As you focus on the New Year and what lies ahead in 2016, it is the perfect time to revolutionize specific areas of your life. Instead of the typical resolutions that most Americans make, which include countless variations of losing weight, getting organized, and saving more money, what if we instead made 2016 the year where we resolved to improve our work life? This doesn’t necessarily mean that our resolutions should involve “getting a raise” or “being promoted” (although those may fall into place if you follow some of the below ideas). Rather, what if we resolve to just be better? Be a better employee. Be a better manager. Be a better leader and influencer. If we all focus on being better and influencing positive change, we’d all enjoy working more, and we may even work harder and be more productive.

AS AN EMPLOYEE

Ensure that the human aspect exists in your job, no matter where you fall within the organization. While it is important to maintain a professional employee-supervisor relationship as well as peer-to-peer, there must also be balance that includes empathy and a personal touch in those relationships. We aren’t robots, and we can have connections at work that extend beyond the tasks and deliverables of our jobs. Getting to know a coworker a little better can build rapport and allow you as a team to be even more productive and effective.

Find your work-life balance, and be sure to unplug and destress on a regular basis. Get control of your schedule—both personal and professional—and find the right mix so that you feel that you do more in life than work. Use your paid time off for true vacations during which you don’t monitor company email. Put your phone out of reach when you’re spending time with friends and family. When you achieve a milestone or goal at work, treat yourself to something special. After a big project wraps up, I will occasionally go get a massage or buy that nice bottle of wine that I normally considered a splurge.

AS A MANAGER

Reward talent and hard work. Recognizing the effort of your productive employees makes them feel appreciated and often results in those talented employees working even harder for you. Keep in mind, too, that simply taking the time out of your own schedule to acknowledge the contributions of team members will pay huge dividends. Along the same lines, be careful that the wrong people aren’t hired, promoted, or applauded, which is often insulting to the good, hard-working employees.

Get to know your employees, find out what they are passionate about, find out what they are REALLY good at—and make sure those things are incorporated into their job. Job satisfaction and productivity soar when employees’ passions are applied to their job. And by getting to know your employees, you’ll learn what motivates and drives them—tangible incentives, verbal praise, more responsibility to feed their souls with growth and opportunity—which will allow you to meet their needs and expectations when it comes to reward and recognition.

AS A LEADER

Create a culture that employees yearn to be part of. The character and values of a company start from the top and trickle down through the organization. Imagine that you rule the world, and the personality of the company and environment you build is passed onto everyone. What kind of attitude and values would you exhibit? Now putting that into real life, in 2016 focus on ensuring that you exemplify what you want the company to be and how you want others to feel when they are part of it. Also hire with that culture in mind as well so that the growth of the company reflects the foundation, vision, and mission.

Own your work. Treat your job as if it’s your business. Being responsible for the outcome of your work and taking complete ownership of it—both the successes and the failures—will be recognized and respected, and you’ll be setting a great example of being accountable for your responsibilities and the success of the company.

MAKE A NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION!

Considering that work takes up such a large portion of our lives, if we can make that aspect of it better, just think about how well everything else will fall into place. What other ways can you resolve to be better in the workplace and make a dramatic, wide-reaching change about who you are on the job? Leave comments below and stick with the resolution as long as you can!

If you are anything like me, right about now you are scratching your head trying to think of that perfect gift for that special someone. But if it’s for a member of your team, then look no further—the perfect gift does not have to come wrapped with a bow, nor did it have to be ordered on Cyber Monday.

If you want to give your team members something special this holiday season, take the time to write a heart-felt card thanking them for what they do. Notice, I said “write” and not “type” or “email.” Actually writing a letter sends a deeper message than the words spell out. It sends a message of thoughtfulness, authenticity, dedication, and appreciation—all things that contribute to an employee’s motivation and satisfaction.

Here are a few pointers that might help you craft the perfect end-of-year note.

