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Ducks in a Row: Motivation and Trust

Tuesday, March 12th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aucklandphotonews/8252061970/

Yesterday’s Oldie was a reminder that there are very view motivators that can beat VSI (vested self-interest) when it comes to engaging your team.

Some people respond to money, but many more respond to intangible rewards.

How do you know what works?

How can you tailor motivators individually for each person?

I’ve heard from bosses at every level that they’re already stretched, they need to focus on the deliverables and their team and just don’t have the time to deal with individuals.

Which is laughable, since the team is comprised of individuals and the bosses job is to engage and motivate them, so the deliverables are delivered on time.

Great managers have no fear of using one of the most efficient approaches, i.e., ask your current team and each new hire.

Don’t suggest or use multiple choice, just ask.

  • What makes you eager to come to work?
  • If you could choose just one thing, other than compensation, that would light your work fire what would if be?

Don’t ask in a group situation if you want real answers, honest answers.

In fact, don’t ask in person, since you may not be able to control your initial reaction. If that happens it will break trust with that person and it is unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon.

Remember, this isn’t about what motivates you, nor is it any business of yours to judge what motivates someone else.

Hand the questions out in hard copy with each person’s name already on it.

Tell them you are using hardcopy to avoid the chance of accidental leaks and promise their responses won’t be shared with anybody.

It is extremely important that you don’t share them, even anonymously, with anyone, especially inside the company. Doing so for any reason, with anyone is betrayal, pure and simple.

Explain that because all humans are different you want to understand what really matters to each of them and that once you do you’ll do your best to provide it.

Finally, don’t kid yourself, if you don’t honor your promise it is betrayal, the equivalent to sleeping around when in a committed relationship.

If you don’t know how to be faithful, you’re better off just forgetting about this post.

Image credit: Auckland Photo News

Golden Oldies: The Number One, World-Beating, Best Motivator

Monday, March 11th, 2019

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Engagement is way down, jobs are plentiful, turnover is way up, and managers aren’t just searching for solutions.

No, what they really want to find is a silver bullet; a Harry Potter magic wand they can wave to promote engagement, hike productivity, juice creativity and sustain the whole thing.

But as we all know, silver bullets and magic wands are in extremely short supply.

That said, VSI, as explained below, comes pretty close.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

How do you lead/influence/motivate/get/force others to move in the direction you choose or achieve a goal, large or small, that you set? That question is the basis for yards of books and megabytes of content, but in spite of all that’s already been written I thought I’d add my bit to the total.

After all, responding to this question is almost a right of passage in the land of leadership and motivation.

So here’s my two-word answer: vested self-interest (VSI).

Over the years, I’ve found vested self-interest to be not only the most powerful people motivator around, but also one of the least expensive, since the cost is mainly from the effort to learn what it is for each person.

And the idea must have merit when you consider that a Sudanese cell phone billionaire is using it to incentivize African heads of state to act responsibly.

In that case, the incentive was money, but that’s not always the case. If it were, then companies wouldn’t lose talent to other companies offering the same or even lower pay.

It’s an error to always assume that dollars will do it, or that what turns on one, turns on all. Hot buttons are as individual as your people are and don’t always involve tangibles.

As a manager, it’s up to you to discover each of your people’s hot buttons, i.e., what really turns them on, and then find a way to satisfy it in return for what you want in performance, innovation, etc.

Taking the time to learn what the buttons are allows you to power your team as never before, which, in turn, should give you the ability to satisfy your own VSI.

Remembering that generalities are always dangerous, here are some of the most common hot buttons

    • public recognition – not just for big things, but for the small, everyday wins that fill most people’s working lives;
    • strokes – a few words here, a compliment there, doesn’t take much time, but be warned, people aren’t stupid, if your comments are lip-service only they will know and respond accordingly;
    • giving back – supported or encouraged volunteer programs, leave day banks, etc.;
    • making a difference – internally and/or externally; and
    • growing/stretching – the opportunity to do something new, learn new skills, etc.

Obviously, money is still a motivator, but it’s not always big bucks, it’s more that the amount is relevant to the accomplishment and logical relative to the company’s circumstances.

And it doesn’t need to be “new” money, it can be a different way to cut a current pie. For example, I get many queries from senior execs asking for exotic approaches and detailed how-to’s for implementing cultural and other intangible changes that often require encouraging (and at times, coercing) their managerial staff into actually doing them.

The most successful method I’ve found is as simple as one, two, three.

    1. Carefully define, in a quantifiable manner, what you want done (not “increase retention,” but “reduce turnover X% by [date]”).
    2. Include these well-quantified goals in the managers’ annual objectives. (This is not a variation of MBO.)
    3. Make it clear to your managers that they will be evaluated on these goals and that the evaluation will impact their annual reviews and compensation.

