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?
Create A Mission For Your People from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Missions Statements are so muddled full of ambiguous language usually created by committee that has dumbed down and watered down any idea to be so empty of any meaning, that no one could take ownership of it. Don’t ever let a committee prepare your mission statement. So how do we fix it?
Employees Are Not Created Equal from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Too much effort is spent in managing people into conformity. The truth is that too many managers want one employee to be just like another employee - one who models the traits and gets the results management likes. It's counterproductive when managers start trying to manage their employees the exact same way. It's worse when they expect each employee's results to be the same.
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.
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.
For the organization as a whole, Vision is the more important of the two as it sets up where you want to end up.
However, for the employees, Mission statement is far more important as it determines what needs to be done today.
The problem is when organizations have such a bland and generic Mission Statement, no one knows what they are supposed to be doing. It’s called a Mission statement because it’s the mission: what you’re supposed to be doing. When a good Mission statement spells it out, it makes it easier for employees to make the right decisions.
Would your Mission Statement allow your people to make the right decisions or is it so muddled and mundane that your people don’t take it seriously?
Every department of an organization should have their own Mission Statement that specifically outlines the duties and Culture of the department within the larger framework. A departmental Mission works because, when in doubt, your people can look to the Mission Statement for the right thing to do. If it isn’t spelled out, your people will do whatever they think is best - based on their perception of the right thing to do.
Managers, if you want to be spending less time putting out fires and more time being able to coach your people better, develop a Mission Statement for your department that keeps your people focused, on-task and engaged.
I will bet that the largest number of your people end up in Category 2.
So why is that? Why are you hiring and managing only average people to turn out average work?
Most managers will make the excuse that 80% of workers are considered average - when in fact it is 1% of workers who are average (right on the mid-point) and 99% either above or below average. It is nothing more than an excuse because it lets managers off without having to try harder to coach their people to become higher-performers.
This is how managers end up with an average staff - they accept that this is the hand they have been dealt and then make excuses for not wanting to make it better - because it seems like a lot of work. But then those same managers complain that their staff members aren't engaged on the job. Huh. Imagine that.
It's not workers who have an attitude of "good enough," it's their managers who have it. Good enough lets you off the hook of having to coach better, communicate better and to take more of an active interest in their development.
Yes you do have the time. You just have poor priorities. You're not a paperworker or a meetinger. You're a manager. So manage - priority one. Make your people better and want to be better. You are the coach - they are the players. Are you going for an average season or are you going to attempt to win the championship.
The job is "people-work not paperwork." Re-prioritize.
