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Category: Management

Categories
Growth Management Skills

3 Qualities of a Great Mentor

 

If you want to learn what it takes to become a great mentor, one place to look is at the great mentors who’ve influenced your success. As a motivational speaker, my mentors (and I’ve had several including Jim Kouzes, Tom Peters, and Terry Pearce) had more confidence in my abilities than I did, and always looked for opportunities to shove me into the training and speaking spotlight. If you don’t think you have a mentor yet, try looking at others who’ve achieved their goals and see what they learned from their mentors. At a minimum, I think you’ll find that great mentors do three things that conveniently all start with the letter E – they encourage, equip, and exemplify. I’ll highlight one in this blog and the others in subsequent blogs. So read on and then stay tuned.

MENTORS ENCOURAGE

Great mentors help you see the possibilities of your personal portrait when your life is still a mostly blank canvas.

For instance, Deborah Sweeney, the CEO of MyCorporation, learned early that she should never settle for less than her best. Why? Because her mentor, who happened to be her mother, stressed that message.

“She always told me, ‘This or something better,’” Sweeney said. “This had a real influence on how I approached my college and job. I was unwilling to settle for anything less than my highest potential.”

Marina Lau, a senior marketing manager at JotForm, says one of her key mentors provided all sorts of practical advice, but it was all built on a foundation of creating a strong sense of inner confidence.

“She taught me that even before you can accumulate decades of experience, it’s important to always remember your value as an employee, because you inherently come with a unique set of skills, continually cultivated over time,” Lau said. “Instilling that confidence in me as a young professional has been an invaluable experience.”

Mentors don’t just encourage with words, but with actions. When Ruth Wilson first opened Brightmont Academy, a private school for grades 6-12, she found encouragement from Dr. Albert Reichert, a developmental pediatrician. In addition to helping her work through specific challenges, Dr. Reichert put his reputation on the line by recommending Wilson’s new school to families under his care.

“More than one parent expressed skepticism about my age,” Wilson said, “but most acquiesced based on Dr. Reichert’s endorsement of my program.”

The good doctor believed in his protégé, and all great mentors encourage with words and actions the inspired confidence. So don’t just tell people you believe in them. Show them.

MENTORS EQUIP

Few things are more frustrating than trying to take on a project without the right equipment or tools. Try setting up a tent without the poles. Or building a swing set without the nuts and bolts. Try building a tree fort with no hammer or nails (not that I’ve done that).
So what tools should you offer as a mentor? Whatever your protégé needs to succeed, of course.

Mentors might equip their protégés with specific skills like how to build healthy relationships, how to use the company’s project management software, how to become a leader, what to look for when reading a P&L, or, in the case of Adwoa Dadzie, how to think big.

“I needed to build my ability to think about broad impact,” said Dadzie, the VP of HR for a Fortune 500 company. “As an HR leader, what I do for one person can have long-term vast impact on all employees in a work group, in a building, and, potentially, in a company. I needed to learn how to think more strategically about the impact of my actions and my decisions to minimize negative impact and maximize the positive ones.”

The tools mentors provide aren’t always skills-based. Sometimes they look like an email introduction to a key contact or a word of advice on dealing with an important stakeholder. And they often come in the form of pearls of wisdom and nuggets of advice than become engrained in someone’s thinking, equipping them for challenges for years to come.

When Steven Benson was starting out at Google, his first sales manager, Mark Flessel, stressed the importance of focusing on the needs of his customer’s business. “Then I could map my solution to what makes them successful,” said Benson, who now is founder and CEO of Badger Maps. That “what do others need” mindset now plays a role in how he builds his business.

If you’ve had a great mentor, you’ve probably experienced this. You’re facing a situation and thinking through what to do when suddenly your mentor’s words spring freshly into your mind. Live those words out. And pass them on to someone else.

MENTORS EXEMPLIFY

I’ve never met great mentors, or heard of any for that matter, who didn’t walk the walk as well or better than they talked the talk. Mentors aren’t perfect, of course, but they teach hard work by working hard. They teach great listening skills by listening well. They teach perseverance by persevering.

