Today’s business leaders must take a progressive, evolutionary approach to managing their companies and leading their people in order to compete in a modern business climate marked by increasing speed and constant change. To keep up with customer demand and incoming challenges from competitors, they need the right tools to implement processes that optimize employee engagement and productivity.

TM Solutions of Raleigh, North Carolina, a leading talent management firm delivering progressive solutions that help businesses grow and manage execution, has developed the Mobile Manager, a first-in-class talent management software solution powered by Virtual Performance Coaching, Talent Cards and Peer Cards.   The Mobile Manager provides a platform for success based on understanding the key drivers that motivate people and propel their performance to new heights of achievement on an ongoing basis.

Unlike milestone-driven performance management frameworks, Mobile Manager enables managers and teams to get the relevant information and individualized feedback they need, as they need it—daily and weekly—never letting untapped potential or festering workplace issues go unresolved between performance reviews. 

Recently, a middle-market North Carolina technology company approached TM Solutions to deliver over 150 personalized coaching feedback sessions spanning six focus areas to their leaders and key individual contributors.  The coaching feedback sessions covered personal effectiveness, leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, motivating others and conflict resolution.  TM Solutions custom-tailored each of the 150 sessions to the personal and unique needs of each individual, rather than delivering “off-the-shelf” or platform sessions more commonplace in talent management.

Through the modern miracle of Mobile Manager cloud technology, TM Solutions delivered all 150 sessions within 10 days, a feat that would take most Fortune 500 talent managers weeks or months to accomplish. Now, with the Mobile Manager, powered by Virtual Performance Coaching, talent management fuels efficiency, rather that hampering it.

Aided by on-site, live coaching and training workshops from Rob Pulley and the TM Solutions team, the North Carolina company is focusing on eight key drivers of its success.  First, the most important component of success is leadership, the executives and managers who Manage Profitability, Improve Performance, Engage Teams, and Develop for the Future. The profitability emphasis is on fast execution with individualized “take action” strategies for immediate implementation. Performance improvement focuses on high-impact dialogue to enhance individual and team productivity, quality, and efficiency.

Honing in on the fact that employee engagement suffers when leadership is not present or flexible, employees leave managers, not organizations.  Employee engagement is fueled by leaders who can strengthen relationships through building trust and understanding as well as adapting leadership styles and individualizing their motivation strategies.  Finally, the leadership framework seeks to develop a bench of strong players for the future, both in terms of leadership development and filling key roles as needs for the business arise in a fast-changing marketplace.

In addition to developing the leadership team, the North Carolina firm also focuses on the development of future leaders and employees as individual performers.  Areas of focus include Enhancing Personal Effectiveness, Strengthening Relationships, Expanding Influence, and Building Emotional Intelligence. 

First among individual performance drivers is enhancing personal effectiveness.  The goal here is to understand and leverage unique strengths and preferences for each individual to increase confidence and improve ability to work effectively in multiple environments and situations encountered in the workplace. Next, team members, as well as their leaders, work to strengthen their interpersonal relationships through reducing conflict and communication barriers through understanding their unique needs and interpersonal drivers.

Through Mobile Manager and Virtual Performance Coaching, employees work to expand their influence throughout the organization and, critically, their own flexibility, through improving their ability to read and adapt to various environmental and interpersonal situations.  Finally, the company is working with its people to build emotional intelligence.  As employees build their own emotional intelligence through understanding their own unique preferences and rejections, along with how others perceive them.

For more information on TM Solutions, Mobile Manager, and Virtual Performance Coaching, contact the company at info@tms-hr.com or call 919-325-1583.

About TM Solutions

TM Solutions, LLC, founded in 2004, is an HR consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions.  Combining TMS Online, HR Store, TMSelect, Mobile Manager and Leadership Workshops with TMS OnDemand consultation services, TM Solutions helps clients attract and retain top talent while minimizing risk and reducing cost.  Innovative companies in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region turn to TM Solutions for talent management needs.

Media Contact

Rob Pulley, President

Phone:   (919) 325-1583

Email:  robpulley@tms-hr.com

In our last post, we began exploring the concept of empowering others, a foundation of effective leadership. Sound leadership is a hallmark of successful businesses, and at the core of this leadership is an ethos built around optimizing high-performance teams.

