1. Look for signs of commitment during the hiring phase.  If you hire someone who is “just looking for a job” and your company is not necessarily their passion, you may end up hiring someone who appreciates having the job but may not be completely committed to all of your standards and methods of serving your customers.
2. Do you have leaders who are not committed?  Employees behaviors and perceptions are learned and reinforced primarily from their leaders.  If you have leaders who are not completely committed to your standards, they are modeling this compliance to your employees.  Look to your leaders to ensure that they are committed to your organization’s standards.
3. Leadership did not realize the psychology behind commitment.  It is easy to misinterpret the feeling of commitment.  Some leaders think that that as long as they see their employees coming to work every day on time and doing the desired levels of production that is the definition of commitment.  I challenge you to think more deeply about what commitment is look beyond just showing up eery day.  Are they employees demonstrating that they are happy to be there or are they grumbling?  Do they engage with leaders during meetings/coaching sessions or do they simply sit there and say nothing?  Do they recommend ideas and demonstrate innovative thought patterns or do they just come in every day, sit down and do their job without communicating? Challenge yourselves to dig into the level of commitment of your employees.
4. Leaders have allowed issues to fester.  When employees complain about something, do the leaders ask more questions and dig into the meat of the issues or do they tell the employees to just suck it up and realize that this is just the way things are?  If employees express a concern about something and they do not feel that the concern is being fully heard, they will move into a state of compliance with many of their behaviors related to the issue that they feel is not being addressed.  When employees bring up issues or concerns, do the leaders ask questions to seek understanding or do they simply try to convince the employees to change their minds and stop complaining?
5. Are employees involved in the decision making processes?  When people are involved in the decision making process they are more likely to be committed to the outcomes.  Employees who feel that decisions descend upon them from above and they have no input or voice about the decisions will be more likely to simply comply with the decisions.
6. Are leaders explaining WHY standards are important?  The number one leadership behavior that builds commitment is to ensure that employees understand why they are following certain standards.  If your employees are questioning your standards and your leaders are simply saying, “Because I said so“, “Because that’s what management wants” or “Because that’s what the rule book says” your employees will have a very challenging time getting committed to those standards.

If you are looking to change your levels of commitment, these are the first root causes to look at.  Analyze your levels of commitment and dig into the details in order to understand what needs to change in order to drive higher levels of commitment.

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
What is happening in the organization to create a compliant workforce?  What is the first thing that you will do to make a change to the levels of commitment?

1. When your employees are simply being compliant and are not really committed to the standard, there is a only a split second of time between the employee being compliant and being non-compliant.  Because compliance is a conscious decision, any number of things could turn employees against performing the desired standard.  Peer pressure, negative feelings toward you as the leader, time pressures, or simply wanting to take the easier way out are all reasons why an employee will choose to NOT follow the standard.  Employees who are compliant and not COMMITTED, are not consistent in their performance.  When employees are inconsistent in their performance, it makes leaders feel as though they can’t trust the employees to do the right thing.  When leaders can’t trust their employees, this creates an unhealthy working environment.
2. Compliant employees are high maintenance.  If I am there watching the employee, I am acting as the extrinsic motivator to prompt the employee to follow the standard.  But as a leader, you can’t (nor do you want) to be watching your employees all the time.  It takes a great deal of effort to lead compliant employees because you feel as though you need to be watching them often to ensure that they are following the standards.
3. If you are not confident that the employee is truly committed to your standards, you will feel compelled to micro-manage the employee.  This will make you feel like you are babysitting the employee and it will make the employee feel treated like a child.  TRUST is one of the most important values to have in your workplace.  In order to truly build trust into the core of your business, you must feel reassured that your employees are following the standards even when you are not around.  The only way for leaders to really feel confident that their employees are following all the standards when they are not present, is if employees are truly committed to the standards.  So in order to have complete trust, it is essential that you have a committed workforce, not one that is simply compliant.
4. Committed workforces are more successful because the customers receive consistent service with every interaction because employees are committed to doing the right thing all the time.  When customers are consistently receiving high level of service, there are few complaints and few dissatisfied customers.  This means there are very few resources being expended on dealing with problems.  When there are few resources being allocated to handling problems, the company is more profitable.
5. Committed workforces tend to be happier employees.  Committed employees tend to be more engaged employees.  Engaged employees take a higher level of pride and involvement in their companies and invest more of themselves in the company.  Since employees are happier, they are naturally more productive and more likely to be innovative and collaborative with other employees.  There are fewer cliques and fewer emotional distractions with committed employees.