• While we often give recognition for the major, public-facing accomplishments, being noticed for the small things can actually mean a lot more to an employee. Think of small wins, seemingly insignificant contributions, or behaviors that often go overlooked, and acknowledge them.
• This is a great time of year to provide positive feedback. Often, we think of feedback as only constructive or negative, but the positive feedback has a major impact, too. Focus on each team member’s helpful or impactful contributions from the last year. And, providing positive feedback makes employees more receptive to constructive feedback down the road.
• Use the S-B-I method. Situation-Behavior-Impact. Refer to specific events, and mention the situation, their behavior, and the impact that it had.
• Be specific. Do not resort to generalities like, “Thanks for your great work this year.” Really think of the details, and mention them. Your employees will thank you.
• Focus equally on what the person achieved as much as how they achieved it. Highlighting values like teamwork, honesty, or tenacity, or behaviors such as helping others, contributing ideas, or showing enthusiasm for the work are more important than reeling off a list of accomplishments they checked off during the year.
• Share your personal feelings. Express gratitude or share how rewarding it is to you personally to see somebody grow in their role or achieve greater results. Tell them how their contributions have impacted you personally. Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Be honest.

While this is the perfect of time of year to start this practice, writing these sorts of notes periodically throughout the year can have a major impact on your relationship with your employees and their satisfaction and contribution in their roles. Think of it like performance management; waiting until the performance review to give feedback leaves months of missed opportunities. So start your new management practice now, and keep it going all year long. We have heard countless stories from employees who have kept such personal tokens of recognition for years. It’s a small gesture with a giant upside.

Don’t be surprised if this little assignment proves to be more challenging than you expect. That just proves that the best presents often require a lot of thought and a personal touch. After all, you know what they say: “It’s the thought that counts.”

Good luck.

In the past, managers and leaders often worked with teams who reported directly to them, sitting in the same office. But the world we work in, thanks to advances in technology, has changed. Does the following sound familiar? You have a young new team member who gets promoted to a managerial role during a reorganization. The new team she is responsible for leading includes the following:

• Two people (former peers) in the same office as she is
• Two people (whom she has never met face to face) working from home in different cities
• Three people (for whom English is a second language) working in foreign subsidiaries

Welcome to the dual world of virtual AND global!

Now it’s everybody!

Global work used to be the mandate of a few jet setters while leading virtual teams was the purview of a few executives with access to the videoconferencing room.

But then the world became more connected and more flat. Today everybody in the enterprise has to master the skills of working on teams that are both physically dispersed and culturally diverse.

So how did this come to pass?

It often goes unstated, but it’s worth asking: Why do we need to embrace virtual and global work?

The quick response is that it is critical in getting the work done in today’s business environment. Organizations need to take advantage of the global talent market, while the cost arbitrage means that relying only on local suppliers of products and services would make your enterprise uncompetitive. For decades now, companies have sought out efficiencies by organizing teams in matrix structures, which often means global functions are spread thinly around the globe.

While many employees report the frustrations and challenges of working both virtually and globally, few seem to figure out the best options for making this arrangement work in their favor.

A challenge left unmastered

And yet, despite decades of working behind computers, are we any better at managing our virtual relationships? Even though people of all levels in organizations are working globally, do they know how to do this well?

The first step in developing better skills is to be aware of the challenges in working virtually, globally, or both. Here is a quick summary of the top challenges:

The importance of being thoughtful

Today, in this new context, team members need to be savvy at avoiding the pitfalls that come with working virtually, but also have to be aware of difficulties in intercultural communication. This requires everyone to be more thoughtful in how they approach their work. When working virtually and globally, we need to pause and question our default ways of working.

For instance, the temptation to use email to fix everything is very strong and presents an appealing alternative to truly dealing with tangible communication barriers. Creativity is required to align people who are in different time zones, speak different languages, and yet need to accomplish a complex goal.

