Susan Scott's Blog, page 113

Why Building Trust is the Most Important Job for Managers

Companies spend a lot of time and money training managers on their day-to-day responsibilities, with the focus being on the end result and the goals they need to hit.

In turn, they believe that this type of development supports managers to build the trust necessary to accomplish their goals.

Unfortunately, trust is not built by just crossing your “T’s” and dotting your “I’s”. Successful organizations know they need their managers to cultivate relationships on behalf of the company by building trust with the employees, other colleagues, and the customers.

So how do your managers build that necessary level of trust so that those relationships become the workhorses for your organization?

By having conversations that are open, authentic, and keep the health of the relationship in mind.

Managers have to remember every interaction matters. There is no such thing as a trivial comment.

If a company isn’t experiencing the overall success it wants, perhaps it’s time to look at the bigger picture. Go beyond the symptoms of the problem and look at the root cause.

No doubt hitting metrics is an important part of the job, and the only way for a company to hit those metrics is with an engaged and thriving workforce.

This requires the organization to ask itself: Has management built trust among the employees? Are people engaged and collaborating with one another? Is there rapport among managers? Are your customers benefiting from the relationships established within your organization?

If the answer is no, it’s time to evaluate how you move forward.

Now it’s time to ask: Are we providing our managers with all the skills necessary to get the results we need?

Bottom line, effective organizations support manager’s by providing development that helps them learn how to have authentic and open conversations and puts an emphasis on the human management side of their jobs.

Fierce Resources: Why We No Longer Feel Rested After Taking a Vacation

This week’s featured article was published today on the USA Today website in their Travel section.

Why We No Longer Feel Rested After Taking a Vacation, by Jayne Clark highlights the findings of a Fierce, Inc. study done this past spring.

Fierce surveyed 1,000 executives and employees in multiple fields, including finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, education, and defense. The survey uncovers that vacations tend to fail in delivering any stress-relieving benefits.

Other findings highlighted in the USA Today article from the Fierce, Inc. survey:

– 41.6 % of workers check in with the office at least every other day.

– 6.5 % check in multiple times per day while on vacation.

– Only 25.8% of respondents completely pull the plug on office contact while vacationing.

To read the full article click here.

 

Fierce Tip of the Week: Collaborate Often

This week’s tip is to look at how you can break down communication barriers and instead collaborate often.

At Fierce, we conducted a leadership development study (results featured in our Fierce Whitepaper: Six Key Trends of Employee Engagement), with over 1,400 corporate executives, educators, and individual contributors across multiple industries.

We found that at the heart of employee engagement is effective and frequent communication. Not surprisingly, this type of communication can’t happen if an organization has a non-collaborative mentality.

For example, 98% polled believed a leader’s decision-making process should include input from the people impacted by the decision. However, 40% polled feel leaders and decision makers consistently fail to ask.

Leaders who make decisions in a vacuum and don’t collaborate with their teams set the tone for how employees treat each other. If you’re in a management role, take this week to move away from this old school style of leading and instead engage those around you.

You might be surprised by the domino effect it has and how much easier it makes your job. You can inherently make better decisions.

Don’t sell yourself or your organization short: collaborate more and more. It can be a game changer.

Fierce Resources: Honesty IS the Best Policy

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Fierce blog and was written by Fierce CEO & President, Halley Bock.

Having open communication is critical to the success of a company and directly affects the ability to innovate. This week on the Fierce blog we’ve focused on the power of thinking outside the box and bringing those new ideas to your organization.

Honesty IS the Best Policy, reinforces the benefits of open feedback.

“Companies that foster and encourage honest feedback make more money than companies who don’t. Period. That’s the assertion Corporate Executive Board makes in their recent study shared by Harvard Business Review. They found that organizations who rated highly in the area of open communication delivered a 10-year TSR (total shareholder return) of 7.9% compared to 2.1% at other companies. That’s impressive.”

To read the full blog click here.

How to Propose a New Idea in a Closed Environment

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” -Steve Jobs

Anyone can be a leader within an organization. Whether or not your role has the “leader” title assigned to it, you can be someone on the forefront innovating.

Organizations that encourage everyone, from individual contributors, managers, all the way up to the CEO, to take on a leadership mindset create cultures that don’t settle.

Few companies are really in this place. Many choose to abide by an old rank and file hierarchy that squashes creativity and inevitably disengaging employees.

So what can you do if you work inside a culture where new ideas are not welcomed? Do you have to accept it for what it is and keep your creativity to yourself?

