I always say that if you look after your team, they will look after your business AND customers. Another thing I say is that they can be your best assets or worst liabilities, and that choice is absolutely yours.
The Problem with People Management
Because people are a big part of my performance development processes with clients, I make it my business to keep up to speed on all things people management / getting the best out of your teams. It never ceases to amaze me though that many leaders still have the opinion that they pay their teams in line with standards so they should do a good job.. If you are that short sighted, all I can say is good luck with your performance over time.
I get posed this question regularly and my answer to that is that we are all human and everyone should be treated with respect. Another trait of being human is we naturally like to work together on things and unfortunately business often teaches us to work in silos…The danger there is that you won’t get the best out of people and could run the risk of creating
- An ‘Us against them’environment
- Busy teams but adding no value (think hamsters on wheels)
- Employees who have become institutionalized (crash and burners)
- to name but a few…
Building Employee Engagement
Like everything in life, business is (or should be) about building strong relationships, with your teams, your customers and your suppliers. It should also be about helping each other and know when people are struggling, possibly having turned a corner. Some people want more financial recognition for their efforts, others just want acknowledgement. We are all different and as the saying goes it’s ‘Different strokes for different folks’. So how to you please people? or can you please people?
Again like in life, you can’t please everyone all of the time, and you shouldn’t, and regardless of what the latest and greatest techniques are, there are some fundamentals you should know about of the people that work for you
- Are they happy in their job?
- Are they having issues at home and do they need some flexibility?
- Do you know their strengths?
- And are you leveraging them?
- Are they learning and developing?
- Are they providing value?
- In general do they have a good attitude to life and work?
Then with those questions, what are you doing about them?
And if you can see a pattern here, these are all questions that you would ask if you actually cared for them, like a friend, mentor or family member and then do your best to help them. Will some people take advantage, absolutely then the question I have is, why are they working for you and who hired them?
As when relationships are balanced that naturally involve give and take you will start to see great improvements on the ground..that is the law of reciprocation supporting your business success!
There are many different ways you can work on this, but there is model I like to demonstrate this with from the Engagement Equation as it makes it very clear that I discuss in this video.
Your People – Video Transcripts
Hey Shay Lynch, your director of Future State. And again today, I wanna focus on your people. One of the big questions I always get asked is, how do I drive performance? How do I improve my output? How do I get more out of my team, right? Which is all well and good. But the question I have is, what do you do for your team? Because it’s not just good enough to drive performance. This is a relationship, you need to make sure you’re looking after your team. So they’re looking after your business. As I keep saying, if you’re not looking after your team, you sure as well not looking after your business. So it’s important to focus on your people in your business. So with that, I just wanna go through a model I came across many years ago called Engagement Equation. It’s very, very simple, but it shows so much in terms of what you need to do to get people to work right up in this S&C, which we’ll explain in a second, right? So what this model talks about, is how it breaks down people within your business. So we look at this chart here very quickly, right? There is a line going down the middle. To the right: businesses driving, this is your people by the way in the middle here. So this is your business driving performance and outputs. So they want the team to contribute at its peak, right? So this line going across, and this side of the chart is all about contribution, right? Which is all well and good. But many people forget about this side, the satisfaction and the values, right? So it’s important to find the balance between satisfaction and contribution. So that’s what it is how many people satisfied to the best of your ability and contributing to the best your ability. So they’re driving and they are happy. That is the key that is the balance that you need to achieve in order to them to get longer term sustainable success from your teams. If you don’t get that things will fall apart over time, you’ll get natural attrition, you get poor performing people. And this is how we we break down to people into a number of different areas, right? So if you have people, number one here that are really satisfied, but they’re very far away from contributing. So this is an issue ’cause it’s all well and good having people satisfied, but they’re not contributing and people like, they could be new comers, right? That could be what’s called the honeymooners in the business. They could have a great attitude, but low performing because they don’t know what the right things are to do yet, so they need to be groomed. You can also state like the only name you call these, they’re hamsters on the wheel, busy but not getting outputs, but that well, once you nurture them, that can drive performance over time. But so don’t forget about these people. And