The most important mentor in Katherine Sullivan’s life, for instance, never finished high school, but Sullivan’s now 94-year-old grandfather worked hard to provide for his family during the Great Depression, fought for his country in World War II, and became a successful business owner.

“As a young girl, I watched his work ethic and success drive him in life and business,” said Sullivan, CEO of Marketing Solved. “This was directly transferred to me … Seeing his hard work taught me that I earn everything I get and nothing is ever handed to you.”

Denise Supplee, co-founder of both SparkRental.com and SnapLandlord.com, watched her father build a business by taking risks, so she learned not to fear the challenges that come with entrepreneurship.

“It is easy to speak about things you want to do, but you must take action,” she said. “He built a business empire against all odds.”

No matter what you preach as a mentor, the message that will have the biggest impact will come from how you live – your attitude, your sense of humor, your commitment to excellence, your investment in others, your sense of self-worth, your gratitude, your … well, your everything.

It’s interesting that when I speak to people about the mentors in their lives they often refer to people who weren’t formally mentors. They were just people who invested in them out of love and lived in a manner worth emulating. You never know who is watching, so the time to lead by example is now … and always.

 

Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

Belle’s World – Personal Relationships

Original Prompt published on July 16, 2017 on Belle’s World.

Do your personal relationships affect your business success?

If you were to look at the world of business, many successful executives have business coaches. Business coaches focus on helping a leader become more charismatic, lead better, manage people or situations better and even become self-aware of themselves (a small list.)  I’ve had multiple business coaches, in my career and they have supported me in very specific situations. Over time they helped me manage my emotions, the process of dealing with the situation and making me a better business woman.  In all instances, they delved into my personal life, personality and way of thinking based on my experiences.

My first business coach spent more time on my personal life than on the business situation. I only had three sessions with my first business coach (Brandon) but our conversation Day 1 became a turning point for where I am today. Brandon was a year ahead of me in B-School and came back after he graduated to coach students still in the MBA program.  I started talking about my aspirations of becoming a Fortune 100 CMO one day.  On paper – I was on track – I had 4 years of marketing and branding experience at a Fortune 200 company and additionally, had 1.5 years with a top 10 global advertising agency.  However, within 10 minutes he started asking me about my life – my personal life. At the time, I was living with my, to be second husband and dealing with hiding it from my parents.  I was struggling with opening myself up to my parents about a large piece of my life and yet was living as the dutiful daughter completing her MBA and going on to bigger and better things.  Emotionally I was all over the place and my coach could see that in the first 10 minutes.  He started taking me down a path of helping me understand, that I was shouldering a lot of emotional responsibility for multiple people.  He described it to me as a 2 story burning house. I could only save one person at a time including myself.   My decision on who I saved wasn’t based on the fact that I did love or didn’t love the people in my life.  However, he was trying to show me that burning house was my constant, in my everyday life and at some point would burn me.  He gave me the example because my emotional dial was always burning and I wasn’t putting any emotional effort into what I wanted. If I wanted to be successful at business, I was going to have to learn to be honest, with those around me that I loved and additionally, with myself.  Over the next two sessions, I started making progress on mentally understanding the path I needed to take to get myself in a good place to be the business woman I wanted to be.  The self-awareness process took about 5 years including a second divorce, multiple promotions and eventually leaving the corporate world 3 years ago.  The business success of multiple promotions happened when I truly remember starting to own my personal emotional health and it opened myself to becoming a better employee and leader.  If you get a chance check out Brandon Smith who was my first business coach and made the biggest business impact on my life by focusing on my personal side.

My second business coach was given to me as a reward for dealing with a very intense personnel issue at work.  I was leading a project to get data and evidence that a leader in our organization had committed fraud with the company and additionally was not doing any work.  The individual and I had a good relationship because they didn’t like conflict.  However, I had to change my personality to be strong about the situation and collect the information and yet keep a civil attitude in the situation.  After the situation was taken care of, the company provided me a business coach, to groom me for the next level in my career. About halfway through our first meeting, my coach had somehow come to the topic of my second divorce, which had just happened, in the 6 months prior to this incident.  She realized there were still some lingering emotions and conflicts that I was dealing with personally that were not allowing me to take my current job to the next level.  Over the next six months we spent 50% of our time talking through and giving me homework on managing my emotional baggage and 50% of the time setting a specific goal for my role.  To be honest, I spent more time on working through my personal stuff which in turn helped me exceed my professional goal we had set.

