Why Mid-Managers Are Lifeblood from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Kevin Burns, Workplace Expert, says most middle managers get very little training and are thrust into a role that most are ill-prepared for. It is the most thankless job and the one with the highest "hassle" factor. Add to that, when the economy tanks, middle managers are usually the first to go. The truth is, I am on the side of middle managers. I want them to get better.
You Call Yourself A Professional? from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Kevin Burns, Workplace Expert, tackles the subject of being a "professional." How can you call your people "professionals" when you only give them formal feedback once a year? Do you think Tiger gets one golf lesson each year? How about Kobe or Sidney Crosby? You say you run a "professional" organization but do you really?
If you want to toast with your co-workers, pick a neutral location away from the workplace. Do not, under any circumstances, allow alcohol to cross the threshold of your workplace.
In addition to being responsible for the behavior of your people under the influence, allowing alcohol into the office makes you responsible for virtually everything that your people do between the time they leave the office and actually arrive at home. That includes how they get home. But host an event in a bar or hotel ballroom, and then the responsibility is on the host facility to ensure their guests don’t get too drunk and disruptive.
Do not host a party in the workplace. Your workplace is for working. Bars are for drinking. If you want to have your people enter into a high-performance mindset when they walk through the doors each day, don’t allow them to come out of that mindset while they are in the office by creating a memory of drunken or lascivious behavior fueled by alcohol. Focus.
Build your culture of high-performance by keeping focused. Assess every activity (including the Christmas party) to ensure that you are not sending your people mixed messages. Doing so creates difficulty for managers and hurts your Culture.
If you want to celebrate with your people, take it outside.
Each person on my list will get an appropriate gift and gifts that have meaning for them. How? They told me what they wanted.
I carry a Blackberry and over the course of a year, I have many interactions with the people on my Christmas gift list. In conversation, they will usually give up some piece of information about something they’ve seen, heard about or just gotta have. I simply enter that information in my Blackberry. Then, come Christmas shopping, I simply pull out the Blackberry and purchase a few items from their individual lists. Hey, it’s exactly how Santa does it. You know the “making a list and checking it twice” thing. At the heart of it all is a list. Make one and you take away your stress.
Look you can’t manage Christmas or your family but you can manage how you find the perfect gift - pay attention all year long. Write it down. Get it into a list or a database of some sort. Then, in a few hours, after you’ve mapped out your stores geographically, you are done in no time.
The busiest and most stressful time of the year are the 10 days leading up to Christmas at the malls. Why, if there were a better way, would you put yourself through the stress year after year? You get to enjoy quiet times at home while others are losing their minds at the mall.
Now give yourself a daily reminder on your Blackberry starting December 26 to pay attention to the conversations going on around you. Don’t worry, once you start entering things into your lists it will simply come naturally.
Meanwhile, good luck out there. I’m home with my cup of tea, feet up, stretched out on the leather sofa watching the original Miracle on 34th Street on the big screen. Yes Virginia, there really is an easy way to be Santa.
Some organizations are refocusing and re-naming their Casual Fridays "First Date Fridays" and encouraging their employees to dress as though they were attempting to impress a first date by wearing something appropriate and sophisticated. Others are banning jeans outright so they don't have to deem one pair of jeans acceptable and another not. No flip-flops, no tank tops, no shorts, no halter tops and yes, underwear ... always. Other organizations are offering their employees the chance to dress down (just a little) for a donation to a charity.
Right now the data is being gathered to determine whether Casual Day is leading to a slide to casual service, casual language and casual productivity. I will bet it does. If you lower the standard in one area of your workplace you end up lowering the standard in all areas. Casual is casual no?
The problem is that for the employee, Casual Fridays make the day all about the clothes (or lack of them in some cases) and not about the work anymore. If your people aren't grasping the whole "dress responsibly" thing, it's likely because you, as a manager, have been ineffective in getting the message across.
Casual Fridays is as much a test of communication and Culture as it is about wearing your comfy clothes for a day. If you want your people to dress appropriately, articulate effectively what you would like to see. Otherwise, you'll be putting out fires from staff members who are offended by the dress of other staff members.
