Category: Leadership

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Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em

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Retaining talented employees is a key problem for corporations. Even when there is a slower economy, attracting and holding top talent is a serious concern. The trend is exacerbated by a growing propensity for people to change jobs frequently. After 20 years of down-sizing, it is ironic that corporations are now concerned about losing employees.

The problem is one of getting qualified and talented people into the right jobs and keeping them there. HR professionals, managers and CEO’s are all searching for what they can do to keep their good, talented employees.

Some organizations are turning to retention bonuses to attract and retain talented people, some reported to be as high as $20,000. There are also reports of an amazing array of perks and benefits being offered to make employees’ lives more comfortable. Some organizations offer dry-cleaning services, car-detailing, concierge services to run errands, child-care, pet-sitting, gym programs, and chair massages.

But you can’t buy love. Throwing money or gifts at people isn’t enough to keep them. If they don’t like the company, the people they work with, the boss or the way that they’re treated, they will still leave.

Finding solutions to employee retention means more profitable companies, happier, more productive employees, and more satisfied customers, and ultimately greater stock value.

Losing employees is very expensive. Studies have found that the cost of replacing lost talent is 70 to 200 percent of that person’s annual salary. Expenses include recruiting, orientation and training, lost productivity during that period, even lost customer satisfaction because of the change. Finding and training the best employees is a major investment.

What can a company do, once they have found talented people, given them valuable training and equipped them, to prevent them from walking out the back door and going to competitors?

Why they leave, why they stay

Study after study shows that people leave because of their direct supervisors, more so than any other reason. It is the manager who more than anyone else can do something about retaining workers. The manager can be seen as responsible for creating a satisfactory working environment.

However, studies also show that 9 out of 10 managers think people stay or go because of money (Harvard Management Update, June 1988.) This keeps showing up in research, in spite of the fact that people leaving jobs say otherwise. Money and perks matter, but employees report that what they want most is challenging, meaningful work, a good boss, and an opportunity for learning and development.

In 1999 the Hay Group studied more than 500,000 employees in 300 companies. They found that of 50 retention factors, pay was the least important. Other studies bring up similar lists of the 10 most important reasons people want to stay with a company.

  1. Career growth, learning and development
  2. Exciting, challenging work
  3. Meaningful work, ability to make a difference and a contribution
  4. Great people
  5. Being part of a team
  6. Good boss
  7. Recognition for work well done
  8. Autonomy, a sense of control over one’s work
  9. Flexible hours and dress
  10.  Fair pay and benefits

 

This is contingent upon people having already attained a certain level of material comfort. That is, once people have their basic needs met, they care more about what they do and who they work with, rather than the money.

It’s not about the money

So why do managers still think it’s the money? Do they view people as important capital assets, or as easily replaced? Do they nurture, respect and protect their workers? Or are they looking at them only as performers? Diagnosing the gaps in espoused theory and theory in action is important in putting retention efforts in the hands of managers who are most closely working with the employees and who can make the difference.

One possible explanation why managers still think it’s the money may be that

when employees complain to them, they often bring up the subject of compensation. Workers come to their bosses when they want a raise. They may feel they are not earning enough, or as much as another person. When these concerns are frequently verbalized to managers it gives them the impression that money is what matters the most.

A 1999 study by the Saratoga Institute for the American Management Association cites three reasons people leave their jobs:

  1. Poor supervisor skills
  2. No growth opportunities
  3. Inability to speak freely

 

Some of the most comprehensive research on what makes a great company has been done by the Gallup Organization. In 1999 they published the results of a meta-survey of over 1 million employees. This information is invaluable and is contained in the book, First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (Simon & Schuster, 1999).           .

The important relationship with the manager

Based on a wealth of data, the Gallup Organization attempted to define not only what makes a great company, but because so much depends upon it, what makes a great manager.

In today’s labor markets, companies compete to find and keep the best employees, using pay, benefits, promotions, impressive job titles and training. But these well-intentioned efforts miss the mark. The most important element in attracting and retaining key employees is the front-line manager.

The Gallup study found that people weren’t necessarily loyal to the company, but rather to the unit they worked in, and this was because of their feelings toward their immediate supervisor.  In other words, companies aren’t employers-of-choice; it is the supervisors who are the essential determinants in retaining talented people.

No matter how generous its pay, benefits or training, a company that lacks great supervisors and managers will suffer. Great managers, according to the Gallup research, have the following behaviors that set them apart from others:

  1. They select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience.
  2. They set clear expectations and define the right outcomes rather than the right steps.
  3. They motivate people, by building on their strengths rather than trying to fix their weaknesses.
  4. As each employee grows, they encourage them to find the right fit for their strengths within the organization.

 

Creating loyalty

The following four elements have been proven to be effective in creating employee loyalty: praise and recognition, a sense of contribution to the company, learning and development, and having a best friend at work.

  1. Praise and recognition: It has been said that no news is good news, but for managers interested in keeping the best workers, this is not true. For workers, not getting any feedback is tantamount to being ignored: it leads to complacency. Workplaces that ignore performance will destroy the very human spirit that makes the true difference in quality output and service delivery.

 

Positive recognition is often thought of as coming strictly from supervisors or managers, but studies have found that employees also value praise and recognition from peers. Co-workers know the particulars of a job and when they give good feedback it can be more meaningful.

What can a manager do to help foster this? Model the appropriate way to give frequent praise and recognition. Working with a coach will help develop appropriate and effective feedback skills.