Over the years, I have met very successful business people and when we meet, we don’t talk about business.  We talk about life – their families, their travels, their fears and other vulnerabilities that they don’t want to talk to others about.  With me, I show them that I value my personal world as much if not much more than my business world even though I am an ambitious business woman.  However, I give them stories on how each time I dealt with personal issues (whether relationships, money, love, family, health etc) that allowed me to take my business career up one level because of the lessons I learned from dealing with the issue, having honest conversations and processing the emotions that came out of it. The stories are based on a current issue that they are facing. Every time life throws a lemon, I try to make a stiff lemonade that will take me through an array of emotions and may not be the easiest thing to deal with (hence a stiff lemonade.)

So today, I work with business executives to understand their personal lives – the trials and tribulations they are going through.  Understanding what are the hidden fear or issues they are dealing with that they don’t want to speak to others about, for fear of looking like they don’t have it together.  I give them a safe space to unleash what’s in their mind by using me as a sounding board that gives no judgment but helps them become accountable for their thoughts and actions.  I take them out of their comfort zone for a while so they can dig deep into what they truly want and how they want to move forward in their lives.  All the self reflection and hyper awareness makes them cognizant of their actions and behavior in the business world allowing them to take themselves up a notch so they are not dealing with a burning house in the background but instead hearing the birds sing as they move forward.

So why do many executives roll their eyes when a life guide / coach comes to them to prioritize their personal life which in turn will make them better leaders / business person? 

 

Welcome to Belle’s world. Everything in this world is based on a bell curve. Our media concentrates on giving advice to make everyone be a part of the masses.

This is a weekly series of Urvi’s insights on her perception of the world. They say perception is reality and she lives in her own fantasy world. This allows her to delve into the human element of our lives, helping individuals decipher their own souls, to understand, who they are and what they want, in the journey of life.

Belle’s world explores the extremes and goes beyond the surface. Ready to read about some of the “elephants in the room?”

Contact urvi, for a free, 30 minute consultation, if you want to build your emotional wealth and enhance your life based on your inner core. #thehumanelement

Categories
Growth Management Operations Personal Development

Your Company May Be Next

The Story of Two Businesses

After being forced to change the design of their businesses, the companies reported dramatic loss of sales and even bankruptcy. Though they did everything right, they still were unable to survive. They had a plan based on a target customer, had the funding and the location they needed. Yet an insignificant population prevented them from succeeding.

Story #1

We can determine who will be in a movie theater by what the movie is rated. If it is rated G there will be kids present. Rated R and we don’t anticipate kids there.

There are PG movies that adults would be interested in like Shrek, Despicable Me, and Beauty & the Beast. Grownups might not go to these movies since they don’t want to deal with kids in attendance. However, they would show up if there was an adult only audience. The result would be increased ticket sales for the movie makers and the theaters, extra exposure for the film since a higher amount of people will be viewing it and a pleasant experience for the adults. A win-win for everyone.

Wouldn’t it be great if adults could go see movies and not be surrounded by kids. I’m not talking about denying families from seeing the movies. Instead having movie times for adults only. Something like adult swim in public pools where the kids must stay out of the pool for 10 minutes while the adults swim.

When the topic of adult only movie screenings is mentioned parents complain they want to bring their children. Despite there being numerous movie times for everyone and only a few that are adult only, people will object. If the adult movie time is only once a day or starts at 11pm people will complain, ‘My kids should be able to attend.’ Even though the parents have a multitude of screenings to pick from, they want what they are told they can’t have.

So the adult only screenings are dropped. We let the meager amount of voices prevail. When did this become the norm? The bellyachers say their kids have a right to attend. What happened to the rights of the adults?

Story #2

There was a bar/restaurant by me that had sand courts so the customers could play volleyball and consume beverages. Parents would bring their kids, who of course used the volleyball courts as a sandbox. When asked for the kids to move so a game could be played, the parents would complain stating their kids had a right to be there.