then you have the number twos which are high performing high contribution, right? But not satisfied. So if you’re not keeping them satisfied, We call them the crush and burners, they can only go that far to that effort for so long. And then there’s got maybe institutionalized I get annoyed because they’re not getting satisfied. They’re not getting enough back from the business. And then either one of these, if they’re not managed correctly, could fall into number three, which is completely disengaged, they’ve turned a corner, you will get nothing out of these people and the only people you have to blame for getting people here is yourself, because you’re all very focused on this and forgot about that. So again, the importance is really to make sure that the balances are right. And then you have the number fours here, right? These are already almost engaged. You’ve just to do a little bit more to bring them up here. So the question then is how do you make sure you drive contribution and satisfaction all the way up this chart so you get to the S&C? That is the key. And again, you can read many, many books, you can talk about many, many models. There’s very few I like to talk about one or two, this one and Daniel Pink’s AMP model. They’re very simple, very straightforward. You can work with them very simple and get good results very, very quickly. But in its essence, what will that drive on? What do you need to drive to ensure? Very simple, focus on the key few small things in the beginning, and then you can build it, right? First and foremost, as a leader, right? And we’ll talk about leader in other videos, you need to lead, you need to bring them up, you need to show them the values for the business, intersect with values for the people in your business, right? There needs to be that like, rivalry, that relationship to ensure there’s a balance, right? So once you start leading, and then if you’ve got a set of like senior management, or if it’s just you depending on the size of your business, you need to understand what the strengths of each individual of your teams are. What are their strengths, because they have strengths. So play to their strengths, put them in roles, where they use their strengths. They’re called strengths-based roles. So if you have someone who’s really good at risk, help them with strategy, put them in a strategic role. If you have someone that’s good at problem solving, put them on your process to ensure you get better outputs on your process. There are so many things you can play around with but always ensure discover the strengths of your people, and then try and play to them as best. Try and get the balance what’s in it for them and what’s in it for the business, that’s win-win. And if you don’t have to do that, again, there’s many tools online, like StrengthsFinder by Gallup online. You can use many different tools to find this. And that can actually be a very rewarding exercise for your team, because then again, it shows that you care about them, but always develop an understanding of the strengths of the people within your business, okay? Then you need to find the balance. So you don’t wanna push people too hard here. You don’t wanna have people over here. What is the balance that you wanna find with your team that you expect X amount of outputs over a certain period of time. Now we’re not talking about time exchange for money, right? or money exchange for time. We’re talking about, a results-orientation work environment. You will create a great predefined outputs, that are not emergency outputs, they’re what’s called Smart urgency outputs they create sense of urgency, but not emergency, there’s a big difference. So they’re just putting people in the stretch zone of their capability, but just enough to keep them motivated and interested in what they do, with a stretch goal, not an emergency goal, right? And then the balance for me on top of all this, the icing on the cake, is to promote strong relationships. It’s important to have strong relationships in your business, not people are just coming in to do a job, get it done and go home. You want to promote strong relationships. Because friendships, people, friends, look after each other. I’m always saying this, it’s a superpower in your business, get people to peak form. They don’t have to be best friends, but just promote strong, encouraging positive relationships. Because what happens with friends, when friends are against the wall, friends look after each other, they help each other. Helping people are happy people, happy people are performing people and strong relationships. And that’s not just with the people on the ground, but with the leadership team as well or the senior management, because when you’re away on business, or you’re off for a few weeks, if you have good relationships on the ground, the people while you’re away, they’re looking after you because when they’re away, you’re gonna look after them, and they’ll also make sure they’re covered. It’s all about creating a really positive, dynamic, and I call it the law of reciprocation. If you don’t know about it, google it, research it, because it’d be a superpower in your business. But that’s it. This is a very simple model. It’s great to understand not to try and box people, but it’s good to know where do people fit within your business. So then you can actually do something about it, whether they’re satisfied and not contributing or contributing and not satisfied. How do you bring them up, so their max satisfaction and max contribution, and then you will see the power of that and results you will get in your business. I hope this made sense. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions get in touch and in the meantime, this is Shay Lynch saying thanks for listening.
