Archives for September 2007

Hungry for It!

September 21, 2007 by admin

This is a great post that I think says a lot about manager/employee relations in much of UK management.

Personal Assistants and secretaries marching in the streets to demand the opportunity to

unleash their potential at work;
make progress not coffee;
be recognised as ‘career girls not cover girls’ and as ‘office heroes’.

It captures what the Progressive Managers Network is all about – developing managers that provide these iopportunites all of the time toevery one on the team.

All power to their elbow!

For a while now I have used a Honda advert in my work with clients – the one with the fluffy bunnies and the dirty diesel engine that becomes clean and environmentally friendly. It has a wonderfully catchy tune with the lyrics ‘Hate something, change something, make something better…’

It helps people to understand that both love and hate provide the fuel for change; the energy, inspiration and motivation required to make something happen. The power to make things better. ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ are full of opportunity and potential.

It is indifference that is the problem. Indifference never made anything happen.

Often the people that hate things the most are the ones that you need to talk with to make things better. Passion fuels progress. That is why I love hate – and encourage managers to love it too. Find out what people hate – and help them to change it.

Today though I met an organisation based here in Leeds called ‘Stop Hate UK’. Their purpose is to stop hate crime, and their unique contribution is to make reporting of hate crime easier and to provide practical and relevant help to those who suffer it. Wow! No problem getting up in the morning to go and work on that!

In organisational life it is usually the object of hatred (the unethical practice, the flaky printer, the fussy customer) that provides the opportunity for change. But perhaps there are times when it is the hater that provides the real opportunity for progress rather then the hated?

If you would like to know about the work of STOP HATE UK then just click on the graphic to visit their website. And if you are a victim of a hate crime then give them a call.

Appreciation, Affirming Feedback and Retention!

September 17, 2007 by admin

According to the Department of Labor in the USA, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.

Is there any reason to suspect that things may be different or better here in the UK? I doubt it. We have a long history of management by exception (managers leaving the good stuff alone and focussing on the problems). Often work is designed so that managers really don’t get to see or hear the good stuff that goes on.

I have played my part in this.

I once helped a call centre to install a piece of software that allowed callers to rate the quality of service provided by the agent. Low scores generated e-mails to team leaders with attached MP3 recordings of the call and invited them to provide coaching to the agent involved where appropriate.

This helped to quickly reduce the number of problem calls. But it also had the unwanted effect of damaging the perceptions that team leaders had of many of their agents – because the only stuff they saw and heard was bad. Likewise agents started to perceive team leaders as critical, picky and failing to appreciate the good work that was done. No wonder employee retention in the call centre business is low.

Once we changed the software so that team leaders got e-mailed about the great calls as well as the bad ones things in this call centre rapidly got better.

Is your job designed to help you to see, appreciate and feedback on the good stuff that your team members do?
Have you been trained in how to do this well?
Do you spend enough time and effort on it?

Things To Do To Develop Teamwork

September 17, 2007 by admin

I have recently been doing a some work with managers to help them learn how to coach their staff to improve performance. One of the most common topics for coaching was team working. Several managers came up with variations of “I wish I could help so-and-so to be more of a team player.” But few have any idea where to start – other then perhaps providing some team building training. Typically they have started to talk about the need to be more of a team player – but with few positive results.

In helping managers to work out how to coach someone to be a better team player I have found that the first step is to help them to define exactly what behaviours they see (or don’t see) that lead them to draw the inference that so-and-so is not a team-player. I ask them;

“What is it that you see this person do that makes you think they are not a team player?”

This usually releases a whole list of things such as:

They often interrupt others in meetings
They often don’t listen to other peoples suggestions
They say they will do something and then they don’t deliver
If they don’t get their way then they don’t get behind the decision.

Making this step from a label (poor team player) to a set of behaviours is the essential key to making progress. They can use feedback around specific behaviours to discourage behaviours that aren’t working – and to encourage those that are.

They can develop SMART goals for coaching that will help them to learn new behaviours and habits that are more conducive to team working. We can coach them to behave differently in key team working contexts. An examples of a SMART goal that I have used in coaching people around this topic is:

“Within 6 weeks at least 2 different managers will mention to me your effectiveness in supporting the work of the team.”

Then, by using coaching and feedback to influence specific behaviours it is possible to significantly improve team working within weeks.

Interruption as the Biggest Enemy of Productivity?

September 13, 2007 by admin

Mark Howell over at Strategy Central writes:

Do you know what the biggest enemy of productivity is? Can you guess?

According to Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, “proximity is an invitation to interruption and interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity.”

Interruptions maybe a problem – but proximity is not the cause.

I work with colleagues all over the world – and I often wish we shared an office – especially when we have a telephone conference. Proximity improves communication and understanding, deepens relationships and provides some lubricant to getting things done!

The problem may be:

a lack of protocols and agreements about an ‘open door policy’ and what it means. Especially when there aren’t any doors!
no formal planned times for 121 communication to take place. If there were then 99% of the non-urgent stuff could wait for the planned time.
a lack of assertiveness in handling inappropriate requests or contact
people are just so dis-engaged with the work that they just don’t care.

Whatever the problem – it is not proximity.