Remember, this is a bar/restaurant. Even at 11pm the adults couldn’t play because children would be in the sand. I’m talking about little kids. What are they doing at a bar at 11pm? The company created a venue where people could play volleyball yet the courts sat empty. Finally, it drove the adults away and the bar was unable to keep afloat. It closed. It could not survive when its target customer had been chased away. Instead, it was taken over by parents who in essence needed a place that could babysit their kids.

What makes it right for the complainers to get their way? The restaurant had an adult venue. It welcomed everyone, including kids. Yet when the children were asked to move the adults were being chastised by parents for wanting to play volleyball. The owners lost their business because a meager amount of people, who were not the target customer, were too selfish to let the owner run his business the way it was designed.

I enjoyed family time and wanted to do as much with my children as I could. I wouldn’t take my children to places that weren’t designed for them. It was fine. I just went somewhere else. There were so many places that were family friendly I didn’t need to be at any of the very few that weren’t.

Yet somehow we allow a small number of people determine what should be. The business owner created a place made for adults. Why can’t he do that? It’s his business and his vision. I don’t go to a barber shop to get my hair done and complain they don’t have stylists for women. I go to a salon.

We have been submitting to a small, overly verbal group too long. No one gets to determine how things will be in our business. We create our company to run the way we want. No one has the right to change a company’s DNA. A business can’t satisfy everyone so let the owner decide who its customers are.

Build your enterprise the way you want and stick to it when the pressure is on. You’ve created this entity and know it better than anyone. You have set a goal and are shooting for it. Only you have the best interest for your company, so stay on track.

We have to stop allowing the self-absorbed, the nut jobs, the complainers, (whatever you want to call them) determine what we do with our business. Their voices may be loud, but their numbers are few. Explain to them why you have set up your organization this way. Those who do not like the way things are need to do business elsewhere. You don’t care; they weren’t who you were shooting for.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Skills Women In Business

Turning a Faux Pas into a Win

The other day I was doing a training on leadership communication for a large client in the communication technology industry. Among their many products and services are video and teleconferencing tools. In the course of my program, we got to the part about facilitating virtual meetings, and as I clicked to the next slide, I suddenly heard a couple of boos from the crowd. I look up and realized my gaffe: my default visual was an image of people chatting on Skype – a direct competitor.

Now I had a choice to make: I could flush beet-red, babble a string of mortified apologies, and run out of the room in humiliation, or I could turn it around and make it a “teachable moment.” I opted for the latter, and explicitly shared this very choice with the group.

“Actually, I’m glad this happened, because it allows me to demonstrate some additional strategies in leadership communication, rather than just talking about them.”

From there, I walked them through a sequence of steps, both in addressing my personal mistake, and narrating the conscious strategy behind each step I was taking in the process. I share it with you here, so that you can also learn from my mistake, and use the experience to your advantage, as I did.

First, I apologized. I had made an undeniable, objective mistake, and it was my responsibility to own it. My voice stayed even in speed and volume to indicate composure, and model the degree of drama that I believed was warranted by the situation, so they could follow suit.

Second, I briefly explained my original intention behind the mistake, providing just enough information to help them understand what happened and increase empathy. In this case, at the time I selected these images, my focus and biggest challenge was finding appropriate pictures with sufficiently high resolution so I could zoom it on the slide and still have the picture be in sharp focus for the best visual experience, which limited my options based on the images I found on-line.

Third, I offered a solution to the problem, and engaged the audience in helping me to solve it. “Let me offer this to you in return: From here on out, I will replace these two images with your products instead, and have them be the standard images when I present to other companies in the future. How does that sound?” I saw lots of head nods in the audience. Free advertising for them; who wouldn’t appreciate that?

Then I followed up with, “But I’m going to need a little assistance. Since I wasn’t able to find good, high-resolution images of (Product X) online, I need one of you to send me some. Who here will volunteer to send them to me?” Half a dozen hands shot up in the air. Now, not only had I offered an agreeable solution, but I had enrolled the client’s enthusiastic participation in helping me execute the decision. Now we were partners, sharing in the responsibility to achieve the desired outcome.

At the end of the day, one woman said, “I really wanted to see where you were going to go with it once that (competitor) image popped up, but you handled the whole situation perfectly! I’m so glad we got to go through the process with you.”

