And we have just set some November dates for Front Line Leadership in Cambridge, Ontario and The Psychology of Persuasion and Influence in London, Ontario.

Now is your opportunity to download your complimentary copy of the What Great Supervisors Know ebook.  Simply click on the link, enter your email address, update your profile and you will get the link for the book. The pocket-sized book is a terrific reference for supervisors and team leaders. After reviewing the ebook version, consider buying copies for your front line leadership team.
 
The challenge with focusing training and development only at the leadership level is that it relies on the trickle-down approach. The goal is to impact the leaders who then in turn take their new skills and impact employees at the front line.

The challenge is that many of these new approaches and techniques become watered down and get lost in translation between what leaders heard and what they are prepared to apply back on the job.

One forward-looking company took the bold step of shutting down production for an entire week in order to put everyone in the company through one week of intensive training on continuous improvement, lean and problem solving techniques. You might be agast to think about shutting down for a week – after all you would be losing 2% of your production.

The company rationalized the decision by equating it to a plant shut down to maintain and upgrade equipment. Instead of upgrading equipment, they upgraded the people.

The president of the company said he was completely astounded by the results. The very next week after the training, employees were immediately putting their new skills to work, making changes to work flow in order to reduce waste and improve throughput. Many employees commented that they didn’t know they had permission to make changes and improvements. Financially, the company was more profitable after the training and morale and attitude shot upward as well.

Even if you can’t quite buy into the idea of shutting down production for a week, consider running a little experiment. Set up a pilot group where you bring employees in and train them on many of the same concepts you would train supervisors and managers. This could include identifying opportunities for improvement, communication, conflict, team building and problem solving.  Then set them loose and see the kind of impact they have on your organization.

Leaders will continue to require development to help them in their role. After all, even the most enlightened employees will become frustrated if their manager doesn’t encourage them to make improvements. If you have gone the leadership route in the past and want to take it to another level, consider opening up the training to your front line staff.

—
 
Dr. Peter DeShane and I are scheduling another workshop: The Psychology of Persuasion and Influence on June 9th in London, Ontario.
 
Now is the time of year when companies plan leadership retreats – see how we can make these meetings more positive and productive.
  
Have a great week!

The Missing Ingredient
 
Most process improvement initiatives involve a tool kit of problem solving tools, methodology and intensive training. Some, like Six Sigma come with fancy names like Black Belt and Green Belt and business books and consultants trumpet the extraordinary payback, with a sizable investment!
 
Some cynics might think that greedy consultants are really just repackaging concepts such as value stream mapping and continuous improvement into fancier systems and there is some truth there.
 
Management can be forgiven for being seduced into paying big bucks for training and consulting. The promised payback is extraordinary, especially in the early stages when the low hanging fruit is picked. Once the initiative moves from the most enthusiastic managers involved in pilot projects to the broader organization, many initiatives begin to fade.
 
The missing ingredient is Leadership.
 
In fact, for most businesses, the exhaustive tool kits are overkill and can overwhelm the organization.
 
Without leadership, all of these initiatives fail to connect the people to the process. For managers without effective people skills the technical tools appear to do away with the need to engage and motivate. It’s not that the tools are ineffective – they just don’t create the full benefit without leadership.
 
It could be argued that an effective manager with good leadership skills could achieve similar results with the basic premise of reducing wasted effort, getting employees to engage in finding better ways of doing their work and measuring key aspects of the process.
 
Before embarking on a large process improvement, consider how your leadership team will keep the process alive and ensure benefits are sustained.

Reflection Questions

• Is the proposed process improvement overkill for your type of organization? 
• Is the leadership team (from executives to the front line) capable and consistent in managing people and process? 
• How would consistent and capable leadership help run the business better, perhaps without lots of additional training/consulting?

Action Items

• Continue to invest in the leadership capabilities of your team from the executive suites to the front line leaders.
• Make continuous improvement and lean part of the culture instead of being a special project.
• Ensure sustainability by having consistent management attention over a long period of time.

• If you are in a leadership role, are there questions you answer and problems you solve that you know could be handled by your team?
• If you are constantly giving answers, how does it impact your job satisfaction and the morale of your workgroup?
• How would your leadership role be more rewarding if you could get the team to solve most of the problems they encounter? 

Action Items

• Size up your work group – do they have the capability to think more for themselves without coming to you for every little question and problem?
• Begin asking, “What do you think would work?” when you are presented with a question or problem.
• Give coaching to help the employee make better decisions and develop good judgement.
• Give positive feedback when the employee takes initiative to solve problems on their own.
• Enjoy having some extra time to focus on bigger issues and problems that need your attention.

• Do you provide adequate training so that employees understand both what is expected and how to perform in their jobs?
• Do you provide regular, detailed performance feedback both informally and formally?
• How to you treat your temporary employees? Do they feel that they play a worthy role on the team even though they might not work for you for a long time?

