Leaders to Leader

Eight Ways Others Evaluate Trust in Leaders

The need for trust in the workplace and communication therein is understood by many leaders to be the foundational building block of the organization. The degree of trust developed will impact employee performance and retention, the development of teams and implementation of organizational change. Irrespective of size and industry, organizations are comprised of individuals who desire the same thing: the ability to trust those they work with. People cannot trust an organization, but they can trust their superiors, employees and associates.

Issues of broken trust and personal betrayal are far from just the result of restructuring, downsizing or other major organizational events. They are the product of the numerous micro-decisions that leaders and managers make every day. When individuals do not keep agreements or remain true to their word, and do not share information or trust another employee’s judgment or competence, trust is breached. Employees develop feelings of betrayal that lead to a chain of unresolved conflicts. These unresolved conflicts build a strong sense of mistrust and disloyalty that is extremely difficult to counteract.

This is important for leaders because they are personally responsible for developing the trust needed to bind their organization together into a cohesive unit. They have the personal ability to control the series of micro-decisions that contribute to a sense of mistrust and undermine their ability to lead. With their personal words and actions, they have the power to build or destroy their employee’s faith. They are the ones who must know that every statement or decision, no matter how inconsequential it may appear at the time, has an effect on whether or not corporate goals are reached.

Feelings of broken trust and betrayal are not just the byproducts of cataclysmic organizational change. They happen every day, and are in fact so pervasive that studies conducted since the mid-1940s have consistently shown that employees seem to have higher needs for esteem, respect and self-actualization, while most employers feel concerned only for their employees’ salary and safety. This demonstrates a clear disconnect that has implications for the future of organizations.

There is an increased need for trust in organizations as the world and corporate environments continue to change. Both organizational structures and managerial practices are changing and these changes do not appear to be ending in the near term. The policies and traditions that cemented employees to a company, which they relied upon, have disappeared. They have all exacted a high price in the form of diminishing employee loyalty and trust.

Many managers and leaders will quickly attribute the lack of loyalty to employee job-hopping. Yet the 2001 Randstad North American Employee Review reported that 77% of employees polled defined success as “a long-term commitment with one company.”

The lack of trust in many work environments is pervasive. Restructuring, mergers and acquisitions have produced not only opportunity, but also uncertainty and anxiety. Individuals in the current climate feel that they are unable to trust their future, their organization or even themselves.

Leaders need to create open and flexible organizations that are able to readily adapt to rapidly changing conditions. All indications point to organizational environments becoming more complex as changes and global pressures become more intense. While this places tremendous stress on the organization, leaders must also respond to their employees’ needs in a way that honors relationships and builds trust.

Change requires organizations to become agile and flexible. This demands employees who are willing to take risks. Taking risks requires employees that are able to trust themselves, their capabilities, and decisions as well as their leaders, coworkers and organizations.

Leaders must learn to evaluate their employees to determine their capacity for trust. This means establishing a foundation for trust that demands that past unsettled conflicts be resolved before a solid foundation for trust can be built. It also means that leaders must be conscious of their daily practices that either make or break employee trust.

The dynamics of trust are complex. It takes time and effort to develop trust and one small event to lose it. Regaining lost trust, while extremely difficult, is a critical element in any relationship. By first trusting themselves and others, it is possible for leaders to then develop caring, genuine relationships and rebuild trust with their employees.

When trust is ignored, the pain and price is tremendous, as it is the key to all successful change initiatives within the organization. Without trust, change will be difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Excerpt: Building and Nurturing Trust in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Five Strategies to Build Trust

The Concept of Change Means Leaders Must Communicate

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Leadership Roles & Responsibilities: Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Negative Employee Behaviors: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

The Impact of Change on Individuals: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 26, 2013 at 10:47 am

Self-Belief Fuels a Strong Sense of Optimism

The Sheer Power of a Leader’s Personal Determination

Theodore Newton Vail –  AT&T – A Telecom Giant (1845-1921)

Do you believe in yourself, your abilities and possess the confidence to succeed in life? It is impossible to develop a high degree of confidence without first having a strong sense of self-belief. This implies knowing without a doubt that you can do it, no matter what you realistically set your mind to do. “Henry Ford had tremendous self-belief and he constantly preached on it. He would hire workers [who] didn’t know [the] understand the meaning of impossible and would keep pushing the limits of their imagination.” [1]

Without a strong sense of self-belief, Estée Lauder (Estée Lauder) would never have even taken her first steps forward. “A tireless believer in herself, in her wares, and in hard work, Lauder haunted a purchasing agent at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York’s classy department store, until she landed a small order. From there, she staked out her ever larger, ever more laden counters in the nation’s leading emporiums.” [2]

Self-belief fuels a strong sense of optimism. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) observed: “Optimism is essential when trying to do anything difficult because difficult things often take a long time. That optimism can carry you through the various stages as the long term unfolds. And it’s the long term that matters.” [3]

Self-belief and optimism provide effective leaders the means to overcome adversity and failure, as was exhibited by John Chambers (Cisco) when he saw his revenues collapse. “Cisco executives say Chambers always believed that Cisco would come out of the bust stronger. ‘We’re extremely optimistic that John Chambers will see to the success of all of us,’ says Mona Hudak, a Cisco manager. ‘We really are trying to build a great company that’s built to last,’ Chambers says.” [4]

Theodore Vail (AT&T) originally left AT&T after the initial investors did not concur with his vision of the company. After J.P. Morgan (J.P. Morgan Bank) acquired AT&T, Vail was brought back to implement his vision. “Vail’s determination and his confidence in the telephone company’s future were unshaken by the fact that the money market was dangerously sagging and recession loomed ahead.

“’When Mr. Vail came back to the telephone company as president,’ an executive at the Chicago associated company later recalled, ‘telephone men and the public generally recognized that somebody was there who not only knew the telephone business, but the world’s business, and it restored confidence.’ Vail was more than just a ‘telephone man;’ he was a knowledgeable entrepreneur, in his 20-year absence from the company, his successful business ventures had made him a millionaire several times over.” [5]

Henry Ford – Leadership Case Study (http://www.leadership-with-you.com)
Guzzardi Jr. Walter, The U.S. Business Hall of Fame (Fortune Magazine, March 14, 1988)
Walker, Rob, Jeff Bezos Amazon.com – America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs (Inc. Magazine, April 1, 2004)
Maney Kevin, Chambers, Cisco Born Again (USA Today, January 21, 2004)
Fry Annette R., Man of Decision (Bell Telephone Magazine, March-April 1975)

Excerpt: Great! What Makes Leaders Great, What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI, 2011) Read a FREE Chapter.

Your Commitment to Others Defines You as a Leader

Your Personal Vision Anchors You to Weather Your Storms

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 25, 2013 at 10:29 am

Posted in Beliefs, Leadership, Optimism

Tagged with Amazon, AT&T, Cisco, company, confidence, Estée Lauder, J.P. Morgan, Jeff Bezos, John Chambers, optimism, self-belief, sense of self belief, strong sense of self belief, Theodore Vail, vision

Effective Problem Solving Requires A Systematic Approach

Correctly Framing Problems Pinpoints the Right Solution

Effective problem solving in a complex world and in times of uncertainty demands a systematic approach that allows managers to be fair and consistent in the solutions they create. As both customers and employees are placed under more and more pressure to produce, problem-solving skills take on a heightened significance.

Effective problem solving requires that managers use a systematic approach rather than their intuitive judgment alone. Studies have shown that managers make more accurate judgments when they use such an approach for resolving problems and making critical decisions.

Many of the problems managers must resolve involve customers and can impact their business. The use of a systematic problem solving approach ensures that managers will consider all aspects of the issue before making decisions. Additionally, an established system is more efficient and effective than spending hours in unorganized thought considering the dimensions of an issue and creating a possible solution.

As resolving issues requires a series of determinations to arrive at a successful conclusion, it follows that successful problem solving is not possible without effective decision making. When encountering a problem the following techniques should be utilized:

Identify Primary Issues

Often problems are stated in terms describing symptoms rather than root causes. It is a common pitfall for managers to react to these symptoms and take action to resolve them without identifying their underlying causes. To avoid this misstep, managers should stand back and examine the problem to identify actual causes and the degree of difficulty involved in resolving the issue.

Identification of the primary issue is key to the rest of the resolution process. If not properly identified, the manager can waste valuable time and resources on inapplicable solutions.

Frame the Problem

Framing is another word for structuring the problem. Once the preliminary issue has been identified, framing allows the manager to structure the problem in the proper context, identifying the resources and potential solutions that may need to be employed. It should be noted that how a problem is framed does create a bias toward one solution over another. For instance, in terms of accounts, compare, “How can this problem be solved without impacting my profitability?” to “How can this problem be resolved to the customer’s complete satisfaction?” One solution is clearly customer focused while the other is internally focused. The solutions framed by both questions will produce markedly different results.

Gather Information

The third phase of problem solving is the gathering of facts and information to clearly define the extent of the problem and point to the causes. One pitfall managers must be cognizant of is not to discount information that challenges their perceptions and personal biases.

The key to information gathering is to go about it in a systematic manner that allows facts and data to be developed in an organized fashion.

Identify and Prioritize Potential Solutions

As information and data are organized, correlated and analyzed, a series of possible solutions should begin to emerge. When able, managers should use brainstorming techniques with all of the involved parties to identify several paths to take. At this point, limiting factors and other criteria should not be considered. The key is to flesh out ideas and concepts, group them and develop a final series of potential solutions to be considered.

Once the list of all potential solutions has been created, the manager should examine the feasibility of each in regard to time, cost, ease of use, satisfaction and any other important criteria. Solutions should then be ranked from best to worst.

Agree on Optimal Solution

The ideal solution is the one that is acceptable to all parties. The top one or two potential solutions should be considered and modified to meet the needs of all concerned. A win-lose solution may be expedient, but will create ill will in the long-term; as such, where possible it is always better to arrive at a win-win solution.

Assimilate Lessons

The final aspect of problem solving often overlooked by managers is the ability to assimilate the lessons learned from the situation and to refer back to those lessons when a similar problem arises.

Managers need to establish a system to learn from the results of their past decisions. This may require that they periodically spend several hours, once or twice a year, to review those decisions and their subsequent impact and ramifications on their business.

Excerpt: Problem Solving: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Leaders Need to Focus on Questions Rather Than Offering Answers

Six Critical Issues To Consider When Solving Problems

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Developing Critical Thinking Skills: The Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Conflict Resolution: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Series

Intelligent Decision Making: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 22, 2013 at 10:01 am

Posted in Creative Thinking, investigative Thinking, Problem Solving

Tagged with causes, decisions, framed, framing, information, issue, managers, potential solutions, problem, problem solving, problems, resolve, resolving, solutions, symptoms, systematic approach

Producing Better Decision-Making That Results in More Positive Outcomes

How Personal Agendas Can Destroy a Team

One of the primary reasons organizations and companies go through the effort of developing a qualified team environment is to produce better decision-making that results in more positive outcomes. This creates a more effective, efficient and productive work environment that helps ensure the success of the organization.

Good decision-making is facilitated by open and effective team communication that allows teams to consider all perspectives and points of view. The synergy of the team allows it to make decisions and outcomes that individuals alone would be unable to reach. Properly done and implemented, effective team decision-making makes the job immensely easier for everyone involved.

When leaders build an effective team structure and facilitate its activities, they will find that teams are more effective and productive at making decisions than leaders alone would be. This not only makes the leader’s job easier, but also enables their organizational unit to be more effective in implementing new decisions.

The structure and synergy created in the team environment greatly enhances decision-making in all organizational settings. This section discusses what contributes to this enhanced decision making ability.

Increased Informational Flow

The structure and makeup of teams typically allows them to develop more information and data than the average individual is capable of producing. Additionally, because of the number and combination of individuals, teams can analyze information and data more effectively and efficiently than a single individual. These enhanced analytical skills allow teams to base their decisions more on facts and data in order to support their conclusions and recommendations.

Balanced Perspectives

The structure of the team allows for the input of more feedback and perspectives on any specific issue or topic because all team members are mandated to participate and supply their feedback. The team has the ability to produce a balanced perspective on any issue it reviews.

All Points of View Considered

The brainstorming and consensus-building techniques employed by most teams allow them to consider all points of view and perspectives supplied by team members. Throughout the process, concepts are built upon in order to consolidate ideas and perspectives and use the synergy of the group to create more powerful solutions. This allows the team to weigh alternative solutions before reaching a final decision.

Solutions Prioritized

The consensus building and synergy of the team in the decision making mode allows it to consider, weigh and prioritize all possible solutions to any issue or problem. This process is based on criteria established by the team ahead of time, freeing it from any personal bias or agenda. It allows teams to effectively filter all potential solutions in order to arrive at the best possible decision.

Positive Outcomes

The team process allows people to thoroughly consider all points of view and create balanced solutions that ultimately produce positive outcomes for the organization.

It should be noted that initial decision-making in new team environments can be awkward and time-consuming. As teams become more experienced and mature in making decisions, the entire process will become more streamlined, automatic and efficient. Leaders should avoid the temptation of minimizing the team’s ability to grow, especially during the early stages of team development. Doing so will hinder its potential for growth, effectiveness and productivity.

Excerpt: Boosting Team Communication: Pinpoint Leadership Skills Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Related:

The Use of Teams Requires Self-Discipline

Overcoming and Preventing Groupthink

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

A Team’s Purpose, Function & Use: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Building Strong Teams: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Building Team Roles & Direction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing a Team Approach: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing & Planning for Team Results: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 21, 2013 at 10:16 am

Posted in Decision Making, Productivity, Teams

Tagged with consensus building, decision-making, decisions, information and data, making decisions, outcomes, perspectives, points of view, positive outcomes, synergy of the team, team, team environment, team members

Personal Techniques to Handle and Adapt to Change

Dealing With the Challenges of Change

The Greek word metamórphosis means, “changed or transformed.” When individuals accept that change is a natural part of their organizational environment, they cease resisting it and are thus transformed. They henceforth evolve with the ongoing changes that take place in the organization.

Most people fear change. In the workplace, leaders’ fears are fed by a feeling that if they attempt to initiate change, they will lose their job because their superiors will not support their efforts. Leaders also resist change due to the time constraints associated with their existing responsibilities. If time is taken from these, they fear their core business will fail, resulting in everyone being out of a job. Additionally, change is an unknown. Since leaders might fear what the unknown will bring to their organization, they attempt to ignore it, hoping it just goes away.

Leaders must comprehend that what they fear is the organization-threatening choices that companies are faced with after ignoring the earlier and obvious need for change. At such a point, the organization has no other option but to make a decision or perish.

Leaders must learn to accept that change is here to stay and something that they must deal with in small and incremental steps that allow the organization to evolve. Taking the proper far-sighted approach ensures that a company will not have to face the organization-threatening changes that everyone fears.

Before leaders can deal with organizational change they must first accept change personally and professionally. If they can hone personal techniques to handle and adapt to change, then they can adjust these techniques to the workplace and their leadership style. These methods are discussed below:

Acceptance

Individuals must learn to accept change. Whether they realize it or not, most people currently in the workplace grew up in a dynamic environment characterized by change. Since the 1960s, society has been subject to drastic change stemming from events such as the civil rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate. All of these pivotal events spurred waves of change that have impacted everyone’s lives to this day.

Since the 1980s, society has seen monumental advances in technology that have changed everyone’s lives as well. The introduction of the personal computer, fax machines, cell phones, email, VCRs, the Internet, mobile computing devices and a host of other technological devices have literally changed the face of business and personal lives.

Whether or not one would admit it, life has changed, and most changes have been quietly accepted and integrated into many people’s lives. And many would agree that it has made their lives easier and better. So if people fear change, then they would be well served to go back over their lives to see how they have handled and adapted to change. Most would probably agree that it has been a slow, incremental process that they have hardly noticed, except in hindsight.

Observe Change

Every time individuals buy a new car, a new electronic device such as a computer or DVD player, or a new consumer product such as self-rising pizza crust, they are accepting change. Since these changes are small, they are not the life-threatening events everyone fears; yet, they are still changes. Obviously, individuals can resist or deny change by choosing not to purchase these products, but most feel they have no other option, and subsequently think nothing of it.

As leaders learn to handle change in the workplace, they should begin by observing the countless changes made in their personal lives. They should note the impact these have made and how they felt about the results. These reflections should help leaders learn how to adapt in a constantly changing workplace environment.

Learn Personal Flexibility

Inflexible individuals have the most difficulty adapting to change. These are often older people who grew up in a more stable pre-1960s environment. They liked the way things were and resisted even the smallest changes. However, this description does not characterize everyone who grew up during this period. Many, in fact, have found the changes in society and technology liberating, making their lives easier and more productive.

It is not age so much as mindset that is important. Leaders must learn to become personally flexible. Anyone can become more flexible by learning to change some of the minor details in their lives, such as eating at a new restaurant, rearranging the furniture in their homes and offices, changing a hair style or taking a vacation somewhere new or unknown.

When individuals learn to be personally flexible and adaptable, they can easily do the same in the workplace. It starts with taking small, incremental steps and then observing the effects and consequences.

Look for Small Opportunities

Life outside the workplace provides individuals with many opportunities to change and improve their lives. Individuals should become more aware of the countless opportunities for change. Most people can make these changes without a second thought. As a personal lesson in accepting change, leaders should look for small opportunities they can seize to change their lives. They should learn to evaluate their personal decisions and analyze the impact these small changes have on their lives.

Experiment

Individuals should experiment with various methods of change. When they experiment, observe and learn from the results in their personal lives, it should be easy to translate these lessons to the workplace.

It is notable that most people are more conservative about changes in their personal lives than at work because they have to pay for the changes out of their own pocket. At work, on the other hand, they are spending the company’s money. This is not to say they have lost their thrift altogether, but it makes a difference that the monetary costs associated with change are not their direct burden.

Excerpt: The Impact of Change on Individuals: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Related:

Managing Change: The Transition From Chaos to Order

You Keep Innovating if You Want to Keep Leading

Facilitating Change: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communications in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: The Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 20, 2013 at 10:21 am

Posted in Change, Change Management, Flexibility, Leadership

Tagged with accept change, accepting change, Change, change in the workplace, changes, evolve, fear change, fears, incremental steps, individuals, Leaders, lives, people fear, people fear change, personal lives, personally flexible, resist, transformed, workplace

A “Conspiracy of Silence” Creates an Organizational Tolerance of Harassment

Functioning in a Less Than Meaningful Workplace

The role of the leader is to create a smooth operating and empowered organization that frees employees from obstacles and barriers to their personal productivity. The presence of harassing behaviors and those who would use them against their fellow employees destroys any and all empowerment and organizational cohesiveness a leader builds.

Harassment in any form humiliates and frustrates not only the victim but the employees forced to witness these behaviors on a consistent and regular basis. A “conspiracy of silence” typically develops that creates an organizational tolerance of harassment even when corporate policies are in place to prevent harassment in any form from occurring.

While harassment may not be tolerated at the higher levels of management, it can be present in the lower echelons of the organization. A failure to deal with this jeopardizes the victim of harassment, the company, and the leader who observes it but fails to take appropriate action to eliminate it.

The real legal ramifications and consequences are becoming increasingly severe for the leader and company that turn a blind eye to this negative behavior. Additionally, leaders allow their authority to be undermined and diminished, which results in a measurable impact upon their professional and the company’s financial performance. What appears to be an easy decision to “look the other way” can have far-reaching career advancement implications.

Surveys published by Harvard Business School regarding employees’ perceptions of harassing behavior show that multiple or extreme instances clearly have serious ramifications for organizations. These surveys included employees from a number of major U.S.-based corporations and specifically indicated the following:

Job Satisfaction

Harvard reported a 15% decline in job satisfaction between those employees who never witnessed these harassing behaviors and those who witnessed two or more instances within their company.

Evaluation of Supervisor

Approval ratings of supervisors who tolerated these behaviors in the workplace plummeted by 20%. Included with this is the loss of trust in the system that is supposed to allow employees to make complaints without negative consequences in terms of their jobs and potential for advancement within the organization.

Communications

Organizations experienced a 10% decline in company communications. This is due to a lack of trust in the system and a feeling among employees that they are placing themselves in jeopardy if they make complaints about harassing behaviors. There is a strong sentiment that management does not take discipline seriously and that there is a fear of reprisal that keeps employees silent.

View of Senior Management

Organizations experienced a 15% drop in the approval of the actions of senior management. The prevailing view is that senior managers are out of touch with what is happening in the lower echelons of the organization, specifically highlighted by the fact that they feel adequate policies and channels are in place to deal with the problem of harassment.

Organizational Commitment

Personal commitment to the organization is reported to drop approximately 20% as employees feel they have been left on their own to deal with these problems. There is a prevailing view that when harassment occurs, they are powerless to do anything to effectively handle the problem. This is why so many ultimately go outside of the company and go through the legal system to handle the problem.

Employee Turnover

Employee turnover increases with the existence of workplace harassment within the organization. Approximately 30% of those who witness harassing behavior will actively look for a new job. For employees who have actually been harassed the number increases to approximately 50%. This represents a loss to the organization that then has to replace and train new employees as well as a drain on experienced and productive employees who refuse to tolerate this negative behavior.

Additionally, once employees feel compelled to seek new employment due to the hostile workplace environment, the liability risks to the company increase as many will seek compensation for financial and monetary losses associated with the change in jobs.

It is difficult for companies to quantify the total financial impact these factors have on efficiency and productivity, not to mention the financial risks associated with lawsuits stemming from this behavior. It places leaders in the dilemma of having to effectively lead in what may be considered a hostile workplace environment. The principles of empowerment and team development are negated, completely undermining leaders’ efforts.

Excerpt: Workplace Harassment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Handling Workplace Complaints, Concerns and Issues

With Conflict Resolution Nothing is Straightforward and Simple

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Sexual Harassment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Negative Employee Behaviors: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Building & Nurturing Trust in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communications in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 19, 2013 at 10:20 am

Posted in Harassment, Leadership, Workplace Compliance

Tagged with behaviors, communications, company, consequences, Employee Turnover, employees, harassing, harassing behaviors, harassment, job satisfaction, legal, negative behavior, Organization, productivity, ramifications, trust, victim, workplace

Awash in Data But Starved For Knowledge

Attaining Organizational Results Requires Visionary Thinking and Planning on Multiple Levels

Leaders are awash in data and information but starve for knowledge. Information is useless unless it readily provides the leader with key insights that allow him or her to apply their expertise to solve a problem, resolve an issue or improve performance. Additionally, too much information can hinder a leader’s ability to effectively lead their organization.

As corporations grow, they tend to become bureaucratic. Individuals generate reams of reports and forms to justify their position and importance. Some managers hide their inefficiency behind mountains of reports and data. Effective leaders are able to rise above this sea of information and distill it into a series of key metrics and reports. This effort provides them with the knowledge needed to manage their areas of responsibility.

This is important for leaders to understand because it is too easy to get bogged down in meetings and reports that don’t contribute to their productivity and profitability. Leaders use information to their advantage but cast off the burdens of needless information that hinder their ability to lead.

Leaders are able to filter through the bureaucratic sea of information to obtain the specific data and reports they need to effectively manage their activities and organizational unit. They are able to do this by using the following techniques:

Knowing What Is Being Reported and Available

Leaders know what is being reported throughout the corporation and what is available to them. They are able to filter out the reports and information they need to receive. They cancel or delegate other reports to subordinates to analyze for them.

Knowing What Information Is Needed

Leaders know what critical sections or numbers in a report they need to access. Where possible, they use subordinates to generate a simple one-page summary of the information they need to effectively lead and manage their organization. If necessary, they refer to the full reports for additional detail. They understand that delegation frees up their time and ability to effectively lead. This action also allows subordinates to professionally develop critical skills.

Knowing What the Information Reports

Effective leaders ensure they are provided with precise information and data they require to efficiently lead and manage their organization. They also know what every metric means to them at a single glance, gauging whether performance is increasing or lagging. When necessary, they know where to go to obtain the supporting data and analysis required, to assist them to pinpoint problematic areas of performance.

Knowing How Often Information Should Be Received

Effective leaders know the frequency when specific information needs to be reported to them. They know what information they need to have at their fingertips and what can be periodically reported to them. They understand that timeliness of specific information is essential to their success. They also know that information reported too frequently is as hindering as having too much information.

Knowing What to Do with the Information

Effective leaders know what to do with the information they receive and what events and activities each piece of information and data triggers within their organization. They clearly understand what the information means to them and how they need to apply it.

Knowing What Will Happen if Information Is Not Received

Leaders understand that there is certain information that is essential to effectively direct and lead their organizations. They also wisely know that a great deal of information will never be missed if they never receive it. Unessential information is delegated to subordinates or eliminated all together.

Knowing How to Maximize Time by Minimizing Information

Information can take many forms besides reports. Many leaders are needlessly copied letters, faxes and emails by subordinates. More are included in countless meetings. Effective leaders learn how to delegate and eliminate many sources of unnecessary information. They understand this works to hamper their ability to effectively lead and manage their organizations. If their presence is requested at a meeting, they assign a subordinate to represent them or turn down the request if their presence is not totally necessary.

