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 last week’s post, we discussed some of the ways that managers and team members betray the trust of their colleagues and undermine the understanding required to move quickly and effectively through inevitable confrontations and conflicts that will arise at work. In today’s article, we’ll take a look at successful strategies for leveraging these twin foundations of trust and understanding for the benefit of everyone on your team. 

Stand and Deliver

Let’s start with the most important element of effective conflict resolution—stepping up!  The best leaders read situations quickly and recognize conflicts within their teams early on, and rather than avoiding them,  they step into the fray and put their leadership and problem-solving skills to work.  These managers view each conflict situation as an opportunity for all parties to grow and learn.

In this positive spirit, great managers and team members build trust and understanding even in the heat of resolving conflicts. Meeting conflict head-on, while always communicating a self-sacrificing, “for the good of the team” mentality, can earn you the distinction as a person of character within the organization. People see that those who take on disagreements and problems early on, and effectively prevent them from becoming bigger issues down the road, have a huge impact on the engagement and productivity of their teammates, and thus the profitability of the company.

Active Listening

Another key component of resolving conflict through trust and understanding is availing yourself to listen more and speak less.  Focusing on listening enables us to read situations more quickly, eliminating the element of surprise as imminent disagreements or issues are coming at us. Not only does active, focused listening help you build the understanding needed to begin resolving a conflict quickly and effectively, it also projects to the other party that you’re engaged in such a way that you’re considering the importance of what they need in the moment.

Practicing focused, active listening during interpersonal conflict slows things down and helps everyone involved gain better perspective, especially with their respective abilities to step into the shoes of those with whom they disagree. Slowing things down and getting everyone’s interests, wants, and needs out in the open and heard by all parties involved has a cooling effect that moves the resolution process in the right direction.

Consensus or Compromise

The ultimate resolution of any conflict comes from achieving either consensus or compromise.  Consensus involves everyone’s agreement, while compromise has the interested parties giving up some of what they need in order to achieve harmony for the team.

In order to achieve consensus or compromise, we must seek and find common ground among the people involved in a conflict. We define this common ground by first getting a good sense of what’s important and what’s not important to both parties.  As we talk out the possibilities for reconciliation, we must get ongoing confirmation of the perspectives and wants of others while clearly presenting our own perspectives and wants.

If we’re truly sincere in our ongoing affirmation of what those around us need and want from their work, we can reach consensus or compromise without damaging our relationships.

Again, effective conflict resolution is all about working on those foundations of trust and understanding. The good news is, if you approach people with sincerity, truly seeking a resolution that fits everyone’s needs, you’ll build even greater trust and understanding even while in the midst of conflict.  That is the ultimate reward for having the courage to step up, listening to others, and considering their needs. Everyone emerges from the heat of the battle tested, yet even more confident about the integrity and loyalty of those with whom they live to fight another day.

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.

Hiring is such a simple concept, right?  You have an open position in your company, and you hire someone to fill it. They begin working for you, and you begin to compensate them for their services.   

Anyone who’s been involved in the hiring process knows that it isn’t that easy, ever.  So, what makes such a seemingly clear-cut transaction often so complicated?

Companies consist of people, and we’re all different, like snowflakes.  It’s the wonder of humanity. What makes human beings so special are the nuances, those shades of difference between the individuals that make up your company’s particular leadership, employees and potential talent.  Add all of these people up and tie them together with your company’s vision and supporting policies, and you have yourself an organizational culture uniquely different from any other. 

For the growing, successful business, this culture is the machine that drives the company through innovation to sustainable growth and profitability.  Unlike a machine, however, you can’t add or replace parts, like nuts or bolts, without changing the nature of the business itself—because you’re replacing people. When you add or replace people, you must choose wisely or risk ruining the “magic” that made your company successful in the first place.

As you go about replacing people, how do you keep the magic alive?  Hiring well has two primary components – position fit and organization fit.  Position fit refers simply to whether the person can do the job.  Does this individual have the knowledge, skill set and capacity to perform the work?  Organization fit refers to the style that underlines how things are done and whether the individual matches well with the company’s philosophy and culture and has the potential to mesh well with others on the team.

How do you identify position and organization fit in potential hires?  The first step in assessing any kind of fit is to specifically define your team’s needs.  Using the questions posed in the Four Cs of talent management—Capability, Consistency, Commitment, and Connection—you can identify the critical success factors necessary to hire well.

Position Fit—It’s About Capability and Consistency

Position fit maps to questions of Capability and Consistency. In terms of Capability, does your candidate have the knowledge, skill, ability, and experience to succeed in your open position? With regard to consistency, has your candidate demonstrated a track record of success in similar roles at other organizations, or roles with similar skill and ability requirements?

A thorough job description can assist in developing a laundry list of items that you anticipate a new person can help your business achieve. As you build this list, it’s important to prioritize, tapering the list to include only the three to six specific skills and abilities instrumental to success in the role at your company, including the baseline problem-solving capacity necessary for the work at hand.  

Using a variety of screening tools such as structured interviews, well-built applications and other assessments, can help you determine how each candidate stacks up on each of these critical areas. Hiring well becomes a much easier proposition when you have the right tools at your disposal to sort out all of the differences among your candidates.

Organization Fit—Measuring Commitment and Connection

Organization fit maps to questions of Commitment and Connection.  As you begin to measure a candidate’s commitment, you must ask if the candidate’s needs—their own wants, goals, and interests—are compatible with those of the organization. In terms of connection, you need to assess whether there’s potential for a true, human connection between the candidate and the team members with whom they will work.

Basically, you need to consider the culture of the business and the team into which you are looking to hire new talent, and this opens up a host of deeper questions as you drill down into the differences in the talent pool available to fill your open role. What sort of person will or won’t fit?  What sort of person might cover an existing gap in order to make the team stronger?  Does this person buy into the vision of the business?  Is this the next logical step in this candidate’s career path?  These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when considering new talent.

Again, having the right tools at your disposal can make tackling organization fit a much simpler proposition, as you navigate the differences among various candidates, all of whom express an eagerness to join your firm.  Research-based assessment tools see past the veneer of an applicant-vetting process, identifying, measuring, and prioritizing the high-priority personal branding characteristics and strengths you need in a new hire with an “all-in” attitude that’s aligned with their teammates and the goals and aspirations of the organization.

If you’re having trouble defining these critical areas that make hiring great people a lot easier, TM Solutions can help. We can assist you with our Assessment and Selection services, helping you hire only the best by using research-based assessment tools such as TMSelect™ to identify and measure key knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal characteristics. 

Contact us today to learn more.

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.