Tuesday, July 4, 2017

BRING OUT THE BEST IN EVERY EMPLOYEE - PART 2

SHORT NOTES FROM:
BRING OUT THE BEST IN EVERY EMPLOYEE
Don Brown and Bill Hawkins
Mcgraw Hill (200 pages)

Image result for cartoon new tech
Salsafrica Blog - WordPress.com

JUST ASK ME

Give yourself the freedom to not to have all the answers.  Understand that soon you won’t know enough to be the expert.  Learn how to ask and what to ask.

What your people want you to know
Leaders as cop (to police the performance) and as coach (that functionally trains and maintains the technical competency and interactions of teams) no longer applies.  They are simply not enough.  Noe in the new era, people look at leaders as engager (enabler) to be able to successfully navigate the storm facing us.

Your people already know more than you about their role, work, and reality on the job.  So it’s just about asking them
How they can be more effective
To adopt the suggestions they can
To follow through on resolutions for challenge

Have the courage to ask for input and look in the mirror.  Have the humanity to admit you can improve, and have the discipline to follow up and get better (Marshall Goldsmith, author, speaker, and coach).


What your people want you to do
People respond to what we do, not to what we know.  Knowing might help us understand and accept, but what we do is what impacts others.

Start, stop and continue – the good, the bad, and the better.  If you want to get more out of your term and you don’t have resources, you have to connect your staff to a higher calling of our work.





GETTING READY
STEP 1: TARGETING THE CORE OF YOUR TEAM
What you focus on expands.  What we focus on, think about, look at, listen to, and involve in, will grow and expand within our lives.  A high potential employee is usually defined as an individual who has been identified as having what it takes to move up into more senior roles and responsibilities.

Motivation is intrinsic.  It’s inside of us.  It’s very difficult to create motivation in someone else, but you can create movement in the right direction.  Peter Drucker observed that we spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do, but we don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop doing.  So, spend 90% of your time and energy in engaging 93.2% of your people and not on the 6.8% that’s in the problematic quadrant.  Free yourself to engage the core of your team.

Potential is what is possible, what we are capable of but have not yet realized.  Initially, the purpose of identifying high-potential talent was that of helping organizations maintain their leadership pipelines the steady flow of tomorrow’s leaders.

Allow yourself the freedom to focus on the top of the curve, find the core of your team.  Davis L. Holloway, Southwest Airlines, describes core team as:
Who exhibit and demonstrate a positive and supportive attitude, whatever the context
Who appear actively engaged in contributing
Who exemplify and inspire others who are responsible for themselves
Who have a positive effect on other team members
Who populate the boss’s mental list of employees to be proud of
Who exhibit every level of readiness for different objectives

Timothy Srock (Vice president of human resource, McLaren Regional Medical Centre) and Troy Van Hausen (director of human resources, The Maschhoffs) also has their own understanding, identifying, and engaging the core of the teams.  To them, complexity makes it tough on the leader, and understanding and engaging that core of the team is essential today.

Identifying a team’s core is about establishing the expectations first and then applying them to the people you have in place, people come and go, but the standard and consistency is the key to a team’s core,

Everyone is created equally.  But not every role is created equal.  Not every role drives the same value.  Identify those critical roles that really drive heavy value.  Then start to identify in your core team who really drives the values, and the secondary roles that protect the wealth.  To be effective as leaders, we need to understand the roles we fill, as well as the people in them.

Identify the individuals by:
i. Look at the product of their work.  Core members produce and their output is measurable.
ii. Disproportionate influence.  The people who are the core of the team are the people who others go to.  People come to them because they are strong at what they do, and they’re respected.
iii. Members of the core of a team want to learn.  Engaged human beings are always looking to do more, learn more. And expand their boundaries.

The jobs, the roles themselves are evolving.  The role can move from wealth-gathering to wealth-protecting.  We need both direct-to-value and support-to-value roles.  Core team members embrace the rush, the evolution.

If you want to create capacity without headcount, stop spending your ‘mental shelf space’ and emotional energy at the two ends of the normal bell curve.  Start leading at the top of the curve, the core of the team, and continue embracing the evolution of your role.



STEP 2: PREPARING TO LEAD IN THE MOMENT
Your interactions in the moment are what turn on added effort.  You can best prepare yourself to be more effective in the moment by making sure you fully understand the dynamics of human interaction by getting to know a simple anatomy of communications.  Anatomy is the science or study of structure.