We outlined some of the pitfalls of managers who fail in their efforts to empower others, such as not understanding the strengths and contributions of those who work on their teams, micromanaging projects, failure to spread mission-critical and enjoyable work in an inclusive way, and perhaps most important to the empowerment equation, failing to share the credit when the team achieves wins and successes.

This week, we’ll lay out some examples of foundational, positive behaviors that separate great leaders from the pack via the concept of empowering others to achieve excellence.

Delegating Decision-Making Ability, Not Just Tasks to Perform

The notion of power itself centers on having the ability to set a professional course for yourself and others through the power of decision-making.  Much ingrained in our society is the idea that when we rise through promotion to a position of leadership, we acquire an earned power of decision-making. Thus, it’s hard for us, sometimes, to share responsibilities and decision-making with others who have not earned this distinction.

But in today’s modern business environment, where success is largely predicated on high-performing teams, we must be willing to shake this old paradigm and share our power with those on our teams.  While managers can’t delegate their authority in many matters, such as hiring/firing and disciplinary situations, they can push decision-making ability down to the lowest optimal levels that make sense.

By lowest optimal levels, we mean that if you have a subject-matter expert on your team, you should delegate the decisions that fit within the wheelhouse of their professional expertise and perspective.  Having the ability to make these decisions empowers that person beyond just giving highly-respected counsel, and they tend to rise to an even higher degree of greatness when they feel responsible and accountable for making the call for the team.

Encouraging Others to Resolve Problems versus Following Prescribed Solutions

Conflict and disagreements are natural problems that arise as people work together. People come to shared work with many different sets of perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and as workdays or projects play out, these differences will inevitably lead to both constructive and destructive conflict.

Managers often are too quick to pull the trigger when a conflict exists.  As the leader of the group, they naturally feel it’s their responsibility to resolve conflict and to maintain positive working relationships.  They are judge and jury for their teams, and they prescribe a solution when different team members are at odds over a business matter or a clash of personal styles.  Rather than making a decision in favor of one side or the other, or even forging a compromise, managers should lead their employees to resolve their differences with each other without intervention.  The role of the manager becomes that of a coach or advisor, seeking to build up the parties in a way that enables them to better understand each other and reach resolution quickly.

When executed properly, the result is much greater than simply getting everyone to follow a prescribed solution that often reaches the lowest common denominator. When people solve their issues without intervention from above, they tend to buy in to the resolution more quickly and actually use it as a form of empowerment, yet another way to make decisions and have greater control over their own destinies.

Creating an Open Environment for Questioning Established Norms

To effectively empower their people, leaders must create an environment of openness. Having an open-door policy for employees seeking feedback is a minimum requirement in today’s business climate.  However, having this minimum requirement does not empower employees.  To empower others to achieve excellence, leaders must fearlessly open the gates of understanding by removing any barriers to openness, even if that means an employee needs to question established work processes and systems.

Nobody wants to hear “that’s the way we’ve always done it, so stick to it.”  Businesses grow and achieve greater heights of success when they innovate.  No company has changed for the better without having an empowered employee taking on the behaviors of leadership and daring self and others to question the status quo.

We’re not advocating a culture of complaints, blame and excuses, but rather a culture of feedback and continuous improvement, where leaders and employees seek out and welcome feedback.  The point is that people need to be able to question the norm when they see fit. Leaders should welcome these questions and reasons for questioning without any detriment, perceived or real, to the questioner. A great mindset to adopt is that when someone questions your team’s way of doing things, they are doing it because they want the team to achieve more.

Allowing Teams to Set Goals Consistent with Those of the Organization

We have seen many examples of how leaders empower their people, and some of the most successful organizations even delegate goal-setting to their respective teams.  In this framework, leadership and senior levels set the course based on the interests and expectations of various stakeholders, especially owners and customers. Everyone wants to grow, but these goals are typically tempered by an executive view that defines sustainable, manageable growth.

The role of managers in these types of organizations becomes that of a facilitator, as they advise their teams on factors to consider when setting their individual and team performance goals, ensuring that these sub-sets of goals within the company align with those of the organization.  Again, something special happens when people are given guidance and allowed to set their own course within a guided framework—they become much more highly engaged and productive and they do it with efficiency.