Effective leaders understand that a specific amount of information is required to manage the organization. Anything above that level is a needless burden. If they allow it, an oversaturation of information decreases their effectiveness and productivity. They use their expertise, wisdom and experience to distinguish between the information they need to know and the information that carries little or no value to their efforts.

Excerpt: Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Performance Plans Create Results and Maximizes Performance

Measure What Needs to Be Measured

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Performance Management: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Maximizing Financial Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 18, 2013 at 10:31 am

Posted in Management Challenges, Performance Planning, Productivity

Tagged with data, effective leaders, filter, information, information and data, knowledge, Leaders, performance, reports, sea of information, too much information

Performance Indicators Provide Feedback and Insight into All Levels of Leadership

Attaining Organizational Results Requires Visionary Thinking and Planning on Multiple Levels

Key performance indicators or metrics allow organizations to create a common reporting system and language that leaders on all levels can understand and use in their decision-making. However, performance measurement decisions deliver key information and data that triggers specific decisions and actions at different levels of the organization.

Performance-based measurement systems provide feedback and insight into all levels of leadership within the organization. Local leaders make decisions based upon trigger points and triggered events as well as overall performance of their organizational units.

On the other hand, senior managers must take a strategic perspective that links the performance of all organizational units into feedback related to the entire organization’s performance; their decisions are global and focus on the sustainability of the entire organization.

It is important for leaders on all levels to understand the links between local performance and the entire organization. Key performance indicators and metrics trigger decisions on multiple levels. Lower trigger points may cause lower levels to react and make decisions and changes based upon the organizational unit in a specific location.

Senior leadership will have trigger points at higher levels that concern the performance of the entire organization, compelling them to make decisions and changes based upon the feedback they receive. While the perspectives may be different at various levels of leadership, the use of key performance indicators and metrics allows all leaders to make the decisions that are their responsibility.

Decisions can be tactical on a local operational level and strategic at a higher leadership level. The decisions are linked in that the strategic decisions will impact tactical decisions, but tactical may not affect strategic. Strategic decisions typically provide leaders with the boundaries and parameters that they must work within.

Leaders at all levels must understand that all decisions impact the organization. Daily decisions may not appear to be connected to the major areas discussed in this section, but, ultimately, all decisions made are based in one of these key areas.

Quality of Execution of Organizational Strategies

The availability of performance measurement systems and key performance indicators provides leaders on all levels of the organization with the decision making tools to measure the quality of the strategy that drives the organization.

Financial indicators are lagging indicators, while non-financial indicators provide leaders with a balanced view of what is happening. Metrics provide leaders with specific questions to facilitate the organization’s ability to make tough decisions and quickly seize opportunities as well as to evaluate how well it adapts to changing technologies and markets.

Improvement of Non-Financial Performance

Non-financial metrics linked with more traditional financial ones provide leaders with the information to make timely decisions that impact their unit’s performance and the entire organization’s ability to adapt. Triggered events and predetermined trigger points provide pivotal moments for leaders to make key performance decisions. These events can be established on both strategic and tactical levels with individual leaders responsible for making specific decisions within the organization.

Value Creation

More companies are using value creation indexes that focus on the relationship between non-financial performance and the organization’s market value. The establishment of a value creation index provides leaders with key insights by establishing direct links between the two areas of focus. Research has shown that a reliance on non-financial performance leads to more accurate forecasts and valuation. Typically the value creation drivers are:

Innovation
Quality
Customers
Management
Alliances
Technology
Brand
Employees
Environment

While value creation is defined and utilized by senior leadership within the organization, its metrics that measure non-financial performance are driven into the organization and become part of the suite of performance measurement tools used by leaders on all levels.

Research has shown that intangible elements such as innovation, alliance, management and employees are the key players in producing the organization’s value. Within the durable and non-durable manufacturing environment, improvement in key value drivers results in higher market values. These are the indicators that allow organizations to measure and predict future performance.

Efficient Resource Allocation

The balanced use of performance measurement systems that evaluate both financial and non-financial performance metrics allow leaders to efficiently allocate the use of scarce resources throughout the organization. Decisions that effectively manage resource allocation allow organizations to sustain their performance and profitability.

While local leadership on the tactical level makes decisions on the use and application of resources, senior leadership on the strategic level is able to ensure that resources are used in ways that benefit the entire organization. The use of performance measurement metrics allows leaders on all levels to evaluate effectiveness and make decisions regarding future performance.

Excerpt: Maximizing Financial Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Performance Plans Create Results and Maximizes Performance

Measure What Needs to Be Measured

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Performance Management: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 15, 2013 at 11:03 am

Leadership Removes Barriers to Performance

Execution: Six Action Steps

An effective performance management platform has specific overall outcomes that leaders need to achieve if they are to be successful. In the traditional bureaucratic organization, these programs are often meaningless. However, within the empowered organization, an effective performance management program efficiently moves the organization forward.

As a performance management program is developed and implemented, the role of the leader becomes increasingly important as they grow in their personal abilities. This means that true leadership capabilities must emerge in crafting clear and understandable goals for employees as well as developing simple but effective plans for the organization to follow.

This is important for leaders to understand because true leadership that removes barriers to performance, demands proactive involvement and interaction. As leaders mature in their responsibilities, they take their roles more seriously, and develop the self-confidence to stretch both themselves and their employees to higher levels of productivity and success. By challenging the old political bureaucracies that hinder performance and overall success they become leaders in the truest sense of the word.

The essence of performance standard development within the empowered organization is to reach the point where employees direct and evaluate their own performance. The role of the leader is to help the employee reach mutually agreeable goals and standards to measure progress toward those goals. Once this is achieved the leader provides them the direction and information the employee needs to assess their individual performance against their goals.

Once this state is reached within the organization, several positive outcomes are created that assist both the organization and its leaders. These are:

Simplicity

Simplicity is the ally of the true leader and complexity the favorite tool of traditional bureaucratic organizations. Leaders must take the responsibility of simplifying their organizations. The more straightforward an organizational structure they can create, the more effective it will be.

As performance standards are established for individual employees, an understanding should be reached as to how their work and contributions fit into the organization. Employees should know they are not performing a mindless task, but one that adds value to the overall output and outcomes of the entire organization. When employees see that what they do counts and the clear connection between their job and organizational success, it removes much of the clutter and interference that hampers decision making. This simplifies the process the organization must undergo to enhance performance and productivity.

Self-Confidence

For the leader, the process allows them to create simple plans with clear targets and objectives. It allows them to communicate more easily with their employees because they understand the connection between their contributions and the organization’s success.

When levels of simplicity are achieved within the organization, many barriers are removed and cooperation between leaders and employees is enhanced. All understand the results that must be achieved and why they are important. Additionally, when the entire process is simplified, plans are easily implemented and are more effective. The barriers of complexity traditionally in place within a bureaucratic organization are removed. The more success attained by leaders, employees and the organization, the more self-confidence is established that allows all to reach for more ambitious goals and objectives.

As in a cohesive organizational unit, everyone is accountable to everyone else within the unit, the performance of all leaders and employees is clear to all parties. This minimizes excuses and wastes less time, financial and operational resources.

Speed

The impact of both simplicity and self-confidence has an overall impact on the speed in which the organization operates. Within the empowered organization, leaders and employees have an established and mutually agreeable clear purpose. All understand the ramifications of hesitancy in today’s competitive global markets.

The overarching goal of performance planning and implementation within the empowered organization is to increase the speed of all internal processes from production to marketing to overall management. When leaders are successful in establishing clear and understandable goals, simple plans and self-directing evaluation, the barriers to decision making and overall output are effectively removed. This allows the organization to react more quickly and nimbly to the forces of change as well as ongoing competitive pressures.

Excerpt: Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Performance Plans Create Results and Maximizes Performance

Objectives Allow Managers to Focus on Obtaining Results

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Performance Management: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Maximizing Financial Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 14, 2013 at 10:45 am

The Concept of Change Means Leaders Must Communicate

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Leaders are the facilitators of change within their organization. As such, in implementing an initiative or new direction, they must employ proven techniques and strategies to ensure good communication with their employees. This is true of the entire process of change—from beginning to end. Without open and effective communication, leaders can create problems and issues that hinder their efforts to make the needed changes.

Leaders should understand that change is uncomfortable, and adapting to change can be confusing and messy until the “kinks” are worked out. There is no way to communicate change to employees that makes it an enjoyable process. While planning for change can list tasks and responsibilities, it doesn’t lessen the discomfort of altering long-held behaviors and habits that comprise individual employee comfort zones.

Because change is in fact an ongoing, difficult process that pulls people out of their comfort zones, the importance of good communication is magnified. It becomes crucial for managers and leaders to gather outside sources of information, solicit employee feedback and perspectives, and use this information to create specific “plans of attack.” Every group is unique and a cookie cutter approach to communicating and managing change will not work.

Within the realm of a leader’s main responsibilities is the role of effectively conveying the need for change to his or her employees. The concept of change means that leaders must communicate during the planning, announcing, implementation and completion of the process of change within their organization.

Proven techniques for facilitating smooth and effective communication include:

Identify and Communicate the Results to Be Achieved

The communication of change means that leaders must clearly articulate the results they want and the specific means required to achieve them. Often leaders must communicate two messages simultaneously: the macro, or “big picture” of how the changes in their unit plays a role in the overall changes within the organization, and the micro, or detailed picture of the specific changes to be made.

When leaders communicate both the macro and micro views of change, they give their employees a balanced picture of how their contributions to facilitating change benefit the organization. Surveys have shown that employees are markedly more effective when they understand how their efforts contribute to the overall goals of the organization.

Simplify Jargon and Buzzwords

Many organizations and industries have developed their own jargon and buzzwords. Often managers, leaders and employees rely heavily on these specialized terms. However, many of these words lack real substance or meaning in their daily use. Words and phrases such as “responsive,” “employee friendly,” “customer focused,” “empowered” and others should have specific meanings. For instance, if an organization is responsive, what exactly does that mean to leaders and employees? What are the parameters defining this word’s use and application? The same is true for any other buzzword: tts definition should be plain to employees so they are clear on what the term means and how it applies in the workplace.

Share Information Early and Often

Managers and leaders should share as much information as possible with their employees.

In many large publicly owned organizations, the emphasis is placed on good communication with investors, not employees. While obviously the importance of the former cannot be argued, it is the latter that does the work of moving the organization forward.

Consequently, when employees learn of organizational changes and developments through the media or the rumor mill, they become more apprehensive and less productive until put at ease. Rather than lose time and revenue to this anxiety and uncertainty, managers and leaders communicate as much information as they can up front.

Maintain Quality and Consistency

Managers and leaders should maintain a consistent, quality flow of information to their employees. Due to the ease with which communication channels can get bogged down with meaningless information, leaders should filter their communications to ensure significant and substantial information is imparted to their employees.

Don’t Underestimate the Duration of Change

Many leaders fail to appreciate the length of time required to develop, nurture and maintain change within their organization. Effective change goes beyond its announcement or the introduction of new programs to implement it.

Leaders must understand that organizational change means altering ingrained personal habits. This takes time, and open and active communication is required throughout the process. Leaders should not shortchange it with ineffective communication at critical, often later stages of change.

Use a Variety of Communication Pathways

Effective communication of change is as varied as each individual involved in the process. Many managers and leaders limit their communications during change to a single medium such as email or the intranet.

If managers and leaders wish to develop an effective communication program during the process of change, they should transmit their message through a variety of means, such as unit/company meetings, email/intranet updates and daily interactions.

Don’t Confuse Process with Communication

Managers and leaders should not confuse the process of change with communication. The process of change can include creating vision, developing teams, planning and countless meetings. Properly designed, these can be effective communication vehicles, but not sufficient to meet the communication requirements of organizational change.

Provide Ample Opportunity for Feedback and Concerns

Managers and leaders should provide their employees ample opportunities to share their fears and concerns, ask questions and share insights. Managers and leaders should make addressing employee concerns and following up with answers and informational updates a primary concern. This empowers employees and gives them ownership in ideas and concepts. It keeps key people from leaving, and often prevents those who remain from sabotaging the process of change.

Excerpt: Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Related:

Dealing With the Challenges of Change

Use These Seven Strategies to Respond to Change

Communication Has to Start With Telling the Truth

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Facilitating Change: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Impact of Change on Individuals: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 13, 2013 at 11:13 am

Posted in Change Management, Leadership

Tagged with Change, comfort zones, communication, communication of change, effective communication, employees, facilitating, feedback, good communication, information, jargon, Leaders, organizational change, process of change, responsibilities

Happy or Grumpy: Your Mood Impacts Your Organization’s Performance

Three Reasons Why Leaders Fail

Numerous studies have shown that when leaders are in a happy mood, the individuals around them tend to view everything in a much more positive light. The resulting atmosphere provides for an optimistic workplace, which in turn facilitates higher overall productivity, more creative reasoning and more efficient decision-making. The converse is often true when a leader’s negative moods prevail: they have detrimental effects for the leader, his or her employees and the organization’s performance.

In 2000, Caroline Bartel of New York University and Richard Saavedra of the University of Michigan studied 70 workgroups across diverse industries. Their research found that people who gather within normal meeting settings end up sharing their good or bad moods within two hours. Other research has corroborated the fact that people who work together share their moods.

It is significant for leaders to understand that within most organizations, moods that originate at the top have a tendency to spread quickly throughout the workplace. The reason for this diffusion is that nearly everyone in the company observes these moods and is thus directly influenced by them. Leader’s that are not cognizant of this process fail to understand the personal impact they, and their moods, have on organizational performance.

A large body of research indicates that a majority of leaders are unaware that their emotional intelligence levels, their moods and their behaviors have a definite impact on employees and the organization. Leaders can remain clueless as to how these factors have the power to resonate throughout an organization.

In many instances the repercussions of unwatched and uncontrolled negative behaviors are immediate. Employees can be reluctant to communicate accurate and realistic data and information for fear of the leader’s emotional reaction and potential rage.

The consequences of negative emotional reactions are damaging to the point that the leader becomes emotionally disconnected from the organization; as a result, he or she will not have a realistic sense of what is occurring in the workplace. These circumstances are especially troubling when employees actively work to hide failures, mistakes and potentially troubling trends.

While an emotionally disconnected leader can often sense something is amiss in the workplace, the exact cause remains elusive and their personal effectiveness is thus undermined. The perceived uncertainty of the situation also forces leaders to second-guess their employees. Other serious organizational problems can be caused by the following reasons:

Lack of Awareness

When leaders demonstrate a lack of personal awareness, they cannot objectively gauge their own personal moods let alone the impact those moods have on the organization. In some instances, a lack of awareness is the result of the leader’s ignorance, but more often it is a reflection of older leadership styles being used.

Many leaders who fall victim to a lack of awareness feel their personal moods are nobody’s business. Because these leaders do not see the need to force themselves to accommodate their employees, it becomes their employees’ responsibility to deal with the moods. Whatever the cause and reason, a lack of personal awareness undermines not only the leader’s effectiveness, but also the bottom-line performance of their organization.

Lack of Self-Management

When leaders possess a lack of self-management skills, it can be toxic to an organization. Mood swings, highly emotional responses, rages and outbursts have a dramatic and negative impact on all employees. In all these instances, leaders allow their emotions to control them. These uncontrolled emotions serve to undermine employee motivation and morale, which produces immediate and negative consequences on organizational productivity.

When leaders allow themselves to be emotionally unstable, their organization will experience higher rates of absenteeism and employee turnover due to increased stress levels. This tangible impact on an organization can be directly analyzed, quantified and demonstrated.

Lack of Social Awareness

Leaders clearly lack social awareness when they fail to empathize with employees and other individuals. Those who lack social awareness are either unaware a problem in this area exists or they don’t care about the impact their words and actions have on employees and the organization. Leaders who only focus on results while neglecting personal contributions, actively demonstrate this social deficiency.

Such leaders are unconcerned about motivation, morale or personal issues. Consequently, they will often find themselves surrounded by incompetent or fearful employees. The competent individuals or those with better employment options will quickly leave. The subsequent impact on the company’s productivity and profitability will be serious and obvious.

Poor Relationship Management

Leaders who possess poor relationship management skills are unable to communicate effectively, which results in misunderstandings, confusion and conflict. Employees in this situation can feel leaderless and uncommitted, as their work is often criticized and second-guessed by the leader. The leader’s poor relationships with employees subsequently lower morale and motivation. Employees don’t know where they stand with these leaders. And this feeling often results in high employee turnover and lower productivity.

While possible, it is uncommon for leaders to exhibit symptoms in only one of the above areas: usually they are deficient in multiple emotional intelligence categories. When these factors are combined, their impacts are intensified; a toxic organizational atmosphere is thus created that is saturated with problems and conflicts.

Often these leaders cause extreme chaos and havoc within the entire organization. Not only does this diminish their standing and effectiveness as a leader, but also it can completely undermine and destroy an organization’s effectiveness. Turmoil and damage will remain until a more hopeful and realistic leader replaces the dissonant one. And this change generally becomes the only viable alternative to relieve chaos and repair the organization.

Excerpt: Leadership Styles: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Related:

How Well Do You Set the Tone?

Communication Starts With Respecting What Others Have To Say

Unresolved Conflict is Corrosive to Leadership

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Becoming a Leader of Your Own Making: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 12, 2013 at 10:54 am

Empowerment Changes the Mindset of the Organization

Change is Not a Destination But a Process

The factors constituting organizational empowerment create a change in the mindset of the organization. Most traditional companies have an established centralized bureaucracy with a strong management rather than leadership mindset. These are different approaches to how an organization is run and ultimately evolves in the face of continual change. When leaders understand the factors that increase empowerment, they are capable of leading their organization’s evolution through a series of incremental changes.

Leaders at all levels of an organization have the personal ability to shape the culture, climate and character of their units through their personal vision, desire to produce improved results and the dynamics they create to change and motivate their employees.

Through a leader’s personal example and proactive approach to their employees, other leaders are created. As employees are empowered within the organization, their leadership characteristics emerge and are developed. Rather than limit these capabilities, leaders cultivate these individuals until their potential is realized. This is a tremendous responsibility for the individual leader to assume, but a necessity if the organization is to grow and evolve in the face of continuous change.

Leaders at all levels assume the responsibilities of influencing the attitudes, activities and actions of their employees. This is opposed to the role of managers or supervisors who see their role as simply directing the employees under them. In the capacity of an influencer, the leader applies the principles of effective leadership and focuses his or her organizational unit through the use and application of the following factors:

Outcomes

Leaders shape the outputs and outcomes of their organization. Their overall goal is meeting the needs and demands of the customer, whether internal or external. This places an emphasis on results over processes. In other words, the final desired result is concentrated on, and not necessarily the process that produces the result. Within the empowered organization, the process can be radically changed by the involvement of frontline employees to produce a higher-quality outcome in a more efficient and profitable manner.

Groups

Rather than focus on an individual job or task, leaders focus their attention on the collective results and outcomes produced through involvement of the workgroups and teams within their organization. The use and application of effective leadership and motivational methods allows leaders to build and foster strong organizational cohesiveness. This results in increased empowerment, overall accountability and effectiveness.

Ideas

Leaders encourage and stimulate creative thinking within their organizational units to develop new ideas and concepts to improve team outcomes. Rather than enforce old and possibly ineffective ideas, leaders attempt to harness the “native knowledge” of individual employees to increase the productivity of the organizational unit. Rather than looking for things to go wrong and then fixing them, leaders are looking for the things that are working and seeking ways to expand their use through increased testing and experimentation.

Competition

Rather than fear and ignore it, leaders thrive on tough competition. They use the competitive environment they must function within to drive their organization forward by eliminating waste and inefficiency and by focusing the organization on producing a higher-quality product or outcome that can compete more effectively in the marketplace.

Involvement

Leaders are always seeking new ways to motivate and stimulate the involvement of all employees in producing a better product or outcome. The empowered organization increases the employee’s ownership and accountability by flattening the decision making process. This allows frontline employees, closest to and best qualified to positively impact the final outcome or product, to make key decisions.

Empowerment

Rather than tightly control the decision making process, leaders are continually looking for new ways to empower individual employees to make the critical decisions that reduce inefficiency and frustration at key points positively impacting the organization’s output or product.

Since changes are produced by countless decisions made everyday, rather than slow and complicate the process, empowerment streamlines and makes the entire organization more effective and efficient. Employees do not have to wait for countless and wasteful meetings to make decisions, but can make them “on the fly” to quickly resolve a problem. This allows the organization to move quickly forward, free of needless barriers.

Proactive vs. Reactive

Leaders are proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting, they actively seek ways to make things happen. In this regard leaders are dynamic and animated in their interaction with both their superiors and employees rather than inanimate and reactive. The energy and dynamics of their personal behavior creates a sense of excitement and is highly contagious to other members of the organization. This produces positive attitudes and motivation throughout the organization.

Employees as Resources

Leaders hold their employees in high regard and respect their personal abilities, insight and intelligence. In this capacity, they maintain a perspective that treats employees as human resources with something positive to contribute to the organization—not a worker with a job. In this capacity and through the use of such leadership and empowerment principles, the “us vs. them” attitude prevalent in many organizations is eliminated or greatly diminished.

Innovation

When all of the factors constituting an empowered organization are considered, leaders are focusing the members of their organization on improving personal initiative and innovation. This is opposed to simply improving individual employee compliance and conformance to organizational goals and objectives.

When freed of constraints and empowered to actively contribute to produce positive outcomes and results, employees are capable and motivated to meet the challenges presented to them. This advances and improves the overall organization.

Culture

Leaders use all the factors that ultimately constitute an empowered organization to shape its character, culture and climate. Most will discover that the climate they create and shape will assume the characteristics they personally display.

Excerpt: Organizational Empowerment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Creating a Culture of Innovation

Building Employee Support Requires Interactive Leadership

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Empowerment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Facilitating Change: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 11, 2013 at 10:45 am

Posted in Empowerment, Leadership, Performance

Tagged with accountability, attitudes, decision making process, decision-making, effective leadership, employees, empowered, empowered organization, empowerment, frontline employees, Leaders, Organization, organizational unit, outcomes

Empowerment Is Not Synonymous With Surrender

Five Reasons Why Team Communications Can Deteriorate

The maintenance of team strength requires ongoing leadership diligence and interaction. If leaders fail to pay attention to what is happening within the team culture and environment, it is easy to stumble into several pitfalls. Many major problems can be avoided by structured attentiveness.

It is easy for leaders to begin surrendering their personal authority as they actively work to empower team members. Many assume that individual teams are automatically able to meet the responsibilities assigned to them – thus making their jobs and workloads much lighter. When this belief takes hold, it is easy for leaders to assume that their responsibilities are being effectively handled. Because of it, they generally tend to miss the undercurrents and interactions that work to undermine team strength and productivity.

Because leaders understand that empowerment is not synonymous with surrender, they play an active, ongoing role in guiding and directing the actions of their individual teams. The roles and responsibilities of individual leaders are not subjugated to their teams. Rather, teams become a mechanism for leaders to be more effective within their organization and more productive in what they need to achieve within shorter periods of time.

There are a number of common pitfalls leaders can stumble into as they develop and build their teams.

Lack of Solid Team Structure

Leaders must ensure that their teams have a solid structure in place. This includes all team members having a clear and concise understanding of their roles and responsibilities. It also includes development of and adherence to the norms, rules and boundaries established during the team’s formation. Once a particular team has been established, a primary leadership responsibility is to make sure that the team adheres to its overall structure.

Not Being Observant

Within the team structure, leaders need to take a hands-off stance in regard to team matters and discussions in order to actively and impartially observe what is occurring. This enables them to be vigilant concerning internal team conflict, dominant personalities and other issues that can impact an individual team’s productivity, strength and performance. Leaders cannot assume that effective team management occurs automatically within the team growth and development process. Specific attention needs to be paid to all details when any negative occurrences take place.

Allowing or Minimizing Disruptive Team Behaviors

Leaders must understand that the team culture has a specific structure that guides and directs its progress and functioning. Specific roles must be assigned to maintain this structure for an adherence to the rules, boundaries and regulations that a particular team collectively develops.

One common pitfall many leaders stumble into involves allowing individual disruptive behaviors to continue to the point where they actively hamper the team’s progress. The acceptance of disruptive behaviors by leaders and other members can undermine overall team strength, as they have a tendency to intimidate less assertive participants into silence. Leaders must be vigilant for specific behaviors that inhibit the free-flow of ideas, thoughts and feedback within the team culture.

A Failure to Intervene

One of the team leader’s major responsibilities is to intervene whenever required to eliminate disruptive behaviors or any other barriers that negatively impact the entire team process. When they tend to overlook specific performance-inhibiting behaviors, they are ultimately undermining team strength. It is up to team leaders to take increasingly stern measures when intervening within the team environment. These measures often start with intervention in the group setting itself; if this proves ineffective, personal intervention with the offending member(s) must be undertaken.

