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Employee Engagement: Tips to Help Teams Tap Outside Experts!

In my previous employee engagement post, Engage Through Connection Not Status, I cautioned leaders to tap their employees’ views and opinions not just those of high status sources and outside experts.

Yet, once you have shown your employees that you value their talents and views, it’s important to inspire them to tap outside experts. Outside influence spurs change, growth, and success. It breaks through the comfort of the known and the grip of tunnel vision.

Frequently, employees are resistant to outside experts. They take it as a challenge to their own ability. They may also believe that you mistrust their ability when you as leaders bring in outside experts. Have you discussed what outside experts can do both for the organization and for the employees? It’s risky to assume that employees see this clearly.

Help your employees value and tap outside expertise to hasten their growth!

First, define success as being dependent on learning, changing, growing!

• Define a team as people growing and changing to reach a shared success. If instead, you define it as people working together to achieve a goal, it reinforces that they “should” be able to do this without outside help.
• Make it kool to learn through many sources not just kool to achieve the end result.
• Let them see you learning from outside experts to define this activity as valuable.
• Help them to assess their objectivity and their blind spots. It’s a great way to open their views to the value of outside experts.

Employee Engagement: More Tips to Help Them Embrace Outside Expertise!

Employee Engagement: Outside expertise help create our stardom. Image licensed from Istock.com.

Share these insights about outside expertise with your teams …

1. It helps catapult us to the stars; it doesn’t diminish or challenge our stardom and achievements.
2. Outside expertise helps prevent our tunnel vision and groupthink.
3. Outside expertise wondrously challenges us to question our hidden rules and assumptions, see our true nature, and break out of our comfort zone all while reducing the risk through expertise and knowledge!
4. It speeds our success by shortening our learning curve and easing the pain of change.
5. Outside expertise doesn’t set our vision; it helps us reach the vision we set.
6. It gives us an outside view of our competitions’ strengths and the inside chance of surpassing them all!

Leaders, you needn’t abandon outside experts in order to engage employees. Blend them in!

Employee engagement is about engaging the talent you hired to change, learn, and grow — to be agile. Agility breeds success as it keeps an organization current and vital as the market changes. Outside expertise feeds this agility with objectivity, knowledge, and momentum.

Have this discussion with your employees so they can replace resistance and mistrust of outside expertise with a view of its true value!

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Both images in this post licensed from Istock.com.

Related Posts:
Employee Engagement: Inspire Employees to Succeed Not Cling to You
5 Essentials to Spark Employee Agility
Leadership: 5 Essentials to Building 21st Century Teams

©2013 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Tags: Agile Teams, employee engagement, Leadership, People Skills, peopleskills, Teamwork