Today’s successful, respected managers understand that developing relationships at work is critically important to their individual and team’s success.  Unfortunately, one of the attributes we see in poor performing managers is a lack of caring about their peers and direct reports and, more importantly, a streak of unconscious arrogance regarding their own abilities to “read” people.  This whole context—the notion of reading people—is out of place in today’s business world, as we now know that working with people is a continuous process of understanding them, not just some kind of gut-check assessment upon the first meeting or review session.

And understanding your people at work—your colleagues, direct reports, and your own managers—is, as we discussed in a recent blog post, one of the core foundations of building high performance teams at companies, along with trust and openness.  High performance has a direct correlation with employees’ ability, no matter their role, to develop relationships and earn credibility, whether that credibility lies with their supervisors, colleagues, or the people who report to them.

If managers and employees are seeking to improve their performance through strengthening relationships at work, then they need to ditch the reading people mindset and get down to the harder work of really understanding them.  And in order to gain this understanding, they must focus on the journey, not certain events along the way, like a certain project, recent mishap, windfall, or performance reviews.

Understanding people is a process, and the process is defined by multiple interactions and perceptions on the part of the people involved.  To begin our process for understanding others, we must first understand ourselves.  As people, we tend to understand ourselves in terms of the things we value, our own strengths, skills, and positive attributes, as well as what we see as our own shortcomings, flaws, or liabilities.  For example, you may see yourself as gregarious, creative, and driven—all fantastic traits. But you may also recognize that you are a procrastinator, lack confidence in high pressure settings, and tend to be defensive when others don’t immediately warm to an idea you think is your most brilliant yet. Thus, you’ve distilled yourself down to these three positives, along with corresponding negatives.

Once we understand ourselves, it’s much easier to see how we can understand others and develop relationships accordingly.  A natural law of attraction—speaking purely in the professional context here—is that we will gravitate toward people, more specifically toward characteristics or behaviors that mirror or complement our own.  This is what separates the good managers from the arrogant ones, the ones who assume they are great at reading and influencing people.  Good managers are willing to engage themselves in the introspection required to have a baseline understanding of themselves—in both relaxed times and high pressure situations, as well as individual work and collaboration with teams—to have that same understanding of others.

What it boils down to, ultimately, is that managers must seek to understand their own greatest strengths and weaknesses, and then seek representative qualities in their employees that provide either amplification of the things they like about themselves or provide a nice counterpoint to the manager’s own weaknesses.  For those arrogant managers, even admitting they have a weakness is a huge first step to better understanding.

So, if you’re an extrovert that tends to be very expressive, but lacks an analytical perspective, you may uncover, through listening and observing, a team member at work who mirrors your extroversion, chooses fewer words, and leans heavily on information-gathering and analysis to make decisions.  In the end, to defeat the unconscious arrogance that’s so rife in management in many companies, managers must be challenged to have humility about their own abilities, re-contextualizing reading people into understanding them, knowing themselves first, and then listening to others to gain perspective on their value to the team and organization at large.

TM Solutions created the Mobile Manager with the demands placed on today’s manager in mind.  Our new software tool combines multiple elements needed by today’s managers in order for them to execute on multiple fronts.  This multi-channel understanding of managers’ needs matches our own understanding that managers must play multiple roles in executing corporate strategy in the following areas:  leadership, coaching, collaborating, and team-building,

We’ve created the Mobile Manager as a one-stop hub for companies to leverage all of TM Solutions’ coaching, training, and development offerings in a user-friendly space optimized for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, since we know that many managers must interact with remote employees or simply need these devices with them at all times to deal with the high speed of business opportunities these days.

Within this hub, we’ve built several core components to help managers execute in the field. First, managers have with them at all times a dashboard organizational view of all of the people within their chain of command and company work groups. Within this dashboard, managers can link to two important tools, Talent Cards and Peer Cards, for each person they interact with, take orders from, or manage on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Talent Cards and Peer Cards play a vital role in helping managers execute in the field.  Quickly-accessible Talent Cards help managers understand their employees and provide a predictive model for how they will react in certain situations, whether it’s a high pressure environment or a fun team challenge. Managers will have the psychometric foundation, via the Talent Card, to understand their employees’ motivations and get a quick refresher on each employee’s preferences, sensitivities and hot buttons, both in terms of their work-related values and interests and any relevant personal information that feeds into the greater understanding of that employee as a person.

The Mobile Manager exploits the genius behind Peer Cards in much the same way.  Many organizations call upon their management groups to collaborate on initiatives that they can then roll out within their own respective silos.  Sometimes these groups can come from the same function—as with regional managers at financial services companies—or they can be cross-functional,  as with government task forces represented by leaders from multiple agencies.  Regardless of function, in order to execute in collaborative situations, managers need to build understanding of their colleagues.  And often, due to the speed of opportunity or the urgency of the challenge they are asked to address, this understanding must be built quickly, and the Peer Card is there to do it.