In the end, what matters most is how you respond in the moment. Keep your composure, acknowledge the error, apologize appropriately, give only as much explanation as is necessary (sometimes none), then offer a remedy and see it through. This enables you to maintain control of the situation and lead by example, which helps you to build (or rebuild) trust, reinforcing your image and reputation as a leader.

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Do you have questions or comments about the issues in today’s post, want to know how to apply them, or how to help others with them? If so, contact me at laura@vocalimpactproductions.com or click here to schedule a 20-minute focus call to discuss them with me personally!

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Motivation and Growth

For the past four weeks I’ve been writing about motivation and your team. This is the fourth and last article in this series. If you have missed the first three you can find them here – In order of their release – How to Motivate Your Team, Motivation and Alignment, and Motivation and the Big Picture.

In this article we look at the third way to tap into intrinsic motivators through growth. I’ve never met anyone successful who said, “I’m good, I don’t want to grow,” and since you are looking to create a highly successful team one of your goals is to fill it with people who crave growth.

You want employees who bring value to your organization, who bring new ideas and innovation to their jobs, and who you want to stay with you for the long haul. That means you want employees who are not satisfied with the status quo.

Because turnover is expensive and losing talent that has tribal knowledge is irreplaceable, you need to tap into motivators that will also create employee loyalty. This means providing your employees educational opportunities and allowing them to step into new roles and take on new responsibilities over time, it’s about growth.

You may think that providing too much growth opportunity will mean that you will lose these employees in the long run and have to deal with the turnover anyway. It’s true that they may not work on your team or directly for you in the long run as their skills and value increases, but it means they stay within your organization, providing continued service that benefits everyone, including you.

Growth does not have to cost a lot either; it can be as small as having someone take a new leadership role in a meeting or having the opportunity to present to a more senior group. Of course, it can also be more involved such as including tuition reimbursement for college classes.  You can also provide coaching and mentoring that often can be done by someone else in your organization or by a third party on a more limited basis. It is about providing the opportunities they need to be set up for success.

Even providing a small budget for your employees to take a class that helps them grow personally will create loyalty. They may be interested in writing, cooking, gardening, computers, or public speaking. People want to be supported and often don’t have the support they need at home to improve themselves. When you are the one to provide that, they will in turn do more for you.

One of my favorite and inexpensive resources that you can provide is to pay for your employee’s membership in Toastmasters. My experience with this organization includes being a member, a club officer, and a district leader. In my time I have seen so many people grow in their confidence, leadership, and speaking skills, which will certainly provide benefit to you and your company in return.

Figure out your budget and sit down with your employees to find out how you can best help them grow. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution and some people may need more than others. I can tell you from personal experience some of my most de-motivational times at work were the years that my employer told me there was no budget for training and I had to figure out free ways (or pay for it myself) to get the continuing education credits I needed for the required certifications I had to maintain.

If you have implemented this type of program and still have challenges with employee motivation, timely or high quality deliverables, or other unfavorable situations it could be the alignment issue that I discuss in the second article. When your employees are not aligned personally with the work they do it does not matter how much growth opportunities they have, they will most likely never be an A player. That can be easily fixed and I’m happy to discuss it with you just like I am happy to discuss any challenge you are having with motivation. Just send me an email to sharon@c-suiteresults.com.

Categories
Management Marketing Personal Development

Are Clever Marketing Methods Killing Your Brand?

 

Marketing budgets are increasing as more pressure builds on organizations to raise awareness of their brands and stand out from their competitors with clever advertising, sponsorship and digital media. This is happening at a time when customers and clients are demanding a higher level of customer experience, trust, respect and a touch of ‘personality’ to the brands they deal with and buy into. However, on the other hand, our research at Walking TALL has found that there is a general increase in corporate bad manners within organizations and a slide towards the other extreme to that of apathy and often scripted, unauthentic & insincere communication.

In addition, communication turn-around and response times are getting longer, and call waiting times extended in the ever-increasing call centre systems we all so frequently have to endure.  In turn this can create a significant roadblock between your customers and your brand, and the business success you strive for, need and indeed work hard to achieve.

It’s not difficult to see the obvious and dangerous void opening up here.

