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.

Success in business requires proper planning and execution. We can’t effectively plan for our future success without properly diagnosing the present state of our organizations.

The TM Solutions Business Diagnostic Series addresses several key points to consider when assessing your business and how well it’s positioned for marketplace success.  We tackle fundamental concepts like Managing Profitability, Minimizing Risk, Maximizing Productivity, Improving Expertise and Capabilities, Strengthening Leadership Teams, and Investing in People. 

In our most recent diagnostic piece, we discussed the necessary factors for Maximizing Productivity.  Today’s installment concerns the areas companies must address to sharpen their swords for the never-ending marketplace battle, Improving Expertise and Capabilities.  As the marketplace changes—new technologies replace old ones and new competitors come to the forefront.  The market demands that companies create a newer, better version of themselves to remain competitive each year.  And companies achieve this newer, better version through Improving Expertise and Capabilities.

TM Solutions has observed how the very best companies increase their firepower for executing their respective business plans by focusing in four areas of Improving Expertise and Capabilities:  attracting and retaining top talent, improving the quality of talent hired, ensuring the right talent is in the right position, and enhancing personal effectiveness and relationships.  

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

The lifeblood of any company exists in its pool of top talent, that key group made up of the most productive people that carry the company to success in the market year after year.  In all talent management practices from defining roles to compensation to technology investments and training and development, companies must be mindful of making decisions that facilitate retention of their top people.  In addition, companies must also build in a manner that attracts more people to join as they are needed.

Every company should have the aspiration of becoming an Employer of Choice.  From an internal perspective, companies should seek to be held in such esteem that their own people know there are no greener pastures.  Externally, people working for competitors and other companies see your organization as the ultimate career destination.

When diagnosing their ability to attract and retain top talent, companies should seek to understand both the positives and negatives associated with employee engagement.  They should have a thorough understanding of the motivation drivers of their own employees; conversely, they should make every effort to understand why top people leave the company—whether it’s lack of growth opportunities, compensation packages, poor management, or something else entirely.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we have the ability to attract and hire the top 10 percent of market talent, both active and passive job seekers?  Are we an Employer of Choice?

2.       Do employees and leaders have an intense desire to be a member of our organization?

3.       Do we understand why employees leave our organization?  Are we proactively addressing these issues?

4.       Do our employee engagement and motivation strategies begin with our onboarding process?

Improving the Quality of Talent Hired

Often, a better way of widening the pool of the most talented people in a company is to develop from within. In other words, companies can invest in their current people to breed top talent from inside the company, rather than paying (usually more) to bring in outside talent.  Ironically, building talent from within begins with hiring strategically; that is, you hire to meet both current and future needs of the business.

In order to breed top talent, leaders must understand the needs of their businesses first.  They must understand the success factors—unique to their companies—that are most important not only for leadership positions, but for key individual contributor positions as well.   As they understand these success factors, they must then deploy the proper talent assessment tools and techniques to understand the development gaps that must be overcome to turn potential talent into top talent.

Finally, companies must have measures in place to ensure that new hires come up to speed quickly, meeting or exceeding your productivity standards.  These measures will help to diminish unacceptable levels of new hire turnover, leading to more fulfilled employees who will align with the company’s values and business goals.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we fully understand what success factors are most important for leadership and key individual contributor positions? 

2.       Have we properly trained our management and support staff on talent assessment tools and techniques?

3.       Is our employee turnover rate for new hires (less than 6 months) within acceptable levels?  What’s the associated cost? 

4.       Are employees reaching full, or at least acceptable, productivity levels in a timely fashion?

Ensuring the Right Talent Is in the Right Position

Successful companies that can effectively execute both their strategic and operational plans have the right talent in the right position.  This includes matching people throughout the organization, not just the executive team and other key positions, but all positions. And for each position, companies much have a plan of succession fueled by a pipeline of leaders.

A word of caution for the more progressive or emerging growth companies: while looking to the future, don’t ignore the present need for adequate staffing levels.  There must be a great deal of flexibility in your staffing plans to balance both strategic and operational requirements.  This means having the flexibility to add staff or trim staff very quickly based on your financial, market and customer demands.   

