Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

develop

How to Pull Your Business Results Out of a Rut

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How to Pull Your Business Results Out of a Rut
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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.

Five Daily Habits for Good Management

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Five Daily Habits for Good Management
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Is your company or team making steady and continuous improvements? Or do you feel like you are throwing darts that keep missing the target?

When you’ve spent serious money on strategies and plans to raise team or company performance and these initiatives don’t stick, it’s time to look in the mirror.

You aren’t alone.

The reported failure of large-scale change programs is approximately 70% (McKinsey and Company). It can be that you or an advisor have selected a program that does not address well the needs of the plant, function, or business. But more often than not, the failure lies with the people – not the program.

If your enterprise isn’t making daily strides, check your personal daily management habits. Because more often than not, this is what is holding things back.

Where are you when you review the following 5 points?

The 5-Point List of Daily Good Management Habits

1. Are you teaching people how to solve problems?

If you are telling others what to do, rather than teaching them how to think so that they can perform on their own, then you are wasting everyone’s time, energy, and money. Do you find yourself consistently providing answers for others, rather than helping them to work out the critical thinking necessary to develop excellent decision-making and autonomy? Shift your mindset and your behavior to empower your team to grow and perform at higher levels for you.

2. Are you creating a physically and emotionally safe environment for people to dialogue with one another?

Let’s face it – it’s probably not your product that is the slowdown problem. It’s the way your people work together. Rate healthy communication and conflict management in your enterprise on a scale of 1-5. Let’s say that 1 indicates silos, a reticence to work things out, chronic unresolved conflict resulting in poor performance. And 5 indicates the high ability to work things out, solve problems together, and a great team and company spirit. Where are you? Less than a 5 means you have a problem area that will slow down your performance targets.

3. Are you celebrating mistakes as points of learning?

If your company culture punishes mistakes, you are stifling creative thinking and innovative results. Learn to differentiate between repetitive blunders that cost the enterprise time and money, and new mistakes made on the trail to your new or improved product or service. Celebrate the latter, recognizing that without striking out to try new things, you will always get the same results you have gotten.

4. Are you focusing on results?

Make sure your action plans, meetings, and regular follow-up reports on these are examining results, pinpointing areas of low performance, and course-correcting. Too often, the status quo within a company creates complacency and a lack of follow-through. Make sure that decisions are made on next steps, and an accountability mechanism is put in place so that momentum is not lost.

5. Are you giving regular feedback and coaching to others?

You’ve placed great confidence in your team, and in the spirit of empowerment, you have allowed them to get out there and make change. But how in touch with them are you as they do this? Don’t mistake abdication for empowerment. Regular coaching and feedback are necessary to nurture your people. Focus on the charge you have given them, supporting them with what they need in order to succeed. Remember to include what they feel is important to their personal and professional development. And don’t avoid the tough stuff. People, first. Results follow.

Are you doing all these things well, but still not getting the results you seek?

Your program’s action plan may be costing you big money. More on this next week.

Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?

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Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?
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Three Trust Indicators

You can talk all you want about time management tactics, learning how to facilitate critical conversations, and mastering conflict resolution.

But unless your team enjoys a high level of trust among its team members, none of these wonderful skills will help your team’s performance.

In fact, your team may be costing your company a lot of money.

Signs of an Unhealthy Trust Quotient

Here are some signs your team may have an unhealthy (and therefore costly) trust quotient.

  • Everything takes longer and seems harder for team members.
  • People don’t do their best work.
  • They easily become disengaged and withdrawn.
  • Their confidence in themselves and others on the team diminishes.
  • They have feelings of complacency or even fatigue.
  • They are not as prone to connecting with each other or sharing information.
  • Grousing about the company may be a common theme.
  • Some might even question if the enterprise is a right fit for them.

What It Is Not

These signs are not to be confused with team overload, where a company over-commits, and its results are felt throughout the organization with inappropriate workloads and deadlines. No, this is not overload.

What It Is

This is a falling away from former collaboration. It’s an unwillingness to participate by speaking up. It’s a reticence to take risks together, and an uncomfortable commitment to the status quo. You may see things like escalated emotions, turf issues, abdication of responsibility or micromanaging, and certainly some hidden agendas.

As you consider what comes with low trust, you can easily deduce what this means to the company.

What do you do when you detect signs that your team needs to build more trust?

You need to determine the source of this lack of trust so that you can rectify it.

According to researchers Dennis Reina, PhD; Michelle Reina, PhD, and David Hudnut, MIA, renewing trust can result in greater accountability, effectiveness, innovation, respect, performance, profitability (need I go on?). The researchers have developed a Team Trust Scale that measures three areas: trust of character, trust of capability, and trust of communication.

How does your team rate?

I have taken the researchers’ indices of a high level of trust in these areas and paraphrased statements with which you and your team members can rate yourselves.

Using a scale of 1-5, with 5 being highest. How do you rate?

Trust of Character

  • I manage expectations
  • I establish boundaries
  • I delegate appropriately
  • I encourage mutually-serving intentions
  • I keep agreements
  • I am consistent

Trust of Capability

  • I acknowledge people’s abilities and skills
  • I allow people to make decisions
  • I involve others and seek their input
  • I help people learn skills

Trust of Communication:

  • I share information
  • I tell the truth
  • I admit mistakes
  • I give and receive constructive feedback
  • I maintain confidentiality
  • I speak with good purpose

How did you do? And where do you need to shore up first, in order to make biggest impact in up-leveling team trust?

Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without

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Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without
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How many leadership behaviors have you read about? Ten? Twenty? Another number?

Pretty mind-boggling, isn’t it? And if you are like many, such a sea of varying information can cause you to simply put the latest article aside and go back to doing things the way you know how.

