by Judy Rathwell | Oct 7, 2019 | Leadership Aha!, Newsletter, Performance Development
Many of us have those very talented friends and colleagues that are always being pursued by other organizations – Some leave; some don’t. Companies are often taken by surprise when the announcement comes that someone they idolized leaves for another opportunity.
In asking those that leave, many of these have rung true….“As you reflect upon the past few years, what missed opportunities did they have to retain you?”
- Believe a paycheck is a retention tool. A paycheck, alone, won’t make someone stay.
- Act like retention is only HR’s job. People don’t quit their company, they quit their managers and colleagues. Retention is everyone’s job.
- Think you know what’s best for your employee’s career. Employees, too, should have a say in how their career develops.
- Ignore the importance of culture. If organizational values only exist on a fancy wall poster, culture isn’t being minded.
- Not offer professional development. Learning doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive. It just needs to happen.
- Fail to develop career paths. Career growth doesn’t mean climbing the corporate ladder. It means helping people feel like they’re progressing in their profession.
- Don’t tell people they matter. Employees need to feel like they count. Small things add up.
- Ignore the little things. Every employer knows your birthday, start date, and other odds and ends about you. If they don’t use this personal information to make you feel valued, they’re missing out on easy opportunities to engage you.
- Fail to keep pace with workforce trends. If software is outdated, the dress code doesn’t make sense, and there’s not a lot of focus on the workplace experience, then your business needs to catch up with the rest of the world and develop modern workforce practices.
- Treat your top talent like everyone else. If you’ve got superstars, they deserve superstar treatment. (Not diva treatment, they just need special attention so they’re developed for future opportunities.)
We know that work is a relationship between an employer (and leader) and an employee. For any relationship to work, both have to be committed and put their best foot forward.
List first seen in a blog post from Lead Star, September 2019
by Judy Rathwell | Sep 23, 2019 | Leadership Aha!, Newsletter, Performance Development
When it comes to success, we have often been taught the value of IQ through test-taking and traditional education focus.
Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.
Dweck focuses on two core attitudes: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.
Fixed mindset – you believe you are who you are and cannot change. Often leaving you feeling hopeless and overwhelmed when faced with a challenge that is more than you believe you can handle.
Growth mindset – you believe you can improve with effort. With this attitude, most outperform because they embrace challenges and an opportunity to learn.
Many believe having an ability, like being smart, inspires confidence. It does, but only while the going is easy. The deciding factor in life is how you handle setbacks and challenges. People with a growth mindset embrace setbacks as learning opportunities.
According to Dweck, success in life is all about how you deal with failure. She describes the approach to failure of people with the growth mindset this way,
“Failure is information—we label it a failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, and I’m a problem solver, so I’ll try something else.'”
Thankfully, your mindset is something you can change and grow. Below are strategies that will help you do just that:
- Move beyond helpless. After a failure or being stuck, we can feel helpless. The key is how we react to that feeling. We can either learn from it and move forward or let it drag us down and stay stuck.
- Be passionate.What you lack in talent, you can make up for in passion – driving your unrelenting pursuit of excellence.
- Take action.This helps eliminate fear and anxiety which can be paralyzing and the best way to overcome them is to take action.
- Expect results. This keeps you motivated. If you don’t think you will succeed, you may become discourages or not even try.
- Be flexible.Embrace adversity as a means for improvement, as opposed to something that sets you back.
- Don’t complain when things don’t go your way.This can become a habit! A growth mindset looks for the opportunity.
What are some ways you encourage others (or yourself) to move from a fixed to a growth mindset?
by Judy Rathwell | Aug 20, 2019 | Communication, Engagement, Leadership Aha!, Leadership Development, Newsletter
Meetings. The word can solicit strong feelings about their value and level of effectiveness. Regardless of how you feel about them, meetings are an essential part of most organizations. Many of us practice the standard guidelines for creating a good meeting: creating a clear agenda/meeting objective, keeping time, recapping action items, inviting the right people, etc.
So how can meetings be more engaging and productive? What’s missing?
Knowing your audience’s personality style is often the missing piece.
A personality assessment like EverythingDiSC® can help bridge the gap between employees and optimal workplace communication. For example:
- Consider that D-styles prefer meetings with minimal small talk and an agenda that everyone sticks to.
- Allow i-styles to flourish by allowing them to express personal opinions and have open discussions with others.
- To ensure S-styles feel comfortable, provide them with your meeting’s outline or agenda in advance so they can prepare.
- Remember that C-styles don’t do well with making big decisions when they feel rushed or pressured.
These are some of the elements of how knowing your communication style and that of your other meeting participants can make for more effective meetings.
-Adapted from EverythingDiSC® blog July 11, 2019
by Judy Rathwell | Jul 8, 2019 | Communication, Leadership Aha!, Newsletter
A wise man once said, communication makes friends; a lack of communication makes enemies. Our words have power! We all know communication is important, and yet effective communication can be a battle for individuals, teams, and organizations. Communication is the gateway to clarity, which ultimately gets the right things done.
As Alan Schaefer, Branding People Together states, “to ensure we have clarity, we must consider how we share and process information. Most of us have experienced a scenario where you have a meeting with one or several people. You have a robust, or at least what appears to be forward-moving, conversation. You break the metaphorical huddle and go running whatever plays you understand to be correct. You come back together and people are so off course that you have a twilight-zone moment of disbelief wondering, Was the other person in the same conversation as the rest of us?”