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we have a pipeline of leaders and the appropriate bench strength for all key positions?

2.       Are we adequately staffed to execute our operational and strategic plans?

3.       Do our managers have the appropriate tools and resources available to hire, engage, coach and remove employees effectively?

4.       Do we have a culture of accountability?  Are we consistently achieving organizational production, quality and productivity goals? 

Enhancing Personal Effectiveness and Relationships

Our final focus area for Improving Expertise and Capabilities is enhancing personal effectiveness and relationships.  If you agree that your talent is the key to your organizational success, then the foundation of that success is in creating a culture of continuous improvement.  Every individual from the CEO down to the receptionist must be committed to enhancing their personal effectiveness and strengthening the relationships around them. 

Companies must invest time and resources, such as coaching and development workshops, for making both better leaders and employees.  They must also ensure that the culture of the organization encourages constructive feedback to drive the performance of both individuals and teams. A culture of continuous improvement builds trust across the organization and creates a change ready and take action mind-set for all. 

What’s most important with regard to strategies to improve employee productivity, quality of work, and relationships with people across teams and the company itself is having a high level of consistency and frequency of engaging people through effective processes and tools. Companies must leverage these processes and tools on an ongoing basis—rather than the traditional annual or semi-annual performance management models.  In this way, the company achieves continuous, on-the-fly improvement that is more responsive to the faster-than-ever, demanding pace of today’s marketplace.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we invest time and resources to develop leaders and employees?

2.       Do our leaders and employees seek out and welcome constructive feedback for individuals and teams?

3.       Do we have effective processes and tools available to improve production, quality, productivity and relationships?  Can we do this in real time, not just once a year?

4.       Do we have a culture of continuous improvement?  Are our employees and leaders proactive about taking advantage growth opportunities?

Next week, the focus of the TM Solutions Diagnostic Series turns to Strengthening Leadership Teams—don’t miss it.

Success in business requires proper planning and execution. We can’t effectively plan for our future success without properly diagnosing the present state of our organizations.

The TM Solutions Business Diagnostic Series addresses several key points to consider when assessing your business and how well it’s positioned for marketplace success.  We tackle fundamental concepts like Managing Profitability, Minimizing Risk, Maximizing Productivity, Improving Expertise and Capabilities, Strengthening Leadership Teams, and Investing in People. 

Last week’s diagnostic piece outlined the thought processes and check-up questions for Minimizing Risk. Today’s installment addresses the “fire in the furnace”—Maximizing Productivity across the company footprint. Managing profitability and Minimizing Risk address critical measures of a strong balance sheet and compliance framework, while employee productivity is the fuel that drives an organization’s success across the board.

Through our experience in working with some of the most successful companies in American business, TM Solutions has uncovered four success factors in maximizing productivity: enhancing team production, quality, and efficiency, creating a culture of accountability, improving leader and employee engagement levels, and reducing employee turnover to acceptable levels.

Enhancing Team Production, Quality, and Efficiency

Most companies have some kind of performance management program in place; unfortunately, most of these programs are inadequate to deal with the pace and urgency of modern business.  If your company is relying on the traditional once or twice-a-year engagement model without ongoing performance feedback and dialogue, your managers are missing the greatest opportunity to maximize team production, quality, and efficiency and will struggle to respond to changing market conditions.

To keep people and their productivity high and centered on more consistent achievement of business goals, companies must stay attuned to leveraging the strengths and minimizing the liabilities of each team member on a regular basis. We must also understand the wants and needs of each individual and how well these align with the team’s and organization’s goals.

To adjust to the demands of both the business and employees, companies need to have more dynamic performance processes and tools allowing managers to provide high impact feedback on a daily or weekly basis, rather than simply spending several hours a few times each year.  This means that they should be able to spend just a few minutes, whenever needs arise, to check the pulse of particular team members and ensure that productivity is maximized, along with employee engagement from proper communication, coaching and motivation techniques tailored to each employee’s needs.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Can our performance management program provide individualized take-action strategies ready to implement right away?  Or is this only provided once or twice a year?

2.       Are we aware of each team member’s wants and needs, natural strengths or potential liabilities?

3.       Can we provide coaching and guidance to each employee on how to improve productivity, quality of work, or team effectiveness? Can we do this in a matter of minutes and “on-the-fly?”