So with all of these reasons why committed employees are better for the organization, how do we end up in situations where employees are barely compliant, let alone committed?  Come back tomorrow for reasons how compliance, rather than commitment occurs.

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
Are your employees compliant or committed to your company’s standards?  Are there standards that your company enforces that many employees are having a hard time getting committed to?  What is your company doing to foster commitment rather than compliance?

Stage 1: Unconscious non-compliance.  In this first stage of learning, I do not know what I don’t know.  I am not complying or confirming to the standards because I do not know what the standards are.  With teaching or coaching, I will gain the knowledge to know the rules and then I will move out of the first stage of learning and into the next stage.

Stage 2: Conscious compliance.  Now that I have knowledge, I have to be aware of using this new knowledge so that I do not fall back into my old habits.  Just because I have knowledge, I am not an immediate expert in the new task I have just learned, so I have to be conscious of what I am doing.  I am continuing to practice this new behavior, but it is very easy for me to slip back into old ways of performing which would put me into Stage 3.

Stage 3: Conscious non-compliance.  Because I am still learning and practicing and changing my old ways, it is very easy for me to slip back into my old habits and ways of behaving.  In this stage, I know what the standards are but I am choosing not to follow the new way of thinking.  There are many reasons why I am choosing to be non-compliant (SEE A LATER POST WITH SOME OF THESE REASONS).  This is a conscious choice that I am making.  Without reinforcement to change my behaviors, it is easy for me to slip back into my previous behaviors.  If allowed to go back to old ways long enough, the learning that I gained in Stage 1 will no longer be remembered or able to be recalled and used.  It will almost be as if the learning I received did not exist if I am allowed to be consciously non-compliant long enough.

Stage 4: Unconscious compliance. With the right coaching, practice, training, reinforcement, tools, and personal understanding, I now move into Stage 4.  During this stage I have moved from compliance to a standard and have moved into commitment to the standard.  I have now formed a new habit and I no longer have to remind myself how to behave differently.  My old habits are a way of the past and I am now fully adapted to my new way of thinking and behaving.   This is the ideal state for all employees.  We want all of our employees to be in this fourth stage of learning- COMMITTED… committed to our company beliefs, committed to our customers, committed to our safety standards, committed to serving each other and committed to doing the right thing.  It’s easy to say, “We want a committed workforce!” but when you understand the basic psychology of learning, this commitment is sometimes easier said than done.

Understanding these four stages of learning is the first step in creating a committed workforce.  Look for more information in future posts with details about using this model and helping to create the levels of commitment that you are striving to achieve in your business.

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
Are there behaviors that we need to demonstrate in a more committed way?  What is preventing us from moving from merely complying to a standard and truly getting committed to it? 

When you are considering how to get better (whether personally or as a whole corporate culture) it is important to remember that this decision is not a one time event that is executed and then done.  It very much is a journey that evolves over time.  Every individual and every company has a unique starting point in what their current performance looks like today.  Every organization then experiences their own detours, roadblocks and even wrong turns.  And every organization has their vision of what the final destination looks like when their performance vision will match with the reality.  But everyone’s journey is unique.  While there is a defined process that I use to help organizations execute this journey, it is important to respect and appreciate the individual nuances that make each journey special and distinctive.  Each journey has its own extraordinary moments when all the stars are in alignment and “ah-ha” sparks of transformation occur.  It is exciting to consider the possibilities of where your organization could be with a keen eye on the details.  Just imagine….. Please visit my web site for more information about this Journey to WOW!