In fact this phenomenon is creating a sinkhole that is devouring client loyalty and great customer experience, potentially losing your company $millions in brand investment. The level of loss cannot easily be measured however it’s not difficult to visualize the impact to the brand when you consider as a customer how you feel and how you subsequently talk about that brand to your friends and colleagues when the experience you have with an employee of that company is negative.

Let me explain further – with the sophisticated marketing methods that are available to us as businesses today and the trend of brand focus on values and themes such as integrity, trust, caring, green, social responsibility, innovation and family-orientated to name but a few, teamed with the increasing brand reach, customers and all stakeholders have forgivably high expectations of the experience they will get from their interactions with your company. They expect to receive that level of care and interest in them that is so heavily advertised, therefore when it’s not there, there is a very high height to fall from, that in turn damages your brand.

This sinkhole is going to expand if organizations don’t wake up to the critical need to provide the employees with the behavioral training required to ensure that they interpret and internalize for themselves the meaning behind the values you have created. There is a need for a deeper appreciation of your corporate messaging on a level that employees can relate to, than perhaps you have undertaken already. Unless your people can understand the values, and live and breathe them every day, authentically, then you are wasting your corporate brand investment. Ultimately therefore, your increasing marketing budgets will kill your brand, due to the apparent falseness of your brand claims when a customer experiences your brand for themselves.

This goes for the leadership team also – the true personality of the corporate brand can be heavily influenced by the culture in part created by your senior team and executive. This includes their behaviors, external brand image and visibility & profile.

Typically Marketing and Brand Directors are not as focussed on people behaviors and the impact they have on the brand as they should be. This tends to be the responsibility of the HR and/or Learning & Development departments with little interaction with marketing. However, in order to reach the true marketing and brand objectives, would it not make sense to integrate people behaviors into any brand strategy at an early stage?

We are at a point in our business environment, where we need to re-align the corporate culture with that demanded by our clients and customers, if we are to stand out, create loyalty and get widely talked about for the right reasons.

It’s time to align people brand and behaviors with your corporate brand in a way that sticks.

Read more on this topic in Corporate Brand Personality by Lesley Everett, published Feb 2016

 

Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

Three Reasons Why Feedback Can Be Fearful

Have you ever had to tell someone something but you hesitated?  Perhaps they said something hurtful.  Perhaps they disappointed you in some way.  Instead of speaking up, you avoided the confrontation.  You second guessed your position.  You may have even made up excuses for the offender’s poor behavior.  Giving effective feedback can be quite difficult and if it’s avoided can cause even more damage.

For years I personally found it very difficult to give effective feedback to others.  In my first business partnership I experienced difficult situations.  My partner would often embarrass me in front of clients.  Or perhaps he would omit important information for me to do my job.  I was often caught being either confused or ineffective in front of clients.  I always found excuses not to give him feedback about these difficult situations because I was afraid.

Eventually the partnership had to be dissolved.  Over time, I came to realize that I contributed to the demise of our company because I lacked the ability and willingness to tell him the truth.  It was at that moment I decided to commit myself to giving necessary feedback without fear.  I created the process called Fearless Feedback.

There are three major reasons why feedback can be difficult in organizations.  First, our definitions are confusing.  Feedback can be misinterpreted as criticism.  People do not like to be criticized and most people are fearful of delivering criticism because it won’t be easily accepted.  It is interesting how 96% of people want feedback if they know it can improve their performance. (Folkman, 2014)  Furthermore, 92% agreed that negative information is effective if delivered properly. (Jack Zenger, 2014)

A useful distinction is needed.  Feedback is data for the purpose of learning and criticism is an opinion or judgment.  Unless we make this clear distinction confusion and resistance will be the result.

Second, many managers will avoid being seen as a judge of behavior out of fear of making things worse.  This explains why many of us hesitate to say anything. We don’t want to make things worse than they already are.  We fear damaging trust and relationships by speaking our truth and so we remain silent.  Many fear they will be seen as biased and their insights will be rejected.  This rejection can cause hurt to the giver not just the receiver.