 

2.   A sense of contribution to the company: Excellence only happens when people have a deeply felt sense of purpose in their lives. Human beings want to know they make a difference. Organizations need to let employees know how their job and their performance is important to the overall success of the company. There must be an alignment of the worker’s personal reasons for being there and the purpose of the job. It is more exciting to share a mission rather than to simply accomplish a task.

      What can a manager do to increase this sense of meaning? Involve the workers in other aspects of the company. Take them to meetings, let them know about what’s going on in the company in other departments and teams.

3.   Learning and development: It is important to offer trainings and learning opportunities. Traditional management highlights the need to help employees identify their weaknesses and then creates a plan for them to improve. The emphasis is on what the employee is not, rather than on developing more of who they are. Effective organizations are now hiring coaches to help workers develop their strengths and to become more of who they are.

      Working with a coach involves holding up a mirror to employees and encouraging them to know themselves. As they come to better understand who they are, they can see opportunities for growth in the company, utilizing their strengths and talents. As they move forward in their self-knowledge, they can look for places within the company where their talents are a good fit.

4.  Having a best friend at work: This is a key element in why people choose to stay at a job, even in the face of other dissatisfactions. In the best workplaces, managers recognize that employees want to forge quality relationships with their co-workers and that company loyalty can be built from such relationships. Developing trusting relationships with one’s coworkers provides a significant emotional compensation for employees. While organizations pay close attention to the loyalty workers may feel toward the company, the best employers recognize that loyalty also exists among workers to each other. Great managers allow time and opportunity for these relationships to flourish.

Managers know that they need to attract and retain talented people in order to succeed in the competitive workplace. And they also have to find ways to get workers to improve performance. People usually don’t think of themselves as performers, but as individuals with certain strengths and talents. Workers must know that the manager cares about them on a human level before they are going to be motivated to make extra efforts.

There is no one-size-fits all retention formula. Here are some of the ingredients:

  1. Honest communications in all directions
  2. Supervisors who invite workers into all facets of work and help them to see the big picture, that is, the corporate value of their contributions
  3. Workplaces that encourage experimentation and learning.

 

There are no new tricks. It is the same old story: there is a great need to engage and enable the hearts, minds, and yes, even the soul of people at work. This engagement is far more important than bonuses, perks and even chair massages. It is primordial to retaining talented people.

 

Measuring Strong Retention Factors

The Gallup Organization has released the results of their massive in-depth study of great manager across a wide variety of industries in a book, First Break All The Rules: What Great Managers do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (Simon & Schuster, 1999). This research generated thousands of different survey questions on employee opinion.

Finally, using sophisticated statistical analysis, they produced 12 questions which work to distinguish the strongest departments of a company. This essential measuring stick provides the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover.

They are reprinted here with permission of the Gallup Organization, Copyright 1999. They are copyrighted  and cannot be used without Gallup’s permission.

They can be accessed at www.gallup.com/poll/managing/managing.asp.

  1. I know what is expected of me at work.*
  2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.*
  3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.*
  4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for good work.
  5. My supervisor or the person I report to seems to care about me as a person.*
  6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
  7. In the last six months, someone at work has talked with me about my progress.*
  8. At work, my opinions seem to count.
  9. The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.

10. My associates (fellow employees) are committed to doing quality work.

11. I have a best friend at work.

12. The last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

According to the results of years of Gallup Organization research, these 12 questions are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace.

*Further analysis revealed that five of these questions are linked to retention: numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7. When employees score highest marks for these five questions, the company has a strong retention factor. As a manager, if you want to build high retention, then securing high marks to these five questions is a good place to start.

Resources:

Buckingham, Marcus and Curt Coffman; First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently; Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Gendron, Marie; “Keys to Retaining Your Best Managers in a Tight Job Market,” Harvard Management Update (June 1998): 1-4.

Hay Group, “1998-1999 Employee Attitudes Study,” 8, HR/OD, (December 1, 1998).

Herman, Roger E.; Keeping Good People: Strategies for Solving the #1 Problem Facing Business Today; Oakhill Press, 1999.

Kaye, Beverly and Sharon Jordan-Evans: Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People To Stay;  Berrett-Kockler Publishers, 1999.

Klobucar Logan, Jill; “Retention Tangibles and Intangibles” ; ASTD’s Training & Development, April 2000.

Smart, Bradford D., Ph.D; Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People; Prentice Hall Press, 1999.

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Managing For Peak Performance

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 “Put simply, the best managers bring out the best from their people. This is true of football coaches, orchestra conductors, big-company executives, and small-business owners. They are like alchemists who turn lead into gold. Put more accurately, they find and mine the gold that resides in everyone.” ~ Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People (Harvard Business Press, 2011)

Most managers want their people to achieve excellence at work. We really can’t ask for more. In fact, peak performance can be defined as a combination of:

  • Excellence
  • Consistency
  • Ongoing improvement

To achieve peak performance, each person must find the right job, tasks and conditions that match his or her strengths. Facilitating the right fit therefore becomes one of a manager’s most crucial responsibilities. While every employee has the potential to deliver peak performance, it’s up to the manager to find ways to make it happen.

It’s easy to spot peak performance when it happens. It’s what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). Employees who work at optimum levels experience a state of “flow,” typically losing themselves in a project, meeting or discussion. They may lose track of time or where they are.

Each of us has relished such moments, but it’s hard to purposely replicate “flow” experiences. Many managers struggle to find the right words to rekindle motivation in people who have lost their enthusiasm.

