TM Solutions works with clients to define what’s important to them and help them stay focused and committed to achieving both their short and long-term professional goals.  We work with individuals to assess their strengths and potential liabilities, and we identify the personal styles and resources that are unique to each of them.  Because no two people are alike, customized development helps to maximize our potential and promote success in business.

When we partner with clients, we devise strategies to improve personal effectiveness, strengthen relationships and leadership, as well as help them overcome potential obstacles and challenges that they may face.  Our Path to Excellence program, a TM Solutions exclusive, includes individual coaching, group workshops and our web-based Mobile Manager application.  This program will assist in developing new capabilities for sustained excellence over time.  The Path to Excellence includes a 12-step process beginning with purpose, awareness, personal branding and taking action.

In last week’s post, we explored the first four steps on the Path to Excellence:  establishing a foundation and purpose, building awareness and understanding, creating a personal brand and strategy, and focusing on continuous improvement and taking action.  In this week’s post, we’ll tackle four more steps along the Path to Excellence.

Working Effectively in Ambiguous Situations

Sometimes we can’t see change coming, despite our best efforts to be proactive in the workplace. Sometimes, change is happening right in front of you—with a colleague, someone on your team, a marketplace shift, or in your dealings with a customer. And when it does happen, navigating unforeseen change can leave you in ambiguous situations.

When faced with ambiguous situations, particularly in fast-paced environments, it’s important that stay true to our values, remain calm, be consistent and predictable with regard to how we handle the risk and uncertainty.  People that demonstrate excellence in the workplace accept change rather quickly, adjust promptly to changing circumstances, and find alternate methods to achieve goals.  Remember, your peers and team will look to you in times of challenging or ambiguous situations, and if they see you effectively coping with change, shifting gears comfortably, then you’ve taken a huge step by influencing someone else with your own actions and behaviors.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Do I effectively cope with change? Can I shift gears comfortably?

Do I effectively handle risk and uncertainty?

Convey the Proper Sense of Urgency

There are two types of people we find challenging to work with—two types that don’t convey the proper sense of urgency with regard to their work activities and challenges. The first type is the “hair on fire” person, or the one who gives even the smallest, least significant tasks the attention and stress of challenges that could make or break the company itself.  The second type is the “easy-going” person, or the one who thinks everything’s going to be alright, no matter the real importance of the task.  They treat the next big client pitch as if it were a trip to the water cooler.

You don’t want to have your hair on fire with everything you face, nor do you want to be perceived as the not so engaged happy-go-lucky team member.  That’s why you must make a daily effort to convey the proper sense of urgency with regard to your own projects or activities. People who achieve excellence in their careers always seem to exhibit the proper sense of urgency and attention to apply to any situation. Even better, they separate themselves from others, achieving the highest levels of excellence by demonstrating concern and the proper sense of urgency for the work of team and peers. This not only allows them to accomplish great results—it also influences their colleagues to do the same, achieving balance in the way they approach their work.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Do I convey too much urgency for too many projects or activities?  Is everything important?

Do I convey a sense of urgency for the projects of others?

Proactively Seek Out Feedback and Deal Constructively with Mistakes

We know that failure is the best teacher.  When you are successful, it’s easy to forget the challenges you faced and how you achieved your goals.  .  However, when you fail, the obstacles you faced, the mistakes you made, and the goals you missed, all come into sharp focus.  Our ability to take in feedback—especially feedback that points out our shortcomings and failures—as well as our ability to deal constructively with mistakes, is perhaps our hardest challenge on the Path to Excellence.

Once we are comfortable seeking out feedback from others, it’s important that we have these conversations in the right spirit. We should focus on listening and understanding the speaker’s feedback and message, not responding with our own judgments, evaluation or positions. We should commit ourselves to not trying to defend or explain ourselves, only to thank the feedback giver for their attention and commitment to you..  Only when we can commit to just listening will we take what we really need from these conversations—great tools for self-improvement based on our own actual mistakes.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Do I eliminate defensiveness when receiving feedback?

Do I focus on my role and contributions to failures?

Increase Sensitivity to People and Issues

The Path to Excellence isn’t a “my way or the highway” proposition.  Rather, it’s a journey we take along with our leaders, colleagues, and the people on our teams at work.  Achieving excellence isn’t something we find purely by searching within ourselves.  We also achieve excellence through increasing our sensitivity to others, as well as the issues we are all surrounded with at work.

When we are sensitive to others, we can take their unique perspectives and contributions to the workplace and leverage them for our own self-improvement. How many times have you stared down a seemingly unsolvable problem, only to have a colleague show you a different way of looking at it that completely enabled your own understanding?

And speaking of understanding, when we seek to understand others, gaining their perspectives on the different situations we all face in life and at work, we better understand ourselves.  We better see how our own temperaments, attitudes, and preconceived notions drive our own successes and failures, and, based on what we learn from being more in tune with our colleagues, we can improve.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Do I actively seek out different viewpoints to leverage their perspectives and unique contributions?

Do I always treat others with respect and how they want to be treated?

Tune in next week for the conclusion of our series, the 12 Steps on the Path to Excellence, an exclusive coaching framework from TM Solutions.

Successful companies realize that delivering value to stakeholders and achieving a competitive advantage is heavily dependent on smart investments in current and future leadership.  The demands on business leaders to drive positive change and invoke employee engagement are growing more complex year after year.  To meet these needs and marketplace demands, TM Solutions, a human resources consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions, announces the launch of its breakthrough talent management software, the Mobile Manager.

The Raleigh, NC-based firm’s Mobile Manager unifies its suite of talent management solutions for business on a single online platform designed for today’s managers.  The new technology unifies TMSelect, the firm’s state-of-the-art talent management process, with training and development workshops to help managers and their employees achieve better results in the workplace.

Market changes, speed of technology, and “do-more-with-less” requirements of modern business have inspired TM Solutions’ executive team, led by President Rob Pulley, to develop the Mobile Manager.  According to Pulley, the greatest benefit of the Mobile Manager is that it causes a paradigm shift to meet these challenges, lifting businesses from the mire of traditional performance management.  “The Mobile Manager is the ultimate tool for companies looking for a boost as they change their cultures to compete in a tough marketplace,” stated Pulley. “Executives need to get away from the old performance management thinking and embrace a style built on the twin foundations of leadership and employee engagement.”

TM Solutions’ framework for today’s managers turns the old “review process” on its head. Gone are the days of managing around events such as quarterly, or, in the case of most companies, annual reviews.  Today’s most efficient, profitable companies must have their managers and key talent focus on three critical areas:  improving personal effectiveness, strengthening relationships (both vertical and lateral), and building high-performance teams.

The Mobile Manager delivers a host of solutions aimed at meeting multiple company needs over the long haul. The software enables managers to streamline their talent management process, thereby saving time and reducing costs. With built-in tools like the Talent Card and Peer Card, managers can build stronger leaders, resulting in sustained excellence and innovation.

More effectively than the performance management framework of yesteryear, the Mobile Manager actually improves performance by facilitating high impact dialogue between managers and employees, driving productivity, quality, and efficiency in their work together.

According to Pulley, there is simply no greater investment, and, more importantly, no greater return that companies can see on their investment, than creating a culture of continuous improvement by developing employee leaders for the present and future.