The Care and Feeding of Misfits

People don’t leave their personalities at the workplace door. As business managers, we interact with people during all stages of their life. The manager-employee relationship is a complex one as like it or not, we are perceived as being in a position of power over staff.

This introduces stress to the relationship but may also trigger past relationship experiences for people. This may in turn trigger emotions and behaviours that have little to do with the current work situation, and more to do with the past experiences that may be hard-wired in the brain of either person. These behaviours can be extreme, or at least, an ongoing distraction from work priorities.

Unfortunately, if there is no specific strategy to create a high-performing culture, productivity can resemble a normal curve…..
– 15% at the bottom who are “misfits” (and consume 70% of energy and attention)
– 70% in the middle (at varying levels of performance) and
– 15% at the top “carrying” the rest.

Unless staff are acutely aware of the direct effect of their performance (or otherwise) on business survival, they may well develop a “distorted sense of entitlement.” (See Blog entry: Distorted Sense of Entitlement – whose fault?”) It is simple: our job as leaders is to ensure people do what is needed for the collective success. Ignoring below-optimal performance is actively placing the business, and other people, under unnecessary pressure.

IGNORING misfits is too passive a word, here; it is not accurate. Not acting quickly with the bottom 15% is what I call “IGNORATION”. This is an active ignoring action that has the effect of stimulating MORE of the deviant behaviour, causing ever-increasing pressure on the business.

A high-performance culture is one where whoever sees the deviant behaviour calls the person on it immediately, according to an AGREED protocol. Not only is this more likely to succeed but let’s face it, a manager is vastly outnumbered. If everyone takes responsibility to ensure that everyone is holding up their end, the business stands the best chance of success in a competitive market.

Not swiftly addressing unhelpful attitudes and behaviours is FEEDING the misfits and annoying the top 15%. Over time, the middle 70% watch all the care and feeding of the misfits, and a good number realise that the “bottom” is where people do as they please, on full pay!

Ensure you are not a manager guilty of ignoration. Involve people in the success of the business. They are smart and full of ideas – tap into these and as a team, vow to starve mediocrity and feed exceptional effort. Soon the misfits will leave in search of care and feeding – elsewhere.

Cherri

Posted in Managing for business success | Leave a comment

The way you get control is to give it away

That may sound strange. When I first became a manager of people, I was conscious that this was not going to be a happy time – for me or anyone else! I was definitely at the extreme end of “need for control”. I had a very precise idea of how I wanted things done. I tortured myself about our reputation as a department, and that the sky would fall in if a single error was made. What would my boss think? What would other managers and departments think?

I knew that I couldn’t control people’s thoughts. But how I wanted to! If only everyone would think the same way I did, then everything would be fine. It took me a LONG, painful time to learn that:
o Other people have amazing ideas
o Everyone has a brain as good as, if not better than, mine
o I am outnumbered – so even if I were 10 times smarter and better than the rest, I would never be able to do everything that the department needed to deliver on
o If I tried to “control” people, they would shut down and I would never see their brilliance – yet they would still draw their full pay entitlement.
So I changed the question from: “How can I control everyone and everything?” to “How can I get the BEST” from each person.”

When we did Social Style analysis at our company it helped me appreciate that we have patterns of behaviour that have to do with personality, our past, the person we choose to present in any given situation, and the situation itself. This helped me to understand and work with the range of people on my team, and the managers around and above me.

From there, I realised that having a close relationship with staff was really important. The parallel with the home environment is obvious. Not in terms of being a controlling, dictatorial parent like the one described above, but more that when we get clear about the role of parents – to shape character and capability – it becomes about adding value as a performance coach, while each person’s own internal parent takes care of business. This requires creating a regime of “quality timeouts” to ensure we establish and maintain a performance partnership with staff, reviewing work together frequently with the goal of continuous improvement. One-to-one and as a department.

What I have also learnt is the value of Management by Key Indicators (as opposed to Management by Objectives). I have learnt that these need to change as we change, the game advances and our competitors move things. Also, I have learnt the value of Open Book management. While this concept is now decades old and well documented, we are still hearing success stories, such as those mentioned in an article entitled “The Neuroscience of Leadership” by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz where they write:

“Open-book management,” has been credited with remarkable gains at companies like Springfield Remanufacturing, because it repeatedly focuses employees’ attention on the company’s financial data. Toyota’s production system, similarly, involves people at every level of the company in developing a fine-grained awareness of their processes and how to improve them.