Two Sides of the Disengagement Coin

Disengaged employees often appear to lack commitment. In reality, many of them crave re-engagement. No one enjoys working without passion or joy.

While many factors cause disengagement, the most prevalent is feeling overwhelmed (or, conversely, underwhelmed). Disconnection and overload pose obstacles to performance, yet they often go undetected or ignored because neither qualifies as a disciplinary issue.

Meanwhile, managers try to work around such problems, hoping for a miraculous turnaround or spark that reignites energy and drive. They try incentives, empowerment programs or the management fad du jour.

While it’s impossible to spark flow moments all day long, you can greatly improve your ability to help others achieve peak performance. Until recently, managers tried various motivational methods, with only temporary success.

You can’t sprint to peak performance, the brain needs careful management and rest. Brain science tells us that as knowledge workers, we must manage our thinking minds with care.

In addition to variety and stimulation, we require food, rest, human engagement, physical exercise and challenge. You cannot expect a human being to sit at a desk for hours and produce quality work without providing these essential elements.

We often forget that thinking is hard work. If you work too many hours, your brain’s supply of neurotransmitters will be depleted, and you won’t be able to sustain top performance. Without proper care, the brain will underperform—and brain fatigue mimics disengagement and lack of commitment.

Peak performance also depends on how we feel: hopeful, in control, optimistic and grateful. We need to know that we’re appreciated.

Using Brain Science to Bring Out the Best

While no management guru has found the golden key to unlocking the full panoply of human potential at work, several diverse areas of research shed new light on the possibilities.

Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, author of Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People (Harvard Business Press, 2011), synthesizes such new research into five sequential steps managers can apply to maximize employees’ peak performance. A psychiatrist and ADD expert, he draws on brain science, performance research and his own experience to present a proven process for getting the best from your people:

  1. Select: Put the right people in the right job, and give them responsibilities that “light up” their brains.
  2. Connect: Strengthen interpersonal bonds among team members.
  3. Play: Help people unleash their imaginations at work.
  4. Grapple and Grow: When the pressure’s on, enable employees to achieve mastery of their work.
  5. Shine: Use the right rewards to promote loyalty and stoke your people’s desire to excel.

“Neither the individual nor the job holds the magic,” Hallowell writes. “But the right person doing the right job creates the magical interaction that leads to peak performance.”

Hallowell refers to the five cited essential ingredients as “The Cycle of Excellence,” which works because it exploits the powerful interaction between an individual’s intrinsic capabilities and extrinsic environment.

Step 1: Select

To match the right person to the right job, examine how three key questions intersect:

  1. At what tasks or jobs does this person excel?
  2. What does he/she like to do?
  3. How does he/she add value to the organization?

Set the stage for your employees to do well with responsibilities they enjoy. You can then determine how they will add the greatest possible value to your organization.

According to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll, 33 percent of 7,718 employees surveyed believed they had reached a dead end in their jobs, and 21 percent were eager to change careers. Only 20 percent felt passionate about their work.

When so many skilled and motivated people spend decades moving from one job to the next, something is wrong. They clearly have not landed in the right outlets for their talents and strengths. Their brains never light up.

The better the fit, the better the performance. People require clear roles that allow them to succeed, while also providing room to learn, grow and be challenged.

Step 2: Connect

Managers and employees require a mutual atmosphere of trust, optimism, openness, transparency, creativity and positive energy. Each group can contribute to reducing toxic fear and worry, insecurity, backbiting, gossip and disconnection.

A positive working environment starts with how the boss handles negativity, failure and problems. The boss sets the tone and models preferred behaviors and reactions. Employees take their cues from those who lead them.

To encourage connection:

  • Look for the spark of brilliance within everyone.
  • Encourage a learning mindset.
  • Model and teach optimism, as well as the belief that teamwork can overcome any problem.
  • Use human moments instead of relying on electronic communication.
  • Learn about each person.
  • Treat everyone with respect, especially those you dislike.
  • Meet people where they are, and know that most will do their best with what they have.
  • Encourage reality.
  • Use humor without sarcasm or at others’ expense.
  • Seek out the quiet ones, and try to bring them in.

Step 3: Play

Play isn’t limited to break time. Any activity that involves the imagination lights up our brains and produces creative thoughts and ideas. Play boosts morale, reduces fatigue and brings joy to our workdays.

Encourage imaginative play with these steps:

  • Ask open-ended questions.
  • Encourage everyone to produce three new ideas each month.
  • Allow for irreverence or goofiness (without disrespect), and model this behavior.
  • Brainstorm.
  • Reward new ideas and innovations.
  • Encourage people to question everything.

Step 4: Grapple and Grow

Help people engage imaginatively with tasks they like and at which they excel. You can then encourage them to stretch beyond their usual limits.

If tasks are too easy, people fall into boredom and routine without making any progress or learning anything new. Your job, as a manager, is to be a catalyst when people get stuck, offering suggestions but letting them work out solutions.

Step 5: Shine

Every employee should feel recognized and valued for what he or she does. Recognition should not be reserved solely for a group’s stars.

People learn from mistakes, and they grow even more when their successes are noticed and praised. Letting them know that you appreciate victories large and small will motivate them and secure their loyalty.

