Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

managing

Jumpstart Company Performance with Trust

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Jumpstart Company Performance with Trust
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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

Three Ways Compassion Makes Your Business Better

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Three Ways Compassion Makes Your Business Better
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In a recent CBS This Morning interview, Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, expressed the importance of compassion in the workplace.

Regarding the organization of the future, Jeff said, “It’s about walking the walk… It’s about looking at different perspectives…it’s about those interpersonal or soft skills…that will set yourself, your team, and the organization up for success.”

To some people, this may sound like fluff.

After all, what’s love got to do with it?

How do you link compassion with success in a way that makes business sense?

First, let’s define what compassion is – and what it isn’t. A short definition of compassion is to have concern for the well-being of others. For more on this – and to learn what it isn’t – see my article on compassion and boundaries.

How does having concern for the well-being of others increase the bottom line?

Here are three ways compassion directly impacts your revenues.

1. Communication.

When compassion is absent from communication, it reflects a lack of willingness to walk in the other person’s shoes.

It is evidenced by little or no interest in hearing the perspectives of others, or in seeking to understand. It is also evidenced by a heightened tendency for reactive and judgmental thinking.

Poor communication can actually cost your company an average of $26,041 in productivity per employee per year. It can cost your managers the ability to perform the work and manage others; and it can cost you your leadership reputation.

2. Team and organizational alignment.

When compassion is absent from a company, teams and team members within teams work in silos.

Silos are responsible for missed deadlines, arguments over who is responsible for what, distrust, poor assumptions about others, conflict – the list goes on. The energy in such a business is negative and draining to the soul, and productivity is low as a result of it.

Do you consider yourself a compassionate leader? Be careful. Hubris Syndrome can creep up quickly, and you may discover you have actually compromised your leadership. For more on this, see my article: “Can You Lead with Heart and Get Results?”

3. Competitive advantage.

Caring for others gives you a corporate edge. But when compassion is absent, it has been proven to compromise your employees’ feelings of safety and loyalty.

They doubt that learning, collaboration, and innovation are possible at your company and can shut down, which impacts the bottom line. Service quality suffers without compassion, and the employee’s desire to empathize with others and move beyond personal bias to form a team suffers as well.

It is time to identify and take action on strategies for the workplace that ignite compassion, because, as you see, love and results do, indeed, go hand in hand.

Inspired by the book, Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates People and Organizations (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017, 272 pages)

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

Has Your Leadership Expired?

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Has Your Leadership Expired?
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There is much buzz about “the organization of the future” as the top business focus around the globe. Indeed, in a world-wide survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd, the focus takes first place among 11 other key issues facing executives today as they ask themselves how to keep their respective companies sustainable into the next generation and beyond.

This makes sense. What leader doesn’t want his or her company to move into the future successfully? Those leading realize that, as technology and shifting customer demands transform the business landscape, they will need to restructure the organization, including many processes, roles and responsibilities, and other moving parts in order to deliver services and products.

But leadership needs to change, too.

In order to lead the organization of the future, to support required new approaches, ways of thinking, doing, workforce shifts, and so much more, leaders will need to up their game.

Is your leadership up to it?

Or is it out of date?

Top tenets of the organization of the future include operating at a faster pace, adapting more quickly to market demands, acquiring new knowledge more rapidly, and embracing dynamic career demands.

What will the leaders of today need to do in order to prepare for this?

The answer lies beyond a traditional emphasis on horizontal development, which concentrates on acquiring additional information, skills and competencies.

Instead, leaders will also need to add a focus on their vertical development – developing more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking.

This only makes sense: a more complex world mean that the organization needs to respond in kind.

To do this, we need a more sophisticated way of seeing and making sense of things so that we can lead effectively.

Here are some highlights of vertical development. Do you reflect these in your leadership?

  • Strategic Thinking 2.0

Your strategic thinking sees many patterns and connections. Gone is the black and white thinking of the past. It’s time to become comfortable with uncertainty as the norm instead of having a high need for certainty.