No.

The beauty of culture is that it is made up of the people who inhabit it. Meaning, everyone impacts how things operate, not just those at the top.

Here are three tips to propose new ideas in a less than open environment:

Tip #1: Lead by Example

This isn’t a blog that encourages you to throw caution to the wind and break the rules of your company. However, there are probably unwritten cultural norms that keep people from fully coming forward and innovating. These issues can range from not bringing up a perspective in a meeting because you don’t want to rock the boat to continuing a process that is outdated only because it is the way things have always been done.

Take this opportunity to start small and be the change you want to see. If you own a responsibility and you have an idea of a better way of doing it – do it. Try it out and create some metrics for yourself to see if it really does improve results. Keep track of those metrics and after a month show it to your supervisor, pointing out how your new idea has worked.

Tip #2: Use Your Voice

A leadership mindset is not for the faint-hearted. It takes courage to put yourself out there and be the one who speaks to an issue. The reward is that you directly impact how things happen and become a more active participant within your company.

If you’re in a meeting, use your voice. If someone has a different opinion than you about a topic, don’t sit there and internally stew about it. Voice your concerns and throw your own idea in the ring. If you’re not invited into the decision making process and you have a strong opinion, even if it goes against everything your culture stands for, set up a time to speak with leaders and express your concern.

Make it clear that you understand it’s ultimately their decision, and you hoped to just share your perspective.  This can be very scary and not easy to do. However, it shows others within your organization that you have great ideas and that you care.

Tip #3: Keep Going

Let’s say you do tips one and two and have success, and you’re feeling pretty good about your job. So what’s next? Keep Going.

Let’s say you follow through with tips one and two, and it didn’t work out as well as you had hoped. You are probably slightly discouraged. What’s next? Keep Going.

The reality is being a leader isn’t a title – it’s a mentality. Innovating and thinking outside the box is a trait of productive individuals, and it takes practice.

Realize that your job satisfaction rests mostly in your own power, and that you can impact the day-to-day outcomes of your job. Even within a culture that doesn’t foster creativity, there is room for you to be creative and to lead those around you to do the same.

How do you innovate within your organization?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Think Outside the Box

It’s easy to fall into a pattern. It’s only natural to apply your knowledge of a process, that you know works, to similar projects. You might think to yourself: I know an effective way to do this, why fix something that isn’t broken?

This week’s tip is to question your processes, patterns, and ideas. Challenge yourself and those around you to think outside the box.

This can be an effective exercise whether you’re in a defined, “official” leader role or not.

Sometimes when our first instinct is to just streamline an idea, it can dampen the instinct to innovate. Thinking outside the box doesn’t mean making things more complicated. It can be as simple as getting more creative with how you spend your time in weekly meetings, how your organization handles customer service interaction, and even a new way your audience can interact with the brand of your company.

If you have an out of the box idea that you’ve been sitting with for a while, take the time this week to bring it forward.  If the opportunity to innovate this week  comes your way, call on your experience of how things have worked in the past and challenge yourself to get more creative. Suggest an idea you might not normally suggest.

What you come up with may surprise you!

 

Fierce Resource: How to (Finally) Quit Your Job

This week’s featured piece first appeared on the Harvard Blog Review Network.

It connects well with the topics we’ve been discussing all week on the Fierce blog about how and why to address difficult topics head on with open and honest communication.

How to (Finally) Quit Your Job, written by Daniel Gulati, focuses on the psychological reasons people stay in jobs that make them unhappy.

“Here’s the cold truth: Deciding you want to quit is usually just the first move in a sometimes long and arduous cerebral chess match you’ll play with yourself. The reasons that over 70% of Americans stay in jobs they hate might surprise you. I’ve found that people’s inability to quit their current roles had little to do with the perceived riskiness of their new professions, their financial situation, or general economic conditions. The real barrier for most of us is not external. It’s our own psychology: We overthink decisions, fear eventual failure, and prioritize near-term, visible rewards over long-range success.”

In this blog, he offers three takeaways discovered when conducting his research of unhappy workers. These takeaways help explain how individuals are able to overcome their physiological hurdles and leave a job they’re miserable in.

To read the full article click here.

 

 

 

3 Tips for Leaders to Address a Team Performance Issue

As a leader, ideally, you’ve built a relationship with each of your employees. You’ve swapped stories about your families, collaborated on successful work projects, and built the emotional capital necessary to have a successful team- most of the time.