When a person is underperforming, consider that lack of recognition may be a cause. An employee usually won’t come right out and tell you that he/she feels undervalued, so you must look for the subtle signs. In addition:

  • Be on the lookout for moments when you can catch someone doing something right. It doesn’t have to be unusual or spectacular. Don’t withhold compliments.
  • Be generous with praise. People will pick up on your use of praise and start to perform for themselves and each other.
  • Recognize attitudes, as well as achievements. Optimism and a growth mindset are two attitudes you can single out and encourage. Look for others.

When you’re in sync with your people, you create positive energy and opportunities for peak performance. Working together can be one of life’s greatest joys—and it’s what we’re wired to do.

Maintaining Excellence in Uncertain Times

Nothing is as difficult as managing in uncertain times. With the rapidly changing competitive environment and new technologies, it’s hard to keep up.

Managing people well is even more challenging when you’re constantly putting out fires. How are you supposed to bring out the best in your people when no one has a clue as to what will happen tomorrow?

Most managers draw upon their core values and lessons learned along the way. To ensure success, embrace a plan like the Cycle of Excellence. It can help you manage people when they’re faltering. Perhaps one of the five steps is going unfulfilled. An employee may not be in the right job or may not be sufficiently challenged.

A plan is a mooring to use during times of crisis and chaos—a strategy for redirecting energies in the right direction. It can be used to correct course. You can’t sacrifice performance in the name of speed, cost cutting, efficiency, and what can be mislabeled as necessity. When you ignore connections, deep thought disappears in favor of decisions based on fear.

These five areas of focus can help you avoid fear-based management practices, which have the potential to disable you. Use it to identify problem areas and decide on a plan of action. In this way you and your employee can creatively manage for growth not just survival.

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Rethinking Motivation

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Most business leaders have lost sight of what motivates people at work. In fact, some companies haven’t updated their management practices in years, which means they’re incapable of creating high-performance teams.

Companies continue to ignore the obvious: Offering incentives and rewards is less effective than tapping into truly meaningful intrinsic motivation. Leaders operate on old assumptions about motivation despite a wealth of well-documented scientific evidence.

The old “carrot-and-stick” mentality may actually inhibit employees from seeking creative solutions, partly because they focus on attaining rewards instead of solving problems.

So, how can you successfully tap into workers’ inherent motivation and creative drive? How can you boost the number of actively engaged employees from the paltry 33 percent reported by the Gallup Organization? And how can you sustain employees’ enthusiasm after their first 30 days on the job?

Seven Deadly Flaws

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, former U.S. Department of Labor aide Daniel H. Pink says businesses are out of sync with what scientists have been telling us over the last 50 years.

The hackneyed carrot-and-stick approach, now dubbed “Motivation 2.0,” encourages poor leadership practices, including Pink’s “seven deadly flaws”:

  1. Extinguishing motivation
  2. Diminishing performance
  3. Crushing creativity
  4. Crowding out good behavior
  5. Encouraging cheating, shortcuts and unethical behavior
  6. Becoming addictive or obsessive
  7. Fostering short-term thinking

In fact, Pink holds Motivation 2.0 partly responsible for the economic chaos of 2008. Mortgage brokers, for instance, were so hungry for commissions that they made questionable loans, which helped bring the nation’s banking system to its knees.

The Hawthorne Studies

In the 1920s, Harvard Business School initiated the first studies of human behavior at work, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Clinical psychologist Elton Mayo and Harvard Medical School physiologist L.J. Henderson were recruited to study the impact of various working conditions, such as how lighting affects fatigue levels.

Early research was conducted at AT&T’s Western Electric Hawthorne Plant. The results were published by F.J. Roethlisberger and W. Dickson in Management and the Worker.

The researchers found that workers’ and managers’ social needs had a powerful impact on their behavior at work. Workers enthusiastically embraced opportunities to contribute their thoughts, ideas and experiences regarding workplace issues.

Unfortunately, these findings failed to change work conditions for employees.

Scientific Management

At the beginning of the 20th century, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor asserted that businesses were being run in inefficient, haphazard ways. He invented the concept of “scientific management,” which assumed workers were little more than machines. To make the machine run smoothly, you rewarded the behaviors you wanted and punished those you discouraged.

“Work,” Taylor stated, “consists of mainly simple, not particularly interesting, tasks. The only way to get people to do them is to incentivize them properly and monitor them carefully.”

Thus began the firmly entrenched practice of motivating people with the proverbial carrots and sticks.

In the 1900s, Taylor had a point. We were, after all, building railroads, highways and major factories. But today, in much of the developed world, this is no longer entirely true. For many people, jobs have become more complex, challenging and self-directed.

Freud, Skinner & Maslow

The 20th century saw the birth of psychology and study of the human psyche. Sigmund Freud proposed that all humans were driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain. In the 1930s, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner created a large body of experimental research to show the effects of positive reinforcement on augmenting certain behaviors and extinguishing others.

In the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow questioned the idea that human behavior was purely rat- or pigeon-like. He launched the field of humanistic psychology, proposing that once survival needs were met, people sought to achieve self-mastery and actualization.

In the 1960s, MIT management professor Douglas McGregor imported Maslow’s ideas to the business world. He proposed that humans had higher drives that weren’t contingent on rewards and punishments. If managers could tap into these inner motivations and grant employees greater autonomy and respect, workers would unleash greater performance.

While McGregor’s writing influenced some organizations, there were only modest improvements —mostly more flexible dress codes, working conditions and empowerment programs.

Despite these psychological insights, businesses entered the 21st century using outdated and ineffective motivational strategies.

The Third Drive

In 1949, psychologist Harry Harlow placed puzzles in monkeys’ cages and was surprised to find that the primates successfully solved them.