It was Jan Carlzon, that superb leader of Scandinavian Airlines, who said:
“An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.”

You get real control of your business when you have EVERYONE informed, inspired and committed to the success of the business. This is the way you have the least control over people and the most control over success.

Posted in Managing for business success | Leave a comment

Performance feedback and the brain

It’s been said that the quickest way to put people under stress is to say: “Here’s some feedback.”

We are told by neurophysicists and others who study brain development and our social intelligence systems that our brain is largely emotional. Even the most rational among us have active primal emotional systems in the mid-brain that keep negative emotions in check. These are emotions such as fear, anxiety and anger. (Many would say that anger is an expression of fear.) For others, these emotions are not well-regulated and life can be an emotional roller coaster, much to the bemusement of those around them who keep emotions in check.

The nature-nurture debate seems to have been largely resolved now, as we have a substantial body of research to show the interplay of genes and environment on what becomes a unique neural network development in each individual’s brain. While it is true that we all have the same instincts and brain development systems, we form interpretations of events that become hardwired in our unique neural networks, and in turn colour our interpretation of future events.

We carry this with us into the workplace and can be hyper-sensitive to, OR seem completely immune to, interpersonal work situations.

In conversations with managers over the last few weeks, their people management challenges were described as the following:
1. People lose their temper, not only with colleagues but also with seniors. (This not only causes upset to the people at the receiving end, it triggers stress responses in others.)
2. People display aggression that appears to others to be out of kilter with the situation – bordering on rage.
3. People cannot handle negative feedback.

I am quoting here. The term “negative feedback” is one I choose not to use due to the meaning it has acquired. I just prefer to use the term feedback – if you have to differentiate then see it as either change feedback or positive feedback. After all, feedback is about opinion. It may even be more than one person’s opinion. But the only person’s opinion that counts is the person whose performance is being commented on. If they don’t “get it” no opinion will change their behaviour in the desired direction.

Even tangible results can’t be relayed as absolute fact as there could be external factors affecting results that a person has no control over. And people can be very creative with what they attribute failure to – we all can! So, having the person see their behaviour the way others do is key to behaviour change – and how can they see what others see without constant, rich situation-feedback?

It is because we don’t create feedback-rich environments that people end up with a warped sense of their value and contribution. So who’s really at fault here? It is the fact that we don’t stop someone losing their temper the first time it happens that they learn this as a pattern of interaction, and become more and more extreme in their behaviour. There is a two-year old in all of us, looking for the boundaries. (Maybe with some people more than others, that two-year old seeks expression.)

People are what they are due to a history of experiences that they bring into the workplace. Then the workplace either reinforces that person’s learned views about people, or challenges them.

To change people’s behaviour, research suggests that there are some key success factors:
1. There has to be a relationship of trust with someone they admire. This “coach” figure can go a long way to correct distorted views the person has about themselves and/or their environment.
2. There has to be systematic, regular performance discussions so that these are a fundamental part of the person’s work experience
3. Finally, the “coach” has to be congruent with their own communication and this is about self-awareness. Without this, this person may unwittingly be causing intense stress for the people they manage.

I see evidence of this stress all the time. Staff tell me about managers who:
– give confusing instructions
– don’t seem to know what they want but then are generous with their criticism when they don’t get it
– think people are mind-readers.

We’ve all been there at one time or another on both sides of that equation. The only answer that will keep us all sane is to admit we are human, fallible and with limited vision. We only see some of the information, some of the time. So does everyone else. Only by pooling our views with others do we start to build a picture from which we can start making some accurate calls.

