– All I want this year is more dedicated leadership and active employee engagement!

2024 has just “stopped working” and 2025 is now a reality, and as one client said recently – a new year is looming! For organisations to remain attractive employers in a time of continuous change and lingering effects from the pandemic, an increasing number of global conflicts, an energy crisis and uncertainty, new thinking is required. Both the leadership role and the employee role have changed. Now it is time to make expectations clear, understood and accepted. Why not use 2025 to develop more dedicated leadership, more active employee participation and strengthen your attractiveness as an employer?

In HR, the term “psychological contract” is used. This refers to “the mutual understanding of the demands, expectations and promises that exist between employers and employees. The contract may be explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious.” Thousands of employees and leaders are currently experiencing a breach of this contract. The consequences are that more employees are considering leaving, they resign physically or “mentally”. The phenomenon of “quiet quitting” has increased. More people contribute only what they must, engagement has declined and the sense of belonging to the workplace has weakened.

It is important for you as a reader to understand that this is not a desired situation for employees, leaders or organisations. It is a consequence — primarily a consequence of broken expectations. The problem is that these expectations are largely unclear, unconscious, unspoken and not clearly anchored in policies, strategies or actions.

Expectation management and role clarity as prerequisites for building relationships

What should, ought, or must we expect from leaders, employees, and employers in today’s and tomorrow’s working life? In the leadership field today, people talk about things like

relationship-based leadership, trust-based leadership, empowering leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership, and superleadership. It’s no wonder that leaders, as Øystein Sunde so beautifully puts it, “can feel as confused as a fart in a wicker chair.” We prefer to simplify and believe that leaders have four fundamental jobs.

Leaders have four equally important jobs

1. Leadership is getting the job done
Every organisation delivers different services or products that leaders are responsible for. Ensuring these are delivered according to recipients’ requirements and expectations is leaders’ primary responsibility — what they are measured on and held accountable for.

2. Leadership is improving how the job is done
As mentioned earlier, everything is evolving, and continuous improvement is expected in all types of deliveries. It is therefore part of a leader’s job to set goals for and deliver improvements in how the work is carried out within their area of responsibility.

3. Leadership is developing your employees
For our deliveries to hold sufficient quality and for work processes to improve continuously, the most important resource — the employees — must also be in continuous development. This is also something leaders must facilitate and deliver on.

4. Leadership is developing your own leadership
Leaders are role models — for better or for worse. Employees and others influenced by a leader tend to adopt the leader’s behaviour (more than what the leader says). To move others, leaders must be able to move themselves; they must set goals for and develop their own leadership in ways that are noticeable to their surroundings.

Leaders have hectic workdays, and many of the leaders we meet experience pressure and stress that make it difficult to prioritise anything other than “getting the job done.” The metaphor “there is so much woodcutting that there is no tim

Expectations for active employee participation – three leadership tasks that apply to all of us!

1. Employees must lead themselves (self-leadership)
Employees must take responsibility for performing their own work and for contributing to the development of that work. As an employee, you must participate in setting goals, planning and prioritising, and anchoring what you do with your leader and others who have a stake in your work. Employees must take responsibility for their own career and development, be the “engine” of their own competence development, and know what gives them meaning and what creates engagement.

2. Employees must make themselves “leadable” (exercise co-leadership)
Employees must communicate their wishes and needs in a way that the recipient (often the immediate leader) understands. They must take responsibility for building good relationships with their leader/management. Leaders should see and recognise employees, but employees must make themselves visible. No one is a mind reader. Employees must orient themselves toward the needs of the organisation and be constructive, solution-oriented contributors.

3. Employees must exercise “employee leadership”
Leadership is about influence — and employees influence each other far more than they realise. We increasingly work in groups, teams and projects, and the demands for social competence and relational awareness have increased. We set goals, plan and carry out various tasks together with others (traditional leadership tasks). We must both seek and give feedback to others, and we all share responsibility for creating a good working and learning environment.

When leadership and employee participation meet in practice (task no. 3 is a shared responsibility)

A leader’s task no. 3 is to develop their employees, and employees have a task to develop themselves. This means leaders must know their employees’ professional and personal strengths, their motivation, goals, and what gives their work meaning — and employees must communicate more (no, your leader is not a mind reader). Leaders must focus more on employees’ learning and development, not just on tasks and deliverables. Goals and room for action must, of course, be clarified in a partnership where leaders are clear about needs, goals and direction, and employees are clear about their own professional and personal goals.

Leaders and employees must figure out how to follow up each other in a motivating and accountable way. Employees must reflect more on their own learning, effort, performance and results. They must assess their own development, motivate themselves, and express what they need in terms of clarity or feedback from their leader or others. Leaders must provide more and better feedback on effort, improvement and results.

The attentive reader will immediately understand that leaders (and employees) who succeed with task no. 3 will “deliver” on task no. 1 and task no. 2. The competent reader can also reflect on what this type of follow-up means for intrinsic motivation — elements such as autonomy, use of talent, expectation clarity, identity and perceived leadership support. Consider what consequences this kind of mutual follow-up might have for the leader–employee relationship itself. What effects might it have on turnover intention, the likelihood of “quiet quitting,” and the ambition to be an attractive employer?