When it comes to working virtually and globally, here are some best practices to increase clarity and drive collaboration:

• Email is never going to be the answer to everything: Although it may be difficult to meet due to time zone differences, some questions and tasks are better achieved over a conference call than by emailing back and forth. Choose the right technology for the right task and learn to use them all, at the appropriate opportunity.
• Align on priorities: Do not allow valuable in-person or virtual meeting time to go wasted by not checking in that everyone knows what the next steps will look like and why those priorities might change.
• Learn what disagreement sounds like across cultures: Don’t expect everyone you are working with to express disagreement or hesitation in the same way. Check your assumptions.
• Pre-work for meetings can be a very useful tactic: Amazon famously makes meetings more effective by creating six-page “briefs” of the topics that need to be covered during the meeting, so everyone can read and understand the question in depth. This means that face-to-face time involves rich discussion and is not slowed down by clarifying questions or is held up by needing more information. If meeting time is scarce, make pre-work meaningful, concise, and mandatory.
• Avoid colloquialisms: These will not help you communicate with someone across a language barrier with a time zone delay. You might want to “table the discussion” and “put a pin in it” until you figure out “if that dog can hunt,” but saying it in that exact way will not “score you a home run” with a global team.

So, before you write that next email, schedule that next meeting (at 3:00 AM Tokyo time), or pick up the phone, remember to think carefully about how to bridge the gaps that exist and ask yourself if how you are working supports what you are working toward. The people who do best with working virtually and globally have a clear intentionality to their actions and their approach. This thoughtfulness in process, method, and collaboration is an absolute requirement to thriving in the modern age of work.

Butler recently had the great pleasure of going to an athletic reunion at the small high school he attended in Norlina, North Carolina. The invitation simply stated, “Open to all who participated in athletics from 1915 when the school opened through existing freshmen in 1981 when the school closed.” Over 300 people showed up and many old relationships were rekindled. Top athletes from every decade reminisced about championship teams and standout coaches and players.

Though Butler had heard of the last speaker of the night and knew he was from his county, not until he was introduced did Butler realize that the speaker was a junior at Norlina High when it closed. David Henderson had been a basketball superstar at Norlina for three years and then at Warren County High School during his senior year. He went on to play for Duke University, serving as a co-captain his senior year as the Blue Devils made it all the way to the final four.

David’s message was excellent. Let’s paraphrase the key points:

• The best teams have clearly defined roles and match players to those roles
• Some coaches only coach—the great ones also teach
• He remembers where he’s from and takes his community with him as he travels the world
• All of us should reach out and help raise up those in our community who may be disenfranchised

All four key points are powerful and relevant. Given our work with the TOPS model, the first two bullets were especially germane for us. As we have reflected on them, their applicability to the business world couldn’t be more pertinent.

The first point, the fact that the best teams have clearly defined roles, speaks exactly to what Aimee discovers from her brother in our book. Role clarity provides great insight on every aspect of performance. It points to whom to recruit to fill the role and what skills to focus development efforts on, and, most importantly, it defines the specific outcomes the role must successfully produce for the team to win.

Defined roles lose much of their power, however, if they are not followed up with the subtle distinctions David points out about coaches and coaching. Some coaches focus solely on the game plan and the tactics required to carry it out. They are good tacticians. The best coaches also focus on teaching individuals how to be great in their specific roles. The teaching transforms a collection of individuals from a group of talented athletes into a high performing, winning team.

Butler is very proud to have grown up in the small rural town of Norlina, and, like David, he takes the community with him wherever he goes. Butler found it uplifting to hear David’s message and refreshing to witness the humility with which he delivered it.

Questions to ponder:

• Are roles clear on your team?
• Are coaches as teachers prevalent in your organization?

Leaders face challenges every day, big and small. Those challenges can take on even greater complexity with remote teams.

