Skills Improvement Archives

5 Questions to End the Slow Painful Death of Death by Meetings

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?

August 19, 2015

2 Steps to Keep People from Quitting

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:

3 Steps to Better Leadership

Get a Leadership Development Game Plan

What has been your number one strategy to keep people from quitting? Does it involve leadership development?

August 18, 2015

2 Things to Do to Address HR’s Biggest Pain Points

We had a great time and learned a lot at the Alabama SHRM Conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s always great to network with colleagues and learn from some of the best in our profession. We try to make this type of event part of our professional development game plan.

In order to learn even more at the conference, we asked the professionals who stopped by our booth to complete a short survey where they identified their biggest pain points in HR.

Here’s how the results shook out (subscribers click through to see chart):

While there was no stand-out pain point above all the others, the highest scoring area was compliance training at 31%. Next in line were leadership training and employee development at 24%. In trying to make some sense out of these trends from the additional comments people added, two key things emerged:

HR professionals’ biggest pain points are the things that impact the business in the long term. When you add it all up, so many of the things are people development issues- employee development, training of all varieties and succession planning- all critically important, but….
The pain points aren’t being impacted for one of two reasons:
1. Lack of buy-in from upper management
2. Lack of time to address

So how do we address the things that are keeping us from impacting the important things? I found some insights from the conference:

There was so much focus at the conference on HR needing and wanting to be a “strategic business partner” and wanting a “seat at the table”. This ties to number 1 here. The gist of how to get a seat at the table and therefore buy-in from upper management was you gotta prove it. The best way to prove it is through data that shows the impact on the bottom line. In one of Jennifer McClure’s she focused on utilizing data to help make better human capital decisions, not to track metrics that have happened in the past. For example, she used data to get her boss to buy-in to an HRIS system that was needed.For example, one professional noted that the biggest pain point he/she has is succession planning. Comments he/she made tied to this issue went something like this… “We think the leaders that have been here 10 years will stay another 10 and even though I know they all won’t; there is no buy-in at the top to start planning in case people at the senior management level do exit for whatever reason”.Want to get senior management’s attention in order to get buy-in to start planning? Put in front of them the replacement cost of someone at that level and the lost time in productivity due to someone at that level exiting unexpectedly. Most cost to replace stats (SHRM has some good resources on this) show a 100-200% of base salary cost and that doesn’t even factor in lost time due to productivity.
In terms of addressing lack of time to address key HR pain point areas, two insights showed up from the conference during Dawn Hrdlica-Burke’s lunch keynote on HR needing a revival. Some simple, yet profound insights were offered as methods to get rid of the “stuff” and to devote time to purpose and addressing your greatest HR pain points.

Get control of your email.
A great guy was sitting next to me at the lunch. When she mentioned getting control of your email, he leaned over and said, “I’ve started checking email ONLY at Noon and at 4 pm and it has increased my productivity dramatically.” I knew he wasn’t joking when we emailed after the conference about getting together for some business development reasons and I got an automatic reply from him stating that he only checks email at Noon and 4, and he would respond to me during one of those times. Well done! What is he doing during with that increased productivity time? My hope would be he is addressing some of those key pain point areas that impact the bottom line.
Delegate.

Once you’ve maximized some productive time by not letting your email control you, you can either delegate 1) the stuff that is keeping you from getting to your critical HR pain point areas (and a pain point may actually be one of these) or you can 2) delegate the pain point area. For example, if compliance training is your number one pain point area that you don’t have enough time to get to (and I would tell you this isn’t a strategic priority, it is just a get it done and check if off thing), then find a quality vendor that can deliver this training for you in a way that leads to more efficiency. But wait you say, “I can’t do that, it will cost money and I’m back to my issue of lack of buy-in”. See number 1 above. Prove the value of outsourcing it to with data. You know you’ve found a good vendor when they can provide you with this data to prove it.

We at Horizon Point spend a lot of time focusing on helping clients address those strategic pain point areas that are critical to employee development. Contact us if you need to consider how you might bring in help to address those priorities that lead to a more engaged workforce. And we can help you with the data to prove it’s worth it. An example here.