Harlow saw no logical reason for them to do so. Their survival didn’t depend on it, and they didn’t receive any rewards or avoid any punishments. Apparently, the monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they had a desire to do so.

As to their motivation, Harlow offered a novel theory: “The performance of the task provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys performed because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it, and the joy of the task was its own reward.

Further experiments found that offering external rewards to solve these puzzles didn’t improve performance. In fact, rewards disrupted task completion.

This led Harlow to identify a third drive in human motivation:

  1. The first drive for behaviors is survival. We drink, eat and copulate to ensure our survival.
  2. The second drive is to seek rewards and avoid punishment.
  3. The third drive is intrinsic: to achieve internal satisfaction.

But Harlow’s theory was met with disdain from the behavioral scientists who dominated motivational theory at the time. It took almost two decades for scientists to return their attention to intrinsic drives.

Negative Impact of Rewards

In 1969, psychologist Edward Deci ran a series of experiments that showed students lost intrinsic interest in an activity when money was offered as an external reward. The results surprised many behavioral scientists.

Although rewards can deliver a short-term boost, the effect wears off. Even worse, rewards can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue a project.

Deci proposed that human beings have an inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.

Open Source Innovations

The third drive has become more important as our society moves from a manufacturing-based economy to one of knowledge and services.

Carrots and sticks continue to provide effective incentive and motivation for work tasks that are routine and repetitive. But for jobs that require complex creativity, intrinsic motivation works best.

As proof, examine the case of two companies that set out to publish online encyclopedias:

  1. Microsoft hired the best people and devoted considerable funds to achieve Encarta.
  2. A global force of volunteers created Wikipedia with no budget or salaries.

Encarta no longer exists, while Wikipedia thrives as a fully functional volunteer project.

Most businesses haven’t caught up to this new understanding of what motivates us. Too many organizations, governments and nonprofits still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance — ideas that are clearly outdated and ineffective. They continue to pursue short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of evidence against them.

Unleashing Motivation

How do you move yourself — and your company — away from using carrot-and-stick incentives?

Pink describes three critical conditions for an intrinsic motivational environment:

  1. Autonomy: Give people autonomy over what they’re doing and how they do it, including choosing their time, tasks, team and techniques.
  2. Mastery: Give them an opportunity to master their work and make progress through deliberate practice.
  3. Purpose: Make sure people have a sense of purpose in their work — preferably to something higher and beyond their job, salary and company.

Autonomy may seem daunting when it comes to practical implementations. Some companies, however, have already forged new and innovative work environments that are generating huge results — most notably, Best Buy’s ROWE (“results-oriented work environment”) program. With ROWE, employees have no schedules and are measured only by what they get done.

Google is famous for its “20-percent time” program, which allows engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on projects that interest them. Google Mail is one successful project that came out of the program.

The Australian tech company Atlassian implemented a similar program, with engineers given a full day each quarter to work on any software problem they choose — a ritual the company calls “FedEx” days. (Completed projects are delivered overnight.)

Creating Flow

People are most productive and satisfied when their work puts them in a state of “flow” — more commonly recognized as being “in the zone.” In the flow state, one experiences a heightened sense of focus and a generally higher sense of satisfaction.

What we know about flow is primarily based on the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose seminal book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, describes it as the moment in which “a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

You can’t give people the opportunity to create “flow” experiences without providing autonomy, time to practice and improve mastery, and a sense of higher purpose.

Rethinking Management

Intrinsic motivation theories aren’t palatable to everyone. Unfortunately, our notions of what constitutes proper motivation in the office are often too entrenched to be flexible. Some companies have given lip service to worker “empowerment,” without actually letting go of control.

At its core, management hasn’t changed all that much since Taylor and his scientific management theory proposed that we need to control the passive nature of workers with extrinsic motivators.

This doesn’t work for motivating non-routine, right-brain activities required of knowledge workers today. Management, in this sense, is deeply out of sync with human nature — in essence, management is the problem, not the solution.

Rethinking Human Nature

Our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed, to seek out and explore solutions to problems. If your employees are inert, disengaged and bored, something has flipped their default setting.

Many leaders will resist giving up their carrots, and many workers will find it hard to imagine a world without incentives. We’re conditioned to like the carrots and avoid the sticks.

But leaders who recognize the value of, and who can implement, intrinsic motivation can expect a whole new workplace — and an entirely new definition of work. We don’t need better management as much as a renaissance of self-direction.

The bigger, unanswered question is whether today’s leaders are ready to rise to the new challenges autonomy will require.

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Are you aware of the “Leadership Shadow” you cast?

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Many of the Executive Coaching clients I’ve worked with seem to be unaware of the “Shadow” they cast as a Leader. It’s a shadow that reflects what a leader pays attention to, how they respond to crisis, deal with a disagreement, treat those around them, and behave in general. It all feeds into the cultural fabric of the organization.

As I’ve observed, if a leader treats every unexpected problem or unanticipated roadblock as a major crisis, so will employees. If a leader takes the view that every problem could have been avoided and therefore when something goes wrong, heads will roll, the resulting behavior will be one of blame and finger-pointing. If a leader views mistakes as a natural part of learning, exploring, and experimenting, the result is an attitude that supports risk taking and innovation.