In high-stress environments, how we approach challenges typically predicts the outcome.  Our approach governs where we end up, and the mind is the fastest way to travel.  Related factors to be considered:
What we think, especially about ourselves, can intensify the stress we experience from other sources
Emotions are even worse when we begin something we’ve never tried before
The law of cause and effect operates in our lives
What we believe are whatever dominates our thinking will result in interpersonal experience that reflect those patterns
Think positively
Recognize old ineffective patterns and have the awareness not to give them new life
We are what we repeatedly think and do
Being engulfed by a situation over which you seen to lack control can create a strong sense of helplessness
Improvement and growth are always gradual
Reframing your habits of thought about communication in general and business communication in particular.

The consensus seems to be that about 70% of who we are is nurture (by environmental influences, by what happens to us) and 30% nature (by our genetic hardwiring).  In other words, 70% of who we are is made up of environmentally conditioned traits (hoe our life has formed us) and only 30% is made up of the genetically inherited traits beyond our control.



STEP 3: KNOW YOUR COMMUNICATION STYLE
While people are generally aware that they have communication strengths that govern their everyday behavior or communication style, they are often not aware that these communication styles are well defined, even obvious, and they produce specific and unique profile patterns.  Communication style model will reveal the standard of validity and reliability which will measure more than just assertiveness and responsiveness.  Depending on the intensity, communication strength will control your attitude, action, and responses up to 60% of the time.

Understanding the characteristics of the 4 primary strengths of communication will reflect how you think, understand, relate, and come across to others thus giving you tremendous value.
Communication Strengths
The Decision Strength
(Dominance/ Non Dominance)
Dominant or Controlling person
-       Result oriented
-       Primarily concerned with getting things done
-       Hard-driving and to the point
-       Dislike indecisiveness
-       Appear outwardly secure
-       Are innovative, venturesome, ingenious, big-picture oriented
-       Sometimes abrasive
-       Trouble shooters, decisive, risk-takers


Non Dominant or Cooperative person
-       Non-threatening way of working with others
-       Not forcefully demanding
-       Seldom impose upon others
-       Mild-mannered, composed, and often modest
-       Decision makers
-       Appreciate input from others before making decisions
-       Genuinely prefer input from others

The People Strength
(Extroversion/ Ambiversion/ Introversion)
Extrovert or Outgoing Person
-       People oriented
-       Friendly, pleasant, persuasive, emphatic, enthusiastic, talkative, stimulating, motivating, and optimistic
-       Good mixers and good coordinator
-       Likes to be with and influence people
-       Are verbal
-       Dracon to others


Ambiverts (The Center point of the Dimension of Extroversion)
-       Can move easily between seeking to be with others to just being by themselves to think things over or to communicate one on one


Introverted or Reserved
-       Selective in whom they place their trust
-       Take greater care in protecting their private life
-       Prefer not to speak without weighing the potential consequences
-       Are creative
-       Have an individualistic side
-       Tend to be contemplative
-       Enjoy quiet
-       Do not need others around for self-fulfilling activities

The Pace Strength
(Patience/ Impatience)
Patient or Paced Individual
-       Relaxed, easy going, steady, amiable, warm, dependent, sincere, likeable, and a good listener
-       Likes peace and harmony
-       Likes to be cooperative
-       Likes to save time
-       Likes time to adjust changes
-       Their first answer is typically not their best answer
-       Simply prefer time to think things over before answering


Impatient or Urgent person
-       Action oriented
-       Does not tolerate delays
-       Lack of adequate planning
-       Have a strong sense of urgency
-       Important for them to keep busy and have others respond quickly to them
-       They learn quickly and prefer variety
-       Seek out new, exciting situations that offer them a change of pace

The systems Strength
(Conformity/ Non-Conformity)
Conformist or Systematic Person
-       Will be careful, accurate, precise, thorough, skillful, dependable, meticulous, conservative, prudent, anxiety prone, worried, sensitive to criticism, and a perfectionist
-       Liking details and systems
-       Prefers to work systematically
-       Wants outcomes to be correct
-       Wants to be fair


Non-Conformist or Independent person
-       Generalist orientation to life
-       Tendency to avoid or delegate detail work
-       Usually are uninhibited and candid
-       Relate well to activities that take them out of ordinary or prescribed situations
-       Want freedom and minimal controls
-       Can be resistant to controls
-       Will tend to rationalize



The autonomy of communication variables comprises of how we make decisions, our need for people, our sense of urgency, and our attention to detail.  You can tell a lot about someone just by having the ‘autonomy’ to go on; dominance, extroversion, patience (pace) and conformity.

