Embracing Agility With Hands, Heart, and Spirit

This article is written by Jacqueline & Milton Mayfield, authors of the Motivating Language Assessment featured on Comparative Agility.

Culture is the core of the Agile Enterprise and is co-created with communication, especially from leaders. The three dimensions of motivating language (ML), hands, heart, and spirit, grow a culture of positive communication that motivates its participants.

Here is a brief overview of how Motivating Language promotes employee engagement, customer focus, continuous improvement, and change sustainability in the VUCA world.

The hands (direction-giving language) dispel ambiguity and uncertainty through transparency, priorities, goal setting, role clarity, constructive feedback, and articulating rewards. This information is probably not surprising and is frequently discussed in academic and popular press books.

But research shows that ML has far greater potential when partnered with heart and spirit (empathetic and meaning-making language). What’s more, our data tell us that relatively few leaders fully access these tools. The heart refers to emotional bonding, support, and empathy between leaders and followers. And spirit is inclusive leader communication that aligns a followers’ personal values with an organization’s vision, instills a commitment to a higher purpose, and shares the behavioral expectations of each enterprise’s unique culture.

ML has been developed and empirically tested around the globe for over thirty years. The consistent benefits of combining hands, heart, and spirit are rich for the organization and its employees. Value-added includes improved employee performance, engagement, reduced absenteeism, and higher retention, more job satisfaction and commitment, plus greater psychological safety, employee trust, and perceived competence of leadership. Going further, ML cultivates innovation and is particularly helpful in navigating change because hands set new goals and rewards, heart offers emotional support and inclusion for transition, while spirit sustains the modified vision and clarifies how to serve customers in the best ways.

There are a few requirements for ML to flourish. The leader has to walk the talk and demonstrate behavioral integrity. Second, leaders need to listen actively and with acceptance to followers. Third, hands, heart, and spirit should all be coordinated to optimize ML’s contributions. Fortunately, motivating language is a state, not a trait; a journey, not a destination. Most people can continuously improve their ML capabilities.

ML knowledge is expanding in global settings. Recent progress includes the discovery that peers can positively influence each other with peer motivating language (PML) to boost their performance, job satisfaction, and commitment. Other new studies find leader ML enhances employee experience through substantial links with fair treatment, gratitude, and psychological empowerment.

We believe that much advice about enterprise communication is vague and understated. High ML leaders can shape a culture of positive communication which translates into better employee motivation. Just as important, high ML teams can achieve impressive benefits. Simply put, ML is a compass for navigating VUCA.