Do I Have To Earn Your Trust or Earn Your Distrust?

When I interview prospective clients for the recruiting and consulting side of business, it’s important that I understand the culture and learn what I’m dealing with.   So I ALWAYS ask this dynamite question:  Just think of the knowledge I garner from the possible answers. And ask yourself, what would employees say about me if I was asked this question?

“At this company which statement is more correct?”

A.    I have to earn your trust?  OR

B.    I have to earn your distrust?

Most narcissistic people I have met want all the glory.  Their writings and verbal discussions are so filled with the words, “I and ME” that it becomes nauseating.  But let somebody on the team make a mistake and it suddenly becomes all about “that” person and what is worse, the narcissistic wants everybody to know that the mistake wasn’t his/her fault.

Let’s examine what the some of the ramifications of answers to either A or B.

A:  Tells me that this person doesn’t trust anybody;  That he/she is going to always be watching over my shoulder ready to pounce on the first mistake;  That he/she probably has a personality that wreaks of “I’m always right;” That he/she has no problem speaking or acting in a condescending manner just make him/herself appear as the only authority; And probably a guy or gal that will ride you hard and put you away wet time after time and without any compassion for the consequences.  PERSONALLY, THIS IS NOT MY FAVORITE KIND OF PERSON>

B:  Tells me that this person is confident and mostly defined in their role; That he/she sees the value in me; That they trust me to do achieve what my talents, abilities and promises allow me; That they understand there will be bumps in the road but that we will probably all learn and move forward;  That he/she will probably be a good mentor and help guide to excellence for both myself and the company.  PERSONALLY, I GRAVITATE TOWARDS THESE TYPES OF PROFESSIONALS.

Within any given industry today, there so may people in the “A” category that cost their companies thousands if not millions of dollars.  Micro-Managing and Micro-Managers are NOT good for business.  If you company experiences this and you can’t find a fix, you can review a short 4 hour process we perform on site call Management Acclimatization® and I’d be happy to discuss this at any time.

Be a great citizen this week and make it wonderful for not only you but everybody around you.  Call or write if I can help.

Regards,

George F. Mancuso, CPC, CEO

Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Has Your Title Clouded Your Progress?

“Okay George I took your advice and invited my key executives and department heads to an offsite dinner meeting.  They were told to bring two sentences that described me on an unsigned piece of paper so I didn’t know who wrote what.  I assured everybody there would be no indignation or retaliation just a learning experience for me to be a better owner.  And much to my shock, I was defined as a micro-manager and narcissistic.”

“Once I got my composure, we talked and there is no doubt I have been a micro-manager and yes I certainly give off the appearance that it IS all about me.  So now George my old friend of great wisdom, “HOW DO I FIX ME?”  (Sammy M. CEO, Heavy Equipment Manufacturing, Missouri)

First and foremost, you must want to change for the good of YOU.  Management and ownership of any company comes with tremendous responsibilities.  You must demonstrate knowledge, judgment and technique on the business side.  And you must be filled with logic, compassion and understanding on the personal side.  But most of all you must demonstrate CONFIDENCE IN YOUR TEAM!  If there is no confidence then there is no team or worse there is no manager.

Your personal experiences may give you a false sense of security or confidence in the quest to manage your organization affectively.  Most all companies are filled with live, breathing, human beings who have brains and are willing to use them.  USE THE RESOURCES that you have within your organization because they have talent and abilities and because you have confidence in them.

The next concept you must grasp is a little word called, “TRUST.”  This is one of the most difficult processes to master for a micro manager.  Learn to delegate and have an understanding  that other people are in most cases, NEVER going to do it just like you do.  Be willing to deal with it and become a mentor/teacher so those employees improve and continue to make your life easy.

You must learn to hold your tongue.  Get the people who attended the dinner to give you a secret signal when they hear you get on one of your “hey look at me moods.”  Think of the words you say and ask yourself, “How would I react if my boss just said that to me?”  You CAN teach old dog new tricks and you must start retraining yourself to give the accolades to the team and take the heat when heat comes on behalf of the team.

There is no magic, just discipline of self.  If you don’t want to improve, I can say with some certainly you will never achieve measurable improvement.  If you are having problems getting your arms around this problem perhaps a Management Acclimatization® event in your conference room is in order.