Action Items

• Refrain from maligning so called McJobs, especially if your organization doesn’t measure up to the robust people management practices of McDonalds.
• If you manage in an organization that employs relatively low-skilled employees it doesn’t mean that you should treat them with less respect.
• If you manage higher-skilled and higher-paid staff then you really should be implementing positive and proactive leadership practices. It will help you better manage your business.

Feet: At the Feet level, we want to make the path as easy as possible for people to change. If we remove obstacles and make the path towards change easier, the change will happen quicker, with less resistance.
 
Engage the Feet: Create tools, checklists, systems, etc that support the change. You also want to make the existing habits harder to continue. A good example of this is freezing your credit card in a block of ice to avoid over spending or not having tempting junk food in the house when you are dieting.
 
The best change strategy is to combine all three elements in a powerful trifecta.
 
Reflection Question
 
Are you providing people with the logical, emotional and logistical means to accomplish your desired change?
 
Action Items

• Select a current or future change initiative.
• List the logical reasons for the change and specifically what you want people to do differently.
• Make people stronger by showing them they are already on the way and that what you are asking from them isn’t really that overwhelming.
• Remove any systemic obstacles and create support tools that help them move in the direction you desire.
• Watch how much faster, easier and less stressful your next change initiative will be.

Dear Santa,

I have been a good employee all year and wish that you could help my manager bring me the following gifts this season. They would help me become happier and more productive next year.

1. Give me the gift of clear expectations – help my manager become more clear in what he or she expects of me. I am tired of guessing the expectations and getting limited direction.
2. Give me the gift of regular feedback – rather than wait until my performance review, I wish my manager would give me feedback regularly – daily, weekly and monthly. If he or she gave me regular feedback on what I was doing well or needed to improve, I would do my best to improve.
3. Give me the gift of feeling part of the team – like everyone else I have the need to belong and feel part of the team. Help my manager build a stronger team by treating people fairly, not playing favorites and not talking about people behind their backs.
4. Give me the gift of better communication – help my manager keep me better informed about what is going on. If communication is so important, why does my manager do so little of it? Sure they are busy – typically doing things that we the employees could do if only they would delegate and stop trying to make every decision themselves.
5. Give me the gift of praise and recognition – it’s natural to find faults but please help my manager notice all the good things we are doing and tell us about them more often. We will be more likely to repeat the good things if they are mentioned to us more often. On the other hand when our manager focuses on the negative, we tend to give him more of that. Human behavior is funny, eh Santa?
6. Give me the gift of a challenge to grow my talent – My manager finds it easier to keep giving the same assignments to the same people. He thinks it makes his job easier but it really hurts our flexibility and we want something new to do every once in a while. One of the reasons I will stay in my job is because I can learn something new.
7. Give me the gift of training (and train my boss too!) – Show me I am important by investing in me to do my job better. My manager could benefit from some training too – making my wishes come true. I think even my manager’s manager needs some training because my boss behaves the way his boss expects. In fact most of the behaviors my boss wants to change come all the way from the top!

I will remember to leave out the milk and cookies!

I should have trusted my gut. The men’s washroom was littered with paper towel, the service was slow and the staff were frazzled. This wasn’t an isolated incident; previous visits had exposed similar poor performance.

Another location in the same chain had a totally different feel. Staff were happy, service was fast and as customers we were happy. While I didn’t have actual data, one outlet certainly looked busier than the other.

How can it be that two locations of the same chain in different cities could have such a different customer experience? Sites are selected using strict criteria and there are standard operating procedures. So what would explain the difference? Leadership.

In our experience a weak manager or supervisor will cause differences in profitability, sales, costs, cleanliness, morale and turnover. This variation doesn’t just show up in restaurants. It applies to retail stores, factories, production lines and engineering groups.

What leadership behaviors lead to these variations in performance?

1. Expectations: A weak manager doesn’t make his or her expectations known clearly to all staff. Without clear standards, performance tends to drop to the bare minimum.
2. Hiring: A manager will contribute to his or her own demise be being less selective in hiring decisions, poor interviewing skills and deviating from standard procedures and guidelines.
3. Training: Weak managers will either omit training or delegate training to staff members who are not qualified to teach the company system.
4. Monitoring: Managers need to personally observe performance and make sure staff are doing what is expected, correct unacceptable performance and provide encouragement.
5. Communication: Weak managers spend less time speaking with staff one on one and in team meetings.

1. Get a Recovery and Growth Mindset

Now is the time for you and your team to shift thinking from defense to offense. As the recession begins to fade there are tremendous opportunities to grow your business. The challenge is to recognize the opportunities and then take action to exploit the potential.