Instead of spending time setting and communicating goals in a top-down approach and then watching and waiting as individuals and teams reach buy-in stage, shift gears and have  the buy-in stage early as individuals and teams create these goals in a bottom-up approach.

In our last article, we detailed several ways that leaders, managers and executives undermine their own credibility and trust. 

Betraying the trust of your employees has a ripple effect—lack of credibility and trust results in  a lack of leadership.  That lack of leadership yields disengaged employees.

Disengaged employees typically exhibit far less productivity than their engaged counterparts, and the organization’s profitability and long-term prospects for success suffer.  In a nutshell, managers and executives, through failures in building the cornerstones of leadership—credibility and trust—will ultimately cause their own organizations to fail, as disengagement becomes viral.

This week, we’ll focus on multiple ways that successful managers and executives exert a positive influence on their employees, driving credibility and trust and fueling employee engagement and productivity along the way.

Build Relationships

Too many managers think they can lead others without forming a personal relationship with them.  They think, largely to their peril, that they can keep an arm’s length approach to managing, drawing upon that old standard of keeping their personal and business worlds strictly apart.

Today’s successful managers realize that real leadership is not about blurring those lines but rather building appropriate professional relationships based on time-tested principles. They are open and available to their people, always there to listen, give advice, and validate or restore confidence when their employees need it.

They have faith in others, and they show it in the ways they speak to their people and delegate work to them. And they prove, over and over again, that they always look to the best interests of others when making decisions.  When people can sense that you have their best interests in mind, they don’t always need to agree with a decision to embrace it and stay engaged with their work and the company’s goals.

Be Steady at the Helm

People place a high level of trust and credibility in the notion of consistency.  The best managers focus on having a steady demeanor regardless of the situation.

There’s a huge psychological aspect to the manager/employee relationship dynamic.  Even the most engaged employees still look to the behavior of their managers as a kind of bellwether for how they, their team, or the company itself is performing.  As competitive pressures peak, it’s important that leaders understand how to remain consistent in their own attitudes and behaviors.

This isn’t to say that managers need to adopt a stoic, nonchalant stance. It’s more about not getting too high or carried away by success or too low, adopting a doomsday attitude after a recent loss. Keeping in mind that we all live to fight another day, whether it’s after a blow to our confidence or a big win, helps us to remain steady at the helm.

Master the Art of Giving Feedback

In our years of working with high-performance teams, we’ve seen that even those who consistently deliver superior performance within an organization crave good feedback from their managers and executives.

When managers are giving feedback to their employees, it must first be frank—people simply can’t improve if they can’t identify an issue through objectivity and honesty from their leaders. Feedback must also be open, meaning that it can’t just be a one-way street. Managers should be prepared to talk through issues, gain understanding by hearing from the employee their thoughts on the issue, and walk away with a greater understanding of the problem and a greater resolution of the issue.

Finally, feedback should be accurate and timely.  This requires that managers stay in touch with what’s really happening with the people on their teams and how they are performing in their positions. Leaders should be able to step in at any time, offering key advice that’s pertinent to the situation and the employee’s needs.

Demonstrate Character and Concern for Others

We all face tests of our honesty, ethics, and ability to put others’ interests above our own almost every day at work.  Perhaps the best way that leaders build credibility and trust is through showing a consistent ability to rise to these occasions and demonstrate character and concern for others.

Those leaders who stand tall on character are those who never look for excuses and remain accountable, not only for their own individual work, but for their team’s performance as well. They keep their integrity no matter the personal consequence, and they see through an ethical dilemma with great clarity.

While these instances to show character may not occur every day, a more constant opportunity for leadership is in showing concern for others.  All too often, managers can be too self-absorbed or focused on their own work to see someone in need.  At any given time, someone on their team can be dealing with something on the broad spectrum of the human condition, from dealing with a family tragedy to missing out on a promotion at the hands of a colleague.

The manager who is attuned to these situations and gives that employee a shoulder or boost at just the right time earns a special degree of trust and credibility that can sometimes last years.

