We recently came across a company president’s bio that launched readers into his management philosophy with this statement in the very first sentence:  “I believe in empowering the members of our team, our partners and our employees, to achieve their career goals and provide best-in-class service to our customers.” 

This gentleman gets it!  The foundational building block of leadership, building winning, high-performing teams, comes from a simple, yet challenging concept—empowering others to achieve.  Empowered people have an unmatched drive for excellence, not just on their own terms, but also in terms that are completely aligned with the organization’s goals for its own success and that of its customers.

No one among us can have long-term sustained success, personally or professionally, without the help of others.  This is especially true in modern business, where the most successful organizations embrace the team concept of empowering individuals as part of teams that collaborate to reach goals for service, operations, sales, marketing, finance, and human resources. 

In our work with sustainably profitable companies, we’ve observed that executives and managers are committing themselves on a daily basis to empowering others.  In today’s article, we’ll discuss some of the mistakes that routinely occur on dysfunctional teams within organizations, hampering the company’s ability to achieve its market potential.

Not Understanding the Contributions and Strengths of Others

Managing people effectively takes a personal investment.  This investment must be in shaping a better understanding of the people on your team, taking account of their evolving contributions and strengths. Too many people in leadership positions fail to recognize their employees as individuals—each employee is performing his or her work based on their own unique core values and beliefs—their interests, likes, dislikes, motivations, as well as their own natural strengths and weaknesses.

Recognizing the fact that people contribute in different ways and are interested in different things presents both challenges and opportunities for today’s leaders. Great leaders are always looking to coach and develop others for individual and collective success.  Weak leaders are always looking to manage and direct others to promote themselves, and they ask employees only how they can help them and the organization, with little or no regard for the employee’s own ambitions, motivations, and engagement.

Conversely, the spoken or unspoken question from great leaders is “How can I leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses to help you grow and succeed?  As we observe others succeed and fail with various projects and tasks, we gain a greater understanding of strengths and liabilities allowing us to provide better coaching and feedback to build confidence and keep each team member engaged.  As we’ve discussed in previous posts, higher engagement leads to greater productivity, and greater productivity leads to greater profitability for the entire organization.

Micromanaging the Team

Micromanagement is a symptom of not understanding and valuing the contributions and strengths of others, which leads to a lack of trust and confidence in both the manager and employee. The worst managers are typically micromanagers, asking their people for constant updates on their progress.  To offer on-the-fly coaching or advice that equips your team to accomplish tasks at hand is one thing.  To constantly take a pulse-check for results or outputs well ahead of established timelines for completed work is another matter, entirely.

Those with a tendency to micromanage need to look within themselves and ask a simple question:  “Do I trust my people?”  They will find that the answer is often an obvious, emphatic, “No.”  In these instances, the proper reaction is not to continue micromanaging, but to build those trust levels to a level appropriate that the manager can ease up and actually become the coach and advocate his or her people need. Micromanagement is only a temporary solution to the manager’s problem, since it’s serial in nature, leading to a breakdown in confidence by the employees.  This type of management fuels disengagement and sharp drops in actual productivity because the team simply plays to the lowest-common denominator performance to keep the manager off their backs.

Failure to Spread Mission-critical and Most Enjoyable Work

Lack of trust in your employees also fuels another negative behavior that undermines team success, a failure to spread mission-critical work to others.  No one among us really wants to do all of the work ourselves, but when our trust levels break down, managers, particularly those in production roles, tend to keep for themselves the work they deem “make-or-break.”  This represents a road to ruin for both managers and their employees, as failure to spread mission-critical work leads to individual overload on the manager’s part, and, even more damning, a pervasive sense among the team that their manager doesn’t trust them.

Managers who exhibit this weakness also tend to perversely “reward” themselves with the most enjoyable work that comes down the pipeline.  This behavior, too, is readily transparent to the team, and causes much detriment to attitudes and engagement levels.  No one wants to get stuck exclusively doing the low-to-no credit, “dirty work”—this behavior tears down teams rather than builds them.

Not Sharing Wins and Successes with Others

Too many managers take credit for the success built on the individual and collaborative work accomplished within their teams.  They also tend to fail their people by allowing them to shoulder the bulk of the blame when the team fails to reach a goal.

While people have different motivating factors, we all thrive on being credited for the work we do that brings about success. Virtually no one says or thinks they never need to be recognized.  Knowing this, managers must place a very high premium on how they speak to their people in individual conversations with them, in front of the entire team, as well as in their communications with executives. People thrive on individual praise, respect from their colleagues, and recognition by those whom they’ve placed trust in their very livelihood by working in their organizations. Managers should never miss a deserved opportunity to share their wins and successes with the people who make those victories happen.

