Leaders Can Show The Way

Change begins 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 ( Gman says: 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, CPC
President
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Don’t Underestimate the Role of Managers During Times of Change

    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 you 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 initiatives 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 initiations of change in the model represents an area that organizations must consider if they want to build strong management capability. Just focusing on one trigger point of change will not bring about lasting change in management capability; the current culture will overwhelm small changes. By focusing on numerous change initiatives, organizations can modify the culture and create long-term change. Briefly, review 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 valid points 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 intrinsic intention of change is encouraging: a belief that managers’ roles do make a difference.

Regards,
George F. Mancuso, CPC
President
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

QUESTION:  HOW DO WE MEASURE THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT OF KEEPING OUR TOP PERFORMERS?

DISCUSSION:  Most companies today recognize the value of attracting and retaining a strong, competent workforce.  But most also don’t fully appreciate how they can improve retention rates.

When surveyed, employees indicate their top reasons for leaving a position are:

·        Not getting along with their direct supervisor.

·        Desire for more money.

·        Need for better work/life balance.

·        Lack of career growth, challenging assignments.

It’s noteworthy that three of the four top reasons are non-financial. Employers can do much to address these issues, but frequently only pay lip service to significantly enhancing the employee experience. If employers paid this little attention to their customers’ experience, they would likely be out of business.
So, what’s an enlightened employer to do?

• Actively demonstrate that you value the unique needs of each employee
• Tailor your HR and benefit programs to your workforce (flexible work schedules, choices in health plan options, PTO banks, etc.)
• Publicly recognize outstanding performance and employee achievements.
• Teach supervisors how to be good coaches and managers.
• Provide ongoing training on issues such as handling conflict, delivering difficult messages and conducting effective performance discussions.
• Ensure alignment between business goals and employee rewards.

• Appropriately mix base and variable pay.
• Unambiguously link performance to rewards.
• Clearly delineate between rewards for top and bottom performers.
• Nurture the employee ecosystem.
• Make sure employees understand what the organization values are.
• Practice what you preach—hold managers accountable for their actions and for tolerating or ignoring unacceptable behavior.
• Focus attention on high performers; deal effectively with marginal performers (Is an “up or out” philosophy right for you? Or, is a culture of mediocrity acceptable?).
• Ask top performers what makes them successful at your organization and why they stay.
• Ask employees what is and what is not working and act on their input.

Commonly used solutions today include pre-hire assessments, (WE OFFER AND UTILIZE THE DiSC® ASSESSMENT PROFILE) variable compensation programs, and links between the performance management and compensation systems (both strategic linkages and automated, processing-type linkages). Planned enhancements over the next year typically include the implementation of learning management systems and online skills/competency tracking systems.

Forward-thinking companies do a reasonable job of tracking the key performance indicators of retention, which have historically covered employee satisfaction levels, turnover rates and benchmarks for similar organizations, and worker productivity metrics. However, these measures do little to illuminate why retention issues occur. 

These basic measures should be expanded to track items such as employee satisfaction with specific areas of their job (their work, their supervisor, their pay, their commute, their co-workers); turnover rates should be evaluated by employee level, tenure, speed of advancement, performance rating, sex, age and other factors.

The key is to progress from simply tracking data to understanding information to determining cause and effect. Then you can affect your bottom line.  Client Growth Consultants is here to help.  Call or write and we will respond immediately!

George Mancuso, CPC
President
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Do You Pay Yourself?

Do You Pay Yourself?

PAY YOURSELF!!!

The holidays can be fun, but they can also add stress to our already crazy existence as business professionals.  If you close your eyes and review 2011 – would you make any changes?  Would your W-2 be higher?  Would you take better care of yourself?

Here is a chance to wave the magic wand…….Picture 2012 as a White Board which is very exciting and full of opportunities!  You can create anything you want for yourself next year.  Now ask yourself this question…..Do you know EXACTLY what you want?  Most people don’t get what they want out of life because they’re too busy worrying about everyone else to take time to determine what THEY want out of life.

During this extremely busy upcoming Holiday Season(s), find a quiet place for yourself for at least one hour.  Close your eyes and envision yourself one year from now, and you are celebrating your BEST YEAR EVER!

Now open your eyes and write down who was at this celebration, what you achieved and what you have to do (starting now) to make it happen.  Make certain some of these goals are “personal goals.”

Think about this…..

What you do for a living is admirable!

What you do for a living is challenging!

What you do for a living changes the lives of other people on a daily basis!  How incredible is that?

Put yourself on your Holiday Shopping List.  Reward yourself each month of 2012 when you achieve your monthly goals.  Your clients, your peers, your friends, your employees need YOU, to take care of YOURSELF in 2012, so that you can take care of them.

Don’t be afraid to pay yourself!  It will be well worth the investment.

Regards,

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