We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for stories and best practices for personal wellness and wellbeing, skills improvement, and more.
One of the best ways to improve and sustain great performance at work is to ask for feedback and to give it, freely, continuously and in the spirit of driving better performance. Here are some posts to help you out with this quest:
6 Steps for Maximizing Feedback Through Feedforward
Drop Lots of FYIs to Communicate Effectively
3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization
Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?
Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.
In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.
You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.
As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,
“Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”
So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:
1. Ask. Ask and ask often what employees want. You need to do this in aggregate and individually. We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, Gallup’s 12 engagement questions for this. Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks. More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…
Are your rewards and benefits personalized? If so, what positive results have you seen?
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Whether you’re headed out the door for an interview, starting your first day of work or wanting to move up in your career, what you wear (and what you don’t) can be an important factor in success. Although the workplace has become more casual than it once was, it’s important to know the different cues in order to dress for success. Here are three tips to identify what to wear:
1. Look around you. What the majority of people are wearing around you is probably what is the unspoken norm of acceptable. I walked into my first interview for a job coming out of college, and it was obvious everyone there was dressed like they were going to an interview too. Suit. If you had a skirt on, put hose on, do not show your arms. It was obvious what was required, and I ended up shelling out almost all of my first paycheck on a new wardrobe of business attire. And sweating all summer long… But if I hadn’t worn this, I would not have been seen as acceptable in the environment I was working in and I would not have been respected as a new person coming in.
2. Simply Ask. If you are unsure of what the dress code is for an organization or what is most appropriate after looking at the people around you, simply ask. Many employers don’t have formal dress codes anymore (but they might- and you should read it if there is one), but there is usually an unspoken standard. Ask about what that is. I remember coming from previously mentioned corporate job, to accepting a position at a much smaller organization. I wasn’t sure what the protocol for dress was at this new place because I had seen people that worked there in a variety of attire. So I asked. The response I got was “just don’t wear anything you would wear to the river on the weekends,” which was code for, “Business casual is the norm, unless there is an important meeting or something going on.”
3. Think about where you want to be. This is the most important point to consider. Dress at a workplace is an unspoken pulse on company culture. Once you’ve identified what the dress is for an organization or a job within an organization, you need to consider whether or not that is a fit for you along with other organizational fit factors. This is also an important point to consider if you want to move up. A good piece of advice I think we have all probably heard is, “Dress for the position you want, not the position you have.”
Have you ever dressed inappropriately in the workplace and been “punished” for doing so?
In a leadership training class on communication in the workplace, I had one participant tell the group that meetings at his company were the biggest waste of time. When probed as to why, the basic gist of it came down to two reasons:
1. No one knows why the heck a meeting has been called and/or why they need to be there
2. Nothing results from the meetings
Because of this dialogue as well as other feedback we had received, we started incorporating a segment on effective meetings into our standard Communication Outline lineup.
Whether you are dealing with these two major meeting issues or just want to sharpen the saw on facilitating effective meetings, here is a checklist of questions to ask yourself:
1. Do you even need to have a meeting? Is there a more effective way to communicate and/or make decisions?
2. If a meeting is needed, what is the meeting’s objective? Clearly outline an agenda that meets this objective and send it out to all participants ahead of time. While in the meeting, stick only to topics related to the objective. If a topic comes up outside the scope of the meetings objective, politely redirect the conversation back to the objective and remind people you are doing so out of respect for everyone’s time.
3. Who really needs to be there? We often include people because we don’t want to hurt feelings and/or we simply don’t take the time to think through who needs to be at the table. Only include those who are truly needed. In the case where decisions need to be made in a meeting, the smaller the group the better.
4. Did the meeting result in decisions, action items and timelines centered-round the meeting’s objective?
5. Did you put in place a mechanism to follow-up on the action items and timelines set forth in the meeting?
Do you know the number one reason why people quit a job? It’s not for more money or better benefits or advancement opportunities. People may cite these factors as a reason for leaving in an exit interview or casual conversation, but what most likely led them to look elsewhere in the first place is because of a bad boss. As a Harvard Business Review article stated, “Studies have consistently shown that having a bad manager or a poor relationship with one’s manager is a top reason an employee quits.”
Yep, most likely your number one reason for turnover is bad leadership, especially at the frontline level. And how much does turnover cost? Most studies report between 150-300% of the person’s annual salary depending on the position. Ouch.
However, in the same Harvard Business Review article, only 12% of survey respondents said they currently invest sufficiently in the development of frontline managers.
So one of the best ways to nip a turnover issue in the bud and to potentially gain a competitive advantage over competitors is to fix your leadership issues, with the greatest bang for your buck being at the frontline level. Here are two steps to do just that:
1. Identify, assess and select frontline leadership talent based on skills needed to effectively lead and develop others, not skills needed to perform successfully in the doer role. The classic Peter Principle states the people are often promoted to their level of incompetence. Most frontline leaders are promoted to a supervisory role because they are good at the doer role, not because they are equipped with the skills to be effective leading others.
Whether you are hiring someone externally or promoting from within, you need to assess both the leadership potential of the person (skill) as well as the desire to be in a leadership role (will). As Kris Dunn said in one of his all-to truthful and to-the-point performance management posts at HR Capitalist, “That makes hiring people (leaders) – who are comfortable with the gray and understand the value of taking many small actions towards a goal with no guarantee of success – one of the most important things you can do today.” Find out if the person can lead others in a gray world and if he/she actually wants to.
If you want some tips on what dimensions you need assess potential leadership talent for, give us a shout out and we can help. Kris Dunn’s post just cited has some food for thought on this, and entrepreur.com can help you get you started in thinking about key traits to evaluate.
2. Teach frontline leaders the skills they need to be effective in a management role. We often promote people to their level of incompetence because we throw them to the wolves as a new leader and expect them to come out alive. What often happens is we make no investment in cultivating the new skills needed be effective at our organization and then are surprised when they fail.
Doing this before someone is even promoted and/or hired into the role is imperative. For example, we have a company we love working with that calls us to come and do one-on-one leadership coaching/training with anyone before they are promoted into a supervisory role. You can’t be promoted without this step in the process.
Developing and deploying a leadership development training plan at an individual and company level in order to effectively transition people from doer to leader then ensure people maintain and grow in effective leadership skills is an ongoing effort. Development plans are also a great way to facilitate succession planning and foster employee engagement.
If you want more tips on strategies for putting together effective development plans, you might like these posts:
Get a Leadership Development Game Plan
What has been your number one strategy to keep people from quitting? Does it involve leadership development?