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4 Ways Managers Handle Workplace Errors – Which Way is the Right Way?

Posted on August 29, 2011 by in Articles

HARD goals are called HARD goals for a good reason. They should challenge even your best people to reach beyond what’s tried and tested and comfortable; in other words, the status quo. And, like any tough challenge, sometimes before success is reached, folks make mistakes, freeze up, doubt their abilities or shy away from accountability.

When it comes to HARD goals, errors are inevitable and to be expected, but critical errors left uncorrected are unacceptable. Mistakes left unaddressed are likely to be repeated. This translates to heavy frustration on your part and unnecessary performance limitations on the part of your employees. Both of which have no place in a Hundred Percenter workplace.

When mistakes happen, there are typically four ways the situation can go:

  1. The mistake is never discussed, or the employee is gently reprimanded, neither approach makes any impact whatsoever and the mistake is soon repeated. (The Appeaser)
  2. The employee is scolded unreasonably hard and thus becomes less concerned with improvement and more concerned with vengeance which creates additional performance problems. (The Intimidator)
  3. The mistake is ignored, often with the hope that it will fix itself. (The Avoider).
  4. The employee is called on the error and then guided on what can be done to correct and prevent it from happening again; thus inspiring a desire to make a change that results in Hundred Percenter performance. (The 100% Leader)

100 % Leaders aren’t afraid to constructively critique employee performance when warranted. But, they understand there’s a fine balance between making corrections that do nothing, corrections that push good employees to Hundred Percenter performance, and corrections that push good employees to either stop trying or send them barreling out the door. No one welcomes a humiliating scolding or a correction that is no more than a harsh analysis of the problem. It makes most people defensive, and once the walls of defensiveness spring up, chances of willing improvement drop into the negative digits.

You may want to say, “Tim, this HARD goal requires strict attention to detail and your organizational skills are notoriously lousy. If you don’t clean up your act, the whole team will suffer because of it.” It may be the truth, and probably you and everyone who has known Tim since the first grade knows it, but it won’t get Hundred Percenter results. You might hurt Tim’s feelings and push him to get his act together–temporarily. But, he’s probably cursing you under his breath for your insensitive approach and plotting all the ways he can get back at you for publicly making him look like an idiot.

It’s just as ineffective to use any of the popular softening “tricks” such as “criticize the action, not the person”, or “layer the constructive feedback with praise to make it sound kinder and gentler.” These techniques don’t work and they have a tendency to backfire and produce the opposite results of what you want.

Bottom line, when good people mess up, they get it, and they feel bad about it. They’re not racing down the halls, kicking up their heels, and shouting, “Whoopee! I gave our best client misinformation and he pulled his account!” And if they are, well, you’ve got a whole different set of problems on your hands.

When good employees make mistakes, whether they are executing HARD goals or going about their day-to-day performance, they usually have an awareness that things didn’t go right. It may be conscious or subconscious, but in most cases, they know that on some level they messed up. (Getting people to come to terms with an error and admit it outright may be a bit more psychologically involved, but we’ll get to that in a minute). The thing to remember is that chances are really good that your best people, when they mess up, have already spent some time sweating out their feelings of lousy self worth and the repercussions they may face for having made the mistake. So they don’t need you to make them feel any worse; they are already doing a really good job of that on their own.

Ultimately, your good performers; your Hundred Percenters, and those with potential to be the same, want to move forward from the mistake and redeem themselves. What they do need from you is some guidance on why the error happened, how to correct it, and how to keep it from happening again. And through it all, they want to be treated with respect. After all, these folks have a history of good or promising performance. And mistake or no mistake, that does count for something.

Companies Are Doing a Lousy Job of Attracting Great Talent

Posted on August 26, 2011 by in Articles

Collectively, we’re doing a lousy job of attracting great talent. That’s a tough thing to hear, especially since it happens to be true. But I didn’t say it first; you did — via the collective voice of your peers.

Over the past several months, Leadership IQ has been conducting one of the largest talent-management studies ever done. We’re looking at executives from more than 1,000 companies, folks strategically selected to represent every company size, every industry, and every major country. Our goal is to learn what’s working — and what’s not working — across the full talent management continuum (e.g. recruiting, hiring, developing, engaging, leading, retaining, etc.). It’s a massive undertaking that’s already presented us with tremendous amounts of information. And one thing that’s coming through loud and clear is that the current trends in recruiting definitely aren’t working.