4.       Do our leadership teams use effective communication strategies to engage and develop their teams?

Creating a Culture of Accountability

Many organizations have a problem with accountability.  Often, a lack of accountability permeates the management ranks, and it’s no surprise that front-line teams take on this culture from their managers.  While everyone wants to be holding the keys when the company drives to success, many blame or excuse responsibility when things go wrong. 

Accountability is one of the core competencies of leadership.  Good leaders take responsibility for losses with every bit the fervor that they do when the company profits. They do this because  failure is the best teacher. When we take a proper level of accountability for a loss, we learn, we grow, setting up many future wins as a result.

While creating a culture of accountability clearly begins at the top, the process must flow through an entire organization.  Organizational standards must clearly recognize and reward success, so that the company can hold up examples to which others may aspire in their own work.  Ultimately, having organizational accountability means setting a foundation for confronting problems and outright failures, with the goal of improving and growing the people and teams responsible.

Companies must look to reward success and address failure with great frequency and as early as possible.  No great success should take too long to achieve reward, while failure should be anticipated and addressed with great urgency as well.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do our leaders hold themselves and others responsible and answerable for planning, execution and achieving business results, in both good and bad times?

2.       Are standards and expectations clearly communicated to everyone?  Do our peers and direct reports understand what success looks like?

3.       Do we regularly recognize and reward success?  Can we distinguish our top performers from everyone else? 

4.       Do we confront organizational performance problems early and frequently? 

Improving Leader and Employee Engagement Levels

To maximize productivity, you must first maximize the engagement levels of your company’s leaders and employees.  Since companies engage with each individual, leaders and managers must understand what motivates their employees.  While some respond with financial incentives, others want assurances that they can grow within their current roles or earn promotions with greater responsibility.

Leaders must pride themselves not on having their own way of leading teams, but in individualized ways that they use to reach each team member. This approach maximizes the individual, and, by extension, then maximizes the potential of the team.  To achieve this level of engagement, leaders must adapt their personal styles, rather than adhering to a “my way or the highway” mentality, in order to earn respect, build trust, and influence each member of their team.

One element of adapting personal leadership style that is a necessary component of individualizing their management approach is taking a personal interest in each employee. When leaders and managers take a personal interest in the well-being, wants, and needs of each employee, they are better able to tailor their management styles and motivation techniques to each one more effectively.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we understand what makes each of our employees tick? Is it money, status or reputation, growth opportunities, control, autonomy, or is it something else?

2.       Do we motivate and engage our teams with an individualized approach? 

3.       Do our leaders adapt their styles to various situations and people to earn respect, build trust and expand their influence?

4.       Do our leaders take a personal interest in their teams?

Reducing Employee Turnover to Acceptable Levels

Many companies that are otherwise successful fail to reach their full productivity, and thus, profitability, because they fail to retain talented employees.  If we understand an employee’s individual wants and needs, and their expectations from the company in exchange for their performance, we can better understand why they may leave—even when times are good for the company.

The strongest companies are proactive in addressing employee turnover, and they start at the very beginning during the talent acquisition process through onboarding.  During this time, they take an aggressive stance on hiring for organizational fit and engagement, and they don’t miss a beat during the early months of the employee’s tenure.

While the first weeks and months after hiring are certainly critical, the organization must remain focused on understanding the long-term engagement needs of the employee in the following months and years.  There must be ongoing effort to make work fun and interesting for all—this is part of having employees thrive in a productive environment.

Managers and leaders must continue to assess and address areas where they can provide a platform for each employee to grow and learn as they advance through the organization with increased responsibilities.  Training, coaching, and issuing challenging assignments are essential, as long as they align properly with the employee’s own interests, to maximizing productivity and eliminating concerns about retention.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we understand why our peers and direct reports joined the organization?  Do we understand why they will leave?

2.       Are we proactive about employee turnover by taking a holistic approach and addressing turnover at the source – talent acquisition and onboarding?

3.       Do we enrich work roles and make work fun and interesting?

4.       Do we provide opportunities for personal growth and increased responsibilities through training, coaching and challenging assignments?  Is this based on each employee’s interests?

