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

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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

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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