One thing we asked the executives participating in the study to evaluate was their companies’ talent pipelines. And we asked them to consider in particular how successful they were in sourcing the following four categories of talent: executive, professional, technical and unskilled. The feedback we got, frankly, is not good at all, and here’s what I mean. For each of the four talent categories named above, fewer than 10% of the companies said they were doing an Excellent job at sourcing that talent. Uggh. And, at least 65% of the companies said they were Average or Below Average in sourcing talent in each of the four categories.

Now some people look at that 65% and say, “Huh, I could live with being average — it’s better than totally stinking.” And I guess to some extent that’s true; technically speaking, being average is better than totally stinking. But average isn’t good enough to get the talent you’re after. This is an issue I see so many organizations getting wrong that it’s worth taking a minute to really nail it down.

I don’t care if you’re hiring a housekeeper, an engineer, a nurse, or your next CEO; you want somebody in that role who “gets it” — who wants to be great at whatever they do. As a leader in your industry, it’s not your job to hire people that aren’t totally awful. It’s your job to hire high performers, the people who have the right skills and the right attitude to succeed at your organization. But the people you want to drive to your organization aren’t always going to come knocking on your door.

High performers aren’t looking for an average job opportunity, you know, a place to go five days a week just to kill some time and get a paycheck. They want more than that, they want ongoing success. They want a job where the culture fits their personality, and where there’s a clear path in front of them that always leads to being a high performer. But these great people aren’t just sitting around waiting for your call. Generally, they’re employed someplace else. Or even if they are in a career transition, you can bet they are going to carefully choose their next job, and not just jump at the first place that offers a steady paycheck.

Ok, you might get lucky and find that your next high performer is in a weakened negotiating position. Maybe he’s been out of work for a while or she’s just entering the workforce. Or maybe you found a true “diamond in the rough” that nobody else has discovered yet. But I wouldn’t make hope or luck the foundation of your talent strategy.

Thinking competitively is a pretty typical and, for the most part, accepted mindset in the sales world. You have competitors, and those competitors have customers that you most certainly will try to steal away. You’ll identify those customers, try to find where they’re hurting, figure out how to solve that pain, understand what drives their purchasing, hone your pitch, highlight your advantages and call, call, call. Welcome to Sales 101.

The thing is, we understand and even celebrate this need for competitive differentiation and pursuit in the world of sales. But when it comes to sourcing talent, we often operate as though there’s millions of high performers sitting around with nothing better to do than jump at our job ads. We act like all we have to do is describe our open positions and, voilá, the best of the best will be lined up outside our door.

It’s time to grasp the reality that unless you want to remain trapped forever in a world where fewer than 10% of leaders have “excellent” talent pipelines, you’re going to have to change the way you recruit for the talent you want.

The 2 Crucial Strengths All 100% Leaders Share

Posted on August 22, 2011 by in Articles

What is a 100% Leader?

Put simply, a 100% Leader creates Hundred Percenters. A 100% Leader takes average people, and by challenging them and creating a connection with them, unleashes their true potential to achieve extraordinary results. The 100% Leader doesn’t just accept people as they are, the 100% Leader sees what we could become and cares enough to push us past self-imposed limitations to realize that potential.

Over the years, we’ve studied more than 125,000 leaders. We’ve analyzed their styles, decisions, actions, and the hard and soft outcomes that result. We wanted to know which leaders generated the most profits, had the greatest innovations, highest productivity and lowest turnover, among other indicators. After all the regressions, factor analyses, and just plain common sense, we discovered the two most important differentiating factors in separating exceptional from average leaders are Challenge and Connection.

Connection is the strength of the emotional connection a leader builds with their people; do employees share openly, do they want the leader’s feedback (positive or constructive), do they believe the leader really cares about their success, and do they trust the leader’s intentions.

Challenge is the extent to which a leader pushes their folks; how difficult are the assignments, how much do they make people stretch, and whether people are asked to develop skills in areas where they haven’t yet developed an obvious aptitude.

Two of the most important decisions you have to make as a leader are how much you want to challenge your folks to push their limits and how tight an emotional bond you want to build with them. The decisions you make on these two issues will determine exactly what kind of leader you’re going to be.