Balancing strategic initiatives, departmental goals, and project deadlines as a leader is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that to be successful, leaders need to also be skilled at communicating, building trust, and providing feedback and coaching at times as well. That’s a lot to tackle on its own. Arguably, you could spend a lifetime honing just those skills! But in this day and age, it is rare to not also have the added challenge of leading remote teams. With the inevitable barriers like time zone challenges, disconnected team members, or the struggle to onboard an individual in a remote location, what’s a virtual leader to do?

• Be transparent – You have to share more information than you might otherwise share. Over-communicate to build trust. Transparency can be as simple as sending an email at the beginning of the week to let your team members know what you’re working on and where you will be if they need to reach you or explaining that the silence on the line is just you being thoughtful about your response rather than rushed.
• Connect the dots – Another way to say this is “show your math.” Communicate the context for why certain decisions have been made or priorities have been set. Help your team see the connection between what they are doing and the impact on the organization by clearly describing it.
• Avoid multitasking – This may be hardest of all! In today’s distracted world, focusing on just one thing at a time can feel impossible. But when in a virtual meeting, leading by example and being fully present (close Outlook, silence your cell, and listen closely) makes a world of difference.
• Share personal information – You can create a virtual water cooler to check in on the small details like what your team member did this weekend. Open a one-on-one conversation with a personal question. Make notes on your team members’ interests and children’s names for easy reference if you have a large team. Share information about yourself too: This can foster connections and lead to greater trust.

These simple but powerful actions can increase trust and employee engagement across time zones and geographical barriers.

To end this on a fun note, I found a rather entertaining infographic on which leaders could hack it as remote leaders.

Written by Fraser Marlow and Kristen Bakalar 

Performance management is a business process that appears stuck in a bygone age. This activity remains broadly disliked, cumbersome, often demotivating, and a major waste of time. Moreover, it most often falls short on what it was designed to do, which is to manage performance. Managers, individuals, and executives alike have little faith in the process when it comes to assessing and ranking individual performance.

Fraser Marlow (head of our leadership practice at BlessingWhite) and I teamed up for a webinar to share the new approach currently being implemented by pioneering firms that want to get back to the heart of performance management using a collaborative and coaching-based approach.

We shared insights from BlessingWhite’s recent research report to help attendees:

• Learn why performance management is falling short of its primary goal of sustaining performance
• Find out what pioneering organizations are doing as an alternative what model might be best for you
• Explore six guiding principles and a four-phase plan to make the switch

If you missed the webinar, a recording is now available. But if you’re looking for the Reader’s Digest version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some  key takeaways:

• Few organizations still have a need for a rank-and-yank approach to managing performance. Rather than focus on ‘setting the bar’ the focus should be on helping each employee tap into their full potential and set their own bar.
• Companies that ditch the rankings usually do themselves a great service as they are able to shift the conversation towards coaching and developing, increasing performance going forwards rather than documenting what has been.
• This transformation takes strong leadership at the OD level and new skills for managers and individuals.

During the session, a number of questions came up, and while we were able to address some of them, we weren’t able to get to all of them due to time. Below are those questions and my best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, and I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: How does a manager deal with the employee who drives the conversation but has a wildly unrealistic view of their performance­?

A: The same question could be asked from the perspective of an employee: “How do I handle a performance conversation when my manager has a wildly unrealistic view of my performance?”  These irreconcilable perspectives do come up from time to time.  Our general advice is as follows:

• Make sure that regular, candid conversations are taking place – much easier to do course corrections over short intervals than hit an impasse at the end of the year.
• Utilize this conversation as a coaching moment. Ask the employee about their ambitions, and how they will get there.  Inquire about what training or development they will need to achieve their lofty goals.  Ask questions to try to understand their innate drivers – is it prestige, challenge, money, etc. that makes them think they are ready for this big leap in their career.  By understanding their drivers, you may be able to redirect them into something that is more attainable, yet satisfies their needs.  In the end, it may be necessary for you to delicately tell this person that their career goals are not quite in line with their performance or ability, but I highly recommend following that up with some ways they can improve their performance, knowledge, or skill.  For example, a training course, a book to read, a mentor, coaching sessions with you, etc.
• Sometimes using a 360 or 180 degree process provides more perspectives. In leadership development we prefer this approach because a leader can build a more complete perspective of her or his ability to lead while listening to multiple feedback providers.
• If worst comes to worse, bring in an independent observer or mediator who can help broker the conversation. An effective external observer (from the HR group for instance) can sometimes help identify any subjective intra-personal issues that are having a negative impact on the manager-employee relationship.