Tune in next week, when we’ll discuss the ways that successful managers empower others around them.

We like to share some of the wisdom we’ve gleaned from working with dozens of high-performing companies through our best practices consultation, leadership development, talent management, and talent acquisition services.  Some of the traits that we commonly observe in teams that drive the successful companies are effective communication, trust, and openness.

Recently, we ran across a large company outside of our family of clients that serves as a living example of how shifting from old management structures and workplace frameworks and embracing a few key principles for internal and external relationship development can drive a business to runaway success.  That company is Zappos.

Zappos is a well-known internet retailer founded in 1999, with an initial specialty in shoes that expanded to include all manner of men’s and women’s apparel. By 2009, after just 10 years in business, the company reached annual sales of $1 billion and was acquired by internet giant Amazon in a deal valued at $1.2 billion.

The external hallmarks of Zappos are a commitment to exhaustive inventory—carrying every make and model imaginable in the world of shoes and clothing—and a well-documented commitment to what the company calls WOW.  And while the company’s commitment to its employees and its customers to routinely go above and beyond in service is certainly remarkable, we believe that the real secret to success lies in its stated core value for building open and honest relationships with communication.

While all of the company’s stated core values are inspirational, this commitment by executive leadership at Zappos to internal relationship building is to be commended.  This commitment has taken Zappos to the leading edge of its marketplace, transforming the company into sets of high-performing teams.

In a recent piece, we discussed the seven keys to effective communication at work.  The seventh key is perhaps most critical to an organization with the highest aspirations, the challenge to every employee to always be open, honest and accountable. This is a very tough challenge for many people, due in most part to the fact that they have been oriented to the business world by companies clinging to the old ways of “need-to-know” communications by secretive, politically-driven management teams.

But once people open up their communications in an environment without punishment or penalty, they open their teams to many possibilities for success. A key to this concept of openness is not only an open-mindedness to the ideas of others, but also a real appreciation for diversity of backgrounds and the perspectives that ultimately drive those ideas and shape their creators.

While most of us consider ourselves to be honest people, it’s funny how we can become less-than-honest in the workplace by simply withholding information from others, shifting our positions on issues that arise, and closed-door maneuvering with perceived allies to achieve our ambitions. In the new way of building high-performing teams, we must reject these urges that have been almost encouraged by companies in the old order.

We must strive for honesty by being forthright with others—up-front in the positions we take and staying true to them. People should know where you stand, so that they can count on your honesty and give you respect, even if they don’t necessarily agree with you on a particular strategy or solution to a problem.

Remember, too, that relationships are a two-way street. You must not only remain consistent in your own communications, but you must also appreciate the commitment of others in your organization to be open and honest with you. Sometimes, your ego will tell you that all of this openness and honesty isn’t a good thing, especially when you receive criticism. You must resist the urge to retaliate against constructive criticism, since this damages the relationship and closes an opportunity for your own improvement.

When we embrace openness and honesty, we build trust. And when we build trust, we build engagement and effort to unforeseen levels that drive greater success. It’s a winning formula that we’ve seen over and over again, and Zappos is a great example of a company committed to the right principles.

On Tuesday, August 21, 2012, TM Solutions is offering a workshop on Communicating Effectively.  The workshop, hosted by Parata Systems, is a 90-minute program that will begin running at 9 am.  During the workshop, we will explore concepts such as active listening, open and direct interactions with others, and strengthening your reputation, image, and personal brand.

For more information and to register as our special guest, please visit our website at this link.

There are many ways to achieve success in business, and there are many models to follow, as you can see from the seventy-five thousand search results from amazon.com.  At TM Solutions, we believe that the core of any company’s success or failure is how they link strategy with their people.

What we’ve found in our many years of experience in analyzing what companies are doing right, as well as what they’re doing wrong, is that companies build a culture of excellence  by focusing on  four key areas:  strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.

Strategy and Planning

Whether you’re a start-up, in growth mode, or mature, you should always act in a strategic manner and plan your success through your planning around your human resources—the people who drive your company’s success or cause it to lag in failure.  In order to plan effectively, you must take an introspective view of your company, asking the right questions to determine where you need change, what you need to start doing, stop doing, do more of, do less of. 

Do you understand what success factors drive performance excellence, as well as what factors are stagnating the organization?  Do your culture, values, and management objectives align with your overall business strategy? Are you attracting top talent consistently—as an “employer of choice”—or is your turnover at unacceptable levels?  Are your employees fully engaged in your business?  Do you understand why they join your organization, and more importantly, do you understand why they would leave? 