What is one thing you can do today to address a pain point?

June 2, 2015

10 Books Leaders Need to be Reading

Leaders are readers. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow as a leader is to read about leadership and take the knowledge gained from your reading and apply it.

When asked about the best leadership books out there, here are the ones I recommend.

Great leaders lead themselves first. You can’t lead others if you can’t leader yourself through strong personal habits. The best personal leadership book I have found is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Leaders are influencers. For a timeless classic on influence, read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Leaders are Empathetic. Read what I believe to be the best fiction ever written. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Even if you read it as a student, it’s a good one to re-read, with a particular focus on the leadership lessons to apply. Also check out The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People by Kevin Leman
A leader customizes his/her style based on whom he/she is leading. To understand situational leadership in order to customize, read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard.
Leaders understand how to run an organization. For insights on what makes an organization successful, read Good to Great by Jim Collins. For the entrepreneurial leader wanting to understand how to run a great start-up and/or scale and grow one, read Scale by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel and EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey.
Leaders know the most important decisions they make are people decisions. To know how to hire the best, read Who?: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
Leaders know that once they answer the Who question they need to be able to explain the Why to them. To understand the importance of Why, read Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.
Although answering Why? takes you a long way in motivating others, for more insights on motivation and building people and teams, read The Leadership Challenge byJames Kouzes and Barry Posner and Boundaries for Leaders by Henry Cloud.
Leaders learn from the success and failures of others. Pick up a biography or memoir of a leader. Some good ones are: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and the biographies of different presidents and visionaries by David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose.
Leaders have some good reference books to turn to when they need tools or templates to help them succeed. Keep a copy of the The Successful Manager’s Handbook on your desk for this purpose.

Which leadership books have had the most impact on you?

Like this post? You may also like:

Horizon Point Book Review 2014

Horizon Point Book Review 2013

Harvard Business Review: 11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read

May 5, 2015

4 Tips for reconciling the irony of stress and productivity in the workplace

What’s impacting performance in the workplace more than anything else these days? Many people would say it is stress, which is pushing some to the point of full-blown mental health issues.

Consider how Graeme Cowan, author of Back From the Brink, describes this reality in the Fall 2014 issue of Global Corporate Xpansion Magazine:

“In a hypercompetitive global economy, organizations must be ‘on’ 24/7. Yet this scramble for perpetual performance is taking a harsh toll on employees. They relentlessly push to get ahead and stay ahead- working longer days, emailing after hours, taking fewer vacations- often with little acknowledgement for their efforts. The result is a workforce that’s not just disengaged (Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report revealed that 70 percent of U.S. employees fall into this category), but also stressed and depressed.

And here’s the irony. The constant hustle aimed at increasing productivity and profitability actually decreases both.”[i]

So what should you do as an employer to combat this irony?

Assess both the level of stress and the causes of stress in your workforce. Developing and administering an organizational survey to assess the level of stress in employees can help you effectively develop a plan to reduce stress levels at the workplace through policies, practices and programs. You can’t know what to change if you don’t know what the sources of issues are. In addition, if you do put a plan in place, you can’t know if and how you’ve improved if you don’t have baseline measurements to compare.
Provide stress management training to your staff. Providing stress management training to your employees can help increase productivity and profitability in the workplace. Hopefully you have committed to assessing the stress level of your organization (see #1) and have a skilled training provider that can take that information and develop a customized stress management program for your organization.
Analyze your talent management processes, particularly your selection process. Does it assess people for organizational and job fit? For more reading on this, check out an article I published inHR Alabama– see page 16. If people aren’t aligned with the organizational purpose and the job purpose, stress is bound to ensue, leading to decreased productivity.
Design policies, procedures and tools that allow people to work smarter not harder and that put controls in place to keep people from falling victim to the toll that working 24/7 takes.

For more food for thought on this see:

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

Should Employers Ban Email after Work Hours?

Stress Leave

Need more help as an employee or employer to manage stress? Download Stress Management: How to Deal with Stress in the Short and Long Term