  • Leading Change

Success is no longer defined as achievement of individuals and teams, but a realization of a shared vision. Change is embraced as a culture and is a collaborative, ongoing process.

  • Leading Across Boundaries

Are you focused on the success of your own area of responsibility? This will be termed “siloed thinking,” and replaced by working in partnership with other functions. Brain-trusting will become a regular way of thinking and doing.

How do you develop these traits and practices in yourself, your team, and your employee base?

Nick Petrie, author of “Vertical Leaders,” www.CCL.org, outlines a 3-pronged approach that can support your growth initiative:

  1. Intense stretch experiences

Provide periodic “bursts” of learning stimulation by providing a challenging work initiative or project that stretches current thinking and skills.

  1. New ways of thinking

Hold periodic meetings with an outside facilitator with the intent of challenging beliefs and behaviors to develop higher thinking. During these meetings, choose two to three difficult business issues to surface beliefs, biases, and mental models so that you can collectively challenge these and shift thinking.

  1. Strong developmental networks

Use peer coaching to see through the eyes of different stakeholders and learn how to work on real-life issues incorporating multiple considerations.

As you review the suggestions above, you no doubt recognize that these kinds of shifts require dedication and time. However, without this commitment, your enterprise will probably become a casualty of the coming changes. Making the effort to meet the future now is an investment that will surely pay off today, as well as tomorrow.

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

Are You Holding Your Employees Hostage?

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Are You Holding Your Employees Hostage?
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Five Ways to Find Out…

Do your employees feel happy and secure at work?

Or do they feel as though they are being held hostage?

You may not realize it, but when an enterprise is trust deficient, its employees suffer, which means the company does, too.

In fact, if your culture isn’t emotionally connected, your employees can experience the same stressful range of emotions as a hostage does, feeling anxious, fearful, and with the ambition to get out quickly.

It’s difficult to detect the emotions – but you can readily see the effects. What should you look for? And what’s causing it?

Here are five ways to identify whether your culture is lacking in trust, and what is causing it.

  1. Your executive team hasn’t had a new idea in ages.

Your executives are aware of changing trends, but they aren’t exhibiting the creativity and innovation needed for the company to retain its competitive edge. This usually indicates an atmosphere where new and creative is not welcome, or where the opinions of others are not valued.

Are you surrounded by “yes” people who always think your ideas are wonderful?

If so, you will want to take a look at your listening skills and determine if you are encouraging the perspectives of others – not being first with all the answers.

  1. You have a manager who is a chronic complainer.

Your managers tend to shy away from solutions and wait for you to solve problems. One of them consistently brings complaints to your door.

Are you holding them accountable for results?

I’m guessing you are. But are you empowering them with the ability to come up with possible solutions to problems?

If you have complainers or those who wait for orders, this means you need to exercise providing feedback to help them take that responsibility.

  1. One of your teams doesn’t play well with others.

Teams have trouble getting the work done when they must involve other teams to complete an initiative.

Does one of your teams have a chronic “bad kid” reputation? If they can’t connect well with others to get the job done, this means a conversation about their performance with the rest of the enterprise.

Of course, this can’t be done in isolation – chances are, if you have a “bad kid” team in your company, the culture supports it. Time to revisit.

  1. You put up with a key employee who is rough around the edges.

This person is great at technical skills, but very poor when it comes to getting along with others.

This is close to #3 above – the “bad kid” team. However, if you have put up with a key employee who is rough around the edges, this probably means you don’t want to touch the situation for a reason.

Perhaps the person is a star performer or some kind of genius who can do something for your enterprise that no one else can.

Think again – when an employee is allowed to mistreat or disrespect others, this is a de-motivator to the rest of your employee base. Demotivation leads to productivity loss, turnover, etc. – so, no matter how good they are, their behavior is not worth putting up with. Find a solution.

