12 things managers must do to create a great workplace 6 of 12

14 February 2012 Leave a comment

6. Someone Encourages My Development

The innate yearning to learn and grow is natural to human beings. Our jobs allow us to encounter new situations and find new ways to overcome challenges every day. Why, then, do we have a tendency to stall or stagnate?

Every employee should be consciously aware of how he or she is learning and growing. This is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization.

[Our objective was to identify the consistent dimensions of workplaces with high levels of four critical outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. The research identified 12 dimensions that consistently correlate with these four outcomes -- dimensions Gallup now uses to measure the health of a workplace. An associated research effort, in which Gallup studied more than 80,000 managers, focused on discovering what great managers do to create quality workplaces.

Conventional management theory has always highlighted employee development. Primarily, the traditional approach was to identify an employee's weaknesses, then create a plan to correct them. By focusing on their weaknesses, so the reasoning went, employees would become stronger and more productive. While this approach seems to make sense, it has had a significant, unintended consequence -- it has emphasized who the employee is not, rather than who the employee is. As a result, a manager's constant determination to change something about the employee has been the common theme in the management-employee relationship.

Change can be a good and effective means to improvement, of course, when it encompasses something positive such as learning a new skill. In the conventional approach, however, management has often tried to change dispositional factors, things that are part of an employee's hard wiring or talent -- time management, for example. While there are many tools to aid in this effort, the way an employee manages his or her time is a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior -- part of an employee's hard wiring and not something every employee can be trained to do better. Great managers make a clear, definite distinction between what can be trained in and what can't.

For the past 40 years, development has primarily meant, "getting promoted." Today, the world's best managers suggest that development embodies the degree to which employees are growing within their current roles. Most employees want to be promoted, but not if it means doing a job that does not match their individual talents and skills. Such promotions may work, but the new position often requires a distinctly different set of talents -- talents the promoted employee may not possess. So, in the end, the promotion significantly impacts the quality of life for both the individuals promoted and the people they supervise or support.

In today's workplace, the concept of lifetime employment is passé; the new emphasis is on lifetime employability. Managers who want to help their direct reports assist them to develop self-understanding and a clear perspective on the roles they will excel in. To accomplish this goal, such managers pursue straightforward discussions with employees. In these discussions, the manager seeks to understand the employee's strengths, talents, and skills, why he accepted a position with that employer in the first place and what keeps him there. They discuss the kinds of relationships the employee needs for greatest productivity, his desired mode of recognition, and the yearnings and directions the employee wishes to follow.

The best managers feel there is nothing very complicated about development. Development holds up a mirror to employees and encourages them to know themselves. As employees come to understand who they are, these managers strive to provide responsibilities that will be a good "fit" for their talents. Then, as employees move forward in their self-knowledge, great managers persist in looking for opportunities to make the best use of employees' talents.]

Please leave a comment, or phone me on 0412 921 292 if you’d like some help in your business to implement any of what you’ve read here.

In particular, if you’d like some insight into the natural dispositions of your staff for development purposes, take a look at www.121Match.com.au

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10 biggest sales training mistakes and how to avoid 6 of 10

7 February 2012 Leave a comment

6. Companies Buy “Sugar Pills” vs Real Solutions to their Sales Problems 

Many sales seminars are nothing but “sugar pills” – great for a quick burst of energy, but the effects wear off quickly.

We’ve all seen studies that show how much information is actually retained in a typical seminar – only about 20% that day…and only 10% by the next day! Then over time, almost everything drifts away, except maybe one or two basic thoughts.

(And admittedly, sometimes all we need are one or two good ideas.  But that’s not sales training!)

So basically, one-day seminars aren’t good for much beyond waking people up temporarily and maybe implanting a few new ideas.

In order to change behaviour on a long-term basis, management must be dedicated to a training program that is consistent, on-going, progressive and engaging.

If/when you are ready for some sales training that is more than just a temporary buzz, call me on 0412 921 292.

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12 things managers must do to create a great workplace 5 of 12

24 January 2012 1 Comment

5. My Supervisor Cares About Me

Gallup’s research indicates that employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers and supervisors. The impact that a supervisor has in today’s workplace can be either very valuable or very costly to the organisation and the people who work there.

Making sure that every employee has a quality relationship with someone who can guide them is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization.