Q: I agree with the comment that employee satisfaction is not only bonuses, etc. My question is about how this fits with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when an employee is not able to meet the basic needs with their salary.

A:  As we described during the Q&A session, perspectives on salary can be quite diverse.  We see many cases where several employees on a team make approximately the same salary, yet compensation is only an issue for some of them.  In the end, individuals have varying thresholds when it comes to their basic needs, and in this case, their salaries.

Ultimately, if the company is paying below market rates and employees are dissatisfied with this, the best the manager can do is acknowledge that compensation is an issue, and look for factors that are within his or her control, that together, the manager and employee can work on.

Q: Can you please share tips on HOW TO shift manager and employee beliefs from ‘management’ to participative and employee driven?  I’m concerned that our culture is so embedded in fear of stepping out that we need to make this change safe and forward focused.

A: As discussed during the session, changing the culture is a significant undertaking.  If the managers in your organization are heavily attached to their role as ‘boss’, have little intention of sticking their head out or trying something new, then moving towards a culture of ‘manager as coach’ will take a lot of effort.

In the employee-manager dyad, it may benefit both parties to help the manager see the benefits of a more participative employee (innovation, ownership, accountability, productivity, willingness to take on more work, etc.), so he/she may be more willing to ask questions that ordinarily wouldn’t be asked.  For example, asking the employee what he/she wants from his/her career.  Sounds like in your organization, this question would not typically be asked.  It may feel like a risk, but taking a small step like this may open the door to more free flowing conversations.

In the broader sense, I would suggest you start by discussing the impacts of this culture with your senior team. Whatwould the benefits be of gradually shifting towards a more collaborative and team-focused approach?

If you do have the support for undertaking this journey together, consider the trust/skill continuum as discussed on the call, and think about how you might start to empower individuals and managers to begin driving their own conversations.  Which parts of the process could you start to take away without causing the managers to feel widely exposed?

Share the idea with people in the company, but communicate that this is not an overnight change.  You will be gradually liberating people from the forced conversations that an old-school performance approach might drive, and providing them with gradually more freedom to decide how best to spend that time and what topics to explore.  The commitment from senior leaders in this regard is paramount.

Q: How does this process look in financial services industries? Aren’t there different key drivers?

A: In theory, every organization would incorporate their key drivers into their performance management systems and/or their coaching relationships.  If you are moving from ‘traditional’ performance management to more of a coaching relationship between managers and employees, the key drivers still play into the approach; but in the latter case, the manager is coaching towards key drivers, as opposed to measuring people on key drivers.

In industries with quotas, sales goals, or other quantifiable measurements, there is inherently a rating given.  But these numbers aren’t in a review format, where you are rating the employee’s performance, as much as it is an agreed-upon goal that has either been achieved or not achieved.  When it comes to managing performance, however, we’d still recommend the manager coach the employee towards those goals (forward looking), and help them succeed along the way, rather than waiting until the end of the year/quarter/month and looking backwards at performance.  By then it’s too late.

We would also like to highlight our ‘hot off the presses’ research report The Challenges of Leading in a Regulatory Environment which articulates many of the dynamics of leadership currently at play in financial services and banking in particular.  You can download a copy of the report here.

Q: How can I connect compensation to performance without rankings?

This is a common question: organizations do not want to do away with pay-for-performance nor do they want decisions around merit increases to seem arbitrary.