Next week, the TM Solutions Business Diagnostics Series will address the key area of Improving Expertise and Capabilities.

Gone are the days of consistency, predictability, stability, or maintaining the status quo defining organizational strength.  Instead, an organization’s very survival is dependent on its ability to embrace volatility and change in the marketplace.  Organizations that can demonstrate adaptability can survive and have some short-term success.  However, short-term success does not define an organization’s real strength.  For organizations to have long-term, sustained success, they not only need to adapt to change, they must demonstrate the ability to do more with less, respond quickly to change, and to create change.  Organizations that can do this effectively will not only survive, but thrive.  

Organizational strength is not measured by what you build, what you sell, or how you are structured.    Today, organizational strength is measured by three foundational assets – Efficiency, Speed, and Innovation, along with 12 intangible assets.  These 15 assets make up the body that covers the engine that drives companies to success. Assessment of these 15 assets  of the business provide leaders with the tools they need to make better decisions and engage the organization in more purposeful strategic planning.

In part one of this series on what makes a successful company, we discussed the first five factors that drive organizational strength:  the foundational asset of Efficiency, along with the intangible assets of Trust, Accountability, Quality, and Communication.   Last week, we explored the foundational asset of Speed, along with the intangible assets of Awareness, Customer Focus, Execution, and Flexibility.  

In this week’s final installment, we’ll tackle the final five factors—every bit as important as the first 10—that drive organizational strength:  the foundational asset of Innovation, along with the intangible assets of Collaboration, Leadership, Talent, and Organizational Commitment.

Innovation

While innovation has many wide-ranging definitions in many different contexts, from a standpoint of driving organizational effectiveness, innovation stands for the power of ideas to shape us both internally with each other, as well as with our customers and the marketplace.

The mark of a powerful organization is that it routinely generates new ideas and goes beyond the status quo, recognizing the need for new or modified approaches in the marketplace. Not only do strong organizations actively seek out and identify new opportunities to develop and offer new products and services, they also stay abreast of government, business, industry, and market information—the readily available sources that may reveal opportunities for innovative products and services.

From an internal perspective, the most powerful organizations strive for cross-functional collaboration, fueled by an openness to the ideas of others in the company, as the solution framework for most, if not all challenges it faces.  In order to drive these collaborations to their greatest potential, leaders in these organizations are deliberate in their initiation of actions that may involve risk to achieve a recognized benefit or advantage for the group.

To shape their companies into cultures of continuous innovation, the best leaders bring together different perspectives and approaches, creatively combining the diversity within their organizations in different ways specifically tailored to the problems or challenges on the company’s horizon.

Collaboration

The cornerstone of a powerful, innovation-based corporate culture is collaboration.  In order to spark sustainable collaboration, companies must evoke participation and creativity from everyone and strive for group consensus to effectively solve problems and deliver results.

Does your organization encourage and reward cooperation by individuals and teams?  This encouragement and rewarding creates a culture based on open dialogue, where participants constructively resolve the conflicts and disagreements that inevitably arise around the pursuit of great ideas by energetic, passionate people.  The goal here is not to have constant harmony—that’s rather impossible among human beings—but to create a place where these inevitable disagreements are not ignored, suppressed, or denied.

For collaborative culture-building, we must not only focus on openness but also on group dynamics and individual thoughts and emotions. We make sure that the group relationships are working well, and that everyone feels good about the tasks at hand.  Unfortunately, many organizations believe they have a collaborative environment because they implement some kind of team-building exercise, like sending teams out zip-lining in the woods together.  Having fun and creating a friendly competitive environment is healthy, but real collaboration revolves around constructive conflict.

If we say we’re going to utilize collaboration to solve problems and make our organization better, then we need to push for results and actual, impactful decisions from cross-functional activities.  The continuous team-building aspect to operating in a collaborative way is quite valuable and certainly not to be discounted in any way, but let’s not take our eyes off the prize here—let’s drive for collaboration as a cornerstone of accomplishment within our companies.

Leadership

The most powerful organizations place a heavy emphasis on leadership, and they look at leadership from multiple perspectives.  First, they measure their own effectiveness by how well they build leaders to sustain the organization’s excellence, both in the present and in the future.

