Susan Scott's Blog, page 88

Fierce Resources: 8 Ways to Successfully Manage a Multi-Generational Workforce

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the work intelligent.ly website and was written by David Raymond, a Practice Manager at Ricoh’s Output & Distribution Consulting Practice.

8 Ways to Successfully Manage a Multi-Generational Workforce gives insightful tips on how to engage the different generations represented within your organization. The truth is, we’re more alike than we are dissimilar. The goal for leaders is to encourage conversations among the different generations, and to realize that what motivates one might not motivate the other.

“At Ricoh, the development of a successful multi-generational workforce is a key priority. That’s why we have built an entire corporate council, known as the Generational Diversity Council, around the idea of attracting and retaining the best talent, making strategic investments to foster a mobile workforce; and most importantly, striving to become a preferred employer for workers of all generations.”

To read the full article, click here.

Get Results by Building More Effective Relationships

Next week Fierce will join GAMA International for their annual Leaders and Management Programs (LAMP) conference in Nashville, Tennessee. GAMA’s goal as an organization is to support and professionally develop field leaders in the insurance and financial services industry.

A challenge facing many leaders within the insurance and financial services industry, and most industries for that matter, is recruiting, maintaining, and sustaining relationships with employees.

Many insurance and financial service organizations have dispersed workforces and keeping the lines of communication open between the field offices and the corporate office can be difficult. Finding the balance between autonomy and alignment is a tricky one, and sometimes it can lead to top talent looking elsewhere.  Add in to the mix that many field leaders are leading a multi-generational workforce and recruitment becomes a burning issue.

In Fierce Generations, a major focus of the training is understanding what motivates people. When leaders learn how to leverage their team’s diversity and identify what the driving needs are, it can help everyone better understand what each employee really needs in order to feel engaged and fulfilled.

By supporting leaders to have these types of conversations with their staff, the organization is taking a stronger position with the growth of the company. It’s leveraging the talent it has in the room in order to get the results it needs and wants.

To further the conversation, are you going to be LAMP?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Bridge the Generation Gap

Chances are you work closely with someone who is of a different generation than you. Maybe he or she is your boss or your newest hire. Regardless, if they’re on your team or you work directly with them, your relationship with said person(s) directly impacts your results.

So how do you think you do at building relationships with people of a different generation than you?

I’ve always done really well connecting with colleagues who are almost exactly my age or those in the Boomer age range. My values, how I see the world, and what we think is funny or interesting often times seems to be the same. And yet, do I work with people much younger than me or Gen X’ers? Yes.

The reality is that it’s important to be self-aware about who you form relationships with more organically and who you need to be more intentional with. It’s easy to dismiss an entire generation with broad stereotypes to get out of having to put some work behind building a relationship. And yet, is that going to help you be effective or get the results you want?

What I’ve come to find out in my own practice of seeking out those who are different than me is, that in fact, I’m a lot more like them than I am dissimilar. Many times it was easier than I originally thought.

So how will you bridge the generation gap this week?

Fierce Resources: 10 Tips For Recognizing Employees

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the boston.com website and was written by Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce, a Southborough-based company that specializes in workplace recognition solutions.

10 Tips For Recognizing Employees provides practical and easy to use tips to let your employees know that you see their hard work and appreciate them. These tips are beneficial not only for celebrating your employees for National Employee Appreciation Day but for all year.

“March 7 is Employee Appreciation Day. This day encourages all employers, managers and CEOs to focus attention on the efforts of all employees, in all industries and thank them for their hard work. While the ways that companies choose to appreciate their employees may vary widely, Southborough-based Globoforce, which specializes in social recognition solutions in the workplace, encourages all companies to appreciate and recognize their employees not just one day, but every day.”

To read the full article, click here.

Training vs. Learning – An Event vs. a Process

Each month Fierce gathers together as an organization to share what has impacted us over the month. It’s a time to reconnect and re-energize. This week our training department talked about their deep passion for how, at its core, Fierce is not a training company – it’s a learning company.

So what’s the difference?

Training is an event; learning is a process.

The reality is when organizations expect one or two days of training to magically transform their cultures, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment. True behavior change happens when the heads and hearts of learners are engaged both in the classroom and beyond.

Below are three easy ways to continue your employees learning post-training.

#1 Ask for Commitment

You can’t ask someone to change their behavior and learn new habits if there is no interest. So if you’re bringing training, ask what type of training your employees want to receive and then get a commitment on how they’ll use the training. Some of our clients ask each learner to pick an accountability partner and commit to reporting out once a month on how they are using Fierce and its impact. Each partner is responsible for sending the other’s response to their Learning and Development department.