The Worst Way to Start a Job Ad

Posted on August 17, 2011 by in Articles

Imagine you’re out on a date (it could be date night with your spouse, or a blind date with a total stranger, or whatever). Now, let’s say you really want to win that date over, become the only person in the room he or she can see or hear. We’re talking full-blown smitten here. How do you think you should start that date — by talking about yourself, or by talking about your date?

Now, almost everybody gets the right answer in the date scenario. Of course, you talk about your date. But here’s the shocker: In the world of recruiting, a place where you also want to quickly capture the positive attention of another person, almost everybody gets it wrong. And it’s destroying a lot of recruiting pitches.

Let me prove it to you. Over 90% of job ads begin with a paragraph like this:

ACME Corp. is a top-tier solutions firm that provides information technology, systems engineering and professional services to customers in the public and private sectors. With 30,000 professionals worldwide, the company has the customer knowledge, technical expertise and proven performance to manage large-scale, mission-critical IT programs. With fiscal year 2010 sales of $10 billion, ACME Corp. is the third-largest company in our industry. Our vision is to be our customers’ first choice in each and every market we serve. To earn our customers’ trust and meet their individual needs, we will provide valued solutions with the best prices, products and services that make our customers’ lives easier. But we’re not finished. We’re on our way to even bigger and better things. Providing superior customer service requires superior people.

Unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this opening paragraph is terrible. You don’t even have to read every line to feel the automatic turn off. This ad is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. In the blind-date equivalent of this ad, you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived. It doesn’t matter if you are recruiting one person or a thousand; the only way to grab a high performer’s attention is to open your pitch by discussing the issues that matter to them, and whether or not you can meet their needs.

Neurologically speaking, the opening paragraph of your ad (the first few seconds you have someone’s attention) are the most important. It’s during these first precious moments that your audience forms their opinions about you, when their brains decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to what you have to say.

The lesson in all this is, whether you’re dating to find the perfect match or recruiting to find the perfect match, always start the interactions by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction, and that you care about the same things that they care about. And if you don’t know what their interests are, do some research and figure it out.

This might sound like heresy, I know, but candidates really don’t care how long you’ve been in business or how many awards you’ve won — at least not right off the bat. Is somebody really NOT going to apply because you don’t have enough employees or awards? Are they really sitting there thinking, “Well, I would have applied, but they only have 30,000 employees and $10 billion in sales, and I have a strict rule that I will only work for companies with over 40,000 employees and over $15 billion in sales.”

People care about whatever they care about, so that’s what you need to give them in your job ad. Meet their needs, and you’ll attract them. Don’t and you won’t.

5 Innovation Strategies All Organizations Can Use

Posted on August 16, 2011 by in Articles

Innovation is not merely a novelty of the high-tech industry. Innovation is a process that any organization can use for solving problems and staying ahead of the competition.

Regardless of industry (high-tech, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.), truly innovative organizations use 5 common innovation strategies: empowerment, honesty, community, goals and leadership.

Empowerment

Empowerment is one of the most critical and most difficult of the innovation strategies. Innovation is not always neat and systematic. It can be messy and slow. In order to innovate, you have to let folks get dirty and play.

Still, empowerment is not a blank check for failure. It’s an innovation strategy that must be formalized. Design boundaries so that employees have enough room to be creative but not so much room that they’re out of alignment with the organization.

Google has found a good balance with one of its innovation strategies called “20 percent time.” Basically, it means that technical employees are required — yes, required — to spend 20% of their time on technical projects of their own choosing based on what inspires them. The remaining 80% of their time is spent on core engineering projects.

Kaiser Permanente’s innovation strategy is multi-layered. The first part is an internal innovation consultancy. The consultancy’s job is simply to sit back and watch what happens inside of Kaiser. In one case, they found that nurses were being interrupted up to 17 times while trying to administer medications. After identifying the problem, they applied the second part of their innovation strategy, to include frontline employees in innovation development, and asked nurses to brainstorm about solutions. With the nurses’ help, they developed “Non-Interruption” wear, a sash to be worn over their uniforms when doing work that should not be interrupted. The result was a 50% reduction in the number of staff interruptions, and a 50% increase in the standardization of medication administration.