Here’s what to do:
1. Let staff know you are human and have only one perspective…..but that you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t tell them your views. Acknowledge they have a view as well.
2. Listen. Don’t judge. But be consistent and firm with your view – you are representing not YOU but the organisation and clients. (Whoever is paying the bills including payroll; either sponsors or clients.)
3. Form a performance partnership – equal but different in contribution. This way, you can both be your at your best in what is, let’s face it, an incredibly demanding work situation. Without it, neither of you is completely doing what you are there for.
4. Like every important relationship, set up a regime of catch ups; once a month at least, for one-on-one time. (For some it may need to be more frequent e.g. sales people who need support for what can seem at times to be a soul-destroying job!)

When you are up to speed with this, then raise your expectations of people and watch the brilliance emerge – the oft-quoted Pygmalion effect.

Cherri Holland

Posted in B2B (Brain to Brain) communication | 2 Comments

The connection between the brain and performance

It is amazing that there are still business leaders, and even managers throughout organisations, who pay little heed to how the human brain is structured, formed and (most importantly) changed.

Everyone I ask admits that they know that their brain determines how they think, feel, act, and therefore what they achieve. How then is this not critical to their career planning and even how they spend their time at work each day?

For those in a management role, this is the sole influence on how your staff think, feel and act and therefore the results they achieve. For those who doubt the sweeping nature of this statement, consider why one person in a sales team makes effortless sales yet another, working with the same product range, in the same market, can’t.

The brain structures for commitment to business goals are now well documented. Research into how the brain functions, how thinking forms and how it changes, how interactions with others influence our performance, and the role that management and leadership play in work results of work teams, is vast.

Daniel Goleman’s work in the area of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence was fundamental to the work conducted by David Rock in establishing the Neuroleadership Institute. Daniel Seigel’s book, The Developing Mind, is another example of how accessible this information has been made for us in business.

What I’m interested in is:
How the brain gets “stuck” with certain thoughts
How the brain changes and re-programmes itself
How managers can change the way people think
How sales people can influence the thinking of others (given that they are being bombarded all the time by advertisers and therefore listening selectively)
How organisations can get the best performance from people

Brain research gives us clear, and even simple, answers to these questions. It is just a matter of finding it and applying it. The sooner you do, the sooner you and your work team will start to tap into unused potential.

Each person’s brain has enough brain cells to stretch 2 million miles. Each brain is capable of a million billion connections. Each of these has the potential to cause a breakthrough idea.

It is time to USE what you purchase with your payroll.

Posted in B2B (Brain to Brain) communication | Leave a comment

Helping salespeople sell

I ran a sales workshop last week and was again reminded that salespeople don’t sell. They advertise. They get in front of clients and present information. Is that not what advertisers do? Sure, they make the message compelling in a range of ways….but so do advertisers. Selling is ensuring people are driven to take action. That is different from getting in front of clients and presenting information. If it were that simple, companies would simply use direct mail. It would be a lot cheaper!

Many people say that when they make a purchase decision, they weigh up the pros and cons and they make a logical, deliberate choice. Research shows something else. It shows us that ALL people (including analytical, technical people) make decisions emotionally and then justify their YES or NO decision using logic.

Understanding more about how the brain works helps to make sense of this. The right, emotional hemisphere is the side that is driven to change. The left, logical and analytical side sticks with what you know to be true. So, leave it to the left brain and you’d never try anything new. In selling, you have to use right brain communication strategies such as emotion, symbols, stories, pictures, metaphor and intrigue.

Once you capture people’s imagination…..once you move (even disturb) them enough………. and IF your service is the right fit, selling is easy. Closing the deal is harder as there may be a range of others involved in a purchase decision who become involved later in the process and who are in left-brain mode when they go through the supplied information “cold”. Very often at this stage, the sales process grinds to a halt.

The sales process you use therefore depends on the type of service you sell, type pf customers you sell to and time taken from initial contact to transaction completion. Understanding the right/left brain process of decision-making helps you to formulate a reliable sales process. This has given rise to a whole new area of research called Neuromarketing.

Change your sales formula and you will change your results. It was encouraging to watch the salespeople on the course rise to the challenge: how can you disturb your customers sufficiently that they are driven to act, to improve their current position? Having come to the course with the objective of learning how to influence people, they could immediately see the value of this in key relationships in their business (and even home lives!)

We are all highly susceptible to influence. You decide – be the influenced or be the one doing the influence.

Posted in How to change people | Leave a comment

People past their use-by date?