So how do you prevent your team from falling prey to the telephone game? Below are three ways to prevent miscommunication:
- Use the right format –Email? Phone? Face to face? We tend to default to email a lot! Email is best used to spread information, like recapping action items after a meeting or sharing attachments others need, NOT for in-depth communication. This means no debating, convincing or critiquing via email—save that for face-to-face communication.
- Know Yourself and Others. The more you know about yourself and those you’re communicating with, the more effective you will be. This is especially helpful with people who are wired differently than you.
- Repeat and Recap. At the end of a conversation, repeat what you heard, allowing for feedback on whether you understood the message in the way the speaker intended. You will be amazed by how many times the other person will say, “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant…” This includes recapping next steps if applicable.
The good news is, like anything else, you can build your communication skills and become a skilled communicator that’s productive and clear. You are what you repeatedly do.
Are you known as a skilled communicator?
by Judy Rathwell | Jun 18, 2019 | Communication, Influence, Leadership Aha!
“Well, that’s just how we do things here… It’s how we’ve always done it… It’s best that you don’t rock the boat…”
Have you ever heard these dismissive responses when you or your colleagues have suggested changing things in the workplace? Change is always met with some resistance – just ask any visionary.
Anyone Can Challenge the Status Quo
Even when we know something should be different, we don’t always have the courage to take action. And when we do, we risk our ideas falling on deaf ears, or being overruled or ignored. These five approaches can help increase your chances of success when considering challenging to the status quo.
- Ask the Right Questions
If you keep asking yourself “why” when you’re following a process or regular course of action, you’ve likely identified something to be improved.
If that’s the case, ask yourself and other people questions, in order to fully understand why things are being done in a particular way. There may be good reasons that you’re unaware of, or maybe it is just because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Listen carefully – their answers may lead to further questions, problems or solutions that you hadn’t considered.
- Prioritize Your Ideas
Perhaps you have a whole list of ideas that you’d like to implement. If so, it’s important to pick your battles. Being passionate about change is admirable, but rattling off new ideas every day will see people start to tune out, and your best ideas may get lost among the lesser ones.
For maximum impact, pick the ones that are most relevant and likely to succeed. Choose wisely; take time for self-reflection and factor in some personal brainstorming.
- Gather Allies
If you’re planning to challenge long-standing attitudes or processes, it can help to have people on your side!
Multiple perspectives can help creativity to blossom. You won’t be the only person in the office with ideas, and you might inspire others to speak up with theirs. You’ll gather allies who can support you if you meet resistance, either face-on or behind your back.
Remember, collaboration is the key to success, so it’s important to put your ego aside.
- Perfect Your Pitch
There’s a fine line between firm reasoning and antagonism, and change is a scary and therefore touchy subject for some people. If you’re too forceful, you risk people shutting off, and perhaps shutting down your idea before you even had the chance to sell it to them. Be sensitive to other people’s points of view. Listen to what they have to say and be clear about what’s at risk and what will be improved by your idea.
Keep your pitch short and snappy, and leave plenty of time for discussion and questions. Be sure to choose the right moment too.
- Keep Calm and Persevere
If you don’t succeed straight away, don’t let exhaustion, anger or stress get the better of you. It’s important not to let failures get you down. Learn from the experience and focus on turning negative emotions around. Some ideas can take a while to come to fruition.
Have you ever challenged the status quo? How did you approach it? What was the outcome? Would you do anything differently next time?
Source: Mindtools, Faye Bradshaw April 2019
by Judy Rathwell | Jun 4, 2019 | Communication, Leadership Aha!, Performance Development
“No matter how much success you’re having, you cannot continue working together if you can’t communicate” –James Cameron
Managers play a critical role in developing the people on their teams. Without strong leaders and a strategic management plan, people often become complacent or feel unfulfilled and “stuck” in their jobs. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. recently shared A Winning Approach to Employee Development, making it personalized to the individual by noting the following for each direct report:
- Individualized assessments of the employee’s potential
- Employee’s career and development goals
- Identifying employee’s motivators. Such as do they appreciate acts of service (helping them)? Gifts (coffee cards, lunch certificates)? Quality time (regular meetings, going out to lunch together)? Words of affirmation? Etc.
- Identifying the employee’s preferred work personality style (DiSC)
Curious about how to tailor your development approach to the employee’s preferred work styles using DiSC? Here are some simple ways to get started:
- For D-style employees, consider development opportunities that have the potential for impressive results, as success is typically their bottom line. Review the big picture with them and encourage them to come up with appropriate long-term goals.
- When working with i-styles, allow them to lead small groups, as they thrive in a collaborative environment. Help them stay focused by pointing out the negative consequences of not taking enough time to develop skills with deliberate effort.
- For developing S-style team members, be mindful to push them gently to grow and develop—slow and steady tends to win with them. Show them that they have what it takes to work autonomously, and don’t be afraid to offer constructive feedback when necessary.
- With C-styles, try putting development opportunities into clear, well-organized framework. Make sure that these independent and logic-driven employees see the drawbacks of always playing it safe, and remind them to fill you in on their progress.
By communicating with our employees in the way they are wired/prefer, shows them we see and hear them – making them feel valued. And that is a critical component to developing people.
Aha! Leadership is an authorized partner for Everything DiSC® and its tools and assessments. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you or your employees, please email aha@ahaledership.com