Remember that your thoughts of today are programming your tomorrow.  If you woke up this morning and said to you, “this is going to be a terrible day” it probably will be.  So why not wake up each day and tell yourself, “I’m going to be a better person today” and you will be.  Again I say to you, YOUR THOUGHTS OF TODAY ARE PROGRAMMING YOUR TOMORROW!  Use that thought process wisely and you will reap the rewards.

Have a tremendous week.

Regards,

George F. Mancuso, CEO
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

How Do We Retain Employees Without Busting The Budget?

WE DON’T HAVE THE BUDGET TO BOOST SALARIES, SO HOW DO WE STILL RETAIN TOP EMPLOYEES?

Money is a convenient and overused excuse for turnover. It is rare that money alone causes the typical employee to leave. Most employees would willingly take a little less money than they could make somewhere else if they find other things they value more in their work environment—challenge, developmental opportunities, friendships with peers and supervisors, flexibility, appreciation and other real benefits.

Even in cases where employees are happy with the job, knowing that they are paid significantly below market can cause hard feelings and lead to turnover. Money is a natural and fundamental concern. As such, it often deserves serious, albeit painful, consideration and action by even the most cash-strapped organization.

Before you spend a penny on additional salary, benefits or other programs, it is important to find out specifically what is broken in your relationship with employees. If you don’t do this, you risk fixing the wrong things and wasting precious money, time, effort and good will. Here are a few data-gathering techniques that have worked well for me over the years:

Exit Interviews:
Identify what leads your employees to read want ads or accept a call from a recruiter in the first place.

There are a number of good questions you can use to get the information you need. One of my favorites is “Tell me about the three things you’d change tomorrow if you owned the company.” Another is “What things, if changed, would have prevented you from considering another job?”

An active and patient listener will glean a lot of good information from these questions.

Focus Groups and Surveys;
There are a number of decent employee-opinion survey products commercially available. Learning to do a focus group is easily within the grasp of most HR professionals.

Even so, I prefer using objective, experienced third parties to do this kind of work. Employees often feel that outsiders will keep their input more confidential and are less likely to have their feelings hurt by the results of focus groups than will company personnel. Focus groups and surveys done by outside personnel tend to get more forthright answers than those done by in-house personnel.

Retention Interviews;
Identify the employees you really, really need to keep. Sit down with them and discuss the company, their personal satisfaction, ideas to make their job even better than it is, and related topics.

Showing your interest is often rewarded with additional commitment and longevity.

One word of caution for all of these techniques: Don’t use them if you aren’t willing to listen to what people think. More important, if you are not willing to consider making changes, you are well advised not to ask. The “sugar high” of raised expectations quickly diminishes into all-time lows of employee morale if people think you aren’t listening.

You will find that the answers to turnover are not as elusive as you may think. They are, in reality, fairly basic. The suggestions you harvest from employees will help you design the practical solutions you need and can afford.

Regards,

George F. Mancuso, CPC CEO
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Why You Must Build Management Capability - Continued

This is part 2 of 2 of the article I posted on October 14, 2012

Actions to take
    Doing the bare minimum of training and development—just enough to keep your organization within the law, and to keep from being sued—can easily lead to behaviors that damage companies’ reputations. Once damaged, a reputation takes significant time and money to restore. Some companies never really recover. Before find yourself in a position of losing top talent or dealing with a weakened organizational reputation, you can invest in processes to improve the management capability in your organization.

    Human resource leaders are in an ideal position to influence all the elements needed to change the role of managers and to help their organizations build management capability. Many elements are needed, of course, but the first is the sponsorship of the most senior leaders to ensure buy-in and demonstrable support for the process. The rest of the elements involve your organization’s beliefs, values and culture. All of these are levers for change and are necessary to reinforce norms and expectations.

    Building management capability goes beyond training. It includes transforming the organization’s culture so that it values the role that management plays in attracting and retaining top talent and setting forth clear expectations for the manager’s role. As this model indicates, all organizations have an underlying set of beliefs about the importance of the manager. Organizations that have strong management capabilities believe that managers are critical for their ability to attract, retain and motivate employees. Strong beliefs influence the values of an organization, and consequently, culture.