However, being a leader means that sometimes you are confronted with the challenge of how to best handle delicate situations, such as addressing the performance issues of your team.

Even great teams at times, for one reason or another, don’t perform to the expected standard.

You, as a leader, may have the urge to avoid the situation and hope it goes away. The reality, though, is there are problems and the longer they go on without being talked about – the worse they will get.

Make sure to not call a team meeting if your issue is about one individual team member. Honor your team’s time by addressing issues that are relevant to the unit as a whole and save individual conversations for another time.

Below are three tips to help your team to move past their performance issue and onward.

Tip #1: Acknowledge the Issue

Like flipping on a light switch in a dark room, gather your team together and acknowledge there is an issue. In the Fierce Team Model, we teach how to conduct a Beach Ball meeting. We call it a Beach Ball meeting, because we view each employee on a team as a stripe of color – like on a beach ball. Each stripe of color represents a different perspective.

This type of meeting allows you, the leader, to create a setting where you come to the table with your team and address an issue collaboratively. This is a great way to tackle a subject like a team’s performance, because it removes the punitive feeling that is associated with this topic and encourages the team to come to a solution together.

Tip #2: Get Curious and Open it Up for Dialogue

After you call out the issue, allow each employee’s perspectives to be heard. Your goal is to facilitate this conversation by listening and helping your team solve the current challenges.

Don’t immediately dismiss an excuse, instead ask: Given our team’s goals, what can we do to achieve them? What will help us move forward?

Tip #3: Create an Action Plan

The final step is to create an action plan. Ask the team: Knowing what the team knows now, what is everyone committing to do over the next week, month, and year? Get specific! Assign responsibilities and schedule a time for everyone to reconnect on progress.

If one meeting isn’t enough to tackle the issue and you don’t have time to get to this critical step, schedule the next meeting right then. It’s also possible that some of your team members might have individual issues that don’t apply to the unit as a whole. Address their concerns by setting up a time to meet with them one-on-one and create specific next steps for them.

Addressing an issue like performance can be a hard, yet necessary, component of leadership. In the end though, addressing an issue in an open and communicative matter strengthens the relationship with individuals as well as your team as whole.

As a leader, how do you address performance issues?

 

Fierce Tip of the Week: Welcome the Chance to Unearth a “Mokita”

“Mokita”- that which everyone knows and no one speaks of.

The term “mokita” derives from The Papuans of New Guinea. In western culture, we commonly refer to these unspoken issues as “the elephant in the room” or the “800 pound gorilla”.

Whatever you call it, we universally recognize that our lives contain a certain number of things we try to ignore.

This week’s tip is to open yourself up and welcome the chance to unearth a “mokita”.

If you’re a leader within an organization, suggest having an “Annual Mokita Amnesty Day”. This would be a time where your team can get together and put words to those unspoken issues that linger in your hallways. The goal is to stay current and avoid creating an even bigger “mokita”.

It is critical before you call the meeting to ask yourself: Am I ready to hear what may come up?

If the answer is “no”, or even a very shaky “maybe”, take some serious time to examine if you want to hear the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Unearthing a “mokita” should not to be taken lightly. However, avoiding it helps no one.

If you’re questioning whether you’re ready to hear what others might say, tally for yourself how much each “hidden” truth is costing you, your team, and your company.

The Papuans of New Guinea judge the health of any community by the number of “mokitas” that exists. Leaders who have the courage to address these issues head on show that, above all else, they care most about the health of their teams.

Fierce Resource:Tackling Common Core… Collaboratively

This week’s featured piece was first published on the Education Week website on the Learning Forward PD Watch blog.

You might be familiar with the Learning Forward PD Watch blog already, as a Fierce blog partner. We currently collaborate by both contributing to their site as well as having author Stephanie Hirsch contribute regular blog posts on the Fierce blog.

In this piece, Tackling Common Core…Collaboratively, author Stephanie Hirsch highlights Douglas County School System:

“Teachers in the Douglas County School System have found a way to manage three challenges that are overwhelming many educators across the country: simultaneously implementing new teacher evaluation systems, the Common Core State Standards, and new student assessments.”

Fierce is dedicated to transforming the conversations educators are having with both each other and their students. This piece highlights that at the core of Douglas County’s success is their willingness to collaborate and communicate openly.

We chose to highlight this blog because we often hear educators through Fierce in the Schools discuss these challenges and the desire to overcome them.

To read the full blog click here.