Stop Driving Your Employees Nuts

image:holykaw.alltop.com
culled from:www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/cmd-hdbk.pdf

After dedicating a large portion of my professional life to helping leaders develop new skills to improve workplace performance, I’ve come to a startling (and perhaps career-limiting) conclusion: Employee engagement, motivation, and results are less about introducing new leadership behaviors and more about just stopping the stuff that makes employees crazy.

Let me frame this as a little parable. Leaders in a mythical company worked diligently to create a lovely gardened footpath. They design it to honor, inspire and rejuvenate the workforce. But no one used it. Why? Because — unbeknownst to the leaders — the employees were walking around every day with sharp stones in their shoes. All of their energy was focused toward relieving or coping with that discomfort; so taking additional painful steps — regardless how lovely the path — didn’t even occur to them.

Employees can’t appreciate the “extras” that leaders may offer through enhanced skills and abilities if they are distracted (or pained) by their own significant irritants. Obviously’ employees will benefit when leaders attend training, learn important skills and apply new approaches to their roles. But where organizations can realize an even greater return on their investments (of time, energy, and money) is isolating and eliminating the five most significant de-motivators and impediments to employees joyfully and fully contributing their talents to the cause.

    Unclear expectations: The vast majority of employees want to do a good job. They want to contribute and perform well. What hampers that is a lack of clarity about what the outcome should be, what the standards are, what success looks like and how they’ll be evaluated. Withhold this information and you’ll undermine performance — and make employees nuts.
    Underutilization: It’s critical that employees feel that they are bringing the best they have to offer, particularly as workplace demographics shift toward younger workers. Study after study confirms a connection between employees feeling that their talents are being fully tapped and greater engagement. Underutilization of skills, capacities and people sub-optimizes results. And it makes employees nuts.
    Unnecessary systems, rules and processes: Many organizations find themselves overlaying rules and systems without thoughtful reconciliation. Got a problem? Introduce a new process! As a result, they become like those states with antiquated statutes. Perhaps there was a reason to enact a law about not looking a donkey in the eye on Sunday, but it doesn’t make sense today. And it makes employees nuts.
    Unproductive use of time: Little is more frustrating to employees than wasting time — Meetings that start late, projects that go nowhere, reports that are filed without review or consideration, fire drills that force people to scramble for no real reason. Those “five minutes here” and an “hour there”build up over time, undermining organizational credibility and results. And it makes employees nuts.
    Unrelenting change: Don’t get me wrong. Keeping pace with today’s dynamic marketplace demands a commitment to change. Yet many organizations have developed an affection for switching things up, redesigning structures, revising the schedule, redefining direction, etc. Sometimes it’s just change for change’s sake. The problem is that people become change-resistant. They internalize a sense of impermanence that causes them to resist or simply ignore the steady stream of changes washing over them. Unrelenting changes hurts genuine organizational transformation efforts. And it makes employees nuts.

As a leader, what may matter more than what you do is what you un-do. Make it a priority to address the five factors that make employees nuts. Help remove those sharp stones from their shoes. You’ll see remarkable results… step by step.

Going nuts yourself? As an employee, what factors undermine your motivation and ability to deliver results? What sharp stones are you stepping on each day?

Julie Winkle Giulioni is the author of “Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want,” with Bev Kaye. Giulioni has spent the past 25 years improving performance through learning. She consults with organizations to develop and deploy innovative instructional designs and training worldwide. You can learn more about her consulting, speaking, and blog at JulieWinkleGiulioni.com.

Leadership, Management, Command, & Control

While there are plenty of discussions about leadership verses management and the need for command and control nowadays, these are important concepts that every leader must be aware of to successfully guide their organization. In fact, they are the four pillars of every organization as they directly drive the organization. Used properly, the business will grow; used improperly, the business will sink.

These are not distinct processes, but rather concepts that all leaders perform in order to build and strengthen their organizations.

Interpersonal, Conceptional, Effectiveness, and Efficiency

As the above diagram shows, the four pillars overlap, thus they are not separate processes. This blending gives the organization the ability to focus on opportunities and deal with threats:

    Leadership drives the interpersonal aspects of the organization, such as moral and team spirit.
    Management deals with the conceptual issues of the organization, such as planning and organizing.
    Command guides the organization with well thought-out visions that makes it effective.
    Control provides structure to the organization in order to make it more efficient.

Benefits of the Four Processes

Benefits of the four pillars
Command and Control

While most people think of command as simply telling others what to do, it goes far beyond that. Command is the imparting of a vision to the organization in order to achieve and end-goal. It does this by formulating a well-thought out vision and then clearly communicating it. Command emphasizes success and reward. That is, the organization has to be successful to survive and in turn reward its members (both intrinsically and extrinsically).

An example would be visioning a process that helps to increase informal learning and make it more effective. A bad vision would be implementing a social media tool, such as a wiki or Twitter. This is because social media tools are the means rather than an end-goal. That is, they are more like specific objectives that enable you to achieve your end-goal (vision).

Now you might implement a social media tool as explained below, but the real goal is to increase interactions that lead to informal learning, while a supporting process is the tool itself.

Visions do not have to come from the top, but rather anywhere within the organization. Informal leaders are often good sources of visions; however, if the vision requires resources, then they normally need the support of a formal leader.

In contrast, Control is the process used to establish and provide structure in order to deal with uncertainties. Visions normally produce change, which in turn produce tension. These uncertainties cause tensions that leaders must deal with so they do not impede the organization. This is far different from most people's conception in which they think of control as controlling others.

For example, an organization might implement a new social media tool to enable its worker to interact with others and aid the process of informal learning more effectively. After implementing the tool the leader might ask, “Is the tool we provided to increase the effectiveness of informal learning really working?” Thus, control is also used to measure and evaluate.

Inherent in evaluation is efficiency—the act of examining the new tool often leads to processes that make it more efficient. This can be good because it can save money and often improve a tool or process. The danger of this is if the command process is weak and the control process is strong then it can make efficiency the end-goal. That is, it replaces effectiveness with efficiency.

A good example of this is our present economy that caused many organizations to perform massive layoffs. Now the very same organizations are complaining that they cannot find qualified workers. Efficiency over road effectiveness—they failed to realize that they would need a trained workforce in the future.