2. Upgrade Your Mental Software

When was the last time you invested in growing the knowledge, skills and capabilities of yourself and the team around you? Is your team trying to achieve success in 2010 with a 2004 mindset? If your organization isn’t changing as rapidly as the environment around it then you might want to upgrade capabilities with training, coaching or consulting aimed at the areas of greatest need.

3. Lead

The root cause of both success and failure is leadership. If your team isn’t up to the challenge it may be them or it may be the leader. Develop a clear idea in your mind on what you want to achieve and then ask the team how they can make it happen. Challenge is a top motivator so get your team reenergized by focusing on a big goal that they can sink their teeth into.

If we can help your organization reenergize and refocus, please connect with us for a complimentary consultation.

By spending so much time on tasks, the leader tends to spend less time on the people side of their job. The people side includes explaining expectations, delegating, communicating face to face, providing coaching, training staff, giving performance feedback, and challenging, correcting and recognizing employees.

In the short term, focusing on tasks gets things done. Think of how much you get done on the day before leaving for vacation. In the medium to long term, the task-focused manager creates even more work for themselves because they allow the team to wither and become demotivated. This causes a drop in productivity and results begin to wane. It becomes a death spiral when the manager puts even more emphasis on tasks, hoping to turn things around.

Tips to Get a Better Balance Between Tasks and People

1. Monitor Where You Spend Your Time

For one week, take an inventory of your time usage. As you complete a task, deal with an issue or attend a meeting, ask yourself if someone else on your team could do that task if you were to delegate and coach them. Ask yourself if the task requires your personal attention or could be completed by someone else at a lower cost allowing you to focus on higher value tasks. Ask yourself if your time is being absorbed by activities caused because you did not spend enough time communicating expectations, training staff or addressing a problem sooner.

2. Grow the Capability and Capacity of Your Team

Take the tasks and opportunities you identified in step one and determine how to get your team to take ownership of that task. It may be a simple matter of asking an individual to take on the task, or it may require some clarification of expectations and coaching. View this time as an investment that will pay dividends when you no longer have to take valuable time to do it yourself.

3. Redirect Your Efforts

Without as many tasks competing for your attention, use your new found time to plan, set goals and develop people for the medium and long term. Be known as a developer of people and you will quickly rise to higher levels of leadership responsibility.

Spending more time on the people side of the leadership equation will raise business performance and get more accomplished with less stress and aggravation.

A lack of accountability in your organization causes the following problems:

• reduced profitability
• poor customer service
• silos and lack of cooperation between departments
• projects that fail to create intended results
• lack of personal growth for employees
• added stress and frustration for the manager

Cascading accountability

The manager is always accountable. The key leadership skill is to transfer portions of this accountability to individuals in the workgroup. If accountability is not transferred, then employees will potentially put the manager in jeopardy by not keeping their commitments. The manager then has to continually chase people to get things done, or take care of it themselves. Either way, the productivity and value created by the department will be below potential.

We crave accountability and we are afraid of it at the same time

Employees crave accountability because it creates a sense of accomplishment. They can take pride in owning the success that comes with the achievement. At the same time, employees are afraid that the punishment for not meeting objectives will be more severe than the possible praise that comes with a job well done. Managers can counteract this by shifting emphasis from catching mistakes to celebrating achievement. Once employees let go of the fear, they can step forward and create better results.

Micromanaging does not create accountability

Accountability comes when the manager makes it clear what the expected outcomes are and the boundaries and then lets the employees take ownership over how they achieve the outcomes. A manager may think that assigning job tasks is enough to create accountability. If the manager assigns a task and dictates how it must be done, then the accountability remains with the manager. If instead the manager describes the desired outcome and then gives employees the freedom to achieve the outcome using their own talents, the employee can be held accountable for results.

Accountability requires measurement, follow-up and consequences

Scorekeeping is a powerful way to have employees show one another and their manager whether they are achieving objectives. The scoreboard must be simple enough and visual enough that everyone can tell at a glance whether they are winning or losing. Public scorekeeping also taps into peer pressure. Most people do not want to let others down. Having peers able to see the performance of others gives each person the motivation to succeed and be part of the team.

Steps to Creating Greater Accountability

1. Be clear about the end results – customer satisfaction, elimination of wasted effort, safety, housekeeping and expense control.
2. Ask each employee on your team what they can do to help improve and positively impact the end results.
3. Avoid diluting the accountability – do not take back ownership of the task when the employee finds it difficult. Let them grow through the experience.
4. Track progress and allow the team to take credit for achieving the results.
5. Identify, correct and potentially weed out the team members who are not capable or motivated to achieve results.

Do you or the leaders in your organization need help creating a positive, accountable work climate? Check out the solutions at www.UniqueDevelopment.com