Resources, even among the fastest-growing organizations, always have finite limits.  The best organizations recognize this fact of business life, and they also recognize the leaders among them who foster new ways to use limited resources and devote time to building future resources.

As you ponder the leadership perspective of your own organization, ask yourself if the leaders have enough of an internal focus—do the leaders in your company help employees develop a clear understanding of what they will need to do to contribute to the success of the team and organization?  Leadership isn’t just about optimizing resources such as time and money to advance the goals of the organization—there’s a reservoir of human capital in every organization, and its effectiveness has a very direct corollary with how well leaders summon this human capital to overcome challenges in the market.

The hallmark of effective organizations’ leadership groups is an infectious optimism. Does your company have leaders that optimistically talk about the future and possibilities for the organization, and then help you and others translate vision into action?  If so, great—if not, this among the very first corrective steps for companies not achieving their full potential.

Finally, companies that have reached the top echelons of organizational effectiveness must be strong at identifying and developing future leaders. As evidence of this strength, they should be able to point to a burgeoning internal pipeline of leaders and the appropriate bench strength for all key positions. 

Talent

While innovation, collaboration, and leadership help to define the culture of a powerful organization, talent is the true foundation for success.  Companies can look at their historic achievements, current performance, and model for the future based on how well they acquire, build, and leverage talent.

The most effective organizations are “employers of choice,” in that they not only have the right talent in the right jobs to compete in today’s and tomorrow’s marketplace, but also demonstrate an ongoing ability to attract and retain top talent across their platforms.  They do this through continuous investment in the talent they already have—it’s evident to those outside the company—plowing significant time and resources to develop both leaders and employees.

Employers of choice reap significant benefits from their time and resource investments.  They find themselves adequately staffed with engaged people to execute operational and strategic plans—there’s nothing like having the right people to not only achieve this year’s goals but also drive a company head-long into the future.  Engaged employees reciprocate the investment with an intense desire to be a member of the organization, fueling the retention of the company’s greatest wealth of talent.

Organizational Commitment

All of these factors that drive organizational effectiveness, from innovation in products and services to the ongoing development of talent, culminate in organizational commitment.

Committed organizations stand as shining examples of places where people take pride in their work and expend discretionary effort to achieve goals.  They exhibit high levels of energy and enthusiasm, with a strong desire to achieve today’s results and move on to tomorrow’s challenges.   And they define success throughout the process of achieving goals, not just at the end of a sales campaign or new product development initiative.

Having a committed organization results in fewer people “going off-the-grid,” chasing their own personal ambitions without regard to the organization’s larger goals.  We think of this in terms of alignment—people demonstrate their daily needs in terms that are aligned with the organization’s culture and goals, with a strong desire to see personal success, along with success for other team members, managers, and executives.  In short, committed people only see success when they can see it permeate the organization as a whole.

Organizational commitment ultimately manifests itself by way of support—no matter the position—executive, manager, or employee—people support each other and achieve together.

Conclusion

To summarize, we believe that companies draw their ultimate strength from many areas.  Three foundational assets—Efficiency, Speed, and Innovation—are the foundation of the most successful organizations in any marketplace. The best companies focus on maximizing their return on each effort, executing quickly, so that they can change with market dynamics and customer needs.

After these foundational assets, the highest-performing organizations also exhibit superior levels of Trust, Accountability, Quality, Communication, Awareness, Customer Focus, Execution, Flexibility, Collaboration, Leadership, Talent, and Organizational Commitment.

Do you have questions about the level of your organization’s strength heading into 2013?  Start getting the answers today with the Organizational Strength Assessment, a TM Solutions business diagnostic available at the HR Store.

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

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

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

Working Effectively in Ambiguous Situations

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

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

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

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

Do I effectively handle risk and uncertainty?

Convey the Proper Sense of Urgency

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

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

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

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

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

Proactively Seek Out Feedback and Deal Constructively with Mistakes

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

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

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Do I eliminate defensiveness when receiving feedback?

Do I focus on my role and contributions to failures?

Increase Sensitivity to People and Issues

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

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

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

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

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

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

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