Third, many managers were never taught how to give effective feedback.  This lack of knowledge damages confidence.  A lack of confidence not only damages the credibility of the information but it can also create fear of loss of credibility by the giver.  A loss of credibility is the greatest fear in the workplace. (Kathleen D. Ryan, 1998)

What if there was a way to change our mindset about feedback such that we welcomed it with open arms?  What if there was a way to deliver it without fear?  What if people expected it and felt obligated to both give it and receive it? The next two blogs will explain the details of the Fearless Feedback process including what it is and how to use it. Stay tuned.

 

 

Folkman, J. Z. (2014). Feedback-The-Powerful-Paradox. Retrieved December 26, 2016, from http://zengerfolkman.com/: http://zengerfolkman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ZF-Feedback-The-Powerful-Paradox.pdf

Jack Zenger, J. F. (2014, January 25). Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give. Retrieved December 26, 2016, from https://hbr.org: https://hbr.org/2014/01/your-employees-want-the-negative-feedback-you-hate-to-give

Kathleen D. Ryan, D. K. (1998). Driving Fear Out of the Workplace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal.  Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.   Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP.  Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.

Why Feedback can be Fearful

How to Know When to Give Feedback

Categories
Best Practices Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

You May Not Be As Influential As You Think Are

Click here to watch You May Not Be As Influential As You Think You Are

Today’s fast-paced business environment requires leaders who can create influence others with sound communication practices.  In today’s world of emails and text messages, it’s easy to overlook the importance of face-to-face communication and the discipline required to be influential Monday to Monday®.

How you deliver determines whether or not others see you as credible, knowledgeable and trustworthy. Without doing this effectively, you inhibit your potential to: influence, increase profits and build a reputation you’re proud of Monday to Monday®.

Message take-aways

  • What influence is and what it is not.
  • What it means and takes to be influential Monday to Monday®
  • Sabotaging your influence without knowing it
  • What are the misperceptions of influence?

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development

Motivation and the Big Picture

In the first article on motivation we explored how to motivate your team and then we dug deeper on the topic of alignment. In this article we explore the second way to tap into your teams motivation with the big picture.

You’ve already heard me talk about internal and external motivation so let’s look at how the big picture can help your team internalize their motivation to enhance productivity and results.

The fact that most people are motivated by more than just money is even truer today because Millennials are more commonly driven by purpose. This is important because this diverse and well-educated group is expected to make up 36% of the U.S. workforce by 2018 and nearly half of all workers by 2020. For you to have the best of the best employees and stay competitive in this ever-changing marketplace, this is a group you want to take seriously, whether you have been running your organization for a long time or are an emerging leader.

Your workforce wants to know where they fit into the big picture, what the organizations goals and mission is, and that their work has purpose. Punching a clock or showing up to do a job with no meaning is not going to cut it anymore. Your most loyal, dedicated, and hard working employees will be the ones that understand and believe in the purpose of their role in the organization.

The message on purpose starts with you helping to ensure everyone understands the big picture, the purpose of the organization; what the organization set out to accomplish and why. What is the reason the organization was founded in the first place, who did the founders want to serve, and why? If you, as a leader of your organization cannot articulate this it may be time to re-visit the mission and vision. These statements should be more than just plaques you hang in the lobby or around the office; they need to be beliefs that people can understand and be part of. But they have to be easy to articulate and understand for everyone in your organization for them to be meaningful.

Once the big picture is communicated, it needs to be included in conversations on a regular basis so that your employees will start to work towards that mission, because they are part of something bigger than themselves. However, for this to be true they need to continue to hear the mission, its importance, and how they are helping make this happen. There are many times when an employee does not understand the direct link between his or her job and the bigger picture. With each role, each task, each project, continue to communicate and teach others to communicate why the work is important to the big picture, why it has purpose.

Encourage these types of conversations among the ranks; it should become a viral conversation that anyone can have at any time about the purpose, mission, and vision of the organization. The more people truly feel the connection to something bigger, something important, the more they will dedicate themselves to serving that purpose. And once they start to internalize this purpose you have made the important shift from external motivation to internal, which is the most important type of motivation to move people forward.

For more resources visit www.c-suiteresults.com where you can find articles, videos, assessment tools, books, and the C-Suite Success Radio show. To discuss purpose and motivation in more detail reach out to sharon@c-suiteresults.com

Categories
Best Practices Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

Eve of Disruption – Future of Work – People

Are you providing the environment and support for your employees to be ready for the changing environment of the Future of Work?