With a perspective geared less for management and more for collaboration, managers can work together and execute corporate strategy through understanding their colleagues’ communication preferences, interpersonal expectations, strengths, and motivations through the Peer Card.

The Mobile Manager also incorporates other tools and services to enhance leadership and coaching as execution areas for managers.  TM Solutions has delivered live (as well as recorded) learning sessions through topical webinars aimed at areas such as engaging teams through effective leadership and communicating effectively. 

In addition to highly interactive content that sparks immediate new execution abilities based on coachable areas, TM Solutions has also brought into the Mobile Manager its extensive library of training and development content, from best practice solutions to leadership coaching and talent assessment knowledge bases.  As you can see, TM Solutions has quite literally tried to think of any challenge that managers can face in the field and optimize the answers to these challenges through vital technology made for today’s mobile, fast-paced setting.

When you want your people to execute the plan, you leave them no excuse for failure. You want them to have every platform to succeed, and the Mobile Manager can be that platform to drive organizational and individual success.

In last week’s installment, we discussed a couple of key benefits of TM Solutions’ Mobile Manager for organizations, becoming an employer of choice and driving employee engagement and accountability. This week, we’ll discuss how the Mobile Manager aids organizations in building high-performance teams and strengthening leadership teams.

Building high-performance teams is critical to today’s challenging business environment.  Businesses achieving the highest level of market success are doing so with more horizontal, team-focused environments, versus the old model of vertical management.

Companies need high-performing teams in every aspect of their businesses. While many companies were early to embrace the team concept in sales via producer-manager roles, many still have not embraced the team concept in totality.  Product development teams have the ability to exponentially achieve greater innovation than siloed gurus, and operational teams have the ability to tackle problems at any scope.  It’s been proven, time and again, that corporate executive teams out-perform companies full of yes-men and women moving orders from the top down the management chain. What works for the military, in this case, doesn’t necessarily translate into the business world.

Key to the team-building concept is the breakthrough innovation of the Peer Card, one of the main drivers of the Mobile Manager.  While many companies try to paint full pictures of their employees to promote management’s understanding, few have embraced the revolutionary concept of peer-to-peer engagement embodied in the Peer Card.

With the Peer Card, employees see the strengths and development areas of the people with whom they must execute their respective business plans each and every day. With an engaged and accountable group of people, the Peer Card is an incredible driver of success. Each employee knows how the other is motivated, approaches problems, tends to work within a group, and other key values and interests that drive individual measures of success and worth.

In today’s business environment, companies can see real return-on-investment not only in individual talent management, but also in strengthening leadership teams. Forty-one (41) per cent of a company’s profitability—managing revenues, expenses, and efficiency—comes from its frontline leaders.  So how do companies tackle strengthening leadership teams?

Many companies have embraced educational opportunities for their leaders, such as offering executive management training in-house or through a third party and they have done so with varying levels of success.  While these offerings seem like a great fit, companies often find their leaders fleeing for greener pastures because of a built-in recipe for failure—placing leadership engagement in the hands of a corporate or outside entity.

This isn’t to say that paying for your employees to obtain executive education is a bad concept; to the contrary, these can be very successful strategies to build leaders in the company.  What’s neglected in this strategy can be addressed in the same manner that companies utilize the Mobile Manager with employees within high-performing teams.

What strengthens leadership is the actual practice of leading.  Too many managers are left to simply “manage to the numbers” or to existing performance management templates. The Mobile Manager turns this old concept on its head by immersing managers in the practice of leading.

The Mobile Manager dictates a systematic approach, so that managers can be a part of their teams’ performance, within sales campaigns, innovation initiatives, and problem-solving for internal needs or for customers.  Talent Cards help them with managing their direct reports, while Peer Cards assist them with understanding and strengthening their relationships with other leaders in the company.  Ongoing training and education never leaves managers waiting for that next course of action in their own development.

The launch of the Mobile Manager from TM Solutions is ushering in a new wave of resources for companies searching for a new way forward in managing their businesses for growth and opportunity in the marketplace.

One of the cornerstones of running a smart organization, primed to turn marketplace challenges into business opportunities, is talent management.  There are four key points to talent management:

·         Becoming an Employer of Choice

·         Driving Engagement and Accountability

·         Building High-Performance Teams

·         Strengthening Your Leadership Teams

While there are many potential employees in most markets, businesses want to become an employer of choice.  What does this mean?  In most cases, top performers are on somebody’s radar—headhunters, corporate recruiters, and skilled human resources executives are always looking out for the people who will come into an organization and drive growth and sustainability, whether their talents lie in business development, management, or operations.

Becoming an employer of choice means that these top performers will remain loyal to your organization, rather than playing the market to hear what others have to offer, whether it’s better compensation, more responsibility, or new challenges.  To become an employer of choice, you must earn your employees’ loyalty, just as you do with your customers. 

