realisedevelopment.net

Just another WordPress site

How to Motivate Your Problem People

by

Everyone has motivational energy. Everyone acts in ways that they believe will make things better for them, their loved ones or the wider community.

Even problem employees are driven and committed — it is just that the direction or nature of their drive and commitment is not recognised or valued in the workplace.

In trying to motivate problem employees, most managers either:

  • try to “sell” their viewpoint to employees—or
  • dismiss them as ‘lazy’
  • avoid managing them all together and hope that the problem will go away.

1. Create a rich picture of the ‘problem’ employee.

Don’t simply label him difficult. Build a relationship and find out what drives him, what’s blocking those drives, and what might happen if the blockages were removed. A system of regular 121s should let you build a relationship that can achieve this within a month or two.

2. Replace predetermined ‘solutions’ with feedback

Don’t demand new behaviours just point out the impacts of those already in place and ask what he might be able to do differently? Help him to develop a menu of possibilities and choose to follow the ones that interest him.

20 Fail Proof Ways to Expose a Lazy Employee

by

20 Fail Proof Ways to Expose a Lazy Employee is an interesting blog post that contains some useful ideas and resources – but to my mind exemplifies much that is wrong with management today. The assumption is that the employees is ‘bad’ and has to be exposed, ‘put right’ or fired.

In the majority of such cases, in my experience, managers get the employees that they deserve. The behaviour of the employee is a direct reflection of the way that they are being managed. I would advise the manager to reflect on their own role in creating this problem employee.

‘Lazy’ is a label and labels rarely help. Managers must learn to notice the behaviours that they see that lead them to think that someone is lazy.

They should then give feedback about the behaviours (arriving late, leaving early, personal e-mails, staring out the window for hours) and the impact that the behaviours have. ie ‘When you arrive late, leave early, stare out the window and spend hours on your personal e-mails I get frustrated because I can’t help thinking that you could get more done. I worry that you might get a reputation for laziness and that you won’t do as well as you could in your work here. Is there anything you can differently to avoid these concerns?

Managers who know that they have a ‘disengaged’ employee must think about their own role in the employees lack of engagement. After all they are paid as a manager to ensure that people are productive! It is their problem – not the employees!

  • Have they got the employee in a role where they can use their strengths?
  • Have they clearly expressed the performance standards associated with the position in a way that the employee understands?
  • Have they given feedback about the behaviours that cause concern?
  • Have they offered to coach the employee in order to improve their performance?
  • Does the employee get appreciation and recognition when they do things well?
  • Only once all of these options have been explored should they consider the option of firing them.

Something for Nothing in Halifax

by

Would you like to learn a management tool that is guaranteed to:

  • Save you time
  • Increase levels of trust in your team
  • Improve communication
  • Make you a noticeably better manager
  • Get more done – more quickly
  • Accelerate the professional development of your team, and
  • Reduce the pain of performance reviews?

Then come along to a free introductory session of the Progressive Managers’ Network at the Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre on March 26th from 13.30 to 16.30.

At the event you will get a free gift to help improve your management worth more than £25.

Places are strictly limited so please book your place online here. Or call me for more information on 0113 2167782.
If you know of a manager who might be interested please forward them a link to this page.

What Gets Measured Gets Done – recognition and reward

by

‘What Gets Measured Gets Done’ gets my vote for the single, most dangerous, least accurate, management ‘truism’ of them all!

Suppose we changed the expression to ‘What Gets Recognised Gets Done’.   What difference would that make to the way we do our business?

First of all managers and leaders would have to think about what they want to recognise in their organisation.  This is a big question.  It speaks to values, performance and ethos.  Recognition encourages consideration of many things that cannot be easily ‘measured’.

If Enron had ‘recognised’ more than short term financial performance would things have  turned out differently?  What are Goldman Sachs ‘recognising’ as they pay out £8.4 billion in performance related bonuses to their staff (UK employees of the bank average £320 000 in Performance Related Pay)?  Is financial performance the only thing that matters for Goldman Sachs or do they provide equally strong ‘recognition’ for other things that might matter like ‘ethics’ or ‘long term customer relationships’?

Secondly managers and leaders would have to consider how are they going to recognise it?  What does excellence look like, sound like, feel like?  You can’t just rely on the numbers.  You might have to go and observe people doing the work:

  • see how they speak to customers
  • watch how they contribute to meetings
  • understand how they prepare a paper for the board.

Feedback becomes a primary tool for recognising what works and what doesn’t.  It also becomes a primary tool for reward as people start to get recognition and validation for the good stuff that they do.

So the next time someone says ‘What gets measured gets done’  perhaps you should ask them if they really believe what they say.

A Great Coaching Model

by

Prem Rao has posted a great piece on a simple coaching model for managers.  However, I think that feedback is often a much more effective and efficient way to help people learn than coaching and this should always be tried before coaching is used.

I encourage all the managers I work with to coach all team members on goal based coaching contracts all the time! This builds the ability of the team to be way more productive and more efficient. But coaching is only used when other simpler and less time intensive techniques like feedback have failed to produce the desired results.

Helping managers to be specific about the behaviours they are trying to develop is always the starting point for me. I ask what kind of things they wish they could develop people on. Typical responses are things like to…’Show more initiative’ or ‘Be more of a team player’ or ‘Be more confident/assertive’ etc.

I then encourage them to think through what specific behaviours they have seen that lead them to think that this is an area that an individual needs to develop? Many managers struggle with this step. They have to spend some time watching people to figure out what it is that they are doing, or not doing, that leads to the diagnosis.

Once they are clear on the behaviours that are to be the focus of development I ask managers whether they have ever given feedback about them to the individual concerned. Usually the answer is no! This is a real missed opportunity because the simple use of consistent adjusting feedback (by a manager who is good at using both adjusting and affirming feedback) will often get results much more quickly and cost effectively than coaching.

If feedback does not work we then move onto goal based coaching.

The sad truth though is that most managers in the UK have never be trained how to use feedback effectively or how to coach their staff. And a fair percentage of those that have been taught fail to put it into practice because they are too busy fire fighting or doing what their team should be developed to do.