  1. One or more of your teams or areas is less productive than others.

This can manifest in ways such as sub-par productivity, continually missed deadlines, and finger-pointing and blaming in meetings.

Who is steering your ship? If you find that you are continually taking that team’s manager to task on poor performance, this means you haven’t defined what productivity looks like – or you aren’t holding him or her accountable to that shared agreement.

Being transparent about how this is affecting the larger body is pivotal. You are otherwise disrespecting your entire employee base.

These five scenarios cultivate a culture that is devoid of trust. And when trust is lacking, the enterprise will suffer. Where do you need more trust in your organization? Download the infographic to find out.

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

Why Downsizing May Not Be the Answer

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The Hidden Costs of Downsizing
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Tom S., CEO of the Jansen Company (fictitious individual and company names, real client), called me a short time after downsizing.

The company had lost quite a few customers due to the bad press it had received for this.

Employee morale and engagement were rapidly sinking.

There was a loss in productivity due not only to the occurrence itself, but also because the remaining employees had to absorb the work previously done by those having lost their jobs.

The cost in dollars to Jansen was significant and surprising.

The move to restructure had been a move to stop profit bleed. But just totaling money spent on loss of market share due to bad press, severance packages for those laid off, and current training costs for those who needed to absorb the work left behind, was more than the company had projected.

Additionally, employee turnover was on the rise, as people didn’t trust what the company might do next. The search for replacements was also costing Jansen money, time, and effort, as well as the onboarding and training to get the new people up to speed.

Things were a mess as a result of the downsizing.

It appeared that Jansen’s downsizing had been an incredibly poor idea that did not pay off.

It’s a fact that a majority of layoffs do not turn out well. Downsizing has become a default response to an ambiguous future marked by swift advances in technology, volatile markets, and growing competition (for more on this, see “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company” by Sucher and Gupta, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2018 issue).

There are new and more successful alternatives emerging – but in Jansen’s case, this was now water under the bridge.

The CEO had called me in because the executive team members were under extreme stress. A couple of them who had never worked well together were simply not talking to one another. He was afraid that some of these executives might secretly be job hunting, and the company couldn’t afford such a final blow.

He wondered if executive coaching might be the answer to supporting his team with the agility they needed as they faced managing this unexpected situation.

I agreed to meet with each one of the executives individually to get a sense of where they were vis-à-vis their commitment to the company and to assess their ability to manage change.

As I did so, I learned that their effectiveness as team members and as team itself had been compromised long before the decision to downsize took place.

And I wished I could have coached them sooner – before they found themselves in such a difficult situation. Because what I identified were some areas in their leadership that, had these been strengthened, might have circumvented the downsizing and what led up to it.

Here were the chief team and individual behaviors I uncovered. These led to high COI (costs of inaction).

  • Poor communication and conflict management (by the way, this one area account for around 67% of all productivity loss in any enterprise)
  • Slow and poor decision-making processes leading to less-than-optimal outcomes
  • Ineffective approaches to bring others along in the process for buy-in and commitment
  • Poor ability to keep eyes on the horizon for trends and shifts while managing the present
  • Poor stress management from high productivity and little return
  • Unwillingness to consider multiple perspectives leading to better creativity and innovation

I believe Jansen would not have had to consider downsizing, had decision-makers recognized the value of intentional and consistent leadership development.

Leadership directly affects all levels of the organization’s success.

Is your leadership producing a great ROI? Here are some questions to help you gauge this:

  1. Are people clamoring to work for your company? Are your employees highly engaged and productive?
  2. Is your business consistently increasing revenue and profitability? Or are there areas that need help?
  3. Are you retaining your current market share and capturing more? Or are you stalled at a certain point?
  4. Where do you stand vis-à-vis the competition? How well are your products and services reflecting the innovation you need to be on top?
  5. What does overall performance look like for your enterprise? Are there any silos or broken parts needing your attention?

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