Honesty

As you start down the road of empowerment, you’ll need the second of the innovation strategies, honesty.

You may end up with more ideas than you can handle and some ideas, no matter how innovative, may not work. You have to be ready to identify and kill off “zombie projects.” Child psychologists say that when you keep every single picture your kid has ever drawn, it actually stifles the child’s creativity. It’s better to pull out the really great ones and discard the rest. The same strategy applies to innovation projects. Every 30-90 days, find the projects that aren’t working, kill them off and start new ones.

Community

Innovation strategy number three: Use community as a resource to spark innovation. A great technique for fostering an innovation community is to create “leadership grand rounds.” Gathering together managers from different departments (nursing, pharmacy, radiology, purchasing, etc.) for a few hours once a month to share experiences (not advice).

Procter & Gamble uses an innovation strategy they call “Connect and Develop.” Unlike Research and Develop, Connect and Develop creates research innovation through connections with the community outside of their organization. Once a year, they develop scientific briefs (based on consumer needs they are trying to fill) and take them to their network of suppliers to see if any of them have ready-made solutions. The combined R&D staff of their top 15 suppliers is 50,000 people. When they started mining them for ideas, their innovation success rate almost doubled.

Goals

All of the innovation strategies in the world won’t produce true innovation if you don’t set HARD goals (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult; see my book Hard Goals for more). After studying organizations that use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound), we found that, because of the “realistic” and “achievable” parts, organizations were under performing. Of the 4,000 people we studied, only 13% said they were going to reach their full potential with the SMART goal and only 15% said they were going to achieve greatness.

Set goals that force people to think ahead and have more vision. One of the things General Electric does to set HARD goals is ask all of their business unit leaders to identify the bigger trends that are shaping their particular business landscape. Then, they apply goals that are actually unachievable if the business units stay focused on the current business environment.

Leadership

Finally, in order to implement all of these innovation strategies you need innovation in management. Make sure your leaders are getting the following kinds of leadership experiences:

  • Managed ambiguous situations
  • Had to “pull the trigger”
  • Made decisions in data-poor environment
  • Found new customers

Follow these five tried and true innovation strategies, and you will create a truly innovative culture.

How to Overcome Employee Inertia

Posted on August 15, 2011 by in Articles

It would be great if employees spontaneously turned into Hundred Percenters without any help, like an amoeba reproducing through mitosis. But they don’t; they need an outside push.

Remember your high school or college physics class and Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Apply that law to your employees, and it says they will keep doing what they’re doing–unless you do something about it.

As a 100% Leader, you already know that being a Hundred Percenter is significantly more fulfilling than squeaking by. When we do only what’s required, or less, we incur untold personal, organizational and societal costs. But unless your employees have been convincingly presented with these facts in a way that speaks of the benefits in words they can hear, they have no reason to stray from path of the status quo.

Imagine you have your legs crossed (you’re kicking back, reading this article, and you just happen to have your legs crossed). As long as crossing your legs is a comfortable position, you’re likely to keep them crossed. Now imagine that out of nowhere, your legs suddenly cramp, and crossing them becomes deeply uncomfortable. What would you do? (This is not a trick question.) Of course, you’d uncross your legs. Without the leg cramp, the status quo of crossed legs would remain unperturbed. However, make the status quo uncomfortable, and the old state is replaced by something new (and ostensibly better).

The first critical lesson of being a 100% Leader is, if the status quo felt bad, people would have changed already. So we can infer that if employees haven’t yet changed to Hundred Percenter performance, they must think the status quo is A-Okay.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a lack of awareness of “acute badness” that gives us an attachment to treading water at “just good enough to get by.” It’s also the fragility of our egos. Whatever our current state may be, we arrived here by virtue of thousands of decisions made along the way. Every project where we had a choice of the hard way or the easy way, work late or leave early, take a risk or play it safe, led us to where we are today. And presumably, we feel pretty good about the decisions we made along the way.

If you come right out and tell an employee to change the state he or she is in, in effect, you’re saying, “Undo all those decisions you made previously because it turns out that they were bad decisions.” It gets even worse if up until now you’ve approached employee motivation primarily by appeasing: coddling, loving ‘em up, and telling them they’re doing a great job. Conquering the ego is risky business. If you suddenly throw the present system into reverse, you’re going to make heads spin, and that’s counterproductive. Creating Hundred Percenters doesn’t mean pulling the rug out from under your people. Instead, you need to give them a whole new platform on which to stand.

