I thought I’d mention a couple of his ten [...]]]> I read an interesting column today, 2011 could mark beginning of true recovery, by local author Jerry Thurber.  He’s talking specifically about the employment background checking industry, but when it comes to recovery, this clearly applies to all the corporate customers which will hire companies such as his.

I thought I’d mention a couple of his ten points:

Turnover is going to go up big time. Employees are itching to move around. As the economy starts to create demand, people are going to move around more. Face it – many of you have been making life miserable for your employees these last two years. It is payback time.

This reinforces what I’ve been talking about, that there are a WHOLE LOT of disenfranchised employees that are looking to change jobs.  Maybe you’ll get good people from your competitors in exchange for those you lose, and that can even be a good thing.

To a limited extent.

When you lose a critical mass of your top performers, you may have lost your business.  Your expertise is in your people.

And following the above, there’s another important point:

Fraud and abuse will increase. This is a tough one for me to even write down, but it is going to happen. Traditional mores that keep fraud and abuse at bay have unraveled somewhat these last two years. Workplace instances of fraud will increase.

When employees don’t feel like they’ve been treated fairly and respected by their employers, they no longer have the same bond of civility.  And this is something you can’t effectively address through rules and policing.  Sure, some of that might be necessary, but in the end, if your employees don’t feel fairly treated, they’ll find ways to subvert the rules and damage the business.

The path out of this is to focus on rebuilding trust.  It’ll take a long time, a lot of concerted effort, but it’s the only way.

Give your employees reasons to want to stay, to contribute, and to grow.  They’ll stay.

The problem is that it’s not true.

Read more on my Small [...]]]> There’s a simple formula to business success: Do what your customers say they want, they’ll reward you with money, and everybody will be satisfied.

The problem is that it’s not true.

Read more on my Small Fish blog»

I have just signed up with a coaching services firm, Small Fish Business Coaching, based in Australia.  This is a huge leap forward for me and my business, because I’m moving away from working totally on my own, to being in partnership with [...]]]> I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog recently, but there’s a good reason.

I have just signed up with a coaching services firm, Small Fish Business Coaching, based in Australia.  This is a huge leap forward for me and my business, because I’m moving away from working totally on my own, to being in partnership with a rapidly growing group that is intent on improving the plight of small business owners, one at a time.

It also means that I’ve tightened my focus from being all businesses – really much too broad – to be on small businesses.  That would typically be smaller than 50 employees or $20M in revenue.

I completed my training, I’m getting my business cards printed later today, I’m now listed on the Small Fish websites in both Australia and the US, I took care of state registration and other logistics, and I’m cranking away on spreading the word.

There’s a lot to do, but I can already see progress.  This is a new, exciting phase to my career!

There’s a couple of requests I’d like to make to you:

If you’re a small business owner in Northern Colorado, or know small business owners who really want to improve the state of their business, please let me know.  I have a powerful process which can help a business owner improve profits, customer satisfaction, employee motivation, and personal balance.

If you’re a business coach, and you’re looking to team up with people who have a powerful process and great marketing, then you might want to check out Small Fish.  They’re looking for great coaches in the US, especially.  I’d be happy to provide you an introduction and answer any questions you might have about how I selected them.

And if you want to get a copy of the Small Fish e-mail newsletter, just let me know.

A recent [...]]]> I read an interesting article in the Financial Times today entitled Flexible Leaders Reap Reward of Trust. This reinforces what I’ve been talking about with the connection between leadership skill and employee engagement.  This is based on a study from the Institute of Leadership and Management, a London-based organization which supports the development of leaders.

A recent survey of 5,000 employees shows a strong correlation between management actions in recent years and the trust of employees.  Those leaders who chose to employ the most draconian downsizings resulted in extraordinarily low trust levels.

“This isn’t just nice to have – it oils well-run organisations. If you have got high credit in the bank you will be able to confront change in a way that does not erode organisational performance.”

People avoid organizations which they don’t trust, because there’s so much investment of time and energy.  I might feel free to buy toilet paper from almost any company, whether I trust them or not, because it’s just a transaction and there’s not much at stake.  But I’m going to avoid employers that I don’t trust, because I’m investing my career, my reputation, and short and long term satisfaction.  Not to mention my earning potential for the rest of my life.

This was brought home to me recently by some local job postings that I saw.  There was a small comment offered by a reader which said, “This company has been known to post jobs that aren’t really open.”

Do you see the damage which might be done by that one comment?  This is from an independent party – a job hunter – who might be seen as somewhat credible.  Since job applications can take a lot of time and effort, the most capable people might decide to look elsewhere.  And this might turn into a rumor that has a life of its own.

Trust is hard to build, but easy to destroy.

Back to the study mentioned above:  When employees don’t trust the leadership of the company,

• They’re not going to invest as much personal energy into their jobs;
• They’re going to look for opportunities to move elsewhere; and
• They’re going to be slow to follow changes in direction, not trusting the longevity of the decision.

Trust is intimately tied with employee engagement.  If you’re not working to rebuild trust after the tough decisions you’ve had to make, rest assured that your competitors are.

Why can’t we all just get along?

But the challenge here is to distinguish two ideas which tend to get muddled together:

We often [...]]]> I ran across an interesting HBR article today entitled “Is Your Culture Too Nice?“  It’s pretty thought-provoking, because I’ve become accustomed to polite work cultures, feeling uncomfortable with those which are more confrontational.