Displaying Bias or Favoritism

It is easy for leaders familiar with the capabilities of individual team members to display favoritism toward one member over another. However, any open display of bias will automatically cause other team members to be less open in expressing their concerns, feedback and input. Biases and favoritism have the tendency to create a situation where specific team members become dominant, which, because of their power and influence, can result in the assertion of personal agendas and overall conflict.

Not Allowing Teams to Adequately Develop and Police Themselves

It is easy for leaders, especially within a new team environment, to assume total control over the team process. They feel that it is faster and more productive to “tell and instruct” the team in what to do than allow it to develop and chart its own course.

A team learns best when it grows through its mistakes and through problems it must solve on its own. It needs to be given the room to brainstorm and create solutions, while having the freedom to police itself when internal problems and conflicts surface due to disruptive behaviors or dominant personalities.

Team strength is developed when members are allowed to work collectively through specific challenging situations and arrive at effective solutions as a result of them.

Excerpt: Building Strong Teams: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Eight Strategies for Handling Disruptive Situations

Five Pitfalls Teams Need to Avoid

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

A Team’s Purpose, Function & Use: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Boosting Team Communication: Pinpoint Leadership Skills Development Training Series

Building Team Roles & Direction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing a Team Approach: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing & Planning for Team Results: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 8, 2013 at 1:19 pm

Posted in Leadership, Roles and Responsibilities, Teams

Tagged with behaviors, bias, boundaries, conflict, disruptive behaviors, favoritism, Leaders, Leadership, pitfalls, productivity, roles and responsibilities, rules, strength, team, team culture, team environment, team members, team process, team strength, teams

Questions Should Mirror Employees’ Sense of Adventure, Interest and Curiosity

Leaders Need to Focus on Questions Rather Than Offering Answers

Within the workplace leaders need to emphasize the importance of questioning, and can do this by welcoming all those “why” and “how” questions, and asking a lot of them personally as well. Routine, rigidity and tight boundaries tend to snuff out the questioning process before it begins to achieve any glimmer of light, hope or momentum.

Leaders need to be content with leaving many questions unanswered, and by so doing, create a collection of unknown working elements that offer evidence to the prominent place that curiosity holds within the organization. Leaders can use questions and answers to make the employees’ work life and environment curious and exciting. To do this, questions should mirror employees’ sense of adventure, interest and curiosity. Observing and questioning their world of work helps to establish an outstanding and superb sense of teamwork.

To Make Questions as Important as Answers Safeguard Employees Against Excessive Organizational Routines

Organizational cultures often hinder the attainment of positive workplace growth and development when they tend to allow, incorporate, or spread, a bland veneer of “sameness” or a status quo of “apathy” throughout the working environment and workplace landscape. Faced with a bland, dominated working landscape, it is up to leaders to find ways to liberate their employees from the continuous shaping of ideas, opinions and the peer pressure of “sameness.” Employees can be freed from these organizational culture constraints by becoming good questioners.

When employees are surrounded by leaders and supervisors who provide immediate, simplistic responses to all the questions they ask, a false impression is created that emphasizes, “Answers do not require serious thought or ingenuity.” Employees are prevented from observing firsthand just how initial questions spawn additional ones, which eventually lead to fresh answers. As a result, they tend to lose out on the opportunity to experience mind searching, analyzing and decision making.

Look at Questions and Answers as Part of an Uncompleted Puzzle

Working environments tend to present an endless supply of puzzles. The only problem is, many employees spend most of their time and lives avoiding puzzles and serious questions. Yet, if every question has a quick and easy answer, the purpose of inquiry is lost.

Puzzles within the mind tend to arouse a sense of curiosity and stimulate questioning. While some employees may be bewildered when first attempting to figure something out, good questions will start to break up their mental log jam and begin to unlock everyone’s frozen thinking, while at the same time, setting them on the path to greater understanding.

Puzzle avoidance leads to stagnation and a healthy organization keeps its employees’ heads out of the sand and tries to see what is coming in order to be prepared. A proactive group of employees learns to wrestle with difficult questions and predicaments rather than rely upon recipes and formulas, which may have worked in the past.

If leaders provide a continuous menu of workplace puzzles to decipher, employees will develop at a faster pace, feeling confident and resourceful in the process. Ingenuity and skill will grow faster and when confronted by a problem, quandary or an impossible situation, employees will less likely to be shaken or fearful. Over time, they will actually begin to greet dilemmas as a “challenge and a test of ingenuity.” However, at certain times it is important for leaders to make it a point to answer some questions, especially more complex or wide open ones, with an admission of ignorance or uncertainty.

There is no such thing as a “right question” or “truly perfect sequence” to search out answers since effective questioning tends to require a certain amount of “mind mining” and “muddling around.” Tough questions are intended to invoke some trial-and-error reasoning engagement and outcomes.

Dilemmas, paradoxes and perplexities all deserve and require some “messy questioning” that is balanced by a degree of disciplined, logical inquiry. Thinkers who are able to “shift gears” from the right to left side of the brain, and back and forth between logic and license, will typically generate deeper and more workable insights.

Maintain a Focus on the Importance of Questioning

One of the goals leaders should have is to teach their employees how to find or fashion satisfying answers to work-related puzzles by learning to ask good questions in effective sequences and combinations. As part of their human nature, most employees will tend to seek stability, predictability and certainty in an uncertain world, instead of embracing the challenges associated with it. Instead of learning to use good questions to adapt and adjust to a changing world, they more often than not, adopt a “foxhole” mentality. However, without experience handling unanswerable questions, employees will not be prepared to deal with the riddles of work and life.

As a second goal, it is up to leaders to share a sense of wonderment at the vastness of “what is unknown.” In this regard, questions will often end up becoming a collection of segmented pieces and bits of inquiry whose answers are as confusing as individual puzzle pieces that have no frame or outline to place them into. The question becomes, “How can employees be motivated to relish the challenge to find complex or difficult answers and solutions and how well will they be able to deal with ambiguity?”

When leaders treasure and value the “mysterious and unknowable,” and extensively question things themselves, always seeking answers (even if certain solutions remain abstract, unreliable or unattainable) their employees will tend to become more prepared to deal with the puzzles of everyday situations, events, issues, as well as unforeseeable future occurrences.

Excerpt: Effective Questioning Techniques: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Correctly Framing Problems Pinpoints the Right Solution

Encourage Questions to Improve Open Communication

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Effective Questioning in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing Critical Thinking Skills: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Comprehensive Questioning: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

The Use and Application of Advanced Questioning: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 7, 2013 at 11:11 am

Posted in Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, investigative Thinking

Tagged with answers, curiosity, employees, environment, importance of questioning, ingenuity, inquiry, Leaders, puzzles, questioning, questions, questions and answers, workplace

Questioning Positions Advance the Dialogue

Seven Components of Critical Thinking

Before asking questions, it is essential to know from what position an individual wishes to ask something. It is part of the questioning process to determine the stance he or she needs or wants to take in order to obtain the desired information. It is useful to adhere to the following steps in order to begin defining and determining question positioning.

First, the issue, concern or topic must be defined along with restrictions or expansions. Next, the main topic or issue “aspect,” or the angle or point of view on the matter is identified. The “aspect” often includes a phrase within a certain question that tends to end in “of,” as in “the importance of” or “the implications of.”

It is essential to be clear about how the “aspect” relates to the topic at hand. Aspect questions can reflect an example, a point of view, a stage in the questioning sequence, a cause and effect relationship within the topic or issue, or even one solution that represents a problem in regard to it.

The questioning “aspect,” which often comes at the beginning, must also be identified along with what it means and what it requires in terms of incorporating specific words and phrases. The particular viewpoint must be delineated as well as whether it is the same one the questioner wants the responder(s) to have.

The individual asking questions should not jump to conclusions about what they consider to be an acceptable answer. Different questioning positions or stances should be applied to move dialogue and information-gathering forward.

Below is a list of the most common questioning positions to take with examples.

Account for – Requires an answer that gives the reasons for the subject of the question:

“Can you tell me why there is a need for the large-scale production cutbacks?”

Analyze – Requires an answer that breaks an idea, concept or statement down in order to consider all of its components. Answers of this type should be very methodical and logically organized:

“How do you go about isolating the changes in company policy toward our competitors?”

Compare – Requires an answer that sets items side by side and shows their similarities and differences. A balanced, fair and objective answer is expected:

“Will you tell me about the contribution of our research development and product testing in regard to the product distribution cycle?”

Consider – Requires an answer in which the responder describes and offers his or her thoughts on the subject:

“In what way has our human resources management department been involved in the training of our employees?”

Contrast – Requires an answer that points out the differences between two items:

“Will you inform me about the various positive and negative factors and influences in regard to our major competitive products?”

Criticize – Requires a balanced answer that points out mistakes or weaknesses, or one that also indicates any favorable aspects of the topic or subject of the question.

“To what extent is an understanding of the various approaches useful or not useful for allowing us to make better sense of existing employment relationships?”

Define – Requires an answer that explains the precise meaning of a concept. A definition answer will include definition structure, and one that is likely expanded.

“What does the concept of ‘management roles’ mean to our managers?”

Describe – Requires an answer that explains what something is like or how it works:

“Will you enlighten me about the criteria used for determining the company’s expenditure policy?”

Discuss – Requires an answer that explains an item or concept and offers details about the topic or issue with supportive information or examples, and can point for and/or against something, where explanations for the facts are brought to the forefront. It is important to give both sides of an argument and come to a conclusion:

“Will you help me understand the main requirements of the law in respect to employer-employee relationships?”

Evaluate/Assess – Requires an answer that decides and explains how valuable or important something is. The judgment should be backed by a discussion of the evidence or reasoning involved:

“How would you factor the contribution of our customer service policy into this situation?”

Explain – Requires an answer that offers a rather detailed and exact explanation of an idea or principle, or a set of reasons for a situation or attitude:

“What exactly is the concept of management roles?”

Explore – Requires an answer that thoroughly examines the subject or topic and considers it from a variety of viewpoints:

“Will you tell me more about the economies and diseconomies of our company’s various profit centers?”

Expound – Requires an answer that explains what something means and renders points clear and coherent:

“What deductions can be made after studying the graph exhibited in element C?”

Illustrate – Requires an answer that consists primarily of examples to demonstrate or prove the subject, topic or inference within the question. It is often added to another response or question:

“To what extent does the public participate in the research and development process?”

Justify – Requires an answer that gives only the reasons for a particular position or argument. The issue to be argued may be a negative one as well as positive:

“What factors determine client and customer demands?”

Prove/Disprove – Both of these require answers that demonstrate the logical arguments and/or evidence connected with an idea or proposition. Proving requires “pro” points; disproving “contra” points:

“Will you give me a verbal description as to the functional importance of the IT department in its current operational capacity?”

State – Requires an answer that briefly and clearly expresses relevant points without lengthy discussion of minor details:

“Our company is often at a disadvantage when dealing with industry at a technical level. What do you think we can do about it?”

Summarize/Outline – Requires an answer that contains only the main points of the information available on a topic, issue or subject. Questions of this type often require short answers:

“Will you support your answer through detailing a typical profile of where it applies and how?”

To What Extent Is This True? – Requires an answer that discusses and explains the ways in which something is true and untrue:

“Could you please disclose some of the ramifications of employee behavior in situations involving authority?”

Trace – Requires a statement and brief description in logical or chronological order of the stages or steps in the development of a theory, concept, process, etc.:

“Will you detail examples of the use of positive and negative behaviors in workplace situations and some of their recent applications, hindrances and limitations?”

Excerpt: Comprehensive Questioning: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Related:

Leaders Need to Focus on Questions Rather Than Offering Answers

Seven Styles of Questioning That Sharpen Critical Thinking Skills

Correctly Framing Problems Pinpoints the Right Solution

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Effective Questioning in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing Critical Thinking Skills: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Effective Questioning Techniques: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

The Use and Application of Advanced Questioning: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 6, 2013 at 10:55 am

Posted in Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Questioning

Tagged with answer, asking questions, contribution, differences, explanation, Management, point of view, questioning, questioning positions, relationships, responder, topic, topic or issue

Leadership Shifts Focus From Tasks to Individuals

Leaders Succeed When Employees Are Successful

Managers are often task-oriented, and not necessarily focused on their employees. Leaders on the other hand are people-oriented; they work through and motivate their employees, utilizing their resources to perform assigned tasks in the most productive and profitable way possible.

Many managers confuse management with leadership, and feel they are automatically leaders because they occupy a position of higher responsibility. While this assumption is often true, many fail to display active leadership qualities. The roles leaders fulfill are different than those of managers, although sound management practices are complementary to effective leadership.

While some individuals are natural leaders, most managers must evolve into leaders both by investing time and effort in developing their abilities and by adapting their management roles to a more flexible, effective leadership style.

Leaders learn how to harness the specific talents of every employee team member in driving efficiency and productivity. While this may appear to be more work than it’s worth, effective leaders are able to produce higher levels of productivity with fewer problems than from simply using traditional managing techniques.

When leaders adhere to specific leadership roles they will foster trust, inward strength and a unity of purpose in the groups under their direction. As leaders, they will embrace their own personal responsibilities, understanding that anything is possible and attainable. They will recognize that each specific element is a stepping stone to the next that ultimately creates a transition from managing to leadership. To define a personal leadership role, the following three principles are critical:

Self-Management

Leaders take complete responsibility for all their actions and decisions. Often leaders must make a decision to challenge rules proven to be detrimental to their overall work environment and the people entrusted to them. The role of a leader is to set ineffective or unproductive rules and procedures aside in favor of those promoting increased cooperation, trust and ownership.

Leaders never waiver in this pursuit. They understand that part of their role is to take risks whenever a policy, procedure or situation hinders progress—and stand by their decisions.

Making improvements often means rocking the boat. While often challenging to the best leaders, this is a substantial part of true leadership. Leaders recognize the status quo often isn’t good enough, and that it takes change and creativity to generate improvements.

Leading People

Leaders approach their roles with serious determination. Part of their role is not to dwell on the “rearview mirror,” but to look forward. They learn from past mistakes and errors in judgment, but never allow them to affect future opportunities and possibilities. Leaders learn to detach themselves from their circumstances to maintain a clear, forward-thinking perspective.

In order to succeed, leaders must unburden themselves of emotions and perceived limitations that impede attainment of goals and performance. They know past experiences can easily alter good judgment. For a leader, past experiences become the lessons for the future, producing the wisdom to adapt to change.

Leaders know situations or problems will not always fit into neat compartments and have predictable outcomes. They understand and accept that even the most unthinkable changes and devastating occurrences are a possibility, and that their role is to embrace the challenge to overcome them.

Leaders also know they must be flexible in any and all situations, and that looking forward requires creating viable alternatives. They are aware that part of their function is to embrace change and the challenges it brings.

Cultivate the People under Your Direction

The most important role a leader must fulfill is to cultivate, support and nurture employees. Anything can be achieved with fertile enough ground to plant and grow the seeds of accomplishment. To best achieve this end, it is important to:

Learn and remember:

Leaders know part of their role is to learn everything about every person under their charge. They make it a point to learn what is important to each, to celebrate special days, achievements and even sadness with outward expressions, incentives, written memos, awards, notes and letters. Nothing builds loyalty and cooperation in employees better than being both professionally and personally attuned to them.

Demonstrate fairness and a cooperative spirit:

Leaders work with their employees to maintain high levels of motivation and productive team efforts. They do this by clearly educating their employees on specific procedures, problems and needed skills. Leaders also acknowledge and take seriously the expectations employees have of them. This role builds trust, loyalty and the desire for all to achieve.

Walk the floor—get your hands dirty:

Part of a leader’s role is to offer help when and where it is needed. This can only be done by personally taking part in tasks and assignments and being an overall active participant in what is going on in their workplace. Knowledge is gathered, problems disclosed and people motivated when leaders fulfill this role. Employees gain respect for leaders who willingly undertake this interaction in a positive fashion rather than view it as an obligation.

Excerpt: Leadership Roles & Responsibilities: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Three Reasons Why Leaders Fail

Looking into the Crystal Ball

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Becoming a Leader of Your Own Making: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Leadership Styles: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 5, 2013 at 10:28 am

Posted in Leadership, Performance, Roles and Responsibilities

Tagged with decisions, employees, improvements, Leaders, Leadership, Management, managers, problems, productivity, responsibility, role, roles, trust

Performance Management Must Begin With the Manager

Focusing Employees on Common Goals

The concept of performance management allows managers to align the actions and activities of their employees with the goals and objectives of senior management in order to achieve the stated outcomes of the company.

It is this linkage that allows each individual employee to work toward the accomplishment of mutual goals and objectives.

Many managers make the common mistake of assuming that because they understand the goals and objectives assigned to them, everyone else does as well. This is often where many performance problems occur, as in terms of thinking and action there is a gap between what was planned as an overall company goal and what the unit or department is actually doing. The company might have established a specific goal while employees are working in a fashion wholly unrelated to that goal, which will assure that it is not met.

Managers are the liaison between senior leadership and their people. Often there is no sense of connection between a company’s goals and the actions of individual employees. They continue to perform in their usual fashion without achieving the desired outcomes stated by upper management. The role of the manager is to align the actions of his or her employees with the goals and objectives of the company.

Effective performance management must begin with the manager. Before they can communicate the goals and objectives of management, he or she must clearly understand both what is desired and the means to achieve it. Unless this information is clearly communicated to the manager and he or she comprehends and understands what is desired, there will be a gap in the system that will result in deficient results.

The problem is that in many organizations there is too great a disparity between plans and results. Many employees and managers develop annual plans and then ignore them during the course of the year; there is no actual implementation. They are instead an exercise that management requires, without any real utility or connection to day-to-day work.

Before managers can manage the performance of their people, they must personally commit to it and the results they wish to achieve. Once they have done so, they can then focus their efforts in the following areas:

Clarifying Goals

Managers must take the time to create a two-way dialogue with their people and clearly communicate the company’s goals to them. Employees should be encouraged to question, challenge, interpret and clarify these goals in their minds. This process gives them ownership of the goals, which makes them more concrete and meaningful and increases the likelihood they will be accomplished.

Discussing Ways to Meet Goals

Once employees understand the individual company goals and objectives, managers should discuss the specific ways they can meet them.

These discussions should be detailed and explicit in order to align employees’ strategies and plans with the company goals. Managers should specify the precise changes employees have to make to align their individual behaviors and activities with the company goals.

Employees should be informed of what is now expected of them and how they are expected to meet those expectations. As goals were clarified through encouraging questioning, challenging and interpreting, similar brainstorming should be encouraged to determine the best ways to achieve company goals and objectives.

Following Through to Align Behaviors with Outcomes

The critical link in performance management is the manager’s commitment to follow through with each individual employee to ensure that their work is aligned with the stated outcomes outlined in the company’s goals and objectives. This is where many performance management programs fall short: goals and methodologies are discussed with the unit or department, but individual employees are allowed to backslide into old habits that hinder achieving the company’s goals.

Managers follow through by first observing each individual employee’s professional behavior, discussing the results he or she is achieving, and supporting their efforts with additional training and coaching to keep them on focus.

Excerpt: Performance Management: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Plans Must Be Rooted in Past Performance

Strengthening Performance: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Maximizing Financial Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

March 4, 2013 at 11:50 am

Posted in Performance, Performance Standards, Productivity

Tagged with align the actions, company, employees, goals, goals and objectives, Management, managers, objectives, performance, performance management, the stated outcomes

Change is Not a Destination But a Process

The facilitation of change is not the responsibility of any single individual, but is guided and directed by leadership on many different levels. Because change is dynamic, leadership must be equally so to keep pace with the opportunities and challenges it brings.

Leaders must understand change is not a destination but a process. The global economy does not allow leaders the luxury of resting on their laurels. Rather, it gives them the impetus to change and adapt on a frequent and regular basis. A failure to adapt opens the door to the forces of change overwhelming an organization.

A “management mentality” in the face of change produces a specific outcome, which is essentially to ask, “The organization is changing—now what?”

Leaders on the other hand become the real and active facilitators of change. They understand the forces behind it and use its dynamics as a means to effectively and repeatedly transform their organization. Rather than fear the concept of change, leaders welcome the opportunities it affords them.

Facilitating change within any organization requires proactive participation from all of its leaders. In the dynamic atmosphere of change, leaders must be ever-present and visible. There are a number of proven leadership techniques one can employ to successfully facilitate change within their organization, including:

Promoting Their Vision Daily

The importance of the leader’s personal vision is a guiding and fundamental leadership principle. It is not sufficient for leaders to simply state their vision; they must actively promote and talk about it at every opportunity. It is necessary for leaders to continually remind employees of their direction as they guide them step-by-step through the processes, transitions, problems and successes en route to attaining their vision.

As changes occur within an organization, leaders must take advantage of every opportunity to spotlight events and people in order to showcase individual and group initiatives demonstrating progress toward the defined vision.

Leading by Personal Example

One of the most valuable resources available to a leader is time. Time is at a premium, and leaders must schedule carefully to achieve what is personally important to them. When employees see that their leaders are organized around the strategic priorities established to facilitate change, it communicates that they are in earnest about their personal initiatives.

As a general practice, leaders need to adjust their personal calendars to reflect the strategic priorities of facilitating change. This communicates that the leader is leading with action to back up their words, as they are focusing their time specifically upon the point of change.

Practicing Visible Leadership

Leaders cannot lead from behind a desk or office door. They must be present at the point of change to train, coach, cajole and comfort.

Leaders can only observe and learn when they are in the midst of their employees during the implementation of change. This is not a one-time event, but an ongoing exercise. This is why the efficient scheduling of time is critical if leaders want to be actively involved in the direct facilitation of change transformations.

Being a Compulsive Listener

Leaders have one primary responsibility: to go out and listen to their employees. It should not be done in a passive style of listening, but one where leaders actively engage their employees, learn from their frustrations, take action to clean up a particular stressful or unproductive situation, and enthusiastically encourage each one of them. The process of facilitating change requires that leaders make it an ongoing habit to actively listen and make necessary changes based upon what they specifically learn and observe.

Honoring Your Frontline Staff

Leaders understand that the point of change happens in the front lines of their organization. While it impacts the entire organization, the front lines are the apex of change. This is where its real impact is felt—and where leaders must directly focus their time, efforts and attention.

In this regard, leaders should be honoring their frontline employees. They accomplish this by celebrating all major and minor successes and learning from failures as they test new ideas and concepts.

Delegating

When leaders delegate they are not only freeing up valuable time, they are empowering and training others to perform key tasks. Proper delegation allows leaders to be more responsive to the needs of their organization because they can get out from under tasks demanding their time and hindering their ability to lead. The key to successful delegation is the maintenance of high standards for those the leader designates to perform the delegated work.

Managing Horizontally

When leaders manage horizontally, they are opening up communications and responsiveness at the front lines of their organization, and across multiple functions. This minimizes the delays of bureaucratic up and down communications and replaces it with faster frontline communications across functional boundaries. This allows leaders to test, try, modify, and act on ideas quickly, and facilitates change more rapidly at its apex and focal point.

Questioning Daily Progress

It is easy for leaders to mask a number of functions, items and agendas under the label of change. An effective leader constantly questions his or her progress on a daily basis and asks, “What exactly have I changed?”

Rather than measuring progress over time, leaders understand that facilitating change involves countless decisions and minor changes that produce organizational modifications, alterations or elimination of unproductive practices across many planes and avenues. They are more pragmatic about looking at specific daily changes to ensure that transformations are taking place throughout their organization.

Creating a Sense of Urgency

While the nature of change brings about its own sense of pressure, leaders must continually reinforce their personal sense of urgency to overcome all of the potentially paralyzing fears employees may experience due to change and its compelling nature. Every action and activity a leader undertakes must also be viewed as an unequivocal call for urgency in the pursuit of constant testing and improvement in subsequent change transformations throughout the organization.

Excerpt: Facilitating Change: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Managers as Facilitators of Change

7 Ways to Use Change to Increase Performance

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Impact of Change on Individuals: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 28, 2013 at 10:50 am

Posted in Change, Change Management, Management Challenges

Tagged with adapt, Change, change leaders, employees, facilitating change, facilitation of change, initiatives, Leaders, Leadership, Organization, point of change, strategic priorities, vision

Flexibility is Required When Change is Present

Empowerment is a Structured Discipline

In today’s organizations, conditions are always shifting. Leaders must be enabled by their organizations to be ready whenever conditions require adaptation. Forces of change demand a new mindset, new methods of operation, even new definitions of organizational success. None of this is possible without incorporating flexibility and imagination into decision-making, and the willingness of all organizational members to then see decisions through to enhance change transformations.

In order to fit evolving situations, it is crucial to constantly modify approaches and create flexibility in decision making policies. Problem solving is central to leadership and change itself.

Flexibility, imagination and change can sometimes be exhausting and frightening. Because of this, it is important to keep in mind that organization members will continually seek to avoid the pain and discomfort associated with uncertainty, fear and risk. When all members band together to meet the forces of change, these minimizing priorities can become a major obstacle to overcome in the decision making process.

Since overcoming personal discomfort and unrest is difficult and time consuming, management and leaders must be cautioned against succumbing to any number of fads promising quick fixes and painless successes. When it comes to successful organizational change, there are no easy fixes.