In the world of leadership development, schools of thought are just as varied, and this means that I, as executive coach, can choose to use an assessment that evaluates 10 areas, or 26 areas.

So, now what?

If you are seeking to fast-track your leadership in this new year, I advise that you focus on enhancing just a small subset of four leadership behaviors.

Just four areas.

New research reveals that these four types of leadership behaviors account for 89% of leadership effectiveness, especially for front-line leaders. (Source: McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index https://www.mckinsey.com/)

McKinsey & Company surveyed 81 organizations, diverse in industry and geography (agriculture, consulting, energy, government, insurance, mining, and real estate in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe).

The results showed the following four areas of leadership to be most important, explaining 89% of the variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness.

  1. Supporting others.
  2. Solving problems effectively.
  3. Operating to follow through for results.
  4. Seeking different perspectives.

What does this mean for you?

Well, what it doesn’t mean is that you just need these four and then you can sit back and relax. But what it does mean is that, as you review your leadership commission and where to start, it may well be with these four.

Rating yourself on a scale of 1-5, how do you feel you measure up?

I’ve included some reflective questions to help you begin your assessment:

Supporting others.

Do you operate with authenticity, and show a sincere interest in those around you? Do you seek to inspire and build trust? Are you adopting the approach “tough on issues, tender on people”?

Solving problems effectively.

Are you thoughtful as you analyze and consider best options for action? Do you seek to be proactive in identifying and anticipating challenges, and to come up with solutions, rather than to react too quickly without the information you need, risking a poor decision?

Operating to follow through for results.

Do you marry vision and supporting strategy to action? Have you mastered the behaviors required to meet your goals and objectives, and can you manage people, products, and process effectively so that outcomes are a reflection of your best work?

Seeking different perspectives.

As esoteric as it sounds, do you “seek first to understand, then to be understood?” (Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People). Do you ask your team members to contribute ideas for performance improvement? Are you keeping the pulse on changes in the environment that are likely to influence your company and your work?

Developing any one of these four is a game-changer, and I will tell you frankly that you probably won’t do this alone. Why? It is one thing to be self-aware about the changes one needs to make, and it’s quite another to be able to effectuate those shifts and make them part of who you truly are. You will need to tap into some kind of expert support to step into more of this potential.

This said, the first step to change is to identify the needed change. So, where will you start? What will give you the greatest ROI in your own leadership?

And secondly, who might help you get there?

Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition to Your Next Chapter

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Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition to Your Next Chapter
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Since life is not static, your situation is also full of change. You may be seeking to change careers or retirement. Some of you have just sent your child to college for the first time. Your marital status or your role with an elderly parent may be in question. But, no matter what shift in life is occurring for you, most certainly you are asking yourself what’s next.

Many of us plan with new activities in mind. We see empty space ahead, and the natural human thing to do is to quickly fill this so that we have a navigable course for our days. As human beings, we don’t like not knowing what to do with ourselves.

Then, some of you are in a contemplative stage in your life where you question whether you’ve made the contributions you wanted to make. You ask yourself if you can truly make this next chapter count, making sure that it is meaningful and fulfilling.

If you are finding yourself in a position of change and you are drawing up a bucket list for your next chapter, take the time to ask yourself the following five questions in order to make your future story most meaningful.

Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition

1. How do I ensure that this next chapter is most meaningful?

It’s natural to seek meaning in our lives. It answers questions such as, “How do I navigate the world?” and “Why am I here?” Human beings seek purpose to understand how they fit in, and as you shape your immediate future, it will be more fulfilling if you can relate what you do to a purpose.

For example, if you choose to shift careers, how will doing this bring more meaning into your life? If you decide you will climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, what meaning might you draw from this experience? At many levels, these two examples will provide new opportunities to learn and grow.

2. How can I make sure that whatever I choose makes a difference to others?

This question becomes even more important as we age. At a certain point in life, we begin to question what difference or legacy we have truly created. This harks back to meaning and purpose, and links it to how we have been able to positively affect others.

It answers the question, “Has my life been of worth?”

This query can be answered by identifying how we have contributed by bringing value to the world. We need not take on Mother Teresa’s commission in order to feel confirmed in this way. One of the greatest human beings who contributed to my life was a high school teacher who simply cared enough about his students to show them that he did.

3. Where in my life do I need to play bigger?

It may be that in your current situation, you have ignored some personal growth opportunities. Some of you may have something in your personal life that needs adjusting. Others may have identified a specific dynamic in your professional life that holds you back. Are you comfortable confronting conflict? Confident in presenting? Where in your life might you decide to finally tackle that one thing that keeps you in a compromising comfort zone? One of the greatest satisfactions we can find is that sense of overcoming and stepping into the success that new growth brings.

4. How shall I make this next chapter fun?

A lot of executives and business owners I coach are intent on meeting goals and getting ahead. They should be – this is their commission – to support a healthy enterprise and their own careers.

I see the same in others, whether stay-at-home parents or retirees. It can become somewhat of a dry checklist with little enjoyment, unless we ask ourselves how we can approach our work so that it is fun. When you are in a serious situation such as caretaking, this question may seem odd, but it is even more important. Levity feeds attitude, and attitude feeds soul. How can you infuse fun into your next chapter?

5. Is it possible to “have it all” in this next chapter?

What does “all” mean to you? When most ask this question, they are usually addressing that long list of activities. But if you will take a moment to step back and ask yourself what is most important to you in the coming story, what outcomes you would like to celebrate at the end of that chapter, I think you will find that your list becomes smaller, but more meaningful and full of the essential.

The greatest reward comes not from a full calendar, but from fewer, but deeper and more enjoyable experiences.

Here’s to making an amazing next chapter for yourself! Have fun with these questions, and make sure that your new story counts.