Vested self-interest should do the rest

And as any parent can tell you, VSI works great on kids, too — or anyone, for that matter.

Image credit: Quotes Everlasting

Ducks in a Row: Institutional Jerks

Tuesday, March 5th, 2019

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/littlebiglens/33050548253/

(‘Jerk’ is used here as an umbrella term for bullies, manipulators, bigots, rotten attitudes, rudeness, cruelty, etc.)

Jerks have been around since the dawn of man.

In today’s workplace you can find jerks at any level of an organization.

It’s always been difficult to call out the jerks, because they are usually bullies and good at intimidation.

The rise of individual jerks, some of them extremely powerful, has fostered the rise of institutional jerks, also very powerful.

Some are in tech and run for companies that are household names — Facebook, Google, Amazon — others aren’t as well-known, such as Palantir.

However, you can find them everywhere, in politics — national, regional and local. In religion — any of them. And any other arena you want to focus on.

Their power is more far-reaching and they believe they are untouchable.

Sadly, they often are.

But how much worse is it when the institution itself is the jerk?

Talk about untouchable.

WeWork is on a role to lead the newest crop of institutional jerks.

The company acquired and plans to monetize software that tracks employees throughout a company.

Euclid’s website says the company is “focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future.” Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive.

Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It’s all done over Wi-Fi.

Sound creepy?

It is.

Governments are getting into the act, too.

While the legislation varies slightly from state to state, it generally requires contractors to install software that allows “automatic verification” of their hours billed. Some bills, such as those being considered in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, are as exact as requiring a software solution that takes screenshots of “state-funded activity at least once every three (3) minutes” and store that data for seven years. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania proposals also require logging “keystroke and mouse event frequency.”

Now comes the question that the jerks never seem to think about.

How do you recruit talent, let alone top talent, into an environment that says up front, “we don’t trust you”?

As for the private sector, there is no way that any kind of monitoring or surveillance will remain secret — any more than salaries did.

Companies that choose not to go down that road will enjoy a more productive, creative and loyal workforce, not to mention one heck of a recruiting edge.

Image credit: Steve Baker

Golden Oldies: What To Do When You Get Really Mad

Monday, February 25th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/istolethetv/37792400/Poking through 12+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Ryan’s post a couple of weeks ago reminded me of something I’ve wrote a long time ago.

The sum of it was not that great but in the moment it was contentious. Emails and gnashing of teeth on both sides. In that moment I was angry, but I chose to wait to respond.

My solution? Sleep.

Good solution, but when you’re a boss and something happens that makes you angry you usually can’t wait until the next day to deal with it.

So what do you do? Here’s a solution from the 1970s (and before). It worked then, it works now and it will work in the future.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

How angry do you become when you ask your team or colleague for X and get X — 4, or X + 1. or even Y? How often have you lost, or almost lost it, because of the response you received during a meeting?

What is the only perfect response you can make when something happens and you’re ready to blow your top?

You’ve heard the answer all your life—when you’re angry, shut up/stay quiet/ don’t say anything; don’t “look” anything, either, until you’ve calmed down. Smart advice, but hard to follow.

Many managers don’t even realize when they go into “screaming mode,” because they don’t actually scream—they drip sarcasm, leak contempt, stream scorn or fire off zingers; they belittle and role their eyes. Most don’t realize the long-term damage that they do to their people; others just don’t care—their attitude is that stuff happens, get over it!

What neither type seems to realize is that, over time, one of three things happen,

  • people grow inured to their tantrums,
  • are damaged by them (people do stay in abusive relationships),
  • or leave the company.

To change this,

  • you must first acknowledge to yourself that you do it and that you want to change it; then
  • whenever you feel yourself getting angry smile, nod and leave by saying that you have to make a call, use the bathroom, whatever innocuous excuse best fits the situation;
  • go somewhere private, blow off steam if necessary, but calm down;
  • schedule a time to resume the discussion; then
  • simulate the least amount of anger (if any) needed to get your point across.

It’ll take people time to trust the “new” you, but it’s worth it. In the office, it will pay off in higher productivity and less turnover. You and your people will suffer less from stress, and you, personally, will have more energy, enjoy higher quality sleep, and see improvement in all your relationships

Image credit: istolethetv

Golden Oldies: The Accent Challenge

Monday, February 18th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/98673962@N06/11085205754

Poking through 12+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

You might think that stuff would change in 11 years and you would be correct if you were talking about technology, food, or similar topics. But when the subject is people, not so much.

Accents can be just as much a challenge today as they were when I wrote this and before. The difference 11 years have made is that while there is greater acceptance of diverse accents the need for understanding them hasn’t changed.