Organizations committed to change realize that their leaders need to assert practical, action-oriented decisions to move it ahead. Leaders must be able to think on their feet and improvise. Effective organizations and leaders don’t become focused on the means to creating good decisions, but on the end results. They rely on others’ ideas and insights as well as their own.

An organization committed to sound leadership principles allows its leaders to employ the most effective decision making tools in overcoming every situation that threatens the progress of change. Organizations and leaders alike need to guard against falling into rigid patterns of thinking and behavior where decision-making is concerned.

Organizations must carefully assess how its decisions are made, and seriously consider a situational approach to leadership. In other words, all members must become thoroughly immersed in the “here and now” with a complete understanding of each emerging situation and challenge, and related decisions made accordingly. In order to successfully accomplish this, four strategies need to be addressed and implemented which impact the quality of decisions. These include:

Avoiding a ‘One Size Fits All’ Approach to Decision Making

In the midst of change, trial and error abound. Organizations must acknowledge the fact that change and total empowerment evolve slowly. Decisions must be made along the lines of small steps designed to move the process along smoothly and steadily. This implies discarding management fads that claim all change can be swiftly accomplished with one method or solution.

Instead, leaders must be given full authority to assess every emerging situation and adopt the best-suited courses of action. Organizations discourage their leaders from becoming rigidly embedded in any processes, tools, methods or techniques limiting their creative capabilities to overcome any challenge posed by an emerging situation.

Break Out of Comfort Zones

Organizations often look the other way when some of its leaders repeatedly and doggedly use a particular style or approach to leading people and making decisions directly affecting them. This can be damaging in that it more often than not generates rigidity in thought and action among other leaders and employees. It works to limit creativity and unity of purpose and thought.

Decision-making constrained by comfort zones is generally not conducive to quickly emerging situations demanding immediate and sensible determinations. One’s favorite style or approach often does not fit the demands of a given situation. Immediate directives may at times be more effective than full-blown discussions of certain problems. Other situations will require more intense analyzation to determine root causes and numerous subsequent participatory discussions undertaken. Making effective, lower-risk decisions often requires applying an intensive, customized, and even untried approach to a situation. Organizations and its leaders refuse to take a “prepackaged” response to its problems.

Harnessing, Not Managing Change

Organizations and leaders understand that leadership is a “calling” that demands commitment to the organization’s mission, values and people. All decisions are made with these elements in the forefront. This calling implies leaders must meet external conditions that are always in flux because of new competition, new opportunities and unforeseen threats. Decisions must be made to adapt to and get ahead of changes. In other words, organizations and its leaders must ride the changes, not succumb to the temptation to manage them.

Decision-making must be quick, flexible and agile to surmount the challenges that change brings. When traditional decision making processes are adhered to, an organization builds an internal barrier to responding to a wide variety of contingencies and moving ahead.

Being Ready to Make Changes Immediately

One of the greatest challenges that organizations and leaders face in the midst of change is resisting the temptation to revert to “business as usual” mode, or assume there is only one way to move the organization ahead. Many leaders fall into the trap of returning to the familiar when things get out of control. Leaders must be continually encouraged not to cling to comfortable and automatic responses and actions when stressed by the situation they are forced to deal with.

When it comes to decision making, leaders and organizations need to remember to think small, be flexible and think creatively but opportunistically. They must remain open to new definitions of success, while making the organization stronger and healthier in smaller decision making degrees, not great leaps.

Excerpt: Organizational Empowerment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Related:

Seven Key Benefits of an Empowered Workplace

Managing Change: The Transition From Chaos to Order

Facilitating Change: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Empowerment: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership: The Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 27, 2013 at 10:20 am

Posted in Decision Making, Flexibility, Problem Solving

Tagged with Change, decision-making, emerging situation, flexibility, forces of change, Leaders, Organizations

Performance Plans Create Results and Maximizes Performance

with 6 comments

A performance plan differs from a conventional plan in that it is a proactive document. It is designed for continuous use throughout the year as a guide and reference tool to direct the leader and his or her unit’s activities. The primary purpose of a performance plan is to create results and maximize performance.

Managers often produce an annual performance plan only to give senior management what they want to see. Leaders view performance planning as an opportunity to review and analyze actual past performance. It gives them the means to identify ways to improve their personal and organizational unit’s overall performance and productivity.

Managers as leaders actively use their performance plan to drive the unit’s as well as their own performance. They continually reference their performance plan as a roadmap throughout the year to guide and direct their activities and courses of action as well as those of their subordinates.

Leaders work and plan under the direction of senior management. They define overall strategic company goals and plans. Senior management also forms operational and tactical strategies directing the company’s activities during the year. Typically leaders are responsible for specific aspects of the operational and tactical plans. Their performance plans are directly linked to their assigned goals and objectives. How leaders accomplish these goals and objectives is self-defined. This is where they are given an opportunity to shine.

As was discussed in the previous lesson, leaders are driven by a vision of what is possible, not expected. In formulating a performance plan, leaders begin with an initial preparation before it is formally written and executed. This preliminary process includes:

Collecting and Correlating Data

Leaders collect and correlate the information and data they developed during a review of their organizational unit’s prior performance. This provides a complete picture of the unit’s successes and weaknesses. It helps pinpoint how successes can be capitalized on, and identifies the problems and issues that must be resolved to maximize the unit’s performance.

Leaders ensure their plans coincide with their vision. This is necessary if their vision is to be attained. They analyze and make sure plans can be incorporated into their overall goals and objectives.

The information collected from these two planning activities provides reliable insight and direction. It shapes how performance plans are to be formulated and becomes the foundation for all future performance plans.

Brainstorming

Leaders obtain input and feedback from all members of their unit. This strategy works to bring individual members “on board.” It greatly increases the probability they will accept the plan and implement the necessary strategies to make it successful.

Leaders use brainstorming to get reliable feedback. They use this feedback to creatively approach the development of their performance plan. They need to “think outside of the box” to view their goals and objectives creatively and without bias. Brainstorming accomplishes this by encouraging entrepreneurial thinking. Then leaders can easily define the issues concerning maximizing unit performance from various perspectives.

The purpose of brainstorming is not only to identify ways to achieve goals and complete tasks. It is used as a method to seek out information and ideas for exceeding normal expectations. Leaders always look for ways to optimize performance and results. Effective brainstorming also helps them improve budgetary performance as it maximizes the use of assigned resources.

Formulating Plans

Throughout the preparation and brainstorming phases of planning, the performance plan begins to take shape. Senior management has assigned the overall goals and objectives. The feedback and the analysis of the organizational unit details what needs to be accomplished. From this information, assumptions can be made that will form the basis of the plan.

Leaders clarify the specific direction the organizational unit will take. The steps needed to achieve this direction are carefully outlined and detailed. Each step is then formulated into specific objectives along with the activities required to attain the chosen course of direction.

From this information, leaders assign specific tasks and responsibilities to each individual unit member. These assignments become part of the performance plan, assuring that all objectives will be accomplished.

Leaders make sure each subordinate assigned to a task or responsibility has the necessary resources to be successful. Additionally, each task and responsibility includes established milestones so subordinates understand exactly what they need to do, by when. Milestones provide leaders with performance standards to ensure assigned tasks and responsibilities are accomplished in a timely fashion. This allows for effective managing of the performance plan as well as making modifications when needed.

Formalizing Plans

The final step of performance planning is to formalize a written plan. This becomes the actual management tool that guides and directs the organizational unit in the accomplishment of its goals and objectives.

The degree to which plans need to be refined will vary according to company standards. However, leaders make sure their plan clearly and precisely details the goals and objectives of the entire organizational unit. They write these in clear, easily understood language. Plans also include a timeline plotting each task, responsibility and milestone. Each time segment details the individual(s) responsible for specific tasks and their accomplishment and defines the resources to be allocated. All supporting data collected throughout the planning process is included to substantiate the plan, as well as the list of assumptions the plan is based upon.

Excerpt: Planning to Maximize Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Measure What Needs to Be Measured

Performance Driven Leaders Must Establish Clear Employee Expectations

Decision-Making Begins When an Action Needs to Be Taken

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Maximizing Financial Performance

Strengthening Leadership Performance

Performance Management

Problem Solving

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 26, 2013 at 11:01 am

Posted in Performance, Performance Planning, Plans and Strategies

Tagged with goals, goals and objectives, Leaders, managers, objectives, operational, overall goals, performance, performance plan, Performance planning, plan, tactical, vision

How to Analyze Your Team’s Expectations and Outcomes

Eleven Factors That Affect the Team Environment

In general, the purpose behind analyzing whether team expectations are being met is to promote, enhance or improve something within the team itself to help overcome or prevent specific problems, weaknesses or hindrances.

When analyzing expectations, it becomes important to focus on three types of project-related outcomes: team knowledge, team processes, and the deliverable. Team knowledge includes understanding team terminology, concepts, and relationships among team actions and results.

Team processes are the steps utilized to create a desired deliverable or end product and include: professional attitudes, self-awareness to know when project steps are executed, and self-control during transitions between project-related steps. The deliverable or end product is what is created as a result of team project activity—such as a plan, method, system, document, or process to meet specified needs.

When it comes to predicting, defining and interpreting a team’s results, outcomes and expectations, there are specific skills that should be applied, which tend to cut across all team-related roles. There are four basic questions individual members need to ask themselves before determining if team expectations are being met:

Am I learning what I need to know?
Am I applying what I have learned?
Am I a good role model and expert?
Am I able to teach others to know and apply important team functions, best practices and group dynamic applications?

There are a multitude of reasons why teams may wish to evaluate their performance, including:

Identify accomplishments.
Evaluate if leadership is shared and effective.
Identify team strengths.
Identify points of team weakness.
Analyze team strengths and weaknesses
Identify group dissatisfaction.
Identify low morale.
Identify confusion of team purpose.
Identify drop in participation.
Avoid team stagnation and demise.

Predicting, defining and interpreting a team’s results, outcomes and expectations and their combined effectiveness can be accomplished through a number of assessment and evaluation resources, including:

A complete index or listing of definitions that detail outcomes, which multiple audiences can refer to such as organizational employees, upper management, and/or sponsors
The drafting of performance criteria for examining team-related outcomes
The application of performance review tools for providing timely feedback and for planning developmental actions intended to improve team performance
Providing oral presentations and reports to organizational employees, upper management, and/or sponsors

There are very specific success factors that a team must analyze to determine if it is able to obtain, or is obtaining the results it wants:

The Team’s Ability to Organize

Analyze the team to see if it is:

Establishing a system to communicate standards of excellence
Delegating tasks and responsibilities
Aligning people and resources to present information where all audiences can understand key points and issues

The Team’s Ability to Prioritize

Make sure the team is:

Researching information
Focusing on issues that are most critical to the success of the project
Taking into account the feasibility and the relationship to the goal, blocking time to evaluate
Categorizing issues and reprioritizing if necessary
Identifying the steps to be taken
Identifying the necessary issues to be addressed and placing them into an appropriate order

The Team’s Ability to Analyze

Ensure the team is diagnosing and clarifying issues/data by:

Gathering the most relevant information
Recognizing broader implications of issues/data
Drawing logical inferences
Examining interrelationships between all alternatives
Making decisions that have the greatest positive impact on team outcomes and its deliverable

The Team’s Ability to Manage Time

Check if the team is using time effectively for tasks that are to be completed, including:

Establishing priorities
Preparing project timelines
Monitoring and managing resources
Allocating time for the team to work
Reviewing updates
Thinking about its next action steps

The Team’s Ability to Question

Is the team effectively using questions, which consists of:

Formulating open-ended questions that increase awareness of situations
Requesting clear, concise information that achieves desired results
Providing opportunities to analyze data that results in finding root causes
Creating a nonjudgmental, open and creative environment

The Team’s Ability to Facilitate

Make sure the team works collaboratively to help define its overall goals and specific objectives by:

Utilizing effective group dynamic skills (questioning, clarifying, paraphrasing, summarizing, consensus)
Applying problem solving skills (assess needs, set expectations)
Identifying skills and a timeline
Analyzing data to help team members create plans that assist them to accomplish and meet desired results and time frames

The Team’s Ability to Present

Check if team members prepare clear, concise, well-organized deliveries of information by utilizing effective oral communication skills such as:

Speaking clearly
Varying voice volume, pitch and pace
Displaying high levels of energy and enthusiasm
Applying effective eye contact and body language
Engaging the team audience
Emphasizing key points

The Team’s Ability to Verbally Communicate

Analyze by incorporating the above skills, to see if the team is able to clearly and accurately explain and articulate its:

Mission/vision
Ideas
Procedures
Policies

The Team’s Ability to Make Sound Decisions

Is the team:

Using the scientific method to recognize and define a problem
Facilitating effective ways to access and collect relevant information
Reviewing and evaluating alternative solutions or actions
Selecting the best choices and following through with the implementation of decisions

The Team’s Ability to Problem Solve

Ensure the team is creating effective and appropriate solutions by:

Employing analysis skills to synthesize and apply relevant information/data
Breaking down and clarifying the problem
Defining the desired outcome(s)
Investigating options and alternatives
Selecting the solution that will have the greatest positive impact in the present and for the future

The Team’s Ability to Generate a More Functional Environment

Check if the team is:

Selecting and developing members based on individual and group skills
Identifying and leveraging personality types to complement their strengths
Managing conflict
Creating team roles and expectations resulting in group capacity to facilitate win-win situations within the team setting

The Team’s Ability to Implement and Measure

Is the team executing and overseeing its action plan through:

The preparation and alignment of expectations and resources
The assessing of results against outcomes
Removing barriers
Identifying strategies for continuous progress
Communicating results to stakeholders

The Team’s Ability to Manage Conflict

Ensure that team members use effective techniques and practices to respond to conflict through:

Skill and sensitivity that results in presenting one’s position in adverse circumstances
Seeking to understand those with whom one disagrees to win acceptance
Shaping opinions
Earning respect
Identifying areas of common concern

The Team’s Ability to Research

Check if the team is:

Effectively accessing information from various sources
Analyzing and testing effective solutions that result in better performances, which are based on scientific study, case studies and best practices
Developing a network of experts both inside as well as outside of the organization
Reviewing necessary and applicable journals, books and trends
Utilizing experiential data and best practices
Conducting external and internal informational scans

The Team’s Ability to Strategically Plan

Make sure the team is developing strategies to achieve higher levels of performance and project outcomes by:

Prioritizing critical goals
Identifying and prioritizing success factors
Translating broad strategies into clear objectives
Allocating resources
Anticipating risks
Identifying constraints
Understanding issues that impact team performance

The Team’s Ability to Make Continuous Improvements

Check if the team is continually making improvements in processes and areas of performance by:

Scanning the team environment continually to determine what can be done better
Creating a team environment where risk taking is accepted and rewarded
Establishing a process where information and lessons learned can be shared
Tracking the progress of key steps and milestones within the project and innovative ideas that can be readily shared

The Team’s Ability to Provide Positive, Constructive Feedback

Ensure the team is providing and using positive and constructive feedback to:

Instill a sense of confidence in others
Model behaviors for replication
Help others attain higher levels of performance
Set up action plans for improvement
Aid in initiating a team environment of trust and accomplishment

The Team’s Ability to Collaborate

Is the team seeking the involvement of others by including them in:

All decision making processes
Establishing and building the team’s shared vision and goals
Identifying ways to foster good give-and-take relationships, discouraging “us vs. them” thinking
Building a team environment where the contributions of all members are valued

The Team’s Ability to Plan

Ensure the team is developing plans and processes by:

Translating strategy into specific goals and objectives to support the team’s vision
Identifying team capacities
Establishing clear, realistic timelines
Identifying specific action steps and accountabilities
Identifying, testing and confirming assumptions in the team’s strategic plans

The Team’s Ability to Manage the Project

Make sure the team is effectively monitoring its ongoing progress by:

Tracking progress through clearly set goals and timelines
Developing specific objectives, milestones, and outcome guidelines
Identifying resources and budget
Establishing specific responsibilities for collecting and/or tracking
Presenting critical variables related to the project
Effectively communicating evaluation standards, timelines, expectations, and individual follow-up procedures
Scheduling meetings for follow-up and review

The Team’s Ability to Delegate

Check if the team trusts others to take responsibility that is meaningful, important and interesting by:

Providing necessary individuals with sufficient authority and resources to accomplish assignments
Treating team and work failures as learning opportunities
Personally evaluating themselves on the willingness and ability to delegate
Identifying barriers that may likely hinder the ability to successfully complete the delegated task or project
Creating comfort levels for others

Excerpt: Developing & Planning for Team Results: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

What Is Involved in the ‘Teaming Process’

How Do Know If Your Teams Are Remaining Strong & Productive

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

A Team’s Purpose, Function & Use: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Boosting Team Communication: Pinpoint Leadership Skills Development Training Series

Building Strong Teams: Pinpoint Leadership Skills Development Training Series

Developing a Team Approach: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 25, 2013 at 12:14 pm

Posted in Accountability, Teams

Tagged with employees, expectations, group dynamic, project, results, team, team expectations, team knowledge, team performance, team processes, team strengths, team’s ability, team’s results

Personal Behavioral Patterns Can Interrupt Contact Between Team Members

Five Pitfalls Teams Need to Avoid

Interaction or contact between individual team members creates a personal impact caused by varying personality differences, which in turn directly affects how teams function. Team members must make contact with each other for teams to develop effectively.

Some individuals tend to make immediate team contact without hesitation, through initiating or actively participating in conversations and discussions. Others tend to wait to make contact until invited into interactive encounters. This is a direct reflection of their individual personality styles and how they relate to others and their surroundings.

Each individual member has a complex series of relationships within a team. Most of these relationships are one-to-one with other team members. However, it should be noted that individual members also have a relationship with the team itself and with each subunit of the team.

It is essential for leaders to consider how their focus on team member relationships and willingness to work to make interactions more beneficial directly impacts their teams’ performance and results. The fact that individual personality styles can enhance or inhibit member relationships has ramifications for the team communication process and impacts members’ abilities to solve problems, arrive at consensus and make effective decisions. Therefore, it is important for leaders to pay attention to these characteristics and intercede when they occur to reestablish or maintain positive interaction.

Five personal behavior patterns can interrupt contact between team members. These patterns account for the various ways some team members tend to block or inhibit their relationships with others and create barriers to team effectiveness.

All of the five behaviors outlined below are interlinked and can be exhibited by all individuals, including leaders.

Projection and Mirroring

Projection interrupts contact by producing an overreaction to certain qualities displayed by other team members. Many times individuals who use projection are totally unaware that the team members who generally overreact possess the same behavioral tendencies.

Oftentimes mirroring is displayed when particular individuals accuse others of doing or saying something that reflects their own personal behaviors.

Both of these behaviors are so prominent with certain personalities that these individuals become hypersensitive in their responses and actions with others. Projection and mirroring effectively block contact since there is always an element of judgment involved in the interaction. This invariably places other team members into defensive postures that result in ongoing internal team conflict.

Introjection

Introjection interrupts contact through a lack of thought discrimination on the part of certain individuals in accepting information, perspectives and ideas without question. Team members with a strong tendency toward introjection may work closely with other selective team members whose superior experience is accepted and unchallenged, either through admiration or intimidation.

Team members who tend to introject generally lack the experience, seasoning and expertise to openly and confidently challenge new ideas, perceptions and concepts. Consequently, introjection is considered a part of their overall learning process.

Retroflection

Retroflection interrupts contact, as individuals exhibiting this behavior do for themselves as they would do for others or as they would like others to do for them. Feelings of personal guilt are a classic form of retroflection, where fault is personally accepted without outwardly criticizing others. Retroflection is also a superb form of personal defense. It is often displayed through the avoidance of conflict, which creates a “dead area” in team relationships. Because of retroflection, certain concerned team members often find themselves becoming depressed or deflated.

Confluence

Confluence interrupts contact through a team member’s strong reluctance or inability to reflect inwardly. Outward contact is considered necessary and a top priority for individuals who display this behavioral trait. These members are strongly team-oriented and will often refuse to disband their teams when assignments are completed. Or, these individuals will tend to remain in contact with specific team members long after their teams have been dismantled and their projects disbanded. Additionally, team members who exhibit confluence tend to possess the inability to adequately pace themselves in their tasks and assignments.

Deflection

Deflection is an instinctive avoidance of contact. It is often displayed through the refusal to share personal feelings, perceptions or feedback. It is also identified in interruptive attempts to change subjects, generalize discussions, or tell stories rather than to focus on tasks. Some individuals often use deflection as a way to avoid emotional contact with other team members.

Excerpt: Personality Differences within the Team Setting: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Related:

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

Is Conflict Destructive to Your Organization?

The Challenge of Handling Conflict

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Boosting Team Communication: Pinpoint Leadership Skills Development Training Series

Conflict Resolution: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 22, 2013 at 11:39 am

Posted in Negative Employee Behaviors, Team Development, Teams

Tagged with avoidance, behaviors, confluence, contact, individuals, inhibit, interaction, interrupts contact, introjection, Leaders, mirroring, patterns, personality styles, projection, relationships, retroflection, team, team members

Leaders Need to Focus on Questions Rather Than Offering Answers

Making the Questions as Important as the Answers

The tactical approach to questioning is a highly disciplined process. The questioner must take on the role of acting as “an inner critical voice,” which expands another’s mind to skillfully develop deeper critical thinking abilities.

Questioning for thought provoking insight and understanding, and for inducing more in-depth thinking in another individual requires a tactical approach. For instance, verbal contributions that come from employees when they are questioned can be compared to an array of numerous thoughts that simultaneously flow from one’s mind. Yet, all of the thoughts must be dealt with, weighed, and carefully analyzed in an unbiased and fair manner.

If leaders or managers follow up on all of the answers initially given by employees with further questions that work to advance the discussion, employees are forced to think in a disciplined, intellectually responsible manner. At the same time the questioning process continually aids their own personal agenda to gain more insight and knowledge through posing selective, yet effective facilitating discussion lead-ins.

The oldest and still most powerful tool for instilling critical thinking and mental self-evaluation, is questioning. In order to glean and gather as much usable information as possible, and to change individual perceptions about something, leaders and managers must remain focused on interjecting questions to employees, rather than offering answers.

It is important to practice and model the inquiry process, by continually probing employees on topics, subject-related contexts or mental thinking patterns through the use of very specific questions. The abilities individuals gain by becoming involved in the process and by focusing on the elements of reasoning in a disciplined and self-assessing way tend to enhance employees’ sensitivity to others’ points of view, problem solving and decision making skills. A solid questioning process also helps provide a more balanced mental structure and framework to use in the future, which results from generating and incorporating logical mental relationships that tend to enhance more disciplined thought.

There are three basic ways to instill changes and alterations in employees’ thinking: questioning them for viewpoints and perspectives, questioning them for implications and consequences, and questioning them about the question being asked.

Questioning for Viewpoints and Perspectives

As the discussion and questioning leader, it is important encourage employees to slow their thinking down in order to elaborate upon their responses. Employees must be given the opportunity to develop and test their ideas, standpoints and opinions. Leaders must take employee responses seriously and determine to what extent and in what way the information or assertion is true, or if it makes sense. In order to do this, they need to wonder aloud what the employee is saying and thinking, what the person means, the response’s significance, its relationship to other beliefs, and how what is being said can be tested for its reliability.

Most arguments employees give are from a particular, yet structured point of view. As part of the “questioning for viewpoints and perspectives” process, it is essential to attack the argument from a tactical position. It is often necessary to demonstrate that there may be other, equally valid, viewpoints. Some examples of specific questions that are able to generate alternative viewpoints include:

What else could be accomplished by doing ____?
If we don’t have access to ____ or can’t use ____, what do you think should be done?
What are the positives and negatives of ____?
How do you think ____ and ____ are alike?
Another way to think about this is ____, do you agree?

Implications and Consequences Questions

The argument that employees often give may have logical implications, which can be forecasted. From an “implications and consequence questioning” position, employees should have their arguments challenged. The process requires them to think about if their argument or stance makes sense from a logical standpoint, and if what they say, is desirable and meaningful. Some examples of argument challenging questions include:

What are you implying by saying that?
What else does this remind you of?
How does this information fit into the things we have already learned?
What implications does ____ have on this?
Why is this necessary to know?
What do you think would happen next?
What is an alternative to this?
If what you said happened, what else could happen as a result? Why?

Questions About the Question

Questions about the question tend to be more reflective. Their purpose is to turn an argument, statement or question back onto itself. In other words, leaders can use questions like the ones below to bounce the ball back onto the employees’ personal argument, position or stance:

How can we find out more about what you are saying (or asking)?
What assumptions does this question imply?
Why do you feel this question is important?
To answer this particular question, what questions would have to be answered first?
Does this certain question ask us to evaluate something in particular?
What is the point of asking about ____?
Why do you think the question you asked is important for (me, us) to consider?
Why did you phrase this particular question in the way that you did?
Does this question fit into the context of our discussion?
What does this particular (question, stance, position or opinion) imply?
Is it possible to break this question down at all into one or two other ones?
Do you think this question is an easy or hard one to answer? Why?
Does this question seem clear to you?