The general philosophy here is that performance conversations should focus on performance.  Weaving in the immediacy of compensation (or promotion) into a performance conversation distracts from the core focus.  If the employee knows that at the end of the conversation, they will be told if they get a 5% increase or no increase at all, they are much less likely to be candid, explore areas of improvement or discuss areas where they need support.  The conversation becomes a ‘salary increase justification’ discussion with both manager and direct report caught in a negotiation of why that final decision was reached.

What pioneering firms have done is give managers more discretion around the allocation of a pool of money to their teams, but organizations have also  made their managers more accountable for making sure merit increases are justified.  For example, without ratings, compensation decisions are no longer simply based on a one-to-one matching.  Managers across a department may come together to discuss and agree on where differential salary increases should be applied.

But at the end of the day, what our research indicates is that regular feedback and ongoing performance conversations throughout the year are the best antidote to any nasty surprises when it comes to salary adjustments.

Q: Where on the website can I find the conversation guidelines that Fraser mentioned?­

The following past editions of BlessingWhite’s eNews will provide details on these.  If you want to explore these more in-depth I would recommend BlessingWhite’s book The Engagement Equation.

• 3 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Team written by Mary Ann Masarech.
• Stop the Insanity: Conversations to Help Performance SOAR written by Leah Clark.
• Create a Coaching Culture in 10 Minutes written by Kristen Bakalar.

Q: How do you feel technology affects managing performance?­

A:  Many companies have rolled out new technology to simplify the old-school performance management process.  This may remove some of the pain of formal ranking and documentation.  More interesting approaches are those that take a social approach to reviews, or allow a two-way dialogue around what ‘good performance’ looks like.

At the end of the day, you need to evaluate the system and the conversations that it will drive and ask ‘does this fit with the type of culture we are trying to build?’  If the answer is “no” something needs to be tweaked.  Most companies that are leading the way have changed the core of the program, which is the conversation between the manager and the employee; the forms, technology, system, etc. are secondary.

Q: What about the legal perspective – doesn’t the legal team require documentation?

A: Most legal representatives that we have talked to welcome moving away from the formal documentation approach.  If an employee’s performance slips to the point that the legal team needs to be involved, too often they are faced with a documented history that indicates that the employee has been ‘satisfactory’ or even ‘exceeds expectations’.  This makes the company’s case for dismissal that much harder.  In addition, what we are recommending does not alleviate the need for performance improvement plans or other legal-related documents.  Those are extreme cases.  What we’re proposing is for the masses, not the exceptions.

Do you remember when companies had telex machines? When you had to print out black and white charts and tables on acetate to stick on an overhead projector? Yeah, back in the days when business suits had flared trousers and all telephones were wired to the wall?

The corporate world has come a long way since then. But one vestige of yesteryear still clings on: the old-school performance management process. You know the one—where each manager gets to sit down, one by one, with his or her direct reports and hand them a grade-card for the year. Jane scored four out of five, but Bob scored a two. “We are really going to have to do something about Bob this year,” thinks the manager…

This approach to managing the performance of a team is widely disliked. Team members don’t find it useful in getting coaching to improve performance; managers find the process bureaucratic and counter to the kind of teams they are trying to build. So the organization as a whole must be getting something out of this, surely? Apparently not—most executives have no faith the approach is having a positive impact, and the HR or organizational development team is trying to make important decisions around talent based on fundamentally flawed data.

By and large, companies around the world agree it’s time the old performance management process went the way of the fax, the floppy disk and the Tippex.

But hold on a minute. Performance still needs to be managed, right? We still need to set goals and then evaluate performance towards those goals, providing course correction where needed. So if we throw out the old forms and the ranking, what will take its place?

Luckily a growing number of pioneering companies are leading the way, trying out new approaches and models that are a better fit for today’s nimble, social work environments. At the heart of these approaches is a growth mindset—the assumption that every employee has untapped potential—along with greater coaching by managers via more frequent interactions and ongoing feedback.

