How do your employees represent your business when you aren’t looking? Obviously, you can’t be omnipresent but are you comfortable that your employees are good brand ambassadors?
If you haven’t done so recently, you’d be well served to see how your people are doing in this regard.
I attended a meeting of an organization whose board I serve on. I was in the back of the room, and seated behind me were two disgruntled people who were loudly dissing everything that was reported during the meeting.
During the Q&A portion of the meeting, these people went a few rounds with the moderator of the meeting, until one of them stood up and shrieked an acerbic comment. After this drama, she declared, “I’m a communications professional and I know I’m right.”
How would you rate yourself on asking for help?
I’m not talking about being a slacker and asking others to do your job. Instead, this is about chipping away at your “I can do it all” mentality and gaining benefits from someone who is willing or even eager to help you.
We deal with losses in the workplace all the time. We lose new opportunities and established business. We lose employees. We lose momentum. We lose market share.
When leaders deal with these losses, they often view them tactically. They evaluate the immediate impact, come to conclusions, and move on. They don’t necessarily think deeply about how the immediate impact affects the long term.
I’ve been working with a leadership team where three out of four people are aligned around organizational goals, while the fourth is singing to the tune of his own agenda.
Although this leader is valued in his role, if he doesn’t work to achieve alignment with his colleagues, over time it will infect the leadership team.
Are you ever puzzled that some people think that they communicate well when they are ambiguous at best? Some leaders leave a lot unsaid and yet still expect their people to know what they didn’t say.
The challenge with this is that these people don’t even realize that they’re not verbalizing their thoughts. They may think they have, but they haven’t.
Management successions occur every day in organizations around the world. These range from promotions to first level supervisors to appointments of new CEOs.
A person who is new in the job and immediately proclaims, “This is how it’s going to be now” will face resistance on multiple levels, while the person who steps in and listens will be received quite differently.
How do you handle the weak links on your staff? My guess is that in most cases you wait too long to take appropriate action. No matter what your experience is, it’s human to avoid conflict, and weak links are, de facto, conflicts.
You know the basics: can the employee improve from skills training? Would the person be a better fit in another department in the organization? Can the person benefit from one-on-one mentoring?
One managerial flaw that reinforces a “no win” scenario pertains to encouraging the people who always say “yes” when asked to go above and beyond.
Let’s be clear: this is not a criticism of those who contribute generously by doing more work. Rather, this is a warning about employees who automatically say yes to everything and eventually become choked.
Two months of the year have whooshed away and before too much more time passes, it’s worth taking time to look at what you’ve accomplished so far this year.
Are you on track? Are you pacing the way you expected late last year when you finalized your plan for 2023? What has changed and how are you accommodating those changes?