Setting your vision as a manager – a video you might like

As a manager, what kind of vision do you have for the way things are in your team/workplace?

How clear are you about the kinds of behaviours you want to see – and those you don’t? How clear are those you work with about what the values and beliefs are in your workplace? When they go home, or they talk about their workplace – what do they say?

More importantly, will they say what you want them to say?

For those who work with me, or who come to my “How to be an Outstanding Manager” programme, you’ll know I believe one fo the first things ANY manager needs to do is to get clear about your expectations for your team.

I call it the “How we do things around here” conversation.

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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND LEADERSHIP – PART TWO

Important Management Skills – The Skill of Self-Control

Emotional Intelligence skill number 2: Self control.

There is a well-known proverb: act in haste, repent at leisure.

We all do it sometimes: when we are under pressure we can often feel frustrated, upset, annoyed or some other such negative emotion.  As a result, we may say or do things in a way which have a negative impact on others. The problem with this of course, is it can begin a chain reaction of negativity which is more than likely going to take time and effort to put right, and which may damage style workplace motivation and performance.

Have you ever experienced this with someone at work? Here’s an example.

Scenario 1: The Knee-jerk reaction

One of your staff, whom you do find difficult to get on with at the best of times, has been late for work four times already this month – and you’ve already spoken to them once about it, (quite reasonably in your opinion). They arrive late again today – and you make some abrupt, rather sarcastic comment in front of three other staff.

You’re feeling?  Frustration.

Your response? Sarcasm.

Their response?  Defensive – maybe anger. (Even if they’re in the wrong – they’re feeling stung you’re criticising them in front of others)

Does your reaction solve anything? Doubtful.

Scenario 2: Over-controlling your feelings

Imagine this time, in this same scenario, rather than vent your frustration at the repeated poor timing, you don’t say anything at all because you feel uncomfortable about tackling this. You might make a mental note you’ll tackle it later, but often “later” never comes because there never seems to be an appropriate moment, because it’s “hassle” or because you are worried it might make matters worse. Instead, you might raise it 3 months later in a formal appraisal review. This is probably the most unhelpful response you could have chosen!

The problem is, if you don’t actually communicate your feelings in a constructive way to others,

1. The unwanted behaviour is unlikely to change
2. Others in the team perceive it is “OK” to behave in that way.
3. Others perceive you as “weak” and unfair: they see someone flouting “the rules” and you doing nothing about it.
4. Your confidence is weakened to tackle other “uncomfortable” issues.

The skill is to recognise your emotions, and find a way of communicating with the other person, in a way which retains respect and good will, yet makes your feelings and your expectations crystal clear.

Emotional intelligence requires you do not lose sight of your goal, at the expense of emotions.

In the scenario outlined above, your goal is to restore good time-keeping and maintain motivation in employees.

Five tips to help you develop your emotional intelligence muscle:

1. If you’re about to turn into an exocet missile – keep off the trigger! Put some time between you and the incident.(It’s no coincidence you read articles about counting to ten to calm yourself down. This is based in sound human physiology – our brain processes emotional responses first, and rational thinking second. Giving yourself a little space between your knee-jerk reaction and your final action, allows you to choose your response a little more wisely.)
2. How do you feel about dealing with tricky situations? Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Do you fear being firm or disagreeing with someone might result in people not liking you? Do you back off to avoid hassle?Using emotional intelligence skill number one, that of self-awareness, begin to examinehow your own feelings of worry and discomfort interfere with achieving your goals, and ask yourself if these emotions are serving you or hindering you from achieving your aim.
3. Focus on the outcome you want. Get as clear as you can about the ideal resolution. If you are clear what you want, you’ll feel more confident and it helps you decide how to express it.One key tip here. Don’t just decide what you want, but decide how you want the other person to feel at the end of the discussion too. So, with the “late” scenario – yes, you want the individual to improve their time-keeping, but you also want to keep them on-side and motivated. Whatever tactics you choose, think about how you can achieve both.
4. Try the “fake it till you make it” method! Presumably, you want to appear calm, unruffled and supportive?Think of a time when you do feel these things. What does that look like? How do you talk? Hold yourself? Breathe?Think of the non-verbal cues you give out when you are calm. Practise adopting these behaviours the next time you feel mildly irritated.
5. Keep practising the skill of self control. Emotional intelligence can be learned, but as with any other skill, it requires practice and consistency.Think of it as a muscle: in the same way you build muscle through repetition, you can build emotional muscle and resilience through controlling your emotions. If you’ve had a tendency to “fly off the handle”, or to avoid what you see as “confrontation” for the last 20 years, don’t expect that habit to change overnight.However, practising flexing this “emotional muscle” will not only pay dividends in terms of improving working relationships with your staff and colleagues, studies are now showing that if we build discipline in one area of our lives, it spills out into other areas too.So, not only will your team performance improve, you could find yourself losing weight, or stopping smoking or handling your awkward teenager more effectively as an added bonus! Your confidence will also soar.

