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Riding is an active endeavor requiring constant adjustments on the part of the rider. There are many styles of riding, but all of them involve ongoing, active effort by the rider as well as the horse. To keep your organization moving, you've got to take an active approach to moving along with it. You don't take the steps, but you do have to be there guiding and challenging it every step of the way. The work itself is what employees interact with and live with constantly. It is what they do, what they get paid for. what their job is. That work can be motivating, exciting, challenging, a great learning experience, a wonderful stepping stone to advancement—or it can be a drag, a bore, stressful, dull, dangerous, stupid, meaningless, without purpose, a rat race, a treadmil. In short, the work itself can have a huge influence on the people who do it, just as they have a huge influence on the work. Get the people matched with the right challenges and they blossom, and the bottom line grows too. If people are not properly challenged with work they like, find meaningful, and are motivated to do, then there is very little you can do as a leader to fix the situation. That continous relationship between the employee and their work is too pervasive and powerful for any leader to overcome with good leadership. In fact, good leadership is wasted on bad work. That is why the best leaders always keep an eye on the work itself, and view structuring and supervising employee tasks as a key part of their leadership role. They make sure everyone has a good "line of sight" from what they are doing to some darn good reason for why it needs to be done. Give Employees Checklists for Producing Great Results Usually managers focus attention on desired results by penalizing those who fall short and recognizing or rewarding those who achieve them. But results are the outcome of specific behaviors, so it is often better ro focus on the behavior instead. Make up a list of the three to six most important things to do (keep it positive—a don't list is not as likely to engage employee attention). Motivate by Sharing Specific Gains, Not General Profits Many companies have experimented with employrr profit-sharing plans, and in principle they should work well since they align the employees' financial interests with the company's. The problem is that individual employees are feel pretty far removed from the bottom line of the income statement and don't see clearly enough how what they do affects the results. If profitability seems out of their direct control, it will lack motivating power. But studies of gainsharing plans indicate that they work far better. What they do is link reward (or simple recognition) to one specific and measurable goal that is more directly in the employee's control. For instance, in one supermarket chain employees in some stores were offered bonuses if the stors' payroll costs were kept at or below 9.5 percent of the sales. Now, employees felt they could control this number by watching things like excessive "sick" days and overtime that make labor costs get out control, or by helping to boost sales through friendly service, good selection, and display merchandise. This was a game they could win. Sales went up by a quarter in the stores using this gainsharing plan and labor costs fell, even taking the bonuses into account. The Best Recognition Is a Good New Assignment Most managers say the trick to motivating employees is to give them recognition and rewards—and so they offer cash bonuses, certificates of appreciation, and other pats on the back. But when you ask employees, they often see it differently. To them, the best recognition of their worth is to be selected for a challenging, important new assignment or task. Their attitude often seem to be, "If you value my work, then show me by giving me valuable work to do." Select good employees for an important or highly visible job or role and you give them powerful evidence that they are truly appreciated. (If you haven't got any plum assignments to give out, then get creative and come up with some projects that your good performers can do. No point wasting all that talent!) Devote a Day to Good Work Deloitte Consulting staged an annual IMPACT Day in which many employees work on community projects and do volunteer work for charities. By saving this date on the calendar, the leaders ensure that employees take the idea of community work seriously and they encourage people to put some of their work time and other resources into the effort. I am sure that many employees are active in their communities throughout the year, but much of their effort is outside work. The special day dedicated to such efforts help make them more visible and shows that the company supports its employees in their charitable endeavors. You Can't Afford Not to Pay Them Well Steve Balmner, Microsoft's CEO, is big on cutting costs, but when it comes to the payroll, he is contrarian. In fact, when he took over the top job from Bill Gates, he immediately set about raising salaries in order to ensure that Microsoft's 40,000 employees were paid better than people of equivalent jobs at 65 percent of competing companies. The idea is to make sure nobody you value feels they are undervalued. On the other hand... don't expect pay to do the motivating. In one major study, employees reported they wanted on average 25 percent more pay than they now get—regardless of what their current pay rate is or how recently they received a raise. Nobody thinks thay are overpaid. And even if they did think they were overpaid, it wouldn't lead most people to work any harder than they do now. (If you've doubled everyone's pay today, would they produce twice as much tomorrow? I doubt it. In fact, productivity might actually go down.) Just make sure your people are not underpaid, since pay is far more powerful as a demotivator than a motivator. Providing a Healthy Level of Challenge Psychologist have known for a long time that people need the right level of challenge to function well and be self-motivated. Too much challenge is debilitating and produces anxiety and stress. Too little is boring and can also lead to a feeling of entitlement and a lack of initiative. But give someone a job that requires them to stretch a little and you'll often see peak performance. Now new research adds urgency to this principle of good on-the-job leadership by showing that people who have either too much or too little challenge in their work are a high risk of substance abuse. Greg Oldham and his associates found higher levels of smoking, drinking, and use of illegal drugs among employees who found their work either too simple or too challenging. The work literally drove them to drink, or worse. Their conclusions? "People may use substances to soothe the frustration they experience as a result of being over-or under-stretched by their jobs." (Journal of Health and Social Behavior). They recommand that managers regularly measure an employee's strengths and weakness and match them to appropriately rewarding work. In other words, manage the assignments you give your people, and the amount of support and assistance for doing those assignments, based on what an appropriate level of challenge is. You want them to feel that their work is an exciting and rewarding stretch. If you aren't sure you've got the mix right, you can always try asking them. Assign Improvement Goals Most managers give their employees a list of things to do. A powerful lesson from the many companies that have implemented quality management is that people are more inspired when their leader asks them to do something better. You don't need a formal quality program or any special tools or training to harness the power of this simple leadership technique. Just pick one thing for each employee or group/team of employees that you think they could improve upon (choose something they have enough control over to make it possible for them to improve it). Ask them to think avout how to do the worl better. Suggest that they find some simple ways to measure the quality of the work (like number produced, speed of turnaround, percentage of leads converted to customers. etc.) Then ask them to see if they can find ways to improve. Check back with them periodically and you will generally be rewarded by an enthusiastic description of how they are doing. But don't be critical if there is no improvement. The real benefit of this approach is that it gets your people involved in trying to improve, so make sure you recognize and praize effort as well as results. Help Employees Deal with Criticism As a leader, you need to give employees accurate information about what they have done wrong and its consequences—and give this news fasr. Sometimes, you will notice that the negative feedback discourages them to the point where they don't seem llikely to take positive action to learn from the mistake and do it better next time. This method adds a positive pat on the back and some encouragement at the end of the negative feedback (not the beginning please!). You can end by asking them for their ideas on how to improve (which affirms your belief in their ability to do so), by encouraging them to fix the problem, even just by smiling—a nonverbal form of positive feedback. Here are some simple scripted examples: The way you..............................the.................................did not work out well because it caused a problem with the.................................... I think you can figure out some way to avoid that king of problem in the future. [Smile.] Any ideas? I think your....................................had a few problems. Specifically,............................................... I think you can clean it up if you put a little more time in on it, okay? [Wait to make sure they really agree, then,] Thank you! [Smile.] This doesn't look right. It should be...................................... Can you fix this? [End with smile.] These are direct corrections in which the manager does not hesitate to point out a problem or error. Often there is nothing wrong with that, but managers may hesitate to do so for fear of seeming rude. It helps to practice giving this straight delivery of the "bad news" in a polite manner, with a friendly, encouraging smile at the end to let them know you believe they are capable and competent in general, in spite of the specific problem. Book, $10.95, signed by the author, reg price $19.95  |
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