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.

The key to any organization’s sustained success is leadership.  While this statement, in and of itself isn’t that profound, it’s always a relevant topic when companies are looking to improve and achieve all of their business goals.

Critical to understanding leadership is knowing how, when, and why we need to be looking for ways to motivate others.  We can make an easy business case for motivation, as motivation drives engagement, engagement drives productivity, and productivity directly helps us to achieve goals for revenue, expenses, and profit.  Furthermore, motivation drives retention of the cream of the crop in every company, allowing for greater and more sustained success year after year. 

As a case in point, imagine that one of your more capable and experienced contributors has lost some enthusiasm for her work in the last month, she’s not responsive to her team, peers or customers, or she is doing just the least she can to get by. There may be many reasons why her engagement and productivity levels have waned. In most cases, managers and organizations react to these situations as a performance issue, when in fact it’s a motivation issue.

The challenge and the opportunity for managers is that motivation is a personal issue, not a universal issue. All of us are driven by different things in life, such as how we focus our energy, what we like and dislike, and what we value in self, others and organizations. Ultimately, how you motivate others for improved engagement and productivity will be based on your knowledge and application of these key drivers or preferences.

In today’s post, we will first provide a few areas to consider as to why an employee’s motivation level has dropped. Next week, come back to this space, where we’ll talk more about getting people back on track through effective leadership and influence. To learn even more, join us on March 19 for the “Engaging Your Team through Effective Leadership” webinar as our special guest.

The One-Style-Fits-All Mentality

One of the most common mistakes for managers is when they are married to their own style and preferences.  Today’s business workforce is a diverse lot—people from various backgrounds, levels of education, and prior work experience, not to mention the diversity of their viewpoints and perspectives. 

So why should we even think one style would fit all of these diverse people?  The best managers take a multi-faceted approach to motivating their teams, knowing that they need to tailor their tactics to meet people where it means the most to them.  To do this well, managers must adapt their leadership and communication styles to fit the wants and needs of their individual team members. They must leave the possibilities open to understanding their employees, knowing that some may need to be pushed and challenged,  others may need more frequent appreciation and recognition,  and still others may respond to more basic incentives.

Lack of Faith

Many companies find themselves stuck with individuals in leadership positions that administer and manage versus coach and lead. When you administer and manage, the tendency is to micro-manage your teams.  Where does micro-management come from?  Quite simply, it’s a lack of faith in the team and in individuals to make their contributions on a consistent basis.

We see this over and over again—a manager feels betrayed by a particular employee’s failure to produce results on-time and within budget.  Rather than working on the performance issue, the manager falls into the trap of micro-managing all of their direct reports. Micro-management, while intended to guarantee results for the organization, has the opposite effect. What it really guarantees is disengaged, unmotivated people who will deliver the bare minimum to avoid further scrutiny.

Belief in Universal Self-Motivation

One of the hallmarks of many leaders is self-motivation.  Having an internal drive to reach goals—no matter the situation—separates many of us from the pack, leading to promotions and recognition from executives.  Since many managers have an abundance of self-motivation, they fall into the false trap that others must be motivated the same way, that everyone should be self-starters and self-reliant with the ability to take independent action when necessary.

The fact of the matter is that none of us performs in a vacuum.  We can attribute our personal success to many different factors, from self-motivation to working in a great team environment where we grow from our interactions with other engaged employees at every level of the organization. Managers must recognize this fact, and instead of projecting self-motivation on others, work that much harder to understand their people, how they function together, and what makes individuals and the team drive to success.

Failure to Provide Timely Guidance and Feedback

One aspect of motivation that is universal is that we all need to know how we’re performing, and there’s no better-positioned person to tell us than our manager. Failure to provide timely guidance and feedback to employees sets up multiple situations that can be avoided.  Lack of motivation can come from not understanding the team’s goals or even the work that needs to be accomplished to reach them.

Sometimes this lack of timely guidance and feedback is attributed to the traditional expectations of managers to conduct periodic performance reviews at assigned intervals. As we well know, the pace of modern business moves at lightning speed, and the vast majority of your performance and motivation issues fester between these reviews. Addressing issues and challenges with employees through timely dialogue is the better course of action. Employees receive the coaching and guidance they need to make better decisions and get results.

Negativity

Managers can make or break their team’s performance many times by the levels of positivity and negativity that they exemplify to their employees.  From an engagement standpoint, it’s very difficult for employees to stay motivated when their managers are hyper-focused on their negative attributes and fail to communicate appreciation for all of the positive elements that members of their team bring to the table.  We’re all human, and we all display both positive and negative traits. The key here is balance—we shouldn’t disregard the negatives, nor should we think “it goes without saying” that we appreciate great work habits and attitudes.

When managers occupy a negative mental space, particularly with regard to the team and even the company itself, this negativity is contagious. We can’t expect individual contributors and the teams they comprise to achieve tangible results when managers exhibit a failure of leadership through open negativity.

Conclusion

Motivating others is not something you can do successfully unless you commit to it as an ongoing process.  Your team 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. 

Again, 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.