How would you rate your level of trust in your team and organization?  Could it be better? Successful organizations invest in their people; in fact, we recently completed a Foundation of Leadership workshop (based on many of the principles in this article) for North Carolina-based Kerr Drug, a company committed to the ongoing development and engagement of its employees. If you would like a free consultation on strengthening credibility and trust for your leadership team, please contact robpulley@tms-hr.com. 

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As we’ve outlined many times in this space, profitability comes from productivity, productivity comes from engagement, and engagement comes from leadership.

The most successful organizations are built on a leadership platform where managers motivate and influence people across the company. These managers drive their teams to success with strategies tailored to individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and hot buttons. We recently discussed ways to motivate people, as well as management tactics that can undermine these efforts.  Now, we turn our attention to leading people through influence.

In today’s article, we’ll take a look at some key ways that managers and executives can exert a negative influence on their employees, leading to breakdowns in engagement, decreased productivity and, ultimately, a failure by the company to reach its full potential for profitability and sustained success. 

Difficulty Saying No to Others

Let’s start with something that we could categorize under having the best of intentions at heart—difficulty saying no to others.  Most of us want to please others, and we find that many managers want to keep everyone—their employees, their peers, and their executives—happy. 

Unfortunately, we all have our limits and must perform within them.  Often, there simply isn’t enough time to keep everyone around us happy, and we have to make critical choices on how we use our well of resources, namely, time.  An inability to say no when we are at our personal capacity leads to over-committing and under-delivering. Many who are quite adept at managing customer or organizational expectations turn around and fail the people who help them deliver results on a day-to-day basis.  Just as failing to meet a client or executive deadline causes a business relationship to suffer, failing to attend to the needs and concerns of our peers and our teams lead to an erosion in confidence and trust.

Failing to “Walk the Talk”

As the old adage sagely points out, leaders lead by example.  Those who fail to “walk the talk”—shirking responsibility and accountability in their work—risk a huge negative influence on their employees. The fundamental expectations that humans who work on teams have of one another lies in everyone pitching in, not only to do the work at hand as best as they can, but also taking the accountability and responsibility that comes along with the work.

Furthermore, employees tend to hold their managers and leaders to even higher standards. In their minds, they want to see that you deserve your position, with its greater compensation and benefits, and your “fair share” of the workload, whether you’re actually executing the work or directing it, is your burden to bear.  Bear it well, and people will run through walls for you. Consistently show signs of weakness in leading by example, and then watch their enthusiasm dissipate.

Betraying Confidence

Employees seek the counsel of their managers and leaders for many reasons, whether it’s advice on how to perform their work at a higher level, develop for their careers, or, in some cases, share concerns involving the company, its work, and colleagues on their teams. Keeping confidence in the workplace—becoming a vault for your people when they need to share their burdens with you, is of paramount importance to exerting a positive influence while engaging them.

We talk a lot about trust, because it’s fundamental to not only being a good person, but being a good manager and colleague as well.  If people can’t trust you with their private thoughts, you’ll fail to influence the avenues that occur in broad daylight.

Dismissing the Input of Others

In almost every corporate environment, people collaborate.  And they don’t just collaborate on executing projects or delivering to clients; they solve problems and meet challenges together.

Sometimes, even the best managers fail to take in the ideas and contributions of the people on their teams.  They often do this without thinking—they see a clear path to solving the team’s issue, wanting to quickly make a decision, communicate that solution, and move rapidly into implementation. 

While moving quickly is great, we can’t leave our employees and their ideas behind as collateral damage. People know that the manager is going to decide the course of action for the team, but everyone wants to know, at the very least, that the manager is taking a good account of their ideas and contributions in the process.  Quick dismissals of people and ideas exert a negative influence, driving a “what’s the point in even speaking up” attitude.

Come back for our next article, and we’ll discuss some ways that managers and leaders can build and sustain a high level of trust and credibility with their peers and teams.

In last week’s post, “How to Motivate Others—Challenges and Opportunities,” we discussed multiple areas where people in leadership positions can betray the confidence of their employees and teams, leading to drops in engagement and performance.  Pitfalls for managers can include adopting one-size-fits-all motivational tactics, showing a lack of faith in employees, which leads to micro-management, believing in the concept of universal self-motivation, ongoing failure to provide timely coaching and feedback, and displaying open negativity.