030212 Midwest Energy and InterWeave.2012 CS Week presentation

It is an absolute joy and pleasure to work with their team at Midwest and to assist them on this journey to WOW performance.  CONGRATULATIONS to the entire team at Midwest for embracing the process of behavioral management and having the courage and the tenacity to execute this process with passion.  I am thrilled to be a part of your success. For more information about taking the Journey to WOW visit my web site for details.

We reviewed:

• The benefits of an engaged workforce and why it is a good thing to ensure that people are engaged.
• What we as leaders can do to promote engagement (it was nothing about having parties or just creating a “lively” environment).
• How are leaders portrayed in films and what can we learn from Nelson Mandela, Arch Bishop Romero and others (both fiction and non-fiction).
• How to infuse engagement in the things that we do- like training, meetings and coaching sessions.

And of course the most important concept that was said quite a few times, “What we tolerate becomes our standards”.  

Attached are the 6 Levels of Health that I help organizations to measure to ensure that they are creating the optimal culture – one that is engaged, humble, authentic, courageous, inspiring, inclusive, etc.  That is a big bill to fill- are we up for the challenge??  Where does your organizationl fall in measuring its health?   Six_Levels_of_Organizational_Health as measured by the OLA

Now it is time to execute what we learned and change the behaviors of ourselves and the rest of our leaders.  Let’s all aim for transforming our workforce!

A few background tips:

1. “Acknowledging” is the verbal or non verbal skill of letting another person know that you hear them.  But acknowledging is so much more than that!
2. Acknowledging statements have the power to connect human beings together on deeper levels of engagement.  In these times when “customer engagement” and “employee engagement” are so important to us, acknowledging is absolutely not an option.  But it is a gravely misunderstood skill.  It has become a behavior that is seen as “checking off the box”.   I recently had a salesperson say to me, “I told you I heard you!  What more do you want from me?”    What do I want from you?  What I want is to know that you understand me, you value what I am saying and you care about reducing the level of negative emotion that I am currently feeling!  THAT’S WHAT I WANT FROM YOU!
3. Acknowledging begins in our heart.  It comes from a desire to connect with another human being.  It is not a repetitive statement that you can say over and over again and expect it work the same way this time as it did last time.  In order to be effective it is important that it is personal, meaningful and intentional. It is important that you find your natural voice when it comes to acknowledging but that you are also sensitive to the the needs of the business you are in.
4. Acknowledging means recognizing the spoken needs of another person as well as the unspoken needs of your customers.
5. When we don’t acknowledge appropriately we can leave our customers feeling confused, alienated from the conversation, frustrated that they feel misunderstood and disconnected from our business.  These are all negative results from not acknowledging.
6. The positive results when we do acknowledge others is that they feel better after speaking with us and they are more likely to want to engage with us in the future because we have met their emotional needs.

Attached is a job aid that will help you with examples of what to say and what not to say to acknowledge your customers.    04272012.IW.Acknowledging Dos and Donts

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
Are you using acknowledging to develop a deeper relationship with your customers or are you transacting the behavior without considering the full potential of its purpose?

Here are a few quotes from attendees:

“When I left your presentation yesterday I felt (perception) energized and ready to come back and make a difference in our coaching techniques and call monitoring.  This morning I am meeting with my leads to discuss some of the concepts and let them know we will be changing the way we do things. “   A vibrant leader from Brownells

“So wonderful to have met you! I will definitely be emailing you when I get back into the office later next week and have digested the great information!”  An inspirational leader from PAR

Attached is the PowerPoint that I used during this presentation.  If you are interested in me presenting this as a webinar to your organization, just drop me a note.