A 3-Question Test If Your Culture Has Enough ‘Spark’

Posted on July 26, 2011 by in Articles

Does your culture have enough spark to be truly successful?

Take this quick test to find out. Answer each question on a 7-point scale with 7 being “always” and 1 being “never.”

1. Employees at this company give 100% effort.

7-point scale with 7 being "always" and 1 being "never"

2. Employees are passionate about achieving the organization’s goals.

7-point scale with 7 being "always" and 1 being "never"

3. Employees are proactive, self-sufficient and take ownership for helping the organization succeed.

7-point scale with 7 being "always" and 1 being "never"

Get Your Score

Now, add your scores together. If you scored 18-21, congratulations, you have quite a bit of spark in your culture. If your score is 15-17, you’re missing enough spark to hold your company back from realizing its full potential. And if you scored in the 3-14 range, you could really benefit from putting some spark back in your culture. Because without it, your productivity, growth, innovation, performance and more will suffer.

Managers: Remote Employees Want Your Attention, Too

Posted on July 22, 2011 by in Articles

Note to managers: Employees, especially those who work remotely, want a lot more attention and feedback from you, even if it’s sometimes negative.

According to our research, 66% of employees, both in-house and remote, say that they have too little interaction with their bosses. But employees don’t just want warm-and-fuzzy interactions. While 67% of employees say they get too little positive feedback, 51% also say they get too little constructive criticism from their bosses. Perhaps most troubling is that employees who said they didn’t get enough feedback were 43% less likely to recommend their company to others as a great organization to work for.

As bad as that is, in most cases when we study communication problems in the workplace, we find that issues are magnified between leaders and employees who work in different locations. And here’s why:

  • One of the biggest concerns shared by remote employees is being “out of sight, out of mind.”
  • Remote employees simply don’t feel that they have the same exposure to their bosses as do face-to-face employees (the technical term for those folks is “co-located”).
  • Exposure or visibility is still seen in many organizations as a critical component of career success.
  • After all, they think, who’s more likely to get that next promotion; the employee with lots of exposure to the boss (like perhaps the day before they choose who gets the big promotion), or the employee who only sees the boss every six months?

Now, this may or may not be true in your organization, but it’s a major concern of remote employees nevertheless. Yes, there are some employees (like Dilbert) who feel like they’re better off without seeing the boss. But still, the numbers don’t lie, and the majority want more exposure and contact.

Parenthetically, in an ironic twist, while remote employees tend to be jealous of their co-located colleagues’ visibility and exposure to the boss, the co-located employees are often jealous of their remote counterparts’ autonomy. Yes, it’s a catch-22, and it has frustrated more than a few managers over the years.

Now, it’s not just climbing the career ladder that drives remote employees’ desire for more contact; it’s also their desire to do the best possible work. If you’re trying to meet your boss’ expectations on a particular project, it’s a pretty common assumption that the person who gets the most exposure to that boss is going to get the most feedback. And whoever gets the most feedback is most likely to stay on track and most likely to meet the boss’ exact needs.

All employees are desperate for your feedback. But your remote employees feel this need even more intensely. And they feel vulnerable in their careers and on-the-job performance by not feeling like they’re getting the same feedback as their colleagues in the face-to-face world.

I need to share one more important point: Don’t try to get more communication time with your remote employees by making your group meetings filled with chit-chat. You still need to make your communications purposeful and meaningful, and that’s especially true of remote meetings. After all, as short as attention spans are in face-to-face meetings, they’re about half that in a remote meeting. And in virtual meetings, when employees’ attention does fade, you usually don’t have the visual signals that they’re spacing out and thus you don’t know when you need to bring things back on track.

So what can you do? Simple; schedule some purposeful and meaningful time to connect individually with your remote employees. You can catch up with them, find out what’s hampering them, what’s motivating them, where they’re growing and developing, where they need some course correction, and more. Trust me, in remote situations, there’s a ton for managers and employees to talk about.

Ultimately, your goal is to make sure your remote employees succeed. And to do that, they need lots of feedback from, and connection with, you, their boss.