Remember, your worst enemy in frustrating situations is your own quick reaction.

The first thing you need to do when dealing with a difficult person or situation is not to control the behaviour of the other person(s), but to control your own!

Workplace Motivation: How to Maintain Motivation Through Unsettling Change

As a manager you need to get good not just in managing conflict but at motivating others as well – but never more so than when your staff might be worrying about their jobs, about restructuring or other major changes to their work.

The present business climate is tough, and many businesses are affected by the current downturn. There are three common consequences in businesses when sales and growth slow down. As a manager, you may have experienced any or all three of these:

1. Some staff are made redundant, given reduced hours and bonus opportunities are often lost.
2. There is increased pressure on all staff to do more.
3. Tension, conflict, stress and apathy amongst staff increases, and motivation and engagement often decreases.

If you’re a manager or supervisor, you’ll feel the pressure too – possibly more – because your people’s performance is seen by others as a reflection of your own ability to manage.
It’s an irony that, at a time when you most need your staff to pull together, to be motivated, creative and productive, the environment often produces the exact opposite.

Some managers ride these storms better than others, managing to keep their staff on-side and positive, despite the circumstances.

So how do you increase the engagement and morale of your people, reduce tension and conflict, and increase your chances of hitting targets? Here are three critical things you need to focus on if you want to maintain motivation through a period of intense change.

How to Maintain Workplace Motivation: 3 Key Tips

1. Understand that change causes emotional reactions and notice how your people are reacting.

All change, even changes we choose for ourselves, and which we think of as positive changes, take us through a roller-coaster of emotion. For example, even the presumably happy experience of getting a new job can take you through feelings excitement and celebration, to feeling really nervous about whether you will be successful, to “what on earth have I done, I can’t do this job!” These are all normal, and very common reactions.

When we are faced with changes we haven’t chosen, which outside forces dictate and over which we feel we have little control, such as team restructuring, possible redundancies or new working practices, those emotions can not only be very powerful, they are often very negative. We feel our security and “comfort zone” is threatened, and tension, stress and resistance can be the knee-jerk reaction.

The most successful managers seem to make a point of taking more notice of what’s going on in their team, and how people seem to be reacting to news about change. They know that ignoring signs of discontent, tension or antipathy is likely to allow these negative reactions to become more widespread, and more difficult to deal with.

So, start noticing how your staff are reacting to any proposed or actual changes. Don’t ignore any signs of discontent. Build opportunities for staff to feedback or highlight any issues or concerns they may be having. Once you have a better understanding of how people feel about the changes, you can start to build a strategy for managing the change which will support and encourage staff, and minimise unrest and unease.

2) Increase opportunities for communication

In times of unsettling change you need to keep the channels of communication not only more open, but more regular. At this time, more than others, the risk of gossip, assumptions, and misunderstandings is even greater than normal, and can de-rail any hopes you might have of trying to maintain motivation, focus and performance.

Consider how you can increase opportunities to either meet as a team, or one to one, and allow time to discuss changes, and for people to express their opinions and feelings. It may seem counter-intuitive to allow people to express negative emotions or reactions to change, but actually, research shows time and again, people hate not being listened to far more than change. In many cases, your staff probably realise deep down change is inevitable and actually necessary, but ignoring their views only serves to make them feel de-valued, performance motivation affected. So provide opportunities to allow your staff to have their say, but within a framework which helps to focus on solutions and positive actions.

And think about how you increase this communication too. Wherever possible, face to face always beats any other form of communication when there’s tricky stuff going on. No matter how uncomfortable it might be, wherever possible provide more face to face contact. And a word of caution – be very sparing with the use of e-mail, particularly if you need to communicate something you know might provoke strong reaction. I know you’re busy – and e-mail is a fast and simple way of communicating, but it’s the most easily misconstrued form of communication, and the fallout from a poorly communicated e-mail message will probably end up taking far more of your time and focus than setting up a face to face meeting might have done.

3) Plan a strategy for change

People react to change in different ways. The better you know your staff, the more observant you are about how they are reacting in times of massive change, the more able you are to plan how you are going to handle the situation.