Why can’t we all just get along?

But the challenge here is to distinguish two ideas which tend to get muddled together:

We often equate Competitive with Combative, Friendly with Cooperative.  But as we see here, there are actually mixtures of the ideas which end up being quite useful.

Normally, we think of competitiveness as structured in win/lose terms.  But there’s also some interesting territory in the upper right of this diagram, which is being competitive without some of the negative attributes.  Suppose you have two marketing teams, each looking to outdo each other in creatively bringing customers in the door.  This can be structured as a win-win relationship, where they’re not competing against each other for critical resources, but still look to each other as benchmarks of excellence.  In an ideal situation, you’re totally open and honest with the teams so they know exactly how this is win-win, but still competition.

I’d like to talk about the lower left quadrant as well, which is some of what the HBR article alludes to.  When people are “cooperative” on the surface but actually are combative in their behaviors, you see all forms of unethical, even illegal, dysfunction.  As a leader of an organization like this, you might think that you’ve achieved alignment and compliance, but will then be surprised at the degree to which people undermine your results.

Unfortunately, a lot of employees feel pushed into this quadrant because they’re terrified of losing their jobs, but don’t have any other reason to make strong contributions.  They’ll be cooperative on the surface, but may have sabotaging behaviors under that.  Perhaps you’ve had deep doubts about your own security, and wondered whether it might have impacted your true effectiveness and value to the organization.

In my previous career, we sometimes had interesting discussions about whether the company was in the lower right hand quadrant or upper right.  Had we become so nice and friendly with each other that we’d forgotten that we were facing tough conditions out there in the market?  One of the ways to create a healthier environment was to create a friendly internal competition that reflected the outward reality, based on a win-win attitude of striving for high standards and market leadership.

When it worked, it was spectacular.  But it took constant vigilance by courageous leaders to maintain the right balance.

Granted, there are many different kinds of “doing.”

For some kinds of jobs, progress can be measured in discussions held and decisions made.  This is [...]]]> When it comes down to it, your employees want to spend their days doing useful things.  People can only exist in a limbo of inaction for so long, and then they become restless.

Granted, there are many different kinds of “doing.”

For some kinds of jobs, progress can be measured in discussions held and decisions made.  This is one of the adjustments that many people have to make when they are promoted into their first management job:  Instead of directly delivering results, the job is to make decisions and support others who are making the “useful” contributions.

But management itself is a useful job, just in a different way.  It’s all about organizing, clarifying, communicating, and deciding.  “Fluffy” stuff to those who don’t understand how hard this can be.

One of your jobs as a leader is to set tangible goals for your people, then work with them to help them understand and be motivated by the value that this provides for customers, for partners, for the business.  You want to help them be so excited by what they’re delivering that they’ll take the initiative to do even more of it, more efficiently, and with greater value.

This is what makes your group an engine of value and profit.

Of course there may be people who can never really get excited about the value that you’re defining.  It’s just human nature: different people like different things.  In this case, you have a fundamental choice:  Either help move them into a situation which is better suited to their desires, adapt the job more to their personal goals, or find a complementary statement of “value” which is more to their liking.

Let me give you an example.  Joe worked for me in a group which developed a particular software product.  He was pretty good at that development, but it wasn’t a very motivating result.  But I needed his skills, and didn’t want to move him to another group just because of this.  Instead, through several discussions, we discovered that he really got turned on by seeing customers who were satisfied with his work.  So I was able to build more customer contact into his job – he led the team’s efforts in tracking customer quality.  A couple of years later, having learned this about himself, he moved into a career path which was exclusively focused on customer service.

It’s important to point out that Joe was quite effective at software development, but not because that activity was fun for him.  For him, it was the means to an end of being able to be energized by customers who would be using the software he developed.  But that was quite OK for me and him – we both got what we wanted, with passion, energy, and high productivity.

How can you help your people to understand and get inspired by the value they provide?

I just had to share this quote with you today, as it’s so appropriate for what we’ve been talking about with engaging your employees with their work.

What would cause an employee [...]]]>

Engagement comes from the combination of investing one’s passion and energies plus the trust that those energies will not be in vain.
- Jeff Rogers

I just had to share this quote with you today, as it’s so appropriate for what we’ve been talking about with engaging your employees with their work.

What would cause an employee to trust that their work won’t be in vain?

A lot of trust comes from the relationship that you have, personally, with your employees, plus other leaders, managers and supervisors in your organization.  In general, the trust required is going to be proportional to the amount of contact that employee has with each person in authority, plus the amount of control they perceive that each authority figure has in their lives.

Imagine a company with six levels of management, from the CEO down to the front line supervisor.  The front line employee will likely have the most contact with their direct supervisor, and a lot of their job satisfaction is going to come from a belief that the supervisor is looking out for their best interest, protecting them, judging performance honestly, and giving them useful tasks.

But it may well be that the decisions about pay raises comes from the second level manager.  So that employee will also need to develop some trust of THAT manager as well – not only on receiving pay raises (which may be quite rare these days!) but also based on leadership qualities, listening, and fairness.  As with all trust, it takes a long time to grow, and a remarkably short time to destroy.

For many employees, the level of trust they require of the CEO will be relatively small.  They want to trust the executives not to run the company into the ground and to develop a corporate culture which supports their needs, but that’s not as deep as the day-to-day interactions with one’s immediate bosses.