[Our objective was to identify the consistent dimensions of workplaces with high levels of four critical outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. The research identified 12 dimensions that consistently correlate with these four outcomes -- dimensions Gallup now uses to measure the health of a workplace. An associated research effort, in which Gallup studied more than 80,000 managers, focused on discovering what great managers do to create quality workplaces.

As employees, we have all had unpleasant experiences with bad supervisors or managers. Many of us have also experienced the benefits of a good one. Employees see an amazingly clear difference between good and bad supervisors, according to Gallup evaluations. Yet, when we ask employees, "Do you want to be managed?" everyone says "No." Why is this? Because we automatically think of our bad experiences. What if their best supervisors could manage those employees? Would they want to be managed in that case? Yes. So, the issue is really this: What makes a great manager?

Gallup finds that great managers and supervisors possess identifiable talents or recurring patterns of thought, feelings and behaviors. These managers find a true sense of satisfaction when their employees grow and succeed, even if the employee's success surpasses that of the manager. Great managers intrinsically know how to match the right person with the right roles to produce the best possible results. They set expectations by defining the desired outcome. They don't dissect every role down to exact steps. They help people grow within a role instead of grow out of it. And they always try to bring out what was left in versus trying to put in what was left out.

Great supervisors genuinely care about the people they work with. They treat people as individuals rather than treating everyone in the same way. Supervisors serve as filters between broad organizational changes and employees. They help employees make sense of new initiatives and thus gain true acceptance and understanding. One could speculate that people are not resistant to change; they just have no one to explain how modifications will impact them and their jobs.

For years, Gallup has learned from surveys that the credibility of senior management is critical to employee perceptions of the organization. This led us to encourage CEOs and leaders to increase their visibility and create clearer communications. Then, three years ago, we made a discovery: For employees, the credibility of senior management is largely driven by the quality of relationships employees have with their supervisors. Thus, rather than feeling the need for a town-hall meeting, the CEO should feel compelled to ensure that all employees have caring relationships with their managers or designates.]

Please leave a comment, or phone me on 0412 921 292 if you’d like some help in your business to implement any of what you’ve read here.

There services of www.TEC.com.au may be of particular interest to business owners, CEOs, Managing Directors and General Managers.

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How to survive business growth and expansion

24 January 2012 Leave a comment

The big message for the Go-Go stage of the corporate lifecycle, according to the Adizes model, is to get the company to stand on its own. Caught up in the chaos and excitement of growth, founders think there’s no time to set up effective production and administration systems. They must make time or they will find themselves in such messes as failing to deliver, or selling bad products. If the founder is not capable of institutionalising independent leadership, he will be in the founder’s trap of the business depending inextricably on him to survive. A company that grows with too much abandon will be undone by a project that demands more than its ad hoc systems can handle.

As we have seen in previous posts in this series, what is an asset in one stage of business development turns into a liability in another. A founder’s superb ability to ‘spot a deal’ has a troublesome counter-side during this Go-Go stage. The first taste of success for a founder is like swallowing a tasty minnow for a seagull – it sends her off, scanning the seas for yet another morsel, making deals, foraging for more joint ventures. While some seagull behaviour is normal, and we expect it, seagulls can make a real mess. They fly off, and when they appear they drop undesirable things on deck. Then they take off again and again, only to return later, unannounced, with more to unload!

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.” Henry Miller

So how to handle this growth in terms of the six dimensions of management? Read more of this post

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10 biggest sales training mistakes and how to avoid 5 of 10

16 January 2012 Leave a comment

5. Companies Mistake Product Training for Sales Training

Technically speaking, product training is a part of sales training…it just shouldn’t be the core of sales training.

The core of sales training should focus on the fundamentals of what makes salespeople successful – namely prospecting and closing, or as we put it –Filling and Flushing the pipeline.

While there’s certainly nothing wrong with product training, too much of it, without a balance of fundamentals training, can create salespeople who are talking way too much and not listening.

Sellers get so full of product training all they do is run around and spew their new-found knowledge. While they’re doing that, they forget all about questioning, listening and uncovering needs.

The answer is not to forget about product training altogether, but to make it part of an overall training mix – with the fundamentals at the core.

If/when you are ready for some sales training that complements your product training, call me on 0412 921 292.

