How to Unlock the Potential of Your Team

Employee engagement is the Holy Grail that most employers are searching for in order to have everyone in the team working to their full potential - contributing to a productive workforce, delivering meaningful outcomes, creating a happier workplace, and delivering a better bottom line.

Sadly, the statistics aren’t great. If we look at 2022 data from Gallup (the global authority on all things related to employee engagement), only 23% of our workforce accounts for engaged employees. The disgruntled and actively disengaged category represents 18%; and the fence-sitting, quietly quitting, unengaged group accounts for a whopping 59%.

Read more: Is Quiet Quitting Real?

The cost of untapped potential

Imagine having a team of ten rowers on your boat, with three people rowing their heart out, five just sitting with their arms crossed adding dead weight, and two people rowing in the opposite direction. How fast do you reckon your boat can go? 

If this rowing team represented the entire workforce around the world, the impact of the fence-sitters on the global economy is a staggering US$ 8.8 trillion, or 9% of the global GDP. That’s a lot! 

So, how can we tap into this underutilised potential of the team? The good news is, it’s easier than you think.

Work on the right individuals

Reviewing the Gallup trends over the last 15years, it highlights the issue in black and white. We’ve worked really hard to reduce the actively disengaged category – the disgruntled, disruptive, and disenchanted. Yet, the fence-sitting, quietly quitting category has more or less remained the same over the years. Even though we’ve seen fairly consistent upward trends in engaged employees, it’s the overwhelming volume of the disengaged workforce that signals our greatest source of untapped potential.

Having worked across multiple companies and countries over the last 25 years, I know for a fact that the fence-sitting, quietly quitting employees are only seemingly disengaged. While you might think that these employees only turn up in body, leaving their brains behind, I’ve found that they are waiting to be discovered, leveraged and motivated. 

Discover: What is ‘Quiet Quitting’ and How Should Leaders Respond?

Unlock true team potential 

Below is a three-step framework that will help you to unlock the true potential of your team, leveraging the few engaged team members, involving the majority fence sitters and ignoring the disgruntle.

1. Build Momentum – Leverage belief and the trust of your few diligent team members. They are willing to work hard but there are getting tired, overwhelmed and on the brink of quitting or falling into the disengaged category. The main reason is that they are the only ones who have to deploy initiatives, solve problems, generate new ideas and deliver the day-to-day results. 

The key in this step is to involve a few quietly quitting fence-sitters into some key improvement initiatives that are led by an engaged team member. Ensure the disengaged are involved in resolving matters and are not just sitting idle – like those adding dead weight in our rowing team example.

2. Gain Traction – Expedite results and help the team to make faster progress. I find progress to be the antidote for disengagement. When everyone gets involved and the team starts to make progress, even the quiet ones will start to feel proud of the team’s contribution.

If they follow any structured problem-solving methodologies, chances are over a two-to-three-month period they would deliver exceptional results that would even surprise the engaged few. You’re starting to make a difference.

3. Expand Followers – You cannot keep this success a secret. Leverage every possible opportunity – townhall meetings, newsletters, bulletin boards, canteen posters, team meetings – to share the team’s success.  The best approach is to get the team to present, not you the leader. What you will find is that progress and positivity to be infectious. Celebrate together. Soon, your quietly quitting fence sitters cannot not become engaged.  Then you can leverage them to lead more initiatives on their own, involving the next layer of fence sitters.

The secret

The key to unlocking team’s full potential is involving the quiet quitters. If you repeat the above cycle each quarter, within a year you’ll notice that the ship is turning faster than you expected. With the fence-sitters starting to become believers, teams will start feeling happier, more productive, better engaged and running on all six-cylinders – their full potential.