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.
How To Handle 100+ Emails/Day from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Are you a manager who handles upwards of 100 emails per day? Well, the bad news is handling 100 emails a day is not management. That’s treading water. If you’re treading water as a manager, you’re doing it wrong.
Video, Kindle and Embracing Change from Kevin Burns on Vimeo.
Workplace Expert, Kevin Burns, talks about recent predictions and current realities when it comes to change. Cisco predicts that by 2013, 90% of Internet traffic and 64% of cell phone traffic will be to watch videos. Kindle format books now outsell traditional paperbacks and hard-covers. Change is upon us. Are you ready?
Just thought I would update you on what is happening. I am continuing to take time off away from blogging while I finish up my newest book, "Tweak - The Definitive Management Strategy to Build Your Dream Workplace, Attract The Best Talent, Regain Your Sanity and Never Have To Deal With Problem Employees - In Ten Seconds Or Less!"
I hope to be back here blogging again within the next 30 days.
But that doesn't mean we're closed. Meghan is still taking bookings for 2011 speaking presentations. Feel free to go to www.kevburns.com to get more information or call us toll-free at 1-877-287-6711.
Looking forward to serving you better,
Kevin
Kevin is enjoying a bit of a vacation as well as putting some finishing touches on a few projects. He will return to this space the week of January 10, 2011. Enjoy some family time during the Holidays and Kevin will see you in the New Year.
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.
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.
Huh? But I paid it all off last month.
I called American Express where they happily explained to me that the interest had accrued a few months prior and that was the reason that $7.80 in interest was still owing.
"Well then you sent a bill that wasn't complete," I offered, "and if you send me a bill and it shows an amount owing on it and I pay it before the due date, then we should be square. You sent me a bill that was not complete and I don't think I should have to pay more than you billed me for."
I was asked to hold for a moment. The clerk then returned telling me that he had waived the interest owing.
How many people would have simply accepted the convoluted excuse about interest accruing months previous and simply given up. If every month, 100,000 people were to do that worldwide, then the credit card company would generate $780,000.00 of new income monthly.
The first excuse is to test to see if you'll go along with it. When you don't go along, you get rewarded.
Speak up. It's Filter-Free Fridays™ - a day when you speak the truth - to help, not to hurt. Stop being taken advantage of. Stand up for yourself. Use your voice.
Your job as a manager is to manage people. Make your people your first priority - always.
Your paperwork and meeting with other managers should be secondary to managing your people. After all, the title is Manager - not paperworker, not meetinger. So do just what the title says - manage.
If you aren't touching each member of your team at least once a day, you're doing it wrong. Someone's going to do it better and your good people will be inclined to go to work for them instead.
People-work not paperwork. Now get out of your office and go meet the people you're supposed to be leading.
So why is it that people are so quick to blame their bosses for not getting ahead at work? Nothing irks me more than hearing that incessant whining of "not being recognized" or "my boss plays favorites and I'm not it" or "it's because I'm (gender, sexual orientation, race, age, weight, etc.)."
Those comments are the result of owning an "entitlement" mentality: you think you are entitled to be further than you are and now you are blaming others for not just giving it to you. Truth is, you are also entitled to be unemployed.
Managers who give credence to the people playing this game for fear of being labeled as a bigot, racist, etc., are just as guilty of keeping this entitlement mentality going.
Look, people who say this stuff do so because no one has told them any different. If they are not being promoted because they aren't competent, then they deserve to be told they are not competent. Saying nothing for fear of offending allows employees to pull stuff out of the air, to make stuff up in the absence of information - and then you have twice the work to do in straightening it out.
If you speak with your people every single day (and that really IS your job - not paperwork and management meetings, contrary to what you might think) and let them know how they are doing in simple ten-second conversations, you end up eliminating a lot of the backlash that could come later. People want to know how they are doing and in the absence of information, they will make stuff up based on what they THINK is the truth. My Tweak™ - The Future of Management program addresses exactly this.
If this is happening to you as a manager then you're not managing, you're defending. And you can't help your people get any better if you're constantly defending yourself. When this happens, you are in the way of your people getting any better. Now you need a new manager to start over. Maybe you should have just told them the truth: that their work is mediocre and not worthy of promotion.
Wrong decisions can be made by listening to the wrong people. In fact, I recall a friend of mine who asked me to join into an investment group a few years ago. I researched the person in charge and found that he had a criminal record was banned him from securities investing. Just a few months ago, he was arrested for heading up a ponzi scheme. I hope my friend made out OK and got out after I sent an email with a link to the criminal's past.
Not just anyone should be able to get to you. You must be selective of the voices you allow to speak to you. And as a manager, you had better be listening to the voices who have something to teach you - no matter what it costs. You, the manager, will be responsible to influencing the ears of others. I hope you've got your facts straight and only people in the know get your ear.
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.