Casual Fridays can work but like the other four days of the week, there are standards that must be adhered to.
Oh, and for a chuckle, watch this short clip from CBS's The Office about Casual Fridays.
Strange isn’t it that people can go to the mall to buy a beautiful gift for a loved one while at the same time thumbing their noses at everyone else. They don’t care how they park, they don’t care that they take up two spaces and they certainly don’t care that they inconvenience you. No because they’re selfish, self-absorbed little idiots who, if they understood the spirit of the season, would park respectfully to allow others to have a happy holiday season as well.
So here’s my solution: it’s Filter-Free Fridays™ so the gloves are off. Right now, cut and paste the following and put it into a Word document four or five times on a page. Make it 16-point type and a bold font and when you print them out, cut them into strips:
Carry a bunch of these in your car this Holiday Season. You’re going to need them. It’ll take the edge off when you place one under a windshield wiper. Then you can go shopping smiling - with the full Holiday Spirit inside of you. And if you see someone parking like a jerk, correct them before they walk away from their car. I’ll bet most sheepishly return to their cars and park properly. Embarrassment works.
Organizations have become quite competent at making customers wait and you’re likely quite aware of how long your customers are forced to wait. But have you considered how much your employees wait?
Employees who are forced to wait, especially waiting for fellow workers, cause your people to think. When they think, they reflect on how bored they are waiting, When they discover how bored they are, they blame the job. When they discover how boring the job is, they disengage.
But you, as a manager, can Tweak™ the disengagement out of your people and get them to actively engage. Tweak™ing can identify problems and boredom before they become problems. Tweak™ Management creates dialogue between employees and managers.
Remove wait times for your employees and they actively engage. But only managers who communicate with their people regularly will be able to eliminate boredom. Otherwise, your people sit around waiting to speak with their managers about how long they are forced to wait.
Part of the reason behind Filter-Free Fridays™ is to give you a chance to tell your team members, fellow employees and the really important people in your life how you really feel about them - especially if they impact your life in a positive way.
Everyone should have at least one person who impacts their life in a positive way. If you don't have one, you're hanging out with the wrong crowd. I have one in my life that, over these past two years, has made a tremendous contribution to my life in helping me be better - every day.
Her name is Trish and we have known each other since Grade 4. She got pushed ahead the year after we met allowing her to skip Grade 5 so, come high school, we never took any of the same classes. But I saw her everyday. Once, I asked her on a date when I was 15 - she said yes. I took her to a school dance but never asked for a second date only because I thought she was just being nice by agreeing to go out with me - she wasn't. My self-image as a teenage boy needed some work. So I had to live with my crush on her and never acted on it for fear that she might say no.
Going to a small high-school of 200 students in a small town, everyone knew everyone else. We had the same teachers, went to the same church, had the same friends, knew each others' parents and came from the same economic background. We had history and a keen understanding of each other's values. We came from the same place physically and philosophically.
After high-school graduation we went our separate ways: her off to university and me off to Kapuskasing, Ontario to take a radio job. We never spoke again for 30 years - until a high-school reunion. We developed a great friendship over the following six months seeing each other only once in that time due to living 2000 miles apart.
Tomorrow, in Gatineau, Quebec, I am going to marry the girl I asked on a date some 35 years ago - and she is going to marry me. She said yes. We will be surrounded by our families and close friends - many from high-school. Trish's 20 year-old daughter will be Maid of Honor and my 25 year-old daughter will be Best Man.
But the lesson we offer to our children is to set a standard and never settle. Keep your standards high and always believe that if your relationship seems like a struggle, it may not be the right one. The right one makes loving easy.
So pardon how long my gushing might seem, but once in a lifetime, someone comes along who just rocks your world and, in the words of Jack Nicholson, makes you want to be a better man.
Tomorrow, I will prove it when I simply say, "I do."
And that, my friends, is a glimpse into my personal life - Filter-Free. Do the same for yourself.