Companies have systems in place for sales, customer service, and operations to retain customers, and the Mobile Manager puts this same systematic approach in place for talent management.  The Mobile Manager unifies Talent Cards (tools for manager/employee development and engagement), Peer Cards (tools for building understanding among team members), along with training and education.

Management teams must also seek new and different ways to drive employee engagement and accountability. What we mean here by engagement is that companies must fearlessly walk a two-way street.  Leadership must ensure that they know what their employees are thinking with regard to their own roles within the company, and what they think about their leaders and the company itself.

By accountability, we mean that employees will take full responsibility in their own efforts and those of the teams within which they perform.  In order to take responsibility, and thus, accountability, employees simply can’t match up to an original job description or an annual review. The needs of businesses evolve on a daily basis in these fast times we live in, and these business needs demand more of managers, from a continuous improvement and dialogue perspective, on how they motivate and communicate with their teams.

To facilitate ongoing dialogue to drive evolving business needs, the Mobile Manager offers ongoing training and education to shore up development areas for employees. In addition, the Mobile Manager places a premium on being able to understand employees and how they will perform in various situations and environments that reflect the reality of fast-evolving business. Built on a platform that recognizes each employee as an individual to be developed for future leadership, the Mobile Manager is ideally-suited to companies on the move.

When employees are engaged, they will bring their best ideas to the table in every situation possible. When employees are accountable, they will drive their efforts to bring their ideas and those of others to bear on the success of the company.

In next week's installment, we will discuss building high-performance teams and strengthening your leadership teams.

When you take a look at the DNA of successful companies, you notice that high performing teams within the company drive success, whether it’s in areas like sales and marketing or operations, customer service, and manufacturing.

While there are many aspects to building great teams that continuously take their companies to new levels of success, defined by increased revenues and profitability and managing expenses and resources effectively, there are three fundamental traits that we see over and over again in the highest functioning organizations. Leaders model these traits, and their associates emulate them.  And the very best organizations systematize them.

These fundamental qualities necessary for building high performance teams in business organizations are trust, openness, and understanding.  Let’s start with trust. As with any of these qualities, the success of the team depends upon how managers interact with their employees and how the employees interact with each other.

In a recent Inc. Magazine article, Geoffrey James discusses the work environments and results produced by teams with average managers who motivate by fear and demand that their employees simply follow orders, versus extraordinary managers who motivate through vision and give employees freedom to have fun and take action and responsibility.  The foundational concept here is trust—if managers trust their employees to make their own decisions,  then employees will, in turn, empower each other.  Trust not only heightens performance—it simultaneously drives engagement.

Many managers and workers struggle with the concept of openness. We have gotten so trained in our society on the concept that “knowledge is power,” and, in our weaker moments, we feel that we need to concentrate knowledge in our own hands to control our professional destinies.  Time and again, though, we see the worst performances out of teams led by secretive managers who only give their employees the nuggets they think they need to drive their performance.  James addresses this concept as well—it smacks of a patriarchal approach where managers see their employees less as peers and more like their own children.

A lack of openness results in many types of negative behaviors. Among them—employees finding themselves working in lowest-common-denominator fashion, doing the bare minimum to get by, and looking to stay out of trouble versus achieve. To the contrary, the most open managers—those who freely share business challenges and obstacles freely with their teams—are able to bring more minds to the table to effectively solve problems.  Openness creates a “rise to the occasion” mindset from employees with regard to how they see their leaders and the business, and they want to pull together for each other as well.

As if trust and openness weren’t hard enough for many business managers to achieve, perhaps the hardest nut to crack is that of understanding.  While we regularly train and coach our clients on concepts like trust and openness, to truly create understanding among one’s employees, you either have to be a psychological savant or have the right tools.

That’s where companies like ours come in with solutions to get to the core of who people are as unique human beings through a combination of psychometric, values and interests, and competency assessments.   

There’s a perception out there, no doubt harbored in many low performance organizations,  that companies use this type of front-end screening to weed people out of hiring processes and then utilize manipulative management tactics with employees once they are hired.  We turn these notions on their respective heads—to the contrary, we think that these types of evaluations are best used to plug people into the right functional roles to optimize teams, and we also believe that they provide a critical roadmap for understanding.

This roadmap for understanding is two-fold and best understood by a couple of our products, the Talent Card and Peer Card. Each of these cards is simply a set of outputs and recommendations, one for managers and one for peers, to promote ongoing understanding and better team results.  It almost goes without saying that if people understand what you value in yourself and others, how you operate in stressful situations and react to conflict, and where you find your motivation and passion, they will meet you in the right place.

Promoting understanding among managers, employees, and colleagues is ultimately what building high performance teams is all about. High performance teams deliver sustainable success to both organizations and the individuals who drive them.