Engaged employees feel a strong emotional connection to their organization…a connection that leads them to make the extra effort that ultimately drives higher performance. Engaged employees do the ordinary things extraordinarily well…because they care.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to know that an employee is unlikely to care about …to feel connected to…an organization that doesn’t seem to give a hoot about them…which is why the research on engagement has found that  the key factor in whether or not employees become highly engaged is whether or not they feel that their leaders care about them. In my experience, most of the people who end up in leadership roles are not self-centered, or arrogant, or uncaring.

And yet, they—we—all too often make decisions and take actions that come across that way to our employees. Why is that? One reason is that when we’re in decision-making mode, and especially when the decision we have to make is a tough one, we often fail to include all of our stakeholders, including our employees, in our thought process. I also think that sometimes we fall into thinking of our employees not so much as people but as just another resource—albeit a human resource. Resources are not something you care about. Resources are something you manage, optimize, utilize, etc.

And sometimes we’re just tone deaf. We’re not sensitive to how our actions will be perceived. Part of the reason for that is that even though we may actually care about our employees, on a day-to-day basis we live in a different world. As leaders, we have far more power, we make a lot more money, and in many other ways we’re treated as if we’re special. Basically, all it takes is for us as leaders to start taking the special treatment we enjoy as our due—for us to feel entitled to that treatment instead of viewing it, and our role as leaders, as a privilege. When that happens, it’s easy to start acting in ways that make us look an awful lot like those self-centered, arrogant, uncaring “takers” we don’t ever want to be.

And when that happens, we have only ourselves to blame if our employees don’t give us their best.