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How founders give birth to new businesses

14 December 2011 Leave a comment

In his book ‘The Pursuit of Prime’, Adizes describes the early stage of business development as ‘Courtship to Cradle’. Moving through this first stage of a business feels a lot like ‘new romance’. It is driven by passion, without which a would-be entrepreneur never gets beyond the anxiety and confusion of those early days of uncertainty. Realists adapt to their environment, but the people who dare to be founders of businesses try to change their environment. Founders, therefore are not quite realistic, not even reasonable.  So how to they handle things under the 6 management categories?

Style

The courtship stage is inherently limited; founders suddenly decide to stop their dreaming and bring their ideas into fruition. Having conceived a grand idea, they grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it to the next stage of the corporate lifecycle, Infancy. In infancy, we need doers, realists, overachievers, risk-takers, people who drive to the heart of a problem. This is not always present in the founder themselves – it requires both prophet and doer; a person who dreams and then wakes up to take action. If these elements are not balanced, there are ideas being churned out without any action, or plenty of action, but lacking inspiration.

When examination of a business in courtship reveals a founder committed to the continuous excitement of creating, we can be sure it will be a disaster without some balance. Unless there is a second player willing to take it through the process of pain and politics required to raise a company, the enterprise will be short-lived. Infancy is the time to do, not to dream and talk but to do.

Before a founder can delegate tasks for what needs doing however, the style is a controlling one – and this is as it should be. Despite all the talk about centralization, founders must control everything during the growing stages – obligation precedes delegation. Before they can delegate tasks, they need systems that inform others about what, how, when, and where tasks should be done. At the early stages, even founders themselves are still learning about the job, experimenting with how to do it, and making improvements on the fly. Read more of this post

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12 things managers must do to create a great workplace 4 of 12

14 December 2011 Leave a comment

4. Recognition or Praise

Praise and recognition are essential building blocks of a great workplace. We all possess the need to be recognized as individuals, and to feel a sense of accomplishment. There is nothing complicated about recognition, but it is one of the items that consistently receives the lowest ratings from employees.

Taking the time to recognize and praise good performance is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization.

[Our objective was to identify the consistent dimensions of workplaces with high levels of four critical outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. The research identified 12 dimensions that consistently correlate with these four outcomes -- dimensions Gallup now uses to measure the health of a workplace. An associated research effort, in which Gallup studied more than 80,000 managers, focused on discovering what great managers do to create quality workplaces.

Historically, we handle praise and recognition from the perspective of "if you don't hear anything, assume you're doing a good job." In contrast to this "old industrial workplace" mindset, the new knowledge-based worker relies upon praise and recognition to determine the values of the organization. Today, praise and recognition are communication vehicles for that which is deemed important.

Obviously, recognition can be either positive or negative. Gallup has found, however, that positive and negative recognition are not opposites. Instead, the opposite of any kind of recognition is being ignored. The worst possible thing we can do to someone at work is to ignore any employee. Workplaces that continue to abide by the old culture ("If you don't hear anything . . . ") will destroy the very human spirit that makes the true difference in quality output and service delivery.

Although recognition can be either positive or negative, effective recognition has the following characteristics. It is:

  • positive in nature,
  • immediately connected to performance,
  • specific about what is being praised, and
  • close to the action.

Many organizations have formal recognition programs that have limited effectiveness. This is probably because these programs do not always give employees a clear idea of what, exactly, is being recognized -- such as profit, growth, or productivity.

We often think positive recognition only comes from supervisors or managers, but Gallup has found that employees cherish praise and recognition from peers. Coworkers know intimately the particulars of a job and when they notice excellence, it is a special event. So, the best praise and recognition may not come from the top down -- it may come from a peer recognition program.]

Please leave a comment, or phone me on 0412 921 292 if you’d like some help in your business to implement any of what you’ve read here.

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10 biggest sales training mistakes and how to avoid 4 of 10

6 December 2011 1 Comment

4. Companies Give Salespeople the Training They WANT vs the Training They NEED ie they don’t treat them like a REAL professional

If we truly treated salespeople like professionals, we’d never allow them to pick the training they want vs giving them the training they NEED.

You might be asking yourself, “Wait a minute, what do you mean? If my people are professionals, why can’t they figure out what they need?”

The easiest analogy to understand in this case is that of a professional athlete.

Take the US Super Bowl Champions for example. Every year, since the NFL was created, the Super Bowl Champs (along with every other team) gather all their belongings and they trudge out to some empty college campus where they put on a training camp.

