Employee Engagement / Leadership — 2 comments
14
May 13

My best #1 employee engagement and management tip.

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

This is the most important thing you can do to improve your effectiveness managing your team.

Index Finger

Photo from Inner Compass

Every super effective people manager I know does this, no exceptions…

Meet one-on-one with each of your key staff regularly to talk over how things are going, give them feedback on how they are doing and allow them to give you feedback on how you are doing and how you could help them further their success.

This can take whatever form seems comfortable for you, but you should have a simple agenda for the meeting, even if only in your head, that you follow.  You should make a few notes, to show you care and to allow you to refer to them the next time you meet.  You should do this every six to twelve weeks with each of your team.  If, like many agency managers, you have too many staff to make this work, pick your best and at least do it with them.  This is the most powerful tip and tool I have as a manager.

If you want a copy of my one-on-one form/agenda, email me or comment on this post and I will be happy to send it to you.  The agenda is not as important as it is to make this a real coaching session that feels comfortable to you.  This is not a session to tell someone everything they are doing wrong. If someone messes up it should be dealt with as soon as possible after it happens.  These sessions are for talking about observed strengths, helping make people aware of what you think they are doing well and could do even better at, guiding the right course for the person’s career and working on goals together.

We all crave feedback and we all want to know that someone cares about our success.   The best managers make time to give each of their team regular feedback; there is no getting around this.  Great managers all have their own way of regularly passing on to their team members how they are doing, good and bad, and showing that they listen and care.  Find your way, do it regularly and you will be a long way towards being one of the rare managers that makes a true difference in the lives of their team.

PS – this has nothing to do with the annual performance reviews that you never have time to get around to anyway.  You do those for the organization, this you do for the mutual success of you and your team member.

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07
May 13

Tips for employee feedback

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

A big part of employee engagement is knowing how to provide feedback, both positive and negative, to your team.  Here is a compilation of useful tips, gleaned from the experts.

Give it to them straight.

Feedback arrowsWhen behaviors are observed that run contrary to expectations, you need to have the courage to take the employee aside and tell them the truth. Don’t put your head in the sand and hope the issue resolves itself. Yes it can be uncomfortable for both parties – but this is what managers are paid to do.

Don’t make the mistake of protecting people’s feelings at the expense of the truth, because without your honest feedback they will not see the need to improve.

When things go wrong – avoid praising effort.

“At least you gave it a good effort.” It sounds encouraging and positive, but studies show that consoling people for the amount of effort they put in when they fail – actually makes people feel less worthy and less capable.

Instead, share your positive belief in the employee and that success can be achieved if they take the right actions. Focus on things that are within their power to control. Be specific about what needs to happen, and help them figure out what tangible steps they can take to improve. Helping your employee figure out how to do it right is just as important as letting them know what they are doing wrong.

When things go right – avoid praising ability.

“You’re a great people person.” It sounds positive, but studies show that when we are praised for having high ability, it makes us vulnerable to self-doubt when we encounter difficulty later on (this concept applies to the way we praise children as well).

Instead, praise the aspects of your employee’s performance that were under their control.  Praise the observable actions they took – not the person. For example, talk about their creative ideas, their careful planning, their determination to see the task through to the end etc. That way, when they run into difficulties in the future, they will remember what behaviors helped them to succeed in the past and put these to good use.

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30
Apr 13

The power hungry young manager – a cautionary tale

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

A great front line employee, Jenna, was the most indispensable member of the team to Scott, the previous manager. She always came to work on time and always came with a good attitude, ready to go.  She set a great example for everyone else on the team. Scott could always rely on her to get things done and handle just about anything professionally and “just like I would have”.  Jenna became Scott’s “#1 A Player” very quickly.

When Scott took another position in the company, it was an easy choice for him who to recommend to replace him, Jenna of course.

That is when things went terribly wrong. Turns out Jenna resented those she worked with; at least she acted like it.  She resented that they did not care about the job anywhere near as much as she did, that they could not figure things out for themselves, that they came late, that they were sick all the time, that they did not do things to her standards and, at least in her mind, they slacked off every chance they got!

Power HungryJenna came into management determined to change all that and not in the wimpy way that Scott did.  She was not going to sit idly by while all this went on! There would be rules, there would be scrutiny and by god, there would be discipline!

Things went horrible wrong for Jenna and she was terminated when she lost control on several occasions while more senior managers, including the “wimpy” Scott, tried to coach her on better ways to think about, and work with, her team.

