not. In many organizations today, these basic needs still go unfulfilled. It's up to you as the leader to fulfill them.

What basic needs have you noticed your team requiring? Does your team complain about or request changes to similar needs that are unmet, such as recognition/rewards or compensation needs? How do you address such needs? I would love to hear your feedback and comments.

Engaging the Minds and Hearts of Your Team--Part II

To meet the basic human needs of your employees, leaders must first see them and acknowledge them. In order to see them, leaders must view their employees as people and not just workers. If you look at your employees as human beings, you can identify these six basic needs--three intellectual and three emotional:

Intellectual Needs:

Emotional Needs:

Achieving Passionate Performance is a two-sided challenge: intellectual and emotional. Successful leaders know they must engage both the minds and hearts of their people by satisfying both their intellectual and emotional needs.

When it comes to Passionate Performance, the mind and the heart go hand in hand. Engaged minds build your employees' performance and engaged hearts build their passion. Performance without passion tends to falter during tough times or in the face of challenges that require sacrifice, significant extra effort or unusually creative solutions. On the other hand, passion without performance results in diffused, unfocused efforts.

In tomorrow's posts, I will address each of the needs above starting with the intellectual need of Achievement. Until then, please tell me what you are doing to fully engage your team. No right of wrong answers here--this is the art of leadership.

Come back tomorrow for more from Lee Colan, or visit his website at www.theLgroup.com.

Over the next few days, we will have a series of guest-posts from Lee Colan, the author of Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees: How to Ignite Passionate Performance for Better Business Results, recently released by McGraw-Hill. To read this post in it's entirety, click the "continue reading" link at the end of the entry.

Couple this shortage with technology advancements nearing the speed of light, there are no sustainable competitive advantages anymore... except for your people. Engaging the hearts and minds of your team is the only sustainable advantage left in today's hyper-competitive world.

The bottom line - Leaders must engage their teams to win the talent war! It's the only winning strategy to get and keep your people long term.

For starters, leaders must see the person behind the employee to see universal human needs at work. There are three intellectual needs (Achievement, Autonomy, and Mastery) and three emotional needs (Purpose, Intimacy and Appreciation) that must be fulfilled. The mind and heart go hand in hand when it comes to igniting Passionate Performance. Engaging the mind builds performance. Engaging the hearts ignites passion. Only together can a leader create a passionately performing team.

In today's hyper-competitive market, a burning question for most companies is this: "How can we achieve a significant and sustainable competitive advantage so that we can retain our customers?" After all, keeping existing customers is five times less expensive than finding new ones. That's good business in anyone's book.

Traditional competitive factors like product design, technology and distribution channels are harder to sustain in a super-fast, mega-networked world. In fact, the good old "Four P's of Marketing"--product, price, promotion and placement--are having much less impact for companies competing in today's world.

However, a fifth "P"--people--has become an increasingly important competitive factor. Consider this: About 70% of customers' buying decisions are based on positive human interactions with staff. Add to this the fact that 83% of the U.S. gross domestic product comes from services and information that are created and delivered by people. The bottom line is that people buy from people, not companies. So, your people--and the performance they deliver--are the defining competitive advantage for your organization.

After the jump, I will share how you can leverage the 5th P--your people--to create what I call Passionate Performance. Please let me hear what you are currently doing to create a selling situation where your customers are buying from your people, not your company.

Now, consider how you felt when you left these establishments. Did you buy more than you had planned? Were you likely to return? Did you recommend these businesses to friends? You probably answered "Yes" to at least one of these questions. That's the beginning of a value chain that starts with engaged employees.

Some people are naturally engaged in their work and consistently deliver Passionate Performance. Effective leaders know how to bring these qualities out in everyone. They invest time, energy and resources to engage their people because engaged employees are more likely to:

When you discover how to actively engage your people to deliver Passionate Performance, you start a powerful and self-reinforcing cycle that builds value for your organization. This creates a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. Given enough time and resources, your competitors can replicate your products, distribution channels and technology. However, Passionate Performance cannot be easily duplicated by your competition and creates a rock-solid wall of differentiation between you and the rest of the pack.

Before you think about igniting Passionate Performance in your team, you have to start with yourself. So, please share what YOU do to ignite your own passion.

Passionate Performance is achieved when employees are fully engaged--when they demonstrate a strong, sustained intellectual and emotional attachment to their work.

You will know when employees are demonstrating Passionate Performance because you will feel the enthusiasm and see the results. After all, at the beginning of the day, it's all about possibilities. At the end of the day, it's all about results. Your team will have more fun creating better outcomes. They will be fully present at work, in the moment, in the flow. They will perform at higher levels and be motivated to do more. They will feel like kids again--a time when they had fun doing their very best at whatever they were engaged in. In short, their work will feel like play.

Can you remember a situation where you felt like this? Maybe it was a special project where everything came together perfectly. Or a team you were on where everyone did what was best for the team, creating a rare synergy. Or a certain cause you volunteered for where you felt like the best of your skills and talents flowed naturally to make a real difference. Most of us can remember a situation like this because it was such a unique experience and left us with such a special feeling. It may have been a lot of work, but we most frequently describe it as "fun." That's because our minds and hearts were fully engaged.

What does Passionate Performance look like? How will you know when your employees are giving it? First, look for signs of the big payoff from Passionate Performance: discretionary effort--people choosing to do more for you. You'll know your employees are giving discretionary effort when they:

You might think the instances of employees giving Passionate Performance will be few and far between, but they don't have to be. You can learn how to orchestrate Passionate Performance every day.

Come back tomorrow for more from Lee Colan, or visit his website at www.theLgroup.com.