Last week I ran a public People Management workshop and was once more reminded that people are the make or break element in a business. As I listened to the people “issues” that make up the average manager’s typical day (not counting the myriad that may fly under the radar) I was reminded of the hidden cost where the people you have are not the people you want.

Part of the message of the course is the T.O.P. concept – people need all three skill types to be of real value: TECHNICAL (relating exclusively to their role), OPERATIONAL (referring to how they deliver the outcomes from their role including time management, planning, problem solving and so on) and PEOPLE (including all aspects of interpersonal contact – customers, peers and leaders.)

Many of the issues with people seem to come about when we as leaders do not perpetually stretch them in a deliberate direction. If we leave their development to chance, after five years they will only have one year of experience – the same year repeated five times.

The best way to keep people valuable to the business is to keep them closely plugged in with their customers (who could be internal) and their customers’ customers. Work out how far downstream you need to go with this approach and then make sure they are in contact with the issues at that part of the supply chain. Without their being in meaningful contact with the issues that their services are designed to resolve, they will gradually skew the role in favour of their own needs. This is a survival reaction to the disjointed way we structure organisations. We make it difficult for people to remain relevant. As they repeat actions that are determined by their own thoughts in isolation, these will eventually drive their thoughts and actions each day – they will become hard-wired to being irrelevant.

They may even become quite indignant when challenged as to the use of their time and other resources – especially if they have been doing things a certain way for a long time, with no coaching input.

As a manager, I took my people development responsibilities really seriously. While it is true that as I teach this stuff and therefore I had to, I believe I was fulfilling my role as manager to ensure that my staff were constantly adding value in their roles and constantly improving. Each month they were given a developmental task that grew a skill in a pre-agreed area. I would plan these out 6 months at a time. While some would be replaced as other needs emerged, I generally only did the planning once every 6 months and then drip feed the developmental activities each month. It really worked – when I subsequently left the organisation, my 2IC was ready for the step-up.

Call it Kaizen, call it Continuous Improvement – there are numerous terms for the process of constant change, but in a competitive environment it is a matter of survival.

There is enough evidence now to suggest that our brain is designed to evolve and grow, and when we fail to make this happen in the workplace, we are not only working against nature but robbing our businesses of their best competitive weapon – the brilliance of the human brain.

Expect more from people, ensure they stay plugged in to those who receive value from their services (either directly, indirectly or both) and challenge them to keep improving themselves. Not only will you enjoy your role more; not only will you be giving the business the best chance of success; you will also be giving people a gift that keeps on giving throughout their careers.

Posted in How to change people | Leave a comment

Financial literacy

It was Jan Carlzon, that superb leader of Scandinavian Airlines, who said:
“An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.”

Without information, staff make sense of things in their own way. Do you want to leave this to chance? Do you want them to have an idea of their role in the business based on what someone hurriedly conveyed to them first day on the job; and never again, since?

Or would you rather they know the following……..?
• The cost to the business for every minute they are there
• What revenue is needed to cover this cost and provide your target margin
• The effect of their moment-by-moment choices and actions on this
• The role they play in increasing income and/or decreasing outgo
• A productivity formula where they can constantly assess whether they are contributing what the business needs, and how to continuously improve this

A restaurant owner (true story, apparently) was frustrated by the repeated burning of hamburgers in the kitchen. He gave the kitchen staff one piece of information: the number of additional hamburgers that had to be sold to recoup the loss due to one burnt hamburger. The result? Their behaviour instantly changed – no more burnt hamburgers.

Financial literacy, commercial nous (whatever you want to call it) is essential for staff to contribute fully in their role. Albert Koopman, the legendary founder of Cashbuild, fully involved his staff in every aspect of the business. When they wanted shares in the business, he knew he had succeeded in educating them financially. Google his name – read about his success for yourself.

So:
• Decide what financial info you can share with staff
• Let them know what margin is needed in the business and what influences income and outgo
• Have them work on a productivity formula (or contribution calculator – call it something significant). Don’t spoon feed them with ratios that turn you on! Rather let them develop their own more meaningful measures, and decide how to report back their progress and improvements. (Message? Up to you to prove your contribution to the business.)
• Emphasise the value of simplicity and speed of info-gathering. Analysis paralysis rarely improved the bottom line.
• Be patient – these measures may be rough to start with but they will refine these over time as they get smarter.