Jenna is an extreme example of a great front line employee becoming a terrible manager. With great coaching, interest in helping others do well and a desire to learn about management, many people can make the transition from front line work to manager.  There is a very hard phase in this transition and I think it is the hardest for those that were the biggest stars on the front line. You go from being the star to starting all over again just like in Jenna’s case; she could not handle it and was not open to learning a new set of skills and make no mistake, this is a completely new set of skills.

Employee Engagement — 4 comments
23
Apr 13

The Dragon’s Den or Vanilla Ice Cream

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

I attended a conference recently. The conference was opened by Kevin O’Leary of Dragon’s Den fame and closed by Sean Durfy of WestJet fame.

O’Leary said some very provocative things, many of which made sense from the point of view of how to be more profitable. His vision for Inclusion by IBEX in its current high growth state surely would be to bring in a ruthless management team accountable to a bunch of pure investors, like him, whose only concern is making money, a team who would “whack” anyone who dared bring anything else into the discussion other than how to make more money as fast as possible and sell out while the getting was good.

Durfy talked about the culture of WestJet, the high levels of employee engagement, the employee ownership and the solid financial performance.  There were no truly memorable statements in Durfy’s talk; it was vanilla ice cream, tasty and non-offensive.

In the crowd of Canadian entrepreneurs, I sensed a definite leaning to the O’Leary approach. There were whispers that Durfy was just an employee.  What did he know about making money?

Ice Cream ConeIn the end I thought about us – the Inclusion by IBEX team. Who would we be if we let the dragons into Herdquarters?  I think we would be nothing; it would be against everything we stand for.  We don’t do things to optimize the value of our company for a buy-out, we do things to optimize the value of the company 5 years from now, the most notable things being doing everything we can think of to help agencies that provide supports to individuals be more successful and working to make our workplace the best it can be, for those of us that work here. That is long term value thinking.

As far as employee engagement goes, I know which approach is the only approach. Have you ever heard anyone talk about how great it was to work at The Learning Company (O’Leary’s biggest claim to fame)?  Have you ever heard anyone talk about a great culture at WestJet? I rest my case!

Dragons only care about where there next meal comes from. IBEX’s have a long term plan to feed the herd and respect their environment. We choose the ice cream – sorry Kevin!

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16
Apr 13

Engaging staff on a limited budget – the final post

By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd

This is the last of three posts on engaging staff without more pay.

In the first post two posts, I talked about autonomy and mastery.

To summarize:

Autonomy – give people more control over things like when, how and even with whom, they do the work.  This helps them feel in control of their situation.

Mastery – when you find something that really floats someone’s boat, do everything in your power to get them doing more of this and find ways to give them training, feedback and extra support in this area. This helps them feel good about getting good at something they like.

Understanding and using these two things can improve engagement on your team and this equals better results and  lower staff turnover in our organizations.  It will also make our jobs as managers more rewarding and interesting.

Triangle: Mastery, Autonomy, PurposeThis final post is about purpose.

In the book DRiVE by Daniel Pink, the author talks about a call centre study with a group of call centre representatives.  Their job was to raise funds for a university.  They were split into three groups and each was briefed differently at the start of each shift over a period of time.

The first group was reminded of the personal benefits of working at this job – earning money, developing skills, etc.

The second group was told stories from people who had received scholarships from the funds that were raised and how this had improved their lives.

The final group was a control group; they received no briefings as usual.

What were the results?

The group reminded of what was in it for them, did no better than those in the control group.  But the people in the second group who were reminded what their work accomplished, raised more than twice as much money, through twice as many pledges, as the other groups.

The application of the human craving for purpose in our organizations is powerful.  Talking about WHY we do what we do is far more powerful than talking about how much we get paid and what is in it for each person directly.

The challenge for businesses is to have a “why” that makes sense.  For IBEX our why is to make the lives of working people easier.  We talk about how tough the jobs are of the people we serve.  The entrepreneur trying to do all the administration herself, the office manager over worked and under-appreciated in a medium sized company or the payroll coordinator rushing to meet deadlines in a larger organization.  We can make their lives better by doing our jobs well, going the extra mile for them.  If we make their lives easier through service or systems , they go home happier to their families, they have more energy for what matters to them and we get the same too- we go home happier and more energized and more ready to make a difference than if we just put in our time to push out the payrolls.

Starting off people in your organization with a good dose of WHY seems like an amazing idea to me.  Backing it up further, by having the front line supervisors make it part of regular discussions with their teams, would take the application of purpose to new levels.

If you have a great example of applying purpose, how you helped your team understand why, pass it on.  The first person who sends me a great example will receive a free copy of DRiVE.  Email me or post a comment and I will send you the book!

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