Ten Ways to Engage Your Workforce in 2012

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As we start a new year, leaders will once again ask themselves how they can engage their people – often asking employees to do more with less. Let me start by observing that you can’t motivate people. You need to hire motivated top performers and then make sure you don’t demotivate them. Here are some ways to ensure you don’t:
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  • Make sure people and their jobs match. Too often people want to move to management when they are better solo performers, or they prefer to work individually, but the job requires collaboration. People perform better when they and their jobs are in synch.
  • Give feedback. Top performers will be more engaged when they receive constructive information about what they do well and what they need to improve.
  • Delegate. Give each person whole projects instead of pieces or parts of a project. Grant authority and freedom to get the job done.
  • ‘A’ players want access—to you, your top clients, investors, and anyone else who is important to the organization. Give them this access, and they will engage.
  • Start the year by establishing realistic and achievable objectives. Stretch people; don’t snap them. Dangling the carrot just beyond the donkey’s reach will just make for a very angry donkey.
  • Star performers expect recognition. When you don’t provide it, they feel cheated and devalued. Stars require praise, but unless you offer it sincerely and specifically, they will dismiss it. When you provide it, they repay you with loyalty and exceptional performance.
  • Compensate fairly. Don’t pay an average wage unless you want average performers.
  • Allow for life balance. Top performers tend to be overachievers in all aspects of their lives. Just as they expect to do exceptional work when they are on the job, they insist on outstanding relationships in their private lives. Clever people know the difference between critical and unimportant uses of their time. If you insist on long hours, rigid schedules, and busy work, they will disengage.
  • Don’t micromanage. Communicate, set timeframes, establish goals, and get out of the way. Talk to others about what needs to be done, but let them decide how they will go about it.
  • Establish trust as a two-way street. People who don’t trust their leaders lose their motivation first and their desire to work for the un-trusted leader next. Be consistent in behavior, mood, and policies. Conduct your personal life with the same integrity that you do business, and trust others.

Star performers, by definition, come through your door motivated and ready to engage. They want to contribute to the success of an important organization and work with other ‘A’ players. Make your organization a place where the clever choose to work, and your stars will become your best magnets for other top performers – and all will stay engaged throughout the year.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Dr. Linda Henman, the catalyst for virtuoso organizations, is the author of Landing in the Executive Chair, among other works. She is an expert on setting strategy, planning succession, and developing talent. For more than 30 years she has helped executives and boards in Fortune 500 Companies and privately-held organizations dramatically grow their businesses. She was one of eight succession planning experts who worked directly with John Tyson after his company’s acquisition of International Beef Products. Some of her other clients include Emerson Electric, Avon, Kraft Foods, Edward Jones, and Boeing. She can be reached in St. Louis at www.henmanperformancegroup.com.

Recommended Resource – Getting to Yes

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Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

by Roger Fisher and William Ury

About the Reference

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury recognizes that professionals are in a frequent state of negotiation and provides them with the tools needed to achieve a desirable outcome. This book probes many diverse negotiation circumstances from both sides of the debate and offers constructive, easy-to-follow methods to achieve one’s desired outcomes by:

  • Disentangling the people from the problem
  • Focusing on interests, not positions
  • Working together to find creative and fair options

These methods help the reader negotiate with anyone at any level of their organization.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors believe that negotiation is a key component to individual and organizational success. Getting to Yes breaks down these give and take situations; providing the immediately actionable tools needed to achieve a favorable outcome and making these situations less intimidating. If we had one criticism of the book, it would be that the authors seek to achieve a ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’ outcome for each side. While this appears admirable, it forfeits an upside gain that an effective negotiation might be able to otherwise achieve.

Getting to Yes provides a thorough, actionable negotiation tool set that is critical to every professional and organization’s success; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Practices for Professionals – Effective Use of Discretionary Effort

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In this fast-paced marketplace and certainly during these challenging economic conditions, StrategyDriven Professionals typically find themselves working more than forty hours a work. More common among these professionals is a forty-five hour work week with others working fifty hours a week. When these hours are mandated by one’s role, for instance as a rotating shiftwork supervisor, the hours themselves are not necessary discretionary and are usually compensated. However, when the hours are not mandated by the job itself and are simply a management expectation, whether overtly communicated or a result of an excessive workload, they are by definition discretionary.

While one might feel discretionary effort is rewarded in terms of more rapid advancement or larger pay raises, unless there is an immediate and directly correlated compensation, such as comp-time, the discretionary effort is not truly compensated. Instead, rewards for this this extra effort depends on the good will of those executives, managers, and supervisors for whom one works. This, in turn, begs the question of how to effectively contributing discretionary effort so it not only yields a benefit for the organization but also for you, the professional, providing it.