Remember: You purchase their whole brain with your payroll; why not use it?

Posted in Measuring return on people expenses | 1 Comment

Presenteeism, Absenteeism and Disengagement

Today, the head of the United States Institute of Health and Productivity told TV ONE’s Breakfast programme how the issue of presenteeism adversely affects business performance.

Sean Sullivan defined presenteeism as “employees whose ability to work is compromised by a health problem and they’re there but they’re not fully there.”

See the post “People Management” for the true cost of employing staff. Presenteeism is yet another pressure on the bottom line for Business New Zealand.

Not only do SMEs (bearing in mind that 99% of New Zealand organisations are SMEs and 87% of the total number employ 5 or fewer people) have to function encumbered by absenteeism and legislated sick days that people take by way of entitlement whether they are sick or not, but now we realise that many of those at work are not productive either! A report on the website “Management Issues” puts the cost to the UK economy of presenteeism as high as £13bn.

Examples of presenteeism are wide ranging, including seasonal allergies, chronic pain, diabetes, arthritis, mental problems and emotional issues, all of which impact on people’s concentration, accuracy and productivity in general.

It is a wonder any businesses in New Zealand have any profit at all when you consider the fact that only 1% of our organisations have economies of scale (100+ staff) where the less productive can be carried by the others to some extent without it having a fatal effect on the bottom line. The fact is very few do, or at best the profit is a fraction of what the business owners went into business to achieve.

My particular interest is in the third category (although I can understand most of the focus going on the more visible former two issues.) Disengaged staff are not “employed” as such. Yes, they draw a salary or wage, but what they do each day is “change location” from home to work, and do very little to contribute to the effective functioning of the business. Indeed, many get in the way of others trying to do so.
These people are very adept at appearing productive. But generally their colleagues can see right through this and wonder why management a) can’t see it and/or b) won’t do something about it. The message? High performance is not that important to the business.

For a business to be successful – more so in New Zealand than anywhere else because of our scale challenges – every individual has to be fully engaged………head and heart on the job for the time that they are at work. What they do in their own time is up to them but surely it is reasonable to expect that if they are paid their full entitlement come pay day, then they can be expected to be fully contributing during work hours.

As a country (at a time when we are hearing weekly about the skilled people we are losing to Australia) only when we address this issue head on can we hope to improve our overall domestic performance, and strive for the level of earnings we all know is possible.

Posted in People at work | Leave a comment

Cost-justifying training spend

Return on dollars invested in a variety of people-related expenses in business (including conferences, training courses and on-the-job training – direct and indirect costs) can be measured in a number of ways.

The bottom line of this argument is: any activity that is directly related to making sales or reducing costs (including those due to inefficiencies or lack of initiative and commitment) is going to impact the bottom line of your business – directly or indirectly. Any investment to improve either one of these can be shown to yield a positive return IF you inject preparation and follow up into the equation, instead of sending people away to be trained in isolation.

Do you want to spend money to prove the return on investment, which can be costly as an exercise in itself? Or do you want to put your time and energy into ensuring the intervention impacts on the businesses as needed, and instead use the international ROI research from the last 50 years to cost-justify the spend?

A manager said last week that he was on the verge of firing someone when he invested in some people management coaching earlier this year. (We spent about 2 hours face to face,  had a couple of phone discussions and exchanged a couple of emails.) That “problem” person became the company’s star performer inside 3 months and went on to secure a million dollar plus sale. The spend on this training was about 0.1% of that sale. Those returns are hard to beat! This manager was able to change this person and their results through that investment.

It is understandable that business owners and managers want ROI evidence as there is too much expenditure that does not yield positive results. The post “People Management” refers to research showing the cost of staff as at least 50% more than actual salary – due to a range of indirect costs of employing staff.