These are all questions that deserve some deep, inward searching in order to plan effectively for improvement over the near term as well as the next multi-year phase of your business.

Managing Profitability

Just as there are questions that can help to drive your company’s strategy and planning, ensuring that your people objectives are aligned with the overall strategic objectives of the business, there is a set of questions that can help to determine if your company is managing profitability  correctly.

With regard to your human capacity to meet your business objectives and customer needs, are you over capacity or under capacity?  Are there strategies in place to manage the costs of human resources? Does our talent management strategy allow you to scale up or down, as needed, to meet customer needs?  Is the organization maximizing employee productivity?  Are your company’s employees completely engaged with the company and its mission, driving productivity and customer satisfaction to highest possible levels?

The idea here is that companies should measure their performance not on the number of employees they have—often, the ones that do are incredibly bloated, inefficient, and, obviously, much less profitable—but rather how well they are meeting their main business objectives around revenues, expenses, and profitability, while ensuring to maintain the highest levels of employee engagement and productivity.  This balancing act creates a formula for long-term success—an operation that’s lean and mean in achieving results.

Minimizing Risk

Running a business, both large and small today, in today’s complex environment with limited or no focus on compliance and insurance presents significant risks in both time and money.  In addition to the potential costs, it can also distract key resources away from core business objectives. 

Do you understand what employment laws and regulations apply to your size business?  Are you fully compliant with current employment laws and regulations?  Are you compliant with all federal, state and local reporting and posting requirements?  Are your employees and independent contractors properly classified?  Do your policies align with organizational culture and strategy, and more importantly, are they up-to-date?  Do you currently have corporate legal counsel?

Conduct a basic compliance review to identify appropriate boundaries within employment law based on your organization’s size, industry and growth phase.  Additionally, an effective review evaluates how current management practices stack up to major risk areas as well as identify opportunities for improvement with your day-to-day-activities.  Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Expertise and Capabilities

A final foundational area for taking a look at how well your business is poised for future success is in the questioning and analysis of the aggregate and individual expertise and capabilities of your human capital.  You must question your company’s context within its competitive industry landscape, as well as take internal stock of your priorities with regard to your people.

Do you have the right talent in place to compete in today’s marketplace?  If so, how do you feel about your capabilities to meet challenges and customer demands in the years to come? Are you adequately staffed to execute operational and strategic plans?

A critical set of questions concerns your company’s ability, as mentioned in strategy and planning above, to be an “employer of choice” in order to have the highest levels of expertise and capabilities in its human capital. Do you have the ability to attract top talent?  If so, are you then actually hiring from the top 10 percent among available talent when you bring new people into the company?

Growing your expertise and capabilities isn’t just an external exercise in attracting top talent. It’s also about growing from within, ensuring that prioritizing and investing in professional development for your in-house talent. Are you utilizing professional development programs to maximize your leadership and coaching capabilities at executive and management levels?  Are your front-line people able to add to their expertise with continuing education in their respective skill areas, or flex into management positions by adding coaching skills to their already considerable capabilities in core job functions?

Conclusion

To arrive at the answers that are unique for your business, with regard to where you are with building a performance model for success, you need to ask the right questions. The truth is that there are a lot of right answers, based on the organizational culture and values, as well as your strategic goals and vision. In short, people define success in lots of different ways.

But once you have your own definition for success in place, you need to periodically ask yourself these questions around strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.  What these questions, and their ongoing relevance in the life of a business, should illustrate to you is that your human capital needs are very fluid. Today’s highly competitive team can be too large and unequipped in its capabilities to meet tomorrow’s marketplace needs. Sometimes, you’re accomplishing much more with fewer people—obviously a desired outcome—and sometimes, trying to do too much without having enough or the right people on board to solve problems and achieve results is a fool’s errand.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, and the first thing you can do to walk on the right side of the line is to revisit these questions.

Last week, we introduced the concept of the eight keys for engaging your team through effective leadership, and we discussed four great ways that you can offer better leadership and get better results with others.

Now, let’s take a look at four more keys for engaging your team through effective leadership.

The fifth key is to enrich work roles and your work environment.  You need to find out what’s important to each individual in his or her work.  What’s missing from their role, in terms of actual work or fulfillment?  If the individual likes creative and innovative work,  you should give them more tasks that require skills for problem solving, leading projects, making decisions, and brainstorming, just to name a few.