And what do they do in this annual summer ritual? They return to the fundamentals of the game – blocking, tackling, throwing, catching, kicking, etc. Things they’ve been doing every single year since they were eight years old.

These are athletes who make millions. Who are the best of the very best. And there they are every year…sweating in the summer sun, returning to the core elements of what makes them successful football players and a successful football team.

Ask these athletes about what it is they WANT to do, and their answer may be – “anything BUT training camp!”

We talk with managers who tell us, “I polled the sales staff about what they felt they needed to learn, and none of them felt they needed to work on call reluctance.”

Of course not. Who wants to go to training camp? But who NEEDS to go to training camp? EVERYONE!!!

Every person, in every profession, should return to the fundamentals of success every year, and reinforce this every week.  Especially sales professionals.

We’re not saying that a management team shouldn’t listen to their sales team about skill-sets they feel they need. However, management must keep in mind that sales fundamentals, particularly new business generation, involve things many salespeople aren’t comfortable doing (like picking up the phone and making cold calls) – thus they may never say, “We want to work on making more cold calls.”

If/when you are ready for some sales training that gets back to the fundamentals, call me on 0412 921 292.

Comments?

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Key management levers and when to apply them

15 November 2011 Leave a comment

To solve problems and move a company to Prime, Adizes advocates looking at the contributions of six classic managerial responsibilities:

  1. Style
  2. Structure
  3. Strategy
  4. Staffing
  5. Rewards
  6. Planning and goals

The offerings that each of these areas bring to a business are variable and different at every stage of the business lifecycle, so they form a framework for each of the forthcoming posts in this series.

As changes happen, each of the variables will contribute differently over time as appropriate to the stage of development.

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” Bob Dylan

In order to lead a business to Prime, you must first get it to the healthy part of its current stage in the lifecycle, and prepare to advance it. Company leaders are like parents who know how to treat their child one way when it is a baby, and modify their parental approach as the child grows to adolescence and beyond. Read more of this post

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12 things managers must do to create a great workplace 3 of 12

8 November 2011 Leave a comment

3. Doing What I do Best

Full human potential is realized only when people are in a position to use their talents and strengths. Great performance is found when an individual’s natural talents fit his or her role. Matching the right person with the right job is probably the most significant challenge organizations and managers face today.

Putting people in the roles they best fit is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization.

[Our objective was to identify the consistent dimensions of workplaces with high levels of four critical outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. The research identified 12 dimensions that consistently correlate with these four outcomes -- dimensions Gallup now uses to measure the health of a workplace. An associated research effort, in which Gallup studied more than 80,000 managers, focused on discovering what great managers do to create quality workplaces.

Our research found that the best way to measure if employees' talent is being used is to ask them the degree to which they agree with the statement, "I have an opportunity to do what I do best every day." Having an opportunity to do what I do best, every day, is tied to the integration of a person's talents (her recurring patterns of thoughts, feeling, and behavior), skills (the steps of an activity), and knowledge (the facts and lessons she has learned). Talents are the patterns that can't be turned on and off at will. Great managers realize that while talents are the differentiating factor in excellent performance, they can't be created or altered. In contrast, one's skill sets and knowledge can be changed.

The best managers see the specific talents needed for every role. Conventional wisdom dictates that some roles are so easy, they don't require talent. Great managers rebuff this belief. The best front desk clerks in a hotel, for example, have a talent for "winning others over." They establish a trust relationship with people within the first seven seconds of an interaction. Great telephone service and sales personnel are talented in having a "third ear," or the ability to connect visually and emotionally with people they talk to on the phone. Outstanding accountants see patterns in numbers and "hear" a message or story from them.

Excellence should be revered in every role. Often, managers think that because they would not want a particular job nor have the talent to perform it well, they must manage it as a job no one would want to do, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is, however, a false perspective. The task of the best managers is to clearly define the talents needed for each role, and then choose the right person for that role. A manager's job is not to make people grow talents they do not have, but to identify and use their existing talents to their fullest potential.]

Please leave a comment, or phone me on 0412 921 292 if you’d like some help in your business to implement any of what you’ve read here.

In particular, if you’d like a simple, quick and effective tool that accelerates your appreciation of each person’s natural attributes including interests, values, work style preferences, personality and motivations, take a look at www.121Match.com

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