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Leaders are Readers?

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I had a great break over the holiday season and managed to do loads of reading . 10 books read and not one of them disappointed! This shows that ideas and inspiration are easy to find and cheap.

Putting them into practice is what matters and is where the majority of people – me included –  fall down.  In fact much of my work with PMN is to get great ideas and turn them into simple recipes that can be applied and made to work well.  Because the real learning happens not when we read the book – but when we try stuff out in practice.

So here are a couple of the books I read over Christmas that you can expect to see influencing future PMN workshops and blog posts.

Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly tells the story of management at Admiral Janitorial Services and how they managed to significantly reduce staff turnover and increase sales and quality.  They did this by spending time listening to employees, encouraging them to talk about their aspirations (home ownership, provide a proper Christmas for the family, sort out debt problems etc.).  They then put in place a service to help employees develop and put into practice plans to make these dreams happen.

By developing connections between peoples’ aspirations and their work, employees become significantly more engaged in their work.  This enabled the company to experience phenomenal growth.

In the book Kelly shows how hiring a ‘Dream Manager’ to work confidentially with employees once a month on their dreams and (CRUCIALLY) the plans to make them happen can transform the workplace.

I loved this book and read it in a couple of sittings as it is short (150 pages), well written and with an engaging storyline.

Eddie Obeng’s Money Making Machine is a business fable designed to help entrepreneurs think about their business idea as if it were a money making machine. It provides powerful insights into how to build the machine most effectively to achieve financial success.

Now it is very rarely that I find myself working with anyone who simply wants their business to be a money making machine. Most want their business to make a ‘positive difference’ as a first priority. Making money is a necessary – but by no means sufficient criteria for most successful entrepreneurs. As well as providing some really practical insights this book got me thinking about what a ‘Progress Making Machine’ might be like. Watch this space for the outcomes from that piece of thinking.

You can see a full list of the Xmas reading here.

PMN Bookstore

20 Fail Proof Ways to Expose a Lazy Employee

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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

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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.

How To Motivate and Engage Front Line Managers

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This is the title of an interesting post over at BNet and one that is especially pleasing for me as they reference one of my posts as a potential answer.

The BNet post, and a recent conversation with a Progressive Manager have led me to do some more thinking on the matter. The truth is that many of the managers I meet and work with are ‘accidental’. They have landed in management positions because they are ambitious, bright and have good interpersonal skills. But they have not learned what good management looks like. More importantly they do not understand the potential of good management to transform a mediocre team into an excellent one. ‘Management’ is perceived as a necessary evil that should intrude on the day job as little as possible.

So, if you want to motivate (I would prefer to inspire) and engage frontline managers give them a taste of what a truly great manager is able to do in turning a group of ordinary people into a truly excellent team. This is just about the most rewarding thing you can do. Developing other people and increasing your impact on the world by working effectively through them can be a real buzz.

Managers who achieve this sort of impact don’t do it by fitting in management around the day job. For them, management is the day job. They may still spend some time working in the team rather than on the team – but this is likely to be less than 50% of the time (in BMW I believe managers work in the team 10% of the time with other 90% on management and leadership).

What Gets Measured Gets Done – recognition and reward

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‘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.