Last week, I wrote about the high level impacts and components that are impacting the future of work.  This week, we will explore your employees, that are following the path to have a stable work career but are being affected by the rapid change in the way we live, work and play.

Life expectancy is growing at a rapid rate with health and technological advances.  For the boomers and many in the X-generation, the path forward was having one career, in a specific function or company which was very linear.  However, the work environment and how individuals think have changed the trajectory of what a career looks like.  As a leader, you adapt to change through your own motivations and drive to sustain and move your company forward. This mindset is not shared by most of your employees or staff.  They are there for a stable JOB to support their families and lifestyles.  As a leader, as change happens and employees no longer have the skill(s) set to run your company, you displace them. The impact on these individuals is devastating, emotionally and financially.  These employees were taught to do good work and stay in one place to provide continuity for their companies and stability for themselves.

These employees have developed a loyalty to your company, as each year goes by.  They also get comfortable with the status quo and are probably the least adaptable to change.  Their engagement is high if you don’t make massive changes but they are also the biggest dissenters as they feel the pressure of their little world crumbling away.  However, leaders need to think about keeping them and engaging them as they move forward.  Loyalty is something you can’t buy through a paycheck.  It happens over time through years of working, in a company, that supports the employee’s motivations for working. Relationships solidify the loyalty through understanding the individual and stability over the years.  As we know, in today’s day and age, the younger generation does not stay in one company or job very long and they are in fact, guided to have multiple experiences, so they are well rounded.  The boomers and X-generations were always taught to be in one place otherwise you don’t have the ability to follow through and be a good worker.  So, they put their heads down and stuck around and in turn became complacent. However, many of them are still great workers but don’t have the motivation or understanding of how to change to keep up with the times.  They are soft wired in how they think and you have the ability to impact their mindset.

In high school and college, we had school counselors who helped us navigate our skill sets, likes and subjects.  We would take tests to understand what we were good at and what subjects we would need to take to have certain types of jobs.  This counselor was separate from the person in the main office that would deal with school issues, attendance, etc.  Their sole purpose was to help guide us as we took a step forward on our path (not all of them were good!)   As we adapt to the future of work, we need to look at the structure of our companies and make some drastic changes.  Now, everything to deal with an employee sits in HR.  However, HR has become a very process driven organization versus a human driven organization.  Due to the nature of laws, there are so many policies in place that everyone becomes a box and can’t bring their entire self to the organization. (This is a whole other topic for another day.)   There is no one in HR or a company, that truly works with individual employees to look at the future of their career in a company and helps them adapt.

Companies should be creating a new department with work counselors.  Their sole purpose is to work with employees as movement happens in the market and therefore inside the company.  The counselors work with individual employees to understand what skill sets they currently have and match them to future roles.  In the meantime, as new roles are being created these employees are trained by the company with the support of keeping their job if they can adapt, to their new stability.  This allows the loyal and experienced employee to continually be engaged with the company and not miss a beat.  This creates a deeper sense of purpose for the individual and provides the benefit of prior knowledge and a cost savings to the company.  Instead of spending the money looking externally for the skill set you build the skill set in house with the right employees that you can train to do new and different jobs based on their prior skill set and personality.  Employees want their employers to support this on their journey versus going about it alone. As business leaders, we know the change is coming and need to bring the human element to our employees.  Employees are beginning to understand their own paths and if a company can support them in their journey they will benefit.  Take advantage of loyalty, experience, cost savings and a powerhouse of knowledge right in your backyard to move your company forward as the future of work manifests for each of us.

What programs and processes do you have in place to help support navigating your employees to the future?

 

Eve of Disruption – A weekly series depicting what the future fabric of our society could look like and ideas that could propel your company forward. There is a changing paradigm in how we live, work and play. Are you and your organization moving with the times and adapting to the massive and rapid changes happening right now? The Eve of Disruption looks at ideas that could be 5 – 10 years in the future but most likely will happen in the blink of an eye.

Contact Urvi for a free 30 minute consultation to see how she could infuse the innovation mindset into your organization and help you move to the future.

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