So, for example, you will have the cynics, and the negative activists; you will have those who recognise there may be opportunities or who even champion the changes, and you will have the “fence-sitters” – those who could be swayed either way.

Your prime job is to know where each of your staff sits on the spectrum of emotional reaction – and to consider how you can move as many of them as possible over to feeling more positive than negative and more hopeful than helpless.

For example; how could you utilise your staff who you know are champions of the changes, or who have had positive experiences, to support or influence the cynics or the “fence-sitters”? Which of your team might you need to spend a little more time with? Taking just a little time out to consider how you might plan your approach, can save you time, money and hassle, further down the road, and maintain better employee engagement..

Successful change management to improve workplace motivation is less about managing the physical changes, and far more about managing the very normal, human emotional reactions to change in a way which helps people focus on the positives, and remain engaged, confident and solution focused.

The 3 Secrets to Motivating Employees

On a scale of nought to ten, with 10 being highly motivated, how motivated is the team you manage? Maybe you have some employees or individuals who are more motivated than others? Maybe you’ve inherited a team where apathy and just “working for the pay cheque” are the norm. Or maybe your organisation is in the middle of major change which is having a massive negative impact on peoples’ engagement at work.

Whatever score you gave yourself, studies show most managers believe there’s a considerable amount of untapped energy, enthusiasm and potential which, if even partially released could have a profound effect on the bottom line. Knowing how to access this is a critical management skill, and can reap you massive rewards.

Motivating Your Employee: How?

1) Team management demands you to understand what drives your people
As a manager, you can’t force people to be motivated! A motivational employee attitude comes from within. Each of us is motivated to take (or not take) action for a variety of different reasons, a large number of which are not necessarily immediately obvious to those around us (or even to ourselves!) However, these reasons (or “drivers”) are the key to understanding what will encourage us to take action.

Your role is to provide the conditions and environment where people can and want to do their very best.
How can you do this?

Pay attention to what people say and do, as this is often an indication of their work ethic as well as their drive.
Ask them! As simple as it sounds, just asking them when they’ve felt most or least motivated will give you some potentially useful information and there may be some simple things you can do which will make all the difference to that employee.
Don’t assume! Just because you love to be publicly recognised for high achievement, doesn’t mean this member of staff does! That might be their worst nightmare – and they’ll hate you for it!
When project managing, look for ways to utilize the strengths and individual drivers in your team to maximize the result.

2) Motivation of employees comes from making them feel they’re partners in the drive to get results; not just subordinates.
You may be the boss – but the bottom line is, you can’t achieve the targets without your team! Whilst the overall objectives and strategy may not be negotiable, the how something is achieved is often much more flexible, and offers real opportunity for people to get involved and make constructive suggestions.

Wherever possible, be clear about what you are looking to achieve, and what is non-negotiable, then take the time to consider how each team member can best utilise their own strengths and preferences in terms of their own input. Encourage those who are hesitant, but whom you know from your relationship building, would like to have a go or have the potential to do a good job.

If they feel they have been consulted, and as far as possible been allowed to play to their strengths, they’ll reward you with maximum effort.

3) Understand the considerable power of praise.
I could write masses on this one topic alone! But this one simple thing will do more to build teamwork and employee motivation than anything else!

Did you know, research shows that, in order to increase motivation in employees and ensure top performance is consistently repeated, we need to praise at least 5 times more often than we find fault or criticise? The reality is that, all too often, we focus on the weaknesses, and forget to show appreciation for what’s being done well. Worse – (and this is much more common,) we make a fleeting comment about what has been done well, then move swiftly on to what we think they could do better!! How on earth is that supposed to motivate?

Some simple tips which could transform apathy in your team:

• Make it a habit to notice positive behaviours, attitudes or specific actions an individual takes which support the overall team goals. Keep a note of this, and feedback what you’ve noticed in your informal chats. Watch them glow as they realise you’ve been taking notice!
• If someone exhibits exemplary behaviour, make a point of recognising this as soon as is practically possible.
• When you give feedback of any sort, avoid vague phrases like, “well done” or “good work” which are totally meaningless and far too overused!
• Be specific about the particular action or attitude they have displayed, and, most importantly, explain the overall impact of this great behaviour/action for you, the team or even the organisation.

So, for example, when an employee deals with a particularly difficult and disgruntled customer, turning the whole situation round, you can say “I was really impressed with the way you dealt with x. You maintained your composure, handled her anger extremely well, showed empathy yet managed to find a solution which satisfied both the customer and our own internal guidelines. Without your intervention she might have taken this further. Thanks!”

None of this requires a lot of your time – just a tweak in how you do things – but the dividends for you are worth it!