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10 Ways to Make Your Employees Love You

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This is the title of a great blog post written by Alison Green.   Now I am not sure that we necessarily need all employees to love us but I bet that her list (which I have paraphrased below) contains some insights and clues into how most of us could become MUCH better managers.

  1. Don’t shout, disparage or attack people – nor employees, not customers, not bosses.
  2. Be reasonable. Hold people to high standards, but that don’t demand the impossible.
  3. Keep your word.
  4. Make your team feel respected and valued: Act in ways that show you care about their quality of life. And don’t underestimate the impact of regularly making sure great employees know you think they’re great.
  5. Solicit feedback. Ask for input on everything from how the employee thinks last week’s event went to what you could be doing to make her job easier.
  6. Stay focused on results. Don’t have rules and policies for their own sake; make sure each is connected to an actual business need, and be willing to bend the rules if it makes sense overall.
  7. Workout what people need to do their job better, and help them get it.
  8. Recognise and take the difficult decisions as well as the easy ones
  9. Be honest about performance problems.
  10. Don’t assume you know what’s going on.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

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This is the title of blog post by Jim Estill over at CEO Blog – Time Leadership.  And as Wally Bock says this is ‘one of those hoary old management sayings that hangs around because it’s both true and useful’.

Interestingly in the main body of the post Jim changes the saying slightly to:

What gets tracked and measured gets done.

The addition of this one word makes a massive difference.  The truism leads to poor management because it often gets put into practice as:

  1. What can be measured (objectively) that appears to be a reasonable proxy for what we want to get done?
  2. Let’s measure it and then hope we will get the important things done.

However many of the ‘important things’ are difficult to objectify and measure.  But they can usually be tracked.

Take for example this core value:

‘We challenge complacency and the second rate and embrace change’

My guess is that it would not ‘get measured’.  My second guess is that it would rarely be tracked.  And my third guess is that it would therefore rarely get done!

So how might it be tracked to see if it does get done?

By asking regularly (in 121s perhaps…) questions like:

‘Have you found yourself putting any of our core values in to practice this week?’

‘Which ones?’

‘How did they help or hinder your progress?’

we can regularly track core values and are far more likely to get all team members thinking about how they live the values (or not) in their day to day work.  We can track which are being used to shape practice and decision making and which ones aren’t.  Can you imagine the impact on equality and diversity in your organisation if every employee was asked regularly:

How has your work, this week, lived our value of ‘welcoming people’s differences’.

Or have you found any situations this week where living this value was difficult?

So revisit the mission, vision, values, principles and objectives of your organisation and ask yourself:

  • Are these important enough for me to want to measure or track regularly?
  • How can I track these in such a way that they are more likely to get done? (If you are doing 121s this should be a no-brainer!)
  • Do we have the balance right between tracking and measuring the ‘whats’ the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’?
  • What are the risks of writing these sorts of statements and then not tracking them regularly and building them into expectations around employee performance and development?

Your answer to this last question might feature some or all of the following – hypocrisy, mediocrity, blandness, disillusionment….

Enterprise Problems are Multi-Dimensional

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There is a school of though that says that enterprise professionals just need to be experts on helping clients with the business planning process. However in my experience the enterprise dimension is just one several that need to be addressed if the client is to be helped to make real progress. If the enterprise professional is to work effectively it maybe necessary to help the client to acknowledge and work on some of these other dimensions. As Iain Scott says about one of his clients (and I paraphrase) – ‘she realised that she had to divorce the xxxx before she would be able to make progress on her business idea‘.

Work on ‘other dimensions’ is not always this radical but it is often present and necessary! Some of the possible dimensions that may have an effect on your ability to make progress with a client include:

  • their lack of experience in enterprise and entrepreneurship
  • low socio-economic status
  • poor quality of relationships with significant others (persistent negativity from friends and family)
  • history of educational failure
  • poor mental health
  • chronic illness
  • history of anti-social behaviour
  • intimate partner abuse
  • substance misuse
  • poor accommodation (poor quality, frequent moves, homelessness)
  • lack of social capital
  • ambivalence about the future
  • ethnic, cultural and linguistic barriers
  • refugees
  • illegal immigrants
  • asylum seekers

And I am sure there are more.

My point here is that unless we are able to help the client to recognise and address the multi-dimensional nature of their barriers to successful entrepreneurship then we should expect high levels of frustration and drop out.

So when we talk about ‘referring the client to specialist support’ we need to extend our referral network beyond the marketing and financial specialists to those who can provide a more holistic support service to real people with real multi-dimensional challenges.  Once we have accepted that our clients require this multi-dimensional type of support it provides us with a range of further challenges in managing the boundaries of our own professional competence and practice.

Enterprise Professionals Missing the Point?

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I am amazed by the wonderful work done by so many enterprise professionals that is not:

  • recognised
  • valued, or
  • paid for

Sometimes the only things that seems to count in the world of the Enterprise Professional are:

  • businesses started/expanded/retained
  • jobs created/retained
  • GVA (Gross value added)
  • Percentage of people who have ‘thought about’ starting a business/going self employed
  • numbers engaged in 6 hours (or more) of training

Sometimes even obviously important measures are no longer tracked because they are not directly called for in the policy frameworks within which enterprise work is commissioned and delivered.  These include measures such as the survival rates of the new businesses and also the number of people who thoroughly investigate a business idea and then decide to walk away from it because it is not ‘right’ for them at this time.  These are the clients who put their enterprise dreams ‘on hold’.  It is likely that they will have learned a lot about enterprise on the journey and they will often return with a better business idea after a while.  They will have got the enterprise bug and should certainly be counted as successes.  By putting the ‘dream on hold’ they have almost certainly been saved from future misery and debt.  It is ‘dreams on hold’ clients that we should really be counting as the percentage of the population who have really thought about enterprise.

Failure to collect data on survival rates can lead to an increase in poor start-ups destined to struggle or fail, often leaving a trail of debt, despair and depression with enormous social costs.  Indeed there are often perverse incentive schemes that ‘reward’ enterprise professionals for the facilitation of such start-ups as they are seen as ‘countable’ successes in the short term at least.

However these are not the main points I want to make in this rant!

There are a ream of other measures that are valuable in both social and economic terms that many enterprise professionals fail to track and remain unrecognised.  These often relate to the development of social capital in the course of the enterprise journey.  Tracking social capital or social return on investment is not a massively difficult task – but it does need some planning.

The kind of indicators that could be tracked  and reported on by enterprise professionals include:

  • number of social groups belonged to and frequency and intensity of involvement
  • perceptions of ability to influence their own future
  • feelings of self worth and self esteem
  • how well informed they are about enterprise opportunities
  • frequency of engaging with relatives/friends/neighbours/professionals to explore aspirations and dreams
  • invovlement in virtual networks and frequency of contact
  • exchanges of help and advice
  • perceived control of, and satisfaction with, life
  • trust in people of similar backgrounds
  • trust in people from different backgrounds
  • confidence in ‘institutions’ that might help
  • engagement with crime and anti-social behaviour
  • health gains (reduction of reliance on prescription drugs, mental health improvements etc)

I am sure that the list of good work done by enterprise professionals could go on and on (feel free to let me know any you think I have missed).

The important challenge is how we go about recording the true impact of our work – both socially and economically and making sure that the full value of this is recognised and paid for.