accountability

Do You Suffer from Executive Isolation?

August 15, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Who is in your tribe?

It matters, if you want to remain effective and relevant as a leader.

If remaining so is important to you, you need a tribe that provides you with the nourishment you need to flourish. This tribe should fully support you in your endeavors. And it should also challenge when you do less than your best you so that you continue to strengthen your ability to lead.

Without this kind of tribe, leaders feel isolated and alone. They buy in to the false adage that “it’s lonely at the top.”

That stoicism will damage a leader’s ability to lead.

If this is you – if you are suffering from executive isolation – it is time to form your tribe.

Can you identify with any of the following?

60% of all leaders quietly admit they didn’t feel fully prepared for their new role, and that it was necessary to hide this in order to build credibility with others. They reported feeling lonely and unsure because of a lack of support. If this is you, remember to differentiate between your ability to lead and the fact that there is a learning curve to any new role
Leaders must make tough decisions that others might not understand, so they do not feel free to share these or discuss them with others. They have nowhere they can take this to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. If this is you, you are compromising your decision-making abilities and leadership effectiveness.
Leaders must hold a lot of confidential and/or sensitive information. This is stressful and burdensome, promoting a feeling of isolation. If this is you, the cost of this kind of stress can be far-reaching and hamper your ability to perform.
No leader has all the answers, but they seldom share this fact because they want their employees to have confidence in them and in the direction the company is headed. This is you, if you feel the need to keep significant thoughts and feelings to yourself.

Executive isolation – the dynamic that arises from the situations described above – is insidiously damaging to one’s leadership effectiveness.

A personal tribe for the leader is the solution.

Being part of a tribe where you can take your fears, doubts, and foibles, seems foreign to the person in power. How does that work for the person at the top? And what does it look like?

Here are the needed ingredients for a leader’s tribe (or for any tribe, for that matter!):

1. Nourishment

A leader’s tribe must provide nourishment in the form of healthy ways of relating, healthy connections, and deep and genuine bonds. Human connection is necessary to sustain life, and healthy human connection is necessary to support your highest and best.

2. Confidentiality

Respect for your situation and your stories is paramount. Feeling as though you can trust your tribe with all your “stuff” allows you to fully divulge what you need to without fear of compromise.

3. Support

Bringing deepest thoughts, fears, doubts, and aspirations can feel risky – yet every human being, no matter how accomplished, has them. Your vulnerability should be met by your tribe with genuine support so that you feel acknowledged, accepted, and able to confront where needed.

4. Challenge

Your tribe should love you where you are, and yet love you too much to allow you to stagnate there. You need to be challenged to grow, to smoothen rough edges, and to be called out when you are playing small. Frank feedback with love and respect is invaluable to your ability as leader to flourish and move successfully into the future.

5. Accountability

Your tribe should have your best interests in mind by holding you to your commitments. This is how true and lasting growth can best occur. If you do not have a source that provides this for you, the potential in you will go sadly untapped.

Leaders feel lonely and assume this is par for the course. Yet the right social connection with trusted tribe makes all the difference in how you can evoke continuous and honest growth in your ability to lead.

Who is in your tribe?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Jumpstart Company Performance with Trust

July 4, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

How high is the trust quotient in your company? If it’s low, you are among the 47% of American companies currently losing significant dollars and competitive edge.

How does trust affect company performance?

Well, compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: *

74% less stress
106% more energy at work
50% higher productivity
13% fewer sick days
76% more engagement
29% more satisfaction with their lives
40% less burnout

And those factors have everything to do with individual, team, and company performance.

So now what? How do you raise the trust quotient in your organization?

Here are some important steps to building greater trust.

1. Create shared agreement.

You’ve set company goals, but has your workforce integrated these to support them? When was the last time you had your executive team review their areas to ensure these are aligned with the company-wide goals? Do the metrics and milestones support the goals? Are there any conflicting processes or practices that might silo teams from one another?

If so, ferret these out ruthlessly. Otherwise, you are pitting teams against one another, thus causing mistrust to grow.

2. Respect shared accountability.

What are your practices for setting expectations, reporting on progress, and measuring against your projected success?

If any of these are missing, this will create questions and assumptions about the work of others. In the absence of information, people will create stories to make meaning. Unless you have a regular communication process that keeps everyone in the loop, someone may be assuming others are sleeping on the job – or worse. Assumptions are deadly because they erode trust.

3. Be honest.

Do you foresee you will be unable to deliver a product to a customer? Mentor honesty to your company. Make the difficult call to let the customer know as soon as you are aware. Your customer may not be pleased, but will appreciate your integrity.