Nor has the solution described in this post. If anything, its importance has significantly increased.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The ability to communicate successfully, in both directions, is the mark of a great manager, as is building and managing a powerful and innovative organization.

Accomplishing this mandates a willingness to hire the best available people.

But what do you do when the best can’t be easily understood?

Accents, whether from overseas or US regional, are a major turnoff to many people. Reactions range from idiotic assumptions of incompetence (essentially subconscious prejudice) to annoyance for having to exert effort listening (sheer laziness).

In a diverse world of shrinking talent pools, where English is a second language for many, it’s bad business to pass on those candidates, but it’s also ridiculous to believe that the problem will fix itself or just fade away if you ignore it.

I’m not talking about the need for flawless English, but about recognizing what happens if they aren’t understood.

What can you, as a manager, do?

If the challenge is accent (whether from India, China, New York, Liverpool, Mississippi, etc.), rather than comprehension or language knowledge, that could minimize their contribution or effectiveness, what do you do?

The same solution you use for any good candidate who is lacking a particular skill, you offer training. In this case, accent reduction training.

Again, not to force them to sound like you, but to improve their speech enough to ensure a reasonable level of understanding.

Yes, the discussion and offer needs to be handled with sensitivity, but people aren’t stupid and they know the things that put them at a disadvantage in the workplace. What you are offering to do is pay for training that will give them a boost throughout their career, not just at your company.

The cost isn’t that great, either, the company profiled in the article charges around $1000 per person. In comparison to the cost-per-day of continuing the search, $1000 doesn’t even qualify as a peanut.

Plus, there is additional ROI to you, individually, and to your company.

  • You acquire top talent with a high degree of loyalty, while building a reputation as a creative manager, who knows how to successfully staff outside the box, is willing to invest in people, and has the vision to see beyond the obvious.
  • Your company strengthens its diversity, which typically improves innovation, while your management achievements have an external halo effect on the company.

Image credit: 마 법사

Why Employees and Candidates Ghost

Wednesday, February 6th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lemerou/14250673646/

One of the major reasons people ghost isn’t rocket science.

Nor is the major cause.

Candidates ghost because nothing connected — not the company, culture, job, people, and especially not the hiring manager.

Employees ghost because they aren’t engaged.

They feel that nobody — boss, company, colleagues — gives a damn so why should they.

And in many cases they are correct.

Companies don’t walk their cultural talk, low morale is obvious, as is a “me before thee” attitude, and

for a variety of reasons, bosses treat people as replaceable — even when they know it won’t be easy or could take months.

It’s nothing new.

Since the day people became hires, instead of slaves or indentured, bosses have used and abused them.

They still do, but on a more refined level.

Skipped promotions, demotions with little-to-no explanation, seriously brutal layoffs by email, with no warning (as Elon Musk just did), which is especially destructive to people when the company/job has been cast as some kind of “higher calling,” as is common in the tech world.

Candidates often fare no better.

Many managers consider hiring a necessary evil — resumes bore them, they hate wasting time interviewing — and they have more important things to do.

Strangely enough, HR often acts the same way, with preliminary interviews conducted by interviewers who look for word matches between resumes/candidates and job descriptions.

Obviously, it’s not all companies or all bosses — but likely the ones that get ghosted.

Image credit: Joe Le Merou

Golden Oldies: Ducks in a Row: the Reality of Culture

Monday, January 21st, 2019

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Danial Adkinson was lucky. His first boss was a true role model and taught him one of the most important lessons anyone ever learns. He was especially lucky, because he learned it at a very young age and apparently pretty smart, because it stayed with him.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But then again, making a pizza, or driving a truck, or baking a cake, or any of countless other jobs are not always enjoyable in themselves, either. Out of all the lessons I learned from that guy in the Pizza Hut tie, maybe the biggest is that any job can be the best job if you have the right boss.Danial Adkison

People work for people, not companies.

People quit people, not companies.

They accept positions because of the culture and leave when it changes.

Bosses interpret company culture; they improve or pervert it; they add/subtract/polish/tarnish it.

What bosses don’t do is pass it on intact and untouched.

Flickr image credit: Susanne Nilsson

Millennial Managers

Thursday, January 17th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3555349324/

From the Winter 2018/2019 issue of Inc. Magazine (Use the link to see the actual survey results.)