The truth is, most managers would be afraid that hiring someone who clearly outperforms them would be simply hiring their own replacement. And so, sadly, many really great people get passed over as "overqualified" because of a manager's own insecurities.
The truth is, a high-achiever might be just exactly what your organization needs - but here is the caveat - only if the Culture fit is right.
Hiring shouldn't always be the best person - but should be the best person for the company Culture. Having a highly-focused, customer-focused, high-achiever on staff might be just the ticket to get the rest of your people to build a new customer-focused Culture of high-performance.
But most times this doesn't happen because if a manager hasn't been able to build that Culture already, then he or she obviously doesn't know how to do it. That makes it unlikely that they could recognize good talent and Culture potential if it came along.
But nowhere is it written in the management handbook that a manager can not learn from an employee. Real good managers, employee-focused managers will do what is best for their employees and won't act out of fear of looking poorly or inept. But the moment you pass over a great potential employee because of insecurity is the moment you look incredibly inept.
Managers who welcome new employees on their first day then promptly hand them off to any employee because they have a meeting to run to, run the risk of doing two things:
You say you want to increase employee engagement and reduce employee turnover, yet you hand off a newbie to other staffers without a plan. What are you thinking?
Who is the employee with the best attitude, the best performance, the best engagement and the best intentions? That person is your new on-boarding mentor. Have a conversation with the potential mentor and tell them that because of their performance, you are placing new hires in their care to learn the correct way of doing things around here. Give your people positive responsibility and you will find that they rise to the occasion.
The first relationship that a new employee strikes up is usually the longest lasting relationship. Make sure your new hire gets mentored by the right attitude, the right work ethic, the right performance and the right engagement levels.
If you want to ensure the future Culture of your workplace is headed in the right direction, don't just willy-nilly leave new hires with your staffers. The first few days are important learning times for new employees - especially for improving Culture. Make this a strategic move. You will have made your own job much easier down the road.
On this November 11, how about we take a moment out of our own busy lives to, just for a moment, think about someone else for a change.
Perhaps you work with someone who has done military service or work with the spouse of someone who has done military service. Perhaps one of your own relatives may be former military. Why not think about them for a moment on November 11.
Look around. Look at all of this stuff you have been able to amass. Think of all the things you are able to do and all of the freedoms that you have. We live in some of the best countries in the world. Oh sure, we have our moments and we have our difficulties from time to time. And we don't always get it right. But, we pretty much have it all.
There is a process in place that is as simple as a young man or woman who makes a decision to sign up for active military service. That one person along with thousands of others get trained, focused and deployed to protect the very freedoms and luxuries of life that we have. How hard would it be to say "thank you" on November 11?
Here's how easy it is: on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month take a moment to just be thankful that you have what you have. Someone, maybe someone you don't know, made a decision to stand up for you. Some lost their lives standing up for you and some returned home. Remember, it's not the price they paid that is important, it's the fact that they chose to do something important at all.
Will you acknowledge their service?
To engage the new generation of worker, you have to understand how they think. Every thing they have ever done in their whole lives has involved a menu: cell phone menu, computer menu, web site menu. Even choices that they have could be considered menus: what they would like for lunch, what career path they want to take, courses in school, etc.
Never bark out, "Get that done and then come back for your next task." That's not a menu. A menu is a list of tasks that they can accomplish in no particular order. Give them the choice and they will engage - even the mundane.
The new workers of today may end up with 14 different jobs over a 3-year span but that doesn't mean they are not motivated. It means they haven't found their "fit" yet. This is the first generation to put Culture Fit ahead of pay, benefits, perks and prestige. If it doesn't fit, they won't engage. So understand, it is NOT the work they are not engaging in, it is the workplace they are not engaging in.
This is important. It's not the work that needs to be engaging - it's the workplace.
Leave me a comment. I want to hear your opinion.
According to the survey, "practically all Canadians (97 per cent) want to lead a balanced life and particular priorities include: ensuring that their family is well cared for (91 per cent); wishing to travel (89 per cent); contributing something meaningful to society (87 per cent); and living a greener lifestyle (84 per cent)."