No manager I have asked says they are getting 100% return on that investment, yet where is the call for evidence of return from that investment? Is this just a human thing that when someone else spends money it has dubious value but when I spend money, it is justified?  I do wonder why business owners are reluctant to spend a mere fraction of what staff cost every minute of every day to increase the return on what they are spending anyway. Especially when you consider what the research tells us about the value of well-designed interventions – see more below.

One company I worked with four years ago for three months (half a day a week) attributed their continued trading to this intervention. The return may be roughly calculated as their net profit over X years plus what they will make (minus cost of sale) when they sell the business (which was their original goal for starting out in the first place) minus the $10,000 in the intervention minus the indirect costs of time spent by the business implementing the solution, minus what they could’ve made as two individuals working together (over X period) which was the alternative.

Those are some anecdotal examples; here are some large scale research examples reported in Branded Customer Service by Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart:
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), found that for high investors in employee training:
 Shareholder “market to book” value was 20% higher
 Net sales per employee were 57% greater
 Gross profits per employee were 37% steeper

It was estimated that a minor drop in employee engagement in Singapore cost that economy between $4.9 billion and $6.7 billion annually. (Gallop Management Journal, October 9, 2003.)

Lyle Spenser claims that while results vary from company to company, in general, every 1% improvement in service climate delivers a 2% increase in revenue. (From “Improvement in Service Culture Drives Increase in Revenue” – paper presented at Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 19, 2001.)

While researching this topic I discovered a paper dating back to 1979, quoting research from 1965. One can only imagine the amount of research generated over a 50-year period!

I suggest you use the results of research conducted by numerous multinationals with deep pockets, and instead turn energy and attention to maximising YOUR return on training spend.

There are two key ways you can do this:

1. Ensure you specify what you expect people to bring back from any training opportunity and how you expect them to change themselves and the business as a result. Have them report back on their success with achieving this mission straight after the course, reviewing their personal improvement and action plans.

2. Set them a one-month assignment to measure pre-post changes. Support them with this but allow them to work out how to calculate the benefit to the business of their new skills and workplace actions. Their measures may not be scientifically perfect  but Einstein did say: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Developing financial literacy in staff is essential for optimum business performance – so that everyone makes the right calls, day in day out. As managers and business owners, you’re outnumbered. It is not what you do, but what those around you do that makes the difference.

(More about financial literacy in another blog entry.)

Posted in Measuring return on people expenses | 1 Comment

People change

Sometimes managers say: Can people change? Do they, in reality? Well, I have had at least 6 conversations just in the last week that reinforce my certainty that people can and do change with the right people change intervention.

One person, who I had thought would probably not be able to change his situation, has indeed done so in the three weeks following a one-day workshop. He is taking the action required, and this will now have a flow-on effect to others and their actions. Another person, a team leader, came on a course I ran a week ago. He had six months earlier attended a people management course. He said: “Remember that staff member who was so difficult? I have solved that issue.” He explained that he had applied the techniques from the workshop, and she had completely changed. Imagine what this did to his confidence and resolve. Of course, she was just reacting to his communication approach – once he changed this, so did she.

Another manager relayed to me this week how she had held the performance conversations she needed to, and had been putting off. She had a few more questions about how to activate peer pressure and we were able to generate approaches likely to work in that situation specifically.

Another manager, three weeks since his attendance at a one-day people management course, told me about the conversations he has successfully conducted that had given the outcomes he wanted. He spoke about the value the new skills would have for licensees of their products (who run small businesses with all the associated people challenges) and his intention to arrange this.

Email contact with a supervisor who attended the same programme has led to her arrangement for 4 other people to learn this information – she said she has been telling everyone who will listen about her new knowledge.

The sixth person I have spoken to will be featured in next week’s post: Cost-justifying training spend. It is an amazing example of the tangible return on money spent improving people in a business.

These are all leaders in very different types of business, and they all have one thing in common. They came into a course as one type of person, and they left a day later having made significant CHANGE to themselves. This in turn led to a CHANGE in their behaviour. This in turn led to a CHANGE in the behaviours of the people on their team. The flow on effect is to the performance of the business.

The bottom line: People can and do change. I hear these sorts of stories every week. It is why I do what I do. It takes two people to keep an unproductive dynamic going and just one person to break it, and change it into a productive performance partnership.

Posted in How to change people | Leave a comment