Teams exist to deliver results to an organization, not to create a “crew” for the boss. Most employees want to become employees who are driven by their own resolve, given a robust understanding of the mission they are assigned to accomplish, and an ability to apply their own initiative, leadership, skills and training to produce results. Leadership is not about creating rule following automations. Leadership is about creating trained, inspired, purpose driven and aggressive employees that proactively seek, grow, fix, plan and accomplish missions that their leaders challenge them to complete.
For leaders old and new, here's some advice how to create great employees from day one.
Set a vision & give frequent updates on progress
Workers want to come to work to complete a mission and be part of something larger and not just perform a “job” that is a collection of tasks. One of the best things that a leader can do is to layout the compelling need, challenges and future outcomes for the team to accomplish. This is not a 150+ slide deck from the annual planning process. It is a simple, three- to five- sentence paragraph that lays out what is to be accomplished and why.
A call center may set out on a quest to reduce customers calls by turning its focus to customer education AND problem resolution. The vision of “Call Reduction Through Customer Education” can be frequently discussed, employ simple tracking metrics and inspire the entire team. Vision and the progress of the vision needs to be simple, employ weekly updates,and excite the entire team on its progress towards the mission. Employees must know what their individual roles are and how their actions directly contribute to the top line business results.
Be a coach — develop, train & guide employees to success
One of the best things that you can do to development your team is to throw out your annual performance review process. The Harvard Business Review, Gallup and hundreds of companies have found that the annual performance review process demotivates, frustrates and does not improve individual employee performance.
The leader needs to be a coach and not a reviewer. As a coach, sit down in private with every employee every month and follow this coaching format. First, discuss how the employee’s actions directly contribute to the success and responsibility of the team’s mission. The importance is to emphasize that what the employee does daily directly affects the team’s success. Second, using specific instances with time, date, location and actions, highlight activity that you want to see the employee continue. These should be high impact, positive and very specific so the employee knows what exactly to keep doing.
Third, identify areas where the employee needs to improve and how his or her strengths can aid in this improvement. Again, this needs to use specifics of action, time, date and location so the employee knows what needs to be improved. The critical part of this step is now this is an open conversation how the employee can leverage his or her strengths to overcome some of these deficit areas.
Fourth, important to this coaching discussion is a ratio of Good-to-Improvement items. For every one improvement area, you should have three to five positives. Therefore, if I want to improve two items with an employee, I am going to list six to 10 strengths that the employee demonstrated. The final area is to create an action plan to help the employee accomplish these improvements.
Be flexible on the “how” & inflexible on the “why”
Listening and acting on the ideas of others is a critical aspect of effective leadership. The leader sets the vision and excites the team to adopt and engage to accomplish the vision. Great leaders know that the team and other stakeholders have the best ideas and concepts to make the vision a reality. Leaders must be flexible on the “how” a mission is accomplished and firm on the “why” to make the vision a success.
I once led a team turning around a poorly performing software product that customers had, and hated, to use. My first weeks were frustrating as none of my ideas worked. I stepped back and asked the team their ideas. In just a few hours, the team had great ideas and a plan to transform the situation. Ultimately, the customer satisfaction of the software went from below 10% to above 90% because I let the team determine the solution while I maintained the importance and the progress of the mission we were undertaking. Employees want to be able to test and to contribute their own ideas to create excitement and commitment in the organization.
Leader transparency: admitting mistakes & open analytics
One of the hardest challenges for a leader is admitting when they make or made a mistake. Leaders need to become comfortable saying when they made a mistake, what they learned and their proposal to fix the problem. Open analytics are a great addition to leader transparency so everyone in the organization can see the progress towards major goals and there are no “operational secrets.” Secrecy and failing to apologize will immediately destroy trust in an organization. A leader that is transparent with their own actions and uses open analytics surrounding team performance creates trust and confidence in employees.
Be afraid of ethics ending choices & not “career-ending” choices
Leader ethics are often sacrificed for achieving business results. Every employee can recite a time when a leader took credit for someone’s success, blamed another for their bad decision or did not protect the team from a senior leader’s wrath. Employee’s understand the effects of bad markets, changes in customer buying patterns or the business effects of a competitor’s actions. Good leaders and good teams can overcome bad markets. Teams cannot easily recover from a leader’s poor ethical choices. Bad leader ethics and self-serving behavior are 10 times more destructive than poor market conditions. Leaders always need to constantly stretch themselves to fully understand the ethical decisions of all their actions on the team. Employees do not expect leaders to be perfect. They do expect them to be honest.
Show a career progression based on skills, results & experience — not time in position
Once a person is hired, they want to know what they can do and when they can be promoted. These are great discussions to have when they do not use the words of “pay your dues” and other similar phrases. Employees need to understand and learn the wide range of skills and knowledge to make the next promotion possible. Help employees create concrete plans to learn, experience and gain all the skills and deep knowledge to advance their careers.
Leaders that adopt honest, open, results focused and coaching leadership styles with their employees will accelerate and retain employees regardless of industry and business conditions. Anytime an employee sees “secret” discussions, unfair practices, unclear standards, no developmental coaching, double standards between employees, no development of their skills for future advancement, and an unclear understanding of how they contribute to the organization’s success, they are a when, not an if, that they will leave the company.
Chad Storlie is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Officer, author of two books, and has been published in over 200 publications. Chad is an adjunct Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota – Carlson School of Management and a mid-level marketing executive. He has an MBA from Georgetown University.