Excerpt: Effective Questioning Techniques: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Correctly Framing Problems Pinpoints the Right Solution

For Additional Information the Author Recommends the Following Books:

The Use and Application of Advanced Questioning: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Effective Questioning in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series

Developing Critical Thinking Skills: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Comprehensive Questioning: The Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 21, 2013 at 12:17 pm

Posted in Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Questioning

Tagged with critical thinking, employees, implications and consequences, insight, perspectives, question, questioning, questioning process, questions, tactical approach, thinking, viewpoints

Team Members Support One Another, Collaborate Freely and Communicate Openly

Seven Characteristics of Strong Teams

The formation of teams creates substantial and sustainable long-term benefits for the organization, including the fostering of a self-managing environment where employees are fully empowered to make decisions that increase their efficiency, effectiveness and overall productivity.

Many organizations will transition from groups and committees to formally structured teams with specific goals and objectives that are chartered by the organization to fulfill a specific purpose. Within the company, the transition can be either smooth from one environment to another, or sudden, resulting in traumatic organizational changes.

It is important for leaders to understand that the nature of a team is based upon a discipline that the team structure imposes on itself. Teams create a fully empowered environment that allows organizations to become more efficient, effective and productive. This shift provides companies with the flexibility to become more adaptive to the forces of change, and as a result the world has witnessed an overall increase in global competition in virtually every industry.

Many organizations purport to have so-called team environments, but some standard working groups are mislabeled or misidentified as teams. Some of the most common groups to be mislabeled as teams are discussed below.

Committees

Organizational committees usually serve as an investigative or advisory body reporting to an appointed person or to the one who organized them.

Task Forces

Organizational task forces are temporary problem solving groups formed to deal with issues that overlap lines of authority. A task force may, for its duration, be full or part time.

Quality Circles

Quality circles consist of groups of employees and supervisors who are seeking ways to increase the effectiveness of workgroups through higher productivity and improved quality.

Project Groups

Project groups are organized to work specifically on a project such as a new product or a new facility. Like the task force, the project group may have a temporary existence. When its mission is accomplished, the group disbands.

Teams have many traits that distinguish them from groups. They are normally chartered to fulfill a specific organizational purpose. The most distinguishing characteristic of a team is that its members have as their highest priority the accomplishment of team goals.

The most important business at hand is the success of the team in reaching the collective goals set by its members. Members support one another, collaborate freely and communicate openly and clearly with one another. Effective teams are able to accomplish their organizational purpose within specific areas, as outlined below.

Information

Within the effective team environment, information flows freely—horizontally, vertically and to the entire team. There is a full sharing of information among team members, and individuals are open and honest about what they are communicating with each other.

Personal Relationships

As the team environment develops and is fostered, nurtured and sustained, relationships on the team become more trusting, respectful, collaborative and supportive. Individuals learn to work together and respect one another’s input, perspective and opinions.

Conflict

Within a healthy team environment, conflict is regarded as natural and helpful when it centers around examining issues and key points that need to be addressed and is confined to issues, not personalities. In most group environments conflict is often rooted in personal traits, motives and agendas that tend to be destructive to everyone involved. Once the team environment is fostered and developed, most team members will use conflict constructively to address issues, solve problems and make decisions by examining all aspects of each element.

Team Atmosphere

As team members learn to work with each other in an effective team environment, they become more trusting, respectful, collaborative and supportive, creating an open and nonthreatening environment in which to operate.

Decisions

Decisions in the team environment are arrived at by consensus rather than by a majority vote or by forcing members to agree with the decision of the group. By arriving at a consensus, each team member is fully committed to a full and efficient use of the resources available to the team. In this manner each team member is fully responsible for the decision of the entire team.

Creativity

Within many organizational groups, the emphasis is on activity and end input, rather than output and solutions. Within an effective team environment, the team members create more solution-oriented outcomes. The focus of the group is on results, not activity.

Power Base

Within many organizational groups, it is not uncommon to see power hoarded by individuals or small groups based on internal politics and personal agendas. However, in an effective team environment the power of the team is shared by all of its members. It is based on the competence of each member and the contributions that each makes to the team.

Motivation

Within many organizational environments individual achievement is valued without concern for the group. Individuals and groups place their personal interests over and above the interests of the organization. However, on a team, the individual members set the environment for a commitment to group goals. Rather than being coerced and pressured to go along with imposed goals, members find that there is more chance for achievement through the advancement of the team.

Reward

Within many organizational groups the basis for rewards is often unclear. They can be based on subjective and often arbitrary appraisals of performance, favoring specific individuals over others. However, within an effective team environment the rewards are based on the contribution that the group provides to the organization. The team, rather than individuals within the team, is rewarded for its performance.

Excerpt: A Team’s Purpose, Function & Use: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

Five Critical Factors of Team Success

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 20, 2013 at 10:42 am

Posted in Collaboration, Open Communications, Teams

Tagged with collaborative, effective team environment, empowered, environment, groups, organizational groups, organizational purpose, productivity, respectful, supportive, team, team environment, team members, teams, trusting

Communication Starts With Respecting What Others Have To Say

Are Your Teams Really Working Groups?

As teams are composed of different personalities with different communication styles, communication problems will occur even when team structures are properly constructed and implemented.

Leaders must learn to deal with the practical elements of communication and overcome problems associated with group or team dynamics before moving ahead with more advanced communication issues.

It is important for leaders to understand that before teams can learn to communicate effectively, team members must first learn to communicate by each respecting what the other has to say. Leaders will find that this is the initial challenge that must be overcome after team formation.

Leaders should understand the common problems experienced by groups that can hinder the effectiveness and productivity of the team.

Floundering

Teams commonly have trouble intiating and ending discussions. Members flounder, wondering what actions to take next. Resistance is experienced as the team moves from one phase of the discussion to the next.

Problems from the onset suggest the team lacks clarity or is overwhelmed by the assignment. These startup problems suggest that team members are not comfortable enough with one another to engage in meaningful discussions.

Floundering during discussions suggests that the team has not arrived at a consensus. Team members can be reluctant to expose their work to review and criticism.

Overbearing Participants

Overbearing participants wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the team. They often have a senior rank within the company or possess in-depth technical knowledge. While most teams benefit from their participation, they can cause problems when they forbid any discussion that encroaches on their area of expertise or authority. Overbearing participants will tend to see such group solutions as unworkable, or they will use technical jargon signaling that the subject is off-limits to the group.

Leaders can minimize these problems by reinforcing to the team that, as long as it pertains to the current subject, no area is off-limits. Privately, leaders can talk with overbearing individuals to let them know that it is important for the group to explore the particular subject and for individuals to understand the process.

Dominating Participants

Some team members can consume a disproportionate amount of time by talking too much. Their excessive input inhibits other members of the team from participating. Leaders should structure discussions to encourage equal participation, and openly solicit input and contributions from all team members.

Reluctant Participants

Reluctant participants may feel shy or unsure of themselves in the team, and must be encouraged to contribute their ideas and perspectives. Problems can develop when there are no activities built-in to persuade these individuals to participate.

Leaders must act as gatekeepers to the discussion by openly and actively soliciting input and contributions from these individuals. These measures ensure balanced participation from the entire team.

Self-Assured Statements

Some individuals express personal beliefs and assumptions in a self-assured manner. These statements are so forceful that other team members assume they are hearing a presentation of facts. Consequently, members are reluctant to question these statements without facts and data to defend their position. They may also fear being wrong and thus losing face with the team.

Leaders cannot allow unquestioned acceptance of opinions as facts. They must use techniques and questions that compel members to support their statement with facts and to hold it up to the scrutiny of the entire team.

Rush to Accomplishment

Many teams will have individual members who are impatient and wish to rush through the training activity. These members will come to a decision before the team has had the time to discuss and consider alternative solutions. They will then urge the group to decide matters quickly, and will discourage any further efforts to analyze or discuss the matter. These members can communicate their impatience using nonverbal behavior or direct statements.

Leaders must remind the group of their focus and make sure that specific members do not exert pressure on the team to finish prematurely. If all else fails, leaders may need to directly confront the offender.

Attribution

As a way of bringing meaning to apparent disorder and confusion, people tend to attribute motives to individuals they disagree with or don’t understand. This behavior can lead to hostility in the team environment. Leaders must reaffirm the purpose, boundaries and framework of the training exercise and intervene when such behaviors are exhibited by team members.

Discounting

Discounting occurs when team members fail to assign other members’ ideas and options any validity, credence or credit. If discounting happens frequently, teams can experience hostility.

Every team member deserves respect and attention from the entire team. Leaders must ensure that the team is trained from the onset in active listening and other constructive behaviors. When possible, the leader should provide support to the discounted individual. Leaders will also need to privately discuss the matter with the team member who is responsible for discounting.

Digression and Tangents

Wide-ranging and unfocused team discussions are a natural tendency as teams stray from the topic. While some digressions may be entertaining, they divert the team from the purpose of the activity. Team facilitators are responsible for bringing these discussions back to the team’s agenda.

Feuding Team Members

Feuding team members can disrupt the entire team with their personal disagreements. Usually these feuds predate the team and are best dealt with outside of the team environment. Leaders can offer to facilitate a discussion to end the personal feud or at least arrive at an agreement concerning their behavior in the team setting.

Excerpt: Boosting Team Communication: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Related:

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

When Performance Lags, Look to the Team Culture

Strategies and Solutions for Solving Team Problems

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 19, 2013 at 10:22 am

Functioning in a Less Than Meaningful Workplace

Leaders Have Three Motivational Tools Available to Them

Effectively addressing negative employee interaction requires singling out what truly engages the minds, actions and hearts of individuals. Leaders must identify the factors producing the need in some employees to act negatively and callously toward others. In almost all cases, negative interaction among employees is the result of functioning in a less than meaningful workplace. To stifle interactive negativity, leaders must identify both the factors defining and methods creating a meaningful, reciprocal work environment.

It is important for leaders to understand every employee has a personal set of factors defining a meaningful workplace. When leaders fail to apply practical strategies for making the workplace more reciprocal, with people respectfully and productively working toward a common goal, they can expect continuous negative interaction among employees. This creates havoc that slows productivity and advancement for both the individual work unit and the organization.

How employees define a meaningful work environment determines how they function within their current environment. Some factors are more important than others. For one employee, the top factors may be a desire for a deep sense of purpose, the freedom to be innovative, and the opportunity to build strong relationships in the work setting. Other factors might include ownership in ideas and solutions, an atmosphere that encourages overcoming challenges or a feeling of success within the work unit.

The leadership challenge for reducing and eliminating employee interactive negativity is to reflect on what it is that makes a work environment truly rewarding and fulfilling. Leaders need to create a workplace that keeps its employees busy and productive, but one that also keeps their minds and hearts actively engaged. The only way personal negativity and accompanying actions are displaced is with security, trust, comradery, positive interaction and mutual respect.

Leaders assess their workplace and put into word and action what employees desire to see in a meaningful and rewarding environment. In order to do this, leaders:

Conduct An Environmental Climate Check

Leaders analyze their own negative feelings regarding the workplace. They ask, “Do I often find myself dwelling on the negative aspects of my work and performance and the atmosphere that exists?” If the answer is “yes,” the reasons behind their feelings are a good indicator of why employees feel the same way and negative interactions are taking place.

Taking the time to complete an analysis of the entire work unit atmosphere is the first step in dealing with negative employee interaction. In order to effect positive workplace change, leaders should both ask themselves the following questions and take appropriate actions wherever a “yes” response exists:

Is there an unspoken understanding that work should always be first in every employee’s life?
Does the organizational culture favor workaholics?
Do employees that don’t share this “work first” philosophy feel guilty?
Is there undue pressure on employees to make trade-offs with tasks and assignments against time, resources and availability?
Do individual assignments have more importance than collaborative efforts, trial-and-error methods and interactive positive communication?
Is praise a lower priority than the completion of timelines and tasks?

Seek Out Specific Areas in Which to Focus Your Efforts

Every organizational work unit has room for improvement. The key rests in a leader’s ability to know where to focus his or her efforts for maximum effect. The following are actions proven to transform the work environment in the quickest and most effective way:

Finding out what is most important to employees as far as creating a non-threatening, secure and fulfilling work environment.
Understanding each employee’s top priorities as they relate to work and themselves personally. This can be the starting point for creating a more meaningful and productive workplace for all.
Allowing employees to pause after a major completed task or project in order to gain a sense of closure and to savor their accomplishments.
Acknowledging all progress and getting upper management to recognize major milestones and hurdles employees reach and overcome.
Making challenges exciting, somewhat demanding, but realistic.
Allowing employees to make best use of their talents and to freely use others whenever needed as resources for input, ideas and suggestions.

Track the Fit of Your Employees

Getting to know what fires up your employees is crucial in fostering a rewarding work environment. Identifying the skills and talents they have outside the workplace can help place them into a better fit inside the organization. One of a leader’s responsibilities is to find out what their employees’ interests are, or their sources of motivation and energy. It is vital to talk to each employee about their passions, talents and creative abilities, and then tap into them however and whenever possible.

Negativity permeates an employee’s attitudes when they feel misplaced in their jobs, tasks, assignments and responsibilities. In order to overcome this, leaders assess:

Whether the big picture of the organization is thoroughly discussed with employees so that they clearly understand their personal place in it and how they specifically factor into its success.
If there are any employees who feel a particular job or assignment “just isn’t right” for them. It is important to find out what employees feel they can take on more capably, then match them with projects, assignments, and duties where they can better achieve success.
If there are some employees who feel a clash between their values and goals and those of others in the workplace. When work makes employees feel they need to be a different person in order to “fit in,” a leader can expect negative employee interactions to occur repeatedly.
Whether employees are allowed to consistently tap into their strengths and spend a great deal of their assignment time in activities best matched to their interests and talents.

Analyze Your Unit’s Flexibility

Nothing creates more negative interaction among employees than a work environment that remains inflexible to their needs. Leaders need to establish a more meaningful work environment by making certain that flexibility exists for all employees. They need to make sure the corporate rulebook does not overshadow the positive accomplishments taking place within the unit and among its members. Leaders need to consider:

Are work unit rules flexible when certain situations arise, or are they rigid to the point where the rulebook is still the ultimate word?
Are policies and procedures followed to the letter without allowing employees to question their validity and necessity?
In order to accomplish certain things do employees feel they must sidestep rules and hope they don’t get caught?

Addressing and changing areas needing improvement allows leaders to spend more of their time doing that which works to motivate employees and move the organization forward. Strengthening these areas is best accomplished by interacting with every employee, and taking action to build stronger personal relationships and subsequently a more secure, meaningful workplace.

Excerpt: Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

When Motivating Employees, Expectations Are Everything

Seven Proactive Steps to Take to Deal With a Problem Employee

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 18, 2013 at 11:17 am

Posted in Critical Thinking, Employees, Performance, Problem Solving

Tagged with employee interaction, employees, environment, interaction among employees, Leaders, meaningful work, meaningful work environment, negative employee, negative employee interaction, negative interaction, the workplace, work, work environment, workplace

With Conflict Resolution Nothing is Straightforward and Simple

The Challenge of Handling Conflict

The style of problem solving and conflict resolution is the most important factor in determining group effectiveness. Research has shown that the predominant mode of conflict resolution that characterizes leadership and management groups is the most significant variable in determining whether or not companies are profitable.

The manner in which managers resolve problems and overcome conflict within their organizations may appear of little consequence as long as the problem is solved and the conflict is eliminated. However, managers must understand the group dynamics that impact solutions and their consequences.

There are various modes of conflict resolution that come into play in the workplace. Some define the group by the norms accepted. Other styles of conflict resolution may be appropriate to the circumstances surrounding the problem. Nothing is straightforward and simple.

It is important for managers to understand the complexity of problem solving and conflict resolution. There are specific methods and techniques that managers should use and apply to be consistently effective. However, they should recognize there are other styles of conflict resolution that can be more effective, depending upon the circumstances and the makeup of the individuals involved. Managers must learn to recognize all modes and when they are best applied.

There are a variety of conflict resolution modes that managers will find to be common in the workplace. It should be noted that most groups often act in ways that contain one or more of these styles in their efforts to deal with conflict:

Smoothing and Avoiding

These groups tend to be comprised of accommodating individuals who, when a problem or conflict occurs, will tend to define it in a manner that minimizes the differences between individuals. Their objective is to maintain the status quo within the group. As a whole, this method of conflict resolution is destructive because it does not address the central issues or actually resolve the sources of conflict. Consequently, these issues tend to fester within the group and will emerge later as a larger issue.

The group norms that identify the smoothing and avoiding behavior include individuals who tend to withdraw when attacked in order to avoid conflict. Additionally, individual group members tend to keep their feelings and remarks in check so that they don’t surface. This effectively masks internal conflict and prevents the manager, as well as the group, from identifying the undercurrents that are present.

Confronting and Problem Solving

This form of conflict resolution represents the healthiest behavior. The members of this group tend to be collaborators. They will define the problem relative to the total organization’s needs versus their own. The outcomes of this group are interdependent if the total group benefits from the solution.

The group norms that identify the confronting and problem solving behavior include individuals who feel it is important to bring out and confront the differences of opinion and perspective within the group. They also feel that all solutions to conflict should be open and fair to all involved and to the organization as a whole. The group will tend to arrive at answers and solutions by reason rather than the application of personal power and authority.

Confronting and problem solving behaviors are generally the most effective mode for resolving group conflicts.

Bargaining and Forcing

This form of conflict resolution behavior favors and is beneficial to specific power groups and personal agendas. It takes a winning-at-all-costs slant that positions one group against another. The problems tend to be defined in terms of the stakes of each group. The participants and the atmosphere are confrontational and adversarial. The outcome favors one group at the expense of all others.

The group norms that typify bargaining and forcing behaviors include individuals who will seize the advantage whenever possible and compromise when the advantage is the other group’s. Individuals will tend to maximize the benefits for themselves over the other individual members.

Excerpt: Conflict Resolution: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

“Dissent, Even Conflict Is Necessary, Indeed Desirable”

Handling Workplace Complaints, Concerns and Issues

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 15, 2013 at 11:48 am

Posted in Conflict Resolution, Problem Solving, Productivity

Tagged with conflict, conflict resolution, confronting, group, group norms, groups, managers, problem, problem solving, problem solving and conflict resolution, resolution, styles of conflict resolution

Nine Rules for Coaching Your Employees

Supporting Employees’ Need to Achieve Maximum Results

Many employees work independently in self-directed teams. Managers not only have the responsibility to direct their activities, but they must work with each to assure maximum performance. This means they must actively work with each member, observing, providing feedback and instructing him or her how to correct negative behaviors and strengthen weak skills.

The manager who solely directs and manages his or her team fails to get maximum results from them. Effective managers are motivators focused on assisting each employee to achieve maximum performance and results. This is achieved through the use of effective coaching techniques.

This is important to the manager because as a coach, he or she will recognize negative behaviors that hinder personal performance. The responsibility of effective coaches is not to admonish, but to improve the individual employee. In this manner, these behaviors are corrected and performance is enhanced.

There are specific coaching rules that managers must employ to become effective coaches. These rules are:

Provide a Good Example

Before managers can be effective coaches, they must set a good example for the employees they are supervising. Nothing undermines effective coaching faster than instructing subordinates on how to improve themselves when the coach fails to follow his or her own advice. This only destroys any credibility they may have established.

Be Persistent

Coaches have to be persistent in their efforts to change a negative behavior or to strengthen a weak skill area in an employee. In education it takes over 25 repetitions of proper behavior to overcome one response to a simple negative habit or behavior. Therefore, coaches must have the patience and persistence to work with an employee to correct and reinforce proper behaviors and skills.

Avoid Judgments

When coaches are judgmental of negative or weak behaviors, they put the coached employee on the defensive. This defeats the purpose of coaching as the employee will immediately be resistant to any efforts to correct or polish his or her skills out of fear of being criticized, undermined or intimidated.

Do Not Patronize

Patronizing an employee is a demeaning form of condescension. Employees should be treated as professionals and then they will perform and achieve as such. They are responsible for producing results, and they should be held accountable for their personal performance.

Elicit Advice and Ideas

Managers as coaches are providing feedback focused on altering a behavior or improving a skill. They need to clearly explain what they have observed and state their concerns. Once this has occurred, the employee should be encouraged to express how they feel about the feedback. This should be a discussion where advice and ideas are mutually exchanged.

Listen

Managers must understand that an employee’s performance and behaviors are a reflection of their life and experiences. Other outside influences can impact their performance. When coaching, managers must ask questions and listen for specific answers. They should encourage the employee to talk about all things that may concern them.

Clarify

Conversations and messages can be easily misunderstood. Managers should paraphrase what they hear to ensure they clearly understand what the employee is saying. Paraphrasing prevents miscommunication, clears up misconceptions and creates a more comfortable atmosphere of respect and concern.

Be Accessible

Managers must always be accessible to their employees. Managers can alleviate an employee’s fears and anxieties by being available to listen, empathize, and provide support.

Develop Rapport

When managers are approachable, they openly share their experiences and empathize with their subordinates to understand their thoughts and ideas. Then they unite their goals and vision with them. This accessibility invites rapport that deepens the workplace relationship. When this occurs the stage is set to transition from active coaching into mentoring.

Excerpt: Coaching: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Should Accountability Be a Primary Priority?

Assessing Employee Growth and Development

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 14, 2013 at 10:16 am

Posted in Coaching, Communications, Performance

Tagged with behaviors, coaches, coaching, effective coaching, employee, managers, maximum performance, negative behaviors, performance, personal performance, providing feedback

Approach Problems in a Professional, Logical and Systematic Manner

Correctly Framing Problems Pinpoints the Right Solution

A critical element of business is building relationships that ultimately result in partnerships. As all relationships have problems, the successful employee knows how to handle these issues efficiently and professionally in order to keep relationships productive. Constructive interaction resolves problems to everyone’s satisfaction, which builds good will and trust. The resulting solid relationships can provide the companies with the elusive edge in highly competitive markets.

Many employees are placed on the defensive when faced with a problem. Rather than diagnosing a problem logically, they react emotionally.

There are several types of problems that confront employees, many of which stem from deficiencies in the performance of a product or service. Customers can also create fictitious problems in an effort to gain an advantage in their business relationships. Additionally, there are perceived problems: situations where nothing is actually amiss, but for one reason or another the customer perceives a problem. While any issue—internal or external, real or perceived—can be trying, in all cases the employee must maintain his or her composure and approach the problem in a professional, logical and systematic manner.

People realize that in an imperfect world they will encounter problems. However, it is not the situation itself that tends to cause difficulties, but how the employee reacts to it. Surveys have indicated that a rapid, helpful response and resolution to an issue can strongly bind a customer to the company and employees to each other, whereas a sloppy and slow response can result not only in losing valued employees and customers, but also in turning them into activists that will do anything to undermine the business.

The next time managers are faced with a problem, they can follow the systematic approach outlined below, bearing in mind that speed is indispensable to problem solving.

Identify the Problem

Employees and customers will no doubt bring problems to light without being prompted. The identification of an issue allows the manager to begin a diagnosis and gauge the potential impact of the situation. This step affords the opportunity to establish the importance of the situation and determine how fast to respond.

Define Parameters

Once the issue is identified, it is up to the manager to distinguish the real cause of the problem. Many complaints are either symptomatic of a larger problem or point to other unresolved departmental issues; still others are wholly unrelated to the company’s product or service. The manager will need to define the problem by probing and asking pertinent questions in order to discover needs, expectations and the ultimate reasons behind the problem.

Qualify the Problem

When qualifying, the manager is determining where responsibility for the problem lies. Often when an employee or customer voices a complaint, they place the blame on parties that have little or no responsibility for the problem.

In terms of accounts, a flooring retailer, recounting the instance of a customer coming into his store and vocally complaining about the carpet she bought and its installation, disclosed that upon further examination it was found the customer had purchased the carpeting from a cut-rate competitor and had it installed by an incompetent handyman. She wasn’t a customer, but felt compelled to tell someone, and the only one available was this retailer. It wasn’t his problem, but he was able to turn this ugly situation into a new and happy account.

Quantify the Problem

When quantifying the problem, the manager is defining the size and scope of the situation and zeroing in on the ultimate impact the issue will have on the business. For example, a small order of a critical product can literally shut down a production line. It is up to the manager to identify the extent of the problem and the resulting impact on their employees’ and/or customers’ situation. All too often employees minimize what appears to be a small problem, but in fact has a significant impact. Managers must be careful when dealing with such issues, as how they are handled can ultimately determine future outcomes.

Examine the Problem

During the examining phase, the manager is identifying the source and potential causes of the problem. Decision makers need to examine what has happened, why, and who is responsible for the problem. The process should not be a fault-finding expedition, but a search for the genuine causes of the problem.

In terms of customers, examination includes identifying whether issues such as late delivery, a manufacturing defect, faulty materials or a lack of education caused the problem. The goal is to determine where the ultimate problem lies as well as examine the options that are available to resolve the immediate problem.