Once this happens, re-examine your processes and practices to see what needs adjusting so that this is not a trend.

Are you in the planning stages of a downsizing or merger? Plan out your communication plan to your employees. Delivering tough messages is unpleasant, but saying nothing and surprising people is a trust-breaker.

4. Treat mistakes as points of learning.

Model this for your workforce.

Admitting you were wrong about something and sharing what you have learned from it shows others they can do so, as well.

The quickest way to cut creativity and innovation to the quick is to support a culture of perfection. If your employees get the message that perfection is king, they will play it safe by under-committing and performing at a safe, sub-par level because they don’t trust the company to regard them in the same light if they make a mistake.

Celebrate mistakes. It means you support learning, which is part of a successful future.

5. Facilitate “whole-person” growth.

Are you losing employees when they find promotion opportunities outside of your company?

It may be time to chart out the employee journey, with clear tracks, and supportive education and growth opportunities for both personal and professional development.

The organization of the future will keep learning and development as top priority, bringing meaning and fulfillment to its employee base. This creates a trust in them that you have their interests in mind.

When have you experienced a lack of trust at your company? How did you approach remedying this?

*Source: Zak, Paul. “The Neuroscience of Trust.” Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2017.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Three Ways to Help Your New Employee Execute Well

January 24, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Do you sometimes wonder if one of your managers made a mistake with their latest hire?

How can you tell?

The new hire’s transferable skills check out. Their attitude is positive. Team morale is high. And you can clearly tell the new hire is highly engaged and ready to go.

But he or she is not getting the work done.

Why is this?

There’s a handy, quick mental process I like to go through with leaders when they are second-guessing a latest hire.

Is it really the new hire, or is it your management?

Here is how you can tell.

1. Does the new employee show a clear understanding of their role, responsibilities, and your expectations?

Be careful not to downplay this. I have worked with many great companies whose new hires may receive a job description and a desk as their orientation. The manager counts on the team to fill in the blanks for the new person. If your company takes this casual stance, you are losing money and a potentially great employee.

What does the new hire’s manager truly expect of them and their area of responsibility? What are the goals set for them? Timelines? Metrics?

2. Does the new hire have the right tools and resources to do the job?

Again, most leaders will respond with an immediate “yes.” But they are basing this on what they think the employee needs to do the job. Has he or she been asked the question, “What do you need in order to achieve your goals here? Do you have the tools and resources you need?” Just test this. You may be surprised.

3. Has the immediate supervisor developed an accountability system with their new employee?

Can the employee access their immediate supervisor on a regular basis for help and questions? Does he or she get the regular feedback needed so they know they are on track? The opposite is more prevalent than you would hope.

In fact, according to one study by Dresser & Associates, HR, Payroll, and Management Solutions, only 7% of managers and 10% of senior executives in the workforce are held accountable consistently for developing their direct reports through performance management processes.

How do you compare?

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

How to Pull Your Business Results Out of a Rut

January 17, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

You are a great leader and you treat your people well. You are doing all the right things – coaching and mentoring, teaching people how to solve problems, giving regular feedback… You practice the five daily good management habits we talked about last week (if you missed it, here is the link).

Your employees are happy, and you are well loved. Those who work for you express how fortunate they are – and those who don’t, wish they could.

So why are your business results in a rut?

Five things may be standing in your way. Here is a quick checklist for you and your executive team to use. Where might you be stuck?

1. Do your teams and individual contributors understand how the company vision relates to their area of responsibility?

This seems elementary, and your employees may be able to articulate the vision. After all, it is “front and center” in all your materials, your meetings and retreats. But do they understand how their area of responsibility relates to this vision?

If your staff doesn’t understand why their area of responsibility exists to support the forward motion of the entire enterprise, this needs to be where you start. When people cannot grasp how their individual contributions help to make a difference to the whole, people may be comfortably happy, but they will not have that focused sense of purpose related to the business. Eventually, this disconnect will foster complacency or a lack of motivation that will lull your employee base to under-perform.

2. Do the goals provided to your teams and individual contributors support the company vision, goals, and objectives?

Many a great business has grown quickly and taken on projects and initiatives that may no longer be valid to the goals and objectives you have at present.

I recently worked with an enterprise who asked for my help in increasing productivity and revenue. While performing some due diligence, I discovered that part of the workload assigned to many of their employees was not supporting the direction of the company. This situation occurs often and can be identified and corrected to support higher performance and better results by conducting a yearly work audit using your company’s strategic plan – but that’s another entire article!

