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)

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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