Not too long ago I worked with the head of an engineering organization who reported to the CEO of a medium sized software company. As a part of assessing his leadership style I interviewed a cross section of his direct reports, peers and a sample of primary customers. One of the most significant behaviors that surfaced was his inability to filter negative messages. For example, if the CEO met with him to talk about his concern with delivery dates or a process interruption, he would immediately call a meeting of his responsible staff members and chew them out under the guise of finding out what was happening to cause the problems. He had no idea that his behavior was being modeled by most of his direct reports and the managers that work for them throughout the organization. Being able to filter emotional messages before acting is a fundamental leadership responsibility.

Beyond actions, leaders shape the culture through the stories that they tell and the stories that are told about them. The stories that leaders tell help to inform employees about what leadership considers important.

One story that I’ve retold many times has to do with a new regional VP of Sales who had just relocated back to the U.S. as an expat. He walked into a regional sales review meeting where each manager was expected to present their forecast, where they were and why. After hearing one presentation and the beginning of a second where the managers’ complained about their products and lamented the lack of technology and product capability of their competitors, he stopped the meeting. He then got up and moved to the front of the room with what seemed to be a scene from Patton’s Army. He then said, “I didn’t come here to listen to excuses about why you can’t sell because you believe the competition has better products, technology or whatever.” What I do expect to hear is how your commitment and strategy to sell our company’s products is producing results. After that, I’m open to discussing what we can all do to improve. For those of you who may not have heard or understood what I just said, “we all get paid to sell the products and services of this company and it requires everyone’s commitment to be successful. You have a choice to make, which I expect to see at the reschedule date of this meeting.” That story became part of the folklore that helped shape the future culture of that company.

A critical element of the leadership shadow is the “Say-Do” factor. It has to do with having the courage of your convictions. If you say you are going to do something, but act differently when it’s not politically correct or represents a risk to you or your position, you put your credibility at risk as a leader and create doubts about what the company stands for. A recent situation that exemplifies the “Say-Do” factor is when Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots didn’t allow one of his star players, Wes Welker to start in the critical playoff game against the New York Jets because of comments he made during a news conference regarding the Jets coach. Whether you agree or not, it takes courage to maintain a high Say-Do factor. And, when you consider Belichick’s overall performance as a leader and the consistent results the Patriots have achieved as an organization and business, perhaps it makes sense to examine the Leadership Shadow you cast….

We write this blog to inform and challenge the thinking of our readers. We can only tell if we’ve done that by hearing from you. That’s why we welcome your feedback and comments….

“We can’t solve the problems of today using the same Thinking we used to create them”

– A. Einstein

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Applying Filters to Your Speaking

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Have you ever found yourself with the proverbial “foot in your mouth” because of something you said?  We all do that sometimes – and often in situations where we then feel foolish or embarrassed.  I once heard a great way to filter your thoughts before they come out of your mouth, and to consider what you are going to say before you say it.

Before you speak, ask yourself first, “Is it true?”  Meaning, is what you are going to say a truth …. Or is it a rumor, or gossip, or something that you are spreading that doesn’t merit discussion?

Secondly, ask yourself, “Is it kind?”  Who will be hurt if you speak your thought out loud?  Is it a kindness to speak it, or hurtful?

Last, ask yourself, “Is it necessary?”  Do you really need to say it?  What would happen if you didn’t?  Does what you are planning to say create positive action or unintended consequences?

This simple routine for considering what you are doing to say – BEFORE you say it – will ensure that you are always a positive influence to those around you.   Using this simple routine might mean that you stop gossip rather than extending it; that you curb the impulse to share an exaggerated story.  In asking yourself if what you are going to say is true, kind, and necessary, you will also be modeling effective speaking behaviors and encouraging others to do the same.

I have a client who struggles with her place within a management team.   She tends to think faster than most, and as a result also talk first and is often the first to raise her hand or react to an idea in a meeting.   Together, we discussed a new technique that she successfully used when with groups of people.  She simply counts to five before she speaks.   In that way, she can allow the space around her to slow down, she can consider what she is going to say, and she can apply this test as well – is it kind, is it true, and is it necessary?   When she does speak, then, her words serve her well, and she has become known in that management team as someone who is wise, thoughtful, and kind.

Have you considered how you can apply this simple filter to what you are going to say?  How might it make a difference in your interactions?  Let us hear from you!

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Leadership For Sustainability

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I was rereading the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins the other day and it occurred to me that with all the talk about sustainability in business we should revisit some of those basic concepts covered in that book. The chapter on Fifth Level Leaders really hits home with what it takes to create organizations that are excellent and have a prayer to be sustainable. An interesting question came to my mind. “What if our current elected officials adopted the concepts of a Fifth Level Leader?”

What is a Fifth Level Leader? It is a leader who has two major attributes. The first is a will to succeed no matter what is happening. The second is paradoxical to the first. That is to have a great amount of humility and modesty.

The will to succeed is for the organization not for oneself. This is a foreign concept to most leaders since they are usually focused on themselves first and then the organization. Fifth Level leaders work hard at whatever needs to be done and will not settle for anything less than what will meet the long term objectives of the organization.

What would happen if political leaders became so entrenched in making the organizations they serve succeed that they did not even worry about re-elections because the results would be so overwhelmingly successful that re-election would come automatically?  When service is placed above self good things happen.

The humility needed to be a Fifth Level Leader is the ability to give credit to everyone and everything else when things go well. When things go wrong, a mirror is placed in front of the leader and blame is apportioned to him alone. The organization’s Buck stops with the leader.