    Each of the levers of change in the model represents an area that organizations must consider if they want to build strong management capability. Just focusing on one lever of change will not bring about lasting change in management capability; the current culture will overwhelm small changes. By focusing on numerous change levers, organizations can modify the culture and create long-term change. Briefly, the levers represent the following considerations:

·         Leadership: An organization’s leadership must both believe in the value of the role that managers play and must lead by example.

·         Communication: The leadership team must consistently communicate the importance of the role of the manager to the organization and its ability to achieve high performance, attract talent and retain it.

·         Competencies: Management competencies must be assessed and developed. Entry into a management role must be predicated on an appropriate, although not necessarily perfect, set of skills.

·         Measurement and rewards: Any effective strategy must be integrated into the scorecard. It must be measured and rewarded.

·         Structure and symbols: The role of a manager must be structured so that the manager can spend sufficient time with direct reports. The term "manager" must mean something in terms of role expectations.

    By focusing on these levers of change, the organization will develop new norms and expectations for behavior. The organizational beliefs regarding the management role will actually conform to what the levers of change are encouraging: a belief that managers’ roles do make a difference.

Leadership first: showing the way
    Levers for change begin with leadership. Leadership sets the tone and shows the way. How your leaders think will cast the mold for the rest of the organization.

    It must be clear to others that your organization’s leaders believe that management capability is an asset worth time and resources. Where leaders demonstrate this through their own behaviors, the organizations will have corresponding success. Having leaders publicly recognize individuals for outstanding team management (as opposed to personally exceeding business goals) will set the tone for the importance the organization places on the role of the manager in delivering results.

    When leaders spend time with their direct reports, setting clear goals and expectations, providing feedback and actively working to build bench strength in the organization, they are setting expectations for how others will act. Take Jack Welch during his GE days. He spent a great deal of his personal time both developing his own successor (I’ve preached for years that you should always be training your replacement) and developing leadership capability throughout the organization by participating the GE’s management development programs. As a consequence, GE is constantly cited as having one of the best leadership development programs in the world. This happened because the senior leadership believed in the value of its leaders and made investments to insure they could deliver their maximum capability.

    Also, leaders are the ones who primarily create an organization’s fundamental beliefs, values and culture. Where leaders go astray, organizations often follow. Creating a powerful culture takes time. But leaders can play a powerful role in establishing the outward signs of culture and behaviors that they both embody and endorse.

Communication: keeping everyone on the same page
    Organizations tend to undervalue communication. But communication plays a powerful role as the vehicle through which leaders demonstrate and publicly recognize the desired behaviors in the organization. How leaders talk about managers sets a clear message for what is expected in the organization. Strong communication systems can help organizations build strong cultures and enhance performance.

Competencies: The essential building blocks
    Identifying the critical competencies that make managers successful in your organization is the first step in creating the new manager role. New managers who are hired and current employees who are promoted into management roles must be selected because they have the capability to deliver on key functions of this role. These competencies include such skills as setting goals that fit the business strategy, providing coaching and feedback to others and helping employees understand how they fit into the big picture.

    Often promotions are given because someone is a good individual contributor. Good technical skills are a far cry from good management skills. We need alternative career structures if the only way to move up in the organization is to become a manager. Not all great individual contributors make great managers. By having management competencies defined within an organization we can also coach and develop individuals on how to improve in these specific areas.

Measuring, rewarding and reinforcing
    It’s a cliché, but it’s true: That which gets measured and rewarded gets done. If you don’t include management competencies and results for such areas as reduction in turnover or developing staff to improve organizational bench strength in performance appraisal systems, managers will not focus on these issues. Organizations that reward their managers for being good managers will stand the greatest chance of building strong management capability over time. Rewards do not need to take the form of money. In fact, simple public recognition of strong management skills sends a message to the rest of the organization: Managers are important to us.

Organization structure: the key symbol
    When organizations design jobs so that managers must spend 90 percent of their time doing non-management work, we send a very clear message about how we view the management aspects of a manager’s role: They are not important. We need to redesign organizational structures to support managers so they can truly manage the talent within the organization.