In order for discretionary effort to mutually benefit the organization and you, the professional, consider the following principles:

  • Discretionary effort contributing most to promotions and pay raises is that which is contributed nearest in time to the promotion and/or pay raise decision; this timeframe often being no more than several weeks and, at most, two months
  • Discretionary effort should benefit both the organization and you, the professional. When considering personal benefits, the discretionary effort should contributed to one or more of the following:
    • Direct achievement of a personal performance goal
    • Enhancement of a knowledge or skill or provision of an experience enabling you to both perform your current position more effectively and make you more marketable to outside organizations even if you have no intention of leaving your current company
    • Provides an opportunity to demonstrate next level ability
    • Provides an opportunity to build your eminence/brand within and external to the company, such as authoring and publishing points of view articles and making public forum presentations at conferences, seminars, and universities
    • Enhances both your company’s and your personal stature with clients

The goal of having a company and personal benefit associated with discretionary effort is that your time and effort should necessarily benefit you. Companies are not entitled to free labor. Uncompensated discretionary effort simply drains you of energy because it keeps you from achieving you own personal goals both within the business world and in your personal life. Company leaders will always seek the maximum amount of uncompensated discretionary effort from their employees for no other reason than it better enables the organization to achieve one of its primary missions – to maximize stakeholder value by maximizing productivity and minimizing cost. All discretionary effort increases productivity and its lack of compensation minimizes costs. If there is not a direct or indirect benefit to the professional providing this work, they assume the loss while company’s leaders and shareholders gain.

Final Thoughts…

From a management perspective, does this mean that motivating employees to provide uncompensated discretionary effort is wrong? Our answer is absolutely not. Not all work needs to be monetarily compensated. The good manager will seek to motivate employees to constructively provide discretionary effort. By constructive, we mean contributing discretionary effort in a way that benefits both the company and the individual. Individuals often benefit through the knowledge, skills, and experiences gained through the performance of an activity. These knowledge, skills, and experiences should be recognized and broadly communicated by the manager to enhance the individual’s reputation and rewards opportunities within the organization but they should also serve to maximize the contributor’s employability should it be necessary for him or her to realize the rewards for their good work through employment with another company.

Recommended Resource – I, Steve

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I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words

edited by George Beahm

About the Reference

I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words edited by George Beahm reveals Steve Jobs’ core beliefs about business in a way no other author has been able to achieve… because these insights come directly from Steve Jobs himself. George’s book systematically covers a wide range of topics from ‘Being the Best’ to ‘Risking Failure’, from ‘Passion’ to ‘Values’, and ‘Beyond Recruiting’ to ‘Firing Employees’.

Throughout I, Steve, three predominate themes are revealed:

  • the intersection between design and business values as expressed in products
  • the importance of people, teamwork, and organizational culture in achieving innovation, and
  • the necessity of cutting against conventional wisdom to fulfill what people want before they know they want it.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like I, Steve because it reveals the intimate thoughts and beliefs of a man who was not only a creative genius but who was also a business giant. Most of Steve Jobs’ approaches align well with the principles and philosophies we recommend business leaders adopt to further the success of their organizations. While we recognize that some may disagree with Steve Jobs’ approach to certain circumstances – and on occasion we do too, all agree he was one of the great leaders and visionaries who has shape our modern world.

StrategyDriven Contributors appreciated the layout of I, Steve, the organization of quotes around meaningful topic areas, the dating of each quote, and Steve Jobs’ life story timeline provided at the end of the book. We found that knowing the setting and circumstances of the Steve Jobs’ quotes provided insightful context from which to interpret them. As such, we recommend first-time readers review the ‘Milestones’ timeline presented at the end of the book first and refer to it often when reading individual quotes.

For it’s intimate portrayal of an American entrepreneurial icon, I, Steve is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Tribute to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs who has forever changed our global society. This tribute video by Antonio Marotta and Diana Casadiego was made on one of Steve Jobs’ Macs…

…and this article produced on another.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice Article

System Development

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Organizational performance measures work together to illustrate a complex picture of performance; cascading up and down the organization and horizontally across it. Subsequently, it is important that the characteristics of performance measures within the system be well aligned to enable multi-indicator information development and data flow. (See Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice – Common Construction Characteristics and the StrategyDriven whitepaper Organizational Performance Measures – Construction.) Developing performance measures as a system rather than a collage of individually constructed indicators is the most effective way of achieving this alignment.

Organizational performance measures constructed in a standalone environment, given common units of measure and type, may appear to be part of a seamless and fully integrated system. However, when conceived individually, these measures often serve a singular purpose; typically to monitor one-dimensional performance of a given business process, system, or workgroup. Subsequently, the siloed development of performance indicators does not benefit from a multidimensional perspective that would otherwise infuse a system of collectively developed performance measures; measures that together reveal a complete and complex picture of performance. Instead, what evolves is a set of segmented measures that are fractured in their alignment because of the restrictions placed on the underlying drivers of their development. When used together, these individually developed measures tend to harbor information gaps and foster less than fully accurate conclusions to be drawn when compared with system developed performance measures. Therefore, to avoid these deficiencies, performance measures should be developed collectively as a system. Furthermore, the interrelated use of various measures to determine complex performance should be documented in order to facilitate the completeness of the system’s development and to provide a basis for assessment should a give performance measure be altered in the future.

StrategyDriven's organizational performance measures catalogEnterprise Performance Measurement

We can work with you to assess and improve your performance measurement system; yielding metrics and reports that are operationally relevant, organizationally consistent, and economically implemented. The resulting system helps improve managerial decision-making, organizational alignment, and individual accountability. Learn more about how we can support your implementation and upgrade efforts or contact us for a personal consultation.