Resolve

Once causes have been identified, the problem can be solved to all parties’ satisfaction. Managers who attempt to minimize difficulties at this critical juncture are only hurting themselves. A successful company will do anything to correct a problem, whether internal or external, in a satisfactory and timely manner. Any extra expense will be readily recouped in future productivity and business; failure to follow through with an adequate resolution will build considerable barriers to productivity. The time and money required to thoroughly address a problem are minimal when compared to the productivity gains and repeat business represented by happy employees and customers.

Report Findings

Findings should be reported to senior management so that the cause of the problem can be remedied and a record made in order to avoid its recurrence. The manager’s findings should not spark recriminations, but positive changes within the company that will prevent this type of situation from arising again. These adaptations should allow the company to grow, prosper and thrive while making the manager’s job easier.

No one wants to have to continually solve the same problem with different employees or accounts, as this ultimately undermines the manager’s credibility and the reputation of the company.

Encourage Questions to Improve Open Communication

Decision-Making Begins When an Action Needs to Be Taken

Excerpt: Problem Solving: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 13, 2013 at 10:50 am

Posted in Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Problem Solving

Tagged with business, cause of the problem, company, customer, employees, manager, problem, relationships, response, responsibility for the problem, situation

Motivation Must Be Personal To Be Effective

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All employees are unique in what motivates them to perform to their capacity and excel in their profession. Most will do what is expected of them, but the motivated employee will go to great lengths to exceed expectations. The key is for managers to discover what truly drives their people. Once their motivation is understood, leaders have the power to get the most out of their employees.

Managers often feel there is no need to motivate their employees as long as the pay is adequate. Yet research has demonstrated that the majority of personal motivation is based upon a host of other significant factors such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, personal growth, and advancement.

Compensation is certainly a motivating factor, but it is often linked to these more prime motivators. A poorly designed compensation plan will cause employees to feel unappreciated and not be reflective of their personal achievements. Consequently, many employees link their compensation to their perception of how they are recognized within the organization.

Managers must understand that it is within their power and control to motivate each member of their team to excel.

Managers who wish to maximize their employees’ performance use specific motivators to create an environment in which individuals feel valued for their contributions to the company, know their efforts are appreciated and supported by the organization, and have the desire to achieve higher levels of personal performance. These results can be achieved by nurturing an atmosphere that includes the following elements:

Interest

Managers must take a genuine personal interest in each employee. Although significant, this means going beyond his or her life outside of work. The main areas in which to devote individual attention are in mentoring and nurturing a personal and professional growth as well as in understanding what motivates them. When managers demonstrate an interest in their employees, they are giving and sharing their time, lives and expertise with their employees.

Confidence

Managers who wish to motivate their employees must develop confidence in their abilities. This means allowing employees to experiment with new ideas and techniques while understanding that, as people grow through their experiences, many lessons are best learned through personal mistakes and failure.

Managers must also have the confidence that their employees can develop realistic and attainable plans and allow them to work those plans without interference or micromanagement. Individuals who know they have the liberty to perform their jobs without fear of retribution if they falter are more motivated and empowered to stretch the limits of their capabilities.

Challenge

Employees must be challenged to stretch their personal and professional limits. This includes personal and professional development in areas of vocational knowledge, skills and expertise.

Pride

Managers must maintain a sense of pride in their team, their company and the products they sell. Employees must continually sell themselves on the value of the company and its products or services. If employees aren’t sold, they will have difficulty convincing others of the company’s worth. Additionally, as people need a spark to overcome daily stress and adversity, managers must build and nurture a passion in their employees to achieve and succeed.

Bonding

Managers must establish a sense of fellowship between the individual members of their workplace, which thereby creates comradery and emotional support. Successfully done, this builds a strong team atmosphere and healthy sense of friendly competition that is beneficial to the organization.

Reward and Recognition

Managers should use fair and consistent standards with which to measure performance and base rewards and recognition. Employees should be evaluated against their own performance, and, for best impact, appropriate recognition should be given immediately.

Appreciation

Beyond tangible rewards and recognition, managers must demonstrate their personal appreciation for the efforts and contributions made by their individual employees. They should also avoid taking the top performers on their team for granted. Because these individuals need little attention or direction, they are often overlooked as managers invest more time with more inexperienced or problematic employees. To stretch their personal abilities, the best of the group also need ongoing recognition, appreciation and encouragement.

Related:

Motivation Is More Than Money

16 Ways to Motivate Employees and to Celebrate Their Successes

Leaders Have Three Motivational Tools Available to Them

Recognition Must Be Given Liberally, Frequently and Publicly

Excerpt: Motivating Employees: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 12, 2013 at 11:41 am

Posted in Employees, Motivation, Performance

Tagged with compensation, employees, managers, motivate, motivate their employees, motivation, motivators, performance, recognition, rewards and recognition

Self-Directing Teams Place Responsibility Where Work is Performed

The Use of Teams Requires Self-Discipline

The knowledge revolution has rendered many conventional management methods obsolete. Unprecedented and rapid advancements in information technology, telecommunications and artificial intelligence are transforming both the content and context of work.

Those on the leading edge of these changes have created virtual organizations that have obliterated what has been considered the raw materials of the traditional bureaucracy—the office and files. These traditional elements have been replaced by intranets, electronic databases and groupware as well as web and teleconferencing.

Organizations are increasingly devoting their resources to apprehend, think, learn and innovate—the building blocks of knowledge-based work.

The changes organizations are experiencing are causing them to employ more individuals who use and apply their thinking skills rather than simply follow directions.

Under conditions of uncertainty, bureaucratic organizations do not possess the requisite learning and information processing capacity to cope with the accelerating rate of both technological and social change.

It is important for leaders to understand that they are working within a dynamic and changing environment. As such, their individual actions are not conducted in a void, but in this environment. Likewise, teams are structured and developed in the same atmosphere, where they must relate and work together to accomplish organizational goals.

Many organizations have experimented with the use of teams in the development of various management fads, such as re-engineering and TQM, with mixed or poor results. As teams are structured, leaders must explore the self-directing team structure as one that is capable of producing more desirable and satisfactory results.

The key feature of self-directing teams is the underlying structure that places the responsibility for control and coordination where the work is actually performed. These teams are also held responsible for managing their work process and are held accountable for the results.

Once considered a radical shift in management thinking, many organizations have discovered that self-directed teams are dynamic in nature, and the dynamism of these teams closely lines up with the changes in the business. This shift gives organizations the ability to create continuous self-renewing learning functions that are manifested in the following team structural features:

Employees have the knowledge, information and skills to make all of the decisions that concern them.
The authority and responsibility for control and coordination are located as closely as possible to the individuals actually involved in the work process and those who deal with customers.
Authority is not based upon hierarchical position or status, but upon competence and expertise.
Management and leadership are shared functions widely distributed across levels and departments.
Access to information and feedback is both transparent and instantaneous.
All organizational support systems are congruent and synergistic with the requirements of a self-directed work structure.
The overall role of management is redesigned to focus on the creation of value for key organizational stakeholders including shareholders, customers and employees.

It should be obvious that self-directing teams are structured to more efficiently organize work. They display the properties of complex adaptive systems. The elements of such a system are capable of a high degree of cooperative behavior, where the group is capable of producing more complex results than any single individual could.

Additionally, self-directing teams have a superior competitive advantage because they create a redundancy by extending the skills and functions of individual members and by relocating the responsibility for the control and coordination of work to the specific level that work is performed at. Self-directing teams absorb the function of management since they have the direct responsibility for achieving and measuring results.

Overall, the structure of self-directed teams provides organizations with the flexibility to quickly adapt to meet the challenges facing them, all the while possessing a strong sense of confidence in their success.

Five Critical Factors of Team Success

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

Excerpt: Developing a Team Approach: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series(Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 11, 2013 at 10:42 am

Posted in Performance, Teams

Tagged with control and coordination, directing, information, knowledge, Management, Organizations, responsibility for control and coordination, results, self directing teams, structure, teams, work process

Leaders Have Three Motivational Tools Available to Them

When Motivating Employees, Expectations Are Everything

A challenge leaders face is how to effectively motivate their people and keep personal performance standards high, work assignments stimulating, and directional efforts on course. Leaders need to have several techniques at their fingertips to maintain momentum while moving positively forward.

Leaders make concentrated efforts to motivate employees by encouraging them to develop and grow in their work. Emotional resistance is eliminated when the right motivational techniques are used consistently.

Three vital motivational tools that work effectively in most situations are reassuring, challenging and empathizing. When leaders apply these motivational tools they have better success in improving employee performance, stimulating workplace creativity and reducing individual anxiety.

In order to offer greater tangible benefits to employees and have them produce effective outcomes leaders can motivate by reassuring, challenging and empathizing. These motivational techniques make individuals feel better about their personal worth, challenge them to participate fully, and align tasks and goals with individual needs and desires. Building techniques around these include:

Motivational Reassuring

This motivational technique is effective for helping employees cope with workplace stress and challenges. The key is to motivate by using specific positive actions and verbal support.

Leaders focus on motivating by “cheerleading” employees onward in a supportive role. The main goal is to build commitment through influencing them to participate fully. This reduces worry and stress that they will not be able to perform properly or to the leader’s expectations. This is accomplished in part through suggesting ways to make tasks and assignments easier and offering shortcuts to eliminate frustrations.

Leaders find a good motivational technique is to let employees know that a certain amount of stress is beneficial because it helps optimize productivity. With that in mind, they disclose all details of what is going to happen to each person involved in a task, project or outcome as much as is predictable. Encouraging employees in their efforts as they move one small step at a time is essential. Positive statements about small successful accomplishments work well to overcome personal insecurity.

Another good motivational technique is to help employees recharge physically and emotionally. This can be accomplished by easing up on their workload occasionally, or by offering “perks” when and where a leader feels it is appropriate. The idea is to move the individual’s energy level away from work so renewed bursts of energy can take place.

Motivational Challenging

Motivational challenging works effectively to reduce complacency. Challenging allows employees to be less focused on their own personal wants and problems and more focused on the priorities of the workplace. Motivational techniques need to be focused on the following:

Overcoming an employee’s insecurity level in a positive manner is a challenge for many leaders. This can best be accomplished by creating both positive and negative outcomes directly related to individual performance. Leaders find linking performance targets to bonuses or to other intrinsic rewards works well.

Effective leaders know that challenging employees sometimes requires motivating by applying “tough love.” They motivate by not allowing themselves to shelter the people under their direction from reality. One technique to keep employees motivated is to engineer a crisis by allowing employee apathy to lead to a fall, rather than protecting them from negative consequences. Experience can become one of the most powerful motivators.

One powerful motivator to challenge employees and get them more involved is through the sharing of information on situations, new procedures and changes that are occurring in the workplace. Leaders understand not sharing important information regarding decisions and changes hinders employees and forces them to function in a negative, reactive state. A leader’s goal is to maintain a proactive workplace climate.

Motivational Empathy

This technique is based upon listening to an employee’s side of an issue, sharing viewpoints, and providing positive interaction. Leaders must first understand how employees feel. Motivational empathy techniques are effective to build commitment. Leaders align goals and objectives with specific needs and concerns.

Leaders must win the confidence and trust of the people under them. In order to motivate, leaders need to fully understand their employees. This involves gaining an understanding of their perspectives on problems, fears, beliefs and workplace situations. Leaders can then develop strategies to motivate in a positive way to overcome resistance, which then develops a feeling of trust and security within their followers.

Listening is a very effective way to motivate. Not disputing views or perceptions builds higher levels of encouragement. There are times when leading people means walking or working alongside them while saying nothing. Listening allows time to observe and develop strategies to help increase confidence and productivity. To motivate effectively, it is important not to overwhelm employees with a leader’s personal power, control and confidence. Listening does this.

Sharing quality time with employees is essential to motivate effectively. This includes personal interaction time in order to discuss and share feelings that are important to the employee. Leaders also find it motivational to share their personal feelings. Taking quality time to exhibit kindness, openness, compassion and genuine concern holds more power to motivate than many other techniques combined.

16 Ways to Motivate Employees and to Celebrate Their Successes

Excerpt: Leadership Roles & Responsibilities: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 8, 2013 at 12:11 pm

Posted in Employees, Leadership, Motivation

Tagged with build commitment, challenge, challenging and empathizing, employees, good motivational technique, Leaders, listening, motivational empathy, motivational techniques, performance, productivity, sharing, workplace

Well-Run Meetings Deliver Tangible Benefits

16 Ways to Motivate Employees and to Celebrate Their Successes

Most employees consider meetings boring, demoralizing and pointless; research has demonstrated that they are often in fact correct in this assessment. However, this perception is a reflection of the time and effort managers choose to invest in getting the most out of their meetings. Interesting, exciting and motivational meetings need not be costly, but do require devoted time and effort.

Managers often plan and prepare poorly for many meetings, and to predictable effect. They can fall short because they either don’t know how or don’t have the time to prepare an effective, well-run meeting. Some managers may further hold too many meetings. In many cases, managers are aware that quality meetings are expected by the company, but don’t understand the purpose and objectives.

A well-run meeting takes planning and forethought as to what should be accomplished in terms of specific desired results and outcomes. With companies continuing to slash or freeze budgets, managers must ensure that they are able to reach specific goals and objectives to maximize the return on their meeting investment.

A well-run meeting should provide a team and its individual members with tangible benefits not easily derived from other venues. These benefits include:

Focus

A well-run business meeting should be built around a theme that not only sets expectations for the discussion, but also indicates the tone and goals of the team for the entire year. The focus should be on something concrete that employees should think, feel and believe. As a gimmicky, entertaining theme will create little if any progress toward real objectives, the meeting should be a clear call to employees to pursue a specific goal through concerted and ongoing action.

Excitement and Motivation

In order to produce excitement in the team, well-run meetings should provide sufficient information regarding the company’s initiatives and programs for an upcoming period. The unveiling and demonstrating of new products and/or directions for the company can also be highly motivating. In any regard, employees should be excited about the possibilities presented to them. This excitement, together with public and peer recognition for accomplishments, will better motivate the team to get back into their jobs.

Insight

Well-run meetings should provide employees with additional perspective into the philosophy of the company, along with new directions, concepts and ideas that they can apply directly to their jobs.

The assembly and interaction of employees allows each to gain new ideas and insights into what is working in other departments, divisions and/or regions.

Knowledge and Expertise

Employees should leave meetings with further knowledge and expertise. This should include new company, customer, product and/or competitive knowledge. The purpose should be to impart this knowledge and information to the team and to provide opportunities for developing expertise within the confines of the meeting. These actions can also be taken in training sessions, group settings and workshops.

Enhanced Relationships

Meetings should provide employees and managers with the opportunity to build and enhance relationships with one another during substantive presentations. Many meetings include the presence of key support personnel, with employees given the opportunity to meet and interact with these individuals. During future contacts with these support people, relationships are strengthened to the point that employees can be more effective in dealing with one another and delivering service to customers.

Enhanced Communication

Effective and well-run meetings enhance communication on all levels. Subject matter is presented, and the presenter is available to answer questions and discuss issues with participants. Additionally, employees and managers have the ability to interact with each other in a more relaxed environment. Employees can communicate more openly and candidly than might be possible in other work settings.

Increased Results

The bottom line for any meeting is to enhance the employee’s knowledge and productivity. An increase in individual performance should be seen once employees return to their jobs. Managers will need to continually reinforce and coach individuals to ensure such increases are sustained and continue to grow over time.

Building Employee Support Requires Interactive Leadership

Excerpt: Effective Meetings: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series(Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 7, 2013 at 11:06 am

Posted in Management Practices, Meetings, Plans and Strategies

Tagged with directions, employees, interaction, knowledge, managers, meetings, objectives, opportunity, time, time and effort, well run meetings

Four Questions That Challenge Your Ethical Decisions

Ethics: Actions Do Have Consequences

Many people are faced with a dilemma in that they want to practice conscientious and moral behavior, but are challenged to do so when difficult ethical problems and issues arise. In order to effectively deal with them, managers and their people need superior decision making tools that assist them in making the right choices.

Too many people are under the impression that they need to be deceptive and unethical in order to get ahead. They consider this line of thinking to be shrewd and “streetwise.” In business as in all other arenas, this perception isn’t shrewd: it’s foolish. Poor ethical decisions and judgments in the work environment, especially when considered cumulatively, have dramatic personal, professional and organizational ramifications.

The benefits of dealing with superiors, associates, subordinates and customers in a straight and forthright manner are obvious. Not only is it the right thing to do, it also positively impacts motivation, productivity and profitability. It is simply good business.

A profound business philosophy is to be found in a simple four-step decision making aid. While it does not direct people in what specifically to do or think, it does give them a tool to guide them in all of their business and personal decisions.

Well known to anyone ever associated with Rotary International and translated into more than 100 languages, The Four-Way Test is highly recommended as an easy decision making tool that makes a clear difference in the practice of ethical behavior.

Managers and employees must display the highest standards of honesty and integrity in their conduct to establish and sustain credibility. The Four-Way Test is a handy and simple litmus test for all personal actions and decisions.

Herbert J. Taylor developed the test during the depths of the depression in the 1930s. A young sales manager for Jewel Tea Company, Taylor was asked by Continental Bank in Chicago to take over the management of Club Aluminum Products, a manufacturer of pots and pans. The company was fraught with unethical business practices and bankruptcy. The banks had assumed control of it.

To bring the company out of bankruptcy, Taylor knew he had to change the way it did business. Ultimately, he developed the Four-Way Test business philosophy and instructed all employees to follow it in each of their dealings with customers, suppliers and associates. The philosophy turned the business around and ultimately brought it out of bankruptcy.

Is it the TRUTH?   

All decision-making must start with an objective base of facts—in other words, the truth. This is the basis for all decisions, negotiations and problem solving.

When resolving a conflict, all parties must agree on what constitutes the truth. All viewpoints and insights into the problem must be considered when defining the truth. The same process applies when making a decision. All sides of an issue or problem must be fully and objectively weighed before determining the truth of the matter.

The benefit of such an approach is that it effectively removes bias, emotion and personal agendas from the decision making process. When truth is objectively defined, viable solutions become obvious to a reasonable person.

Is it FAIR to all concerned?

Any problem or decision comes with a variety of options and solutions that are available when making a decision, solving a problem or negotiating a settlement or sale. The key is arriving at the best solution. When options, alternatives and solutions are weighed as to their impact on all parties, it becomes easier to narrow the options. When the final choices are filtered according to their fairness to all parties, the optimal decision will become obvious.

Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

It is important that decisions leave all involved parties satisfied, knowing the decision is fair to them.

Most people want to get on well with others and treat them in the same fashion that they would wish to be treated. Managers and employees must make ethical choices that build consensus and long-term goodwill. This increases employee retention and profitability of the organization.

Decisions made involving individual employees must focus on the same factors. This establishes trust and credibility, which has a direct impact on personal motivation and productivity.

Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

The final point addresses the question, “What’s in it for me?” Individuals want to know how a decision benefits them. The final question assures all involved parties that an equitable and beneficial decision has been reached.

The questions asked in The Four-Way Test are interrelated, with the answer to one question effectively creating the possible answers to the next. The answers and solutions are obvious and logical to all involved.

In the practice of ethical behavior there is an increased need for effective decision making skills and tools to guide and direct managers and employees. Only when specific individuals wish to pursue a personal agenda or achieve a decision will any interference come into play. The Four-Way Test effectively exposes such personal goals and agendas without the need for the manager or employee to directly bring attention to them.

Related:

Seven Practical Applications of Ethics

Leaders Are Judged By The Actions They Take

Trust is Based on Truth

Excerpt: Ethics and Integrity: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 6, 2013 at 10:44 am

Posted in Decision Making, Ethical Leadership, Ethics

Tagged with business philosophy, decision-making, decisions, ethical behavior, fair, practice of ethical behavior, Rotary International, test, the four way test, truth

Supporting Employees’ Need to Achieve Maximum Results

Recognition Must Be Given Liberally, Frequently and Publicly

At a sporting event, cheerleaders are present for the single purpose of providing support for their team. The same applies to the manager in the workplace. Once plans and programs are in place it becomes the responsibility of the manager to provide the support their employees need to achieve maximum results.

The nature of most positions assumes that employees are self-managing and self-directing in the majority of their activities. The traditional role of the manager was to control and direct the employees they supervised. Effective managers now support and motivate their employees by streamlining policies and procedures and by removing internal barriers to their productivity.

Managers must understand that by removing internal barriers and streamlining procedures they make the employee’s job easier, allowing each one to focus on more productive tasks rather than diverting their energy elsewhere. In this manner, the role of the manager is to keep their employees on track and motivated to reach their peak performance.

The role of the manager is to remove the roadblocks their employees encounter in order to enhance their productivity. Effective managers understand it is their primary responsibility to produce results and not just control and direct. Efficiency and productivity are the means to achieving results, and managers need to make attaining them as easy as possible. This is achieved by providing the following:

Attainable Goals

One of the primary responsibilities of a manager is to ensure that their employees have realistic and attainable goals. This does not necessarily mean that goals are easy; rather, they should always stretch the employee’s ability to grow. However, unrealistic and overwhelming goals and objectives are counterproductive because they frustrate and ultimately demotivate the employee.

Employees are responsible for developing their own work-related goals. In many cases they are accepted with little or no scrutiny. Managers should invest the time and resources to have a frank discussion with all individuals concerning their objectives. For example, IBM built their success by ensuring that their employees had a series of smaller, attainable goals. When those were achieved, employees’ successes were celebrated.

Managers should likewise require that their own employees develop a series of smaller plans for the quarter, month, week and day, all linked to the accomplishment of larger goals. In this manner, managers help their employees stay focused on activities that keep them moving forward toward the accomplishment of their objectives.

Without this critical guidance and direction, all unit or department activities for the year may prove wasteful and meaningless. When realistic and attainable plans are in place, the role of the manager is to support their employees’ activities and keep them on track and focused on the results they need to achieve.

Adequate Support

Employees must be provided the necessary tools and resources to achieve the desired results. A lack of adequate support for an employee sends a mixed message and hurts motivation. During the heat of daily activities, employees need timely information, data and support in order to keep moving forward.

When companies fail employees at these critical junctures, they are communicating their lack of concern for their efforts. This often undermines the investment in time and resources made by the worker. If it costs him or her meeting a particular target or goal, motivation to work hard toward the next objective is eliminated. It is replaced with an “If they don’t care, why should I?” attitude. Once this attitude takes hold it is difficult to reverse.

Realistic Reports and Policies

Employees can be burdened with scheduled reports that are generated more out of tradition than need. Aside from the expense and resource utilization reports required as management tools, managers should only request the information they need to monitor the success of the employee’s plan. Beyond that, many reports can duplicate information and may be throwbacks to outdated pre-computer days.

With the advent of computers and business management software, yesterday’s report can easily be transformed into an action plan. This process provides both the manager and employee with an informational tool that directs and informs.

Managers need quality information to monitor their employees’ activities, which can be obtained through a performance metrics system that reports key numbers to reflect the employee’s activities. Typically, such metrics accurately report the progress of activities within the employee’s pipeline.

Effective Skills Development

Managers must ensure that their employees continually polish their skills, which requires providing quality training while monitoring an individual employee’s performance to observe what skills are in need of refinement. When necessary, additional training and coaching may be required. Training should not be considered merely as a reward, but as a requirement if employees are to grow in their profession.

Motivation Is More Than Money

Excerpt: Motivating Employees: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 5, 2013 at 11:15 am

Posted in Employees, Performance, Productivity

Tagged with attainable goals, control and direct, employees, managers, motivation, objectives, performance, productivity, removing internal barriers, role of the manager, time and resources

Objectives Allow Managers to Focus on Obtaining Results

Does This Activity Move Me Forward?

The most effective use of time comes from managers’ abilities to establish and detail appropriate and concise objectives. Making things happen that might otherwise go unattained, objectives allow managers to focus on obtaining results.

Many managers waste time by setting and following objectives that are unclear, imprecise or too broad. Objectives are reliable measurement tools for monitoring progress and directional courses of action.

Time is used unproductively when managers’ objectives are incompatible with organizational purposes and direction. Taking charge and authority over time comes from establishing appropriate departmental objectives.

Exerting a direct influence on attitudes and motivation, appropriate objectives direct managers’ efforts toward achieving concrete goals. Appropriate and effective objectives act as factors of success and become sustained positive attitude builders. They generate a consistency of action—which feeds continuous ongoing success—and prevent managers and employees from performing random activities and making ineffective decisions.

Detailed objectives keep managers on track and alert to potential interferences that can be addressed early before they create serious problems. This maintains workplace momentum and keeps productivity at peak levels. Additionally, effective objectives allow managers to concentrate on future opportunities and establish new goals as future needs occur.

Determining sound daily, weekly and monthly objectives and following them takes work and discipline on the part of the manager. In order to advance personal performance and departmental efficiency, managers must continually revisit all short- and long-term objectives.

Managing by objectives carries a positive impact in terms of saving time and increasing results. Managers should establish prioritized objectives to save work and reduce redundancies and frustrations. Objectives should be detailed carefully to assure essential assignments are met on a continual basis in all major areas.