I’m excited to be with my friends and colleagues at CS WEEK next week.  Lots more sharing to come!

As you read this, you may be shocked or even appalled that these employees would talk like that.  But let’s step back for a moment.  Do you have employees who are accidents just waiting to happen?  We all have employees who “push the limits” and test our standards, they push our customers’ buttons and when you talk with that employee, he/she seems to act as though you are talking to someone else- that what you are saying does not apply to them.

I’ve thought about this situation for a long time and keep coming back to the importance of humility and how there is no room in our workplaces for arrogance.  Why are we accidents waiting to happen? Because we are too sure of ourselves, too convinced that we are invincible, too narrowly focused on our section of the world to recognize our truly limited scope of influence, and too wrapped up in looking outward to dare to look inward and become self-aware.

I want to challenge us all today to consider those employees who may need deeper levels of dialogues from their leaders to understand their perspectives and attitudes.  There is an opportunity to connect with those employees so we can avoid the pending doom that others see, but we don’t.  I challenge us to look around us and identify the employees who appear disengaged or those that do not seem to think that all the rules apply to them.  Let’s find creative ways to begin dialogues with them to find out what they are thinking and begin to break down that outer shell.

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
Are there employees that I need to be more connected with so that I can ensure that I am helping them to embrace our standards and our culture? Do I have “outsiders” on my team that I need to bring into the “inside”?

That’s a really great question.  My first thought when I received that comment was to then ask, “WHY NOT?” And I really don’t mean that to sound brash or rude, I really wanted to help add a different perspective to things.  Whenever we find ourselves asking one sided questions, I think it is always helpful to flip the question around and ask it from the opposite direction.  When organizations tell me that they are teaching their employees to be creative thinkers and they want their employees to think outside the box- this is the best exercise to accomplish that goal– Ask the question from the flip side. 

But I digressed… The question was “why should we reach out to others when they seem to have made it clear that they do not want to engage with us?” Here’s why…

1. We don’t know why the other person has decided to keep to himself.  By reaching out to him or her, we may find out some valuable information and feedback about our organization or about ourselves.  The response I received when I had incorrectly labeled someone “a loner” was that he didn’t feel that his ideas were valued and so he decided to just keep them to himself and consequently kept himself away from everyone else.  That was a very powerful fact that I would not have learned if I had not approached him with genuine care and concern.
2. Making a difference makes life worth living.  Reaching out to someone may seem like a small or trivial task to you, but it may be a monumental event in that other person’s life.  Do you recall the scene in What Women Want when Mel Gibson went to the apartment of Erin the file girl to make sure that she was OK.  While that event was insignificant to Mel Gibson’s character, it was a life-changing event to the otherwise recluse office worker.  We have the power to make a difference in someone else’s life.
3. We are missing out on opportunities to widen our circles.  With the technology of facebook, twitter and other online connection opportunities, there appears to be a real need to add friends to our list.  We seem to be hungry for connections.  We may have lost the art of connecting face to face while we are desperately in search of unknown faces to call our “friends”.
4. As leaders we have an opportunity to model the desired behaviors for others.  If we want an engaged workforce and one in which people feel comfortable talking with others and reaching out when we need something, we need to show others that we are reaching out and asking questions.
5. We need to reach out and include people in our circles.  We have all attended diversity classes at this point in time, right?  Well, let’s put legs on that diversity training we received and reach out and actually INCLUDE someone in our circle.  It’s one thing to “respect diversity” it’s something more than that when we can actually say that we ”extended ourselves and included someone in our inner circle”.  

Being a strong leader means reaching out thinking beyond our current personal space and boundaries.  I challenge us all to extend beyond ourselves and widen our circles of influence in a personal and meaningful way.

MOMENT OF REFLECTION
What can I do differently tomorrow to reach outside of myself and learn something new about someone else?  How can I connect myself in a deeper way to someone else?