The oldest Millennials are now well into their 30s, and they’re increasingly running companies. Inc. and our sister publication, Fast Company, partnered with career-development site the Muse to survey 155 Millennial bosses to see how they manage, what they value, and how they plan to shape the future of business. The top priorities they cited are humanist: creating positive work cultures, forging strong relationships (in person, not through apps), and caring for the whole person, not just the worker. And, unlike some Boomers and Gen-Xers, they’re optimistic about those who will replace them. As Elena Valentine, co-founder and CEO of video company Skill Scout, predicts, “I have a hunch Gen Z is going to make an even bigger impact.”

Of course, the survey focused on CEOs in tech; no one seems to bother doing similar surveys on lower level millennial managers working outside of tech.

So I thought I’d share my own experience over the last 15 years with millennial managers and their workers at my small, local bank branch.

Over those years there have been roughly seven managers, all but one were promoted and are still with the bank.

Unlike large, urban branches, small branches like mine function differently. Tellers remember your name and chat; managers often handle transactions normally done by bankers.

Because I handle the banking, wires, etc., for my Russian business partner I had a lot of interactions with the managers, as well as the staff, and got to know them on a more personal level than you might expect.

The managers all ranged from their late twenties to early thirties.

They managed much the same as the CEOs in the survey. Same concerns and efforts with their peoples’ growth and well-being.

Our conversations often focused on the culture they strove to create and, for a few years, what it took to protect their people from the toxic culture and destructive behavior of a district manager (she created enough stress to put one pregnant manager on doctor-ordered bed rest) who was finally fired.

None of the managers were perfect, although the current one is as close as any manager gets, but they created great micro-cultures, in which their teams thrived.

Impressive, especially when you consider that the bank is Wells Fargo.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

If The Shoe Fits: Startups, Millennials and the Future

Friday, December 14th, 2018

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

For years the media has been proclaiming that the great majority of young people want to be entrepreneurs or work for a startup, as opposed to a larger/older company, because startups were “cool.”

Now it looks like their ardor is what’s cool, as in cooled off.

Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. (…) Two years ago, EIG’s president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”

What changed?

Maybe they learned that wanting to and doing it are very different. That they will work far harder for themselves, even if they are well-funded, or that startups fail  far more often than they succeed (90% vs 10%).

A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one.

But maybe there is something else going on.

Maybe they have figured out that the world doesn’t need another social network / dating app / review site / etc.

Maybe investors have realized that monetizing through ads isn’t a good road to sustainable profitability, considering the push for more European-style privacy.

Or maybe, just maybe, reality has reared its ugly head and they’ve figured out they don’t have enough experience or know enough to create enterprise solutions for real-world needs.

Matt Krisiloff, the former Y Combinator executive, added that the opportunities “to start compelling start-ups,” for college students without industry-specific knowledge, “has vastly shrunk.”

Maybe they aren’t all looking for a safe harbor in the next downturn (there aren’t any), but for the experience that will ground their startup in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.

Maybe our media-inspired view of entrepreneurs is a reflection of the warped views of Silicon Valley as engendered by VCs.

VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it.

Maybe the entrepreneurs of the future will look more like our real world in all its diverse, messy glory.

And a final “maybe.”

Maybe there is room to hope.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Golden Oldies: Management Messes: Pain and Threats

Monday, November 19th, 2018

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

For all the promise of technology people are still people and they respond as such. Further, I doubt that’s going to change within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing.

(Note: Although the “Chat with Miki” box no longer exists, I typically reply to email within 24 hours.)

Read other Golden Oldies here.

“Clint” used the ‘Chat with Miki” box in the right-hand frame to ask me this question.

Have you ever heard this?  “People usually won’t change until the pain of NOT changing exceeds the pain of changing.”

Since this is a pretty common idea I thought I’d share my ideas with everybody.

I’ve heard this and many variations of it over the years, especially when applied to the workplace where it becomes a form of management by threat

For example, if your company or boss decides on a change and people’s jobs hinge on that change, they will change.

The problem is that they will also disengage at some level, maybe a little, but sometimes a lot. Not always obviously, but over time it will show in lower productivity, less creativity and, eventually, higher turnover.

Clint then asked if I thought that vested self-interest could be used instead of increasing the pain.

The answer is absolutely.

VSI is the perfect opposite to increased pain.

By rethinking a desired action, such as change, and presenting it in terms of its value to employees you can trip the VSI switch—but not if it’s a con.

As I’ve said a million times, people are not stupid; if the desired action is not really in their best interests there is nothing you can do that will convince them. VSI will still kick in, but the result will be resume polishing, lots of LinkedIn action and conversations with recruiters.

Clint decided that by using vested self-interest he could reduce the pain of changing. He plans to connect his organization’s goals to his people’s goals, which will effectively reduce the pain and increase the likelihood that they will do what he needs them to do—painlessly.

Handy little item my chat box. Try it, I’m usually here.

Image credit: nkzs on sxc.hu

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