Tune in next week as we explore multiple solutions to set up managers for success in leading and influencing their teams.

Did you know that a recent Towers and Perrin workforce study showed that barely 1 out of 5 employees are engaged in their jobs?  For organizations across the United States, there is too much at stake—money, time and resources—to not make improvements in this area.  A good place to start improving employee engagement is the onboarding process.  Having new hires and internal transfers contribute and add value right away sets the foundation for an engaged and effective workforce. 

Many companies have accepted that some hires will ultimately fit within the organization while others will not.  Managers in these companies, through their own anecdotal experience, chalk up their own success in hiring to a roll of the dice. While this could be noted as an accountability problem, the managers are probably right to attribute the success or failure of their next hire to a roll of the dice, because their company has no real system in place to manage the process of talent acquisition.

Now, these companies believe they have a good system in place, with legions of in-house, veteran recruiters and managers following established protocols and best practices for reviewing resumes, interviewing, and processing new hires.  While this sounds good on the surface, what they really have is an orientation process, not an onboarding program.  

Orientation is a transactional and event-focused process conducted by administrative and support staff.  Onboarding programs, on the other hand, are personalized, targeted development and engagement opportunities conducted by the manager and peers, supported by administrative staff.  Onboarding is designed to strengthen relationships, address development needs, and enhance productivity right away.  In reality, most companies don’t address these three key areas for at least six to twelve months, truly a missed opportunity for driving engagement and productivity. 

What we’re  advocating for is to integrate recruiting and onboarding with team building, performance management and development using smarter talent assessment tools, focused on organization and position fit, values and interests, strengths and weaknesses, and motivational and interpersonal factors. What effective talent assessment tools do for you is illuminate with great precision the real person that you’re bringing into the organization. Simply liking someone and thinking they will be a good fit based on experience, knowledge and intelligence doesn’t necessarily translate into success, so we should eliminate the guessing game.

Sound testing will tell us how the prospective hire will approach solving problems, whether they work better independently or on teams, how receptive they are to giving and receiving certain types of feedback, and, perhaps most importantly for many organization, how they respond to pressure, stress, or deadlines.

Once you know where the new hire’s strengths and weaknesses truly lie, common sense tells you that these types of studies give the manager a dashboard for early-stage onboarding.  Although relationships can break down at any time, during the first few weeks of a new job the seeds for success are either sown or cast by the wayside.  Thus, it’s of paramount importance that managers have such a dashboard at their fingertips, so that they can identify the best ways in which the new hire will fit in with their new team and the organization. And, even more critically, what aspects of the organization and its course of business will drive the new hire to become disengaged. 

What we really need to get away from, as a business society, are one-size-fits-all management and processes.  We act like we are just filling positions, when, in reality, we are asking human beings to fit in with a bunch of other human beings to make contributions.  We can’t continue the old way of doing things, where new hires fill out forms, view organizational charts and learn the “lay of the land.”   Companies should customize these programs as much as possible to the actual needs of both the new hire and the team within which they must perform on a day-to-day basis.

When we identify gaps in the beginning of a relationship, we can come as close as possible to ensuring a successful hire.  Effective talent assessment tools, with the proper analysis and application, allow us to implement customized strategies to help the new hire build strong relationships, contribute and add value right away, and sustain a high level of employee engagement from day one.  Finally, knowing what you have to work with, assets and liabilities, and then executing a plan to leverage strengths and mitigate potential performance gaps before they materialize and impact the team.

People ask quite often, “What’s the single-most important aspect of organizational strength?”  While our first instinct is to answer, “It’s products, customer service, or it’s people,” when it comes down to it, leadership  is no doubt the biggest driver of a company’s success with regard to managing profitability and maximizing productivity.

A Harvard Business School study identified the four greatest drivers of personal and professional success:   attitude, knowledge, intelligence, and skill. The study’s leaders concluded that attitude was the single greatest driver, accounting for 93 percent of an individual’s success. What exactly is attitude?  Attitude is what drives the leader and employees along the spectrum of bad to great, things like commitment to the cause, common purpose, organizational fit, personal values and interests, and relationships with their teams.  And while many managers are good  at managing process and systems, and even some are pretty decent at knowledge and skill transfer, their greatest impact lies in their ability to shape the contributions and attitudes of their people through leading them.

Managers lead in many  ways and there are multiple leadership styles, but what it comes down to are four key components of leadership – building trust, expanding their influence, effective communication, and motivating others.  Let’s first talk about the foundation of leadership – trust. Trust is one of the fundamental virtues of great leaders and influences the amount of discretionary effort your talent will expend to meet business goals.  If you expect your team to go above and beyond, they have to believe you would do the same for them.  It’s that simple.

Leaders build trust in several ways.  As we’ve discussed previously in this space, managers must be sincere and understanding in their dealings with others. Also, they must be open and honest, and keep their promises. Being predictable is key—your people should always know where you stand, even if they don’t agree with you.

Other ways that leaders build trust include keeping the confidence of those who reach out to them in sensitive situations, and be open and accessible to their people.  These two concepts obviously go hand in hand. Finally, managers forge trust through setting high performance standards for themselves and those on their team, and, in turn, demonstrating character and concern for others along the road to high performance.