#2 Provide Examples

Learning can be like one of those eye spy pictures, where you don’t see the image until someone points it out to you, and then it becomes so obvious. Perhaps your learners want to take their new knowledge and flex their new muscle, yet they are drawing a blank on where they can do that in the “real” world. Provide a list of meetings or pieces of the business that the training should start to impact. This way you know the learning is being applied to areas that matter to the business and your employees don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

#3 Identify Champions

There are always those employees that pick something up quickly or have passion around a specific type of learning . Identify who your champions are and leverage their enthusiasm and skill to keep the learning going. It’s not about playing favorites but rather allowing those who are taking the material and running with it to blaze the trail. Give them opportunities to share their wins and their struggles. By providing a platform for their voice, you keep the learning going for everyone.

How do you continue the learning?

Fierce Tip of the Week: Say Thanks!

 

This week, Friday March 7th, is Employee Appreciation Day. It’s your chance, as a leader, to say thank you and have fun with your employees by sharing what you appreciate about each of them and the team.

The reality is you should be having these types conversations year round with your employees. If you only say thanks once a year, no matter how cool a perk you offer, you really won’t build any trust or deepen the relationship. The goal should be for the conversations that happen on Employee Appreciation Day to feel like any other day at the office – your leader notices your hard work and says thank you.

This week have fun and show your appreciation in a thoughtful way that will mean something to your team, and continue to say thanks by keeping the conversation going all year around.

Fierce Resources: What Motivates Us at Work? 7 Fascinating Studies That Give Insights

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the TED blog and explores Dan Ariely’s TED talk: What makes us feel good about our work?

What motivates us at work? 7 fascinating studies that give insights breaks apart Dan Ariely’s fascinating TED talk which details seven studies about how we feel at work, what makes us happy, feel appreciated, and motivates us. He challenges commonly held beliefs about what drives people and where they gain the most satisfaction.

“When you look carefully at the way people work, he says, you find out there’s a lot more at play—and a lot more at stake—than money. In his talk, Ariely provides evidence that we are also driven by meaningful work, by others’ acknowledgement and by the amount of effort we’ve put in: the harder the task is, the prouder we are.”

To read the full article, click here. To watch the TED talk, click here.

How Conversations Support Your Safety Plan

“Tressie Armstrong is a shining star, a model for how to build a strong, trusting school community that can and will do the right thing should the worst thing imaginable occur. When bad things happen, it is too late to talk. Armstrong started early.” — Susan Scott

The reality of the world we currently live in is that a school needs to have safety plan. It’s no longer a nice to have, and instead, it is a must. Educators are faced with asking themselves incredibly difficult questions; what happens when the unthinkable becomes reality? When the unimaginable is happening to your students and teachers? How do we support the individuals, the school, and the community to cope with the aftermath?

At the core of any solid safety plan are the relationships of the people who will execute on it. Strong relationships in that school and community before the crisis happen are critical.

For one California principal, Tressie Armstrong, this was never more true than when a lone gunman hopped a fence and opened fire on 250 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders on the playground of Kelly Elementary school. In the most recent Learning Forward, JSD Article, Tressie recounts her story and shares how the honest and courageous conversations she had before the event, and the relationships that had been built prior, directly impacted the healing of that community.

“During this very intense time, we had to rely on relationships built ahead of time, not only with each other, but also with first responders and district leaders. We were in this together, standing side by side with each other to move through the turmoil. While we were in lockdown, one father, waiting in the neighboring park to receive updates as the situation unfolded, texted me to ask, “I know you have my son safe. How can I help YOU?” I asked him to begin organizing people in the park and help calm the parents waiting there.”

As an educator,  is your school having the conversation?

To read Tressie Armostrong’s full Learning Forward, JSD article, click here.

Fierce Tip of the Week: Respect Others

This week Fierce joins the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) community at their 12th Annual Northwest Conference in Portland, Oregon. PBIS’s mission is to provide a framework; it helps focus the conversation on the positive behavioral outcomes we want for our next generation. It involves schools, families, and their communities together.

A concept that is talked a lot about within the PBIS community is respect. How do we learn to respect others? How do we learn to respect ourselves?

The most simplistic answer is that it starts with how we talk with one another. How we are present with one another? To achieve positive relationships into adulthood, we must teach our children the concept of respect from birth and continue to add to the conversation as they enter school and beyond. 

This week, as adults, think about the concept of respect. How do you show others that you respect them? What kind of conversations do you have to have in order to build a respectful relationship?

Then ask yourself: Am I doing this with my children?

Fierce Resources: Mentoring as a Leadership Development Tool

This week’s Fierce Resource was first published on the Training Magazine website and was written by Douglas F. Dell, SVP e-learning Services, of the Crawford & Company.

Mentoring as a Leadership Development Tool explores the Crawford Mentoring Model and provides actionable next steps, around 5 areas, on how to begin to use mentoring as a leadership development tool.

“How do you improve an emerging leader’s knowledge, networking savvy, and perspective of an organization? The answer is mentoring. By identifying learning goals, leveraging relationships, encouraging active participation, and measuring results, a mentoring program that draws on your existing pool of talent can provide a solution no classroom can deliver. When a recent hire or veteran employee enters a new organization, the speed with which they assimilate by gaining knowledge, building relationships, and applying prior learning to their new environment creates human capital ROI.”

To read the full article, click here.