    By involving your leaders, crafting key messages, developing managers and examining the current messages managers receive about their role in managing others, HR leaders can change how managers are viewed, and how they view themselves.

    The process of building better managers is not fast or cheap. But the rewards can be substantial and well worth the effort.

Regards,

George F. Mancuso

George F. Mancuso, CPC 

Why You Must Build Management Capability

(part 1 of 2)

In the past, organizations have clung to the belief that as long as they had competitive products and services, they could enhance their performance by hiring strong leadership and top talent. While this focus has worked in some cases, in today’s highly competitive labor market—and yes, it is going to get much worse—organizations competing for top talent may be missing the essential managerial skills and processes needed to succeed over the long term.

    Today’s Generation X employees have much higher expectations of what managers should do to support them compared with the prior generation. Furthermore, the new entrants into the workforce, known variously as Generation Y, Millennial or Generation Next, have still greater needs for immediate feedback and development. These young workers are accustomed to praise, reinforcement and time to develop their interests and skills. How can organizations capture and retain this new talent, as well as slightly older up-and-coming leaders?

    Research suggests that most organizations neglect the role of managers, undervalue it and therefore suffer from a lack of strong management capability.  Many valid surveys’ indicates that employees who plan to stay with their current companies are twice as likely as employees who say they might or might not stay to report that their managers recognize their talents and encourage them to use those talents to the fullest extent.

    I would say that the trend that is emerging is not pretty. Today’s managers are also individual co se today’s employees want more from their managers and workplaces, not less. And they are willing to walk out of your workplace if they don’t get it.

    While employees are hungry for praise and eager to get help expanding their capabilities, there is, unfortunately, a corresponding capability gap among managers to give them what they need. This deficit exists for many reasons, including:

Years of downsizing means companies expect more from fewer employees. There simply is not enough time for managers to devote to mentorship and employee development.

·         Insufficient skills. Managers don’t know how to provide feedback and develop people.

·         A dearth of rewards. Managers are rewarded based upon individual contributions and achievements, not their management skills.

·         The mistaken belief that "one size fits all." The same rewards approach won’t motivate everyone.

·         Organizations do not place a high enough value on the role of the manager.

Employees don’t leave companies; they leave their managers (I’ve said this time and time again)
    Employees want managers who will provide goals and direction, feedback and coaching—and who recognize and reward them for good performance. Yet research indicates that managers are not delivering on these expectations. One possible reason is that managers’ roles are not designed to focus on managing people. Most managers spend 90 percent of their time on technical and administrative tasks and only 10 percent of their time on activities related to managing and developing the people who report to them.

    There is a wealth of research indicating that management behavior is a key factor in retention. This is nothing new. Recent research has consistently shown that dissatisfaction with one’s manager is a top reason for leaving the organization.

    More recently, three different research studies—in 1999,. in 2000 and in 2003—examined the factors that predicted whether employees would stay with or leave their current organizations. Some of the most commonly found items predicting intention to leave were:

·         Insufficient feedback and coaching.

·         Insufficient learning and development opportunities.

·         Insufficient reward and recognition for their work.

·         Insufficient sense that their organization values them.

    Management is responsible for delivering on each of these job factors. No one else can affect how an employee feels as dramatically and tangibly as an employee’s immediate manager. The most effective managers are those who know their employees’ strengths and development needs so well that they know which assignments to give based on balancing both organizational needs and those of the employees.

    Coaching and feedback make up one area that is receiving the most attention in organizations today. Employee survey results in company after company are showing that employees want and expect feedback. Research conducted with Gen Xers tells us that this age group not only expects feedback from their managers, but demands it. The Millennial Generation is even more voracious in its need for coaching and input.

    Finally, people want to know that they are appreciated when they do a good job or put in extra effort. Good managers praise employees in ways that raise self-esteem and commitment to the organization. Poor managers just expect it all, and, as a consequence, praise nothing. What they really get is turnover, and lots of it. And then they get less productivity out of the people who do stay.

What actions to take?  Watch your Sunday (October 21, 2012) email for some of the answers

Regards,

George F. Mancuso

George F. Mancuso, CPC