Tips for leaders on communication
(from C.D. “Hoop” Morgan
Founder and Chairman of Forte Institute
In Wilmington, North Carolina)
i. listen
ii. practice situational awareness
iii. stop assuming
iv. not passing judgement without data
v. developing the ability to adapt with agility



To be continued….part 3


BRING OUT THE BEST IN EVERY EMPLOYEE - PART 1

SHORT NOTES FROM:
BRING OUT THE BEST IN EVERY EMPLOYEE
Don Brown and Bill Hawkins
Mcgraw Hill (200 pages)


INTRODUCTION
Image result for cartoon new technology
CartoonStock

Leadership is essentially the process of:
           Influence
          Getting someone else to do something and feel good                 about it
          Bringing out the best in every employee

A powerful leader’s protocol will be learning to be present to meet the team’s needs for communication, feedback, and autonomy.  To equip, you need to know the 5H1H:
         What your people want                            – The Source
         Why the need of protocol for leadership  – The Setting
         What element that trumps all others      – The x-Factor
         What’s in it for everyone                         – The Return          What need to be done                               – The Way
         How to succeed                                        – The Fuel

Leading today is very different from the way it was.  A culture of never-ending change has settled upon us.  The entire world is on a change curve.  That’s why the need for leader’s protocol.

Empathy means that others believe that you understand and that you care.  Simply understanding, both intellectually and emotionally, and caring about their circumstances is directly connected to how engaged they become in performing for you.

The return on bringing out the best in others is directly correlated with the output of your team.  It is about creating capacities without additional headcount.  In order to get the return, you need to be able to be present.

The fuel for effective leadership is generating and focusing your passion for what you do as a leader.  There is a lot you can’t control today in your organizational environment.  But you can control your thoughts, your feelings and your conduct.  Be happy and passionate about what you do as a leader.





A NEW ERA
Image result for cartoon new technology
Toonpool

Change that was once seen as a well-deserved realignment of an antiquated rust belt or dot-com paradigms now bleed over.  So there is no-normal.  Understanding is the first step towards acceptance and adaptation.

NO-NORMAL VARIABLES
GROWTH
There is a great deal of growth taking place.  Growth no longer takes the form of simply striving for more of everything.
Growth can mean a shift in complexity.  Growth can be seen as dynamic movement from one stage or form to another.

In a no-normal state, growth often means consolidation, organizations still become larger.
A final manifestation of growth is to increase in efficiency and complexity.  The work we have to do is growing.  More with less is a very real mantra for just about everyone.

Aby ‘right-sizing’ of the workforce is a balancing act of capacity with current demand.  Our labor force is becoming smaller but more efficient.

Growth is a significant part of a no-normal economy.  It’s just a new kind of growth.  It comes in new forms.  It causes jobs to expand, not the workforce.  It demands a significant increase in personal capacity with personal capacity with a zero increase in headcount.

CHANGE
Change essentially means ‘to make different.’  Change has been a huge part of our professional lives.  Two (2) very important lessons about change in a no-normal world:
      i.        It’s an interactive global curve
    ii.        It’s an externalization of events (things happening to us)

The nature of change has morphed into one everyday occurrence.  It’s also happening outside in.  The pace of change is so rapid that a cumulative effect of change has kicked in.

RELATION-SHIPS
People are waiting to be engaged.  They are waiting to give more discretionary performance.  We can get significant increases in capacity without adding numbers.


Technology has played the single largest role in this no-normal era.  It has transformed our very lives.  We are all connected.  The general purpose of software application has been to save time and increase productivity.  The development of software was designed to make our lives easier and more efficient.  This new era has added a new role for technology’s integration into our lives: entertaining and connecting us.

Organizations have off-loaded work, in many cases, as a cost-cutting strategy.  The integration of hardware and NetWare comes at a cost.  The more we connect electronically, the less we connect personally.  We are losing the ability to connect with each other.

The important issue here is the loss of the empathic connection.  Empathy is the direct identification with another person’s situation, feelings, and motives.  Be understanding and sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another person.  The basic connection of understanding and caring about another human being is a prerequisite to understanding what drives another person’s intentions and motivations.

With the adoption of rightsizing as a survival strategy, organization loyalty to the employee became a thing of the past.  The lifelong relationship between an organization and its employees is gone.  Individual loyalty to the employer has also taken the same hit.  Loyalty in any relationship is always a two way street.

The rule of engagement spells out the appropriate actions in the course of duties.  Engagement matters: how to engage with employees and how they can engage themselves.  In most circles, employees’ engagement is defined in emotional terms:
        How they feel about their boss
        The amount of trust and confidence they have in their              leader
        A reflection of their emotional attachment to their work.


Factors that drives engagement:
Feedback and dialogue with the boss
The quality of working relationships
The perception that a leader lives the organization’s values, not just recites them


To increase the odds of riding out the perfect storm of leadership:
        Hear what your people want you to know, but have been              reluctant to say to you
        Receive the best of thousands of live suggestions on what            to do to engage them
        Learn how to target your efforts
       Master the power of being present with others, to rescue               dying empathy
       Take home a protocol for leading in the moment and                   finding the energy to do it.



To be continued….part 2