You should help the people on your team make their roles more strategic.  One way you can achieve this is by cross-training them on other key functions in the organization, in turn making them more valuable to the company.  Another way is by delegating more interesting work to your team, rather than keeping it to yourself.  Many leaders make the mistake of keeping the most important or interesting projects for themselves, delegating only those tasks or larger jobs they find less interesting—it’s only human nature to fall into this trap, but don’t do it!

The sixth key for engaging your team through effective leadership is personalizing your approach. We’re all unique, so what drives and motivates you definitely isn’t the same for your team.  What do your employees value?  What are their needs, wants, emotions, and motivational drivers?  If you don’t know, then how are you going to lead, influence, and motivate?

Similarly, how you like to lead is how you yourself like to be led.  This concept also applies to your team. If you are oriented to production, results, and performance as a leader, some of your team members may respond well to this style.  But you should prepare yourself for others who are more collaborative and team oriented in their personal styles—you, as the leader, must make adjustments in how you lead, influence and motivate. It’s one of your biggest responsibilities.

You must recognize that no one leadership style is better than another. There’s no room for a “my way or the highway” type of attitude.  Leading isn’t about being right—it’s about doing right. The key is making slight adjustments on interpersonal and cultural context. Leaders adapt.

Another big element to personalizing your approach is how you deal with sensitivities and hot button issues for your individual team members.  A good leader knows when to address these issues head on, and he or she also knows when to avoid these things and stay in tune with the important issues that need to be addressed for getting the work done.

The seventh key to engaging your team through effective leadership is creating a high performance environment.  You must ensure the focus of the team is clear.  A group needs a common purpose—we all have traits or characteristics that we like and dislike about each other; however, with common purpose, these common likes and dislikes shrink into irrelevance in high performance professional environments.

Make sure that the work you give to your team is challenging and rewarding, structured and delegated in such a way that they can support and help each other, rather than compete for your favor.  Each team member needs to be able to trust and understand each of the others, and, by extension of these values, appreciate the contributions of others on the team. 

You should acknowledge and leverage the strengths and weaknesses of the collective group, while also acknowledging weaknesses and closing the group’s performance gaps.

The eighth and final key to engaging your team through effective leadership is empowering others to achieve.  This is a lofty goal, but you must set your sights on it and make it happen. Let us empower you with some ways to do so

Empowering others to achieve means that you’re also empowering them to fail.  Failure is the best teacher, so allow it to happen and then see how an empowered employee reacts next time—odds are that not only will they not make the same mistake twice, that they will achieve exponentially greater results on the next attempt. 

As an impetus for your team to take risks and learn from them, you should reward effort four times as much as you reward for results.  This conditions people to embrace challenges and take chances based on what they think are their best ideas and efforts, versus acting in an overly careful and cautious framework that grips most teams in mediocrity.  People shouldn’t fear the consequences of their work—they should be able to embrace failure as a teacher.

Involve others in shaping plans for the group.  When people believe they are collaborating on a professional roadmap that will shape their immediate future, the buy-in is unbelievable.

Encourage groups or individuals to resolve problems on their own—avoid prescribing a solution for your team when you know they could probably reach one on their own.  Again, this is about empowerment and seizing every opportunity you have to transfer power to them.

Don’t micromanage your team. Stay out of their hair and let them work, flourishing under as little pressure from your end as possible.  Minimize the need for continual updates on progress.  Instead of an update based on some arbitrary notion of time—such as a weekly conference call—tailor your updates to actual milestones dictated by the work.  That way, when you do engage, there will actually be something to talk about and measure, versus simply micromanaging to a calendar.

Finally, develop your replacement.  This shows more than a little fearlessness on your part!  High performing teams have a majority of people on them that could replace the leader immediately, or, they could at least collectively band together to mitigate the loss of the leader.  Funny, that—the notion that the best leaders are the ones who actually make themselves expendable.

In the past, leadership was straightforward and simple. Leaders could demand performance, and they motivated their teams with across-the-board rewards or punishment.  Today’s leaders face a more informed and diverse workforce, creating both opportunity and challenge for leaders and organizations. 

As a result, leaders need to be more creative and resourceful in how they lead and engage their teams.  What worked in the past will not likely work today.  Leadership is not about authority, position or status.  Leadership is more about channeling the contributions of others and understanding the human context. 

From our years of research and assessing the talents, skills, and experience of thousands of employees, managers, and executives, we have seen many ways that people can engage their teams at work through effective leadership.  Based on our findings, we have identified eight keys for engaging your team.  Today we’ll discuss the first four, and we’ll write about the other four in a post next week.