Fifth Level Leaders leave the place better than they found it and cultivate the next generation of leaders to carry on the organization. As Collins says, “most leaders hope the place implodes after they leave so it makes them only look better”. This short-sighted thinking of a lot of leaders does not create sustainability.

Is your organization led by Fifth Level Leaders? If not, what are you doing about it? Although it is not easy to find or develop this type of leader, a Fifth Level leader will only improve the organization. How will you get from Good to Great?

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Customer Loyalty Begins With Employee Loyalty

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Customer loyalty is fast becoming a key strategic initiative for most businesses because loyal customers stay with your organization, and will continue to buy your products or services. Revenue and profitability are important business indicators, but too often they reflect decisions an organization made yesterday; whereas growing a loyal customer base is a key predictor of future success. When an organization is focusing both on profitability and loyal customers, they have the best chance of creating a sustainable business.

A key factor that many organizations miss is the fact that they cannot have loyal customers if they do not have loyal employees. Employee loyalty can be defined as employees being committed to the success of the organization and believing that working for the organization is their best option. It is not about employee tenure. It is about wanting to contribute to the success of the organization.

Finding good employees can be challenging and time consuming. However, once you find the right fit and nurture the employee relationship, it can be quite costly to see that relationship go by the wayside. Depending on what research you read the cost to replace a hourly employee can be anywhere from 35% to 50% of their salary, and for a professional staff person, the replacement cost can go as high as 125%.

How can your organization foster employee loyalty?

  1. Share your vision and strategic plan.
    Communicating what the organization stands for, where the organization is going, and how that impacts all stakeholders, particularly the employees, is key. Employees want and need to know what they are a part of and how their contribution will make a positive impact on the success of the organization. Give them a reason to be there!
  2. Encourage ideas and feedback.
    Create an organizational culture that is open to new ideas and fresh perspectives. Your employees are on the front lines and they can tell you what is working and what might work better. In a recent client engagement where we were working with a cross functional team, a woman who had the least to do with the process made one simple suggestion that ended up saving the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. Loyal employees make positive contributions!
  3. Walk your talk.
    Everything you do and say needs to embody the values and culture of employee loyalty. Recognize and respect your employees. Let them know when they are exceeding goals and objectives, and praise accordingly. If there is a challenge, then give your employee the details straight up. Give employees open and honest feedback and they will reward you with loyalty.
  4. Measure Your Company’s Employee Loyalty.
    You cannot manage or improve what you are not measuring. Your organization cannot improve its employee loyalty factor unless you know your starting point. Do you have a system in place to capture that data? If not, create one or find one. Give your employees an opportunity to tell you what is going well and what needs to be improved. Based on the data you will be able to make strategic decisions that will continue to foster employee loyalty. Your people really are your greatest asset!

 

Creating a loyal customer base can be the measurable difference between you and your competitors. Enhance your ability to accomplish that strategic goal by creating and maintaining loyal employees. Your employees will always be the key!

Tammy A.S. Kohl is President of Resource Associates Corporation. For over 30 years, RAC has specialized in helping businesses assess, measure and improve their employee and customer loyalty. Learn how at www.resourceassociatescorp.com or contact RAC directly at 800.799.6227.

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Take a Look in The Mirror

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Since at least the time of Plato and Socrates some 2400 years ago, mankind has been implored to “know thyself,” in life and in business. Individually, this is often taken to mean knowing your strengths so you can leverage them and knowing your areas of weakness so you can improve them or compensate for them. But it involves much more than this. While at the business level, many organizations struggle with getting more done with fewer people and less resources. As your employees have changed roles or added responsibilities, you need to have confidence that you have the right people in the right positions to get the best possible results.

In some cases you do have the right team members in the right places and in some cases you probably made some wrong choices, as we all have. Companies forced to reorganize made quick decisions resulting in people landing in the wrong roles. Likewise, companies that have experienced significant growth have ended up with similar staffing outcomes. Diagnostic assessments can help you identify performance gaps and help your company effectively understand and align the talents, behaviors, and motivators of every employee. Having the right employee in the right position is as critical to each individual’s success as it is to the success of the entire company.

The first step in bridging performance gaps is for management to commit to a people development process for employees. It should be based on the skills, attitudes, and behaviors necessary for them to do their jobs successfully. If the size of the organization is large enough, it can be implemented by HR. Regardless, the objectives and strategies of developing employees, and how those employees are going to help drive results, needs to be owned by management.

After commitment has been gained and the objectives have been identified, diagnostic assessments can help determine individual performance gaps, since developmental opportunities will be employee-specific. Assessments can also be utilized as an important tool for creating skill development as well attitudinal and behavioral improvement while eliminating employee and organizational resistance to change.

There are a multitude of individual assessment tools available, but regardless of which we utilize, when working with clients we focus diagnostically on the whole person as defined by these three key areas:

  1. WHAT natural talents do your employees possess? An analysis of TALENTS gets at a person’s ability to do things, how they make decisions and interact with the world around them, as well as how they perceive themselves.
  2. WHY are your employees motivated to use their natural talents, based on their personal motivators and drivers? An analysis of MOTIVATORS gets at why people do things. Everyone has their own unique mix of personal drivers and motivators that help guide them toward success. Understanding what really drives a person is a crucial element of success.
  3. HOW do your employees prefer to use their natural talents, based on their preferred behavioral style? An analysis of BEHAVIORS gets at a person’s manner of doing things; how they do things. Since each individual has their own unique preferences and habits for how they like to behave, this understanding is crucial when working with team members as a leader or a manager, or in an environment that requires conflict resolution.