In the survey, Canadians overwhelmingly indicated a desire to spend more time with their families (87 per cent). What that means is that if given the choice between getting a high-paying job with high-demand of hours worked or a more moderate-paying job with much more time to spend with family, most would likely opt for the "family" choice.
Workforce Attitudes are changing. You can't expect to own your employees' lives like in past. The new generation of workers won't stand for it. The collective mindset of the workforce is changing: they want to work less, spend more time with their families, travel more, contribute to society (preferrably through their work) and have a more balanced lifestyle they can feel good about.
You can pay people a little less if you don't work them so hard. Separate your people from their families and you will end up looking for a replacement. That costs you money in on-boarding and your Culture will suffer by being known as a tough place to work.
But then, if you as a boss don't have a decent life-work balance (as opposed to work-life balance), how in the world can you relate to what will attract good employees?
Last week, for Filter-Free Fridays™, I blogged about how you can't just lie to businesses by saying everything was fine when it wasn't and then go home and trash them on the Internet. In fact, I said, "Businesses want to be better. They want to serve you better. They want to offer you better products and service. They want to offer you innovative new ways of improving what they do to make your experience that much better."
And I was wrong.
Not every business wants to be better. In fact, some businesses are so full of themselves that no matter what you say, they will treat you like an idiot and make you feel as though they're doing you a favor by allowing you to do business with them. Those are the businesses that need a swift kick in the revenues.
I encountered one of those businesses this week. After dealing with a constant turnover of sales reps over a seven-month period, my frustration got the better of me. The new sales rep was more concerned about looking good than serving us well. So, I was honest and forthcoming. I told them face-to-face what I thought they might improve but they refused to listen. I told them directly how disappointed I was with their service but they refused to listen. I told them what we initially agreed on but they attempted to arbitrarily change the contract by adding items and clauses not previously spelled out. I did this in-person, in writing and in telephone conversations. And still, they feel that I need to pay more money than what we agreed so that I can be served less.
So now, I will warn others to keep clear of dealing with banquet staff at a particular hotel in the Ottawa area (and if you are an Ottawa area meeting planner or are considering hosting a Ottawa area conference or event, I would be pleased to offer you the name of the hotel and all of the awful salespeople on the inside. Just shoot me an email). I just know that this expereince will become a story in one of my presentations that I will end up sharing with thousands of people. Whoops.
When businesses refuse to pay attention to professional customers, then maybe they'll pay attention when they are forced to see the (dis)satisfaction of their customers telling their stories on the Internet or in other public forums. But then again, maybe not. There comes a time when you are forced to use the court of public opinion if you want to warn others. And that should be the spirit of your efforts: to warn others - not to be vindictive.
Arrogant businesses need to be knocked a peg or two and you are just the person to do it - especially on Filter-Free Fridays™.
Now, when these same students finish school and enter the work world, they will encounter your trainers using archaic and (oh my God this is BORING) PowerPoint slides. They are asked to shut off their cell phones, are not supplied laptops but are given 3-ring binder manuals and no access to Internet video, no collaborative messaging and especially NO social media (because it is viewed as a time-waster).
Not much wonder these new workers think your workplace is a step back in time. Look, these kids are learning with technology you probably not only don't understand but arent even aware exists. Their parents (some of your workers) are helping them with their homework (with rudimentary knowledge of how it all works). Then, when the students become old enough to work for you, you take everything away from them because you don't know how it works.
Who looks like the leader now?
If you want to build a Culture that will attract these new workers, you had better be looking to the educational system to see what your workforce of tomorrow is using today. Stop being such an old fart and get with the program. Social media is here to stay. Internet video is here to stay. In five years, the high school students of today will be coming to work to use technology that hasn't even been invented yet.
If you're still having a difficult time with your email, maybe it's time you stepped out of the way and let people who can use the technology embrace it and run with it. Maybe they are much better able to relate to your up-and-coming workforce.