Techniques to help establish time-saving departmental objectives include:

Establish Compatible Objectives

Managers must make certain that all objectives reflect how their own particular departments interrelate with others. Determining interrelated objectives will prevent departments from becoming independent operating units focused on meeting their own particular time schedules, quality standards and procedures. Valuable time and energy can be wasted because of segmented functions and disjointed compatibility.

When departmental incompatibility exists, time and attention is not devoted to organizational problem solving. Managers spend excessive amounts of time dealing with immediate crises and resulting conflict or chaos. Major issues tend to go unresolved and need more time and energy to remedy at a later time. As the need to produce results becomes pressured and forced, departmental cooperation and unity of effort is hindered.

Lay a Solid Groundwork for Defining Departmental Objectives

Objectives need to address departmental functions and purposes within the organization. Before determining departmental objectives managers need to ask themselves, “Why does my department exist?” Next, managers need to ask, “What should this department accomplish from an organizational standpoint?”

To answer these questions, managers must define departmental expectations, agendas, functions, methods and procedures. Managers must make certain that they contribute in a positive way to the effective use of human resources and profitability. To be effective and more time-sensitive, objectives must detail all necessary activities that contribute to overall organizational goals, as well as specific departmental ones.

Define Areas of Responsibility

Managers need to detail areas of departmental responsibility and identify particular key areas both where unnecessary overlaps occur and where overlaps should occur and do not. Within the analysis process, managers must concentrate on identifying areas of activity that play a significant role in achieving results.

Valuable amounts of time can be saved and transformed into bottom-line profit. Objectives must detail necessary lead time for obtaining such things as raw materials, essential components, additional equipment and human resources.

Define Specific Departmental Functions

Managers need to assess departmental functions that are necessary for attaining determined goals and results before formalizing objectives. While addressing specific functions that are necessary for accomplishing their individual departmental missions, they concentrate on planning, organizing, directing and controlling these functions. Departmental objectives should address how each particular function will be performed and why, as well as major areas of performance accountability.

Related:

Five Strategies to Maintain Your Focus

Defending Against Personal Burnout and Frustration

Excerpt: Time & Personal Management (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 4, 2013 at 11:53 am

Posted in Management Practices, Performance, Time Management

Tagged with areas, departmental functions, departmental objectives, effective objectives, functions, managers, most effective use of time, objectives, time

Use Questions to Build Rather Than to Devastate or Demolish

Building Critical Thinking Skills to Enhance Employee Comprehension and Decision Making

The purpose of good questioning is to support the development of honest and valid relationships and positive feelings of optimism and unity between leaders and employees. It is inevitable that some questions will lead to discovering harsh realities and discouragement.

As leaders instruct and allow their employees to question, they must train them to use what they learn to “build” rather than to “devastate or demolish.” As employees learn to question, it is important to make it clear that their ability to create a positive contribution and impact is recognized.

Questions can be asked in a positive or negative way: “Is the cup half full? Or is it half empty?” As such, the tones of individual questions are able to dramatically influence their response. Optimistically phrased questions invite collaboration as well as open, extensive or expansive answers. While negatively phrased questions tend to cause concern and often result in inadequate information gleaning and gathering. Looking forward with a positive strength of mind, or spirit, results in generating constructive questions that propel the questioner toward identifying and attaining optimal solutions

Optimism is typically based on the belief that things will work out for the best. Many times throughout the question and answer process there is insufficient information to make even an educated guess about an outcome. However, thinking critically and positively in the best manner possible pays off.

Thinking, in the best way possible, is not simplistic or idealistic. It is being prepared for the worst but believing the best will happen. To avoid being ill equipped for facing or acknowledging the unpleasant, the key question to keep in mind is, “What is the worst that could (or will) happen?” Responding to this question provokes preparation while supporting the forward momentum of positive thinking.

Provide a Safe Psychological Questioning Environment for Optimism to Flourish

Just as the workplace needs to provide a safe physical environment to protect their employees, leaders need to provide them a safe psychological environment to nurture their growth. One way is to encourage them to develop a “benefit of the doubt” attitude. This attitude allows everyone to step back and consider other explanations when numerous questions and answers might otherwise lead to a negative conclusion.

Leaders have an important role to play in establishing the positive strength of mind or “spirit” that works to carry employees through tough times and disillusioning moments. An optimistic view of situations, events, issues and circumstances is essential, especially in times of uncertainty and rapid change.

Of course, how each employee chooses to establish his or her sense of optimism or belief is a matter of individual conscience or persuasion. But, every employee within the workplace does deserve an opportunity to question, and to grow and develop by adhering to a personal set of ethical, honorable, and just set of principles. This is what will guard against the advancement and growth of cynicism.

Encourage Optimism and the Benefit of the Doubt

As with most powerful tools, questions can be used to construct potent organizations, or destroy workplaces. Leaders can help shape employee questioning skills toward building a positive workplace by teaching them to consider looking at things through a “cup that is half full, rather than half empty.”

Questioning is at the heart of critical and creative thinking, yet many leaders provide too few opportunities for employees to ask or investigate things through questions that flow out of their own natural sense of interest, concern and curiosity. When leaders begin to encourage more questioning within the workplace, without putting up a wall of resistance or expectations, they can establish a solid foundation for relationship building, comradery and synergy throughout the workplace. These questioning skills can become the basis for successful personal development and adjustment in a rapidly changing, uncertain work environment.

To Generate Higher Levels of Optimism Guard Against Excessive Routine and Simplistic Questioning

Any system that cannot tolerate change is open to destruction. As such, questions about “how,” “why,” and “what if” can be mentally stimulating and valuable, since they tend to introduce just enough change into stable routines to make them interesting.

The constant flow of good and insightful questions tends to keep routines and optimism alive, and employees flexible. As part of the process the leader must admit they do not have all the answers in order to keep the investigative process robust, optimistic and alive. Instead of allowing a good question to go by the wayside, bring the creative process into focus by saying something like: “Let’s think about how we might answer that one.” or, “That’s a great question!” Most importantly, the leader must bring their own way of asking and answering questions out in the open so employees can see how their mind works.

Communication Must Be Personalized To Be Effective

Excerpt: Effective Questioning in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 19.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

February 1, 2013 at 11:27 am

Posted in Leadership, Open Communications, Questioning

Tagged with employees, Leaders, optimism, positive strength of mind, questioning, questioning skills, questions, safe psychological, workplace

Evaluations Have to Be Consistent with Leadership’s Overall Direction

As organizations shift and adapt to forces of change, leaders must also evolve their personal methods—including how they evaluate their employees’ performance. Evaluations have to be consistent with leadership’s overall direction as well as the motivational methods employed by other individual leaders. They should enhance, not undermine, the progress of the organization.

There is a sizeable gulf between leaders who build empowered organizations and those who employ more traditional and antiquated evaluative methods. This has resulted in a source of conflict causing internal dissention and personal rifts that run counter to the goals of the leader and the organization.

As organizations evolve, new methods of performance evaluation must be designed and incorporated so that employees feel they “are” the organization. When this is achieved, employees will both better understand what it will take to accomplish goals and be more inspired to work toward them.

Thus performance evaluation methods need to adapt with the organization to involve rather than alienate the individual employee. Rather than focus on past mistakes and failures, the evaluation moves the organization forward through the development and increased competence of its individual members. In this manner growth is enhanced and ongoing.

Traditional performance evaluation methods typically measure individual employees’ performance based on a rigid set of standards and parameters. These are used to evaluate their work against a job description rather than gauging the employee’s involvement, contribution and personal growth as factors in the larger picture of achieving the organization’s goals and objectives. With this in mind, leaders must look at the method by which they evaluate employee performance, and ensure it is designed to:

Bridge Performance

In an empowered organization, employees cannot be simply evaluated upon whether or not they are working within the parameters of a specific job description. As the organization becomes increasingly empowered and evolves in the use of workgroups and teams, job descriptions become increasingly irrelevant evaluative tools. Performance increasingly shifts away from the individual and to the group or team as employees work toward mutual goals as defined by the shared vision.

In this light, leaders must evaluate the performance of the organization he or she directs and determine how well the individual employee fits into the overall picture. All performance is interconnected; an individual is either a strong or weak link in the entire process. They are evaluated according to how well they work within this environment. Leaders must use the evaluative process to make the individual employee’s work more meaningful by expanding their understanding of how they fit into the organization and how their job can lead to personal self-improvement.

Evaluate Employee Contributions

Rather than evaluate individual employee’s performance against a specific job assignment, leaders must view it in the context of their contribution to the entire organization. In this regard, leaders demonstrate to employees in a very real way that their ideas, insights and personal contributions are both valued and needed if the organization is to succeed.

As empowerment deepens in the organizational environment, a synergy develops within each unit that leads to organizational cohesiveness. Once developed, leaders can easily evaluate how well the individual works and operates within this environment and whether they adapt to or fight the transition.

Provide Guidance for Growth

Rather than focus on past performance, leaders should use the counseling process to give their employees guidance in developing their individual capabilities. This is designed to provide individuals with a road toward increased competence, personal growth and satisfaction. The focus should be on future development and direction that contributes to increased overall levels of productivity required by the organization. In this context, employees understand what is expected of them as they contribute to the future success of the organization.

Increase Personal Involvement

In empowered organizations, the performance evaluation is not an “us against them” proposition, but a process where employees are involved in the improvement of their own performance. The ratings and conflict associated with traditional performance evaluations should be reduced if not eliminated as employees feel an increase in freedom and self-determination through meaningful involvement in their evaluation.

When the focus of the evaluation shifts to the performance of the organization and the employee’s contribution toward the accomplishment of mutual goals and objectives, it becomes clear to most what is needed to improve. This is different than focusing on the faults and problems associated with individual performance.

Individuals want to be part of something bigger, and will work harder toward the attainment of a mutual goal. This is clearly demonstrated when sports teams comprised of average players are able to win championships over more talented teams. The mutual goal of the organization brings out the best in each individual when he or she works with the team. Strong synergy and cohesiveness spurring individual performance on to greater heights is not just a sports phenomenon: it can take effect in any organization.

Should Accountability Be a Primary Priority?

Excerpt: Strengthening Leadership Performance: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 18.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 31, 2013 at 12:28 pm

Posted in Employee Evaluation, Leadership

Tagged with employees, employees’ performance, empowered organizations, evaluation, goals and objectives, Leaders, Mutual Goals, Organization, performance, performance evaluation methods, performance evaluations, work

Cohesiveness is the Fruit of Effective Leadership

Personal Credibility is Anchored in Character and Integrity

The concept of organizational cohesiveness is recognized in the military as a factor that makes or breaks unit effectiveness. Military leaders have long recognized that when cohesiveness breaks down and is left unaddressed, the unit’s ability to perform is not simply diminished but ultimately destroyed. The same concept applies within organizations.

Organizational cohesiveness is achieved when all members of the organization have reached the point where they are working closely together as a single unit toward the accomplishment of mutual goals and objectives without regard to personal agendas and attitudes.

By establishing trust leaders take a diverse collection of individuals and blend them into an efficient working unit. When this occurs, and leaders have built and are nurturing organizational cohesiveness, they will have accomplished their primary goals. This is a most satisfying and beneficial position for leaders to be in.

Leaders build and foster trust not only among their employees and themselves, but between all members of the organizational unit. Cohesiveness is established and is reinforced over time because bonds of trust among individual members of the organization are strengthened. Each individual learns how he or she is able to trust the other members in the attainment of individual and organizational goals.

When leaders are able to establish strong organizational cohesiveness, the following elements are found:

Teamwork

When organizational cohesiveness is achieved, leaders see an overall increase in team development. Individual employees are able to work in self-directed groups to tackle specific problems, concerns and issues that need to be resolved if the organization is to progress and meet its objectives.

In many organizations, this is a major shift in thinking and personal attitudes. Employees and leaders think in terms of the team and organization, replacing their own personal goals and agendas with those of the organization.

Individual Contribution

It has been recognized that any individual within any company or organization can contribute ideas and insights as to how to improve quality, performance and productivity in the position they hold. Yet these individuals are generally reluctant to volunteer this information, primarily because they have not been asked in the past, and have therefore concluded their contributions are unwanted.

When organizational cohesiveness is achieved, many of these barriers are removed and leaders will see an overall increase in individual employee contributions. Since they are motivated by the success of the team or organization, they feel more open to contribute feedback, observations, insights, perspectives and ideas to assist them. When this occurs, and more individuals are motivated to personally contribute, a synergy is achieved that amplifies the power of these ideas, increases brainstorming, and infuses the organization with new and creative thinking.

Empowerment

A workplace environment that is built on trust and thus fosters organizational cohesiveness also builds empowered employees. The sense of trust between leaders and employees empowers them to make more independent decisions and work more freely in groups and teams since they are working toward common organizational goals and objectives. The concepts of trust and empowerment are codependent, feeding and building upon each other, strengthening over time.

Cooperation

While teamwork, empowerment and organizational cohesion all require collaboration between leaders and employees as well as among employees, within a cohesive organizational unit, there are levels of cooperation among individuals, departments, vendors and customers that cannot be minimized. These levels of cooperation are beyond the scope of individual responsibilities, yet are clearly visible and significantly contribute to the success of the organization. They are reflective of “team spirit,” organizational pride and employee comradery. It is noticed by outsiders, helps define the organization and is the first thing to suffer when organizational cohesiveness is disrupted or destroyed.

Leaders should note this sense of cooperation when they have achieved effective levels of organizational cohesiveness and actively monitor it as an overall indicator of unit, division or company health.

Quality

Another easily discernable benefit of organizational cohesiveness is the increase in the quality of unit work and individual contributions. The organization has been able to maximize its efficiency, as an increase in overall product or service quality often translates into fewer defective and rejected units. This reduces the time required to rework faulty units and increases the organization’s efficiency and profitability.

How Leaders Develop Trust

Excerpt: Building and Nurturing Trust in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 30, 2013 at 11:31 am

Posted in Empowerment, Leadership, Trust

Tagged with cohesiveness, employees, goals, Leaders, levels of cooperation, Organization, organizational, organizational cohesiveness, organizational goals, organizational unit, trust

The Proper Use of Feedback Builds Consensus

7 Ways to Use Change to Increase Performance

Productivity is enhanced and empowerment achieved when leaders solicit, then act upon employee feedback, ideas and concepts. Soliciting and acting upon feedback is the essence of leadership. The proper use of feedback allows leaders to build consensus among their employees and give them ownership of the ideas and concepts to be implemented within the organization.

There are critical differences between managers and leaders. Managers tend to direct and control without soliciting feedback and building employee consensus.

Leaders, on the other hand, build their strength from group consensus, acting as facilitator rather than controller. They understand the power and synergy of combining ideas and working together to achieve mutual goals.

The more involvement leaders seek from their employees, the easier it will be to implement new ideas, resolve nagging problems, minimize conflict and move the organization forward.

Leaders will find the more proficient they are in working with their employees and soliciting their input, the smoother things will run as many problems and headaches experienced in the past are eliminated.

The ideas and concepts created by employees during the feedback process can be easily implemented using the following techniques either in a group setting or individually.

Initiate Dialogue

The feedback process begins with the initiation of a dialogue between the leader and employee(s). This should include a clear and concise presentation of the problem or circumstance being addressed.

Whenever possible, a presentation of background material, including any and all supporting facts, should be included in order to afford employees a complete overview of the situation.

Research has shown that by providing employees with the complete information concerning a specific problem, they are more responsive, feel more involved and in the decision making process, and are more productive when the ideas are implemented.

Solicit Feedback

Once the dialogue has been initiated and the facts presented to the employees, the leader should solicit feedback from them and open the floor to discussion.

Respectfully Accept All Feedback

All ideas and feedback should be respectfully accepted and considered. One individual should be assigned to write the ideas down on a whiteboard or large sheet of paper for the group to see.

The leader should make sure no derogatory remarks are made as an individual presents an idea or gives their feedback. A failure to do so will further limit contributions from more reluctant members of the group. Leaders should solicit feedback from each individual in their group, even if they have to ask for it.

Group Similar Ideas & Concepts

Together with the members of the group, the leader should brainstorm to combine ideas and concepts. Often individuals communicate the same idea or concept, but in different ways.

The leader should facilitate the discussion and direct the grouping and combination of related ideas and concepts. They should make sure that the entire group agrees and is in consensus when performing these tasks.

Build on Ideas and Concepts

Once ideas and concepts have been combined, the leader should facilitate additional feedback and brainstorm ways to build and expand upon them. Leaders should make sure that all members of the group are involved and that their additional feedback is solicited. As new points are added and expanded upon, the group should always reach consensus before moving forward.

Prioritize

After adequate discussion has been concluded and the group has run out of new ideas, a consensus should be reached regarding prioritization of the refined ideas/concepts.

The basis for prioritizing each of the ideas should be that which best meets the criteria for resolving the problem or situation presented at the beginning of the discussion.

Assess Feasibility

Every organization has a limited amount of human, financial and physical resources. Leaders will find that the group will typically develop a number of ideas; however, available resources make it impossible to implement each of them. Therefore the group must determine which ideas are feasible under current organizational constraints. Remaining ideas can be tabled for further discussion when additional resources become available or after the initial ideas have been implemented.

Formulate a Plan

Once the final ideas have been selected, then under the leader’s direction the group should formulate a plan to implement them. A specific goal, timeline as well as individual responsibilities are assigned for every aspect of the plan. Additionally, a reporting and measurement mechanism should be included for overall accountability for the plan’s implementation.

Encourage Questions to Improve Open Communication

Five Pitfalls Teams Need to Avoid

Excerpt: Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 29, 2013 at 1:20 pm

Posted in Communications, Creative Thinking, Feedback

Tagged with concepts, consensus, discussion, employees, feedback, feedback process, group, ideas, ideas and concepts, leader, Leaders, solicit feedback

Overcoming and Preventing Groupthink

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Overcoming and preventing groupthink tendencies requires leaders’ constant diligence and continual attention. For constructive thinking to occur within team environments, individuals must possess high degrees of like-mindedness regarding the basic values and mutual respect needed for their teams to succeed. This requires a level of cohesiveness, where personalities become blended and balanced through common missions and purposes.

As leaders attempt to tackle the complicated issues surrounding groupthink, they should be cognizant of the critical evaluator roles all team members assume. They need to understand the constant hazards associated with issues that require rapid action, such as prolonged debates, or with open criticism that potentially leads to damaged feelings, especially when team members resolutely live up to their roles as critical evaluators. Feelings of rejection, depression and anger might be evoked when challenging particular team decisions. This can have a corrosive effect on team morale and working relationships.

It is important for leaders to understand both the negative and positive consequences associated with individual personalities when it comes to dealing with complex groupthink issues. The personality mix of individual team members determines and impacts subsequent team environments and group dynamics. The addition or removal of individual team members tends to greatly impact team environments and their interrelated dynamics.

There are specific strategies to prevent and overcome groupthink tendencies. These can also be implemented when particular individuals are actively decreasing overall team effectiveness.

Create Subgroups

Leaders may need to periodically create subgroups that meet separately under different group leaders to work on the same general team problems. This method creates contrastive team environments with varied personality mixes for arriving at separate conclusions. Once these subgroups have each arrived at a separate consensus, they should all be brought together as a unified team to present their findings and negotiate specific differences.

Consult with Other Associates

Leaders should discuss their teams’ deliberations with trusted associates in their organization. These individuals should possess different expertise, outlooks and values. Once identified, they are expected to make independent evaluations and critiques of team progress. They should be able to offer fresh perspectives and possible solutions that may have been overlooked.

Leaders should then report back to their teams on these in-depth discussions and incorporate newly acquired ideas and recommendations into their teams’ deliberation processes.

Invite Outside Expertise

Leaders should periodically introduce outside expertise into their team environments. This expertise can come from individuals who are trusted associates in their own organizations. They should be selected because of their inherent capacity to grasp new ideas quickly, their ability to identify hidden agendas, their sensitivity to moral and ethical issues and their verbal skills to effectively communicate criticism directly to the teams involved.

Regularly Rotate the Role of Devil’s Advocate

While the role of devil’s advocate is institutionalized in most team environments, leaders should assign the role to a different individual for each team meeting. This rotation gives all team members the opportunity to actively challenge the consensus of the majority at, instead of after, a team meeting.

Spend Time on Surveying Warning Signs

In order to counteract their team’s illusions of invulnerability and tendency to ignore warning signs that interfere with member complacency, leaders may need to make a concerted effort to induce both themselves and team members to pay specific attention to special risks and make appropriate contingency plans accordingly.

Even when team members are assigned specific roles to point out the potential risks that the group needs to consider, they are likely to disregard any warnings if there is a preexisting consensus among the members. Therefore it is critical for leaders to invest time and energy to address specific warning signs that may otherwise go unrecognized because of individual teams succumbing to a groupthink mode.

Holding a Second Consensus Meeting

In order to prevent premature consensus based on feelings of invulnerability, stereotypes and unexamined assumptions, second meetings should be scheduled before individual teams make actual commitments and after they have arrived at their initial consensus. When teams arrive at a consensus, leaders should announce this second meeting, providing individual members with a sufficient amount of time to ponder and reconsider their deliberations, discussions and solutions.

Members should be encouraged to play devil’s advocate and express all residual doubts and rethink entire issues before making any definitive decisions. They should be encouraged to challenge their own arguments and fully disclose and discuss all related risks and objections. Individual team members should present any and all possible objections that have not been previously discussed and explored.

To facilitate discussions, team members should be encouraged to prepare one to two-page documents ahead of time to stimulate open dialogues. These documents need to be collected, copied and disseminated to all team members at the second consensus meeting.

Team secretaries should compile and summarize all key points into a formal document that is given to all members, including the supporting documentation that every individual team member initially provided. This process ensures full disclosure and discussion of all key points, doubts and objections that were not originally brought up prior to the team consensus.

Related:

How Do Know If Your Teams Are Remaining Strong & Productive

Seven Negative Roles & Behaviors Which Undermine Team Performance

Excerpt: Personality Differences within the Team Setting: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 28, 2013 at 10:39 am

Posted in Critical Thinking, Team Development, Teams

Tagged with consensus, devil’s advocate, groupthink, groupthink tendencies, issues, Leaders, members, team, team environments, team meeting, team members, warning signs

Vision is the Faith By Which the Leader Functions

Visionary Leaders Are in a Different Class

Napoleon once remarked, “Leaders are dealers in hope.” Adapted to the corporate environment, this statement might read, “Vision is the faith by which the leader functions.”

Leadership vision is one of the major characteristics defining a leader’s identity and, in the end, reputation. Trust in one’s leader and his or her vision enhances positive leadership outcomes, including overall improved job performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.

A leader should generate a vision similar to that which inspires his or her employees in terms of clarity, challenge, and future orientation and inspiration. Employees need to be encouraged to share the leader’s vision and use it to guide their daily operations. The leader should motivate and empower employees to pursue and attain the vision set before them.

The question employees typically find themselves asking when a leader begins to define and implement action steps to attain his or her visions is: “Can we trust you not to abuse the privilege of authority?”

Credibility as a leader ultimately depends upon perceived vision-related integrity—namely, keeping one’s word and commitment, not taking advantage of personal influence or authority, or manipulating employees into embracing the vision the leader wishes to attain.

Leaders able to maintain a persistent belief in their vision are further considered extremely competent by their employees and seen as a contributing resource rather than force to be opposed.

The depth and detail of a leader’s vision demonstrates his or her level of expertise. Expertise is needed for legitimacy, employee respect and making the vision a reality.

As leaders are involved in decision making all day long, the quality of their decisions is compounded over time. Effective leaders who stand by their personal vision generally make prompt, wise and accurate decisions, even under unimaginably difficult and confusing conditions and situations.

Having a higher level of expertise makes a leader become very pragmatic. The leader tends to see things in realistic terms, which helps to identify and develop strategies that are able to cut through to the core of problems and negative situations relatively quickly. This aids in quicker vision realization.

Expertise is acknowledged and respected when a leader effectively projects his or her vision by explaining to employees the purpose, meaning and significance.

In addition to demonstrating decisiveness and expertise, clearly defining the vision and adhering to it serves the leader by enhancing team performance, generating healthy conflict, and driving overall change.

Enhanced Team Performance

Defining a vision through clarifying roles, goals, and the way forward is a proven means of increasing team performance.

The quality of the relationships employees develop (and the people with whom they develop them) is influenced to a large degree by inward assumptions about their leader’s vision. When those assumptions are based on faulty generalizations, misunderstandings or misinterpretations, the quality of employee relationships suffers.

Factors that contribute to forming strong relationships across differences are affected by individual sets of experiences, beliefs and expectations. Vision has the power to generate positive experiences with others and realistic expectations of them. It helps to develop and maintain positive social identities through a process of molding individuals into a unified collaborative unit that shares the same beliefs, goals and outlooks.

In essence, if properly communicated and then embraced, vision positively shapes the way employees and leaders interact with one another. It helps to generate a type of “social identity” or a perception of oneness through shared and valued personal and work-related characteristics and goals.

Vision Generates Healthy Conflict

A visionary leader is often viewed as one who makes up his or her mind, then remains intractable and unmovable in direction and expectations. This perception tends to generate conflict and resistance.