3. Do your employees have clear action plans that support their goals?

Has your executive team worked with their reports to outline clear plans of action for the year that relate to meeting goals?

This exercise not only ensures that each employee knows what he or she should be doing to support the company direction, it can also be used as a tool to teach them how to think more strategically, solve problems, and hold themselves accountable (not to mention, a great trust-building exercise).

4. Are the metrics assigned to these goals the ones that matter?

This is where a lot of businesses stall. You need to measure in order to assess progress.

However, too many businesses commit to too many change initiatives at the same time, rendering them overwhelmed and stalled. You may collect a lot of very useful data, then, but won’t do anything with it, wasting time, energy, and money. Consider selecting 1-2 key areas or business approaches that will give you the most return, and work on these until you have incorporated them into your business culture and way of operating. Once you have done this, reassess, decide where next to improve, and repeat the process.

5. Are your employees able to execute well?

Do you have the right staff in place, and are they able to perform well so that the action plans become excellent results?

This is where we go back to the daily management habits of successful leaders (see last week’s article on this, here). Are you providing the right tools and resources for them, and are you operating with mutual trust and accountability? This is where we separate the good from the great – and what I’ll be writing more on, next week.

Where in the five points above, do you and your company excel? And where might you do a better job? I look forward to your comments.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Seven Steps to Providing Supportive Feedback

January 3, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Have you ever had an employee ask for feedback?

In theory, this is a good thing. After all, who doesn’t want to lend a hand when a colleague or report asks for help – especially when it pertains to their effectiveness on the job?

Or perhaps you see the need to give an employee feedback, even when they haven’t asked for it.

Either way, you may not feel safe or comfortable as you think about what might happen as a result. Your intention to help may be met by the employee becoming defensive, hurt, or angry.

What then?

How do you handle this? How do you provide information that is candid and in their best interest, and do so in a way that doesn’t backfire?

Seven Steps to Providing Supportive Feedback

1. Be thoughtful and specific about what you both want to accomplish.

Whether your employee has initiated the conversation by asking for feedback, or you have recognized that feedback is needed and have asked them to talk to you, you will want to identify why the feedback is needed and how this will help them, their team, and the company going forward. This will help you frame the conversation supportively, and help them to understand impact.

2. Set up an appropriate setting for your conversation together.

Make sure you and the employee have some dedicated time and are in a place that is quiet and confidential. Feedback provided in passing or in a public place is neither respectful nor beneficial.

3. Emphasize to the employee your desire to be helpful by providing feedback.

If they have initiated this conversation, thank them for placing confidence in you as part of their growth trajectory. If, on the other hand, you have initiated the conversation, you can share that part of your role is to help them grow into more of their potential, and that you take this seriously. In either case, you will want to convey that you come with best intentions and the desire to support them.

4. Affirm them first for the value they bring to the team and the company, noting some of the key strengths you appreciate in them, and how these strengths benefit the company.

Be specific. Use illustrations. For example, saying that someone brings a lot of strengths to the table is too vague and may sound dismissive. On the other hand, identifying that someone exhibits a lot of integrity in the way they deliver results on time or include others, for example, during the last major project…well, you can see the difference. Follow the latter illustration as you recognize their value.

5. Pay attention to your language as you point out growth opportunities.

Let’s say that your employee has a habit of over-promising and under-delivering. Rather than say, “You are untrustworthy,” or “I can’t count on you,” use an illustration to show how their behavior impacts the situation. You might say, “You and I agreed on a deadline for your piece of the XYZ Project. When you were unable to meet this, it meant the team was delayed two weeks in completing their portion so that we could deliver to the customer on time.”

6. Tell them what you need and offer your help by coaching them on this going forward.

Following our illustration, ask them, “Can you shed light on this? Is there something I am missing?” Pause and allow them to respond. If they do not realize this problem is isolated, you may want to give a second situation where it occurred. Either way, you can then ask, “How can I help you so that this one area doesn’t hold you back?” Asking, rather than telling, will allow them a growth moment, allowing them to develop awareness about the problem, and to identify any possible solutions.

7. Offer a go-forward plan.

You can share any insights you have, once you have allowed them to respond. And be intentional about checking in on a regular basis to share how you feel it is going. Catch them doing right when they are on time, and let them know you appreciate it. Give them feedback, as well, if it occurs again, and ask them to help you identify how you can work together to avoid it in future. Hold shared accountability in this.

I’d like to hear of your experience in giving feedback. What has worked – or not worked – for you? How do you use this knowledge as you provide feedback going forward?

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.