Organizations that have taken this approach have experienced better teamwork, higher engagement and participation, less turnover and a tremendous reduction in “busy work”—all that administration that added so little value. Managers who provide feedback throughout the year increase the sense of fairness and ensure employees feel included in the work.

BlessingWhite, a division of GP Strategies that focuses on leadership development and employee engagement, has been working with many of these pioneering organizations to define the new approach and equip managers, individuals and coaches with the right skills and perspectives to make this change happen. We are pleased to share our research and recommendations to those organizations looking to make this journey in the recently published Performance Management: Assess or Unleash report.

You can download a copy of the report at http://blessingwhite.com/research-report/performance-management-research-report-2015/ and you can join report authors Fraser Marlow and Kristen Bakalar as they provide an overview of the report during a webinar on June 24^th at noon EST.

Every year, Deloitte surveys HR leaders worldwide to gauge what is keeping them up at night. The recently published report, Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2015, reminds us of the large trends affecting our work lives: globalization, the omnipresence of technology and social media, the 24/7 nature of work, demographic changes and our shifting needs as employees.

The top challenges that emerge in this environment have remained roughly the same for several years: leadership, culture and employee engagement top the list, followed by learning and development and the need to “reinvent HR.” Overhauling traditional performance management approaches and making better use of data and technology round off the list.

It will not come as a surprise that, of all these top issues, leadership is the one organizations feel the least prepared to address. While respondents to Deloitte’s survey give leadership an importance rating of 78%, the readiness rating is only at 42%.

Ice and Snow

It is interesting to see that on balance, HR and business leaders will rate engagement and culture as on par rather than leadership in terms of importance. This is like saying the symptom is as important as the cause. To try and separate leadership from culture and engagement is like trying to divide ice from snow. If leaders are not engaging those around them to deliver on business priorities, and in doing so building a culture of high performance, then what are they up to?

Poor engagement and dysfunctional culture are the byproducts of poor leadership. Leaders, as the saying goes, “get the culture they behave” and culture in turn “eats strategy for breakfast.” You cannot address one without the other.

Individual Performance

For the majority of the workforce today, employers are looking for more than just cranking the handle and getting the job done. The expectation is that each individual will also contribute ideas, make day-to-day judgment calls and continue to learn and develop. Ultimately, culture is the collective sum of individual behaviors and each individual can make an impact.

We believe every individual is looking for work that is interesting to them, meaningful in its impact and look for jobs that achieve the right work-life balance for them personally. With this assumption in mind, helping people get engaged with the goals and strategy of the organization means empowering and coaching them to higher levels of satisfaction at work while also aligning and coaching them to higher levels of performance. This is the key to achieving—and sustaining—high levels of employee engagement.

Retention Concerns

Employee engagement is often directly associated with retention, and the two are very closely correlated. But being engaged is not a complete guarantee that an employee will stay. Today in the US the number of layoffs has been steady at 1.2% since early 2013.[1] The number of people quitting on the other hand is steadily rising and now stands at 2%. This increased workforce mobility should be a concern to employers: While paying people more money or providing more workplace perks may keep them for a while, a much cheaper and longer-term strategy would be to focus on creating a workplace that they want to be part of. Again, this is the product of focused and deliberate leadership.

Performance Management Overhaul

Over the last year, we have seen an acceleration of a trend highlighted in the Deloitte report: Organizations are keen to find an alternative to the traditional performance management process. Most organizations agree that the traditional “rank and rate” performance management approach does not work, but few alternatives are put forward. When new research in neuroscience demonstrated how counterproductive these annual sessions were, many CEOs asked, “What would be the impact if we just stopped doing performance management altogether?” The answer: very little. Those organizations that dropped the practice (or in some cases pared it back significantly) found that it took a lot of stress out of the system and saved a lot of time and energy. Next, those organizations started to focus that time and energy on having more productive, forward-looking conversations about interests, ambitions and personal development. The relationship between the manager and the direct report shifted quickly from authoritarian to a coaching partnership focused on higher performance.