The extent to which conflict emerges is dependent upon two factors: the strength of the visional expectation, or agreement between employees’ perceptions of the steps needed to attain the vision and the leader’s own expectations, and the outward attitudes, expressions, or behaviors the employee and leader display in embracing the vision and its directional courses of action.

When the two factors above are addressed, where persuasion and a sense of purpose and positive self-benefit are emphasized, feelings of harmony and balance typically replace levels of uncertainty, insecurity and resistance.

When leaders experience conflict, their ability to reduce or eliminate it will always depend upon how well they communicate their expectations both initially and over time.

Vision Drives Organizational Change

The need for change is normally stimulated by an external “trigger” necessitating a modification of some kind. Connecting the vision to this needed change typically forces the organization out of its status quo, alters values and attitudes, and establishes balance and stability.

Acceptance of change and related implementation procedures is loaded with human-related difficulties. Vision enables leaders to achieve higher levels of “buy in” by overcoming employees’ anxiety over changes, their personal uncertainty and lack of ownership of initiatives and their outcomes.

Leaders understand the culture and capabilities of their organization, and use it as the basis for the embracement of visional change. This change is further effected by:

Selecting key employees who tend to display unique leadership qualities to be project facilitators or unit directors for various assignments or tasks.
Working with small groups of employees and mentoring them in various assignments and tasks as it relates to their visional impetus and direction.
Creating ways for those involved in the change to share successes and failures.
Using discussion group cycles or brainstorming to move their visional direction and strategic objectives forward.
Developing small-scale achievable targets in order to introduce change or build small successes from them.
Encouraging both themselves and their employees to be innovative as well as to engage in more productive behaviors in the workplace.
Managing change proactively, by focusing forward movement on implementation and action rather than formal competence building.

Leaders Possess a Deeply Embedded Sense of Purpose

How Well Are You Communicating Your Vision?

Excerpt: Creating and Sustaining a Strong Vision: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 25, 2013 at 12:11 pm

Posted in Leadership, Vision, Visionary Thinking

Tagged with attain the vision, Change, embracing the vision, employees, expectations, expertise, leader, leader’s vision, Leaders, level of expertise, resistance, team performance, vision

Defending Against Personal Burnout and Frustration

Dealing with the Challenges of Change

Many leaders will associate the implementation of change in their organization with elevated levels of stress, frustration and anxiety. These pressures, combined with a typical staff reduction that often requires leaders to accomplish more with less, can lead to personal burnout.

Change management, as incorporated in many organizational plans and strategies, often leads to personal burnout, as rather than take small, incremental steps that allow organizations to evolve. Many will stagnate and resist change until the company is severely threatened and must make huge, destabilizing adjustments to survive.

It is important for leaders to understand that large, overwhelming changes will typically shake up the entire organization as wholesale modifications occur in the way business is conducted. The process is time intensive and traumatic for everyone involved. People require time to recuperate after the event is over; wholesale changes often result in personal burnout.

Undoubtedly, quick and/or frequent change can lead to burnout. However, even in the face of ongoing change, leaders can use the strategies outlined in this section to defend against burnout and frustration.

Part of the Job

Effective leaders accept that change is a normal function associated with their jobs. In this way, change is no longer perceived as an event that threatens the organization, but simply a normal function of everyday business activity.

Leaders who embrace change plan small, incremental adjustments that help their organization slowly evolve and adapt. As a result, the company will eventually see an increase in productivity and efficiency. All it takes is a change in the leader’s perception to reduce the stress and pressures that he or she once associated with organizational change.

Anticipate Rather Than Resist

When people oppose change in their organization, they end up focusing their energy on resistance rather than acceptance. This focus saps the energy required to maintain productivity and effectiveness, which ultimately leads to burnout.

On the other hand, leaders who accept and anticipate change learn to harness its momentum to their benefit and use that energy to enact change throughout the organization, producing positive outcomes and results.

Pace

When organizations implement wholesale changes out of necessity, it can be overwhelming. Many of these changes include layoffs, which increase the intensity of the situation and overburden the leader. In turn, stress and anxiety levels go up, resulting in personal burnout.

However, when leaders plan for ongoing change, adjustments are made in small, incremental steps that allow the organization to transform itself on its own terms. Once done, wholesale organizational change is eliminated, as is the stress and intensity of change.

Incorporate

The incorporation of small, incremental changes into daily activities allows the organization to grow and evolve while simultaneously increasing productivity, effectiveness and efficiency. The incremental nature of change allows leaders to build it seamlessly into the organizational culture.

When the organization accepts change as a daily occurrence, leaders don’t really feel pressured nor do they experience high levels of personal stress and anxiety. This greatly reduces personal burnout.

Experiment

Leaders that learn to accept and incorporate change into their daily responsibilities also learn the value of experimenting with new ideas and concepts. They discover that small changes can be tested with minimal impact and that lessons can be learned from all successes and failures. These lessons are ultimately incorporated into adaptations made by the organization.

Experimentation also helps leaders reduce risks associated with change. And less risk equals less stress, frustration and anxiety—all of which are associated with burnout.

Managers as the Facilitators of Change

Excerpt: Impact of Change on Individuals: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 24, 2013 at 11:26 am

Posted in Change, Leadership Challenges, Response to Change

Tagged with anxiety, burnout, Change, change in their organization, incremental steps, Leaders, normal function, ongoing change, Organization, organizational change, personal burnout, stress, stress and anxiety, wholesale changes

Communication Has to Start With Telling the Truth

The Capacity to Face Reality

Warren Buffett (L), chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and David Rubenstein (R), president of the Economic Club of Washington, participate in a discussion during the 25th anniversary celebration dinner of the Economic Club of Washington June 5, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) remarked, “‘It’s vital to be able to communicate well… Just being able to communicate with others on the job adds at least 50% to your value.” Open and effective communications at all levels solves many problems and reduces conflict before it even occurs. Lee Iacocca (Chrysler) declared, “A leader has to communicate. I’m not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I’m talking about facing reality and telling the truth…

Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it’s painful.” Iacocca notes the importance of intellectual honesty as part of the communication process. “Iacocca says he’s not talking about verbosity or sound bites. He means facing reality and telling the truth, even when it’s painful. If you apply spin, people will know—they’re not stupid—and they’ll stop listening.”

“Peter Drucker [felt] the most valuable asset in a firm is the collective knowledge of its employees. But to realize that value, the people in an organization have to be able to share that knowledge. That means ‘them that’s got it’ have to be able to give it to ‘them that don’t.’ And that transaction requires two-way communication between inspired transmitters and welcome receivers.” The great leaders understood this. In fact, most spent a great deal of their time on the “factory floor” meeting with managers, supervisors and employees to see firsthand what is happening and to understand the problems and issues facing their companies.

At Hewlett-Packard it was discovered that “‘Management by Walking Around’ improves communication, improves quality, improves teamwork, and improves profits. Hewlett and Packard’s visible presence and easy availability (they insisted on a company-wide open-door policy, believing that interruptions were a small price to pay for the advantages of open and frank communication with the talented people they hired) earned them deep credibility with their co-workers. A drill press operator on the outskirts of the factory knew that the CEO and President understood what he did and appreciated his contribution.”

As was previously pointed out, John Patterson (National Cash Register) actually moved his office into the middle of his factory floor. While other leaders, such as Henry Heinz (H.J. Heinz), Harvey Firestone (Firestone Tire), William Proctor (Proctor & Gamble), and George Westinghouse (Westinghouse) did not go to that extreme, they still remained highly visible, and openly and frequently communicated with their employees. In recognition of his frequent presence on the factory floor, Harvey Firestone’s casket was walked through his factory one last time, at the time of his death.

The great leaders spent the majority of their time traveling and communicating with employees and key constituencies. This allowed them to become personally acquainted and to influence employees on all levels. It also provided them with the opportunity to elicit feedback to make more accurate and fact-based decisions.

Fredrick Crawford (TRW) spent “much of his time speaking to employees and projecting the force of his ideas and his personality. One observer called him ‘a natural leader of tremendous vitality, self-assurance and singleness of purpose.’ But there was more to the Thompson program than Crawford. At all levels of the organization, managers tried to convince workers that the company had their best interests at heart…

Thompson managers referred employees as ‘members of the Thompson family’ and tried to minimize status distinctions between managers and workers… the firm’s policies were guided by an effort ‘to eliminate class lines and have our relationships on a first name basis.’”

While this may appear commonplace, some influential leaders like Cary Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard), Richard Fuld (Lehman Brothers) and Roger Smith (General Motors) avoided meeting with their employees. Not only that, they strictly limited their accessibility to them. These leaders, among others who exhibited this characteristic, experienced substantial problems on multiple levels.

Don’t Push Out Figures When Facts Are Going in the Opposite Direction

References:

Stein Ben, Ben Stein: More from My Dinner with Warren (Fortune Magazine, January 7, 2010)
Iacocca Lee, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? (Scribner, 2007)
Iacocca on the Need for Leadership Now (Business Management Daily, March 31, 2010)
Willax Paul A., To Communicate Better, Improve Your Listening Skills (New Hampshire Business Review, September 28, 2007)
Orfalea Paul, Helfert Lance, Lowe Atticus and Zatkowsky Dean, Inspirational Figures David Packard (West Coast Asset Management)
Jacoby Sanford M., Reckoning With Company Unions: The Case of Thompson Products, 1934-1964 (Industrial and Labor Relations Review, October 1, 1989)

Excerpt: Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) Read a Free Chapter

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 23, 2013 at 12:22 pm

Posted in Communications, Employees, Leadership

Tagged with communication, communication process, employees, facing reality, factory floor, great leaders, Hewlett-Packard, intellectual honesty, Leaders, managers, open communications, telling the truth, truth

Planning as a Means to Generate, Oversee and Measure Results

Looking into the Crystal Ball

Most corporations require leaders to produce an annual plan to project possible future results. Many leaders tend to undertake this assignment with little or no enthusiasm even though it is necessary to forge new paths to generating positive, successful outcomes. Once completed, most annual plans sit on the shelf until the next planning cycle. Many times the rationale is that people are too involved and overwhelmed with daily activities to follow their plan.

Effective leaders tend to view planning as a means to generate, oversee and measure results. Planning gives leaders time to consider how they can improve their own as well as overall workplace performance. It allows leaders to reflect on ways to stretch their employees’ abilities in order to make them a more viable resource for generating and enhancing long-term results. In order to get the best results possible from their leadership efforts, leaders need to prepare for them.

Leaders must recognize that preparing for results does have its challenges, and be aware of them before beginning their next planning cycle.

During planning and budgetary reviews, leaders sometimes develop unreliable projected numbers and assumptions. It is all too easy to develop projections without specific facts to back them up, yet obtaining positive end results relies on sound forecasting.

Many leaders fail to invest the needed effort to review past performance, and this deficiency tends to affect their end outcomes. Some also fall short in taking the necessary time to effectively base future projections and assumptions upon what their organizational units have actually achieved in the past, which distorts expectations.

Obtaining results implies that plans and budgets not be developed in a void. Effective leaders realize that they must build on past successes and determine why and how past failures occurred. They know that to increase results it is essential to plan for strengthening weak and non-performing areas.

Leaders can only accomplish this by thoroughly reviewing past performance in all areas in order to link plans to where the organizational unit currently stands. Performance reviews allow leaders to accurately project their organizational unit’s performance forward in incremental steps. This is the only realistic method of achieving and sustaining growth.

As leaders begin the planning process to increase performance and results, they need to address five specific areas that tend to create the greatest challenges:

Faulty Assumptions

Every plan that is designed to increase results needs to be based upon a series of assumptions. Consisting of future and anticipated variables that impact the actual performance of the plan, assumptions include economic conditions, sales and production forecasts, as well as anticipated major orders.

If assumptions are inaccurate, plans will be worthless and future results will not be realized. For example, if a plan is based upon 10% growth when in reality the economy is causing a 10% decline, everything in the plan is based upon an inaccurate assumption.

When developing their plans, leaders must focus on carefully creating, listing and detailing accurate and realistic assumptions. As conditions change during the year, reviewing assumptions becomes a necessary procedure in order to adjust them to actual conditions. This enables leaders to quickly alter and adapt their plans throughout the year, ensuring the likelihood of obtaining the results they want.

Inaccurate Information

To get results, the development and use of accurate information within the planning process is essential. Accurate information is one of the most important aspects of planning and the most significant step in the plan’s implementation process. Leaders must take the opportunity to examine every aspect of their organizational unit’s past performance. This includes reviewing past plans and budgets against actual performance.

Results-oriented leaders understand what worked in the past and why. They identify areas for improvement, revision, modification or an increased workforce. They then focus on underlying causes that tend to influence or precipitate inadequate employee performance. Leaders who make it a point to conduct exhaustive performance reviews are able to produce accurate information and data, which helps to generate higher levels of results over shorter periods of time.

Once leaders produce a comprehensive review, it becomes much easier to update and maintain their information with a higher degree of accuracy. Leaders use the planning process to audit their information and insure its reliability and accuracy.

Pitfalls to Effective Plan Development

The first major planning pitfall that definitely affects positive end results lies in leaders choosing to create new strategies by simply duplicating previous annual plans with one or two selective changes. Most often changes include simply altering numbers to reflect current conditions. The completed plan is then submitted to senior management. These plans have little value in terms of results-oriented direction or particular action steps to follow.

A second major pitfall is found in writing plans from a “backward perspective.” This is where plans are made according to where leaders want to go, rather than on where they should be going. Strategies are developed without regard to the specific facts, data, timelines and information needed to ensure they are accurate and realistic.

All pertinent information and related data supporting various desired outcomes must be included when generating plans, with all other information that tends to conflict with the desired outcomes omitted.

Both pitfalls are attempts to short-circuit the planning process or avoid it, and greatly reduce the chances of obtaining the results leaders need to generate. When this happens, leaders fail to meet their responsibilities to themselves, employees, associates, senior management and stockholders.

Impossible Plan Timetables, Allotments and Factors

How plans are scheduled can have a major impact on whether or not results are obtained. Many leaders often assume they can achieve more than is realistically possible to attain. They tend to insert and carry over expectations of impossible timelines and deadlines for employees to follow and meet.

Performance plans should stretch each organizational unit and members’ capabilities. Time allotments to move processes and actions along toward achieving goals and objectives must be realistic. Additional time must be factored in for unanticipated events that will inevitably occur during the year.

It is essential for leaders not to under-plan, where employees are not pushed to perform. Equally as important they should not over-plan, where employees are constantly placed under stress to meet deadlines. To get better results, leaders must consider the need to balance their plan’s time requirements, workload criteria and expectations.

Failing to View Performance Plans as Positive Management Tools

Often leaders will produce required plans and forget about them until the next ones are due. It is a serious mistake to view planning as an impediment to their work and daily responsibilities.

Results-oriented leaders appreciate how and why performance plans are powerful management tools. Plans guide and direct their actions throughout the year toward the accomplishment of their goals and objectives, which always move them to securing higher levels of workplace results.

Results-oriented leaders focus on taking their plans and breaking them down into smaller monthly plans, which can be easily monitored and altered. Leaders also make certain to generate smaller step-by-step plans for every individual employee. This process tends to link both time and individual performance toward the accomplishment of common goals and objectives.

Planning is a continuous, ongoing process. Performance plans need to be continually revisited, modified and adapted to reflect actual conditions. Situations change and performance plans should allow leaders to readily anticipate and adapt to fluctuations, speedups and slowdowns, as well as unforeseen occurrences.

Related:

The Need to Test Opinions Against the Facts

The Mastery of Details is an Integral Part of Leadership

Excerpt: Becoming a Leader of Your Own Making (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 22, 2013 at 10:28 am

Active Leadership Takes Courage, Passion and Conviction

Three Reasons Why Leaders Fail

Some individuals are natural leaders and automatically “take point” in any and all situations. Others must make a conscious choice to do so, possibly having reluctantly accepted an unexpected leadership role. These individuals are faced with a number of choices having a direct impact on their personal and professional lives.

Active leadership takes individual courage, passion and conviction. The role requires challenging established positions and procedures. It not only places the spotlight on leaders’ behaviors but also puts them under increased scrutiny by others who may not want them to succeed.

Individuals in this position cannot afford to take the path of least resistance. This is when leaders must face difficult choices with real implications for their professional and personal lives. It is not uncommon for emerging leaders to question their own motives and abilities once placed under extreme stress and pressure.

A leader is motivated by an inward desire to do the best they can to maximize both their employees’ efforts and overall organizational performance. While discomfort with increased scrutiny is natural, they must be able to continually persist and press forward toward their goals through adversity.

Effective leaders know they have to take a stand for necessary and essential changes if their organization is to become more competitive, develop inward strength and stability and prosper. It is the “weight” of leadership for a reason, but a necessary burden or challenge for those who see possibilities, opportunities and organizational potential.

The most common frustrations experienced by leaders are demonstrated in the contrasting roles of leaders and traditional managers.

Innovation

Managers are generally administrators of jobs and responsibilities. Leaders are organizational innovators. This means they are constantly identifying and implementing new creative concepts, principles and methods to enhance organizational effectiveness.

Managers typically copy and apply actions and methods known to work. Leaders continually develop new and original ideas. They try things that at times will not work or may even produce unexpected consequences.

Focus on People

Traditional managers tend to maintain the status quo and focus on systems and structures preserving their authority and control. This is an immediate frame of reference predicated upon short-term results and employees as workers with a job. Conversely, leaders pursue in-depth programs around developing their people’s potential. They make a concerted and ongoing effort to build trust and inspire confidence.

This means leaders must deal with resistant bureaucracies and the managers therein who are threatened by change and innovation. They must be willing to deal with opposition from employees and unions used to working under strictly controlled conditions and the barriers thrown in their way to frustrate their efforts and forward movement.

Change is not an easy process, especially when dealing with individuals fearful of its possible outcomes. Leaders must learn to deal with these frustrations and develop strategies to overcome them.

Differences in Style

A wide gulf exists between a typical managerial and leadership style. Traditional managers tend to ask “how and when,” leaders, “what and why.” As innovators, leaders continually question the status quo and challenge its premise, especially when it interferes with their employees’ ability to perform to their potential. Most are labeled troublemakers or rebels, rather than members of the team to be trusted and respected by upper management.

Leadership exacts a personal price. Leaders stand up for and do the right thing regardless of repercussions. They may not be popular, or at times even wanted within their respective organizations. Often their efforts go unappreciated for long periods of time.

However, true leaders continually stand up for what they believe in, relying on their personal visions, knowing in the end the results they and their employees produce will more than negate detractors’ tiresome objections.

Though working hard to meet what is expected of them, traditional managers tend to do as told without questioning the purpose of particular directives.

Even if they do not agree with a particular direction, they rarely openly challenge it.
They keep their eyes on the bottom line, knowing that as long as they do what they are told, they can maintain a comfortable existence.
They become easily threatened by any changes leaders attempt to make that will disrupt the workplace and possibly, their own security.

Leaders remain steadfast in their determination to effect the changes they believe will positively enhance and transform their organizations.

They expect resistance to their ideas, practices and methods, and that it will create frustrations and impediments to enacting operational or procedural changes.
They understand that though painful, their actions are necessary and will ultimately be rewarded.
As their ideas become refined to the point where they take root and develop, leaders derive personal satisfaction from seeing their visions and goals attained.
Leaders accept the burdens, frustrations and often lack of acceptance that comes with adhering to their beliefs.
They are continually “tempered in the furnace” of adversity.
It is this process of refinement that hones their leadership skills and makes them likely candidates for advancement, as compared to most managers taking safer and more secure roads to asserting their influence in the organization.

Related:

Leaders Are Judged By The Actions They Take

“Dissent, Even Conflict Is Necessary, Indeed Desirable”

A Leader’s Management Style Sets the Organizational Tone

Excerpt: Dealing with the Challenges of Leadership (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 17.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 21, 2013 at 10:56 am

Posted in Character, Courage, Leadership

Tagged with frustrations, ideas, increased scrutiny, Leaders, Leadership, managers, stand up for their ideas, status quo, traditional managers

Trust is Based Upon Truth

Leaders Are Judged By The Actions They Take

Trust is based upon truth, which implies open, honest and direct communication free of personal or hidden agendas.

One of the pillars of leadership is developing and fostering a deep sense of mutual workplace trust. One of the most vexing problems faced in organizations is a simple lack of trust between employees and their managers.

For managers to experience successful growth and positive results in their respective department or unit, trust must be established on all levels. Without a deep sense of trust, their vision, goals and plans—as well as unified workplace cohesion—will be unobtainable.

Establishing trust is difficult, time-intensive work. It is earned when synergistic working relationships are established with individual employees. These relationships are characterized by active communication and listening, open and candid interactions, and a total acceptance of all persons as unique individuals. Trust also includes the manager’s personal involvement in ensuring employee as well as departmental success.

The fact that managers are granted authority over employees does not guarantee trust between both parties. Trust is based upon truth, which implies open, honest and direct communication free of personal or hidden agendas. For managers to become totally effective leaders trust must be earned and established. In the absence of trust, leadership principles will be of little consequence in the workplace.

Managers have a unique role within organizational workplaces. While they are responsible for individual employees and are required to guide and direct their activities, many are working on different assignments, projects and tasks in varying phases of completion. Many times it becomes impossible for managers to oversee everyone’s ongoing daily activities. This type of environment demands that high levels of trust are established and sustained.

Lack of trust in the workplace stems from areas managers can fall short in, including:

Establishing a Work Environment Free of Fear

Most managers are generally under extreme pressure to produce ongoing results. Many are focused on agendas that are able to secure or enhance their chances of organizational advancement. In the process, they often create zero-tolerance policies for mistakes and failures. This produces work atmospheres where employees become afraid to discuss problems or results in honest and open dialogue. Rather than trust their managers to support them, they hide pieces of information or mistakes that can hurt or jeopardize them in any way.

Communicating with Employees

Many managers have direct contact with their employees, but often fail to actively listen and engage in conversations that encourage interaction, feedback or input. Some are only interested in picking out certain information that they want to hear without thoroughly listening to anything else being said. Even though they fully believe they are communicating effectively, selective listening and targeted talk work to demoralize their employees and reduce their levels of trust and loyalty.

Interacting in Person

Many managers choose to communicate with their employees via email, written memos or posted messages. Very few efforts are made to interact directly with them on a regular and active basis. This becomes a major pitfall, as only when they make it a point to seek out employees to have open and free discussions and conversations can they become attuned to workplace problems, concerns, and attitudes and know which motivational methods need to be applied to whom.

All employees must be treated fairly, compassionately and honestly and be appreciated for their own particular characteristics and personalities. All have unique needs that must be addressed and met if they are to feel an important part of the organizational team.

Since many tend to function with daily frustrations and pressures associated with their assignments and responsibilities, managers as leaders must become actively involved with them daily in order to encourage and sustain the motivation needed to assure they do not succumb to burnout and other psychological problems.

Specific Steps to Building Trust

If leaders wish to establish and build workplace trust, there are specific behaviors that must be avoided.

Criticism – Discussions concerning documented performance results and how to improve them are always necessary and appropriate as one of the manager’s primary responsibilities and functions. However, they must make it a point to avoid making unwarranted negative comments regarding an employee’s performance, attitudes and decisions, as they are directly perceived as personal criticisms, not constructive performance or work-related input.

Psychological Analysis – Managers as leaders must avoid assuming the role of amateur psychiatrist and analyzing employees’ motivations and behaviors. This includes resisting the urge to prejudge their circumstances, situations and actions.

Advice – Managers can easily provide solutions or advice without making the effort to seek employee input. As problems are often more complex than they appear, managers can short-circuit the learning process and alienate employees by not allowing them to identify why things happened, how ineffective solutions were reached, or the particular factors that contributed to inferior results.

It is important that managers seek employee input in regard to specific problems in order to understand, analyze and learn from the facts and pertinent information they possess. Only then do they provide their advice, suggestions or solutions.

Command – Some managers tend to coerce, manipulate and force employees into completing assignments on time or accepting increased responsibility. As leaders, they need to avoid these types of actions, and instead motivate and encourage their employees to achieve desired results and/or increase their personal effectiveness and efficiency. They must know their employees well enough to be able to match the appropriate motivational strategy with each individual.

Control – Managers as leaders must avoid controlling actions and behavior through intimidation techniques and practices. Threatening employees with negative consequences does not motivate them. Employees need to be consistently and positively encouraged to produce results. Intimidation only serves to demoralize them.

Intense Questioning – Managers as leaders must avoid second-guessing and questioning employees on every decision, idea, recommendation or suggestion they make. Employees must be trusted to make decisions on their own without intense scrutiny and oversight.

A barrage of suggestions or intense questioning as to their employees’ rationale or methods on every assignment only creates more obstacles to them doing their jobs properly, and sends a clear message that their manager thinks them untrustworthy and even incompetent.

Five Ways to Establish Trust and Credibility

Excerpt: Leadership (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

January 18, 2013 at 10:49 am

Posted in Employees, Leadership, Open Communications

Tagged with employee input, employees, lack of trust, Leaders, levels of trust, managers, problems, trust, workplace, workplace trust

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