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Give Your (Best) People Compelling Reasons to Stay

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This is a time of year when people reflect on careers and opportunities. Your best people will have aspirations and ability to pursue them.

  • Do you know what they are?
  • Are you are doing enough to help them stay?

The Mavericks at Work Blog has just published a post helping those with restless hearts and souls to reflect on reasons for leaving or staying in a job. They encourage potential leavers to reflect on the following:

  • Does my company stand for something—anything—special? It’s hard to be thrilled with your job if the company you work for is struggling to succeed, or feels stuck and irrelevant.
  • Am I excited to see my colleagues when I show up for work on Monday morning? “Working for” a company is an abstraction. The reality is that you work with the people closest to you.
  • Do I have a voice at work—does anyone who matters listen to what I say? There’s nothing more depressing and demotivating than feeling that you don’t matter as a person.
  • Am I learning as fast as the world is changing? In a world that moves so fast, the most dangerous thing in anyone’s career is the sense that you’re standing still.
  • Am I making enough money? Strange as it sounds, this is the worst reason to leave a job.

Research tells us that people ‘join an organisation but leave their manager’.

  • Are you doing all that you can to make sure that your best staff, when they think about these questions, decide that there is nowhere they would rather be?

With recruiters telling us that the cost of making a new hire is typically something like 140% of the annual salary of the post this could a very valuable or expensive exercise!

Just Imagine…part 2

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Stairway to Organisational Heaven?

Just imagine…

1. You work in an organisation where everyone gets 30 minutes every week 121 time with their manager to look at how the right work can be done more effectively and to work on communication, trust and respect;
2. Everyone is coached – every week – by their manager. They learn things on a weekly basis and use what they learn to create value;
3. Everyone gets feedback – several times a day. The feedback recognises, appreciates and encourages the good stuff. It also raises awareness around behaviours that people might want to re-think. Everyone knows that feedback is not an emotional big deal. It is just information that is designed to help;
4. Everyone delegates effectively. They expect to be delegated to at least every other month as part of their professional development. Managers ‘delegate and develop’ routinely so that they can consistently do the important (but never urgent) stuff well (stuff like strategy, RnD, customer contact, stakeholder management etc).
5. People who struggle to deliver on their role in the time that the organisation pays them are helped – through feedback and coaching – to find ways to get what they need to get done in the work hours available to them.

What difference would developing these 5 management processes make in your team?

The Manager’s Dip

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Seth Godin‘s new book is called The Dip. The Dip is the hard spot – it is the place that most people give up. Having started off with high hopes the dip is when ‘reality strikes’ results are not what were hoped for and you are faced with two choices; ‘give up’ or ‘push on’.

Every new management job starts out being exciting and fun.  Then it gets harder and less fun and then it hits The Dip.  It is incredibly hard and not much fun at all.  A scarily high number of managers are bang in The Dip. And they are trapped. Too scared to quit. And no belief in their ability to change.

Even the best managers fall into The Dip.  But they recognise it quickly and make some decisions (take some actions) that get them out of it quickly.  Sometimes they move on – and fall into The Dip in a different organisation.  Other times they stay – and they change.  They commit to beat The Dip because it’s worth it.

How do they beat The Dip?

  1. By building trusting and respectful relationships with other people who can help them to beat The Dip – managers, peers, reports, customers and other stakeholders.
  2. By building up the reward once The Dip has been beaten. (‘Do you know what it will mean if we can just get through this?’)
  3. By coaching, giving  feedback, delegating and developing the potential of every one who can help to get through The Dip.

Good managers know:

  • when they can beat The Dip and it is worth beating
  • when the Dip will beat them or it is just not worth the effort.

Some managers know neither of these things.  They just hang in there, working long hours, making little progress like a hamster trapped in wheel and The Dip just gets bigger and deeper.

Choosing a Strategy – The Big Leap Forward or Tiny Steps?

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Choose Your Way Forward

Every organisation is looking to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of its operations. We are all looking for ways to make progress.

The Big Leap

Most of the time organisations go for a ‘big leap’ strategy. They choose a framework or mental model to hang their change efforts on (swot, lean thinking, systems thinking, balanced scorecard, 6 sigma, quality models etc) and then go through a process of ‘strategic planning’ followed by an implementation phase when employees are ‘engaged’ to make change happen.

They plan the jump, build the ramp and then open the throttle. This is by far the preferred choice of most organisations and some of them manage to make the leap.

The Tiny Steps

This is a much more unusual strategy for making progress. The first step in making this work is getting every one in the organisation crystal clear on what the organisation exists to do and how they can contribute. This is where third sector/social change organisations have a real advantage over the profit chasers because of the potential that lies in giving people the chance to make a real difference in society.

The second step is about talking to employees one-on-one every week – about what they have done, what they are going to do and how they can build their contribution in the future. Working with simple management tools including feedback, coaching and delegation these one to ones provide the vehicle for continually keeping everyone ‘aligned’ and contributing to the organisation. Every week it provides an opportunity to coach, improve and delegate. And these processes generate progress and change through a series of tiny steps. Every employee growing their contribution – every week. Week by week, person by person progress is made.

This ‘Tiny Steps’ strategy is a pretty rare choice for organisations to take. It does not rely on gurus or consultants to make it work. It does not need to be underpinned by advanced training – it requires time, commitment and discipline. It requires great management – not great theory.

So choose your way forward with care.

“Twas Ever Thus”

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“First organise the near at hand, then organise the far removed.
First organise the inner, then organise the outer.
First organise the basic, then organise the derivative
First organise the strong, then organise the weak.
First organise the great, then organise the small.
First organise yourself, then organise others”.

General Zhuge Liang

Zhuge Liang (181 – 234) was one of the greatest Chinese strategists, as well as a statesman, engineer, scholar, and inventor. His name has become synonymous with intelligence and tactics in Chinese culture.