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

From our observations of today’s most successful companies, we see that they have built sustained success through the work of strong leadership and high-performance teams.  These companies have transitioned from a less vertical and hierarchical organization—rolling the decisions and the work needed to be done downhill through layers of management—to a more horizontal organization, where teams consisting of empowered employees guided by forward-thinking, innovative managers drive the business to reach and exceed its goals for profitability and service.

While the way forward in business clearly involves this more horizontal approach, it’s not without its own attendant challenges and opportunities.  We’re talking about human beings, after all, and on any given day, we’re as susceptible to conflict as we are to highly-attuned collaboration that sparks the next winning idea.  Thus, conflict resolution, built from the twin foundations of trust and understanding, is critical to keeping groups of people performing together at their highest possible levels.

In today’s article, we will outline some of the ways that managers and team members can betray these foundations of trust and understanding, undermining their efforts at achieving optimal performance.

Confrontation Avoidance

In a team environment, there is simply no way to avoid confrontation. Confrontation or conflict is a natural and healthy part of the human existence.  It’s going to happen, and you have to address it. 

Yet many of us allow negative situations to fester, and we do it for a variety of reasons. Due to differences in personal styles, we can be prone to defining some of the people we work with as difficult, rather than focusing on the situation or differing viewpoint that causes difficulty within the team. As we define people as being difficult and fail to reach constructive dialogue with them, we obviously fail to build positive relationships through trust and understanding.

We can also be uncomfortable sharing critical feedback with others.  When given in the right spirit and with the right motivation, all feedback—both praise and criticism—is crucial to driving others to better execution.  In providing constructive feedback to others, your intent is to keep the team and its goals and purpose in mind, rather than personally insulting people.

Finally, many of us are guilty of thinking that problems will go away on their own. While this can be true in the short-term, people have long memories, and even if the team gets past a conflict, the failure of leadership to address these issues when they surface sets up a future that certainly lacks trust and understanding.

Lacking Sensitivity

As with our personal relationships outside of work, we must always be sensitive to the needs of others—this is the two-way street aspect of any relationship.  Yet too many of us fail to build trust and understanding with our team members, because we have not established our personal credibility or failed to manage the negative perceptions that others have of us.  

As we’ve stated before, today’s managers must not adhere to a “my way or the highway” personal style.  This is especially true of those who can be too direct in their dealings with others.  Many people respond to this directness of approach and language as a personal attack, and this reaction exacerbates the situation rather than solving it.  We must recognize and be sensitive to the other person’s needs, how they deal with pressure and negative situations, and use methods of communication built on that understanding.  When we come from a place of understanding, this builds the trust that we can use to reach a conflict solution quickly and effectively.

Another way that people can fail their colleagues, damaging these foundations of trust and understanding, is through sarcasm.  Many of us think of sarcasm as “just joking around,” but when it’s deployed in a conflict situation, many people react negatively.  Conflict resolution deserves a serious, sober approach.  The more we take our people seriously, avoiding the device of sarcasm, the more they can trust us and better understand the dynamic needed to move forward.

Failure to Adapt

Again, building trust and understanding as a means of driving effective conflict resolution in the workplace is predicated upon leadership having the right frame of mind versus allegiance to a particular personal style. In short, today’s leaders must adapt to the needs of their people.

Failure to adapt to the needs of others is symptomatic of a difficulty in understanding their perspectives.  When you fail to understand where people are coming from as they approach a situation, it’s impossible to find the common ground necessary in resolving problems.  All too often, we fail to place the needs of others, and of the company itself, ahead of our own desires. We turn out to be the real problem, becoming overly sensitive and taking things personally. 

Today’s challenging business environment, in which companies must constantly evolve and improve to survive, much less sustain a high level of performance, demands the best of us as we build and grow our teams.  This dynamic demands that we take positive measures on a daily basis, demanding of ourselves a willingness to compromise and adapt, take others seriously, and meet our team members where they are as people.

In our next post, we will discuss some of the positive attitudes and behaviors that lead to better outcomes for conflict resolution, built on the twin foundations of trust and understanding.

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.

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.

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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