Managers exert their influence in a variety of ways, and for many people, they taken on a manager’s influence by seeing that person as leading by example.  Having a willingness to roll up your sleeves and dig in to the work alongside your people is a great way to influence them by showing instead of telling. 

Managers also build their influence in other ways, such as finding out what others need from them and providing it, in addition to making a concerted effort to take interest in their team members.  Leaders should seek to understand the differences in all of their people, and this understanding should promote more empathy and less judgmental behavior. Furthermore, leaders should work extra hard to understand their audience and reach them where they are, monitoring the tone and pace of conversations, in addition to body language.  And just as they need to be predictable in where they take their stands, managers should be consistent and keep their commitments.

Communicating is, of course, incredibly important for leaders.  Managers who want to become great leaders should focus on three simple components—honesty, openness and understanding. We’ve talked quite a bit about this subject in other articles on this blog, but you can’t discount the importance of effective communication. When people know that you are steadfast—consistently open and honest—so that they always know where you stand, you have a high level of trust driven by their best interests and what’s important to them—they can’t help but have better attitudes about you and what the company is trying to accomplish.

Having the ability to motivate others to maximize discretionary effort is very important for you, your team and the business.   However, before you can motivate others, you must have a high level of trust, understand what factors are most important to them, and adapt your communication style to them.  Without trust and understanding, you cannot effectively influence, motivate or lead.  (Work on linking this paragraph with the previous) But most people do have some external drivers of their own motivation. Some need recognition, while others need reward.  Still others need you to constantly feed their fire, by adding personal development, continuing education, or greater responsibility in future tasks. And when you know a person’s greatest motivational drivers, you simply act upon these with that same honesty and integrity, with their best interests in mind.  It’s quite rare to see a highly-motivated person with a bad attitude.

In conclusion, if companies want to effectively manage profitability and maximize productivity, they can look no further than leadership development. When managers become leaders, they transform employees into followers who, in turn, become leaders themselves.  Investment in leadership development, when executed properly, can create an ongoing cycle of excellence, feeding into so many other successful aspects of a business.

Effective interpersonal communication is the foundation for successful performance and growth in both your career and personal life.  Communication skills enable you to better lead, influence and build relationships with others by developing trust, reducing conflict and misunderstanding, and improving productivity. 

Through our work in leadership development, talent management, and coaching executives, managers, and employees at dozens of profitable, sustainable companies, we have determined a mix of seven keys to effective communication in the workplace:

1. Focus and be clear
2. Listen to understand, not to respond
3. Value and respect different perspectives
4. Identify communication preferences of your audience
5. Adapt to non-verbal and behavioral clues
6. Address or avoid sensitivities and hot buttons of your audience
7. Always be open, honest and accountable

In today’s post, we’ll discuss the first three keys.

First, you must focus and be clear.  This key speaks to the notion that you value your own time, and thus you should value the time of others you deal with in the workplace.  Get to the point when providing information, while avoiding lengthy, unnecessarily-detailed answers.

You should also remember to stay on message, being absolutely clear with regard to the ideas you need to express, especially within the expressed purpose of the conversation. To this end, you should answer questions directly and provide important information only. Just as the best writers distill thousands of words into the hundreds of words that pack the most punch, you should do the same with how you speak with your managers, colleagues, and reports.

Next, you must listen to understand, not to respond.  This concept is pretty difficult for even the smartest among us.  To make this happen, you need to apply common sense—listen more than talk.  Also, avoid urges to interrupt or object on the fly, without hearing out the other person’s thoughts in their entirety.

This should go without saying, but in order to properly listen, you should be engaged in the conversation.  Stop what you’re doing—put away the gadgets (smartphones, TV), minimize the potential for interruptions, and remove physical barriers such as desks, walls, and doors between you and the other person.

As you give the other person more opportunity to speak, be careful to pay attention to not just what is being said, but what is not being said. There are many of us who edit our thoughts quite a bit, never completely sharing what’s on our minds—a good listener can read between the lines and pick up these unspoken thoughts throughout a conversation.

Think through your responses to others after taking proper time to listen. Focus your attention on understanding someone’s message instead of formulating your response.  Being unafraid to give proper consideration, not only to what others have to say but also how you express your own thoughts and reactions, garners respect in professional environments.  Be patient in the process and remember that many people mistrust quick answers.

You must also value and respect different perspectives.  First, you must recognize the value of what others say and their reason and right to say it.

If you’re really seeking to value and respect another person’s perspective, you need to focus on understanding that perspective, not on agreeing or disagreeing with it.  Involve that person in even more conversation than you normally would somebody with whom you share much agreement, asking more questions versus making more declarative statements.  We’ve found that people tend to normally make statements at a rate eight times the number of questions they ask!

Ultimately, do you understand the other person’s perspective, or what they’re even trying to say?  If you’re not sure, simply ask more questions. Remember, your message is not about you or what you may want in a given situation—you want to know what the other party values and why their message is important to them.

In next week’s post, we will cover the four additional keys to effective communication.