This fundamental change in the approach to performance management has a fundamental and very rapid impact on the culture of the organization and employee engagement at all levels. If your organizations are not currently following this trend, we strongly suggest you look into it.

A Holistic View

GP Strategies™ looks holistically at the need for learning, development and performance improvement in organizations. We consult with clients around these very topics as the following model illustrates. Working from a defined strategy, we address the interplay of specific roles, leadership, culture and individual engagement to help raise the level of performance and therefore drive business results.

 The GP Strategies Organizational Excellence Framework

An integrated and holistic approach to aligning these four powerful forces creates swift and sustainable impact on the organization’s ability to consistently perform at a high level—ultimately to deliver the desired business results.

[1] According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics

The new LMS is settling in well and the elves’ training is starting to show results: Teamwork seems to be improving and much more communication is going on, resulting in less rework and faster completion of projects.

Still I felt that we could be doing better. Or to be more precise, I felt like I personally could be doing better. I was frustrated at the lack of progress on the new drone-based delivery system, and I am still getting a lot of pushback from the reindeer crew.

After talking to my executive coach on these issues, I do believe I need to take his advice to heart. The problem isn’t with the elves; it’s related to my leadership style. Sure there are things I want to change around here, but since I am not going to be making these changes myself, I need to get better at bringing the elves along with me. That might mean treating them less as green-booted minions and a bit more like sentient beings with their own free will.

Four things are missing here at the North Pole to make this a high performing team, or so I am told by my coach. We need to build Community, we need some Authentic leadership, the elves really have to believe in the Significance of what we do, and I need to get them Energized around the whole enterprise.

“Think of it this way,” said my coach. “You need to build your leadership CASE: Community, Authenticity, Significance, and Excitement.”

Fair enough. So the first thing I did was get some feedback from the manager elves and shift supervisors. Those folks always have an opinion.

So here are my notes, stating where we need to improve.

On the Community front, the elves are pretty well bonded. Sure we all feel like one big team focused on one common goal, but silos have emerged ever since the big reorg in 2012. Separating out the building elves from the labeling and shipping side of the house resulted in a lot of performance improvement but has also created some silos. The teams of elves feel like we lost our sense of togetherness, so we should plan some deliberate activities to bring these teams closer together as soon as the big rush is over and things settle down in January.

Authenticity might be the most challenging of the four for me personally. I thought everybody knew the big jovial guy in the red suit. After all we had been working together for several hundred years. But while I am told my passion for this enterprise is contagious, the elves want to know more—they want to know why this means so much to me. My coach tells me that sharing a bit more about this system will build trust and help the elves understand why, at times, I get so focused on upping our game.

Significance. I guess I took this one for granted. Who wouldn’t think that delighting every girl and boy around the world would be a meaningful and significant task? But it turns out that in the daily work of building, wrapping, and labeling toys, people lose sight of the big picture. So we need to get some of our team reconnected with the purpose of our mission and help them take a pause and appreciate all over again the big change we are making.

And as for Excitement, I feel it in my blood. Every year around this time I get pumped up at the idea of getting that sleigh out, revving up the reindeer, and dropping off those presents. Of course, it’s easy for me to forget that for the elves, there is a lot of work to meet their deadline, and then it takes only one night to see another year’s worth of presents fly off into the crisp December sky. And on January 1^st, it’s back to planning for the following year. If you look at it from their perspective, it can become a grind. I realize now that it’s easy for me to miss that. As the leader, it’s up to me to make sure we recognize the value that our work provides and create opportunities for all to share in the excitement.

Improving my leadership skills will take time and deliberate attention. But, if I set for myself the goal of learning and improving, and if I see this ambition from the perspective of the elves I aspire to lead, I think I have a good chance of making my leadership CASE!

Transforming from a traditional pharmaceutical giant to a next-generation BioPharma company driven by innovation and customer service is a strategic and ambitious journey. Fortunately, GP Strategies™ was there to help. Watch the full impact story.

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