First, you have to look to yourself and set the example for behaviors and attitudes you wish to see in your team.  Be a role model. 

This is easier said than done, as with much in life.  In order to set the example, you must first have confidence in your own abilities.  From this base of confidence, be enthusiastic and engaged in the business, showing your commitment at every turn.  Confidence and a positive attitude are infectious, and being a role model is perhaps one of the purest forms of leadership.

Just as great attitudes are infectious, so, too are negative ones.  As a leader, be purposeful in providing constructive feedback about the organization and its leaders, be optimistic and positive about the future, but never be negative – that unproductive and relentless complaining about the current or future state of the organization and its people.  Organizations and people benefit from constructive criticism.  Organizations innovate and people grow. 

If you can’t always project positivity in your leadership role, then perhaps you should consider leaving it—for your own good and for the health of the business.  People need to be able to look up to others within the framework of their professional lives, as they do in their everyday personal experience. Staying positive and “above the fray” will make you a go-to person for others—this is another subtle form of leadership.

Think about all of these concepts in terms of your “leadership brand.”  What’s a leadership brand? Your brand consists of your preferences, strengths, and weaknesses.  You should be transparent in all of these areas, so that people have clarity and understanding of ways to use your leadership for their betterment.  You should be predictable and consistent.  Your team and peers should know what to expect from you, in both good and bad times. 

Also, display the proper sense of urgency.  While not everything that happens at work is important, you must gauge when issues are mission critical and/or deadline-sensitive and which ones are not.  For those issues that are mission critical to the organization and team, show more urgency and initiative, and be focused on getting the results you need.  For all other issues, you should show others ways to relax and calmly go about your work.

For issues that are important to you, drive hard and take a stand.  Be courageous when the concepts and positions you value are on the line.  Don’t be afraid to be wrong, take a position, and share your vision with vigor—people respect clarity and vision, whether they ultimately agree with you or not.

The second key for engaging your team through effective leadership is building trust and understanding.  We wrote about this in great detail in a previous post, so here are some of the highlights:

¨       Have faith in the ability of others.

¨       Make sure that feedback with those on your team is a two-way street.

¨       Be proactive and open in seeking feedback on your own leadership performance, as well as other aspects of your role, from others.

¨       Take a personal interest in others, what’s important to them, what they want and need from you.

¨       Be predictable and follow-through on commitments.

¨       Be willing to say no to others, when situations call for it.

¨       Have the best interests of both your team and the individual members of your team when making decisions.

The third key for engaging your team through effective leadership is valuing the contributions of others.  This will be difficult for some of you reading this, because this requires a heavy dose of humility—if you don’t have it, get it, because when you have humility, you realize that everyone on your team is better than you are at something.

Identify strengths and weaknesses of each team member—doing this will help you to understand where you can help them, and where they can help you. Each team member plays an important role in the success of the group. They do this by bringing something special and unique to the table, and you need to convey this to the group and to each individual member.

Shape and implement action strategies based on leveraging the strengths of each member.

The fourth key to engaging your team through effective leadership is making work fun and interesting for others. Do you and your employees actually enjoy coming to work? Do you, as the leader, believe that work should be fun? If not, you’ll have a difficult time with this key.

If you find that when you ask yourself these questions, you discover that having fun is difficult for you personally or for the organizational culture as a whole, then at least focus on making work enjoyable and interesting.  People spend more time in work-related activities than any other activities in their lives. Life is too short, when you think about it, not to have fun during or enjoy doing the activities that take up the most time in your life.

Are people smiling at your office?  Do people laugh where you work? Are people too uptight and “all business” in their attitudes?  If you answered, “No, No, Yes” to these questions, the stress levels at your workplace are too high for optimal performance

Laughter is a natural coping mechanism for all of us—even people who survived the Holocaust used humor and laughter to survive.  We’re not comparing even the worst work environments we’ve seen to the Holocaust, but if it worked for people who were enduring torture and waiting for their deaths, then perhaps it could do you a world of good to take the air out of the room at your overstressed office with some humor.

To make work more interesting, try making it a game.  Reward yourself for completing a task that normally takes 90 minutes in under an hour.  You can do this by treating yourself to your favorite lunch. “Punish” yourself for not achieving a task-specific goal—perhaps by donating $5 to the political party that opposes your beliefs and values (Editor’s Note:  If you didn’t laugh at this attempt at humor, perhaps you’re too uptight and not having fun at work, thus illustrating our point!).

Tune in next week for four more keys for engaging your team at work through effective leadership.