While all of these letdowns can lead to under-performing individuals and team, there are multiple roads that pave the way to success. Let’s take a look at some of the good ways that managers achieve sustained excellence when motivating others.

Setting the Example

Great managers show leadership by looking inward first.  To influence and lead others, you must first set the example. Albert Schweitzer once said, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.”  Providing a successful roadmap for others to follow, whether it’s through your work habits, attitude, or the level of engagement you display, can go a long way toward setting up your management tenure for success.

Leaders in business are role models.  When people follow you, they aren’t just following your orders; rather, they are imitating the behaviors that have made you successful.  Being a good role model is a huge responsibility that falls upon managers, and while we all have our weak moments, every manager should strive to minimize mistakes and liabilities and when they do happen, acknowledge them, learn from them, and continue to move forward.

Signaling Commitment

If setting the example takes introspection, managers must also make sure to show commitment outwardly to the people on their teams. The keys to signaling commitment to employees are being visible, involved, and “in the present.”

Too many managers hide when the workload becomes stressful or times are tough.  Just being visible to your employees and keeping a positive attitude goes a long way to securing their engagement. In addition to being visible, you must get involved—not too much, as with the micro-managers—but involved enough to where you can help your people make intelligent, informed decisions that will help them clear obstacles more quickly.  Finally, be in the present—all too often, managers get too entrenched in their own work and forget that their team must live through today’s successes and challenges.

Challenge Brings Out the Best

As humans we define our personal achievement not by how we routinely accomplish rudimentary tasks, but by how we overcome obstacles and meet challenges to accomplish tasks that we may not have thought possible.  Whether it’s running a faster mile or learning to bake a complex confection, we measure ourselves by overcoming the odds and redefining our own personal excellence.

So it is, too, with our work performance. People need challenging work to propel them to new heights. When you stay attentive to what people need, based on their personal interests and development goals, and then attune those goals to your business objectives, you’ll see that every time you hand out a new challenge, you’ll be handed back an even higher level of achievement.

Know Your People—Really Know Them

Do we really look at others for who they are, or do we just treat them as a group of numbers filling positions in the organization?  Because if we really want to motivate people, we need to know as much about them as we can.  We need to know their strengths, weaknesses and capacity for improvement—from a performance and development standpoint, there are no greater barometers for success.

While assessing strengths and weaknesses isn’t profound for many organizations, most companies fail to take that deeper dive that serves as the motivational engagement platform for these attributes, the employee’s values, interests, likes, dislikes and hot-buttons.  Sound talent management is about aligning the manager’s leadership and personal style, the goals of the business and team, and the interests of the individual. And it’s also about avoiding those issues that could be detrimental to the individual employee’s morale, causing a drop in performance and even disengagement.

Make Work Fun and Interesting

Managers must be creative to meet the engagement needs of their employees.  All people respond with higher levels of motivation when confronted with a manager committed to making their work more rewarding and to enriching their roles within the organization.

People need to know that they are always working toward a higher purpose, and that doesn’t necessarily always mean extra compensation.  People feel a very high sense of reward and fulfillment when they can sense their own importance to an organization constantly growing. And on the lighter side, it’s easy to see why people are better motivated when they associate work with fun, whether it’s the gamification of certain projects or goals, or just having a culture where people enjoy laughing with each other.

Conclusion

Motivating others is not something you can do successfully unless you commit to it as an ongoing process.  Your people will always have a wide range of needs, and those needs often cannot wait until the next scheduled interval for performance reviews or coaching sessions.

At TM Solutions, we spend a lot of time with our clients, helping them as they instill and fuel the processes and tools needed to build a culture where managers tailor motivational needs to the individuals that make up their teams.  To get an even deeper flavor for our thoughts on the subject of motivation, check out our blog series on the Eight Keys for Engaging Your Team through Effective Leadership, as well as our series on the Eight Leadership Essentials for Forging Trust through Action. 

We’d also like to invite you to be our guest, at no cost, for our upcoming webinar, Engaging Your Team through Effective Leadership, coming up on March 19 at 11 am Eastern time. Packed with real-world application and multiple learning opportunities, our leadership webinars give you the tools to develop a foundation for ongoing trust-building and motivation. Please follow this link for registration details.