High Performing Leaders and Employee Engagement: Can You Have One Without the Other?

High Performing Leaders and Employee Engagement: Are Both Essential for Success?

Ask employees, and most will tell you that high performing leaders and employee engagement go hand in hand. But here’s a more provocative question: Can you really call yourself a high performing leader if you’re delivering impressive business results while your team is disengaged?

We know from action learning leadership development programs that some leaders consistently:

• Exceed their performance targets.
• Deliver impressive business results.

while leaving behind:

• Exhausted.
• Frustrated.
• Disengaged employees.

Others build high functioning teams that enjoy working together but consistently fall short of performance expectations.

So, which leader is actually performing at a high level?

While it depends upon your business strategy and workplace culture, we believe the answer is neither. Truly high performing leaders must deliver meaningful business results while creating the conditions for their teams to perform at their peak.

Top leaders do not choose between employee engagement and business performance. They balance and achieve both.

The Dangerous Myth That Results Are All That Matter
Win at all costs organizations frequently reward leaders for what they accomplish while overlooking how they accomplish it.  While this may make sense to execute a win at all costs strategy, it can lead to high profile problems.  Just ask the fired CEO’s of Wells Fargo, VW, and Uber.

A demanding leader might generate extraordinary short-term results through relentless performance pressure, micromanagement, or fear. But what happens when:

• Talented employees begin leaving.
• Discretionary effort
• Employee burnout becomes commonplace?
• Teams bend the rules to meet targets.

Those impressive results may be masking an increasingly fragile team or high stakes risks.

The good news is that corporate culture assessment analyses find that teams in the top engagement quartile achieved almost 25% higher profitability than those in the bottom quartile.

Our take: While employee engagement does not guarantee business performance, consistently ignoring it creates unnecessary business risk.

Why Highly Engaged Teams Are Not Enough
The opposite leadership mistake is equally dangerous.

When leaders avoid conflict, prioritize harmony, and over-index on psychological team safety without establishing clear performance expectations and holding people accountable, performance problems inevitably emerge.

Employees may enjoy their jobs, trust their managers, and feel supported — yet struggle to execute strategic priorities.

A happy team is not necessarily a high performing team.

Without a culture of accountability, employee engagement can drive unwanted levels of workplace complacency.

4 Requirements for High Performing Leaders

Leadership simulation assessment data confirms that the most effective leaders recognize that sustainable performance requires four interconnected disciplines:

• Strategic Clarity
  Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the performance difference between high and low performing teams. High performing leaders ensure employees understand the critical few strategic priorities, what success looks like, and how their work contributes to business outcomes.
• Performance Accountability
  Once the team’s direction and purpose are clear, establish meaningful expectations, provide timely feedback, address underperformance, and consistently reinforce desired behaviors.
• Employee Engagement
  Create a healthy corporate culture where employees feel valued, challenged, supported, and committed to achieving shared goals.
• Continuous Improvement
  Follow project postmortem best practices by building the competence, confidence, and resilience required to sustain results as business conditions change.

When these high performance culture disciplines reinforce one another, leaders create a team capable of consistently outperforming expectations.

The Leadership Question That Matters Most
Instead of asking whether employee engagement matters, executives should ask:

Are our leaders achieving results because of how they lead their people — or despite it?

That distinction reveals whether performance is sustainable.

Leaders who consistently deliver results while strengthening employee commitment, capability, and accountability create competitive advantages that competitors struggle to replicate.

Those who sacrifice engagement for short-term performance may eventually discover that their apparent success came at a much higher cost than anticipated.

The Bottom Line
It is possible to achieve short-term results with disengaged and misaligned employee, but that does not necessarily make you a high performing leader. The strongest leaders refuse to accept employee engagement and performance as an either-or proposition. They understand that results without engagement are unstable, and engagement without results is not enough. The real measure of leadership excellence is the ability to consistently assess and achieve both.

Many leaders waste time focusing on the wrong aspects of performance. Download The 3 Levels of a High-Performing Culture to Get Right to identify the factors that have the greatest impact on discretionary effort, retention, and performance.