 

Establishing new behaviors requires that the employee feels able to adopt those behaviors and feels comfortable doing so. A well-designed people-development process focused on objectives leveraging diagnostic assessments drives long-term change. After the completion of a development process, we consistently see high levels of adaptable change with sustainable results. To learn how to achieve these types of sustainable results for your people and your business give us a call or visit www.pb-coach.com.

When you are looking in the mirror, you are looking at the problem. But, remember, you are also looking at the solution.

 

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A Winning Team

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As children and teenagers most of us have played on a sports team. Can you remember what it felt like to be part of a winning team or a losing team? Remember the elation you felt when your team won a big game and the despair of losing the big game or championship? It is something special to experience being part of something bigger then yourself.

In my experience the concept of a “team based culture” is something a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners and executives want but find very difficult to achieve.  The difficulty begins with the definition.  Plato said that wisdom begins with the definition of terms. So what does Webster’s Dictionary have to say about teams: “a number of persons associated together in work or activity”. Webster’s goes on to describe teamwork as: “work done by several associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal prominence to the efficiency of the whole”.  This is a good start but does not give us enough practical detail and guidance in the business world. Steven Yelen a New York based Business Coach with over 20 years experience in supporting organizations and teams give us some guidance with his ideas on fundamental principles and behaviors that work.

Fundamental Principles of a Successful Team:

-Common Purpose

-Clear and mutually agreed to working approach

-Appropriate balance of task focus and relationship focus

-Agreement on Measurements and Aligned Rewards

Behaviors that support Successful Teams:

-Push for high quality communications

-Help create a climate of trust

-Play your position and bring talent to the team

-Help drive discipline into the team

-Be prepared to sacrifice for the team-be a good sport

-Help new members make the entry

-Strengthen the leader through good followership

-Play down yourself and build up others

Why Teams fail to deliver results?

The biggest root cause of team failures in business can often traced to the lack of establishment of clear purpose, goals, measurements and rewards. Without these foundation pillars in place trust is often the first casualty followed by a lack of energy and sense of helplessness.  Finally, if the leadership is not walking the talk then you can expect cynicism to spread quickly and undermine any opportunity for success.

Final Thought:

There are many examples of organizations that have achieved excellence and delivered exceptional results by creating a team based culture. Some examples include GE, Motorola, McKinsey and Pall Corporation.   Do your research and look at the top players in your industry and you will often find a team based approach separating the leaders from the followers.

A great resource for helping you understand and build high performance teams can be found in the book “The Wisdom of Teams” by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith. 

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The Formula For Success

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STRIVING. PERFORMING. ACHIEVING. Those three words say a lot. When you STRIVE, you work hard and exert yourself, often against the tide of conventional opinion, competition, and your own complacency, doubts and fears. When you PERFORM, you are using your skills and abilities to do something…to execute and to get results. Ultimately, when you ACHIEVE, you are living a purposeful life. You reach a level of performance that is indicative of true success: you’re achieving your goals and dreams!

We understand that success is a journey and a way of living purposefully, not a destination. The foundation of our business coaching work is represented by The Formula for Success:

A ( S + K ) + G = PBC      IR (O, P)

Attitudes plus Skills & Knowledge directed by Goals delivers Positive Behavior Change which yields Improved Results, both Organizationally and Personally.

Let’s look at each component of the Formula, working from right to left…

IR

The first thing we look for is how our clients define success. We start out by asking what improved results (IR) our clients want to achieve in their organization or in their personal lives, and how that will be tracked and measured. The importance of a thoughtful definition of success is that it provides a target toward which everyone can aim. Everything else we do is specifically geared around achieving those results.

PBC

Wouldn’t you agree that if that target is different than where you are today, then you must do something (behave) differently to get there? PBC represents positive behavior change. A definition of insanity is doing the things you’ve always done, but expecting different outcomes.

G

G represents goals. Goals provide focus, otherwise there is no direction. Doesn’t it make sense that if people had goals on which to focus their energy, it would be easier to change their behavior in a way that can be sustained? Goal setting is the tool that generates the activity necessary to turn ideas into strategy, strategy into plans, and plans into reality.

S+K

S+K represent the necessary skills (the how to do something) and knowledge (the where and when to do something). Our process focuses on development of behavioral management skills, meaningful communications, influencing or selling skills, problem solving, decision making, organizing time, disciplining, developing subordinates, delegating authority, motivating others, appraising performance, etc. Everyone needs to be very competent in these areas, but especially in the workplace, where more than 50% of any manager’s job involves using these skills.

A

The A stands for attitude (the want to). Our coaching approach is based on a result-oriented philosophy that first involves developing a goal-oriented attitude among people. Attitude is more of a multiplier of skills and knowledge that will directly influence the goals they set and achieve. People will directly determine in many cases whether they turn a problem into an opportunity, or succumb to it; whether they behave in ways that benefit the entire organization or maintain fiefdoms; whether they expand the client base and services provided or allow atrophy to set in; and whether they diligently look for continuous improvement, or remain satisfied with the status quo.

The results we get depend upon our behavior and attitudes toward the people or events involved, and toward ourselves. If attitudes are basically negative, goals will be set low, and it will be difficult to progress. Growth and promotion will be all but impossible until a positive mindset is developed.

There are many ways and opportunities for individuals and organizations to better focus on results, attitudes and behaviors, skills and knowledge, goal setting and achievement. If you are interested in taking an important first step, let’s chat.